CCLaP Journal #4

CCLaP Journal Chicago Center for Literature and Photography

04 | February 2014

An interview with Cory Doctorow

MAT R O F S NEW PAGE 8 20 ADS NO 9 9 $9.

The Year In Books 2013 New expanded fiction section New reviews of: Aleksandar Hemon Dave Eggers Donna Tartt and two dozen more

Photo features by: Alessandro Passerini Bryan M. Ferguson Heather Killion <â&#x20AC;&#x201D;WolfWendy

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4 The Year In Books 2013

CONTENTS

FEATURES

A look back at our critics’ 50 favorite books of the year, out of the 140 that were reviewed at the website

52 Original Fiction: “1208,” by Matt Rowan

A blue-collar newspaper handler is driven crazy by a mysterious elite nightclub and their refusal to allow him entrance

102 Cory Doctorow: The CCLaP Interview

Enjoy this reprint of our 2008 talk with the famed science-fiction author and co-editor of the “tech freedom” blog Boing Boing

122 Original Fiction: “To Bolivia, By Foot,” by Jason R. Riley

An American corporate executive haggles with South American rebels over gas rights, until all hell breaks loose

158 Original Fiction: “Get Up Tim,” by Sally Weigel

A gay alcoholic professor ponders his life during a walk in 1970s Manhattan, following a breakup by his young, good-looking, closeted lover

PHOTOGRAPHER FEATURES 27 Heather Killion 77 WolfWendy 137 Bryan M. Ferguson 177 Alessandro Passerini

REVIEWS AND ESSAYS

20 Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin, by Catherine Merridale 22 Ada, or Ardor: a Family Chronicle, by Vladimir Nabokov 26 Harper Lee and Peppermint Candy, by Paula Hennessy 45 Mira Corpora, by Jeff Jackson 50 Jesus Was a Time Traveler, by D.J. Gelner 68 Pervert, by Mr. If 70 Chronicle of a Death Foretold, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez 74 This is Between Us, by Kevin Sampsell 97 Following Tommy, by Bob Hartley 100 Schroder, by Amity Gaige 118 The Woman Upstairs, by Claire Messud 120 The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt 2 | The CCLaP Journal

130 Anything That Moves, by Dana Goodyear 132 Out of Print, by George Brock 134 The Piano Teacher, by Elfriede Jelinek 153 The Tragic Fate of Moritz Tot, by Dana Todorovic 156 The Circle, by Dave Eggers 169 A Giant Cow-tipping by Savages, by John Weir Close 172 The Book of My Lives, by Aleksandar Hemon 174 Heart of a Dog, by Mikhail Bulgakov 202 Nothing, by Anne Marie Wirth Cauchon 204 Papal Bull, by Joe Wenke

RARE BOOKS FOR SALE 48 SEXUAL REVOLUTION BUNDLE: First editions of Couples, Portnoyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Complaint, The Prisoner of Sex, and Fear of Flying 98 Myra Breckinridge and Myron, by Gore Vidal 154 Airport, by Arthur Hailey 206 Ralph of the Round House and Ralph on the Overland Express,

by Allen Chapman

PHOTO: HEATHER KILLION

The CCLaP Journal. Published monthly by the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography. Copyright 2014, CCLaP Publishing. Released under a Creative Commons license; some rights reserved. Rights to individual works revert back to authors upon publication.

ISBN: 978-1-939987-15-0 Editor in Chief: Jason Pettus. Photo Editor: Rebecca Brink. Submissions Editor: Allegra Pusateri. Contributing Writers: Travis Fortney, Madeleine Maccar, Jason Pettus, Karl Wolff. This magazine mostly contains material first published the previous month at the CCLaP blog; for all the latest, please visit cclapcenter.com.

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SPECIAL REPORT

The Year in B Compiled by Travis 4 | The CCLaP Journal

Another year, another 140 book reviews at the CCLaP website; and for the seventh year in a row, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re proud to present our annual Year In Books report, a look back at our favorite 50 titles from all of those we reviewed at the blog in 2013. Featuring an extended critical staff for the first time this year, our 2013 best-of lists run the gamut from highly anticipated bestsellers to obscure selfpublished work, and from literary award winners to cyberpunk, bizarro, noirs and more. Turn the page to start this yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s extralong roundup.

Books 2013 s Fortney, Madeleine Maccar, Jason Pettus, and Karl Wolff February 2014 | 5

Best of the Best It's the end of another year, which means it's time for CCLaP's seventh annual Year In Books special week-long report, in which we look back at all the books we read in 2013 and bring 40 or 50 of them to your attention one more time. CCLaP managed to review 140 books in 2013, on par with the usual 125 to 150 we normally get through in any given year, but this time with a big new twist; I myself only reviewed a handful of these titles, the rest covered by our brand-new full-time review staff (including Karl Wolff out of Minnesota, Madeleine Maccar in New Jersey, and fellow Chicagoan Travis Fortney). That means that each of these critics will be doing their own best-of list throughout this week, pooled from only the books they themselves reviewed, while I'll be recusing myself from such a list this year because I got so few books actually read in 2013. (Instead, on my day we'll be running our first new photography feature of 2014.) Then for today, each of us picked our top three reading experiences of 2013, and the combined list of twelve titles officially makes up our "Best of the Best" list for last year. I hope you'll have a chance to come back all week and check out each critic's individual list; but in the meanwhile, here is what we as a staff have determined to be the twelve "best" books of 2013.

Cannonball, by Joseph McElroy. I finally got around to feasting on not one but two Joseph McElroy novels in 2013, devouring his debut effort, A Smuggler’s Bible, and Cannonball, his most recent offering, just months apart, which made for one of the most satisfying introductions to a writer I could have ever hoped for.

While I enjoyed Cannonball as I was losing myself in McElroy’s beautiful words and complex storytelling, it’s one of those reads that truly gets better as it ferments in the memory. Its rich symbolism, effortless upheaval of standard avenues of thought, and hazy recall all combine to force the reader into considering the nature of truth and reconsidering long-held beliefs that may benefit from a harsh reexamination. It is complicated, it is unflinchingly honest to the point of wanting to look away, but most of all, it is rewarding and thought-provoking. (MM) Capital, by John Lanchester. John Lanchester focuses on the residents of a street in London to weave a tapestry of lives affected by the Great Recession. Characters include an absent-minded merchant banker and his shopaholic wife, a Polish immigrant, a Senegalese soccer prodigy, and a Banksy-type artist. Regardless of social station or personal behavior, Lanchester finds the human center of the characters, creating believable and sympathetic inhabitants of London. A wonderful modern update of the sprawling 19th-century realistic novel. (KW) 6 | The CCLaP Journal

The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets, by Diana Wagman. Blood and guts, animal cruelty and explicit sexuality abound in this gripping suspense novel. What makes this one stand out from the pack is the expert use of craft—in lesser hands, this would have been little more than a mildly amusing diversion, but the book Ms. Wegman has created ends up being a madcap, bizarro train-wreck that's impossible to turn away from. (TF) Fight Song, by Joshua Mohr. There's a growing amount of writers out there now who are superb at turning in quirky comedies with high literary quality, including Michael Chabon, Tom Perrotta and Karen Russell; and now you can add Joshua Mohr to this list, who after two previous books of a decidedly darker bent has turned in this still weighty yet more light-hearted comedy about a dysfunctional family and the patriarch who's having a slow mental breakdown in the middle of it. Whether taking on professional magicians, KISS cover bands, or prostitution rings run out of the drive-thru of a fast-food restaurant in the middle of the night, Mohr vaults himself out of the small-press mob and into the smaller circle of national A-list writers with this melancholy but charming winner. (JP) The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt. This is one of those books that made me fall in love with reading all over again. At nearly 800 pages, it does demand a considerable investment of time but the payoff is oceans beyond the effort exerted, especially considering that The Goldfinch is obviously imbued with a special sort of magic that makes hundreds of pages fly by in a dizzy, awestruck whirl of that unique conflict between not wanting to stop reading and not wanting to reach the story’s end. Donna Tartt takes her young protagonist and positions him in the middle of a museum explosion, kills both his parents, subjects him to the pains of unrequited love, flings him across the country twice, unceremoniously dumps him in a foreign country, and saddles him with a drug problem—and softens each blow with achingly gorgeous prose, winsome wisdom and detail so polished it seems effortless, all with the constant but never intrusive reminder that art’s immortality and connectivity can save us all, no matter how damned we believe ourselves to be. (MM) A Guide for the Perplexed, by Dara Horn. Set in a modern Egypt intoxicated with the first flush of the Arab Spring, Dara Horn creates a narrative that is filled in equal measure with intellectual vigor and political intrigue. A Guide for the Perplexed takes as inspiration the similarly named book by medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides. At first, the narrative seems like a thriller, something akin to The Da Vinci Code, but blooms into something much more complex and beautiful. And like nested Russian dolls, the novel takes the reader from modern Egypt to Victorian Egypt to the medieval Egypt of Maimonides. Memory, technology, sibling rivalry, the Egyptian Jewish community, and the evils of personal hubris come together in a mesmerizing novel. (KW) February 2014 | 7

Mira Corpora, by Jeff Jackson. This debut novel features a great mix of breakneck pacing, inventive storytelling, memorable scenes, and unforgettable images. Its disturbing, violent, hyper-sexual, drugfueled, touching and based on a “true story”, though just how true is up in the air. The reason this one makes the list is that it's one of the most original books I read in 2013, but never at the expense of pure entertainment. (TF) Out of Print, by George Brock. After reading and hearing endless invectives lobbed at the current state of media, there was something refreshing about the educated optimism George Brock employed in his thorough examination of how journalism’s past and present hold the key to ensuring its continued survival, as arriving at any viable future is wholly dependent upon accepting that the industry needs to maintain its flexibility as well as its credibility.

Out of Print is packed with an array of information ranging from historical evidence to current media models that have shrugged off old conventions to embrace a modern infrastructure, offers explanations without giving into the temptation of condescension, and remains optimistic without getting bogged down in rosy, revised nostalgia. It is, quite simply, required reading for anyone interested in media studies, or anyone who just wants to be adequately informed about the state of journalism to better understand what it’s up against these days. (MM) Seed, by Rob Ziegler. As a growing amount of novels have recently shown us, the '80s science-fiction subgenre "cyberpunk" is not dead at all, but in fact can be easily adapted to fit the underground culture of our present day, while still delivering on its original promise of noir stories about the ways utopian high-tech gets corrupted and modded when finally making it down to the proletarian street level.

Take this exciting thriller, for example, which tells a fascinating story about the genetic engineering of crops in a post-famine future, and how city-sized artificial intelligences work with grungy Mexican punk-rockers to provide the kind of blight-resistent seeds needed to keep the human race ticking along its haggard way. Face-paced but full of big ideeas, it's not the best sci-fi actioner of the year nor the most thought-provoking, but certainly one of the best novels of 2013 to combine both. (JP) Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury, edited by Sam Weller and Mort Castle. With the recent passing of a true American literary legend, the genre-stretching speculative author Ray Bradbury, it was a perfect time for this all-star tribute to come out, ironically started while Bradbury was still alive but only published after his death. And while it would've been easy for this collection of equally famous contributors to have phoned in their individual entries, instead these writers really dug down and came up with pieces truly honoring the complex, hard-to-define style of Bradbury himself, which says much about what high esteem he is held by the generations of American authors who have come after him. Strong, tight, and thrilling throughout, this is one of the best anthologies I've read in years. (JP) 8 | The CCLaP Journal

Sick Justice: Inside the American Gulag, by Ivan G. Goldman. Ivan G. Goldman stares into the abyss of modern jurisprudence.

From emboldened prosecutors to a corrupt California prison guard lobby to the for-profit prison industry and the Machiavellian designs of ALEC, Goldman's swath is wide and far-ranging. All the more remarkable is his ability to take all this material and boil it down to a succinct single volume. He fills Sick Justice with literary flair, investigative deep journalism, and heartbreaking human tragedy. Goldman has resurrected the fine art of American muckraking. (KW) The Yellow Birds, by Kevin Powers. This one wasn't published in 2013, but it's the best book I read this year, so I had to put it on this list. The bottom line is that in this case the hype was well-justified.

It turns out that the old “horrors of war” story never gets old.

What this book got right was even more starkly evident because it happened to be published within just a few months of several other novels that seemed to be attempting to put a “new spin” on the war novel. (TF)

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Madeleine Maccarâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s picks

Having only been a contributing part of the CCLaP collective since October presents a rather unique challenge in assembling a year's-best sort of list. The upshot of focusing on only a quarter of what I've read this year is that I'm not subjecting a whole new audience to my drunken ravings about how the likes of Infinite Jest and Mrs. Dalloway have forever changed how I look at people (because I apparently gush about whatever I've most recently read when I get a few too many glasses of wine in me), or how mad I am that I denied my childhood self the rapturous thrill of being introduced to A Wrinkle in Time by waiting to ravenously tear through it as an adult. Oh, and the other benefit of a limited selection is that I have to get creative. Which is a challenge I'll accept with gusto. And possibly with a little fudging of the guidelines.

Book That Would Have Depressed the Hell out of Me Had it Not Been So Good: The Book of My Lives, by Aleksandar Hemon.

Aleksandar Hemon's life runs the gamut of surviving some truly harrowing obstacles, like helplessly facing the death of his baby daughter and escaping Sarajevo before all hell broke loose, to proving that those who live with the threat of tragedy dogging their every step know how to wring every single drop of life from every moment they can, even if it means risking a brief tenure as a national threat.

The ups are straight-up celebrations and affirmations of all the things that make life worth living; the downs are the stuff no one ever wants to imagine facing (and any decent person will have trouble accepting that some of these things actually did happen). But Hemon accepts them all with a grace, honesty and willingness to see each segment of his life as a part of something greater, as his narrative paints a picture of a man who has every reason to play fortune's whipping child but is more resilient and meant for better things than that. The Book of My Lives is buoyed by a sly sense of humor and a magnetic honesty that make it one of the best 10 | The CCLaP Journal

books I've read all year and make me wish I could devote a couple-three days to curling up with Hemon's oeuvre.

Book That Surpassed its Source Material in Craftsmanship While Also Proving That a Strange Phenomenon Often Comes with an Even Stranger Origin Tale: The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, The Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made, by Greg Sestero & Tom Bissell. I have a tendency to rate books on a cumulative scale rather than an individual basis, which is why this behind-the-scenes look at the batshit insanity that rather unsurprisingly comprises the back story of boxoffice bomb The Room deserves a second look. The movie's costar Greg Sestero tells the story but it is its mastermind, the enigmatic manchild Tommy Wiseau, who emerges as its main character as Sestero tries to figure out his strange friend with the kind of sympathetic understanding one usually reserves for a bumbling younger sibling. Or a three-legged animal unaware of its limitations. Anyone who's seen the modern-day cult classic that is The Room knows just how deeply, impressively flawed the flick is but Wiseau's never-say-die commitment to seeing his vision come to life exactly as he intended turns into something almost awe-inspiring once it becomes clear that he refuses to let pesky realities like an unfortunate dearth of talent and the necessity of at least a few cinematic conventions stand in his way. An underdog story for the ages, The Disaster Artist is a must-read for fans of The Room and just a wonder to behold for anyone who needs some reassurance that the lofty, unencumbered-byreality aspirations of a five-year-old aren't always unattainable.

The Book That Started out as Required Reading and Ended as a Sheer Delight: Harper Lee and Peppermint Candy, by Paula Hennessy. While not actually published in 2013, I was the lucky one who nabbed this from CCLaP's to-review stash of submissions a few months ago. It wasn't long before this tale of family, self-discovery, illness (ranging from terminal, mental and self-perpetuated), and bravely facing unwelcome truths had me loading its digital pages on my phone so I could sneak in a surreptitious chapter or two when I should have been doing other things. Like working.

Or spending time with people whose company I otherwise enjoy when it's not eating into my precious reading time.

For someone who seems mighty reluctant to call herself a writer, Hennessy adeptly navigates the fine line between drawing on her own experience to create believable characters and falling into the easy trap of mawkish self-aggrandizement. The end result is proof that a book about dealing with late-stage cancer and toxic parents can make for some compulsively readable fare that has oodles of heart with none of the saccharine aftertaste.

Book I Fangirled so Hard Through That I Can't Wait to Go Back and Read it Again When I'm Not Also Mentally Jumping Up and Down While Clapping Bleeding Edge, by Thomas Pynchon. There really is nothing quite like finding out that your favorite writer is February 2014 | 11

poised to publish a new book, and there is no suffering like waiting for the release-day countdown to finally reach its end. I don't feel like I'm exaggerating at all by insisting that Thomas Pynchon is a national treasure and that Bleeding Edge is just one more vote in his favor.

It's not another helping of Gravity's Rainbow but it's also completely unreasonable to keep expecting that kind of a novel to happen ever again. What this book is, among other things, is both a brilliantly paranoid romp through and clear-headed love letter to NYC immediately before and after 11 Sept. with a smattering of mechanical technobabble that only an engineer-poet could finesse into a warmly and humorously fleshand-blood madcap saga. If you insist on reading it to find traces of Pynchon past, revel in the hallmarks of his writing: the arcane allusions, the masterful blend of comedy and tragedy to maximize the effects of the complementarily dueling forces, the brilliant interweaving of deceptively unrelated threads by the handfuls, and sentences scientifically crafted to be tiny little masterpieces stacked upon each other to comprise a work of art shaped with mathematical precision.

Sorry, But It's Going to Take a Full Year for Me to Stop Recommending This Book to Absolutely Everyone (Only I'm Not Really Sorry at All Because It is That. Freaking. Good): The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt. Seriously, why haven't you read this yet? (But if you have, lemme know because I am dying to have an actual conversation about this beast of a novel.)

And I couldn't resist some bonus kudos for two books that were published earlier in 2013. I'd reviewed them purely for fun and didn't feel right recycling my own material for the CCLaP blog, but I also don't feel right not sending some shoutouts their ways.

I Waited Too Long and Now Someone Else Wrote My Book: Out With It: How Stuttering Helped Me Find My Voice, by Katherine Preston. It is a strange role to play being a rarity among raritiesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;that is, a woman who stutters. Katherine Preston beautifully blends her own journey as a stutterer with her research into how the affliction affects others, exploring what little is known about the speech disorder, and examining what kind of treatments are available. Preston takes what could be just another memoir about one's cross to bear and turns it into a unifying, empowering experience by choosing to look at it as something that has helped make her who she is and has granted her the kind of empathy that feeling imprisoned inside oneself brings.

She refuses to give into the trappings of self-pity and 12 | The CCLaP Journal

her own transformation from a self-tormented child to a confident young woman should be comfortingly familiar to anyone who faced a daunting hurdle in their past.

I Would Have Called This the Year's Best Guilty Pleasure if I Didn't Enjoy Reading it With Shameless Glee: Shatnerquest, by Jeff Burk. It starts with the apocalypse interrupting a ComicCon-esque gathering and only gets better from there. There's a helpful Dalek. There's a Klingon vs. Steampunk deathmatch. There's an entire chapter that reads like a Kevin Smith mini-flick (which, naturally, takes place inside a comic book store). There's a giant, rampaging William Shatner. Hell, there's even loads of heart amidst the violence and sheer insanity. It is the ultimate palate cleanser for nerds with a sense of humor and an acquired hankering for bizarro.

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Travis Fortneyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s picks

Since we all already picked our top three books of the year for Monday's Best of the Best list, and since the three books I picked for that list (Jeff Jackson's Mira Corpora, Kevin Powers' Yellow Birds and Diana Wagman's Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets) represent a fairly high percentage of the books that I absolutely fell head over heals for in 2013, I thought I would use this list to highlight the next nine books on my list. I don't mean to recommend these books to absolutely everyone. Rather, these are novels (and one book of short stories) that I personally liked, that conformed well to my sometimes very specific tastes. But without further adieu: Schroeder by Amity Gaige. The story of Ericy Kennedy, born Eric Schroeder, who kidnaps his daughter and takes her on a memorable road trip just as his life is falling apart. Heavy echoes of Lolita, strong plotting, and quite a few scenes that are icky but propulsive make Schroeder one of 2013's most satisfying reads.

All That Is by James Salter. The award for most memorable image of the year goes to James Salter. It's funny what sticks with us long after we've read, but there's a line or two in this book equating class with bags of dog food swaying in the back of a station wagon. That line has crept into my mind during several trips to Petsmart this year. Which, if I'm somehow equating trips to Petsmart in my beat up Mitsubishi with life in the aristocratic Virginia countryside, then that probably means that the dog food I am buying at Petsmart too 14 | The CCLaP Journal

expensive. Well, that's undeniable. But the aforementioned image is one of many in All That Is that stuck with me. And Salter is also to be commended for his use of craft and technique.

Canada by Richard Ford. Richard Ford is probably my favorite living novelist, and though his most recent book doesn't feature a protagonist as charming and knowable as Frank Bascombe, and the writing doesn't seem as energized as it does in those novels, Canada still has to count as one of the best novels I read this year. The reason why is the sentences, plain and simple. The number of working American authors that are putting this much care into sentences can be counted on one hand, and you wouldn't need all of your fingers. Canada is the story of Dell Parsons, who is fifteen when his parents rob a bank, then flees to Canada to escape foster care, where he falls under the care of an American named Arthur Remlinger, whom he sees murder two people. But the plot isn't the point. The writing here wants you to slow down in just the same way that almost every other modern novel wants you to speed up.

The Fainting Room by Sarah Pemberton Strong. One of the things I love about reading is that you can never predict which novels are going to stick with you. Who ever would have thought that a novel featuring lesbian sex between a teenager and a thirty year old woman would would end up being one of my favorite novels of the year? But I've always loved a novel that goes off the rails in the final act and becomes a new book entirely. I've also long admired authors who aren't afraid to tread where others might not go. No one could accuse Ms. Strong of fearful writing, and her ear for ecstatic and even worshipful language in the erotic scenes is undeniable. This one comes highly recommended, especially for readers who don't mind a little hot, hot lesbian sex.

A Marker to Measure Drift by Alexander Maksik. For me, 2013 was the year of the short, meditative novel.

Maybe that's just the kind of novel I chose to read again and again this year. Short and meditative isn't necessarily a recipe for fun, but it can make for a satisfying reading experience. In A Marker to Measure Drift we're introduced to Jacqueline, a young, graceful black woman who is living in a cave on an island in the Aegean Sea. Eventually, the narrative is punctuated by shards of memory. The gray cashmere coat her mother sent her for Christmas, the wide green lawns of her English boarding school. Mr. Maksik uses the simplest of plots, and the sparest methods. We learn that Jacqueline is a refugee from Liberia. The resolution will come when Jacqueline gives voice to her traumas and tell us the details of her story. It all makes for uncomfortable and sometimes gruesome reading, but this February 2014 | 15

is a very effective and contained book.

Bobcat by Rebecca Lee. The best book of short stories I read this year.

A Nearly Perfect Copy by Alison Amend. If you're like me, when a book's description promises an affecting novel about family, and the author has an MFA from Iowa, you feel like you know what you're going to get before you've even cracked it open and read the first sentence. This is going to be a quiet novel. It's going to have pretty sentences, well-drawn characters, not a lot of plot. It might prove to be touching in the end, but it will likely be boring in places, too. It takes Ms. Amend exactly one chapter to defy those low expectations, and less than a hundred pages to lay them to waste completely. A Nearly Perfect Copy combines the art world and cloning with a plot that moves at a thriller-like pace. In my opinion this is one of the most underrated books of 2013, and from an author who has Chicago connections. What's not to love?

Familiar by J. Robert Lennon. The premise of Familiar is simple: a middle-aged woman named Elisa inexplicably enters a parallel universe in which her dead son is alive.

If this idea sounds a little, well, familiar, then I am happy to report that Mr. Lennon handles it with style, crafting a narrative that is frightening, compelling, tense and unique.

The pages fly by, but there are uncomfortable questions lurking below the surface. Has Elisa gone mad? Is her old life or new life the real one? Is happiness available to her in either version? Familiar was my first introduction to J. Robert Lennon's work, and I'm happy to report that this is definitely a novelist that deserves a larger audience.

16 | The CCLaP Journal

Karl Wolffâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s picks As 2014 begins, this marks my third year reviewing for CCLaP. In 2013, I also began reviewing fiction and non-fiction for the New York Journal of Books and the occasional essay on thethepoetryblog. With the added challenge of reviewing a book a week for CCLaP, that has widened my choices for favorite books of the year. On a more informal level, I've become known as "the genre guy" among my fellow CCLaP reviewers.

While I have my own personal genre preferences, I hold no genre as inherently better than any other genre. Western, paranormal romance, adventure, Warhammer 40K tiein novel, and so forth. What matters to me is whether or not the writing is good. And, concurrently, whether or not that good writing is an advantage or a liability. One can write a highly polished "literary novel" that still might miss the mark (see my review of Sweet Thunder by Ivan Doig) or it can lack polish but have passion (see Pervert by Mr If). Despite all this self-justification, reviewing boils down to my subjective reaction to a book. These choices are my own and reflect my own individual quirks, eccentricities, and passions. They are bound to appeal, infuriate, and confound just about everybody.

Best Comedic Novel: The King of Pain, by Seth Kaufman. Seth Kaufman weds postmodern literary flourishes with an acid critique of "reality programming," along with our culture's lurid sensationalism about state-sanctioned torture. Rick Salter is a reality TV producer who helms The King of Pain TV show.

Following a bender, he wakes up beneath his stereo system and a book called The History of Prisons laying beside him. The History of Prisons was written by an author called Seth Kaufman. Then Rick starts reading ... What happens is a dark commentary on our sick sad world.

Best First Novel: Wheatyard, by Peter Anderson. Set in Champaign, Illinois, Wheatyard tells the story of a business student's run-ins with one Elmer Glaciers Wheatyard, a reclusive curmudgeon who pens strange stories and novels. Anderson offers a quirky meditation on the conflicts between the creative drive and the practicalities of the Day Job. Anderson is a new voice that is, by turns, tender and vicious.

February 2014 | 17

Best Foreign Language Reprint: Louis XXX, by Georges Bataille. An anthology of previously unpublished works by Georges Bataille are collected together in what is described as "audaciously experimental pieces of pornographic chamber music." Fragments and shards of narrative come together as poetry, scatology, confession, hallucination, and theory. Not for everyone, but for those interested in the works of Bataille, this is a must read.

Best Political Writing: The Confidence Trap, by David Runciman.

David Runciman's The Confidence Trap is a history of democracy in crisis from the First World War to the present. In a field filled with empty rhetoric and ideological sclerosis, Runciman gives the reader a book that has the potential to change how one perceives political processes. His main thesis is that what many consider democracy's faults are indeed its advantages. Despite writing that sometimes sounds like Zen koans, Runciman writes a book that challenges expectations and is a page-turner.

Best Economics Writing: Debtors' Prison, by Robert Kuttner. Debtor's Prison is a scathing indictment of the cult of austerity. Kuttner, a progressive economist, write with fury and erudition as he takes apart austerity and its misapplications. In addition to his economic muckraking, he delves into the history of personal debt and explores why personal debt is seen as a vice while corporate debt involves bailouts. One of the few books that make reading about debt ratios and central EU bank infrastructure a means to anger up the blood.

Best Bizarro Fiction: Sloughing Off the Rot, by Lance Carbuncle.

Sloughing Off the Rot, by Lance Carbuncle, takes bizarro fiction in a new and wonderful direction. Pop culture references and religious mysticism collide in a work of lowbrow majesty. John travels down the Camino de la Muerte to confront his nemesis, Android Lovethorn. Along the way he meets new friends, gets high, gets wasted, and encounters blumpkins. Vulgar and visionary in equal measure.

Best Thriller/Conspiracy Theory: Bleeding Edge, by Thomas Pynchon.

While I'm sure Pynchon's latest has made it on enough Best Books lists, let me throw my two cents in. I appreciate Bleeding Edge as a delightfully off-kilter example of the conspiracy thriller. It is the quintessential thriller about 9/11, bringing to mind other works like William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, another idiosyncratic thriller.

Best History: The Nazi Seance, by Arthur J. Magida. The story of Erik Jan Hanussen, a self-described mind reader, is deftly handled by Arthur J. Magida in The Nazi Seance. Magida separated myth from reality in a story of twisted relationships, fabricated biographies, and anti-Semitic hate.

Entertaining without being sensational and erudite in its handling of explosive material, The Nazi Seance sounds made up. To use that overused clichĂŠ, "Truth is stranger than fiction." A lot stranger, as it turns out.

18 | The CCLaP Journal

Best Metra Read (a read for your daily commute): I Don't Know, by Leah Hager Cohen. Saying "I don't know," when asked a question can be bad news in certain situations, especially a classroom or in medical school.

Leah Hager Cohen pens a short, intelligent, and compulsively readable exploration of doubt and self-doubt. Saying "I don't know" can be good, but it can also be bad. When waiting for those inevitable Metra delays, don't cuss out Rahm, read this book instead.

Best Adventure: A Land Without Sin, by Paula Huston. A sister who lost her faith searches for her brother, the priest, in modern-day Mexico. In this supremely entertaining adventure novel, Paula Huston spins the tale of two siblings from a Chicago-area Croatian Catholic family. Faith, politics, suffering, archeology, and bloodlust are all explored in A Land Without Sin. Part Graham Greene, part Raiders of the Lost Ark, it's a winning combination of adventure and intellectual struggle in Zapatista-controlled southern Mexico.

Best Just Plain Fun Book: In Thunder Forged, by Ari Marmell. Intrigue, warfare, steampunk mecha, gunmages ... bring it! As a fan of the Warhammer 40K tie-in novels, it was a joy to discover another RPG tie-in novel. Marmell does indeed bring it, giving the reader a violent beautiful world and showing how big the War Machine world-building sandbox really is.

Best Cover Design: The Creative Fire, by Brenda Cooper (cover art by John Picacio). The book itself didn't do it for me, but the cover is extraordinary.

The alchemical admixture of youthful beauty, Pre-Raphaelite flourishes, and rich detailing, John Picacio paints a beautiful cover. In a world of photorealistic covers, it's nice to see cover art that's painterly.

Best Overall Book Design: Wheatyard, by Peter Anderson. KUBOA presents a beautiful looking (and feeling) book. When I first beheld it, it reminded me of those pocketsized books from the Sixties. It's a stylish presentation with an enigmatic cover and pleasing dimensions. Heck, I even liked the font they picked.

Best Batting Average (On average, will the publisher give you, the reader, a well-written, well-designed, entertaining book?): In no particular order: Akashic Books, The Permanent Press, and Pyr. I've read my share of books from these publishers. On average, I've been pleased with what I read. Pyr's range is extraordinary, from conventional space opera to the utterly bonkers. The Permanent Press has re-written the metrics of genre fiction. Whether it is straight genre pieces or more experimental works, the Permanent Press continues to bring out quality work. Finally, Akashic Books has their ongoing Noir Series and their new series about drug culture. Regardless, they represent the gold standard of genre anthologies. C

February 2014 | 19

BOOK REVIEW

Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

By Catherine Merridale

Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company Reviewed by Karl Wolff

Spanning from the pre-Christian times of the early Middle Ages right up to rule of Vladimir Putin, Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin by Catherine Merridale, is a magisterial distillation of nearly a thousand years of Russian history. Unlike other histories of Russia and the Soviet Union, Red Fortress focuses on the Kremlin.

(Kreml means "red" in Russian.) The tight focus allows for a new perspective and gives Merridale a uniquely interdisciplinary approach to the material. The book is at once national history, local history (in this case, a subsection of Moscow), architectural history, art history, and museum history.

Bracketed by the Moscow and Neglinnaya Rivers, the Kremlin began as a fort in the northern Russian hinterlands. What began as a walled city to prevent the depredations of Mongols evolved into a princely enclave for the Ruirik, Danilov, and Romanov dynasties. (The rulers of Russia themselves evolving from dukes to grand dukes to princes and, finally, tsars.) In the opening pages, Merridale stands in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow appreciating the 1668 masterpiece, The Tree of the State of Muscovy. The icon shows "two men who have planted a tree. On the left, holding the medieval equivalent of a watering can, is a priest, and painted letters tell us that he is Peter, the leader of the early fourteenth-century Russian church. On the right, in charge of the plant itself, is a prince, Ivan I, who ruled Moscow for sixteen years 20 | The CCLaP Journal

from 1325 until his death in 1341." It is with this foundational myth that Merridale takes us all the way back to the beginning in the twelfth century, although "There is no reliable record for the Kremlin's beginning." What is exhilarating about reading this book is its immersive power. This is very much pop history and should be on the mustread list of any amateur Kremlinologist or those who enjoy Russian history.

The immersive power propels the narrative forward. The Kremlin's history has much bloodshed, coups, fires, and demolition. Much like Rome, the Kremlin becomes an accretion of history, layer upon layer building over the centuries. We read about early architectural masterpieces, lovingly described, only to witness their immolation or destruction. The Kremlin's rulers, always keeping a tight fist on historical interpretation, build new structures to highlight their glory or raze those that get in their way. In the nineteenth century, we see the clash of these interpretations with the rise of a conservative intellectual elite wanting to preserve the Kremlin's innate "Russian-ness," and the revolutionary firebrands who want to overthrow the ossifying monarchy.

