TLR / How To Read Music by The Literary Review

the literary review an international journal of contemporary writing spring 2010 vol.53 / no.03

how to read music because the universe doesn’t always arrange itself in equal measures rebecca goldstein alex abramovich elena poniatowska percival everett kelly cherry noah elliot blake nina soifer aaron shulman on harmony, art, the sublime, the unimaginable, and related enigmas

$8/ £5 / €7/ ¥1,000

HOW TO READ MUSIC SPRING 2010

a dot and an angosturian dash with an hermaphroditic hypodermic hyphen is all that ’s needed nowadays , with maybe a word here and a blind spot there to help the heavy - heads out of their frowsy mental beds . here ’s a poem , believe it not :

— from

the readies by bob brown , 1930

HOW TO R EAD M USIC

SPRING 2010 VOL.53 / NO.3

Contents POETRY

9–10

Judy Rowe Michaels the birds that night 21–33

A.P. Sullivan Opus Contra Naturum; Sixth Epistle of the Virtual Apostle; Painted Walls of Mexico Calendar; So Dear, What Then Do You Think’s Happening in the Painting? 47–50

Nicholas Samaras Psalm for the Song and the Singing; The Kidnapped Child Learns the Fundamental Structures of Music Theory 65–67

Dan Gutstein For evening; One train pushes second train 74–79

Daneen Wardrop A Walk Is a Way Not To Ask; A Balcony for Elegy; Bekos; Speak to Wish 97–98

Nina Soifer To the Writer on the Elevator

99–106

DE N MAR K

Jørgen Leth Martin Aitken, translator Boredom: Seven poems around a theme 124–128

Maxine Patroni The Problem of Describing Unrequited Love; A Poem about Wind

FICTION

11–20

Percival Everett Confluence 34–46

M EXICO

Elena Poniatowska George Henson, translator Chocolate 59–64

Peter J. Cooley Rijksmuseum: Poem One; Caravaggio, “The Supper at Emmaus,” The National Gallery, London

Noah Elliot Blake How Saying Is Sometimes Saying All Is Right in This Universe; A Moment of Genius; Our Father’s Brain; You May Tell the Story of Your Aunt’s Death

141–148

80–96

131–133

Laura McCullough Sometimes I Ache for Disambiguation; Women and the Syntactical World; God Is Queer 161–172

James Richardson The Stars in Order Of 192–198

Robert Carnevale Woodgrain; Snow on Snow; Nothing To Say 199–203

Kelly Cherry What the poet wishes to say

Kelly Luce Rooey 107–123

Alex Stein Blackberry Thickets: A Conversation with Josan; The Mundane, the Glorious, the Cat Familiar: A Conversation with Katy Byrd 129–130

Rachel Swearingen Woman in Blue 149–160

John Oliver Hodges Troutsky’s Parade

173–179

Aaron Shulman Guide to the Boulevard of Foreseeable Museums 180–191 ITALY

Marco Candida Elizabeth Harris, translator Dream Diary ESSAY

51–58

Alex Abramovich Too Far Gone? 68–73

Katherine Lien Chariott Daughters Made of Dust (Collateral Damage) 134–140

Chip Livingston Trashing Andy Warhol

BOOKS

Thomas E. Kennedy In the Company of Angels By Andrew McKay

Maile Chapman Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto By Jody Handerson

207–213

233–236

Gilbert Sorrentino The Abyss of Human Illusion By Jeff Bursey

Anne Carson Nox By Ted Hamilton

214–217

Tess Gallagher The Man from Kinvara By Abigail Deutsch

Alina Bronsky Broken Glass Park By Marion Wyce 218–226

Mary Jo Bang The Bride of E Louise Glück A Village Life By Renée Ashley 227–229

Maurya Simon The Raindrop’s Gospel: The Trials of St. Jerome and St. Paula, A Novel in Verse By Paul-Victor Winters TLR