Another key element to the Kremlin is religion. The walled city is a mosaic of watchtowers, monasteries and cathedrals, palaces and arsenals. After Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth century, Moscow saw itself as "The Third Rome." In modern language, one could see the Kremlin as home to a "spiritual superpower," transforming this once isolated backwater into a urban area with the prestige of Rome. (This also explains, but doesn't excuse, Putin's recent homophobic legislation and its sanctimonious language.)

In the end, the Kremlin attempts to preserve the national mythology of continuity, stability, and theocracy. The challenge is writing history in such a tightly controlled environment. Merridale explains her many workarounds and negotiations when dealing with a government that is less than forthcoming. Any historian must face the popular crowd when deconstructing a national mythology. (One sees this today in how the Right and the Left turn the Founder Fathers into two sets of dueling caricatures.)

The pleasure of Red Fortress is witnessing history as a material thing that has to be wrestled with to be understood. With Russia's calamitous, horrific, and authoritarian history, it shows how the ordinary Russian would tolerate Vladimir Putin's illegal third term and be nostalgic for the reign of Joseph Stalin. If one just watched the nightly news or read social media updates, this behavior would seem illogical and obscene.

But the everyday attitudes of ordinary citizens are framed by centuries of accumulated history, a dosage of fear for the future, and a nationalist stubbornness inherited from years of suffering, hardship, and disaster.

Red Fortress shows us how the local can become global and how an isolated river fort became the symbol of fear both within Russia and worldwide. Merridale reconstructs the past by diving into the archives, exploring the crevices of monasteries and palaces, and giving her own interpretive gloss on icons and artifacts from Russia's storied past. C

Out of 10: 9.0

February 2014 | 21

THE NSFW FILES

Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

By Vladimir Nabokov Essay by Karl Wolff

Once a month throughout 2013 and ‘14, CCLaP critic Karl Wolff is reading another classic novel that has been notoriously labeled “not safe for work,” in order to assess the true artistic worth of such projects. For all the essays in this series, please visit [cclapcenter. com/karl_wolff].

Personal History: Ada, or Ardor: a Family Chronicle by Vladimir Nabokov, had been on my To Be Read List for quite some time. My knowledge of Nabokov is woefully thin. I have read Lolita multiple times. The first time in high school for purely prurient reasons. To my dismay I discovered a lot of untranslated French passages and utterly lacking in material that would satiate high school lusts. (High school lusts were sated, shocked, and numbed by Naked Lunch.)

The second time I read it I had less prurience in mind, but also a nice set of footnotes to navigate Nabokov’s oft-difficult prose. But Nabokov wrote much more than Lolita. He wrote Pale Fire, an epic poem with footnotes written by a delusional madman. He wrote Invitation to a Beheading, a political fable about totalitarianism. And many more novels, besides plays, poems, translations, and lectures.

Ada represents an oddball combination of attributes: an epic novel about incest set in an alternate history. As 22 | The CCLaP Journal

a fan of the alternate history genre (and erotica), I knew I had to read the book.

The History: Written in 1969, Ada, or Ardor: a Family Chronicle is one of Vladimir Nabokov’s lesser known novels. Airing from 2003 to 2006 (and briefly resurrected on Netflix), Arrested Development is a cult hit and known by many. What do these two things have in common? Incest and comedy. Arrested Development is a hyper-dense sitcom, replete with in-jokes, pop cultural references, satire of political and corporate malfeasance, and George-Michael Bluth’s incurable lust for his cousin Maeby Funke.

Ada is a verbally dense, allusive, word-drunk feast of a doorstopper. Over 580 pages of multilingual puns, alternate history, and incest between cousins Ada Durmanov, amateur lepidopterist, and Van Veen, psychologist and time-theorist. Les Cousins Dangereux is, as the poster boasts, “a ‘relative’ masterpiece of complex eroticism.”

As one of Nabokov’s last three novels, it symbolizes this twentieth century literary stylist at his creative peak. His last two novels would become even more postmodern, metafictional, and solipsistic. Nabokov would refer to Ada in his next novel, Transparent Things. The fictional bibliography includes the novel Ardis.

It represents his nomadic life, his obsessions, and his monumental talent. Written in Montreux, Switzerland, and published at the end of the Sixties, we see Nabokov as both a relic of a by-gone age and a pioneer of a nascent postmodernism. Nabokov came from a family of St. Petersburg aristocrats who fled Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. He settled in France and Germany, studied literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1923. He fled again, this time to the United States, to escape the Nazi onslaught. (Samuel Beckett studied literature at Trinity College, Dublin, from 1923 to 1927.) Later, after teaching at such places like Stanford, Wellesley, Cornell, and Harvard, he returned to Europe in 1961, dying in Switzerland in 1977. Like fellow writers Ivan Klima and Vasily Grossman, Nabokov has witnessed both forms of twentieth century totalitarianism.

Ada came out in 1969. In the United States, the Sixties went down in flames. My Lai, Altamont, and Manson treated Flower Power with carnage, atrocities, and blood.

Monty Python’s Flying Circus began its first season on BBC. Richard Nixon was in his first term and the decade’s idealism would curdle into cynicism and withdrawal. The Sixties and Seventies were the high days of Postmodernism, a literary style endemic of an age where all institutions have proven corrupt, inept, and untrustworthy. There would be Linguistic Turns and New Rights. There would also be erotica and porn. By 1969, one could read Naked Lunch and “Howl” without legal prosecution. The visual arts weren’t quite out of the woods, since the Supreme Court still had their “Stag Nights.” This involved the Nine Brethren watching porn loops and deeming whether they were obscene or not.

Unlike the new pornographers and the vulgarity-laced youth, Nabokov came from an earlier time. An aristocrat to the end, he held strong opinions, wrote with a ferocious erudition, and commanded respect as a literary stylist. (To be fair, fellow prolific writer Anthony Burgess hated rock and roll music.) Like Burgess and Joyce and Pynchon, Nabokov never won the Nobel Prize for Literature, although he certainly deserved it.

Ada got lost in the sea of time. Only a few years later, Pynchon would release his postmodernist masterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow, altering the literary landscape like Rocket 00000.

The Book: Ada begins with a parody of the opening line from Anna Karenina. In many ways, this muligenerational “family chronicle” resembles those old nineteenth century February 2014 | 23

doorstoppers. Although the world is very different than Victorian times, we see characters dominated by class, society, reputation, and manners. All very aristocratic, hyperintelligent, and multilingual. Like their historical Russian counterparts, the family speaks fluent French. The novel even includes a useful family tree. This becomes handy, since Nabokov, ever-playful, has characters with similar names marrying characters also similar named. To summarize: Ivan Durmanov married Daria. They had three children: Ivan, Marina, and Aqua. The other branch of the family had Daedalus Veen marry Countess Irina Garin. Their child is Demetriy (Demon). Daedalus’s brother Ardelion married Mary Trumbell. Their son is Daniel. Daniel married Marina Durmanov. They had two daughters, Adelaida (Ada) and Lucinda (Lucette). Demon Veen marries Aqua Durmanov and they have a son, Van Veen.

Following a history of the earlier generations, the storyline follows the lives of Aqua and Marina. Demon, married to Aqua, has an affair with her sister, Marina.

Nabokov explains it like this:

“Was there some additional spice? Marina, with perverse vainglory, used to affirm in bed that Demon’s senses must have been influenced by a queer sort of “incestuous” (whatever that term means) pleasure (in the sense of the French plaisir, which works up a lot of supplementary spinal vibrato), when he fondled, and savored, and delicately parted and defiled, in unmentionable but fascinating ways, flesh (une chair) that was both that of his wife and that of his mistress, the blended and brightened charms of twin peris, an Aquamarina both single and double, a mirage in an emirate, a germinate gem, an orgy of epithelial alliterations.”

Demon’s philandering ways become reflected, refined, and intensified with Van Veen’s love for Ada. At first the relations between the cousins is purely platonic, one familiar to anyone at family gatherings. But the agape soon turns into eros and their lusts are consummated the night of a spectacular barn fire on the Durmanov property.

Again, since this is an epic tale, I’m going to summarize: They become infatuated with each other, endure separations of various lengths. Lucette falls for Van, turning things into a complicated love triangle. Van goes to college and later becomes an eminent psychologist, while Ada gets married. Time passes.

After the initial chapters do we realize that Van is the author of this family chronicle. Nabokov, again the playful postmodernist, makes the authorship one of rivalry and counter-claims. After certain passages, Ada butts in and gives her opinion.

There’s also insertions by an Editor.

Amidst the dueling narrators, editor interruptions, and alternate history, the novel comes to a complete halt near the end. At that time, Van Veen writes a long theoretic treatise of the nature of time, smugly confident in the wrongness of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. (One sees this in The Royal Family by William T. Vollmann, where the narrative halts and Vollmann treats the reader to a digression on the nature of bail.)

This all happens in a world called Anti-Terra. Some believe that Terra exists, although those people many consider insane or obsessed. The cult of Terra develops to an extent that people believe one goes to Terra after death. Anti-Terra isn’t simply steampunk, although there was a global catastrophe that resulted in the banning of all electrical power. This complicates matters and people end up using the toilet to communicate. (No, that isn’t a typo. Anti-Terrans communicate via dorophone, a kind of sewer-based telephonic system.) Politically, things are opposite of Earth. What would be the United States in North America has been colonized by the Russians, although it was discovered by Africa. England conquered France in 1815 (a nice counter-Napoleonic twist). And chronologically, everything appears as it would fifty years hence. So life on Anti-Terra in 1900 would seem like life in 1950.

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Is anyone else confused?

The brilliance of Ada is that Nabokov actually pulls it off successfully. The novel finally ends with a brief summation of the novel itself, the once epic bildungsroman folding back on itself in an act of literary contortion.

The Verdict: In the ladies bathroom Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) takes a giant snort of cocaine. “I said God damn! God damn!” That would be my response to reading Ada. It’s a big challenging book that will knock your socks off. Literary genius meeting moral depravity the likes of which I can only compare it to the works of the Marquis de Sade and William S. Burroughs.

Ada is one of the Great Books of Literature. It’s usually not found on Top 100 lists, but it should be. It is also a word-drunk celebration of language, a monument to excess and playfulness, along the lines of Darconville’s Cat by Alexander Theroux, Gravity’s Rainbow, Ulysses, and Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe. It is a literary classic and a must-read for those who enjoy erotica, alternate history, and trilingual puns. C

February 2014 | 25

BOOK REVIEW

Harper Lee and Peppermint Candy

By Paula Hennessy

Self-published Reviewed by Madeleine Maccar

Harper Lee and Peppermint Candy follows three generations of women but shifts its primary focus between Addie, whose easy-life lucky streak is nearing its end with the discovery that she has late-stage cancer, and her granddaughter, Megan, who begins the novel as just another messed-up teenager holding everyone around her emotionally hostage before realizing that her years of attention-seeking antics have sent shockwaves through her extended family. Megan’s mother, Laura, has been prone to wildly repellant histrionics since childhood; the family assumes this toxic proximity could only result in a train wreck of a child, a suspicion that is more or less confirmed when Laura’s departure coincides with the beginning of Megan’s remarkable turnaround.

This is a brave little novel that taps into its multifaceted characters’ potential to tactfully approach uncomfortable truths: Some people are legitimately struggling with psychological issues while others are bored and craving the drama that arises from an illusion of mental illness; choosing between palliative treatment for maximum quality of life and aggressive medical procedures that offer any chance of a greater quantity of days is a decision that only the individual facing his or her mortality can make; the allure and, eventually, sobering price to pay for living in denial; some people are woefully unfit for the parental roles they’ve assumed; family can be redemptive and ruinous in equal measures. Author Paula Hennessy drew on her experiences working in a children’s psychological unit to celebrate both the human capacity for change and the far-reaching benefits of increased self-awareness, both of which greatly contribute to the believable duality of her characters. Harper Lee and Peppermint Candy is a heartfelt, optimistic-without-being-treacly tribute to how one person can leave a lasting impression on others, sometimes for the worse but oftentimes to a staggeringly positive effect. C

Out of 10: 8.1 26 | The CCLaP Journal

PHOTOGRAPHER FEATURE

Heather Killion

February 2014 | 27

Location: Sacramento, California

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Line features heavily in your work. Do you have a design or architectural background that draws you to it?

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I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have an academic or professional background in design or architecture, but I do have a lot of interest in both of those fields. My parents were very into Art Deco design, and I was raised with a great appreciation for design and form. Over time I my taste has shifted and I have developed a affinity for Mid Century Modern architecture and design.

I am very drawn to it, I really love the clean lines and simplistic beauty of it. It has definitely been an influence on how I take photographs.

February 2014 | 31

You have a gift for framing picking and framing signs to photograph in such a way that they take on perhaps unintended meanings.

Is finding these little verbal/visual quirks merely an issue of keeping oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eyes open to the world around you, or do you actively seek out signage to photograph?

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I have done photography thoughout my life, but had stopped for many years.

When I picked up my camera again I started photographing primarily signs.

There are a lot of people out there that photograph old signs so itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a challenge to try to find a way of doing it and making it unique.

My approach is to find signs that are unexpected or humorous. I struggle a bit, and sometimes for me photography seems so heavy and serious, so finding subjects that are funny is a good way to keep it light.

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What is your relationship with light as a photographer? I hate to lead, but you seem to take joy in its ability to illuminate and sparkle rather than merely its ability to light a subject; in a lot of ways light is your subject in its capacity to color, to expose, and to reflect. You don’t seem interested in manipulating it.

It’s pretty recent that I’ve started experimentng more with light. Of course I know that light is a huge part of photography, and it seems like there are a lot of rules about what you should and shouldn’t do with it, but I think it’s sometimes fun to ignore the rules and just play. I understand that light is a tool, but I also love the idea of light being part of the art, or being the subject of the artwork itself.

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flickr.com/atomicrat

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BOOK REVIEW

Mira Corpora

By Jeff Jackson

Two Dollar Radio Reviewed by Travis Fortney

Mira Corpora is an astonishing piece of work: the rare experimental novel that also features rocket pacing, the coming-of-age story riding in the wake of a million others that still feels fresh and new, the story that wears its shock and awe on its sleeve yet still manages to stun, the debut novel featuring angsty teenagers using drugs that somehow feels authentic. Here’s what you need to know: It’s gripping; it’s interesting; it’s good stuff.

Take, for example, the angsty/suicidal teenage narrator. This year, I have read what feels like a hundred of these novels, all them debuts, and all but one of them from small indie presses. I won’t call out the authors by name, but suffice to say they all have big problems that arise because reading a book featuring suicidal narrator generally involves listening to a lot of what amounts to empty hemming and hawing. I suppose the author’s design in most of these novels is for the reader to firmly align him or herself in the suicidal narrator’s camp, listing all of the reasons this poor young person has to live, while the suicidal narrator drones on and on insufferably about should he or shouldn’t he kill himself. Well, in Mira Corpora, the word suicide is never mentioned. But then we have this scene. Mr. Jackson’s narrator—also named Jeff Jackson—is at this point a 15-year-old urban street person turned sex-slave/pet. A well-heeled German immigrant named Gert-Jan keeps the Jeff Jackson of the novel prisoner by dosing him on a daily basis with with a fizzy neon green pill, but one February 2014 | 45

day young Jeff palms the pill and pantomimes a swallow. The next day, he does the same, and an unnamed plan begins to emerge. “My hands seem to be scavenging for something in particular. All the while I listen to the clanging sound of feet on the circular metal steps. I have no idea what I’m preparing to do until I climb onto a chair and fling a strand of twine over the chandelier.” There you have it. Up until this point in the novel, the idea of suicide hasn’t entered our narrator’s mind. And yet a moment later he’s hanging by his makeshift noose, and a moment after that he’s crashed to the floor with the chandelier still tied to his neck and ceiling rubble all around him, and he drags the whole mess behind him as he staggers to a picture window from which he plans to jump. Obviously, this isn’t the only way to approach suicide in a novel, but it’s so superior to the many recent treatments I’ve seen the subject given that it got my attention. Whereas many debut novels seem filled with the author’s fantasies of anguish, here is the real deal, or at least a close facsimile. Here is an author— as advertised in the “Author’s Note” at the beginning of the text—who seems to be speaking from experience.

And that’s not all that got my attention in Mira Corpora. We meet young Jeff as a six-year-old orphan, and then are reintroduced to him as an eleven-year-old living with his abusive alcoholic mother, who he tells us appears to reclaim him every so often. The best sections of the novel come after Jeff has run away. We are introduced to a backwoods settlement peopled entirely by teenage runaways, where a dead body is burned at a funeral pyre, a band of the escaped monkeys from a foreclosed amusement park wanders the landscape, and lecherous gun-wielding truckers wait in ambush. Jeff visits three “oracles,” whose appearance in the novel seems to echo Homer’s sirens, their sweet song a precursor to death and corruption.

Jeff ’s quest takes him next to the city, where he shuttles “between a cardboard refrigerator box in the alley next to the Emerald Mountain Chinese restaurant and a wool blanket on the concrete floor of the municipal shelter.” One day, the mailman hands him an envelope containing a cassette recording of a legendary and elusive indie musician. Jeff realizes the cassette tape is a gift, and it excites him. He borrows a Walkman from a fellow street person. Mr. Jackson describes the urban landscape beautifully. “A few homeless have bothered to climb the chain-link fence that protects the partitions of dead grass from the public. They lie on the ground like neglected sculptures, blackened by the elements.” And, “The ground is covered in fresh, grayishgreen splatches of pigeon shit.” And, “The wind swirls some grimy black condoms and supermarket fliers at my feet.” While young Jeff is finally listening to the transcendent garage rock on the tape, he’s approached by a roving gang of Luchos. The Luchos tell him to hand the tape over. Jeff refuses. They encircle him and close in. Fight or flight instinct takes over, and Jeff lunges at the head Lucho. He knocks him to the ground, and clamps down on his nose with his teeth. This stuns the gang of Luchos. “His nose is squelchy cartilage in my mouth,” Jeff narrates. “I can feel it start to give. So can he.

More screams. More cursing. [...] With a savage jerk, I rip my head to the side. His nose is in my mouth. A chunk of rubbery gristle. [...] Everything halts for a moment as El Lucho Jefe gives a heart-shuddering, high-pitched scream to the heavens. I spit his nose on the ground.” With the nose on the ground, Jeff and the Luchos are swarmed by stray dogs. Jeff flees and ends up on a rooftop above the park, where he listens to the cassette tape again. “From the first quavering notes,” he narrates, “I can feel again how everything has changed.”

So can the reader. What’s changed for us, is that we’re no longer in a story that resembles any other we’ve read. We’re knee-deep in a propulsive novel that’s not only a cut above the average bildungsroman, but is just objectively good by any standard.

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There’s much more here that I haven’t touched on—the relationship between the “real” and “invented” Jeff Jackson, the novel’s sometimes challenging but ultimately linear structure, and the wonderful way that Mr. Jackson draws attention, again and again to the words on the page themselves. In the age of e-readers, the book as object is very much alive here. When Jeff is struck by the uneasy sensation in the last line that his hand might “stab straight through the page”, the possibility feels all too real. Mira Corpora will amply satisfy readers looking for both depth and entertainment. C

Out of 10: 9.9

Or 10 for readers who like their fiction on the dark, strange, and less than perfectly accessible side

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Couples, by John Updike (1968) Portnoy’s Complaint, by Philip Roth (1969) The Prisoner of Sex, by Norman Mailer (1971) Fear of Flying, by Erica Jong (1973)

RARE BOOK FOR SALE

First Edition, First Printing Write-up by Jason Pettus

CCLaP is making a growing amount of its rare book collection available at reseller eBay.com, both for auction and for instant purchase. For all current books for sale, visit [ebay.com/usr/cclapcenter], or for the collection’s entire list, [cclapcenter.com/rarebooks].

DESCRIPTION: Among the many cultural revolutions that occurred in the 1960s was one having to do with sexuality; after all, these years saw the rise of the second major wave of feminism, the youth movement bringing radical new attitudes about casual relationships, the proliferation of drugs fueling a lot more random hookups, and the invention of the Pill making these hook-ups safer than ever before. And even academic literature got into the act; in fact, it’s easy to argue that these daring books of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s actually marked the popular beginning of the entire Postmodernist literary movement, in that many of these 48 | The CCLaP Journal

now notorious authors actually first established their reputations as young skinny-tied Late Modernist intellectuals, who only blossomed into their new adult careers once the hippies finally took over the arts.

That’s certainly the case with the oldest title being offered in this special four-book bundle today, John Updike’s 1968 Couples; already popular among academic nerds because of his Rabbit, Run from the Kennedy years, this was the book that pushed him into mainstream recognition as well, in that this is literally the first book in history to popularize the idea of suburban sex parties, and every winking reference to this subject in books and movies ever since can eventually be boiled back to this infamously nasty little character study. Then just a year after that came what is the most valuable book in this bundle, Philip Roth’s 1969 Portnoy’s Complaint; yet another young serious Modernist who had already been doing well in publications like The New Yorker, this still incredibly filthy comedy about an overly onanistic young Jew came right during the ascension of Woody Allen, Richard Benjamin and Lenny Bruce, and helped cement the new countercultural concept of the nebbish, neurotic, ethnic sex symbol.

But not all of these former Modernists took to Postmodernism the same way: take Norman Mailer, for example, who before the ‘60s was known mostly as a hard-hitting journalist with Hemingway aspirations, but took to second-wave feminism so badly that he wrote the 1971 The Prisoner of Sex as a response, basically a 250-page complete repudiation of people like Gloria Steinem and everything she and her peers stood for.

But then two years after that came yet another delightfully different response: poet Erica Jong’s 1973 debut novel, Fear of Flying, the titillating semi-autobiographical tale of a young with-it woman during a young with-it time, and all the sexy adventures she finds herself getting into as a result, a book so influential that its concept of the “Mile High Club” still remains a naughty code phrase among society at large even forty years later. Any one of these books would make a great addition to any Postmodernist rare-book collection, but all four together is a real hat trick; and at the modest price they’re being offered for today as a group, this is a must-have for anyone who enjoys collecting important countercultural objects, or those with an interest in the beginnings of Postmodernist literature.

CONDITION: Text: Portnoy and Prisoner, Very Good Plus (VG+). In general still in fantastic shape, with tight bindings and completely clean inside covers. Couples and Flying, Very Good (VG). Generally the same as the others, although in this case with their spines starting to come just a little bit loose from their fabric protections. Dust jacket: Prisoner, Very Good Minus (VG-). Still completely intact, with no major or minor tears, but with rubbing and a few scratch marks on the back cover. Flying, Portnoy and Couples, Good Plus (G+). In all three cases, the covers are generally in good shape and completely intact; but a half-inch missing piece on the back cover of Flying, a one-inch tear in the upper-right front cover of Couples, and a badly torn front inside flap of Portnoy knock the overall rating of all three down significantly. All dust jackets now protected by Demco mylar sheets. All four books have a stated “First Edition” on their copyright pages; lack of additional printing notices make all of them first printings as well.

PROVENANCE: Portnoy and Prisoner: Acquired by CCLaP on September 2, 2013, at the Oak Park Book Fair. Couples: Acquired at the 2012 Newberry Library Book Fair, Chicago. Flying: Acquired in 2012 at Ravenswood Books, Chicago. C

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BOOK REVIEW

Jesus Was a Time Traveler

By D.J. Gelner

Orion’s Comet LLC Reviewed by Madeleine Maccar

I can’t say that I was disappointed in this bizarro-flavored take on time travel—it is more or less impossible to have lukewarm feelings about a book that unabashedly references the likes of Quantum Leap, the Back to the Future trilogy and Star Trek when it’s not dropping lines like “Take that you Nazi assmonsters!”—but for a novel that presents some questions about the true chronological home of Our Lord and Savior directly in its title, Jesus Was a Time Traveler doesn’t spend as much time with the eponymous Son of God as my predilection for purposeful irreverence had hoped. Though I suppose positing that Jesus of Nazareth was really a privileged hippie stoner from the future (albeit one with good intentions) could perhaps strike others as adequately blasphemous.

Instead of the organized-religion skewering I had expected, D.J. Gelner’s novel offers up a timehopping romp that dumps its hero, Dr. Phineas “Finn” Templeton, in a scattershot selection of eras ranging from the reign of dinosaurs to Maryland of 2042—the location, time and purpose of each jump having been predetermined by the mysterious Benefactor whose financial backing helped Finn build his time machine— to piece together its surprisingly zen-like observations about fate’s role in shaping the events that shaped the world, both in the larger all-encompassing historical sense and the much smaller individual basis, while also serving up such decidedly un-scientist-like behaviors as casual drug use, one-night stands and what comes across as almost medically necessary alcoholism.

Finn is an affable enough fellow who’s far less bitter than I would be when he discovers that the history books have attributed his time-travel breakthroughs to the dashing Commander Ricky Corcoran, with whom Finn spends a considerable chunk of the story and, despite 50 | The CCLaP Journal

an admirably controlled initial impulse to sock the usurper of his glory right in his heroically chiseled jawline, comes to begrudgingly tolerate the company of both the Commander and his comrade, Steve Bloomington, as the trio leapfrog their way back and forth across time with occasional help (and hindrance) from fellow time travelers, all of whom identify themselves with the Vulcan salute.

Finn’s encounters with great men and minor players of the past offer a warning against turning fallible humans into historical legend, that perhaps letting the pretty lie that has been polished to an irresistible shine over millennia might just be better left as a widely accepted if unproven truth. The discovery that Jesus’s miracles are nothing more than the work of hyper-modern science that baffle and astound an audience unfamiliar with such marvels comes early in the book, so each subsequent upheaval of longstanding regard for the past is a little less shocking. As it turns out, the inception of time travel works its way backward through time, allowing travelers to leave their unseen “I was here” marks all over history, such as the debt-plagued teacher who escapes his modern woes by tutoring (and mildly terrorizing) the seemingly hopeless Isaac Newton during his academically formative years.

Aided by the frequently uttered mantra of “Whatever happened, happened” acknowledging the Universe’s way of righting itself and eliminating the paradoxes that could muck up the ways that certain events are meant to play out, and the quickmoving plot not allowing its protagonist much time to mull over his failures or close calls, Jesus Was a Time Traveler makes some surprisingly astute observations about the starring role that fate plays in assuring that history remains unmolested so the future plays out the only way it was ever meant to. The book’s world embraces something of an amalgamation of the “canonical” time-travel theories put forth by other media that have tackled the hypothetical accomplishment’s science and philosophy, though ultimately favors a Terminatoresque school of thought—that is, the immutability of what is destined to unfold—as the truth of time travel, rather than the more variable-dependent model that so many movies, shows and books have hinged their outcomes upon.

While the role and power of fate are explored quite extensively in these frantically paced pages, the inherent “goodness” or “evil” of technological breakthroughs gets quite a bit of attention, too. The time-traveling cosmonauts comprising this book’s fictional personae speak of time travel being deregulated, meaning that almost anyone can experience the past for themselves. While some of these characters use these advances for good, such as seizing the opportunity to serve as battlefield nurses in past wars, others simply want to use their access to superior gadgetry to take advantage of their “inferior” predecessors. The same technology is available to the good guys and the baddies, offering a subtle but successful explanation that it’s not the technology that’s evil but the hands in which it falls, and that even then, mere perspective affects the perceived motivation of the technology’s use: Weighing the good of the many against the good of the few looks a lot less admirable to those unlucky enough to be the few cut worms who must forgive the plough in the name of progress.

Like any off-kilter premise that uses wacky antics to underscore a moral imperative or three, Jesus Was a Time Traveler deftly sidesteps the dangers of sermonizing with its copious adventure, a healthy offering of humor and mostly likable characters whose depths aren’t apparent until the big reveal turns everything that the audience—and Finn—think they know on its ear. C

Out of 10: 8.2 February 2014 | 51

ORIGINAL FICTION

120 Photo: John S. | flickr.com/62693815@N03 | Used under the terms of his Creative Commons license 52 | The CCLaP Journal

For a short time at least, Scott Meirion lived what could reasonably be called a contented existence. He had suffered a relatively minor mental breakdown the previous summer, right at the junction of his life’s two biggest misfortunes (to that point), which were: the pinnacle of his grandmother’s Alzheimer’s disease and her subsequent death, and his being fired from his job with a construction firm under whose employ he had managed a living wage the previous five seasons.

His breakdown, meanwhile, was “minor” only insofar as Meirion had determined this to be the inviolable truth of his breakdown.

And so fact was, then, that he’d had a minor breakdown.

28 years old but he could easily have passed for a decade older.

08

Matt Rowan February 2014 | 53

He mourned his grandmother’s loss in his own time, as he settled into a new job working for a city newspaper’s distribution division. While providing a small income it gave him, likewise, a necessary distraction. The position’s responsibilities included either driving the truck—a big, blue box of a vehicle with a sliding passenger- side door—or unloading the strapped together bundles of newspaper at their places of sale, such as convenience stores and other retailers. Meirion’s route, a primarily urban course, was dotted liberally with individual newspaper vending boxes, which had been something of a pilferage liability in the past and were increasingly outfitted with a deterrent mechanism meant to significantly inhibit theft. The mechanism worked similarly to a spring-powered drying rack that you might use to keep art projects separated as they dried; often elementary schools will have larger, horizontal versions of these racks for their students’ use.

The problem of course was the substantial increase in time and labor needed to cut the plastic straps—or “twine” in paper delivery argot—and individually insert the papers in their lattice-barred slots. It wouldn’t have been such a considerable undertaking if it were not for the narrow timeframe in which the delivery persons were operating, the vending boxes—or “safes”—along with the retailers they dealt to—were located strategically near subways and well-traveled commuter sidewalks, machines built to dutifully open for the buying public at the price of fifty cents on weekdays and Saturday and for an additional dollar on Sundays. It was vitally important Meirion made his rounds to each point of sale before the heaving morning crowd had throbbed to its usual acme and at last passed completely through. Meirion also hated the lattice gating because he’d usually pinch his fingers and break skin as he became hypnotized by the tedium of loading, usually catching a digit or extremity on a rogue gear or the nettlesome hinges and springs of a mechanism that was in sum not designed especially well, had not been imagined and effected with the operator’s relative safety at heart. He would exit the truck, grip a bundle by the twine and dispassionately let go of a green vinyl tarp he used to keep the papers clean and free of unnoticed shallow puddles, and then more carefully dropped the bundle of papers he was carrying on top of it, making sure the side of the tarp on which he was setting them was clean. He imagined himself hunched over in winter, the wind and slush surrounding him furiously in terrifying skeins of ice and cold, as though he were some kind of stranded arctic explorer caught perilously in a frozen hurricane. He thought maybe then the pain of his fingers being crushed would be a welcome distraction. He’d need to endure the horrible soggy chill of winter clothing dampened by hoary snow. But winter hadn’t arrived yet. There was still time.

“Really is what people call, what’s it, menial labor, right? That twine and bundles, plus paper safes shit they got us workin with. After enough mornins it does fry them brains to balls.” Empathy Davis, Scott’s ride-along partner, a middle-aged woman who lived on the west side, said. “Sure does,” he agreed, tersely.

Meirion didn’t exactly relish doing one task over the other, the driving over the unloading or vice versa, but he also found neither to be completely devoid of benefits.

Not that this was any ringing endorsement of either, of course. But he was glad for the ephemeral pleasures of each task. For one, with the unloading, he was forced to encounter all sorts of interesting people. The black homeless man who stood outside the Golden Convenience was an interesting person. Sure, yes, he did make Meirion uncomfortable by the perceptible fact that he knew. There was also usually the white homeless man there, too, but he rarely stared into Meirion’s soul.

Were he the driver on delivery day, he could sit numbly on his seat and barely move a muscle his entire shift, responsible only for negotiating random hazards of 54 | The CCLaP Journal

the city’s streets: a parked car’s abruptly opening driver’s side door, bleary-eyed early morning joggers, scurrying animals just visible enough to see and usually avoid. He reloaded his coffee cup at all the retailers along their route. He imagined endless streams of milky brown filling the transparent tubes of his brain, invigorating him and also stirring his bladder too frequently. But his full bladder coupled with the caffeine did help to keep him awake, if a little distractedly.

After Meirion had logged and unloaded the number of unsold newspapers of the previous day and punched out of the company’s electronic timecard system, accessible via a dated IBM with Windows operating system, on his way home from his morning delivery shift he would often stop off at the same Golden Convenience that was part of his route. There, he’d venture inside to buy a meal for himself.

Browsing the various pastries and taquitos available to him, he’d usually settle on a frozen breakfast burrito and frosted brown sugar pop tarts, and this time was no different. He ate the microwaved burrito and cold pop tarts in his car. He closed his eyes only to rest them, but like often happened, he fell to deep sleep. When he was able to open his eyes again, he discovered the black homeless man was standing on the sidewalk up the street—gesturing his number, those five and two fingers aimed unmistakably at Meirion, and shouting what was probably the same number incomprehensibly, or incomprehensibly at least from where Meirion sat, disoriented.

Meirion pretended not to notice.

Eventually the homeless man sidled up and knocked on his window, waving and calling to him, and Meirion said he had no change. Meirion had not checked his pockets or even feigned an attempt as he sometimes would. There may very well have been change in them, his grimy unwashed pockets. And later, as Meirion continued to observe from the safety of his automobile, a 20-something hipster extracted the amount the homeless man was wanting, and both the homeless man and the hipster then departed their meeting point on the street corner, going in different directions.

Meirion drove home discomfited by more than just the malaise one feels after the average workday.

Meirion wasn’t yet old enough to abandon life to reclusion, even though most of his encounters with people he didn’t know well tended to be embarrassing and tortuous affairs. He would hastily escape a fast food restaurant, red-faced and impotent, immediately upon receiving the meal he’d somehow managed to order. Nobody noticed his awkwardness like he did, or really at all. He was losing his life and nothing worth mentioning had happened, in terms of what, in a perfect world, he might have liked to do. But he did get along well with his coworkers, Empathy especially. And good at least that she was who he had been partnered with by his equally unsociable boss, the loading dock foreman and delivery chief, Morty Feldspar, who was far more aggressively aloof than Meirion. Feldspar made Meirion think of George C. Scott, or rather George C. Scott if George C. Scott had possessed no affability or charm.

Meirion did not have many furnishings of any kind. He didn’t own a kitchen table, a stove, or an oven. His walls were naked of pictures and posters. He’d been the sole beneficiary of his grandmother’s estate, but decided to sell most of her possessions, many of which were antiques and brought in more money than he could have expected. In fact, if he had been a little more shrewd he could have fetched far greater profit than what he received. But this was of little concern to him. Selling February 2014 | 55

off his grandmother’s things was more akin to plucking the petals of a flower and releasing the petals to the wind. Meirion was also itchingly fearful that at any moment he could find himself laid off and again seeking employment in another dead-end job.

The extra money he’d gotten eased his fear.

Scott Meirion slept quite a lot, a probable result of his depression. His eyes felt raw and his eyelids rusted over when he was awake.

He was now awake. The TV was going. He vaguely remembered turning it on.

Meirion struggled to an upright position in his sofa chair. His shoulder hurt. His muscles ached from inactivity, and he briefly grabbed both of his thighs and massaged them. He checked his wristwatch. 11:30 pm. Not very many eateries open. He could and, if all else failed, would travel to the Golden Convenience. He would venture out.

The air outside was colder than Meirion had expected. He should have worn a sweatshirt or hoodie. He began his slow, lithe descent to the southern end of his street.

Perhaps it was hunger that had suggested this path to him. He would eventually turn left, not right, at the intersection.

Trees are malevolent figures in the dark, outstretched arms and fingers splayed every which way imaginable. They are especially so among the contradictory surroundings of brick and mortar buildings, utilitarian lampposts with all manner of colorful paper signs with photocopied photographs. The honeylocust trees, so remarkable for their stems that beg to be plucked and then shorn using finger and thumb of two roughly even rows of leaves, which can then be tossed carefree into the air and produce a fully organic confetti effect, were the trees the city had decided to plant in black squares of soil adjacent to the sidewalk. Yet even these evocatively celebratory plants loomed over Meirion like Cleckley psychopaths. He moved steadily onward, undeterred.

Meirion did what he could to let his mind wander, as his body traversed the city block in perceptible quiet. He began to think of his personal bests. What in life had been his personal best in terms of lack of sleep? How long had he gone without a good night’s rest? He could not remember a time when he had gone without it, and suddenly this thought began to trouble him. Maybe it had been as far back as his childhood.

Always, sleep had overtaken him.

Meirion was a failed lover, foolish and doomed always to repeatedly fall for women who would inevitably cut him loose. Of the few women there had been it is certain none, save maybe one, had meant him deliberate harm. They understood the relationship for what it was. He did not. In part, Meirion’s continued romantic failures were due to things within his control, like hygiene, which he woefully neglected. He possessed embedded in the deepest recesses of his gums or throat or tongue somewhere a trace of halitosis. His hair might have been groomed better and less matted by a dirty baseball cap. He could have trimmed the single nose hair that would sometimes descend thinly from his nostril as if lodged in his nose were a line of mechanical pencil lead. Also, Meirion made few decisions grounded in cool logic and a calculable sense of cause and effect. He was taken in by signal flares he should have interpreted as warnings to keep his distance, stay away. Accordingly, in the aftermaths of his severed relationships, he sank deep inside himself like an imperiled turtle, sad and sorry about what had been done to him.

The black homeless man who knew was kicking back a dram of Seagram’s at the street corner when Meirion arrived and, so seeing the man, affected an air of obliviousness. The man was crumpled up on the stoop of a newsstand, windows and 56 | The CCLaP Journal

door shuttered with brown-shingled metal. They gave the appearance of abandonment.

Meirion saw that he might pass without attracting the man’s attention, or failing that, at least move quickly enough not to rouse any inquiry, about the money he (Meirion) could spare or what a drunk raving derelict lets fly, unfiltered. The man let Meirion pass and spoke not one word. But then when Meirion was about three steps of sidewalk past, the man rose and began to creep behind him.

As if waiting for the second that Meirion finally resolved to break off in a dead sprint, the man who knew cut through the silence and said: "Beware what you aim to find out, beware it when news you buy is the most expensive thing on the shelf.”

The man then made what looked to Meirion a sarcastic genuflection and leaned his shoulder into the nearest building, sliding down to a heap at the gradient where the sidewalk and the brick wall intersected.

Meirion at first walked past the building marked “1208.” Meirion reasoned that it could not be a restaurant because if it were it was very bad at being a restaurant.

There was no name or advertisement or menu posted on a wall indicating it was a place where food might be purchased. But then he was struck by a savory-sweet and refulgent aroma.

Scott Meirion stared down the walkway that led to the alley, and along which a wooden door was set up above concrete steps, and a dusty, old incandescent bulb lighted the dark. There was an even fainter light aglow in the solitary window adjacent to the door. He walked cautiously up the steps to the door. He was unsure what to do next. Should he knock?

Meirion decided to knock. There was no other way. And so knocking , he immediately regretted his decision. He thought of trying to escape, to run—to avoid being harangued and chastened by the person or people he was bothering inside. It was too late for that, though. The door began to open.

A short, deliberate Asian man was standing there before him. His expression was inquisitive. He was waiting for Meirion to explain himself.

“I, I’m, I’m sorry. This is a strange question, is this a restaurant?” Meirion asked, trembling.

“Do you or do you not have a reservation, sir?”

“A what?”

Impatiently, the Asian man explained that this was unquestionably a restaurant, and as it happened it was a restaurant in which admittance was granted by reservation only. So, that left the simple question: had Meirion got a reservation or hadn’t he?

“I’m sorry, sir, return when you do have a reservation, please.”

The door began to close. But to Meirion’s great surprise, he thrust an arm out to stop it. To Meirion’s greater surprise, his arm stalwartly held the door in place.

“But, no joke, I am actually starving. Isn’t there some other way?” He stepped back, dislodging his arm.

“I sympathize, truly, but no, sir. You will need a reservation. Thank you for coming out this evening and good bye.” This second time the door slammed shut quickly, too quickly for Meirion to stop it. Meirion heard the disheartening bolting of no fewer than three locks. “So how do I get a reservation?” He decided that was the question he should have asked.

Normally, Scott Meirion would have wandered home dejectedly, and indeed he did wander home again on this day, eventually, but not before rummaging through the dumpsters of 1208, searching for something resembling food but finding nothing.

February 2014 | 57

Morty Feldspar was unhappy with Scott Meirion’s lack of punctuality the following day.

Meirion’s thoughts remained occupied with the previous evening’s mystery, like a song you can’t help but sing, despite others wanting you to stop. Morty Feldspar said, “Is it so terrible, Meiry, to do what’s asked of you and what hasn’t changed in your whole time of working here?” And he shouted expletives until his voice became hoarse and it was clear they’d had no effect on Meirion. Feldspar asked Meirion to speak privately with him in his office. Meirion nodded.

Feldspar eyed Meirion suspiciously. Meirion was acting funny. It wasn’t conscious subversion on Meirion’s part, Feldspar felt certain. But Feldspar was a creature of the system, and he made it his business to insinuate himself in the daily lives and activities of his employees, especially the ones who were acting funny.

“We don’t have a lot of time, because you’ve got your schedule to keep and I’ve got mine, so I’ll do my best to be brief. This what happened this morning, your being late and even for your standards slovenly put together; it does not happen again, capiche?”

“I understand.”

“I hope that doesn’t ruffle As if waiting for the second that your nice clean feathers too much, Meirion finally resolved to break neither.” off in a dead sprint, the man who

“I don’t know why it would.”

“Hey, smart-aleck, say ‘No knew cut through the silence and sir’ next time, but don’t get cute, said: “Beware what you aim to buddy. Because you get me—if find out, beware it when news you you don’t shape up, you ship out.” buy is the most expensive thing Feldspar pointed hard at Meirion.

“You pretty much already on the shelf.” The man then made said that.” what looked to Meirion a sarcastic

“Listen wiseacre, what I tell genuflection and leaned his you? I’m the one who decides who’s shoulder into the nearest building, said what and how clearly they’ve sliding down to a heap at the said it. Now get out of here.”

gradient where the sidewalk and the brick wall intersected.

Meirion dropped his duffel bag to the floor. It made the hollow thud of a partially deflated volleyball.

Meirion walked over to his bright blue rotary dial phone, and he rotary dialed information. He was no longer going to pussyfoot around. He was going to be an adult, finally.

“City and state, please.”

“The city is –”

“Wait, hold on, I’m sorry, sir, but stop. Your manner is making me feel . . . uncomfortable. Can I reprimand you a moment?”

“I, uh.”

“How can you ever expect to be taken seriously, talking the way you do—with that voice! I gather you live alone? Naturally, and who could blame anyone for their unwillingness to spend time with you, creepy as you seem.”

“Just a minute, because all I wanted –”

“All you wanted? Obviously you aren’t brave. Fine, let’s have it, city and state, please.”

58 | The CCLaP Journal

Scott Meirion despondently gave the city and the state. The information operator snorted, asking, “Is that all?” “Yes,” Meirion said. The information operator asked for the establishment's name. Meirion felt himself blush and explained that he didn’t know the name exactly, or if the restaurant he was calling even had one, but he knew its address, that he had referred to it as 1208 up to now. He gave the address of 1208, then, and the information operator silently went about his task of looking up the restaurant.

When the information operator returned, he wanted to know why couldn’t Meirion get his life together long enough to honestly give names and cities and states of places whose mystery isn’t so intimidating, and he put special emphasis on the former of these three things. “In the end I was able to secure a reservation,” explained the information operator, “for myself. It was easy and yet you made it out to be so hard. If you are able you should try to do what I did, which is go the extra mile, call 1208 and reserve seating.”

“I know. That’s why I’m calling.”

“To avoid, that’s why you’re calling. All the same, you people. Pleasant evening.”

The information operator was gone. Scott Meirion hung up. He wanted to cry out in frustration and self-contempt. Instead, he fell backwards into his sofa chair and drifted easily into sleep. He dreamt of terrible things, and voices became shrill and screamed horribly in some twisted mélange of emotional and physical pain.

Meirion was delighted to find in his refrigerator upon awaking a small block of cheddar cheese.

He was delighted twofold when he discovered in his cupboard a box half full of Triscuits, name brand. He then remembered that he had caught in the corner of his eye a flash of red when he earlier opened his refrigerator but so excited was he by the hunk of cheese that he had let the image flutter from his mind without follow up. Now, with thoughts of it restored, he decided to investigate. Meirion pulled open the door and met by its cool lambent light he scrutinized its insides. A bottle of Coca-Cola! This was a true find.

Meirion feasted and slept much better because of his modest though needed discovery of food and foodstuffs (there had been some Tabasco, too). He put “bottles of Coca-Cola” on his grocery list.

It was raining the next morning. The rain was an especially dismal rain, pattering in staccato waves. Rain ostensibly sent by some force greater than Meirion to remind him of the fact that things had not improved much. His hunger meanwhile had become increasingly severe. He ached when its drill bit vibrated to life inside of him. Foods he’d never eaten in such large quantities passed down his gullet and at intervals so regular it was as if they were conducted there by conveyor belt, a factory of food. He was gaining weight and it was beginning to show, especially in his inflated cheeks and drooping chest.

Yet even after becoming “full” with various foods, Meirion was still afflicted with a certain sort of pain, a different kind of hunger. His monomaniacal drive to be seated in 1208, to be served and eat there. What would it be like to be granted access when so many times before it had been denied (it should be mentioned here that Meirion happened back to 1208 on eight or nine additional occasions, never getting past the side entrance).

Meirion had tried nearly every trick he could think of, including pretending to be the mayor, and acting as the mayor, calling information from a payphone. If his plan February 2014 | 59

had worked he would have been a shoe-in, despite that he knew he would need to sound like the mayor, or at least mayoral.

Mercifully, through all of his hemming and hawing, the information operator — who it happened was the very same one Meirion had spoken with awkwardly the last time — did not hang up, though evidently he did not believe that Meirion was the mayor, either. Not for a second.

The operator began asking questions.

Meirion was woefully unprepared for such questions. He regarded them as unfair, salacious tabloid fare, importuning a mayor (Meirion)—possibly the mayor, for all the information operator knew—and flouting his plebeian disbelief in Meirion’s claim, which while it was untrue, could have been true, and if it were true, wasn’t this man wasting the mayor’s very important time? Where were the mayor’s aides to make this phone call for him, understanding that he had far more important things to concern himself with than getting a table at an exclusive restaurant such as 1208, and wouldn’t they have known the number without having to turn to Information, or wouldn’t they have at least had some better method to acquire it, consulting a wealthy constituent with pockets deep enough to penetrate even the most hard to penetrate places, or any other good method befitting a man of his stature? Suddenly Meirion adopted a haughty tone and, with detectable impatience, said, “Now listen here, my good man, but who do you take me for? One of the hoi polloi who have come to expect this debasing treatment?

I haven’t the faintest clue who you believe yourself to be, that you can speak to me as disrespectfully as you’ve chosen, but I suggest you change your tone post haste if you value your job and, quite possibly, your life!” And it seemed for a minute that Meirion had successfully duped the information operator. But what proved to be Meirion’s undoing and what would cost him so greatly was that right at the moment the real mayor was viewable on television, waving to the crowd and wearing his lavender sash with “#1 Mayor” embroidered on it. The information operator looked at this picture on the TV screen and switched back to the awaiting Mayor Scott Meirion, asking him what color his mayor’s sash was, and Meirion unthinkingly replied, “magenta.” The click that ended the call resounded in Meirion’s ear. Meirion hung up the receiver of the pay phone, let the quarters drop, sealing the transaction as completed.

“The rumor is that you’ve been trying to get a table at this restaurant that don’t take you unless you’ve got yourself a fancy reservation like the ones in those fancy movies.”

Morty Feldspar had stopped Meirion on his way inside the loading dock, before he’d even clocked in, so this was unpaid time that made him all the more eager to extricate himself from the foreman’s conspicuously loquacious grip.

Meirion nodded plaintively. He expected a rebuke of, at the very least, modest intensity from the foreman, but instead the foreman became all of a sudden plaintive himself. “Ok well, but clock in and come to my office because I want some words with you.”

Feldspar nodded at Meirion, still the perfect image of an old warhorse, mostly bald with sunken eyes that seemed attached to his thick, untamed eyebrows like fake glasses and mustache, and these came together in symphonic concert to create the uncomfortable appearance of a perpetual glare. His thin lips neither frowned nor smiled, revealing nothing of his designs. The two of them were tucked away and seated inside the alcove that was Feldspar’s “office,” a four-walled enclosure without a ceiling. A large sheet of glass that was more or less a window provided easy viewing of the entire newspaper-delivery operation, the loading docks and personnel and so forth, 60 | The CCLaP Journal

but there were also blinds that could shield its occupants from prying eyes. The blinds were drawn down and closed.

Feldspar’s old mouth opened a sliver to let out a sigh, then stretching his jaw muscles and the leathery skin of his face he began to speak, “I want you to know, Meiry, that I thought of busting your ass right on out of here when I saw what was happening and I realized how much off track you’d gotten. But then I remembered that I was young once, too. And I thought maybe a story from my days as a youngish guy like you, with much of my whole life ahead of me, would help you to understand what exactly you’ve got to do now. So what do you think? You want to hear it?”

“I think that anything is possible, Mr. Feldspar. I’m out of new ideas. I’m happy to whatever you want to say to me,” Meirion said, sincerely — surprised at his sincerity but no less sincere.

“I’ve always appreciated that about you, Meiry. You’re a straight shooter. And so let me return the kindness by telling it to you straight. People who don’t know are always gonna tell you how hard it is to get the things you want in this life. But really it ain’t all that hard. I was in the war, have I told you? A marine. I was a good soldier, too. Attained the rank of Lance Corporal. But war is a dangerous place. Don’t let them tell you different.

“So what you ought to know is we were out this one time. I was leading a squad. It was our responsibility to survey that hill, the one that everybody told us, from intelligence on down the ladder, was good and dandy, no enemy combatants or anything. I can almost smell the tall grass that we were crawling on up that hillside, smell the beads of dew, and see the weird beetles, looking like they had metallic plating that glinted in the dark and seemed to me like the eyes of devils, recon of their own demonic kind. They’d crawl back to the rest of them monsters with a report of what they as horrible eyes had seen. But yeah, some of the men went at it crushing these beetles, because the beetles were slow and moved their crab limbs in this freakin’ methodical style, like they were animatronic or just somehow fake, and for that reason I think basically brought out the worst in the men. The men were all of the sudden like monkeys, eekin’ and ahhin quietly. And anyway while all this happened it turned out not everything was good and dandy on that hill, intelligence was wrong, as it occasionally is.

“It was when the first shot rang out and pierced the leg of one of the men on our left flank, and so he toppled to the ground and went right on to cursing and wailing.

I saw the blood exit his calf like a sideways geyser. Least that’s how I remember it going, a geyser of blood and broken flesh and then pure agony. I mean hell if I know if my memory’s skewed or just plain shot. So Spaulding went immediately over to our guy on the ground, a Mexican name of Javier-something — I can’t remember, and Spaulding was a guy I’d known for the entire war till right then, it felt like.

“He reminded me of my dad who I can tell you was unlike anyone I ever knew.

And Spaulding was just like him, like the spitting image of my dad in his younger years, wire framed and everything. It’s a wonder I got so big as I am cause Dad wasn’t big, definitely not real big. Probably came from my mom’s side, my stature. But ah hell, look how off topic I got. But this might be good to know for you to better understand the stuff I said about war, so let me tell you something else, yeah? When I was even younger than I was for the war, say I’m gonna guess around thirteen but it could have been younger than that, Ma was I guess you could say not really watching where she was going in our perfect little neighborhood, not like wealthy or really classy or all that but really nothing bad ever happened there, but except for we had these neighbors, you understand Meiry?, and they were inheritors of the small house they lived in across February 2014 | 61

the street from our own, which their house used to be occupied by an old aunt of theirs who had no one else to leave it to when she one day died. That’s the story they told. So people of not the best caliber moved in and the problem was these neighbors were quick to make enemies, and if memory serves this one time Ma tried to engage them in light conversation and mentioned about how their bushes needed a trim, the front yard ones, and ok so maybe that was a little insulting on my mom’s part but I think everyone has had an accidental slip and is more insulting than they mean to be sometimes. But plus the bushes looked like trash and really that wasn’t the worst of what she could have said. So what do they do? They cut down our bushes in the middle of the night one night to like these stick-having stubs and nothing else and they poured some kind of herbicide that really beat the shit out of our lawn, to the point where it would require totally new sod, and you can imagine how happy my folks were for that. So Ma marched in what you might say her bullheaded way across the street demanding that they pay for the damage and they said something coy and assholeish like ‘Whatever do you mean?’ and my mom ran back to our station wagon and grabbed a tire iron from out of the back seat part, which she then threw through one of their asshole windows. And then you could say someone pulling the strings above said hey lady you, and not them, went too far this time. She walked right out into the street back to our house and maybe because she expected some sort of retaliation right then she didn’t notice the Cadillac that knocked her up and over the windshield and off its side where she laid in the street unconscious and really badly hurt.

“It was about after the sound of the really horrible thud and crack of suddenly concave windshield glass that Dad, who had wanted to be the bigger people and leave the idiots across the street to some kind of end caused by their own stupidity, came racing around to the front of the house from the back where he’d been for the fiftieth time or something painting our garage a new color (this was a weird hobby of his that I never understood). So when my dad got there he saw Ma lying in the street and completely wrecked, bloody from head to toe. Her body twisted in ways I rather to not remember but ways I can say were not like what’s it kinesiologically natural, and whoever in the Cadillac drove into her was totally and all too gone. I know because I saw everything unfurl like the worst kind of nightmare. Dad didn’t wait. He knew the hospital was close by, and he had me help him to help Ma in our station wagon, laid her out easy there on the very back area where she got the tire iron from. Probably we should have done things differently. We should have called an ambulance to come get her, which seems obvious in retrospect like lots of things do. But we didn’t. We drove her there to the hospital ourselves.

“Our station wagon was a pretty good old tank of a car, and Dad knew how to drive. Ma depended on his driving pretty seriously all of a sudden, so he shot out of the driveway and screeching over our lawn, which was ruined anyway, as I say. And Dad was pretty, what’s it, undone? He was undone by the whole thing, so obviously that’s going to affect how you drive and the decision-making that goes into driving, because he burst right out into traffic and I think it was there, bursting out from our little neighborhood through the intersection and into an oncoming car or scrapping it a little in a small sideswipe, I think that was what he did that pissed off the other driver.

It wasn’t a t-boning or all that brutal like t-boning is, Dad had pulled the station wagon astern the other car, some model Oldsmobile I can’t remember, but Dad pulled astern with the ease of as if it really was this old-timey wooden warship. So our car was this bulky thing and me moving around in back I guess trying to sooth Ma while the keel was anything but even, rocking in a storm.

“And so here’s where the story takes another really awful turn for the bad: The 62 | The CCLaP Journal

guy in the Olds is rightfully pissed at being sideswiped for doing nothing wrong but driving and Dad was in his own way right because he’s got bigger fish to think about.

But who could know that? And so it wasn’t a huge surprise to me that the guy in the Olds drove up right next to us, going to real lengths to roll down his passenger side window, leaning over hard against the passenger seat of his car cause his arms were not very long for starters, so he could shout choice words at Dad, and Dad not in any real mood for this guy’s shit right now, and also probably a little bit pissed about what happened to Ma but with nobody to vent on right then and there cause of her urgent need for urgent care. And the thing was getting really nuts with Dad and the guy in the Olds. So much so that Dad had somehow managed a shoe off his foot and threw it at the guy who looked to catch it awkwardly against his face, and he threw it back but it hit the top of our driver’s side doorframe and skittered off running and tripping behind us in the street. And it’s true you should know that Dad was not normally like this. He was a quiet sort of thoughtful kind of guy, tough in some ways which you might call average but mostly reserved and not at all the violent sort but he did what he had to that day, or what he was pushed to, or maybe better to say is what fell in his lap. You got to deal with shit that falls in your lap, right?

“Sure, sure, and you sort of see the way they were thinking, too, my dad and the guy in the Olds. My dad’s out in the intersection whether the guy in the Olds liked it or no, and the guy in the Olds would have thought or had the choice to think either he’s going to let this maniac in or he’s going to see if the maniac in the station wagon blinks and he’s the one who’s gonna come out on top. It’s like there’s this force that comes over you and in that place, I could feel it just pulsing away from Dad, who listen lemme tell you was a bundle of rage and focus on his single need, face beaded with sweat. And it taught me how, and I mean how, these things come to the moments when everything adds up to its sum, which is either even or odd. You meet someone else and both’ve got it worse than anything and it’s time for one or the other to come out on top. But also, it’s depressing, too. And we must know it, because in the grand scheme, things are not gonna matter how they added up, and I know it’s been said better before but I’m saying it here too, Meiry. It’s no lie to say big guys, guys as big as Michael Jordan, won’t be remembered in a thousand years, not for shit. Or maybe they will as some kind of example of how we filled idle time throughout our long little lives, watching strongmen throw balls into baskets. They’ll study us and they’ll say how this Jordan was one very notable strongman, threw balls through hoops better than all the strongmen and weakmen. So yeah, if that’s true of Jordan then what hope do schlubs like the rest of us got? See my point.

“And then like it was this sudden building explosion, only the building was completely together and intact, like imagine it just appeared up and out of the ground.

Dad was still shouting at the man in the car who was still chasing us, and he’d hopped the curb right after us who were then traveling right towards the front of the hospital, not exactly towards the place that could give Ma the best care and right away, like it wasn’t the emergency room but the main entrance, you know? And finally Dad sort of stops-crashes the station wagon into a pillar there near the entrance, like its right near the concourse you might pull up at and calmly drop people off at and it’s covered with a, whatever, an entrance canopy so it has got these pillars for the canopy, and that’s what Dad hit. And by then I saw it was time for me to do what I could, and so I bolted out of the car, through the revolving doors and to the front desk, and there and then alerted whoever was around of our definite emergency. So I did that about as fast as I remember thinking I could and then came back out to do what I could back at the car.

I ran up to the pillar, and apparently Dad was really very preoccupied with the guy February 2014 | 63

from the Olds because he was basically in a fist fight with that guy and had him at that moment in a pretty gruesome headlock. He was pounding the guy’s head-locked face with his fist really hard. The guy was screaming like a blood-smeared animal.

“Ma, meanwhile, is still in the car. Dad was too busy obviously with the guy, who the guy had probably come running to meet him at Dad’s exit from the driver’s seat. That’s what some bystanders were saying as I came back. And the guy had been waving a lug wrench, ready to beat Dad to hell with it. But Dad managed I’m betting because of pure rage or real deep emotion to wrestle it away. And it was lost in the pair’s scrum, which then got very gritty because they were both out for blood. Dad was maybe a little bit bigger but not much and the guy was stockier but it wasn’t all muscle or anything. I can tell you that Dad was not paying attention or not caring that there was somebody, and not just anybody but Ma, really messed up in the back of our station wagon. I got to work straining real hard to get Ma out of the back myself, though it wasn’t easy because she’d gotten all tied up in the seatbelts, and that happened in part because I tied her up with them because of all the ramming. Because that’s another thing that you might already have figured, Dad and the guy in the other car were ramming each other with their cars on our way to the hospital. It was you could call it oddly like something typically out of a 1980s or ‘90s action movie, but you know, set back in the ‘50s decade where cars were cars. And so, as to what I was saying, Dad and the guy were duking it out. Real war of worlds kind of crap. The guy was able to claw his way out of Dad’s arms, and Dad’s arms had these liquid streaks of red like lines of melting ice because of the clawing, so the guy’s nails must have been long and cut deep is what I gathered. Kinda weird, especially for a guy back then, but whatever.

“The fight went on till Dad got hold of the guy’s lug wrench that he’d come flailing at him with, which Dad picked up while flopping around on the ground after falling down and getting kicked in the stomach. Dad swung it hard against the guy’s shin and that caused the guy to fall over. And Dad stood up on his knees and wrestled over him, pressing the one half of the tire iron’s X shape to the guy’s neck. Dad was trying to asphyxiate the guy. It had gotten to that point. What Dad didn’t know was there was hospital security screaming at the both of them to cease and desist. I’ve never been in a hand-to-hand battle for my life before, so I don’t know how that sounds. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was very loud, though. The one security guard was unholstering his revolver now, and right as the guy’s face turned as blue as I’ve ever seen before, the guard discharged his weapon. Dad took a second to notice that he was wounded and then another second to let fly the worst sounding expletive. Dad writhed on the ground in the way a kid with a stubbed toe does. The bullet apparently lodged somewhere in his spine, as doctor’s later determined there was no exit wound and took x-rays that confirmed it. Can’t remember if it was ever removed with surgery or not. Dad couldn’t use his legs anymore after that, but he didn’t die. The guy from the other car did die, though, a crushed esophagus was what did it. It was voluntary manslaughter in the end, and Dad went to jail for about five years. Course and don’t think for a second I’m feeling sorry for myself, because that is exactly what my uncle taught me not to do. Uncle Murray said, basically, what’s done is done and there’s no use worrying or crying because those things are just gonna keep you thinking about you, and not the bigger picture of what you want in life. And you know something, Meiry? He was right, completely and totally. Uncle Murray raised me for my teenage years cause Dad went to prison, and ok so I’ll just say it cause you probably already see where I’m going but Ma, she didn’t make it. Too much internal damage plus especially hemorrhaging and don’t think for a second I’m feeling sorry for myself that I lost my mother at a 64 | The CCLaP Journal

young age because I am not. People’ve had it worse than me. And I’ve toughed it out like if it was a really agonizing burn down deep in my flesh. I’ve struggled and I’ve persevered. I joined the marines when I turned eighteen and not long after was the hill and the war.

“One thing it taught me, the accident and everything after, is this: people’d be better off walking more than they do, just remember to watch out for cars.

“And I’m sure you know where I’m going now with Spaulding, too. He was shot just like my old man, right in the spine like Dad. He was bent over Javier trying to stanch the bleeding and that didn’t go right, either. But that wasn’t the only bullet to hit Spaulding, just the first. More came right after. The bullets and tracers zipping overhead, and a never-stop sound of machine gun fire pattering from somewhere above on the high ground. Spaulding was mowed down right before my eyes. And I knew, I knew, I knew. I knew, Meiry, I knew what was about to happen to Spaulding and that there was not And Dad stood up on his knees and a thing I had in my arsenal to stop wrestled over him, pressing the it. But I vowed then to never be so powerless as I felt that day on that one half of the tire iron’s X shape hill. Never again would I be. And to the guy’s neck. Dad was trying I’m not feeling sorry for myself to asphyxiate the guy. It had gotten about Spaulding, either. Best friends to that point. What Dad didn’t know die every day. You have to take it in, lift your head up and be tough.” was there was hospital security

screaming at the both of them to cease and desist. I’ve never been in a hand-to-hand battle for my life before, so I don’t know how that sounds. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was very loud, though. The one security guard was unholstering his revolver now, and right as the guy’s face turned as blue as I’ve ever seen before, the guard discharged his weapon.

Feldspar had told a very long story.

It was actually two stories rolled into one, both felt a bit preachy, but Meirion was at least confident he understood Feldspar’s intentions in telling them. Meirion made the necessary arrangements. The first of which was to secure a rental car for his use. The second was to assemble all his available cash in a large plastic bag, which he placed in a special pocket inside his overcoat.

The last was finding a good ski mask in his collection, and he eventually settled on a blue one with red lines around the mouth and eye openings.

Despite everything else you may know about him, Meirion sometimes got philosophical, however unlikely he was to admit it. But he was thinking that maybe fate was merely a figurative rolling of dice until your unfavorable number was called.

Imagine if every time you turned right instead of left, for instance, some terrible event befell your doppelganger who made the opposite directional turn? Say your doppelganger was crushed by some enormous television pushed by unskilled cat burglars out of a window several floors above it, or the same cat burglars smashed your doppelganger into a wall as they make their fumbling getaway in a getaway station wagon. Always, it would be hapless cat burglars cleansing the world of doppelgangers with each and every decision you make. And this is then true: it repeats and repeats February 2014 | 65

until one of your doppelgangers moves on unscathed and you finally meet the cat burglar, one fumbling for you. Something like that.

There was an alley across the street from 1208 that offered an unobstructed view of the restaurant’s blank façade. Meirion backed his rental car down the alley and sat idling there, hands gripping the steering wheel and ski mask pulled down. The building was still there, and hopefully the restaurant was still active inside. “All right, and here’s how we’re going to find out,” Meirion said, finally. He pressed his foot on the gas as soon as the car was in drive, or possibly even sooner than that because his doing so was followed by a loud engine-revving sound suggesting he had hit the gas while the car was still in park. This sound startled Meirion, but after yelling, “Oh, SHIT!” somewhat comically, he was able to correct the situation and soon burned rubber across the street, whereupon he hit the curb hard, irreparably denting the front wheels, and then he smashed the grill of the rental car into 1208’s exterior­—which this had been his very elaborately considered plan, simply smashing a car into 1208.

He stepped out of the rental to assess damages and possibly run away from the scene.

The brick wall of the front of the building was weak, apparently, and he had created a concavity of a width he could shimmy through.

So he did shimmy through the opening and got bits of masonry grit on his overcoat.

This shouldn’t have worked, he thought.

He couldn’t believe it had worked. C

Matt Rowan is the author of the short story collection Why God Why (Love Symbol Press, 2013) and co-edits Untoward Magazine. His work has, or soon will, appear in NOÖ Journal, Gigantic, Atticus Review and Pear Noir!, among others. More at iteraryequations.blogspot.com.

66 | The CCLaP Journal

The Iraq War? The housing market collapse? College football’s concussion crisis?

How can anyone be expected to understand such complexities, especially a “horticulturally dyslexic” farmboy with an eighth-grade education and a penchant for perpetually misunderstanding, misreading, and misinterpreting the world?