230–232

204–206

237–239

240–242

The Shortlist I NTE RVI EW

243–251

Minna Proctor Interview with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein CONTR I B UTORS

252–255

COVE R ARTIST SHARON HARPER MOON STUDIES AND STAR SCRATCHES NO. 5 JUNE–SEPTEMBER 2004 SARATOGA SPRINGS, NEW YORK; MIDDLESEX, VERMONT; JOHNSON, VERMONT; EDEN MILLS, VERMONT; GREENSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA

Long exposures in harsh climates, sunbursts, even skydiving—Sharon Harper’s dogged and sometimes daring working method lies somewhere in the midst of art, astronomy, and Outward Bound. Her large-format photographs are logical, understated, and bluntly expressive of the most inarticulate, moody mind states: the oneiric limbo of racing through the European countryside on a high speed train. The unsettling awe of a foggy shore at twilight. The startling hypnosis of a slowly shifting, starry night. The exquisite omen of darkened branches against a stormy sky, cracked suddenly by lightning. All of this she aptly bundles into the category of the sublime. And for man, standing always at the foot of the sublime looking up, art is the most potent, though approximate and abstract, response. By art here one means tools, craft, systems—not inspiration. Paradoxically, photography, perhaps the most mechanical of mediums, has a closer relationship with chance than with system. Photography has historically prized the vanishing, captured, precise moment. But Harper’s work, especially the recent projects Moon Studies and Star Scratches and One Month, Weather Permitting, is durational. It has everything to do with the passage of time, of movement and shift, and the uniquely technical aspects of traditional photography. As she has written, these images “are not available to the eye until they are fixed on some photographic material.” Harper’s signature “star scratches” are made from the shifting patterns of the open sky as revealed over repeat exposures on subsequent nights on large-format negatives. She trains the camera’s deliberate view on nature’s elusive breadth to suggest a specific emotional experience, and by virtue of inevitable mishaps— light leaks, cloud cover, windy nights—evinces how “the sublime resists imposed structure.” Her newest series, One Month, Weather Permitting, uses long, multiple exposures to capture the stealth but distinct movement of celestial bodies over Banff, Alberta. The images reveal strong, insistent star trails and a capricious—utterly alluring—moon. Her project log discloses a month of cold and foggy © 2004 COPYRIGHT SHARON HARPER. COURTESY OF GALERIE STEFAN RÖPKE, COLOGNE AND RICK WESTER FINE ART, NEW YORK.

nights in Banff. The September 18 entry reads: “0 Exposure; Rain, Snow.” The next night: “50 minute exposure; 3 hour and 20 minute exposure (No Moon. Moving Clouds.)” Two good, long exposures followed on the night of the 20th and a single 45-minute one on the next. The entry concludes: “Original 4x5 silver gelatin negative.” The picture itself is one of the sparest in the series: four extremely distinct and randomly intersecting perfect lines and a dense grey backdrop cross hatched with many faint traces, like cat hairs left behind on an occasionally preferred dark seat cushion. Two weeks later (October 5 and October 6), a combined ten-hour exposure over two moonless, overcast nights gives way to a tequila sunrise-tinted glow; the star scratches slice out of the light like shooting embers. If the scratches were less provocatively askew in their relative trajectories, the scene would look like a shot from the lurid storyboard of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris. The trails, Harper writes, “suggest the illusion of scratches made directly onto film.” Here is a physical language, a manifest footprint, for those miracle points of light composed of nothing more palpable than gassy explosions. She calls these “chance compositions” because they are ultimately subject to unyielding nature, but while dominated by the whims of shifting skies, what we’re actually looking at is a “strictly photographic” phenomenon. These images drag the universe down to touch us, but we’ll never see them in nature. —Minna Proctor This article was commissioned by and first published in BOMB Magazine, Issue #111, Spring 2010. © Bomb Magazine, New Art Publications, and its Contributors. All rights reserved. The BOMB Archive can be viewed at www.bombsite.com.