Born on a farm in Ohio, Humboldt is content to spend his life “outside amongst the oxygen and unhurried hydrocarbons.” But when his father’s farm is threatened with foreclosure, Humboldt is forced to save it by enrolling in college, leading him on an epic absurdist adventure through Washington politics, New York performance art, Boston blue-bloods, post-Katrina New Orleans, multiple murders, and holy resurrections. Mixing the speed and structure of Voltaire’s Candide with a heavy dose of Joycean wordplay, and a love of literary acrobatics worthy of David Foster Wallace, Scott Navicky’s debut novel assails some of modern America’s most cherished beliefs and institutions with the battle cry: “Ticklez l’infâme!”

Download for free at cclapcenter.com/humboldt

CCLaP Publishing

February 2014 | 67

BOOK REVIEW

Pervert

By Mr. If

Philistine Press Reviewed by Karl Wolff

Pervert is a strange, coarse little book about the pseudonymous author (Mr. If) and his erotic journey across small-town England. By turns sexually explicit and painfully confessional, Mr. If narrates his travels and the extramarital affairs. Written in raw unadorned prose, Pervert is the third installment of Mr. If ’s “Entertainment” trilogy. The first volume, Entertainment is a collection of poetry and prose-poems. The second volume, Violence is the Answer explores his extramarital affair with an army wife. Each receives a cheeky alias (Marilyn and Nettles).

Mr. If is the classic cantankerous iconoclast, contrarian, and vagabond. Acting like some mad hybrid of a Samuel Beckett tramp and David Thelwis’s character from Mike Leigh’s Naked, he is both pathetic and infuriating. Pervert begins with Mr. If ’s affair with a woman he considers a Nazi. He gives her the nickname of the Fit Bigot, since she has both a nice body and a reprehensible belief system. In the bar, she says the Government ought to exterminate homosexuals.

Although she holds this belief, she has no trouble sleeping with Mr. If, a self-professed bisexual. As the novella continues, we witness Mr. If ’s affairs with both men and women.

The confrontational nature of the narrative makes it a challenge to review, since Mr. If states plainly he doesn’t give a damn what critics think and is amused if 68 | The CCLaP Journal

anyone actually reads his book in the first place. He is cynical and self-contradictory.

Vocally anti-war, he sleeps with Marilyn, a soldier’s wife, because he loves Nettles, the soldier, but hates the war he’s in. He hates pop culture, psychology, and working.

The novella, and by extension, the Entertainment trilogy, is a confounding, vulgar, satirical gobbet of sputum lobbed at everything held proper by the United Kingdom. A kind of lowbrow bargain basement Miss Lonelyhearts, Pervert is guaranteed to infuriate and amuse. It’s only marred by the ending. Throughout the novella, Mr. If tells his sex partner Derek that his ultimate desire was to murder his father and have sex with his mother. (Cue cliched, “Paging Dr. Freud!”) When Mr. If attends the funeral of his father and actually makes good on his Oedipal obsessions, my expectations and enjoyment crumbled into a heap. Not because of the perversity per se, but because this was, at least according to Mr. If, a piece of non-fiction. After the ending, I didn’t buy such an assertion. (I’m sure Mr. If doesn’t care either way, since his weapons-grade apathy is both his most endearing quality and his most enervating.)

I’m rating this higher because the writing is still highly enjoyable. Not the same enjoyment as when one reads an Iowa Creative Writing Program thesis novel where every sentence is polished within an inch of its life. Pervert is like the opening chords of “God Save the Queen” by the Sex Pistols. It’s not about talent (whether the Sex Pistols had any musical talent is negligible), but their energy and take-no-prisoner confrontationalism.

Additional: Pervert was published by Philistine Press. One can download most of their ebooks for free. This gives the press increased freedom to put out books that are, at first blush, rather bonkers. Sample the wares of Mr. If and others, since Philistine Press has a penchant for the weird, vulgar, and experimental. C

Out of 10: 8.0

February 2014 | 69

ALL WHO WANDER

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

By Gabriel Garcia Marquez Essay by Madeleine Maccar

In the final months of 2013 and throughout 2014, CCLaP cultural essayist Madeleine Maccar is looking at the classic definition of the “hero’s journey,” as seen through a series of international texts that she is reading in English translation. For all the essays in this series, please visit [cclapcenter.com/madeleine_ maccar].

When Gabo’s at the helm of a novel, even the most ordinary story is transformed into something hazier, dreamier and not entirely grounded by the standard definition of logic. Such is the case with 1981’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a breathtaking little novella that packs years of unanswered questions and a parade of multifaceted characters into a mere 120 pages.

Told in a non-linear narrative that jumps back and forth across 27 years, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novella is not as demonstrative of the magical realism with which he has imbued so much of his canon, but it still maintains the ethereal appeal that is peculiar to his fiction. The book begins and ends with its focus on Santiago Nasar, a young man who has been dead longer than he was alive, and the mystery that shrouds his violent, loudly foretold death at the hands of twin brothers Pedro and Pablo Vicario, though a yawning 70 | The CCLaP Journal

chasm of time and directionless queries shove lifetimes between the informal investigation of that raucous dawn and final face-down collapse of his last hours.

It is that erratically charted chronology that contributes to—but is not solely responsible for—the difficulty in determining who the real hero is here, as it’s impossible to make such a proclamation without knowing the full story. And while the book’s final pages do boomerang back to its starting point, the full scope of the facts surrounding Santiago’s murder isn’t revealed until the very end of the book, and even then witnesses prove unreliable or unwilling to divulge all that they know, town gossip that’s grown more akin to modern mythology colors a number of details, and key events prove to have gone unseen, unheard and misunderstood.

The primary players are presented with the same almost journalistically detached treatment that the hours immediately surrounding Santiago’s death receive. There’s Bayardo San Roman, the charming but conceited wealthy foreigner who stumbled upon this small Colombian town in search of a bride and found Angela Vicario, a beautiful girl despite her “penury of spirit,” whom he couldn’t woo with gifts so he won over her family instead; Angela is the youngest daughter of a poor family who thrusts her into a marriage she doesn’t want, only to be returned to her family in both disgrace and a shredded wedding gown immediately upon her new husband’s discovery that he didn’t marry a virgin; Angela claims Santiago, also a wealthy young man, as her first lover, which incites her brothers Pedro and Pablo to murder; the twin brothers search for Santiago, proclaiming to all within earshot that they seek the man who has tarnished their sister’s honor. And then there is the unnamed narrator, who is kin to many of those involved but maintains a professional distance from everyone in his search for the complete truth behind the circumstances leading to Santiago’s death: It is the narrator’s unhurried, intermingled examination of these individuals and the supporting cast that brings their full dimensions into stark clarity, as one’s person’s story is always part of another’s.

I don’t necessarily subscribe to the notion that “hero” and “protagonist” are interchangeable terms, and Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a lovely little example of why, thanks to its almost cinematic approach to storytelling (that is, beginning at the end and gradually shedding more and more light on crucial details as the narrative comes full circle) and matter-of-fact acceptance of life’s opposing polarities. Santiago is the main character but he is dead for much of the book, leaving him little opportunity for a satisfying character arc; yes, Santiago’s death is the crux of the story and it’s more than likely that Angela—thinking that his riches would protect him—falsely named Santiago as the man who took her virginity without taking her as a wife to divert the blame from another man, but does that make him a hero or more of an unwitting martyr? The Vicario twins are the agents of the story’s rising action and are followed extensively before and after they kill Santiago, but they’re also lacking in a hero’s transformation; yes, Pedro and Pablo sought vengeance for their sister’s soiled honor but isn’t it possible that honor in one man’s eyes is cold-blooded murder in another’s? Besides, while they’re on the hunt for Santiago, they broadcast their intent to kill him and brandish the knives to prove it with a little too much desperate bravado, as if they’re begging someone to stop them from exacting the revenge they’re only seeking because they believe societal conventions of familial pride demand it from them. Bayardo is the tragic figure whose chosen bride consents to wed him not from love but because her prayers for the strength to kill herself go unanswered before their wedding day; yes, he could have easily let his temper get the best of him and returned his sullied wife to her family not in disgrace but in a coffin, but he is too soft and his pride too easily wounded for him to carry out such violence—he is, as described by a February 2014 | 71

minor female character, a man who “looked like a fairy .... I could have buttered him up and eaten him alive.”

All that being said, I do believe that dualities can (and do) exist in a hero, especially in contemporary reinterpretations of the long-standing archetype, and especially when being burdened with such a conflicted soul makes the man on a journey so much more human and believably, magnetically flawed.

So how does a hero know when to fight fate or when to bravely accept it? Santiago did neither once his confusion finally gave way to the realization that the Vicario twins were coming for him, running from them and banging on his mother’s locked door as his assailants closed in. He did not suffer his tormentors’ blows and cuts to spare another: Nadar died because he was literally just seconds too late in reaching the sanctuary of his mother’s house. Bayardo also did neither, opting instead to drink himself into oblivion before his own shamed family dragged home the alcohol-soaked groom a full week later, choosing to abuse his body and drown out his thoughts rather than confront himself and his situation. When does a hero know to call a bluff or graciously step back to save another’s honor? Pedro and Pablo did neither, knowing full well that they were looking for someone—anyone—to stop them from killing another man, only to stubbornly forge ahead with their plan once they came face-toface with their intended victim.

With all this in mind, I humbly submit that the two most likely heroes of this tale are Angela and the nameless narrator, as both give themselves up to something bigger for the benefit of others: Angela marries a wealthy man she did not love for the sake of her impoverished family; the narrator serves as the lens through which all pieces of the story are seen, keeping his feelings separate from the facts and inserting himself into the story only when he is an irrefutable firsthand witness of an event, for the sake of the truth about an event that is all that this sleepy, Colombian coastal town could talk about for years after it happened. (The town, it’s worth mentioning, is indisputably the farthest thing from a hero that Chronicle of a Death Foretold has to offer. Individually, the townsfolk certainly displayed the redemptive qualities of decent people; but as a collective force, though, the town waited for a murder to unfold with as much relish as it did for a bishop’s visit, it crowded around at the news of an imminent murder not to intervene but to watch, and its expectations pushed the twins toward murder rather than either lend any credence to their threats or dissuade them entirely.)

For the narrator’s deliberate lack of active presence in the story, I think it’s safest to identify Angela as the true hero of this tale. True, it’s not like Angela had much of a choice in fighting a marriage that was all but chosen for her, but she bore her sentence honorably, taking up the call to wed a man she didn’t love, who had dazzled her family when he should have been courting her, all while she was making up her mind to die rather than admit to her lost virginity. Almost three decades later, while talking to the narrator during his research, Angela finally admitted that after Bayardo deposited Angela back at her parents’ house and her mother greeted her with a righteous beating, she “finally began to remember him ... (t)he blows hurt less because she knew they were for him,” beginning years of obsessive love for the man she once fostered naught but lukewarm feelings for, writing him almost two thousand unopened letters until he reappeared in her life 17 years later.

It is presumably because of her failed marriage and unfortunately delayed adoration that Angela was the one who underwent the most remarkable transformation over the 27 years following Santiago’s death, traversing the lonely terrain linking her early years’ “helpless air” to her genuine preference for and acceptance of death over shame to leaving the town in which she was scandalized to supporting herself as a 72 | The CCLaP Journal

seamstress and becoming, as the narrator later finds her, “so mature and witty that it was difficult to believe that she was the same person.” Still, it seems that being a discarded bride was the proverbial kick in the ass Angela needed to become the person she was always meant to be, as her true colors show themselves as early as the night of her ill-fated wedding: She ultimately refuses to sink to the level of using the tricks and old wives’ remedies for faking the appearance of a deflowered bride’s “stain of honor” that her mother and other supposedly wizened older women had shown her, offering up, instead, evidence of both her willing atonement and her role as her own threshold guardian, as she crosses the bridal threshold knowing that she is dooming herself: “I didn’t do any of what they told me ... because the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was all something dirty that shouldn’t be done to anybody, much less to the poor man who had the bad luck to marry me.”

With the help of the narrator, Angela revisits a life she’s not spoken of in years, confessing to details that she had shared with no one prior. Because of the narrator’s inqueries, we finally learn that there was a conciliatory reunion of sorts between the two shamed spouses, a return to something finally proven genuine that they perhaps both had been faking before, that allows Angela to triumph over her wedding-night ignominy and display a maturation of feelings her 23-year-old self simply had not been capable of. She has both physically and emotionally distanced herself from the deliberately (though not maliciously) deceitful bride she once was to foster the inward journey she would have never been able to embark upon had she lingered in the shadow of her disgrace, demonstrating a rich character development that no other character in this novella can compare to. C

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BOOK REVIEW

This is Between Us

By Kevin Sampsell

Tin House Books Reviewed by Travis Fortney

This is Between Us is a beautiful novel that functions as something like a five-year slice-of-life, capturing the sexual relationship between of pair of aging hipsters in Portland. Author Kevin Sampsell uses a somewhat experimental style, wherein the confessional first person narrator is writing to his beloved—hence, the two characters are referred to throughout as “you” and “I”. Also, the story is told in a series of short vignettes, one or two page scenes that don’t necessarily conform to a discernible plot arc. But the stylistic flourishes feel natural. The use of the second person has the effect of drawing the reader in rather than pushing us away, and the vignettes connote the randomness of memory. For me, the narrator’s need to put this romance to paper added an element of urgency.

We meet You and I just as their romance is taking off in earnest. They met when they were both married to other people, and now they’re both recently divorced.

They have one child apiece, Vince and Maxine. In the first year of their relationship, You and I are on fire for each other, and it’s not without some difficulty that they manage to merge their lives into a somewhat conventional two-parent household. In the second year, they’re still learning the ins and outs of each other. By the end of the third year the fire has waned a bit, and another reassessment is required. They fight, have sex in strange places, break up, get back together, visit a 74 | The CCLaP Journal

couples therapist, raise their children, watch movies, read books, and never stop going to brunch. The male half of the relationship has a character tic where he cries at the drop of a hat, and it gets worse as he gets older. He also has history of bisexuality, and the biggest threat to the relationship comes in the form of “you’s” seductive younger brother. The narrator’s son Vince has an invisible friend that he keeps until he’s a teenager. What all of this is heading toward—whether they’ll make it or not—is what the novel relies on for suspense. I won’t say more because I don’t want to spoil it, but suffice to say the ending of the book felt spot-on to me, in the way that it provided some emotional release and deepened everything that came before it—understated, sure, but nearly perfect. It’s not often that I read a book and think the author got the ending so right.

Here’s the thing. Some novels manage to seep under the skin, take on their own lives inside of you, and creep back out later as a kind of memory, something that your subconscious mind is telling you that you’ve experienced but still have to work the kinks out of to fully understand. I’m glad I read this novel last week and waited until today to review it, because I ended up liking it quite a bit more after letting it settle for a few days. The only other novel I’ve read this year that’s had this effect on me— and I wasn’t expecting it to at the time—is James Salter’s All That Is. I’m aware that the two novels seem very dissimilar, but Sampsell’s prose washes over you in a way that’s similar to Salter’s. Sampsell’s novel, like Salter’s, feels unrushed. You get the sense that the narrator of both novels feels like what they have to say is worth saying the right way. Both novels are frank and honest, and both feature characters that are preoccupied, in very different ways, with understanding the ineffable—in the case of Sampsell’s novel, the person the narrator shares his bed with, and in the case of Salter’s the mysterious beauty in the arc of a life. The two books are also linked by the copious amounts of sex writing in each, which some readers might at times find cringe-worthy, but which I thought added to the feeling of openness.

Perhaps the most shocking revelation in This is Between Us came just after I finished reading it, when I was looking over the cover matter and saw that this is Kevin Sampsell’s debut novel. It’s shocking because Sampsell writes like a seasoned pro, and also because I’ve been aware of the author for many years now and was under the impression that he had long ago made good on his considerable potential. This is Between Us is a remarkable accomplishment, and I hope Sampsell the novelist has a whole shelf of books he’s yet to write. C

Out of 10: 9.0

February 2014 | 75

SUBSCRIBE 12 issues of the CCLaP Journal (2,400 pages of content) PLUS FREE SHIPPING ONLY $99.99 cclapcenter.com/journal

Photo: Francesca Marie

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Wolfwendy PHOTOGRAPHER FEATURE February 2014 | 77

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Location: Berlin and Helsinki Maria Windsch端ttel was born in 1986 in Berlin, Germany. She studied painting and drawing from 2006-2013 in the class of Werner B端ttner at Hochschule f端r bildende K端nste Hamburg, and from 2011 studied fine arts at Aalto University/ TaiK Helsinki. Since 2012 she has been living and working in Germany and Finland.

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Mystic symbols, nature, the seasons, and the moon feature heavily in your photography: What is your interest in the occult, or if not the occult, what is your interest in them as subjects?

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Beauty. It simply doesn’t seem necessary at all to underline maudlinly kistchy photos with maudlinly kistchy sentences.

But I even don’t know if you can say maudlinly kitschy when you’re talking about maudlin kitsch.

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Is the horizon just a way for you to frame your photographs, or does it have a greater significance for you?

Quite the contrary to a frame: for me, the horizon seems to be a connection to the sky which opens the scenery with its included idea of infinity. That caught moment gets from time to time interminably heavily fulfilled with endless space, dimensions, beauty and void.

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You seem really unafraid to experiment with flash and exposure in your photographs; some pictures turn out very white and some dim photos turn out grainy, but it seems like an intentional effect. Is that right?

Indeed light is a very rewarding instrument for me to use. It illuminates, brightens and defines moments, of course, but it is also able to hide contours, colors and situations if overexposed which is whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s even more interesting for me.

Probably it is only a question of time until some of my pictures will end up all like a greatly huge whiteout.

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wolfwendy.com flickr.com/wolfwendy

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BOOK REVIEW

Following Tommy

By Bob Hartley

Cervena Barva Press Reviewed by Jason Pettus

Regular readers will know that CCLaP has been behind on book reviews for just about a year now (a lag we’re finally about to close, thanks to our full-time review staff expanding from one person to four this year), and that means especially that a number of great little smaller novels haven’t gotten the attention around here they deserve; take Bob Hartley’s fictional coming-of-age tale Following Tommy, for example, which won’t exactly blow anyone away but is a good, solid, charming look at life among lower-class Irish-Americans in the pre-P.C. early 1960s. And that’s an important thing to know about this book before starting, that its rough-and-tumble characters living on the gritty west side of Chicago don’t pull any punches here, and that in fact a major part of the plot involves an examination of the rude ways that race relations sometimes played out in these environments.

But this is also in the Nelson Algren wheelhouse too (speaking of rough-and-tumble Chicagoans in the early ‘60s), a funny and endearing look at the daily highs and lows of one such Irish teenager, as he struggles with conflicting feelings about his family, confusion over the opposite sex, and the constant trouble he and his buddies are always getting into with the corrupt cops in their neighborhood. A small, fast-moving manuscript that speaks volumes about the second-generation big-city immigrant experience, the author’s lack of personal connection to this milieu makes it all the more impressive, ultimately a historical book but that feels like it was written by someone who was actually there. It comes generally recommended today, and especially to those who enjoy well-done bildungsromans. C

Out of 10: 8.2

or 8.7 for fans of coming-of-age stories February 2014 | 97

RARE BOOK FOR SALE

Myra Breckinridge (1968) Myron (1974)

By Gore Vidal First Editions, First Printings Write-up by Jason Pettus

CCLaP is making a growing amount of its rare book collection available at reseller eBay.com, both for auction and for instant purchase. For all current books for sale, visit [ebay.com/usr/cclapcenter], or for the collection’s entire list, [cclapcenter.com/rarebooks].

DESCRIPTION: 1968’s Myra Breckinridge was not the first novel of celebrated intellectual Gore Vidal’s career to openly depict homosexuals in a positive light — that would be The City and the Pillar, from way back in the almost unbelievable 1948, right when his career was starting out — but certainly this was the first book of his to cement his reputation as a gay icon and perpetual rabble-rouser, a hugely important work in the history of transsexual literature (even though much of what he says about the subject is now outdated), and an ode to ‘30s and ‘40s Hollywood camp published right in the same years that Susan Sontag was inventing the term “camp” to begin with. Dismissed as pornographic trash by many contemporary critics at the time, Vidal definitely grabs the horns of the countercultural era with both fists here, penning the story of a man in the middle of gender reassignment surgery who is now living as a flamboyant woman, obsessed with the Golden Age of Hollywood and who takes great delight in messing with the minds (and various bodily cavities) of the hunky young men at the fictional acting school owned by her uncle. (And the less said about the notorious 1971 trainwreck of a 98 | The CCLaP Journal

movie adaptation, the better.) Then in 1974, Vidal penned a sequel called Myron that is basically more of the same, although with an odd detail; that because of a recent antipornography decision by the Supreme Court, Vidal replaced all the curse words in the manuscript with the names of various court Justices. An inclusion in Harold Bloom’s famous updating of the Western Canon, this two-book set is considered by many Vidal fans to be some of the best work of his career, and absolutely you cannot have a full understanding of this complex and multi-faceted artist without understanding this most notorious and outrageous side of him. Get these now while they’re still fairly inexpensive, because their value is almost guaranteed to go up, as the history of queer literature becomes more and more of a mainstream subject in the future.

CONDITION: Text: Fine (F) for both. Nearly indistinguishable from how they appeared when brand-new. Dust jacket: Myron, Fine (F); Myra, Very Good Plus (VG+). Nearly indistinguishable from how they appeared when brand-new, although with the older book showing just the smallest signs of its age along the edges. Both jackets now protected by Demco mylar sheets. Both books have stated “First Edition” on copyright pages; lack of additional printing notices makes these first printings as well.

PROVENANCE: Myra: Acquired by CCLaP at the 2012 Chicago Antiquarian Booksellers Fair. Myron: Acquired by CCLaP in 2013 at the Bella Luna going-out-of-business sale.

C

February 2014 | 99

BOOK REVIEW

Schroder

By Amity Gaige

Twelve Books Reviewed by Travis Fortney

On the one hand, Eric Kennedy’s story is that of a familiar American rise and fall. College, followed by a period of wandering, then love and marriage, followed by parenthood. A decent job gives way to better job—in real estate, set up for Eric by his generous father-in-law— and early middle-age is marked by a period of relative prosperity and contentment. But unhappiness creeps in.

The real estate market crashes. A period as a “stay at home dad” follows. Eric’s wife Laura is troubled by his sometimes erratic parenting style. She remarks that she doesn’t feel like she knows him. And so: divorce, shabby apartment, shared visitation. Eric feels a bit blindsided by it all.

So far, Eric seems to fit within a category of masculinity more than adequately represented in recent literary fiction—the limp, withering sad-sack (LWSS); the emasculated, pudgy Viagra-user (EPVU).

But one powerful reason that Schroder rises so high above recent novels featuring such characters—I’m thinking of The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving by Jonathan Evison and A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers, but there are literally hundreds of others to choose from—is that Gaige’s protagonist, despite the many similarities, is emphatically not an LWSS or EPVU. Eric Kennedy is flawed but wonderfully complex. Schroder is the fourth book I’ve given 10 stars to here at CCLaP, after Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds, Richard Ford’s Canada, and Rebbecca Lee’s Bobcat.

Which means that I recommend this book to everyone. I think anyone who reads it will be richer for it.

That said, Schroder is a difficult novel to write about. It’s graceful and elegant, and yet there’s a mean streak that runs through it. It’s a very smart novel that takes much of its structure from Nabokov’s Lolita.

The resemblance is close enough that I recognized it immediately even though I read Lolita in high school, when my mind for reading (and especially reading Nabokov) wasn’t fully formed. Schroder is also one of 100 | The CCLaP Journal

the most well-written books I’ve read this year, and it’s very confidently presented.

And yet, despite the big brain at work Schroder has a breezy, entertaining quality. It’s suspenseful, quick, and at times even thrilling.

The plot goes something like this: Eric Kennedy was born Eric Schroder. The fateful transformation from Schroder to Kennedy takes place after a childhood doctor’s visit, during which young Eric reads a brochure for a summer camp in the waiting room. He steals the brochure, takes it home, and it becomes a powerful fantasy for him. Eric’s life so far has been very unlike the carefree lifestyle depicted in the brochure’s pages—born in Germany, abandoned by (or torn away from) his mother at a young age, transported to a new immigrant life in America, where he and his father fail to fit in. Gaige’s description of Camp Ossipee bears a resemblance to the summer camp at the center of Phillip Roth’s 2009 novel Nemesis. Its a place where you can become a whole new person. Eric Schroder fills out the application on the back of the brochure, but instead of “Schroder” he writes the last name “Kennedy.” On the spot, he concocts a new history for himself—a childhood as a member of fallen aristocratic family, a hazy connection to the “other” Kennedys. As Eric Kennedy, he applies for and receives a scholarship to the camp. And at Camp Ossipee he does become a whole new person. And he likes the new person better than the old. The new person’s name is of course Eric Kennedy, and so he keeps it. When we meet Eric, he has gone to college, gotten married, had a child and succumbed to divorce, all as Eric Kennedy. Now he’s stuck. He’s mired in a custody battle with his wife, but he can’t challenge her in court, because if he did his true identity would be found out.

The genius of this concept is that its so easy to empathize with. Literally everyone has been struck at one time or another with the desire to be more than who we are, so we can understand why Eric would take on his new identity. Starting the story at a place where we can relate to Eric is important, because his decisions quickly go from bad to worse. Soon, we’re watching in something close to horror as he engages in a slow-mo train wreck of a high speed chase with his father-in-law, and then kidnaps his daughter. The bulk of the novel is the ensuing father and daughter road trip. We watch as Eric makes one questionable decision after another. He seems almost determined to prove to us that he is a bad person—he tries to lock his daughter in the trunk of his stolen car, he abandons her to have drunken sex, he loses her asthma medication—but we never lose our sympathy for Eric, or our ability to relate to him.

In last week’s New York Times Book Review there was a column that asked the question of whether there was a “Great American Novel” written by a woman. The answers the dueling columnists gave were unsatisfactory to me—variations of “what is a ‘Great American Novel’ anyway?” Well, I would like to nominate Schroder for that status. This novel tackles the big themes of its day, has a ripped-from-the-headlines plot, and is filled with impeccable writing, but one of it’s major strengths—the extreme empathy with which Gaige approaches her protagonist—is distinctly feminine.

I know, I know. Equating femininity with empathy is reductive. In fact, the thought may be borderline sexist. And I started this review with a mini-rant about LWSS and EPVU protaganists and the reductive view of masculinity that they perpetuate. I guess my point is that I’m not sure that a male writer could have been so generous with Eric, and that the idea discussing the great American novel with the qualifier “written by a woman” attached, while potentially reductive, might be more worthwhile than it seems. C

Out of 10: 10 February 2014 | 101

CORY DO

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OCTOROW THE CCLAP INTERVIEW

In anticipation of the center’s coming book, CCLaP’s Interviews with Science-Fiction Authors, we’re proud to present again this 2008 talk with famed writer and Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow. Raised as an activitst by Trotskyist parents, Doctorow held early important roles in the Creative Commons movement and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Boing Boing is now internationally known for its courageous fights for tech freedom in the face of often much bigger and better-funded enemies; and this has been while penning a series of multiple-award-winning fantastical novels as well, trippy yet playful and with a whole load of subtle political points woven in. This interview originally took place across the street from the Chicago Tribune, where Doctorow was about to go speak regarding his now classic “subversive YA” novel, Little Brother.

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CCLaP: I wanted today to skip over a lot of the things that other people talk about quite a bit with you in interviews, and focus on some things that I've always found interesting about you, but that I don't see you talk about that much. And in fact this goes all the way back to your childhood, and some very interesting things in your Wikipedia bio. You were born in 1971 in Toronto to two Trotskyist activist public teachers. So can you begin by telling us exactly what a "Trotskyist" is?

Cory Doctorow: Trotskyism is a type of Marxist Leninism, although there is no brief, pithy way to describe the distinction. I guess the biggest defining characteristic is that they believe the best way to achieve a worker's program is to work within labor parties.

So my parents are both members of and longstanding activists in the New Democratic Party in Canada, which is much like the old Social Democratic Party in the UK. I don't know if there's a good equivalent in the US; maybe the Farm and Labor Party.

And as a result, you had a childhood as an activist yourself. I found this online and I just wanted to ask for a couple more details: you were a Greenpeace activist as a little kid?

Yeah, I was a door-to-door canvasser for Greenpeace. I organized peace groups in my junior high school. It was very controversial, but Canada was used for tests of intercontinental ballistic missiles, and a lot of Canadians felt this was bad, including me. There was a very large nuclear disarmament and antiwar movement in Canada that I was a part of from a very young age. As young as ten or eleven, I was getting in trouble with the school administration, and getting beat up at school for organizing kid peace groups.

I saw that when you were in high school, you were a founding member of the Grindstone Island Co-Op? Not a founding member. I was on the board of directors, actually. I was always involved with macroscale and microscale community activist causes. Like, at the school I attended, there was a mall across the street, and we would go eat lunch there, and the security guards didn't like us, so they systematically banned all of us for life.

And after trying unsuccessfully to get the mall management to pay attention, I ended up getting invited to a hearing on the law under which we had been banned, and I told my story there to a Toronto Star reporter, who put it on page two the next day. And we actually had the vice president of operations for the mall come by the school the day after, to apologize and personally rescind the ban. It was a great early activist victory.

[Laughter] And this was right around the time that you first started doing creative writing; you had your first semi-professional sales back then. But then at the end of your teen years, you went almost a decade doing no publishing, and you ended up enrolling and dropping out of four different schools. What was going on in this period of your life?

I started selling to the semi-professional zines as a teen, and I didn't break into the pro market until I was 27.

Do you mean things like fanzines when you say "semi-professional?"

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Well, the distinctions only matter if you're really into science fiction. A "professional" scale science fiction magazine would make anyone in any other field of publishing laugh out their nose. The numbers are kind of in the 10,000 to 20,000 circulation, and "semi-pro" is even less than that. They paid, but they just didn't have the same circulation. The distinction only really matters when it comes to things like your membership in the Science Fiction Writers of America.

And awards.

Yeah. So I had been writing my whole life, and I went away to the Clarion science fiction workshop at Michigan State. And afterwards, it took me about five years to assimilate the advice I got. I didn't sell or even finish much in those five years.

You mean it took that long to absorb the lessons and have it be reflected in your writing?

Yeah, that's right. It's a bit of the centipede dilemma. A centipede knows how to walk intuitively, but if you ask him how he manages all those feet, as soon as he starts thinking about it, he starts to trip. I think that's a necessary part of development, to go from the intuitive to the structured. If you only work on an intuitive basis, you can never address your weaknesses. You can't work systematically. In particular there was a piece of advice I got from James Patrick Kelly, who was our instructor the first week there, and on the first day I had turned in a story that had done very well in school, that had been up for some awards. And my fellow students really liked it; we went around the circle and everyone was talking about it. And James said, "Cory Doctorow, you're an asshole. You've convinced these sixteen otherwise very intelligent people that this story has merit, when in fact it's just clever but has no emotional depth. You need to learn how to sit down at the keyboard and tap open a vein." And it took me a long time to assimilate that advice. I mean, I got a lot of great advice at Clarion, but that was the most important bit.

Was part of that because of the genre you work in, science fiction? It's not particularly known for intensely personal stories.

I actually disagree. I think science fiction is actually full of those stories. I think it was more about being twenty years old. [Laughter] I think it just took awhile to learn how to get past all my defense mechanisms to the really meaty, emotional stuff, and to write that emotional stuff. But I got there. I don't know if [my experiences with the universities] is entirely related to that. I... [pause] I had gone to a very good publicly funded alternative school where we were really treated like grad students, and expected to compile our own curriculum, find our own advisors in the community, understand things on our own terms. There was a lot of leeway to try different learning styles.

And by the time I found myself in undergraduate programs that were very regimented, where we were being treated more like high school freshmen than I thought college students would be treated, I just found it really hard to fit in. It culminated with me in an interdisciplinary program that had a thesis as its final project, and I was ramping up for that, and I submitted a thesis proposal that involved producing a year-long project in hypertext on a CD-ROM about deviant culture on the fledgling commercial internet, mostly usenet and FTP stuff, online zines. And I was told that while it sounded really nice, it would have to be turned in under ALA Stylebook guidelines February 2014 | 105

on 25 bond paper, double-spaced 12-point Courier text. And [at the same time], I got a job offer to develop CD-ROMs for the Voyager Company, which was just about the coolest interactive multimedia company in the world. And it was like, "Well, stay here and pay people to not do interactive media, or drop out and get paid more money than I've ever seen in my life to actually do interactive media?" It wasn't a hard decision.

And then the CD-ROM market melted down just in time for me to try my hand at being a Gopher developer, and then a web developer, and I just never looked back.

And this gets us to the next part of your career that I wanted to talk to you about.

You moved out to San Francisco in 2000, I assume for these things that we're talking about?

1999, actually. And I oozed out in reality; I didn't shut down my Toronto residence for awhile.

Oh, so you just sort of gradually ended up there?

Yeah, yeah. So right at the beginning of the [dot-com era] bust.

And this was right at the same time that you won the John Campbell Award for best new science-fiction writer, right?

Here in Chicago, actually, just about two blocks from where we are now, at the 2000 Worldcon.

And it was during this period that you ended up at the Electronic Frontier Foundation [EFF]. Was it part of being in that culture, in that city, in that time, that led you there?

There were a bunch of contributing factors. Like, I started this peer-to-peer software company with these two friends, and of course copyright law was an important piece of what we were doing. And I got involved with the EFF at first because they were advising us on these issues. The way we connected with them was that we had hired a bunch of programmers from the Cult of the Dead Cow, which is a hacker group which had worked with them on encryption and privacy issues. So I ended up at first as a client of the EFF, and then a friend of some of EFF's attorneys, and then a friend of the organization. I did a lot of speaking bills with them and so on. And I eventually decided that I wanted to change jobs, to leave this job I had helped found, as the bust got worse and the boom contracted more. I had actually planned to move back to Toronto; I had spoken to the EFF and they didn't think they could offer me a job. And I had actually gotten an apartment in Toronto, had given up my place in San Francisco, and there was actually a moving truck that was halfway on its way to pick me up. And I had just gone back to Toronto again to look at the apartment and start setting things up, and I was at the airport when the executive director of the EFF called up and said, "An anonymous donor has just given us a grant to fund your position. Do you still want it?" And I was like, "Jeez." I had just broken up with my girlfriend who was in San Francisco, and I was like, "I don't know! I'll tell you on Monday!" It was Friday at the time, and I was headed back to San Francisco on Monday. And Monday I landed and decided it was what I wanted to do. So it was kind of like time bifurcated to me. In another universe, I went home.

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Now, this is the same time that you got involved with what's known as Creative Commons, and all the political issues that go with that. This is one of those sections of your career I was talking about before, where you've been interviewed extensively about these issues, so I thought we'd skip over a lot of this stuff. But I did have four very specific questions for you about the subject. First, back in 2007, just a year ago, in an interview you did with [Mondo 2000 founder] R.U. Serius, you had mentioned that you knew of maybe ten or fifteen other authors who had released their books under Creative Commons licenses. A year later, what is that number?

Gosh, I don't know where to even start. At least double that. A good place to look at this stuff is the annual Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Creative Commons list, which is in honor of Howard Hendrix, who is actually a friend of mine and I think a pretty good guy, although he was misguided on this issue. He was vice president of the Science Fiction Writers of America at the time, and he gave a talk about how people who give their work away are "web scabs" who will lead us all to become "pixel-stained technopeasants." And as a result, a lot more new writers released their work under Creative Commons licenses, so now on an annual basis, they have a standard day when they release this work.

Okay, second, I wanted to mention a quote you've said quite often â&#x20AC;&#x201D; that the most pirated books out there are also the most profitable, and that ultimately you should be glad if someone's stealing your work, because it means that someone cares enough about your work to bother stealing it. For people who are a little unclear on the concept, could you go into a little more detail about what you mean?

That's a reasonably good summation. This comes from an essay by Tim O'Reilly, the owner of O'Reilly Media, one of the largest tech book publishers in the world. He said, "piracy is progressive taxation." This is based not on abstract reasoning but on practical lessons they've learned as a publisher. Obviously these are subjects endemic to the internet, so the books that O'Reilly publishes are widely pirated online. And he says that the stuff that gets pirated comes either from people for whom piracy actually results in more sales; or if piracy does end up costing you a sale or two, you tend to be the kind of person who can afford it. The only people who lose money from pirated sales are those who are already selling so many copies that [the pirated copies] are a drop in the bucket. This is also the result of a group of quantitative economists at Cambridge, who found that for the bottom 75 percent of musicians, piracy increased sales; for the next 23 or 24 percent, piracy had no impact on sales; and for the top one or two percent, piracy cost a few sales. And Tim's point was that, in order to make a few more pennies for people who are already millionaires, we're willing to take the vast majority of artists, that 75 percent for whom piracy actually inspires more sales, and wipe them out. We can't stop piracy for the few without stopping piracy for the many.

All right, third question. As far as I know, you're one of the only living authors who offers his work through [famed archival organization] Project Gutenberg. How did that come about?

They just asked me! And to tell you the truth, I'm not sure why Project Gutenberg doesn't just offer every book that's released under a Creative Commons license.

Honestly, it's kind of a mystery to me. I love the Gutenberg project.

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And then finally, one of the side effects of releasing your work under a Creative Commons license is that you get back modified versions of your work from your fans, and supplemental work like illustrations. From a personal standpoint, which of those two types do you enjoy more — the things that add on to your original text, or the things that take your text and create something new out of it?

I don't think there's a general category that's my favorite or least favorite; I think it's the characteristics of each individual derivative work. The thing that makes it great is how well it's executed.

Is there a certain type of thing that always makes you giggle when it comes in?

I once received these illustrations for [my novel] Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, and that might be my favorite thing I've ever received.

I have occasionally gotten legal threats, but my response is to immediately publish them publicly.

I think that’s a pretty good response. I think I have a pretty good lay understanding of what’s lawful and what’s not lawful, and there’s nothing unlawful about reporting on the legal behavior of a corporation. I’m pretty sanguine about doing that. A legal threat only exists to try to shut you up or scare you, and the single best thing you can do is immediately publish it publicly.

So, even with all these things going on as an activist and with EFF, you're still working on your creative writing, and that brings us to 2003, a big year for you. Your first novel comes out, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and it gets a lot of coverage, a lot of love; and you win the Nebula Award for your short work.

Just nominated. I didn't win.

Oh, okay.

And my first story collection came out that year too.

I just wanted to ask you quickly about how you feel like your life either changed or stayed the same because of those things all happening in quick order. You had been a fan of science-fiction since an early age; how did it feel to finally slip into the "inner circle," so to speak?

The fact is that that year was so busy for me, [those accolades] almost got lost in the jumble of it all. By the time I left the EFF, I was traveling every month for at least three weeks out of each month. 31 countries in three years. I think the biggest thing in my life, more than anything else, was that I got better at working under less than ideal circumstances, even if I felt like sleeping. I didn't have the luxury of waiting for the right moment. I just had to keep working.

Okay, Cory, let's talk about what I suspect a lot of people are tuning into this interview to hear you talk about—your involvement with the website Boing Boing.

To start with, let's get through some of this basic history as fast as we can, and you just stop me if I get any of this wrong. Boing Boing started as a paper publication 108 | The CCLaP Journal

in 1988 by a group of people, one of those people being Mark Frauenfelder. In the mid-'90s, they were one of the dozens and dozens of zines that were victims of that infamous Diamond Distributor debacle, where the company went out of business owing hundreds of thousands of dollars to people, and something like a hundred zines all went out of business at the same time. Just this really terrible moment in zine history. And then sometime around 2000, Mark is out in the Bay area, the same as you, and gets involved with Wired magazine. And as part of an assignment, he's asked to do a field test of the then-new "Blogger" content management system.

Actually, Mark was the founding managing editor of Wired Online. He had moved on at that point, and was freelancing for a number of publications, and one of them was the Industry Standard. And he started the online version of Boing Boing as research for an article with them.

And your start with Boing Boing was as simple as that Mark was going on vacation, and needed someone to run it for a couple of weeks, is that right?

Mark had been doing it for almost a year, and we were friends. He had been having 40 or 50 readers a day.

How did Mark and you know each other?

I sent him a letter when he was editing Wired, and then I started to work for Wired too.

And then he did a profile of me for the Industry Standard. So he had maybe only 40 or 50 readers a day, and posted maybe once a day at most, sometimes less. But when [Segway inventor] Dean Kamen announced that he had come up with a new device but wouldn't say what it wasâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;they were calling it "Ginger" or "It"â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Mark looked up Kamen's patent filings and found a picture of a Segway and posted it online. And that night CNN featured Boing Boing, and that attracted thousands and thousands of readers. But he was heading to vacation the next day to Hawaii, so he asked if I would take over for a couple of weeks, because he was hoping those readers might come back, so I stepped in and updated the blog for a couple of weeks. And when he came back, he said, "You did a lovely job, so why don't you stay?"

And it was casual circumstances that brought about all four co-editors, right?

Yeah. We had this little guest-blogger bar on the side of the page, because I wanted to invite people to come blog for us. Blogging hadn't really caught on yet, but there was a lot of people I was interested in seeing what would happen if they were invited to blog. [Science-fiction author] Rudy Rucker was one, [actor] Wiley Wiggins was one.

And when Wiley was done, he thought his job was to nominate another guest blogger, so he brought in Xeni Jardin. And she did such a great job, we asked her to stay. And Mark was friends with David Pescovitz through Wired, so he asked him to come on board too. And we started getting really popular, and our bandwidth charges started creeping up, and we realized that we needed to start making some money, so we asked [Industry Standard founder] John Battelle if he'd be interested in trying us out for some ad brokerage, and that's how he started Federated Media.

Now, as far as numbers are concerned, I've heard this before, and I wanted to see if this was actually true. You have one-third the readership of the New York Times?

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I don't know what the readership of the New York Times is.

Do you want to mention your specific numbers?

I think we're at 400,000 unique visitors a day right now to the website, and another million through RSS. I think it's three million unique visitors to the website each month. Ad purchasing at Federated Media is automated, so you can just go to that website and it will tell you all the latest numbers of readers. It's not a secret or anything.

And of course all these numbers are ultimately guesswork, uniques in particular. And Boing Boing is very friendly towards aggregation, and we don't measure any of the aggregated numbers. And since we're the target of so many censorship companies like AdFilter, we allow our readers to run this thing called "Distributed Boing Boing," in which our content is mirrored on a bunch of other websites, that you can visit if our main website [BoingBoing.net] is blocked in your country, at your office, at your school. Or at airports, like how Denver International Airport blocks us. Or entire cities, like how the city of Boston's Wifi service blocks us. And we're told that even the mirror websites get tons of trafficâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;apparently one of them gets 100,000 unique readers a day just on its ownâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;so we have no idea what our actual real numbers are.

But they all serve our ads, so that's fine with us!

And this gets us into a more general subject I wanted to talk with you about; because no matter what the specific numbers are, it's for sure that you have a large audience, and are maybe the singlemost influential non-corporate blog in the world right now. I've always been curious as to how aware all of you at Boing Boing are of that. How much of that stays in the back of your head when you're doing your daily posting?

I can't speak for the other editors, but I primarily use Boing Boing as a public home for my bookmarks, for things I find interesting and that I want to keep track of and come back to later. That's its most important function to me. So I try not to think of how influential or not influential the blog is being. I'd say the only time I think about how influential the blog is being is when people try to twist my arm. "It'd really mean a lot to me if you posted this," when it might not be something up our alley. We have one and only one canonical way to suggest things for Boing Boing, which is our online "suggest a site" form. And it's almost a guarantee that if someone bypasses that form and sends me a direct email asking me to put something up, it's almost always something that I don't want to put up, and the reason they're using email is because they think they can make me feel guilty enough to put it up. That's the only time I really think about Boing Boing's influence.

So you're able to separate the pressure that someone in your position might feel, as far as knowing just how many people are going to be seeing the thing you've written about?

I hope so. I do occasionally post things that I deliberately hope people will take an interest in, and do something about, but only to the same extent that I would do that for my circle of personal friends. When I post a warning that the warranty service from company such-and-such is miserable, and I know because I took out a warranty with them and they treated me very badly, that's simply warning my friends to be careful.

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And this leads us to something I did want to talk about in more detail, which is that you do every so often pick specific subjects at Boing Boing and follow them for awhile, talk about the issues for awhile. Probably one of the most famous examples was in 2005, with the giant ongoing battle with Sony over rootkits and DRM, and Boing Boing bringing it to the attention of a mainstream audience. [Ed: For those who don't remember, this was the first discovery by the public that "Digital Rights Management" malware even existed in the entertainment industry, a fact that Sony tried to hide, but that became part of the national conversation because of a dozen investigative articles Boing Boing published over a six-month period.] When it came to that, and when it comes to other political things that happen at Boing Boing, I think there's a lot of people who would become concerned for their own welfare in those situations, and would think, "My God, am I about to get sued back to the Stone Age by Sony? Am I about to lose my house and my car and my job?"

Do any of those fears go through your own mind when you get involved with these kinds of issues? And let's talk specifically about that experience with Sony, since that caused so much attention.

Well, in 2005 I wasn't worried about losing my house or car because I didn't own one [laughter], and I wasn't worried about losing my job because it was with a legal organization!

Well, let's put it this way. For a lot of bloggers out there, if they suddenly had a lot of attention from a big corporate worldwide company, throwing legal threats at them every single day, I think a lot of personal bloggers would be tempted to just walk away from the entire situation.

I have occasionally gotten legal threats, but my response is to immediately publish them publicly. I think that's a pretty good response. I think I have a pretty good lay understanding of what's lawful and what's not lawful, and there's nothing unlawful about reporting on the legal behavior of a corporation. I'm pretty sanguine about doing that. A legal threat only exists to try to shut you up or scare you, and the single best thing you can do is immediately publish it publicly. I'm trying to think of a good example...Well, there was this company, Starcraft, that made DRM software for videogames. And they were behaving badly and were doing terrible things, and I put it online, and I got this legal threat in this sort of broken English from some Russian executive for this company, informing me that I was violating eleven international copyright laws. And speaking as someone who's been a delegate at the United Nations on the subject of copyright, that was news to me. [Laughter] And so I immediately published the legal threat and mercilessly made fun of him, and that itself became news and harmed them even more. I think the more we do that, the more we expose these bullies to the light of day, the less someone might be inclined to bully someone.

And I'll give you a great counter-example too. Do you know the movie Free to Be You and Me, or the book? I'm a great fan of it, and I grew up with it. And in 1994 or '95, I bought the URL FreeToBeYouAndMe.com, thinking I might put up a fansite or something, but then never got around to it. And so it was just sitting there and I was paying for it year after year, and I got this email from the lawyer of the Free To Be Foundation, and he said, "I see you have this domain, and I'd be interested in talking with you about acquiring it." What he didn't say was, "You're a domain squatter," "you're a copyright thief," anything like that; just "I'd like to talk with you February 2014 | 111

about it." And so I called him up and said, "Tell me about your group," and he was like, "We're this 501c, and Gloria Steinem's on our board of directors," etc. And I was like, "That's super cool, so you can just have the URL." And he's like, "Really?" And I'm like, "Yeah! I'm not doing anything with it!" [Laughter] And I said, "If you had sent a legal threat, I would've published it, made fun of it, and dug my heels in so that it would've cost you tens of thousands of dollars, and you still wouldn't have gotten the goddamn domain. But by being a mensch about it, you got what you wanted, I got what I wanted." I asked him if he'd send me an autographed copy of the book, and he said, "Oh, I'll get the whole board to sign it." [Laughter] And just one more thing about Boing Boing before we move on. This might possibly be the biggest honor you've now received; Virgin Airlines named one of their planes "The Unicorn Chaser." Tell us a little about that.

It's not actually a very interesting story. They just called us up one day and was like, "How'd you like to name one of our planes?" And we said sure, and had a discussion about it, and came up with "Unicorn Chaser."

[Laughter] No, I mean, what does "Unicorn Chaser" mean?

Ohhhh! [Laughter] That was something Xeni came up with. There was this one time that Mark was living on this small island in the South Pacific with his family, and he got this incredibly grody fungus, and he posted a picture of it online and was like, "Does anyone know what this is?" And it was just really gross, so Xeni put up a picture of a unicorn and said, "Any picture that disgusting needs a unicorn chaser." And so that became a little thing she would do, anytime something gross would get posted at Boing Boing. We had a couple of other ideas. "NSFW." [Laughter] But Virgin said that no airplane could ever have the words "not safe" in its name. And then my idea was "Technical Virgin," but that got shot down. [Laughter] Well, let's move on to the whole reason you're in Chicago, which is that you've got a new book out. It's your first Young Adult novel, called Little Brother. I have a copy, but I'm ashamed to say that I didn't get it read before our interview, so could you please tell us a little about what it's about?

[In fake German accent] This interview is over! [Laughter] Little Brother is a Young Adult novel about hacker kids who, after a terrorist attack on San Francisco, find themselves subjected to surveillance and control from the Department of Homeland Security at a level they find offensive to their dignity and liberty, and that they think is not going to help win the war on terror, and indeed they're taken into custody and subjected to interrogation and so on. And they decide that they're going to take back their city. And they do it three ways: they take back their technology, and instead of using it in the way it's used with young people today, to spy on them and control them, they repurpose their technology to let them communicate in secret, and to undermine the efforts of the DHS to surveil them. They build a thing called the X-Net, which is made out of hacked Xboxes, an encrypted overlay network to the internet, that they can use to communicate in secret; and then they start playing games with radio frequency IDs, in people's purses and cars, to confound data mining that the DHS does on average individuals. They also educate themselves on mathematics, and learn more about the math of rare events. So much of our [terrorism] policy is being driven 112 | The CCLaP Journal

by bad understandings of the statistics behind rare events. I think by nature, humans don't understand the statistics of rare events. We get off an airplane in Las Vegas, and we look at the Strip and we think, "Look at all those giant buildings! Think of all that money those people have to lose to me, as I gamble at the tables!" instead of thinking, "Holy moley, how could they have built all those giant buildings unless everyone who gets off a plane here loses their shirt?" We are willing to accept that an automated data mining system can be used to identify terrorists and keep them off airplanes. Here in Chicago, they've just expanded this 700-smart-camera network system that tracks and surveils people using algorithms. So they decide they're going to educate people about the statistics of fear. And then finally, they end up getting involved with electoral politics, because at the end of the day, if you don't participate in the system, the system participates in you. And they basically fight back against the DHS. At your personal site, just like all your other books, there is a free digital copy of this. And you're on a big tour right now. How big is that tour?

Chicago, Milwaukee, Seattle, San Francisco, New York... There was a date in Toronto to start, and a date in Los Angeles in the middle. Then I go back to L.A., then head to Texas, after going back to London. So yeah, about a month long and pretty grueling, but it's pretty awesome too.

And what I wanted to talk about in a little detail about this is that you all are doing some very interesting promotional things as part of this release. What I find most fascinating, for example, is that you've been handing out hundreds of free paper copies of the book to high-school journalists around the country.

I actually got that idea from a website called WIPO, a website about young people, culture, marketing and commerce. Another writer had done this very successfully, and it seemed like a great idea, as far as getting copies of the book directly into the hands of young people who love books and tell their friends about their books. So we solicited 200 high-school newspapers, and sent them all copies and had them write reviews. I think that was very effective. The reviews were very good, and I heard from a lot of young readers who found out about the book through their high-school newspapers and went on to read the book.

And tell us just briefly about some of these other unusual things you all are doing.

Sure. For one, there's this website called Instructables, which is a community site for people who make things, everything from cakes to firecrackers to computers. They've done a series of Instructable how-tos for technology from the book. There's a whole community of people there who are building technology that's found in the book. And every chapter of the book does have a description of technology that you can actually build, to take more control over your life and better secure your freedom. We're encouraging people to shoot videos of them, and we're going to put the best ones on Boing Boing. And there's a DRM-free commercial audiobook from Random House.

It's the first time Random House has ever done an audiobook that's only available as a DRM-free download. It comes with a license that encourages people to sample, remix and reuse any 30 minutes of it they want, and share it with people in any way they want, as long as it's non-commercial. And I also contacted a number of podcasters whose podcasts I like, and asked them if they'd run an excerpt from the book. So those February 2014 | 113

went out to a couple of hundred thousand podcast listeners. You're welcome to an excerpt too. I can send you the entire eleven-hour audiobook and you can drop any 30 minutes you like into your podcast.

This brings up a more general question I wanted to ask you: how important do you find it, at the beginning of a new project like this, to go out and find brand-new things to try that you've never tried before? Did you sit down at the beginning of this campaign and say to yourself, "I really want to do something that no one else has done?"

Not that nobody else has done; I just try to iterate. Every time I release a book, I keep notes on what worked, and add ideas for what might work the next time around.

So it's not just new for the sake of new?

It's entrepreneurial. I'm a serial entrepreneur, and writing is one of my I think by nature, humans don’t entrepreneurial activities. As a smallunderstand the statistics of rare business person, the most important thing I can do is to be extremely events. We get off an airplane attuned to how the marketplace is in Las Vegas, and we look at unfolding, and to respond flexibly to it. the Strip and we think, “Look So for example, every time I've done a free electronic book release, I've tried a at all those giant buildings! little something different with the file Think of all that money those formatting, based on reader feedback, people have to lose to me, as I publisher feedback, and what I think works and what doesn't. These free gamble at the tables!” instead ebooks are done for a lot of reasons, of thinking, “Holy moley, how but one of them is to sell more books, could they have built all those and there are simply different things that might work better than others. giant buildings unless everyone So one of the things I did this time who gets off a plane here loses around was for every chapter, all 23 their shirt?” chapters, I came up with a different bookstore to dedicate it to. I wrote a paragraph about why that bookstore is important to me, and included a direct link to be able to directly buy a copy of the book from that store. And, you know, I'm a former bookseller myself, I love bookstores, they're my biggest vice. And none of these stores solicited me to do this; I just did it, because it seemed like a great thing to do, to remind people that this book is for sale at these places, and to turn people on to the bookstores I love.

So speaking of entrepreneurialism, there's two other things going on in your life these days, as far as your career and making money, and I had a real quick question about both of these. First of all, your magazine work has sort of blossomed in the last couple of years. You've been published now in such places as Wired, Popular Science, the New York Times, Salon. I just wanted to ask, are you still having to go out and hustle for these kinds of assignments? Or has the success of your other stuff now brought these publications more to you? I ask this more from a 114 | The CCLaP Journal

technical standpoint, as far as people who might be listening who are freelance writers themselves.

These days, I have so much work with Boing Boing and through the novels that I don't really pitch magazine ideas anymore. Sometimes I'll get commissions from magazines.

So for example, right now I'm doing something for the Association for Computing Machinery magazine, one for Bookseller magazine in the UK, and I just did an assignment for Forbes. That one I actually did pitch. I was going back to Toronto and I just reconnected with a guy named Darren Atkinson, whom I wrote my first Wired piece about, about high-tech dumpster divers. And in the fifteen years since I wrote about him, he has completely industrialized the process of dumpster diving, and I thought this was a really cool story. And I had written for Forbes before, so I asked them if they'd be interested in this story. So when I went back to Toronto with my daughter, to show her to my family, and we were out there for a couple of weeks, I took an evening off and drove around with Darren all night.

And the other thing I wanted to bring up was that you spent a year as a visiting professor at the University of Southern California, and this is without you having a formal college degree yourself. I just wanted to ask, was that ever an issue at USC? Did anyone ever bring that up?

No, no one ever did. The only time it ever came up was when my students would tell me how much they were paying to attend the university, and I would go, "Oh my God!" [Laughter] Was that a fun experience?

Yes, very very fun. My wife and I are thinking of repeating the experience in Singapore, so that we can get out of London during the Olympics. We've been given an offer there, and we're really seriously considering it.

We have to wrap things up, so you can get to your next appearance, but I had three last questions for you. First, without going into specifics, you've been known throughout your career for touching on a lot of hot topics and very contemporary issues. I was curious if you had a particular secret for staying one step ahead of the curve, especially as a science-fiction writer.

You know, I like to think that I predict the present. I stay attuned to what's going on in my day-to-day life. I think the most important thing is putting it all on Boing Boing, which helps keep it in my subconscious, and I think maybe helps me draw connections before other people do.

Second. Back in 2003, right before your first novel came out, you spent a little time in an early interview describing the kind of audience you hoped you'd be able to find for it. At the time, it was this really eclectic description, but here in 2008 we can just say, "Oh, Boing Boing readers." It's a little more complicated than that; it's not just Boing Boing readers, but fans of people like Charles Stross or Warren Ellis. And I was just curious in knowing whether you like the fact that we now have a more formal way of describing that kind of reader? Or do you miss the days when it was more difficult to describe this kind of person?

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I still think it's difficult to describe that kind of person! [Laughter] A description like "Boing Boing reader" is semantically unknown to anyone besides Boing Boing readers.

Really? Boing Boing is just so popular now. Don't you find more and more that you can just mention to a stranger, "Boing Boing," and people will go, "Ohhh, Boing Boing!"

I guess so, sometimes. But that is decidedly a micro-micro thing.

And then finally, just for personal interest only, have you ever heard from any staff members of Walt Disney World, acknowledging your fascination with the theme park? [Ed: Cory's first novel is set in a far-future abandoned Disney World that is now maintained by a small city's worth of volunteers, and he regularly writes about the resort at Boing Boing.] Have you ever received any sly invitations to come visit after hours or anything like that?

Oh, not just sly; every time I go to Disney World, I go out to lunch with imagineers who have written me fan letters.

Oh, I had no idea!

Yeah, I spoke at the imagineering convention in Burbank last year. And I'm going to the American Library Association conference next year in Anaheim, and am hoping that my friends will be able to get me a half-price room at Disney's California Adventure, instead of staying at the conference hotel. Yeah, I have this friend who works at Disney, and he said that when he first went to work there, he saw that there was a copy of that book in every person's cubicle. C

In the six years since this interview, Little Brother has become a popular staple in Young Adult literature, and in fact his newest book is its sequel, 2013â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Homeland. Visit him at craphound.com and boingboing.net.

116 | The CCLaP Journal

McAllen, Texas is the indie-rock capital of the world; or at least it would be, if all their bands didn’t have the pesky habit of disintegrating before ever having their first big success. That’s the central premise of Austinite Fernando A. Flores’ literary debut, and anyone who’s ever pawned their guitar to buy more beer will find much in this book to celebrate. Working from the conceit that all acts of creativity are vital to human happiness, no matter what the public reaction, Flores presents a smorgasbord of interconnected tales about artists who can’t quite seem to get their act together—from the performance artist whose most important work was only ever seen by five people, to the revered punk singer who never recorded a single album, to the bar band who accidentally become pawns of a local political campaign—and shows how in all these cases, the mere existence of these artists is a magical antidote against day-to-day ennui and adversity, and that it’s actually the rest of the squares who are the true bullshit artists.

By turns hilarious, heartbreaking and infuriating, this compact story collection is a loving ode to small-town music scenes in all their messy glory, and a welcome slap in the face to our “Yes We Can” times.

CCLaP Publishing

Download for free at cclapcenter.com/bsartists

Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas, Vol. I

A story cycle by Fernando A. Flores February 2014 | 117

BOOK REVIEW

The Woman Upstairs

By Claire Messud

Knopf Reviewed by Travis Fortney

Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs is a novel about how hard it is to be a woman. And if your first impulse is to think that this man would find it impossible to enjoy and even admire a novel about how hard it is be a woman, then you would be wrong.

This novel’s plot involves Cambridge schoolteacher Nora Eldgridge’s obsession with the Shahid family— mother Sirena, son Reza, and husband husband Skandar—who are visiting Cambridge for the year while Skandar teaches at Harvard. Reza, a third-grader, ends up in Nora’s class. All is well until a playground incident, in which slurs like “terrorist” are uttered and stones are thrown, necessitates that Nora call Sirena.

When Sirena comes to the school to gather her son, she and Nora strike up a friendship. Sirena is an artist, and Nora is, too. Or at least Nora thinks of herself that way.

Soon Nora and Sirena are sharing a studio for the year, spending their afternoons drinking coffee, gossiping, and sharing sweets. But the relationship is never quite even. Nora becomes much more invested than Sirena does, and it’s pretty clear from the beginning that she’s going to get hurt.

But I should back it up a bit. The truth is that the plot here is a bit disappointing, and the end of the novel is predictable and underwhelming. But the plot isn’t the point. The point is to understand Nora, or try to. Nora defines herself as a “Woman Upstairs”—that is, a good 118 | The CCLaP Journal

daughter, good friend and good sister, who fate has marked for spinsterhood, but who won’t let a little bad luck and loneliness stop her from being nice. As you might imagine, Nora is coming around to the realization that niceness is overrated. She’s trying to own her anger, and to figure out how she might use it.

I’m always personally fascinated by characters trying to make that final leap into adult happiness, and The Woman Upstairs succeeds in part because Nora’s desire to fulfill her human potential isn’t specific to women. Wants and needs are confusing, friendships can be confusing, and, for some of us, seemingly simple choices are fraught with doubt and endless self-examination.

I think the reason I found this novel so worthwhile, and even fascinating, is that Ms. Messud maintains a generosity with Nora’s character. It would be easy for her to make a joke out of Nora, easy for Nora to be much less worthwhile than she herself thinks she is. But Ms. Messud doesn’t make it easy for the reader to make that call. For example, Nora’s artwork in the novel is portrayed as good, but not great.

She works on a perfect replica of Emily Dickinson’s bedroom for most of the novel, which is a perhaps a little light on inspiration, but could be a fairly moving in the right hands. Sirena, meanwhile, sharing the same space, works on her own interpretation of Alice’s Wonderland. Which sounds trite, and maybe a little worse than Nora’s project.

But soon it’s Sirena’s project that takes over the gallery space, the geography of the friendship, and most of Nora’s available creative drive. It’s clear that Sirena is on an upward trajectory as an artist, while Nora is destined to remain behind.

Somewhat disturbingly, Ms. Messud’s life clearly resembles Sirena’s much more that it does Nora’s. So, the reason that this novel has been written must be that the author finds something worth examining in Nora’s existence, or that she has a special insight into Nora’s character that she thinks is worth sharing, and not that she personally relates to her. But whatever that insight is, it’s never exactly clear, and I don’t think the reader’s thinking about Nora will deepen dramatically over the course of the novel.

So there are no easy answers here. While it’s never quite clear what we’re supposed to think of Nora, it becomes clear that what’s standing in her way, what’s separating her from the Sirena’s of the world, is mostly her own outlook. True or not, such an idea is certainly food for thought. C

Out of 10: 9.0

February 2014 | 119

BOOK REVIEW

The Goldfinch

By Donna Tartt

Little, Brown and Company Reviewed by Madeleine Maccar

The story that is the backbone of Donna Tartt’s third novel, The Goldfinch, is one I keep seeing compared rather favorably, if not with a bit of reductive simplicity, to Dickens: An adolescent Theo Decker loses his mother in a museum explosion, leaving him first emotionally orphaned and later legally unmoored when his ne’er-dowell father meets a graciously early end (which is the only death in this book that brought me physical relief), eventually driving him to seek refuge with the avuncular Hobie, an antiques dealer to whom Theo was fatefully led in the aftermath of his mother’s death. Theo carries around the untreated damage of his mother’s death for as long as The Goldfinch follows him—-into the early years of his adulthood—-and presumably well beyond that to the point where he refers to his PTSD and its array of triggers with a familiarity usually reserved for an appendage. This gaping, fiercely protected wound draws him into some less than savory proclivities, like a nasty drug habit and selling Hobie’s lovingly refurbished antiques as extant relics from earlier times, unbeknownst to the guardian who’s more of a father figure than he’s ever known in the only way he knows how to rescue the older man from financial ruin, but also renders Theo so bravely honest and sympathetically magnetic that it’s easy to forgive his lesser qualities, especially since many of his shortcomings are born of a marriage between good intentions and limited options.

In fact, among the myriad lessons this book explores regarding the dualities of human nature and life itself, the fact that goodness doesn’t always come from goodness and that bad doesn’t always beget bad is one of its most fervently emphasized—and it should come as no surprise that a novel so devoted to art should be so keen on the notion that the world is painted in much more than just blacks and whites. The Goldfinch borrows its title from the Carel Fabritius painting of the same name (the artist, it should be noted, also died in an explosion), a favorite painting of his mother’s that 120 | The CCLaP Journal

Theo “rescues” from the museum during his dazed, frantic efforts to escape, a theft that was really executed as a testament to the hope that his mother would soon return home to her son and the painting he liberated for her delight alone. It is the painting that propels Theo toward a life of covert misdeeds but it is also a tangible connection to the mother whose death threw the trajectory of his future regrettably off course.

Theo himself is proof that something good can come from less than well-intentioned origins, as his own father lacks the integrity and heart Theo inherited from his mother.

Far from harboring delusions about himself, Theo is his own worst critic, which only renders him all the more likable.

Theo is the bruised, beating heart of this novel and the supporting cast does lend vibrant splashes of color and gorgeous harmonies throughout the composition, but the cities Theo finds himself ping-ponging across are just as alive as any corporeal character. The New York City Theo considers his lifelong home and the one he returns to after years of Las Vegas life reflect the city’s tireless mutability as well as Theo’s own internal metamorphosis. If NYC acts almost as its own foil, then the thin, flashy veneer and always encroaching desert of Vegas offers a glimpse into downright alien territory, a life of premature adulthood’s self-reliance and prolonged childhood’s tendency toward bad life choices under the uninterested watch of his self-absorbed father that contrasts darkly but critically against with the two-against-the-world safety and warmth his mother offered. The unceremonious and abrupt shift to Amsterdam robs the city of some of its old-world, foreign charm in Theo’s alternately confused, feverish and despairing states during his relatively short but transformative stay, but Tartt still subtly weaves its essence into Theo’s distracted narration. The full effect allows the unique spirits of the three cities to spring off each page with a palpable dimensionality that is wholly immersive. It is impossible to not see each dark street, feel each slap of icy wind and tiny drops of sweat, conjure each richly but unobtrusively detailed scene down to the draping of a tablecloth.