POETRY

Judy Rowe Michaels the birds that night

the birds that night were saying no more than they had to, they were saying no more, they were saying no more than they had, so the conductor of the night stopped it, saying, “first bird, mark the slurs and for godsake get their beaks opening together. listen,” he said, “if you can hear yourself, you’re too loud.” night after night the same—they’d pretend not to know the score, or not the same score, which he knew by heart, he just needed a good band and some rehearsal time, but every night a concert? conducting hadn’t been his first love, maybe, but now he feels responsible for the night, a sloppy cut-off, a tempo too brisk TLR

for clean runs and—no one’s fault but his, the score a communal story but someone has to lead. but they’re prima donnas, each hears his own night and can keep it up till dawn.

SHORT STORY

Percival Everett Confluence

Let me tell you about my dream, my father said. Two black men walk into a bar and the rosy-faced, white barkeep says we don’t serve niggers in here and one of the men points to the other and says but he’s the president and the barkeep says that’s his problem. So the president walks over and gives the barkeep a box and says these are Chilmark chocolates and the barkeep says thank you and reaches over to shake the president’s hand. The president jumps back, says what’s that? And the barkeep says it’s a hand buzzer, a gag, get used to it, asshole. And that was your dream? I asked him. As best I can remember. And I’ve written something for you. He looked at my face. Not to you, but for you. It’s sort of something you would write, if you wrote. Here it is: And yet I continue to live. That was how my father put it, sitting in his wheelchair, the one he could not move around by himself, his right arm useless in his lap, his left nearly so, held up slightly just under his sternum, his new black Velcro-shut shoes uneven on the metal rests, this side of his face, the side near me, the left side, sagging visibly, his voice somewhere between his throat and the back of his tongue. And yet I continue to live. I had suggested that the salt my mother was sprinkling liberally over his food might not be the best thing for his high blood pressure, even though at his age, in his condition, who could really deny the man the simple pleasure of too much salt, but my mother snapped at me, saying, I’ve been taking care of him for a long time. My first thought was how true that was in so many ways, good and bad, and that was when my father spoke, making a joke and a comment and TLR

reminding me that in the vessel that looked something like him there was still the man I knew. And yet I continue to live, the right side of his mouth turning up in as much of a smile as his nerve-starved face would allow and I laughed with him. My mother had not heard what he had said and even if she had it would have been lost on her, but she reacted to our laughter, and that reaction was what

What do you think of this? His voice was clearer than it had been in years, the words finding the full theater of his mouth, his eyes sharp on me. I think itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s awful, I told him, because he asked for very little and deserved the truth.

it would have been if she had heard his comment and had understood, it would have made no difference, none at all, as she became angry, insecure and jealous that we were sharing anything. My father was depressed, it took no genius to see that, sitting there all day long in that room in what they call assisted living, pressing his button and waiting for the orderly to come hook him up to a lift to take him to the toilet, pressing his button because the nurses were late getting him ready for bed and he was falling asleep in his chair, pressing his button because there was nothing else to do but press the damn button. I was depressed too, seeing him that way, then leaving to live my own life far away, knowing his condition, knowing his sadness, knowing his boredom, and depressed because I could for days on end live my life without feeling the horror of his daily existence. What I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know was how he could continue to live, sitting there day after day, seeming so weak, feeling so little through his body and feeling so much through his mind, his hand shaking, a crooked finger in the air, when he was trying to tell me something, I could even see it when we were on the phone. How, like this, at seventy-nine could he still be alive? Then during one of my useless visits, visits that I made because I felt I ought to pay, visits I made because I loved him, though I always seemed to make him sadder, he said, his crooked finger resting peacefully on the back of his right hand, What do you think of this? His voice was clearer than it had been in years, the words finding the full theater of his mouth, his eyes sharp on me. I think itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s awful, I told him, because he asked for very little and deserved the truth. You should love your father more, I think he said, the voice again retreating. 12