The painstaking research that went into this book—foreign languages, art, literature, antiques restoration, far-flung locales, capturing low-brow banter and high-class empty chatter with equally convincing success—is as impressive as Tartt’s enviable command of storytelling and word-slinging. Each detail is as necessary as it is beautifully finessed, the mark of a gifted writer who knows exactly what to highlight for maximum impact rather than an amateur’s scattershot load of tacked-on trivialities to hold up a story that carries no emotional weight.

A work that champions the restorative power of art, how one thing can be so beautiful in so many ways that it indiscriminately sings out to scores across the barriers of time and geography and culture to unite an audience that can’t begin to know the exhaustive scope of its reach, ought to be an appropriately transformative work itself. Celebrating a masterful talent that echoes across otherwise impregnable distances because it is so rarely seen again rings trite if the tribute isn’t equal to the task. The Goldfinch hits all the high notes, captures a complicated spirit in the warmest and richest of tones, and deploys an impressive literary arsenal all to such resounding success that it is, without a scrap of doubt, my only logical choice for Best Book of 2013. What else do you call a book that spans nearly 800 pages and still feels too short?

That it takes a commanding self-control to write about without using five exclamation points after every caps-locked sentence? That brings with its last page the heartache of saying goodbye to an old friend? C

Out of 10: 10 February 2014 | 121

ORIGINAL FICTION

Photo: Pedro Szekely | flickr.com/pedrosz Used under the terms of his Creative Commons license

TO BOLIVIA 122 | The CCLaP Journal

There was something in my eye but my fingers were dirty. They would not come clean. The eye watered and I squeezed it shut, looking straight ahead. I didn’t dare look side to side— the dust, the eyelash—it grated over my cornea with undue pain. I went to pull at the contact, but resisted. My unclean hands. If I didn’t move, maybe the intruder would let me be.

Yet I had no time to hold still.

The man hurried passengers into a taxi, barking Spanish directions at the driver. He shoved me into the seat against two Italians, our backpacks torn from us and thrown shotgun. The tires squealed at each corner, then rumbled violently over an old railroad grade. The seat’s springs gave no resistance to the strain, and the taxi’s framework rammed repeatedly into my tailbone. I stiffened.

Jason R. Riley

A, BY FOOT February 2014 | 123

For a moment the windows fogged. With a frantic, squeaking swipe at the condensation, the driver veered into the oncoming traffic of a wide boulevard, ripped the wheel back, careened left, and left again. Pressed into the window, I too touched the moisture and then rubbed my fingers together until spindly rolls of brown emerged between them. I cleared the slim black crescent from my eye. Now that I could see, I was lost. A shrill metallic growl increased quickly as we came to a stop. Standing before us was a Toyota van, one too small for all the people that had already squeezed through its side door. Action whirled about me: men tossed backpacks up to a rack held on the roof by a corroded arc-weld, while others rushed me through the door; with care they ducked my head so it missed the frame. I felt the victim of a kidnapping, with no one back home to receive the ransom demand. I had only my fellow abductees.

Clasping my pack, I crawled into the last remaining space: the pinched aisle along the flank. The tall Italian flipped-down an eye patch of a seat, hinged to the wall; I sat, bag to chest.

The man who’d jammed me into the taxi pushed his way through the door and someone on the outside had to slide it shut—it didn’t seem to latch. He crouched, his wide body blocking the exit. Cold, damp air whistled through the gap. With nowhere else to look, I examined the man’s pocked skin, his frightening size, his glossy black eyes. Every inch of him a street boss, yet upon his face there seemed no cruelty, no ill-will. Despite his rough handling, I had no choice but to trust him. His actions that morning had betrayed a good nature: few, when met with an eight mile roadblock, would go through the trouble he had already. The man had sold us the tickets, and he would honor that commitment—integrity, unlike the rival bus company. He understood history, and its present tense: reality.

The War of the Pacific had begun over a century ago when Chile took Bolivia’s littoral land. Bolivia’s trade had ever since flowed on this singular road through their Peruvian ally, rather than that once great saltpeter bed of Chilean Atacama, née Bolivian. Five-hundred years of donated mineral wealth, and all she had to show in her empty hands were her still full teats. Bolivia was not through giving. I was headed east, trying to suckle at the second largest pocket of natural gas on the continent.

Adhering to some oath of sustainable development, I was not. I had spent almost a year in preparation, only to dance with failure in the final week. The contract negotiations were to begin in three days. And a peasant uprising risked it all. Despite the blockade, I couldn’t return to Cusco for a flight. My crossing required a sleepy, manual checkpoint. This was the road; the only road to Bolivia.

So cramped was the van that elbows didn’t rub, we moved in solid blocks on the four rows of seats: unsafe, aftermarket additions without consideration for leg room.

The tall Italian tried to shift after each bump drove the tin seat back into his shins.

Three adolescent American girls—traveling with a woman—helped nothing.

They trilled, in voices sharp as the taxi’s brakes, songs they created on the spot, as though held at gunpoint:

Inca Kola it’s the one

Drinking it is so much fun

Tastes a lot like bubble gum

Inca Kola. . . it’s the one

“—No, wait—I already said that. What was our last verse?”

“Now’s not the time, girls,” hissed a voice behind me in Québécois, just loud enough for me to silently agree. In front of the devil’s choir, four Germans rolled, tied, and re-tied their red bandanas until they became tight red slashes upon their necks.

The Italians glowered in their discomfort, and the Peruvians sat facing the passengers, 124 | The CCLaP Journal

speaking Aymara. I felt as if on the last bus from Babel, a fallen tower in our wake— everyone’s language confused.

The road was drawn faintly, less than a pencil line pressed upon a scrub plain, and was erased by the scale of the Andes that disrupted the expanse—jutting up, into and through the clouds. After thirty minutes we saw buses and freight trucks, sitting engines cold, abandoned on the road. The van stopped where it could make a U-turn, in three or four points. Against a series of roadblocks—like me—the trucks had no hope of turning around. I felt myself chained to the passengers before me as the door slid open and they expanded out into the cold, thin air. Perhaps surprised with the sudden exposure, I stumbled to the road and let one of the German men help me to my feet. We began our walk across the unknown.

I understood the backup as the first barrier appeared, a wide mound of earth and stone, as if dug to reveal a mass grave. Without further thought of the imagined dead, I climbed atop the pile to get a better view for my camera: a string of people moved and thinned to no more than an ant trail, miles away, at the limit of my vision. One of the American girls struggled with her plastic suitcase. Her chaperone then hired a boy with a bicycle to porter it through the turmoil.

I pocketed my camera and soon the passengers were several barriers ahead. I walked faster and then stopped. One of the girls had fallen behind to lace-up her pink tennis shoe, propping it against a large rock within a barrier across the road. For a moment, I hovered, deciding to wait for her, wondering why she wore no socks.

“So what are you ladies doing all the way down here?” I asked, and regretted. I must have startled her because she took in a little gasp.

“My mother is taking my sisters and me on a pilgrimage to Copacabana.” The girl pushed her curly black hair beneath her knit cap. “She’s Bolivian.”

I looked toward the two blonde girls walking away next to the boy with the suitcase balanced across his bicycle frame, then back to the girl. “I would have never guessed you were sisters—you all seem to be the same age.”

“Well, we are: the same age and sisters.” She had moved a little ahead of me.

“When my mom had me she adopted my sisters so we could all grow up together. Why are you here, mister?”

I should have just said work. “Aren’t your feet cold? I have a pair of warm socks.”

The girl didn’t answer. She began walking faster, and then ran the last few meters to join her sisters.

“OK, sorry. Guess I’m the asshole here.” I stood alone, wondering why I had offered the help.

Cold rain began, as if to answer me. I pulled a black trash bag from my pack, tore a hole in the bottom, and pulled it over my head. Wiping the rain from my face, I scrubbed it into my unwashed hair, then, carefully, wicked the water from my eyes.

I put on my Brewers cap and adjusted the bill. Rain soaked the blue wool and trickled down the back of my neck.

A green sign vandalized in red, at once, welcomed all to Ilave and encouraged in a violent script: ¡Luchar por la justicia! I hoped my proposal would not be greeted with the same fight. The road paused for a crumpled guard station, its windows and contents having been destroyed. Broken glass surrounded the structure, and ahead of me, the group circled wide. A flat-bed trailer reclined on its side, like a great beast toppled by thirst. A mangy dog lifted its leg. The rain had stopped.

I finally caught up to the Italians. “They’ve had enough of something.”

“Ya Basta,” said the stout one, flicking his hand at the tall one, who was wringing the water from his jumper, leaving a woolen point along the side of his belly.

February 2014 | 125

Our path diverted from the paved to the unpaved—a slick, hard-packed earth that had eroded down the center to form a shallow, gravelly ditch. The path narrowed, the buildings squatting in, encouraging us to walk nearly single file. All homes shuttered tight, yet Ilave writhed within. The streets ran as a festival in motion. At the corner, someone detonated a large firecracker or a small stick of dynamite. A light concussive wind puffed against the back of my ears. Against distant cheers, we passengers marched in this perverse parade—one where I felt the onlookers might fall upon me when next the rain came down. Villagers huddled beneath the dripping eaves, their stares wanting merely to witness the moment raindrops would snap against my trash bag poncho. I feared them, not for some wild gesture or cry, but because they were so placid. Calm and ignoring the destruction that surrounded us; that they had created. Routine. No more than a footstep over a puddle.

The street widened and a stone-faced man approached from the side, his straight, black hair dry, but glistening. He took up my pace and walked beside me, his left hand hidden inside a woven shoulder bag.

“Buenos.” I tensed slightly, preparing to fend off a blow.

The street’s length and breadth Though more wary of what the bag concealed. were strewn with empty fuel

The stone crumbled. “Buenos cans and broken bottles—thick dias,” he said with a high-pitched returnable bottles. Small piles shaman’s voice.

“What’s happening here?” I of refuse sent-up acrid clouds asked in Spanish. of polymer smoke. Midway

“The mayor—that dirty down the street a windshield Kharisiri stole our plata. He turned on us all. Ran off to Lima. Once, lay silent upon the road— he was our savior—fought to bring discarded in a moment of terror the lights back—he fought the and spider-webbed where a government and returned electricity to Ilave. He was good then. They small boulder protruded from transformed him in Lima—fed its center. The crowds had him the fat of children. Now he is abandoned this stretch.

Kharisiri—he sucks the fat from us while we sleep. He will return—his thirst is too great. We must be ready.

So we guard the highway until he does.”

I looked at him with a smirk, but there was truth in his face. “Sounds fair.”

“For where are you going?”

“Cochabamba.”

“To Bolivia, by foot.” He laughed, a wispy otherworldly laugh, as though he had detected my lie. “That will help you understand, gringo: a lesson. A lesson of el Peru.

Via bien.” Unconsciously, I thumbed at the steel ring on my little finger. The man peeled away, his swollen toes puffed out of homemade sandals, toward the only open kiosko. At the crunch of glass beneath my feet, I looked forward.

The street’s length and breadth were strewn with empty fuel cans and broken bottles—thick returnable bottles. Small piles of refuse sent-up acrid clouds of polymer smoke. Midway down the street a windshield lay silent upon the road—discarded in a moment of terror and spider-webbed where a small boulder protruded from its center. The crowds had abandoned this stretch. A vacuum of sound enveloped all 126 | The CCLaP Journal

voices in terse-echoed silence—only the scuff of footsteps over glass and the muffled cracklings of smoldering embers escaped. The three sisters huddled, each had a hand upon their porter’s bicycle. Their mother urged them forward. No one took this route.

The Kharisiri lurked, I shook my head.

Behind the colorless clouds the sun had crested and began its fast descent. I was soaked, and I shivered. The Québécois man had taken hold of his wife’s elbow, in what seemed an attempt to speed her pace.

“Crisse moi!” the Québécois woman snarled, jerking her arm out of her husband’s reach when he tried to touch her again. With the rest of the street on mute, her voice cracked sharply. He widened his eyes for her to shut up, then rushed impetuously forward. She retreated and walked alone at the side of the road. I too wanted to pull her closer, for safety. The Italians chuckled.

“A peaceful walk, hey?” The tall Italian raised his arms to the sky and shaking his fists in appreciation. “Ah, it’s great!” We neared the end of the glass-strewn confusion.

“What the hell are you talking about? The village is gone, and they seem absolutely convinced the mayor is some kind of fuckin’ vampire.”

“Okay, so maybe it’s a little dangerous,” he replied in his perfect English. “But it’s more deadly in your Stati Uniti, because everyone has a gun.” He extended his hand, index finger toward my face and brought down the hammer of his thumb. “Where is your gun, pardner?”

My head jerked toward him too quickly, as though I had something intelligent to argue, but uttered nothing.

“I think don’t worry, so much. You won’t end up dead here.”

“Well, it’s still not—” I stopped talking as a distant call and response of whistles, shouting, and drums rose in the distance. “It sounds like a war protest—”

“Not so lucky,” said the Italian, herding me to the side of the road. “A mob.”

The rain returned, twice as hard; it added rhythm to the chorus of the chant.

Through the blurry sheets the Aymara advanced, nearly phalanxed: pressed twelve deep, equally wide and armed with trusting spears. A shield wall, united in aggression.

Their sound cleared the street long before they came into focus.

Our leader recalled his purpose and nervously pulled us beneath the canopy of a dug-up and boarded fuel station. I stood upon the mound beside a hole where a fuel reservoir once lay covered. In the moment, I felt the need to take another photo. But unlike the beginning of the journey, I realized their angry eyes might turn on me. My camera game had ended.

The inflamed villagers, men and women, advanced. Three hundred feet stomped in syncopated, circular cannons. Then a salvo of angry noise erupted in a voice for Ilave. A volley of whistles followed and the verbal attack on the mayor and any conspirators began anew.

The travelers remained quiet. I packed my camera away and observed, reverent.

The drums faded, and the rain turned colder. At the edge of town, we arrived at a truss bridge, its simple orange span now charred black. The deck smoldered in stinking piles of wire, tire, and ash. I guessed the night before had been spectacular: fire suspended over water, the mob feeding the flames, hundreds of eyes reflecting, squinting against the heat. Now, the crossing marked an end.

In wet shoes we trudged forward for a silent hour. The road sloped gently upward and the leader received a call on his mobile.

“It’s near,” he said. “The final barrier. There.” He pointed to a white stallion standing in the downpour, at the top of the hill. As we neared, the horse became a white van—like the one we arrived in, years ago.

February 2014 | 127

Men on the shoulder tossed new obstacles onto the asphalt as we rolled down the hill. Safe in the van, their act seemed a small diversion. Polyhedral boulders tumbled on their jagged faces in front of the van, protecting Ilave, and leaving scarcely enough road to evade capture.

The city brimmed with clouds and humidity that morning. I poured water into a plastic bowl and scrubbed my face, then pulled-on a clean shirt, and walked down for my breakfast meeting.

“Your colleagues from the Ministerio de Hidrocarburos sent a message. Their car will be twenty minutes late.” The desk clerk in Santa Cruz de la Sierra folded his newspaper. “Señor, did I hear you came from Ilave last week? Here.” He gave the newspaper over to me. It was two days old. Front page. Below the fold. I scanned the words, but did not believe them.

It seemed, on that Monday in April the villagers captured the mayor returning to his home for his clothing. A mob broke through his door, rising up with sticks and fists and chains. In Achillean retribution they tied his hands and dragged him through the streets, scraping the skin from his elbows and the tops of his feet. Over the rocks, filth, and glass his mouth filled with the dust of dried dog piss. His wounds stung less the further they pulled him. When he tried to stand, they beat him down again. Someone crushed his hands so he could not push himself upright. The blood trail led down the street, over the threshold, across the tile and up the stairs to the roof of the tallest two-story building. They held him forward and pronounced to the crowd below his judgment. They remained quiet. Believing him undead, they looped a rope over his head—

I put down the paper.

In the final line, below the photo of the mayor’s head, swollen to twice its size, the paper had quoted an anonymous villager: “This Kharisiri exploited us. Until the next, we are safe.”

But this villager was not anonymous to me. He walked with shiny hair and crooked toes, and he had witnessed. In a high-pitched voice, he warned—a lesson of el Peru—and knew his message would find me. Only now, I saw. C

Jason R. Riley is from Duluth, Minnesota, and works in Northern California. Jason would like to thank Jodi Angel, Ailbhe Keogan and Leanne Farella for their input on this story. His website is jrriley.com.

128 | The CCLaP Journal

Almost since the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography opened for business in 2007, it’s been interviewing science-fiction authors for both its podcast and popular blog; and now here is a compilation of nine of those interviews, featuring eight authors ranging from the starts of their careers to the height of their fame. Each talk conducted by CCLaP executive director Jason Pettus in an insightful, long-form style inspired by “The Paris Review,” these fascinating conversations take place with such genre favorites as Boing Boing co-founder Cory Doctorow, National Book Award finalist George Saunders, and multiple Hugo winners Charles Stross and Ian McDonald; but they also include such local up-and-comers as Mark R. Brand, Mason Johnson and Lauryn Allison, as well as bizarro author and internet sensation Patrick Wensink. Together they paint a revealing and lasting portrait of the state of science-fiction publishing in the 2000s and 2010s, and those who enjoyed these in audio format the first time will want to grab a copy of this first-ever print edition.

Download for free at cclapcenter.com/sfinterviews

CCLaP Publishing

CCLaP's Interviews With Science Fiction Authors From the web pages of the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography February 2014 | 129

BOOK REVIEW

Anything That Moves: Renegade Chefs, Fearless Eaters, and the Making of a New American Food Culture

By Dana Goodyear

Riverhead/Penguin Reviewed by Karl Wolff

My introduction to food writing began with Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. But it began before that, with Trimalchio’s lavish banquet described in The Satyricon and the gustatory decadence of Des Essientes in Against Nature. Writing about food is challenging, since it is a sensual and immediate experience. (Look at how both wine snobs and Guy Fieri are mocked in pop culture. Wine snobs radiate an insufferable pretentiousness, especially to those who have no palate for the grape stuff. And, well, Guy Fieri is probably the Antichrist.) Even amongst the countless foodies and Yelp reviewers, there are extremist cadres in American food culture. What does extreme mean? It means seeking out the culinary fringes, including noshing on things that are taboo, disgusting, or illegal.

Dana Goodyear investigates different strands of extremist food culture in her book, Anything That Moves: Renegade Chefs, Fearless Eaters, and the Making of a New American Food Culture. Coming from Minnesota and with specific food allergies, I was immediately interested in what Goodyear had to say about the outlier foodies and chefs. Since I can’t eat shrimp, I can eat clams, oysters, and squid. I’ve graduated from enjoying venison in season to hunting down providers of sweetbreads (aka organ meat). And, before I leap off the confessional soap-box, I think foie gras and raw milk cheese should be legal. In the end, I found that even my idiosyncratic 130 | The CCLaP Journal

tastes and personal foodie crusades are nothing compared to the extremists she interviews.

The wonderful thing about Anything That Moves is its range of subject material.

There is legendary food writer Jonathan Gold hunting down the obscure and the possibly lethal in Los Angeles, ranging from food trucks to Chinese restaurants with questionable kitchen practices. There are the slow food libertarians who see the FDA as a bureaucracy just as evil as the NSA and the IRS. And there are the Las Vegas chefs, preparing rare and opulent dishes for high rollers. Surrounded by bone-stripping desert heat, these chefs have the challenge of transporting fresh produce and seafood over long distances. One chef compared prepping food for Las Vegas with colonizing the moon. (The extreme climate and geographic isolation are comparative.) There are also extreme eaters, seeking out illegal food at clandestine restaurants. If thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a way to eat whale meat, they will find a way.

Beyond the extremism element, Goodyear brings up salient points in terms of food politics. She spends a considerable amount of time conversing with entophagists.

These proponents of eating insects have a reasonable point. When deforestation, overfishing, and industrial farming has created a crisis situation with meat, there have to be other ways to consume protein. One alternative is to eat bugs. At first blush, it is seen as gross. Then again, lobster and shrimp both belong to the same massive group of arthropods. It may be a while before eating grasshoppers and ants are commonplace, but if American ingenuity is involved, the gateway will probably be adding the elements chocolate and bacon. Deep fry the sucker and one only has to wait a short while before there are stampedes at state fairs.

The hunt for alternate protein sources leads to the concept of what we will eat and why. Many food prohibitions are based on religious tradition. Others are inherited from our modernized culture. The raw food crusaders advocate drinking raw milk.

While there is increased risk of diseases present in raw milk, this seems more like a quibble that calls for some legislative reform and a more small-business-friendly attitude from the FDA. Other raw food fanatics consider the best organic eggs are the ones with the most chicken feces on them. Um ... ewww. One has to draw a line somewhere. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s my redline. It turns out to be not that surprising that there is overlap between the raw food purists and Ron Paul libertarians.

Anything That Moves is a fascinating exploration of the limits of American food culture. Issues like ethics, legislation, and popular taste are covered with in-depth interviews and Dana Goodyearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s crackerjack writing style. C

Out of 10: 9.5

February 2014 | 131

BOOK REVIEW

Out of Print

By George Brock

Kogan Page Reviewed by Madeleine Maccar

“The future business of journalism will resemble the past and will also be unlike it,” proclaims journalist-cumprofessor George Brock as he begins the final chapter of Out of Print, an enlightening and engaging exploration of how journalism got to be what it is through trial and error that also calls upon the industry to maintain its spirit of flexible experimentation if it wishes to thrive in the 21st century. It’s a line that perfectly encapsulates the spirit of a book that is part history/part dissection/part prescriptive measure for the current state of journalism, an industry in upheaval that has been struggling with outdated business models in this hyper-personalized, swiftly moving era that bears little resemblance to the world a decade prior, to say nothing of the centuries before when the only available medium, still in its fledgling state, was adapting to the needs and wants of an increasingly informed public.

I’ve officially been out of print journalism longer than I was in it but, hey: You can take the girl out of the newsroom but you can’t take the newsroom out of the girl. Especially when she fled job satisfaction for job security and resents the decision on a fairly regular basis. At the time, anything was preferable to fearing for my job every three months and not being able to hear myself think over what sounded suspiciously like the death rattle of an industry I arrived at just in time to watch crumble around me. In hindsight, I do wish I’d stuck around a little longer to administer palliative care to something I truly loved being a part of, though I think I got out just in time to be able to justify recalling my newspaper days with perhaps a tad too much nostalgia rather than the exhausted, overworked frustration that punctuated those last months.

So when I heard about Out of Print—which examines the interlocking past, present and uncertain future of journalism with a focus on newspapers—I felt like it was one of those rare times when I was actually part of the target audience. Perhaps for that reason, or because the book maintains an unflinching but rationally optimistic attitude about what’s in store for journalism, 132 | The CCLaP Journal

I found it to be the perfect example of the educated tome one needs to read in order to form both a credible, well-informed opinion on the state of journalism today and an idea of what it will take to ensure that we’ll one day look back on these times as a turning point rather than a terminus.

With his book, Brock effectively dismantles the myths born of lazily connected, coincidental cause and effect, presenting a much-needed reminder that what a thing is and how it looks are rarely the same. Two easy examples: One, the dawn of the internet didn’t really strike the death blows to more traditional media, especially print, so much as it merely exposed their long-festering issues, like how advertising dollars have been on the decline since the ‘80s but were easily mitigated by cinching editorial budgets, a decline in competition, and predominantly stable developed-world economic conditions; two, hindsight offers us the luxury of looking at the whole in retrospect to create a history by linking media milestones but actually living in the middle of one—without the comfort of flipping to the end of the chapter to see how the turbulent present fits with the paradigm-shifting moments of the past that led to this current transition—feels more like standing on unstable ground than witnessing another historical epoch from the inside. As someone who used to vehemently, bitterly complain how those damnably stubborn dinosaurs before me destroyed print journalism with their refusal to either adapt to newer models or embrace the internet as a supplement to rather than replacement of the newspaper, it was strangely comforting to see the extent of just how wrong I was in that regard, to finally understand that it’s not easy to consider the implications of new technology when the daily, immediate demands of having a job to do often demand one’s full attention.

Furthermore, Brock points out that every sudden expansion of information has ripple effects that are both long-lasting and often delayed. When the rise of the internet’s accessibility didn’t have immediate effects, it was hard to anticipate either the full impact or the personal and practical application of these modern connections that have rapidly decreased the size of world while mind-bogglingly increasing every individual’s opportunity to access information both ancient and up-to-the-second current. As someone who has been using the internet since elementary school, it’s easy to forget that such far-reaching connectivity was daunting in its scope to anyone not looking at it for the first time with an adult perspective rather than a child’s easy acceptance of new discoveries.

I can’t speak for someone who never experienced the combination of giddiness and deadline-driven occupational pressure that comes with watching historical events unfold from the newsroom’s vantage point, surrounded by likeminded people in that surreal suspension of time between waiting for results and scrambling in unison to create a product that not only passes along but elaborates on such information for public consumption, but as a former journalist with an admittedly romantic notion of what the industry can accomplish (with a shameless bias for newspapers, whatever the lacking regard many seem to have for them), Out of Print offers plenty of rational reassurance that we’re not facing the death of something but rather its rebirth— should it choose to adapt rather than stagnate. The book is optimistic without being sentimental, thought-provoking without being pretentious and realistic without being harsh, which makes it comforting for someone with a keen interest in seeing journalism prevail and hopefully eye-opening for those who wish to better understand it. C

Out of 10: 9.0 February 2014 | 133

THE NSFW FILES

The Piano Teacher

By Elfriede Jelinek Essay by Karl Wolff

Once a month throughout 2013 and ‘14, CCLaP critic Karl Wolff is reading another classic novel that has been notoriously labeled “not safe for work,” in order to assess the true artistic worth of such projects. For all the essays in this series, please visit [cclapcenter. com/karl_wolff].

Personal History: Every once in a while, the Swedish Academy awards the Nobel Prize in Literature to someone you’ve never heard of. In my case, it was Elfriede Jelinek. When she was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2004, a storm of controversy erupted. Knut Ahnlund resigned in protest, saying her work was “whining, unenjoyable public pornography” and “a mass of text shovelled together without artistic structure.” A Nobel laureate’s work likened to pornography? I became immediately interested in finding Jelinek’s work. As with several other authors in this series, this is the first time I’ve read anything by Elfriede Jelinek and I read it “cold.” (For those who haven’t read The Piano Teacher and want to read it, stop reading this essay right now. Everything below will inevitably involve spoilers, historical and cultural context, and my opinion on the book. Reading those things would ruin your initial reading experience. Caveat lector.)

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The History: Elfriede Jelinek is Austrian. This is an important distinction in Germanlanguage literature. While Germany and Austria share the same language, they are radically different cultures. Germany became unified in a series of nationalistic wars in the 1860s and reigned triumphant with their victory in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. Then the World Wars happened, followed by the economic miracle, and eventual unification between East and West Germany. Following the First World War, Austria was lopped off from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a multinational, multiethnic imperial entity that had been ruled by the Hapsburg dynasty for centuries.

(The Austro-Hungarian Empire also included the nations that made up Yugoslavia, as well as Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania.) A German-speaking aristocracy ran the government and supplied candidates to the officer corps. Non-German speakers were one rung lower on the social hierarchy.

Unlike Germany, with its mix of Lutherans and Catholics, Austria is almost entirely Catholic. For centuries, the Austrian monarchy provided Catholic brides to European kings. Marie Antoinette came from Austria. During the early modern period, Austria saw itself as the bulwark against the Muslim hordes of Asia and the Ottoman Empire. Hitler was also born in Austria.

In addition to this cultural background, Austria has a rich literary tradition.

Writers, philosophers, and intellectuals include Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Thomas Bernhard, Sigmund Freud, Karl Kraus, Arthur Schnitzler, Joseph Roth, and Robert Musil. There are many, many more. Elfriede Jelinek is part of this tradition. Her relentless, bleak, yet darkly comic style is reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard and her acidic bon mots burn like those from Karl Kraus. Kraus summed up the Austrian national character, saying, “Prussia: Freedom of movement, with a muzzle. Austria: Solitary confinement, with permission to scream.” (This reads like a two-sentence summary of The Piano Teacher.) “In Berlin you walk on papier mache, in Vienna you bite granite.”

Elfriede Jelinek distills the suffocating, bureaucratic, culture-soaked decadence, Catholic sexual repression, and her nation’s culpability in Nazi criminality and turns it into a lacerating novel about love, sex, and desperation. Written in 1983, The Piano Teacher can be considered “contemporary fiction.”

The Book: The Piano Teacher is a story about relationships. Erika Kohut teaches piano at the Vienna Conservatory and lives with her mother. After having failed a major recital, Erika’s destiny to become a famous concert pianist is destroyed. Her mother, a monstrous showbiz mom right out of Toddlers & Tiaras, shepherds her daughter into becoming a piano teacher. When she can, Erika escapes the suffocating micromanagement of her mother to watch sex shows and visit porn stores in Vienna’s darker corners.

Then she meets Walter Klemmer, an engineering student studying piano. He is a young student and Erika is approaching forty. Walter thinks he can get sexual experience from Erika. Erika desperately desires Walter to be her lover. Erika punishes herself for such naughty thoughts by cutting herself. Unlike other professionals, Erika shares an apartment with her mother, gives her mother her paychecks, and sleeps with mother in the same bed. (As far as well-adjusted parent-child relationships, Erika and her mother make Norman Bates and his mother seem normal.)

Erika is hen-pecked by her mother, reprimanded and guilt-tripped for buying a dress. She would like nothing more than to escape the clutches of her mother, but she can’t seem to muster the will power. Each are dangerously co-dependent on each other.

The novel also tells us how her father was driven insane by her mother.

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In order to jumpstart the affair, Erika flirts with Walter. They eventually kiss in the Conservatory’s bathroom. Walter hopes he can get Erika to consummate the relationship. Unfortunately, Erika pleasures him, but refuses to bring the act to completion. The stillborn affair enters a black tailspin when she gives Walter a letter.

The letter pleads with Walter. It says he can do whatever he wants with her, including tying her up and beating her. Walter is disgusted. The novel ends with Erika locking her mother in her bedroom and begging Walter to have sex with her. Walter ends up raping her and beating her. After her recovery, she gets a knife and prepares to find Walter to stab him. She chickens out, instead using the knife to cut herself and then walking back to the apartment and back to Mother.

The Verdict: This was one of the few books that effected me physically. The only other books that have done that have been those written by the Marquis de Sade. I had to put it down after reading one or two chapters. Jelinek’s style alienates, intimidates, and mocks. The Swedish Academy said she has a “musical flow of voices and countervoices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s cliches and their subjugating power.” These voices and counter-voices resound throughout the novel. Mother tells Erika she must teach in order to school people in the value of the arts. Then Mother tells Erika that the people coming to her recitals are nothing but philistine poseurs who know nothing about art. Walter, sexually immature, will stop at nothing to possess Erika. Yet he finds her desperation disgusting and he calls her ugly. Again and again, pretensions are raised high and then dashed against the rocks with merciless efficiency. It reminds me of Miss Lonelyhearts

by Nathanael West.

While Jelinek has roots in Communist and feminist ideologies, The Piano Teacher transcends being mere agitprop for some specific agenda. The book’s ferocity is relentless and omnicidal. It attacks everyone and everything. Jelinek is like an Austrian version of Kathy Acker. The book takes everyday cliches and spits them back at the reader’s face.

Granted, this book isn’t for everybody. It lacks a redemptive arc and every character is morally contemptible. Lacking conventional dialogue and filled with dream sequences and hallucinations, it is a challenge to read.

Is it erotica? Or pornography? Hardly. While the book pulsates with sexual derangement and obsession, it is the least erotic thing I’ve read. Sexuality is treated as yet another power game with Erika, Klemmer, and Mother as a trio of self-destructive con artists. While this is challenging literature written with savage beauty, the eroticism is curdled and rancid, since every relationship remains infused with a numbed toxic hatred. C

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Bryan M. Ferguson

PHOTOGRAPHER FEATURE

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Glasgow, Scotland

A nocturnal man whose voyeuristic pastime has mutated into pleasure for strangerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eyeballs.

Predominantly a filmmaker, Bryan M. Ferguson, first pressed his eye to the viewfinder of a DSLR to sustain his obsession to create visuals when film projects would disperse. He has been taking photographs in between motion picture projects since 2008 and finds comfort being the eyes in the dark focusing their vision on a single frame as opposed to 24 per second.

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So many of your images feel like still shots from action movies that never existed. Do you do this on purpose?

I find my work is often described as being fairly cinematic but it’s not something that I’m aware of at the time or something that I set out to do on each shoot, it’s generally just how my eyes see the world. I’m a filmmaker and I believe my background in filmmaking often bleeds into my photographs. Thinking about it now, I guess my photographs can be seen as orphaned shots from films I’ll never make.

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Are your models hired professionals or personal friends? They usually seem up for anything.

All the subjects in my images are people close to me in my personal life. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve rarely worked with hired professionals; I often find you can steal an offbeat expression or a moment of odd posture from someone who isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t trained and also find they are more agreeable to my strange stipulations.

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bryanmferguson.com

flickr.com/bryanishaunted vimeo.com/bryanmferguson

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BOOK REVIEW

The Tragic Fate of Moritz Tot

By Dana Todorovic

KUBOA Reviewed by Madeleine Maccar

You may think a title like The Tragic Fate of Moritz Tot would be too much of a spoiler or that only a truly fatalistic story would bear such a name, but you, like me, would be quite wrong. What Dana Todorovic offers her audience is a tale of compassion, both belatedly appreciated and ultimately misunderstood, as the narrative jumps back and forth between the titular character himself, a former punk-rock musician who lands a gig as a line-prompter in the opera Turandot, and Tobias Keller, who serves as the Advisor for Moral Issues and is the subject of a disciplinary hearing for actions he thought were not only warranted but also of an ethical imperative. As their two stories hurdle forward in two distinctly different directions, it becomes evident how they share a cause-and-effect relationship.

Compelling personal details supporting each story do surface, later to be made clear that they are included only to add background color to each character; for example, there’s an early instance elaborating on Moritz’s musical past wherein he tells of selling his musician grandfather’s gift of a violin for a much cheaper Ibanez guitar and the ensuing mixture of guilt and self-discovery he experiences. Rather than feeling like a tangle of loose threads, however, such an approach eventually highlights the fact that this is more of a philosophical tale rather than mere storytelling.

While Moritz and Tobias are both likable enough for a reader to care what happens to them, it’s really the choices comprising and beliefs driving their halves of the story, as well as its overall interplay between free will and immutable fate, that are the beating heart of this short but poignant novel. C

Out of 10: 8.6 February 2014 | 153

Airport (1968)

By Arthur Hailey

RARE BOOK FOR SALE

SIGNED, First Edition, First Printing Write-up by Jason Pettus

CCLaP is making a growing amount of its rare book collection available at reseller eBay.com, both for auction and for instant purchase. For all current books for sale, visit [ebay.com/usr/cclapcenter], or for the collection’s entire list, [cclapcenter.com/rarebooks].

DESCRIPTION: 1968’s Airport was not the first book of Arthur Hailey’s to become a big hit—just three years previous had been his bestseller Hotel, and his literary debut Runway Zero-Eight in 1958 had already spawned the Canadian television movie Flight Into Danger AND the Hollywood feature Zero Hour!—but certainly it was the book that vaulted him from simply a popular author into a pop-culture icon, staying at the #1 spot in the New York Times bestseller list for an amazing 33 weeks in a row, and selling tens of millions of copies as a result (to say nothing of the whopping 200 million books Hailey sold over the course of his entire career). Then if this wasn’t enough, the 1970 Oscar-winning film adaptation became a huge hit in its own right (still to this day the 42nd biggest grossing movie of all time), and with its 154 | The CCLaP Journal

‘75, ‘77 and ‘79 sequels almost singlehandedly created the “disaster movie” genre that is now such a popular Hollywood staple; and then on top of this, it was both this novel and his earlier Runway Zero-Eight that the Zucker Brothers decided to combine and spoof in their now classic comedy Airplane!, thus tertially becoming the foundation for yet another Hollywood genre that’s now become massively popular with the general public. That’s a lot of notoriety for a man who famously used to declare that his ultimate hope as a writer had only been to see his name on the spine of a hardback; and although his dozen bestsellers over the decades were derided as hack work by critics, Hailey spent years of meticulous academic research on each one, resulting in this case with Airport still being a surprisingly precise and relevant examination of how airports work even 46 years later. A largely panned novel at the time, but now a profoundly important document of the Postmodernist arts, this book proves that it’s not just the critical darlings of the literary world that are worth collecting; and with few signed first printings even still in existence, this is a volume that will do nothing but increase in value as the years continue, and a great acquisition for a young serious collector with the long-term view in mind.

CONDITION: Text: Very Good Minus (VG-). Generally still in good shape, although with a little wear to the top and bottom spine. Dust jacket: Good (G). Small tears to the bottom spine and right top flap, and a quarter-inch tear on the top front, as well as a good half-inch chunk missing on the top spine (see photos for more). SIGNED on the first blank page of the manuscript. As confirmed by the McBride Guide to the Identification of First Editions, a stated “First Edition” on the copyright page, and lack of additional printing notices, makes this a first edition, first printing.

PROVENANCE: Acquired by CCLaP in 2013 at Ravenswood Books, Chicago. C

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BOOK REVIEW

The Circle

By Dave Eggers

McSweeney’s/Knopf Reviewed by Travis Fortney

In The Circle, the tech giant that Dave Eggers presents looks something like a version of Google that has overcome and swallowed all competition. The Circle’s rapid growth is due to its TruYou program. Billed as a way to “clean up” the internet, TruYou is basically a payment system that requires users to use their real names, as well as other personal information. The idea is that the bad things that happen on the internet— trolling and porn, for example—happen under the veil of anonymity. So the Circle takes anonymity out of the equation, and online life is allowed to rise to the utopian heights promised at the dawn of the Internet Age. Which makes sense, right? Because most people’s favorite internet activities are sharing personal information with huge corporations and paying for things.

The Circle features a seemingly bright young woman named Mae Holland—moored in an unfulfilling job at her hometown’s public utility since graduating from college—who attempts to take advantage of the opportunity of a lifetime when she’s offered a job at the Circle. Despite the rosy-eyed view Mae takes of the company, all is not what it seems. As Mae rises from an entry-level customer service position to a high-level public relations role, she becomes a cheerful participant in a plot involving HD webcams that could, brace yourselves, lead to the end of privacy as we know it, not only on the internet, but in our everyday lives!

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Yes, the concept is iffy at best, and the plot seems better suited to 2007 or so. But Eggers writes reliably readable prose. He has a real gift for the corporate slogan. The Circle is peppered with funny lines, and in the first third or so of this five hundred page book, when where we’re headed isn’t so completely obvious, Eggers manages to slowly ratchet up the tension in a way that’s genuinely uncomfortable. It’s entertaining to watch the screens on Mae’s desk multiply, and to watch as she tries to crack the “T2K” in the Circle’s internal “Party Rank,” the number by which a Circler’s online sharing and participation on the company’s various social networks is judged.

Alas, it all becomes way too much. Is a network of webcams really that enormous a cause for concern? Would citizens calling for privacy protection really be so few and so marginalized? Would parents really allow their children to be micro-chipped?

Would Mae really never question a single thing? And also, is the big reveal at the end of the book—the hidden identity of Mae’s love interest—even remotely plausible?

Mae has watched videos starring this mystery man—so are we to believe that he’s aged so dramatically in five years that he’s not recognizable, even when uncovering his identity becomes a kind of all-consuming obsession for Mae? And speaking of the book’s ending, since when do uncomfortable personal situations cause a person to lapse into a coma?

The Circle is also riddled with small problems that are common to a lot of Eggers’ recent work: reliance on cliché, shoddy character work, careless repetitions, and obvious metaphors.

I read The Circle over Thanksgiving, while traveling from Chicago to Ohio. The family celebration I attended in Columbus happened also to be attended by a Googler— I’m not going to name names, since Googlers are probably adept at Googling, but this person holds a similar rank to Mae’s boss’s boss in the novel, and would probably fall somewhere in the Circle’s “Gang of 40”—so I was able, while reading this book, to observe a member of the ruling class that Dave Eggers is so afraid of. At the party, the Googler mostly tended to a brood of children, mixed in with the rest of the family, and took photographs. Then, on Monday, I was mildly surprised to find an email in my inbox, which revealed that the Googler hadn’t been taking pictures at all, but had switched the camera he was using to video mode. The effect was hardly as nefarious as it might seem though. He’d edited the videos together into a five-minute amateur silent film. I found this touching, because it turns out the the Googler is just another human being, who instead of spending his Sunday hatching evil plans to destroy the world, spent it going through video clips of kids hitting a pinata, me sitting and talking to my eighty-five year old grandmother, and everyone cheering at the Buckeyes last second victory over Michigan.

I thought that little story was worth mentioning here, because that humanity is what’s missing from The Circle. C

Out of 10: 7.5

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It’s not in my usual character to miss work, especially when the corners of my mind tempt me with their self-deprecating allure.

To me, staying home from work means that I make chicken noodle soup for myself and then realize that a throbbing headache stings much more acutely when I focus on it. No, the productive nature of my work — the ten-page papers of analysis I sift through, the lesson plans, the lectures that force my voice to have authority — all keep me from crumbling and succumbing to physical or in my case right now, mental weakness.

I remind myself of this in the morning. “Get up Tim,” I mumble to myself. “You always feel better when you get up.”

GET U

Photo: Danny Lyon/Library of Congress | flickr.com/usnationalarchives | Used under the terms of their Creative C

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ORIGINAL FICTION

Sally Weigel

UP TIM

Commons license

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Somehow this morning it is hard to rise and dress for work. Perhaps it is because of the unquenchable craving for gin I had last night. It started off with just one G&T, but I felt my hand repouring until the tonic had run out and the gin tasted comforting enough on its own. Replaying this image in my mind, a little shame and quiet disappointment rises up from in me. This helps me to tear the covers away and tuck in my shirt and dress in my finest wool blazer. And before I know it, I am walking to Delancey Street to catch the F train to work.

I have never paid much attention to street signs — not in New York, where cars will run you over whether or not you should be walking across the street — but when I look up at the little green guy blinking across the street, my vision goes right from me.

Soon my insides start to worry me as well, flip-flopping and trying to force their way out. I rush back to the apartment before I am too far away, reaching the bathroom just as the cheap gin leaves me. I wipe my mouth with a towel and suddenly feel ready to try again. Now that it was all out of me. Now that I felt fresh and empty and ready for a new day.

Just like that, I gain the confidence to believe that I am above being a heartbroken mess. I am Dr. Tim Levin, English professor at Columbia University. I am an intelligent man, I tell myself. I am a younger brother and an uncle of two little girls. I am the son of a happily married couple who has just retired to a summer home in Southhampton.

And might I add, I have every right to go to that summer home if I ever need to play sick for work and spend my days wallowing in my heartbreak. I do damn well deserve it, especially since I have never, not ever, felt like I do now. Like I want to get back the days that I held onto as if they could have been something.

I am not a fool, I know, but I cannot help but think it right now. You would think that after reading “Sons and Lovers” every semester for the past ten years I have been teaching down at Columbia, I would know the dangers of intimacy. With my briefcase tightly in my hand, I walk to the subway and try just to dismiss it all. Either way, foolish or not, I have work and a much needed paycheck that needs to be prioritized now.

I find a seat nestled in with the rest of New York that is heading to work a bit late.

I see a sea of torsos, covered in business suits. They blend into the silver hue of the train car and the concrete tunnel it runs through. The next train I hop onto, the number 1, is packed. I’m left to hold onto the hook above me, and I wonder if my body is rocking because of the train car or if my mind is the one causing the constant swaying back and forth. I close my eyes to escape the dizzying motion, trying to think instead of blue skies.

It’s an image I keep at my disposure. I call it forth quickly and easily when the skyscrapers seem to pierce through my very soul. I try to remind myself that I do not live in a concrete world. I bring to mind blue skies and fluffy clouds like they are something to be imagined, not just an image hidden behind the manmade structures that circle around me and roar underneath me and float up hundreds of stories above me.

But while I try to keep my mind focused on summertime blue, I instead find myself on a bench in the neighborhood park with Alex sitting across the way. All I want is a scene of open air but Alex comes creeping on in.

He is wearing a white t-shirt, like always, sitting on a park bench shivering, and I contemplate whether or not to offer him my sport coat. He won’t take it, I know.

He’ll say he’d look too old, like Harvey Milk, but I know that he is cold by the way he is folding his arms inside his body to keeps his hands warm. I want to hold onto one of his hands buried in his side, the hands that are too worn for his 26-year-old body, 160 | The CCLaP Journal

scarred with grease oil and marked by grill utensils. Yet I can feel his distance with his haphazard stare.

“I’m not asking you to come out,” I say, my hands still fighting the desire to reach for his. “I’m just asking you to move out.”

He spits out his argument like he has it memorized, stored and ready for this exact moment. He says his dad knows that I am gay. That when I walk into the diner, he always calls me Jack Wrangler himself. He says he cannot move because what would his siblings do? He’s the oldest of six, he says, and I wouldn’t understand. He cannot afford to be disowned, which is his word not mine, because I never would want his family to wash their hands of him. He says the diner is his future and besides, what does he have besides a special talent for rummy and the ability to make a really good asopao de pollo?

There’s a part of me that understands, as much as I can. But the more I think about walking over to his cousin’s apartment on 63rd and 1st for rummy night and listening to Alex talk about Gabriela Arriaga, the narrow-hipped gal with hair as long and thin as string, I just can’t help but want to throw him an ultimatum.

“It’s been two years of this,” I say.

“It’s been my entire life.” His dark eyelashes catch the wetness of his held-back tears, and he looks away, unable to let anything fall.

“So you’re never going to move to Harlem with me?”

He stares at the pigeons plucking at his feet, the dogs sticking up their noses at the fall wind, the old man doing the crossword in the Sunday Times. Everything far from my gaze.

“That’s fine,” I say, and I walk away without anything. I just reach over to try and touch his cold hands.

I want to let him go calmly, without a scene, like I am doing him a favor. So I walk back to my apartment okay with it all because that is what needed to be done. But as soon as I fall into my bed, I am greeted by the smell of Alex’s tobacco smoke coated into my thin cotton sheets.

I rip the sheets from the bed and throw them in the washing machine and start to cry in the cold unfinished corner of the laundry room, where no one can see me; but I wouldn’t care even if they did because it wasn’t about pride at this point. I just sit there until the load is finished and then I carry my sheets back, exhausted as I walk up the stairs. I then make my bed neatly and fall asleep.

This scene, annoyingly fresh in my mind, makes me open my eyes again. I replay the incident every moment I have to myself. I spend nights in front of the TV trying to block it out of my mind, because whenever it comes uninvitedly back to me, I get all dizzy and lightheaded.

I know that our bodies manifest our emotions. I know that there are sources of tension in our muscles that have nothing to do with inadequate stretching before working out or how bad the mattress is that you sleep on at night. I know that our bodies respond to our heartbreak, our stress, but I don’t quite know how to tell my body just to stop freaking out all the time, that I am trying to figure it all out.

Like right now, I cannot stop spinning. Granted, I’m a little claustrophobic, and the New York subway has never felt like anything to me except that Michelangelo painting with people pushing and pleading to get aboveground. But why is the cement rushing past me so fast? I feel as if I am on one of those carnival rides from my childhood that spins you so fast everything blurs together and if you spat, it would land on the person three places down.

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watching the color fading fast from my face. I shake off my weakness, staring at my shoes, trying to remember how the tassel fell off the left one. I’m worried that if I drop to my knees now, I will be left without a wallet and stuck past my stop in East Harlem.

I wonder if I can make it, or if I should listen to my rapid heartbeat telling me to move very quickly out of the packed subway car.

If I just tell myself I can make it then I can make it. I wait. I try to forget where I am. I try to redirect my thoughts and hope that I will live to breath fresh air. The doors open quickly at the next stop but movement is slow. I feel my peripheral vision slip and blackness creep into the corners of my eyelids.

“Get out Tim,” I hear myself say.

And so I shuffle through the hoards of unidentifiable people in front of me and run. I skip every other stair on the steps until I see buildings and traffic and a bench across the way. I sit down with my head between my knees and stare down at my loafers until vision comes back and that’s it. That’s when I know I need to do something. Something to mute the sounds of heartbreak.

There is a Philosophy professor in my department who always comes to me with funnies in the morning. He has a black, thinning mess of hair and a rotation of five cement-colored sweaters that he wears in an unchanging schedule, although none of them look all that different from each other. He comes to me with a Peanuts comic that morning when I walk into the office, and I hardly crack a smile at the thing because I am just so focused on the fact that I actually made it to work. “You stressed, son?” he asks, almost as a statement, like he doesn’t need an answer from me. I laugh and say yes, while bypassing him on the way to my office door.

I don’t know why it took me another restless night of sleep and another anxietyridden commute the next morning to finally realize that the little quack was my way out. I always knew Dr. Singh was into meditation, going off with his yoga-instructing wife to the Catskills during breaks for some spiritual vacation. He pranced around the campus telling kids to “sit still and your mind will sit still” as he ran free meditation clinics in between teaching classes on consciousness. And me, being a man of selfimposed isolation at times, I just kept to myself in my cubicle, slowly and steadily working on the stack of term papers that never seemed to dwindle.

But maybe meditation could be my mid-life epiphany. It could be my chance to finally get ahold of the things that I thought I would have sorted out by age thirtyeight. It could be my way of figuring out what to do now, after dropping the thought that I had so bashfully and naively held onto since I was a boy: that falling in love was the point of it all. And maybe it was. Maybe it is, but I can no longer bet on it. So meditation it is.

On Saturday morning I take out a piece of scrap paper on which Dr. Singh had scribbled an address, and find 2248 West 28th St. on a map. At first when I get there, the center doesn’t look any different than my own apartment complex. The doorway is nestled between a window for a women’s boutique full of polyester-wrap dresses and a French creperie whose rich smells stumble out onto the sidewalk, before being swept away and mixed in with everything else before my nose.

Once I walk in, I follow the stairway up to the third floor, turning to the second door on the right that says “Siddha Yoga Meditation Center,” and I walk in. I don’t know what Siddha Yoga is, other than that Dr. Singh has thrown out the term every now and then. But I know that after living in New York for ten years, I am hardly surprised by anything, not even opening a door and finding a room filled with thirty162 | The CCLaP Journal

some strangers sitting on neatly folded blankets, their eyes fixed on a framed picture of an old man up front.

I don’t do much except chuckle to myself, thinking if Alex could see me now. In the liberty that comes with being on your own, I go with the ritual like it’s natural. I take off my shoes and place them on the shelf next to me like I had been there many times before. I walk past the crowd, divided into men on the right and women on the left. I sit down across from a woman so old and frail that her limbs seem to have no rigidity, no bone to them. She pulls her head from the ground, sits up tall and stares at me. Her left eye is green and her right, a white-coated blue. Her brown skin fades into the curves of her wrinkles, and her eyes twinkle with her two-colored stare.

I panic because I didn’t come to ask for enlightenment; I just want to learn how to breathe better. The room dims and everyone’s face follows a record playing in the back. The indecipherable chanting is accompanied by heads rocking back and forth. I see Singh up front. He starts clapping his hands to the beat and sings from a voice deep in his sternum.

I decide to ditch the chanting. I cannot tell what they are saying, even as I look at the leatherbound book next to me and try to follow the Sanskrit. Instead, I close my eyes. I have no idea what to do or think, especially when the goal of it all is to do nothing and think of nothing. I focus on my breathing, with long breaths that stretch my tailbone up long and tall. And I do well for a while. My conscious thoughts are mostly breathing-oriented. “Deeply in,” I think, as long and as deep as I can until I feel like a balloon about to catch onto a pointed branch. Then, exhale, just as deeply and forced.

But somehow when I sit still and go inside my head, all I can concentrate on is Alex undressing. For an hour, I just conjure up new sexual fantasies and replay old scenes with Alex. He has a thick head of hair that’s always messy and skin that makes me want to spend all my days drinking olive oil. His eyes are set too far apart, but that always looked to me like one of those imperfections that differentiated him from the ordinary.

At first, I couldn’t resist when we got together. We just tore off each other’s clothes quickly, like sex was just something that needed to be done before we could speak. It wasn’t superficial, just impulsive. But after a little bit, I would be able to just hear his voice and be happy. I finally understood how my parents could be in love after so many years of living in different bedrooms.

I don’t quite know how really to describe someone I love, but that seems about right. I don’t really know how to describe heartbreak either, except for feeling like you are going to faint every time you step outside. All I know is that I can’t help that whenever I close my eyes, the back of my lids play like a movie reel of scenes with Alex.

That first night we spent together, when the sun eventually came up, we had put our clothes back on; and as we were standing in the attire we had on the day before, he took my hand and kissed it, as if to avoid the staleness of a morning kiss. Squeezing my hand in his, we walked out my door and down the hallway to where I opened the door up to face the sunlight. With New York bustling at our feet, he dropped my hand.

I watched him as he left and I really thought I could help him. I really knew I could love him. But I should have known when he walked away that there could be no happy end to it.

I quickly open my eyes. I don’t think this is where meditation should have taken me. I was hoping for soothing of the mind, not reflection on questions I knew I had no answers to.

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The lights have dimmed now and the chanting has diminished, only to be replaced with the slow, transient plucking of sitar strings that resonates from the record playing behind me. I stare at the guru in the photo, his simple robes and half-smiling face looking as if he wasn’t ready for the shutter to be pressed. I don’t know his name, his story, but there is a jealousy I have toward him, the same unfocused jealousy I have toward Singh. I know I shouldn’t be jealous of people’s calmness; if I want to meditate away my anxiety, I should try to flush out jealousy too. But I don’t understand how these people get to be so damn calm. Like Dr. Singh, he just comes out of board meetings where budgets are cut and he looks at me, winking. “Well, I guess we don’t need health care anyway, right?” He genuinely isn’t perturbed by it. I just don’t know how he survives the kind of world we live in, acting like he could skip all the way to poverty and back.

Or the frail woman next to me, who is now staring at me, pointing her cupped hand to the heavens. “Know God; know your mind,” she says. Her hands move to her forehead. As she lowers her hand to her heart she continues, “Know your mind; know your self.” An elderly man beside her helps her stand but before she turns her back, she looks me in the eye and exclaims, “You are sublime.”

If Alex could see me now, he’d light jasmine incense, put a framed picture of me in front of him and mock me with his loud breathing as he starts singing ‘Hare Krishna.’

“You hippie,” he’d tease. “You fuckin’ hippie.”

My newfound fondness for meditation is surely mockable, and so I don’t know why I keep coming back to the center. I have an almost flawed tendency to live life as a to-do list and just keep checking things off until I don’t even know how I get to where I am. I just keep doing what needs to be done. So after turning off the light in my apartment and lighting incense on my apartment stove, I meditate. I meditate when I wake up and when I go to bed and when I catch the train ride home after I have read so many dissections of Lily Briscoe that I can feel my brain start to burst.

The congestion of the train car escapes me. The only sensation my body feels is a tingling where my index finger and my thumb touch each other. When I finally arrive at my stop, a sudden break in my energy comes and as I become aware of my surroundings again, I walk back to my apartment with a lucid smile.

For the next month, my daily routine is work, meditate, read, sleep. I buy a cat to keep me company in my apartment. I buy a lock for my liquor cabinet. I chant my way to a reassuring existence. I quickly get to my knees on the floor and sit with my back resting on the wall. Om Namah Shivaya. The world does not make it easy to like myself. Om Namah Shivaya. I am trying. Om Namah Shivaya. I am an internal mess of unresolved emotion. Om Namah Shivaya. I am never going to fall out of love with Alex.

Om Namah Shivaya.

Om Namah Shivaya.

Om Namah Shivaya.

I have been feeling better. I can actually bring forth calmness like I am just dialing up my mother on a Sunday afternoon. At first, I sat there for fifteen minutes every night closing my eyes and relaxing, but there are nights where I sit there for a whole hour, even missing Johnny Carson.

Dr. Singh says that he can tell. He says that I should come to terms with my depression because it’s what landed me here. He says that meditation is like cleaning out a closet, and that sometimes things get a bit chaotic before everything can be clean and simple.

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As the new single, clear-headed man that I am, I decide to spend a Sunday buying a new kitchen set, replacing the inner workings of my kitchen cabinets. With a coupon in hand, I walk toward Broadway but don’t get two blocks before someone calls my name. With a slug on my shoulder, I turn around to see Jose and Derek, Alex’s cousins we used to play rummy with on Sunday nights.

“Whatcha doing down here, man?”

“Just Sunday shopping.”

“You’re coming all the way from Harlem for Sunday shopping?”

The words catch me, like the pages of a newspaper stuck together. “Ah, yes, well, go where the coupon says, right?” I say despairingly then change the subject. “Hey, you still playing rummy on Sundays?”

“Yeah. Well, sort of. Ever since you moved, Alex has been bringing Gabriela Arriaga and she can’t play a single hand. We just turn on the TV half the time because what’s the use in playing a one-sided game?”

“Gabriela Arriaga, you say?”

“Yeah, that girl Alex met at church.”

“Well, maybe I’ll come by one of these days.” It’s all I can think to say, preoccupied by the idea of the four of them together watching television like a family affair.

“You should,” Jose says, walking away. “You should.”

I turn around and walk the other way, thinking about my breathing, closing my eyes, trying to envision china patterns.

I have done many things alone in my life, and most of them should be too embarrassing to confess. In the midst of finishing my dissertation, I saw Annie Hall in theatres five times. I was accompanied by a friend for only two of the viewings. I would skip Friday nights meeting colleagues at the local bar to hide in the back of the South Street movie theatre and watch Diane Keaton leave Woody Allen on that sunny California day. I have also lied to my sister on many occasions, saying that I was too busy with my thesis to go shopping, but in fact I would go by myself to Barney’s to look through the racks of Italian-made wool suits.

So I don’t feel a tiny bit of embarrassment staring at my gin. Maybe it’s the liquor talking, but I’ve decided the only real source of meditation is, for me at least, drinking.

It’s the only time I have a sense of being totally present. Perhaps a doomed alcoholic’s speech, like an overwrought playwright, but in that moment, I am thinking about nothing else and smiling about nothing else than just what is.

I look over at the only other person in the bar, an elderly man in a grey suit and top hat. He most likely feels the same as I do about his drink. He is missing his top incisor teeth, which makes it hard to understand him; however, what I can decipher of his muffled words sound particularly wise to me at the moment.

“If I get a cigarette a day ­— just one — then my day’s whole,” he says, throwing up his hands.

I nod. “But I don’t smoke.”

“You don’t smoke?” His voice gets scratchy with curiosity.

“Never have.”

“Never?”

“Never even took a puff.”

“Well, what a great day to start!” He offers me a Newport. The sight of it just plummets my head down into my hands. “Did I offend ya?”

“No, not at all,” I laugh. “May I?” I ask, motioning for the cigarette. He hands me February 2014 | 165

the menthol, displaying his long, sturdy nails with clouds of dirt underneath.

I suddenly view myself from exterior eyes. I am sitting alone at a bar and smoking a cigarette offered by a man whose grime underneath his nails probably has remnants of dust from ten years ago. It’s okay, though, because this is what heartbreak looks like, right? I light the menthol, breathing in the cool smoke that feels particularly harsh for me. As the smoke rises in my throat, my body becomes heavy with the thought of Alex. Alex was always smoking. It was a habit I never thought I’d miss, but the absence of tobacco filling the air during dinner has me eating out at night.

As I finish my cigarette at the bar, I quickly want another. I turn to the man but he’s in the middle of a conversation with me, apparently, that I haven’t heard a word of.

“You’re drunk, aren’t you?” he asks.

I nod up and down, up and down.

“I’m not drunk,” he consoles. “Just hungry.”

“Me too.”

I hop out of the chair and emerge from the basement bar onto the street with a million noises. I just need to see Alex. It has been almost two and a half months and I know the only way I will ever see Alex again is if I do it right now. Before I wake up sober again, scold myself, then get to the ground to meditate again. I just want to see him. I can go without a damn word, so long as I can just see his face.

So I start to trek to the diner. I walk along the streets that hold faces of people with more stories then I’ll ever know and cars that have places to get to and buildings that stand so tall that I wonder if they are beautiful the way they rest, manmade and majestic, holding in the fumes of garbage, blocking any sight of what the day’s weather may be. It’s a claustrophobic city, New York, but it’s a claustrophobic world, and I don’t know if I ran away to anywhere else like Southhampton if it would be any better.

I think I’d still be walking around with people who make me keep things inside, who make any place seem like my lower east side dungeon of an apartment.

Cabo Rojo, the little Puerto Rican restaurant his parents started when they got here in ’69, isn’t far. I make it there in all of twenty minutes, which does nothing to my buzz, so I open the door without even thinking of it. I charge through the door with a pathetic smile. Alex knows the smile. It’s filled with the giddiness that preludes a sudden dissent. He fixes his eyes on me but it’s his brother Luis who makes the first move toward me.

“Tim,” he greets me. “Haven’t seen you in a while. You look like you walked in in your pajamas. Where’s that suit you normally have on?”

“Didn’t go to work today, Luis.”

“You cancelled class?” Alex asks from behind the counter.

“Yup. Too beautiful of a day to go, right?”

“Right,” Alex responds.

“I’m craving fries, Luis. Think I could grab a bag of your greasiest?”

“I don’t know how you do it,” Luis says, patting my belly. “You don’t eat like you can fit in those blue jeans.” He laughs with his protruding belly that challenges the buttons on shirt and then walks to the frying station.

It’s just me and Alex now, with him standing across from me and the counter jammed in between us. I take a good look at him. There’s something about him that says he’s doing fine.

He brushes his hair to the side in annoyance like he’s dealing with a bothersome customer, and looks at me a bit unsurprised that I showed up. He’s muted all the same.

He doesn’t say a word. Instead, he turns to his brother and holds up a watch.

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“I found this on the table over there. The guy just left about ten minutes ago.”

Luis comes over, putting his greasy hands on the golden Rolex. “It’s a beauty!

What do you say we just hold on to it?”

“Hold onto it on your wrist?” Alex asks.

“That seems like a mighty fine place for it.”

Alex rolls his eyes as Luis goes back to tending to the fries with the new jewelry around his wrist.

“I don’t know what to say,” Alex says after his brother has turned his back.

“No use, really. The customer has left and gone.”

“No. I mean, I don’t know what to say to you.” He hasn’t rehearsed anything.

He hasn’t thought of a single word to say to me after being apart for months. I have imagined countless scenarios. Most recently, I thought I would come right out and ask how he was doing with Gabriela, but that seems too bitter. I thought maybe if I were going for a comedic effect, I’d tell him about meditation. There’s just something about right now, though, that makes me feel like a stranger.

“Oh, well, nothing to say,” I respond, rocking on the heels of my feet. “I’m just a customer. Just getting my fries,” I say rocking on the heels of my feet.

“You’re drunk,” he says.

“Yes,” I say smiling. “Yes I am.”

“You should stop drinking, you know. You’ve got a better job than I’ll ever have. I wouldn’t want to see you lose it.” I nod while we wait for the fries in silence. “I would appreciate it if you didn’t come in here,” he says, but he doesn’t look all that destroyed.

“I was just hungry.”

“I know.” I try to soak in his black hair and dark enigmatic eyes and his body, fit as they are when one is twenty-six. It was all fine to see but it stood across from me like I was a leper. “It’s just, you know…” he says, nodding his head back, pointing to Luis turned away behind him.

“Don’t worry. I won’t come in ever again,” I say. “I won’t taint your family’s name.”

Luis turns and hands me fries. I slap down a five, express my thanks and sit down just to watch him for a bit more. This is it so I better get my money’s worth.

He’s beautiful the way he stands there, exactly as he is. I reckon he’ll marry Gabriela — ­ or if not, someone just the same — and if they have kids then heaven will finally greet him. I don’t want to leave him with my last words as they were but I don’t know, this heartbreak thing turns you around, and even though Yeats can shell out poetry from the insanity, all I got were those measly and bitter words: “I won’t taint your family’s name.”

Soon a man walks into the diner. He is balding and wearing a seersucker suit. The man speaks to Alex, pointing at his wrist. I glance at Luis who I’m sure has already dropped the Rolex into the bib of his apron by now. Alex shrugs his shoulder and turns the man away. I stare at his muted lips.

“You looking for a watch, sir?” I say, knowing that it’s not the moral sense in me speaking, just the morning buzz.

“Yeah, have you seen it?”

“I believe the cook spotted it on one of the cushions.”

Luis turns to me. Eyebrows cocked inward, he fumbles for the watch and says, “Yes, must not have heard you talking to Alex here. Is this yours?”

The jolly look he had on earlier handing the fries to me fades. The customer looks at the gold Rolex, then back to Luis with a curious stare.

“Yes, that’s the one. I don’t usually take it off but I just didn’t want it to soak up February 2014 | 167

all that steak grease.” The customer slides it back on his wrist, fastens it tight and then walks off, probably for the last time.

I can feel Luis’s eyes on Alex, Alex’s on my own, while I stare down. Down at the loafers with the one tassel missing. There seems to be anger heading my way but I just stand still, sending it back. The grease from the deep fryer sizzles, the open grill hums and the three of us stand quiet. It is a crowded silence, stuffy and warm, but it rises up in me like a calmness. Perhaps there is something therapeutic about self-destruction.

A little bit of regret and shame is a hell of a lot better than the stagnant and stale loneliness that’s been greeting me with my morning coffee every day since we broke up.

I walk out of the diner, putting one step in front of the other. My footsteps make a pounding that I can’t help but tune into. It sounds like a ticking, like the hands of that Rolex sitting in Luis’s apron or Alex’s heartbeat about ready to explode when I showed up drunk right then. With every unmediated step, the hammering beat grows louder.

“Walk on Tim,” I say to myself. And I repeat it over and over, like a mantra, hoping my body would believe. But just like many things, my body cannot be directed.

Instead it walks back into the diner, past Luis smoking a cigarette outside with a fuming stare, past the bus boy cleaning the tables, past the counter to where Alex is staring at me with a look that says don’t come too close.

“C’mon, what do you say,” I ask, looking into his eyes. “Don’t you want one last time with a man?” My hand follows past his belt loop to his snug jeans, but what I feel is limp and tired.

“Stop it Tim,” he says, although the same words were already circulating in my own head. I knew there was no use.

He nods. That’s all. He nods as I walk away. Even so, it was nice to watch his muted lips, his vulnerable eyes as I leave this time. C

“Get Up Tim” is from the 2012 CCLaP book of the same name.

Download a free electronic copy, or order a special handmade hardback edition, at cclapcenter.com/getuptim.

168 | The CCLaP Journal

BOOK REVIEW

A Giant Cow-tipping by Savages: the Boom, Bust, and Boom Culture of M&A

By John Weir Close

Palgrave Macmillan Reviewed by Karl Wolff

*Originally posted on Black Friday, November 29, 2013.

On this High Holy Day of Capitalism*, let’s look at mergers and acquisitions. At its peak in the Eighties, mergers and acquisitions became a major sector of the global economy. A Giant Cow-tipping by Savages: the Boom, Bust, and Boom Culture of M&A, by John Weir Close traces the history, deals, and personalities that shaped this economic sector. Beginning with the Erie Gang’s war with Cornelius Vanderbilt over railways. In the Gilded Age, robber barons and their paramilitary apparatus connived, intimidated, and bought out their competitors, paving the way for monopolistic capitalism. Like the nineteenth century novel, capitalism sought to become a universalized integrated structure. What do I mean by that? It means that moguls like J.D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie sought to monopolize the means of production. The sought to own the production and distribution of their products. Rockefeller, besides owning oil wells and oil refineries, owned the railroads and the track on which he shipped his oil. The movie industry, once the government took Thomas Edison’s patent-hogging boot off its throat, established the same principle. Movie studios owned the studios, the theaters, and, to a lesser extent, their stars. Vertical and horizontal integration became key to establishing a foothold in the market. Vertical integration means owning production and distribution; horizontal integration involves owning all of one kind of production (like with like). Media February 2014 | 169

conglomerates are a good example of horizontal integration.

Mergers and acquisitions is still alive today. Witness the reaction to Disney acquiring Lucasarts. (Shock! Outrage! Price points!)

A Giant Cow-tipping shows how several notable individuals altered the way business was done. Unlike the monopolizing trend of the Gilded Age, the Second Gilded Age (Reagan’s Eighties) went, like literature, meta. The apogee of business became The Deal. As the decade progressed, deals became bigger and bigger. The Deal itself is a meta concept. Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) shifted the priorities in deal-making.

Unlike the robber barons, who made deals for a specific end, M&A turned the deal into an end in itself. The Deal became a point of pride for venture capitalists, a way to boast to fellow capitalists about one’s acquisitions.

The book profiles important deals, including Carl Icahn’s acquisition of TWA. The story will be very familiar to anyone who has seen Wall Street. There’s a fascinating biography of Sir James Goldsmith, a model for Wall Street’s Sir Larry Wildman. Goldsmith was a British Jew whose personal life was just as wild as his life. He had several families and a penchant for creative risk-taking. Another storyline explored by Close, a former M&A lawyer and founder of The M&A Journal, is the changing demographics of venture capitalism. For decades, capitalism was dominated

by WASPs and Old Money types. Venture capitalism changes character, from the staid exemplars of wealth one finds in Edith Wharton and Louis Auchincloss novels, to the rise of several Jewish financiers.

Before I go on, I want to clarify the whole Jewish thing. It’s easy to see accusations of anti-Semitism coming up. In truth, it’s challenging to find an accurate description that fits snugly into the biographies of the venture capitalists profiled. Sir James Goldsmith was a British citizen descended from German Jews. There is the Zilka clan, “proud members of the free Jewish community that thrived in Iraq for centuries,” who became bankers in a Baghdad that was one-quarter Jewish and totally integrated with the community. In the United States, the WASP ascendancy excluded Jews from “real power at the bar, on the bench, at banks, and in boardrooms.” Weir continues, “Again, the Jews found themselves in control of a monopoly that perpetuated their own stereotype, that of the omnipotent, conniving Machiavellian with hands sullied by the unsavory. But the business of takeovers paid the rent. And then some.” (To extend this metaphor, one also saw Jewish-Americans ascendancy in American literature. See Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and others.) The challenge is exploring this demographic shift in our present hyperventilating, over-reacting PC culture. Remember, it’s a very short step from critiquing the foul business practices of banksters and corporate thugs to making anti-Semitic generalizations and taking the David Icke crazy train. Suffice to say, this wasn’t Newland Archer’s Wall Street any longer.

Close writes about a series of important deals that have shaped our modern business landscape. The tragic demise of Orion Pictures and Sumner Redstone’s battle to acquire Paramount, along with the disastrous merger of AOL and Time-Warner.

What Ted Turner, predicting the merger wouldn’t be a good idea, called, “A giant cowtipping by savages.” There is the story of M&A lawyer Ilan Reich. Reich got caught for insider trading, disbarred, and then fought valiantly to get re-admitted to the bar. He also fought a near-fatal brain tumor and reinvented himself as a businessman. Despite a rogue’s gallery of personal and corporate malfeasance on these pages, the story of Ilan Reich was actually inspiring. Not an easy task, when even this reviewer thinks the best deterrent to corporate misbehavior is to put the head of a board member on a pikestaff. (Unfortunately, only criminals from the lower classes and those using guns to commit their crimes have the honor of getting the death penalty. Yet somehow 170 | The CCLaP Journal

America thinks lethal injection for investment fraud is less effective than, say, a big fine.)

One not knowledgeable in the business of mergers and acquisitions will become well-versed after finishing the book. Everything from hostile take-overs, leveraged buy-outs, and junk bond investment are explained and explored. The legality of these deals is weighed in the Chancery Court of Delaware. Delaware’s unique pro-business environment makes this little state highly important in the annals of venture capitalism. When mergers and acquisitions are discussed, one has to weigh the interests of the multiple parties involved. These include: the shareholders, the board, and the employees. Is the board acting in its own interest at the expense of the shareholders, or vice versa? These questions remind one of issues like federalism and checks and balances in civic government. As one who finds the machinations of the Supreme Court fascinating, along with the inner workings of the Federal Reserve and the State Department, corporate law explored relevant issues in terms of governance and power-sharing.

Unlike government where, ideally, one person means one vote, corporate governance is a different species. M&A involves venture capitalists buying massive blocks of shares in order to get minority or majority ownership of the company. The more shares you own means you own more of the company. (Along with variants like regular stock and preferred stock.) The good thing about publicly traded companies is that anybody can own stock. The bad thing about publicly traded companies is that anybody can own stock, even venture capitalists looking for another trophy to mount on their walls. Since cash is the preferred commodity in M&A, cash becomes central to deal-making. Stock, less so. And phat pension funds means lots of cash for future M&A deals. In addition, should there be legislation that mandates mergers occur that don’t involve stripping companies of their pension funds and breaking up companies for simple financial gain? Does the government really have that authority? One should ask the hundreds of millionaires in Congress for their unbiased opinion. They accept counsel from all denominations, but prefer non-consecutive tens and twenties.

In the end, A Giant Cow-tipping entertains and educates. It reads like a booklength business section of the newspaper. Despite the business section’s tendency to be boring, technical, and conservative, one should read it anyway. Close’s journalistic tone is also refreshing, avoiding the Horatio Alger by-their-bootstraps mythologizing and libertarian temper tantrums-as-philosophy that often gums up business writing.

Here endeth the sermon: Kneel, pray, commercials. C

Out of 10: 9.0

February 2014 | 171

BOOK REVIEW

The Book of My Lives

By Aleksandar Hemon

Farrar, Straus and Giroux Reviewed by Madeleine Maccar

It can be dangerous for a book to boast the kind of praise that covers the dust jacket of The Book of My Lives.

Phrases like “the greatest writer of our generation” and “prepare to have your worldview deepened” carry a considerable amount of expectation and set the reader up for a reading experience that had better deliver the goods. Fortunately, Aleksandar Hemon proves with his first book of non-fiction that he knows a thing or two about turning a catchy phrase, about playing the maximum emotional impact off a minimal word count, about how to strike a sympathetic and powerful chord with his audience without pandering to cheap sentimentalism: It doesn’t take more than a few pages to realize that he is a writer who deserves the heaps of hype thrust upon him.

Despite beginning with attempted sororicide, detouring through a Sarajevo under siege and a strange Chicago filled with potential, and ending with an infant daughter’s death, The Book of My Lives is a triumph of life-affirming celebrations and diversions that all are all pitted against the specter of death that palpably lingers around every corner and unignorably lurks in every shadow. Honoring life while kicking death in the ass is a leaned defense that those who live on the brink of an infrastructure’s collapse have to embrace if they’re going to make it through another day, and that determination to survive on the riches of the present with the threat of an impoverished future always near served Hemon well. Even when faced with an array of losses both intimate and a world away, his gratitude for everything that the immediate now offers never wavers, nor does his eloquently terse, richly evocative language or his knack for finding beauty in the most hopeless of places.

Hemon’s collection of personal essays is most akin to a snapshot of his life experiences thus far. He divests 172 | The CCLaP Journal

himself of any sort of protective barrier as he lays bare his finest loves and lesser moments with equal amounts of honesty, never asking his audience to see him as anything other than an ordinary player who just happens to be living among extraordinary backdrops: his family narrowly fled Sarajevo; his homeland’s turmoil and his youthful need to rebel while wringing every drop of life from an increasingly bleak world combined to thrust him into a birthday party-turned-threatening political statement that would dog him for years; his young daughter was afflicted with a medical condition so rare that there are few established treatments for it; while he rarely address it, he is one of the lucky few who Made It as a writer. His is a life of seemingly impossible rarities that he mostly addresses with a humble poesy, offsetting the expression of human suffering at its worst with simple language, poignant observation and an undeniable humor that derives its bite not from inherently funny situations but rather the way Hemon frames them. There is a sense of immediacy in everything Hemon writes, which made me feel that he was trying to decide if living a life that is so intertwined with national tragedies and rarely witnessed moments makes one obligated to write about them so others will understand.

When he’s not writing about how what he’s lived inside has affected one man’s tiny existence, Hemon relates the threads of his own story to the much bigger, more impersonally all-encompassing tapestry to render both the overall picture and his unusual circumstances more accessible. As Sarajevo’s descent into war becomes increasingly evident, Hemon’s general love of dogs and particularly those in his life surges to the forefront with a sense of kinship—especially since he notes that love of an animal is a luxury in desperate times—as he is apt to find widely unifying elements to relate his own unusual experiences to the statistically more mundane lives of those to whom he’s bringing his story: Like any family that includes a beloved pet, his parents take great care and greater risks to ensure that their Irish setter flees to safety with them. He also radiates a a genuine adoration of literature, speaking of and alluding to a familiarity with renowned authors through their works (and often with the the works themselves) in a way one speaks of old friends and formative loves, rather than the detached the pretensions of academia, marking himself with the sign of a true bookworm, one who drew strength from and sought refuge in literature during turbulent times when tomorrow seems as just an unlikely promise as fifty years from now.

It is, like its laudatory book jacket proclaims, ultimately a tribute to two very different cities, but The Book of My Lives is more than that: It’s about the payoff of getting to know where one is in the world and appreciating the unique influence that places and eras have on their inhabitants. It’s knowing that you’re a part of a city and that it’s a part of you, that you wouldn’t be the same you if you had been influenced by another when and another where. Hemon’s ability to see some of the things he loved about Sarajevo in the Chicago he would one day consider a second home, and then returning to Sarajevo after letting Chicago wash over him gave him the strength to find himself in once-familiar places turned alien, in wholly unfamiliar places turned into home. Home is like love: You have to work for it and you have to let it find you when the time is right. It is a thing that can’t be forced. What’s more, home is the sanctuary that protects against the outside world, and is a haven worth worth protecting from life’s uglier forces. It’s easy to love a city; it is another thing entirely when you feel like a city, in its animated entirety, might actually love you back. C

Out of 10: 9.3 February 2014 | 173

ALL WHO WANDER

Heart of a Dog

By Mikhail Bulgakov

Grove Press Reviewed by Madeleine Maccar

In the final months of 2013 and throughout 2014, CCLaP cultural essayist Madeleine Maccar is looking at the classic definition of the “hero’s journey,” as seen through a series of international texts that she is reading in English translation. For all the essays in this series, please visit [cclapcenter.com/madeleine_ maccar].

I have been itching for an excuse to read more of Mikhail Bulgakov’s brainchildren since my encounter last year with the excoriating metaphorical diatribe that is The Master and Margarita; having recently adopted a lovable rescue mutt, it seemed like an opportune time to sink my teeth into Heart of a Dog, the tale of Sharik, a stray who was rescued from death’s door by a Soviet scientist, nursed back to health, and subject to an experiment that was intended as a victory for eugenics but resulted in the down-on-his-luck dog becoming an odious little man who’s the focal point in Bukhail’s scathing mockery of communism.

It is my dog-happy mindset that made me immediately sympathize with Sharik, whose pathetic likability waned far more slowly for me than it perhaps ought to have. Sharik begins as a nameless, homeless mongrel of indeterminate lineage whose nasty run-in with a local cook’s vat of steaming water left him with a side covered in life-threatening burns where his fur 174 | The CCLaP Journal

used to be. As he lay hopeless and despairing of his future, all too aware that his condition during another brutal Russian winter would most likely result in a fatal bout of pneumonia, good fortune visited him at the last minute in the form of a scientist, Professor Preobrazhensky, who wins the dog’s loyalty with some food and a warm home. What ensues is a tale of Frankensteinian proportions: Once Sharik is acceptably healed, Preobrazhensky surgically swaps the dog’s canine testicles and pituitary gland with those of a fresh human cadaver, yielding the unexpected results of “a resuscitated and expanded brain, and not a newly created one,” a full-on cur-to-cad transformation. Sharik takes on the repugnant physical appearance and belligerent nature of his human organ donor, the latter of which mixes unpleasantly with the canine nature Sharik can’t fully shed.

Sharik isn’t the most lovable pup in literature, as even before the not entirely humanitarian rescue that he believes will herald the beginning of his coddled existence as a gentleman’s dog, Sharik proves himself to have a touch of the self-delusional selfaggrandizement to which lesser men with no real distinction other than being dealt a lucky hand are prone, telling himself that the professor is a man of refined tastes who wouldn’t bring home just any stray. What’s more, Sharik’s gratitude for his supposed guardian angel manifests itself as a groveling loyalty that should have grown with every savory morsel the good professor fed him but, instead, takes the form of the tantrums of the entitled, as Sharik foreshadows the physical destruction and unpleasant situations he’ll later bring on a larger scale as Comrade Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov with doggie tantrums like maliciously tearing apart a prized stuffed owl and wreaking general havoc on both the apartment and the individuals whom the professor employs.

Blessed with nothing more than being an otherwise unlucky mutt who found himself in Professor Preobrazhensky’s path at the exact right time, Sharik can’t take much credit for his rescue and what the professor assumes will most likely result as a sacrifice to the greater good of scientific curiosity, as Preobrazhensky states multiple times that he doesn’t expect the unsuspecting mutt to survive the never-before-attempted surgery that lies ahead.

It is the very haplessness that wrenches Sharik from his canine world into the unfamiliar human realm that perhaps makes him less of an anti-hero and more of an accidental one. Sure, Sharik is short on courage, selflessness and respectability (not to mention that he is brimming over with Bulhakov’s intent for him to be a skewering of the ideal New Soviet Man for which the writer had naught else but contempt), but, really, he never asked to have the hero’s journey thrust upon him in the first place— his greatest aspirations were to have a full belly and not to shuffle off the mortal coil prematurely. When Sharik follows the good professor home, he does so under the spell of the sausage that Preobrazhensky feeds him, with no idea or inkling of a future more demanding than life as a gentleman’s pet. Sharik has his base desires satisfied quite nicely because of a stranger’s intervention; it is with that same lack of power over his own fate that Sharik is offered seemingly otherworldly aid, is hoisted over the threshold of transformation, confronts death, undergoes a literal and sweeping change that leads to the rather remarkable deterioration of any good qualities he possessed as a dog, and ultimately returns to the mutt form he originally possessed, but he misses that crucial morally transformative stage of atonement and personal reflection, which is the singular element of a hero’s journey that the journeyman must undertake entirely of his own volition.

One could argue that perhaps a character whose writer created him as nothing more than a satirical outlet for lambasting a much-maligned system can never rise to hero status at all, that perhaps Professor Preobrazhensky is really the unsung February 2014 | 175

hero of Bulgakov’s short novel. Like Dr. Frankenstein before him, Preobrazhensky experiences the slow dawning of horror over what he has wrought and how he must take responsibility for his out-of-control creation—a creation that, despite the good intentions that fueled the creator’s pursuit of uncharted scientific territory, is ultimately shaped by the societal ugliness it has faced (in Sharik’s case, life as a stray has shown him little else beyond how uncaring the world can be to an unfortunate creature it regards as a nuisance, so it’s only natural that communism’s division of goods would appeal to a creature who never had the means to obtain the things he needs). The professor’s aim was to find the betterment of mankind in a laboratory; realizing that the donor glands in Sharik’s operation were from a louse of a man whose ill temper got himself killed in a barroom knife fight, he accepts that generations of women have naturally birthed countless geniuses against the odds, rendering his pursuits meaningless. Preobrazhensky even ventures the atonement Sharik doesn’t stop to consider by surgically returning the vile Sharikov to his much less morally reprehensible canine state; however, the book’s final image of the restored dog looking on as his master plunges a gloved hand into a jar of brains more than suggests that maybe the professor hasn’t learned his lesson after all.

Heart of a Dog offers up Sharik as a painful lesson that a man is more than the sum of his parts, a cautionary tale that it is dangerous to assume a man can be the product of artificial nomenclature and forced ideals. Being a dog forced into the unnatural packaging and mechanisms of a man, Sharik is darkly humorous proof that while it doesn’t take a traditional hero to follow the arc of a hero’s journey, it does take experience, compassion, and not living as a slave to one’s animalistic id to come back from such an adventure as a well-rounded, respectable human being. C

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Alessandro Passerini

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Location: Emilia - Romagna - Abruzzo, Italy Born in Ferrara (Italy) in 1975, Alessandro Passerini is a photographer for Art+Commerce/VOGUE and has been active in the visual arts for more than twenty years. He is the founder of the Collective TM15, which organizes solo and group art expositions; and is the art director for t the Italian Prize for Painting and Photography “B. Cascella” and the Italian Award for Contemporary art, “P. Occhi.”

Since 2007 Alessandro has been one of the artists promoted and sold by the Saatchi Gallery in London. Since 2012 he has been part of the PhotoVogue photographers project for VOGUE Italia, and in 2013 his photos were published by National Geographic in the Your Shots project.

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What do the mountains mean to you?

I’ve been a soldier, rifleman, and assault and platoon commander in the Italian special corps: Alpini, mountain troops.

The training was harder than you can imagine. However, as we climbed in sun, frost, and storms, never taking the same path, I witnessed spectacles of nature: the peaks of the Alps become pink and “talk” during the night, when the wind passed over them; the largest herd of deer in the Alps, who often came down the mountains with us at arm’s length; wolves and foxes in the snow, who didn’t understand what we were, and fled; incredible silence.

This was what I left with, from that military experience; they never leave me. I love the mountains and all that they are.

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You shoot animals beautifully; where do you find them?

This is a plateau, in Centre Italy, named Campo Imperatore, at 1600 meters high.

It reaches 3000 meters at its highest.

Between 1937 and 1948 the mountaineer, photographer and writer Fosco Maraini, together with Giuseppe Tucci, explored Tibet, then pristine and untouched. From his travel notes, he drew “Secret Tibet”, a book that was a huge success and was translated into twelve languages. Back in Italy, he explored his own mountains in more depth. When he found the Campo Imperatore, Maraini described it as Tibet on a small scale, in the valley of Phari Dzong, coining the term ‘Little Tibet’, which is still in common use.

Here today we see herds of wild horses, shepherds and sheep transhumance, and see some of the mountain hermits return from the forests. I often explore the plateau, and even more often begin to play with the wild horses, for hours and hours.

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Many of your photographs are very grand and breathtaking, but there’s a portion that are lighter and funnier, that have a sense of childhood about them. Is that something you try to capture? Where do you strike the balance, or are those two things related, childhood and grandeur?

I think they’re related, and I admit to not having ever thought clearly about it before.

In taking a picture there is total instinct, similar to that of a child. I’m not interested in trying for the ‘nice picture.’

And in any case it is virtually impossible to get rid of more than twenty years of Visual Arts, so I think that everything goes in much more fluently.

Zen, applied to photography, would read: “Learn photography, become the photography, forget the photography, start to photograph.”

I think I have just started to photograph...

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When you capture adults, they tend to either be very impersonal—with their backs turned—or very personal, as in two people who are very physically close. Where does that duality come from?

People intrigue me, even though I could basically be described as a ‘misanthrope,’ and in fact I often find myself for days in the mountains. But people make me curious, as they would make curious a child.

When their backs are turned, it is for two reasons: in panoramas they are relating to of nature itself, probably with the same philosophy as in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, a Romantic painter. If there are views taken from behind it is because this way people are entirely themselves, without fictions, in their everyday life. And that fascinates me. When you see the face, then they often are people I know and to whom I am linked. But there are also cases in which they are total strangers, and I try to steal some shots without them noticing, in order not to lose the naturalness of that character.

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passeart.it saatchionline.com/passeart

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Sixteen-year-old May Florence is a budding poet who is about to join Louisiana’s most elite boarding school. Her brilliant but reserved twin sister, Susanna, isn’t.

But the truth is, they’ve been drifting apart for some time, their relationship barely sustained by shared friendships and mutual envy. Now, as Susanna watches May prepare to leave her behind, she must reconcile what she thinks she knows about herself and her sister with the secrets they’ve been keeping from one another—or risk losing her closest friend forever. four sparks fall is the story of two young adults searching for love and acceptance in Baton Rouge, a city as complex as the people who inhabit it. At once confessional and speculative, analytical and numinous, T.A. Noonan’s debut novella is an affecting coming-ofage story for readers of all ages.

Download for free at cclapcenter.com/foursparksfall

CCLaP Publishing

four sparks fall a novella

T.A. Noonan

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BOOK REVIEW

Nothing

By Anne Marie Wirth Cauchon Two Dollar Radio Reviewed by Travis Fortney

A few weeks back, I opened a book review about Jeff Jackson’s Mira Corpora, also recently published by Ohio independent press Two Dollar Radio, by writing about how Mr. Jackson handled the suicidal teenage character at the book’s center. In that review, I also noted the staggering number of debut novels from independent presses I have read this year that feature suicidal teenage narrators.

Well, Nothing is another one. Our narrator this time around is Ruth, who takes her suffering, and her drinking, very seriously. It’s not long before we learn that she attempted suicide back in Minneapolis. Or that she’s spent many long hours contemplating it. Or something.

Ah, well.

But looking past all that, Nothing has an energy to it that proves infectious. Ruth’s in Missoula for college at the University of Montana, but her studies take a backseat to “the parties.” The Missoula in the novel apparently has a thriving underground rave scene, where a foreclosed or abandoned house is broken into and then occupied by bands of pill-popping kids who get really high and trash the place. At the party that serves as Nothing’s long opening scene, Ruth meets James, who’s hitched into town looking for clues about his dead father.

James is straight out of an Edward Abbey novel.

He refers to his dad as “pops.” He calls the bartender a “beer maid.” He calls the toilet “the john.” He calls homeless men “hobos.” What James’s affectations are meant to imply is left up the to reader to decide, but my 202 | The CCLaP Journal

impression was that we’re meant to infer a kind of social critique. James is in Montana to answer essential questions about his identity, but what he’s most concerned with is keeping up the appearance of his own authenticity against his preconceived historical notion of the Young Man Gone West. Similarly, Ruth’s unflattering narcissism—I mentioned the suicidal ideation, but she’s also preoccupied with her own beauty in relation to her friend Bridget, and she’s never too hungover to pull together an outfit featuring a couple designers whose names she doesn’t fail to drop—could be taken as a kind of running commentary on poseur nihilism.

Still, despite the unlikeable characters and the uncertainty about just what we’re supposed to think of them, Ms. Wirth Cauchon keeps the plot chugging along and the pages turning, right up to an explosive and satisfying climax. The climax also serves to strengthen the aforementioned reading of Nothing as a novel that manages simultaneously to embody the attitude of its disaffected protagonists and also hold that attitude up for critique.

Nothing is also preoccupied with babies, and chillingly so. There’s a wonderful scene toward the beginning of the novel where Ruth sees an abandoned baby at a party.

“It curled and uncurled its fingers and fists, groping at the dry dirt, its spine writhing weakly, its feet pawing at nothing.” At the same party a girl—who also happens to be named Ruth—dies, and the abandoned baby and dead Ruth keep appearing on the novel’s periphery. “I couldn’t say baby,” Ruth narrates at one point. “It was like saying Revolution or I love you.”

Nothing is most effective when functioning as a kind of youthful Hipster/Occupy update to the Montana fiction of Jim Harrison and Norman Maclean. The common strain in novels by these authors is, first, an undercurrent of violence, and, second, that the Montana landscape hangs over the writing and eventually enters the story to provide a crucial plot twist. Nothing’s Montana is burning, so it’s no surprise when the fires finally arrive. Ms. Wirth Cauchon has stated in interviews that she was inspired by the Montana wildfires that occurred in the summer of 2007. Incidentally, I was in Missoula that summer. When the fires were at their worst, my wife and I camped at the State Park near Flathead Lake. Really, the smoke wasn’t any worse than the smog on an average Chicago Tuesday, but when we woke up in the morning there was a thing layer of ash covering our tent and car. Suffice to say, the situation seemed worth dramatizing. C

Out of 10: 8.0

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BOOK REVIEW

Papal Bull: an Ex-Catholic Calls Out the Catholic Church

By Joe Wenke

Trans Uber LLC Reviewed by Karl Wolff

The Catholic Church has a lot to answer for. Dr. Joe Wenke seeks these answers in his new book, Papal Bull: an Ex-Catholic Calls Out the Catholic Church. (NB: Wenke, an LGBT rights advocate, received his doctorate in English.) Beginning with an autobiographical account of his childhood in a large Catholic family in workingclass Philadelphia, he looks into the Catholic Church’s many facets: saints, miracles, popes and anti-popes, sex, birth control, and systematic child sexual abuse.

Much ink has been spilled about The New Atheists.

(Cue screams of horror and outrage.) While Wenke is part of this phenomenon, his work is strictly second-tier.

The trouble remains a matter of tone and intent. Unlike the works of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, Papal Bull, as evidenced from its punning title, is aimed at a popular audience. His tongue is sharp, but he’s no Christopher Hitchens. But I came late to the New Atheist movement, having come out as a skeptic by reading the Marquis de Sade and listening to George Carlin and Bill Hicks.

The book has lots of jokes. Some are pretty blasphelicious. But once he investigates the Catholic Church’s history of institutional misogyny, homophobia, and, until recently (read: 1965), Anti-Semitism, things get serious. His chapter on clerical child abuse radiates with righteous outrage. He calls out the priests from his school days he knew were pedophiles. And in an 204 | The CCLaP Journal

attempt to bring balance to this account, he spends a chapter outlining the various positive things Catholic charities have done.

As someone who wasn’t raised Catholic, I found the book illuminating in its explanation of specific Catholic doctrine and practice. I never knew Catholics considered that the Virgin Mary was born sinless. Or that Purgatory was just as bad as Hell, except one could leave it. Or what First Fridays were or what the term “Pagan Babies” meant. Being raised Lutheran, all these details were fascinating. (Although one of my parents is Catholic, I attended Catholic services as a confessional tourist, not as a participant. On the other hand, living in a Milwaukee suburb, Catholicism left an indelible mark. Seriously, Friday Fish Fries in Milwaukee, kind of a big deal. One of the many things I miss about the Greater Milwaukee area are the plethora of local church festivals.)

While I agree with Wenke’s anger at the institution, I found the execution less than satisfactory. As a self-confessed skeptic and freethinker, the “Vatican is bad” thing gets old quick. One can rail at the corruptions and depravities of the Holy See until one’s blue in the face. But that comes off as yet another set of tu quoque arguments.

(Tu quoque means simply, “not admitting one’s guilt by blaming others.”) The Vatican is just as corrupt, ossified, and unimaginative as any other political body on the planet. Corruption is pretty banal at this point. But Wenke does have a point when he unleashes a verbal tirade against the institutional deception, misinformation, and moral rot involved in the clergy child rape scandals. Plenary indulgences, nepotism, and simony are corrupt practices. When an institution allows for its members to rape children, bankrolls the cover-up, hires Jesuit attack dog canon lawyers, and blames the rapes on gays cuz the gayz are pedophiles, then, well ... that’s crossing the Rubicon into pure evil. The anger is genuine, but there aren’t any real solutions posited. Well, except the obvious ones: Let priests marry; accept marriage equality as a cultural norm; prosecute pedophile priests with brutal efficiency. In the words of ex-Catholic stand-up George Carlin, “Now’s not the time for rational solutions!”

To be fair, this book was written during the Pope Benedict XVI regime. While it is too early into the reign of Pope Francis I to make knee-jerk conclusions, many things Wenke rail against remain true. But on the whole, this is an entertaining book. A little light in places and at times glib and smug in its attitude, but for those wavering between Lapsed Catholic and Ex-Catholic, some time with this book might be worth it. C

Out of 10: 8.0

and higher for fans of the New Atheists; also higher for those wavering between Lapsed Catholic and Ex-Catholic status

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Ralph of the Round House (1906*) Ralph on the Overland Express (1910*)

RARE BOOK FOR SALE

By Allen Chapman Write-up by Jason Pettus

CCLaP is making a growing amount of its rare book collection available at reseller eBay.com, both for auction and for instant purchase. For all current books for sale, visit [ebay.com/usr/cclapcenter], or for the collection’s entire list, [cclapcenter.com/rarebooks].

DESCRIPTION: As any book fan can tell you, it’s the endless amount of hardback “juvenilia” titles (now called Young Adult or Chapterbooks) from the 1900s to 1950s that is one of the most fun things for a beginning collector to acquire; since there were so many to begin with, and so many still survive, and were often printed so cheaply, they’re extremely affordable still to this day, yet most of them had beautifully detailed covers to attract their target audience of eight- to eighteen-year-olds, and the kind of wonderfully anachronistic titles that look so great when sitting on a shelf in a contemporary living space. Here, for example, are volumes one and four of the now largely forgotten “Ralph of the Railroad” ten-book series, respectively from 1906 and 1910 (full series 1906-1928); yet another franchise from the hugely successful Stratemeyer Syndicate (the publisher that brought us the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, the Bobbsey Twins, and a lot more), they were written by the infamous “Allen Chapman,” not a real person at all but a general pseudonym for the interchangeable rotation of anonymous authors they had on staff, churning out these 150-page quickies by the pound as fast as they could.

In classic style for these types of books, the “Ralph” series follows the ever-escalating adventures of our titular hero, who joins the Great Northern Railway line as a child to help make ends meet, after his railroadobsessed father died under mysterious circumstances 206 | The CCLaP Journal

while being pushed out of the company he co-founded with the evil millionaire Gasper (SPOILER: Gasper might’ve had something to do with it!); as the titles continue, we watch Ralph rise through the ranks of the industry through his industriousness and honesty, each volume a step along the way and featuring a daring action adventure that he must make his way through to rise to the next level. As is often the case with these kinds of books, they’re still fascinating for modern eyes to read, now more for the sense of bygone technology and lifestyle they detail in a fascinatingly microcosmic way; written by Stratemeyer staffers who obviously had a real and passionate love for railroading, they display a century-plus-old disregard for safety standards and child labor that is breathless to see today, and a remarkably cogent step-by-step overview of the hundreds of details that make a 20th-century railroad be able to get from destination A to B to C. A particularly good series to collect because of its brevity, it’s absolutely an attainable goal to eventually acquire all ten volumes of the Ralph saga; and at their ultra-inexpensive price today, this is a great place to start, the kind of wonderfully whimsical and historical-feeling volumes just perfect for a young but serious collector to show off to company.

CONDITION: Text: Good Minus (G-). The reason these books are going so cheaply today is that they are frankly in rough condition, including multiple fabric tears, broken interior cover flaps, and ink writing and embossing impressions on the inside covers.

See photos for more. Issued without dust jackets.

PROVENANCE: Acquired by CCLaP on September 2, 2013, at the Oak Park Book Fair. *And a special note on determining the printing dates of these particular copies. Since it wasn’t considered important at the time to keep track of the individual printing dates of juvenilia books, no such information was usually included on the copyright page, making it nearly impossible to determine the exact date any particular copy was actually printed; for example, although this copy of Ralph of the Round House (book #1 of the series) has a stated copyright date of 1906, note that in the box above it listing all the books in the series, they’re already all the way up to book #3, which means that this particular copy is likely a reprint from the year volume #3 came out, 1909. This makes even more sense when looking at the other book, Ralph on the Overland Express, book #4 of the series, and seeing on its copyright page that it’s the newest book in the series listed; that means this copy was likely part of the first printing in 1910, and that the previous owner originally acquired both this and the older book at the same time.

C

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