I asked if he thought I didn’t visit enough and he shook his head, a gesture I didn’t know how to read, leaving me wondering if he meant that I did not visit enough or that I did. Do you want me to visit more? I asked and he looked at me with the eyes I had always known and even though now they were milky and red and weak, they became his again and he said, Just one more time. I flew away from Philadelphia feeling that I understood all too well and trying not to understand anything, trying not to see anything. There was an animated in-flight movie that I watched without sound and I was struck by just how realistic the whole thing was, the talking animals and stretched faces seem to make perfect sense. I missed my daughter and was glad to be flying home, found some light in the thought that she would be peacefully sleeping when I walked into the house and that I would peek into her room and see her face in the glow of her night-light. And I resolved that I would never put her in the position that I was now in, that I would not let my body fail me to the point that I could not control my own time and space and direction. It had all sneaked up on my father and on me as well, thinking, he and my brother and I, that he would turn a corner and be new in some way, but that corner turned out to be a steep hill and gravity turned out to be as inevitable as we all know it is. And as quickly as the thought of my daughter had brought me back to some happiness, my love for her returned me to a rather selfish consideration of my own future, however cloaked in that fake veil of concern for what she would face, and finally back to the matter at hand, the question put to me, the request made by my father. But how? You don’t live in Philadelphia, I told him. Dad, we’re both here in California. It’s called fiction, son. This is the story you would be writing if you were a fiction writer. It’s depressing. You’re damn right it’s depressing. You’re not very bright, are you? What am I supposed to do with this? Finish it. If you kill me, he said, if you kill me, then I will be sad, yes, confused, no doubt, maybe even angry, if you kill me and if you don’t, if you don’t kill me, then I will feel nothing, feel nothing forever, he said to me, and that is a long time, while he held his book that his failed vision would not allow him to read, not the Bible or any bible, as he would never, in the light or in the dark, actually or pretend to read the Bible or any TLR

everett 13

bible, but he held in his lap, useless in his lap, his soiled Principia Mathematica and he spoke of Russell glowingly and admitted he knew little about Whitehead, except that his name was unfortunate. I can’t read this anymore, he said, this book, because my eyes are useless. I hate similes, my father said, have always hated them, even the good ones and there are no good ones, except maybe this one. His useless eyes narrowed and he said, I sit here, useless, like a bad simile, then he said, perhaps I should say any simile, given what I just said, the adjective bad being superfluous. If you kill me, if you do, he said, then I won’t tell, if you don’t tell me that I am telling my story, is what he said. I won’t tell the world that I have no son if you make it so that you have no father, because I cannot walk or even tremble, he said, Russell was a good man, was good to Wittgenstein even though he was a pompous asshole. Well, here’s a game for Ludwig, Pin the Tail on the Narrator and he began with no pause, except for that silence that must exist before one begins, and he said to do away with he said and began with I was born when I was twenty-three or maybe he was born when he was twenty-three, a year much better than the twenty-second during which he tried to kill himself with paracetamol, his liver would never recover completely, his father and he unable to agree, to come together, harmonize or square, his father, doctor father, Doctor Father, unable to fathom why in nineteen-sixty his son would rather fill his head with logic than go to medical school because how would he support himself and a family and then at twenty-three and in medical school he was happy, and no one understood why, even if he had told them they would not have understood, happy because he finally understood that the Ontological Argument was sound and yet he knew with all certainty, beyond all doubt that there was not and had never been any god. If there was no god and the argument for his existence was sound, then language was a great failure or deceiver or bad toy or good toy, that it could be wound up or twisted and if he knew that, that it could not be trusted, then he knew where to put it, how to view it, that it was there for his pleasure, that it was not pernicious, for how could a thing so twisted finally mean anything, that it was there for his amusement and that all instances of its employ were for amusement. Therefore, the lovely therefore, as the argument carried, not a good argument like the Ontological Argument, perhaps not even sound or valid, that he could become a doctor, be a husband, be a father and rest, if not easy, but rest knowing that it was all a game, not some silly language game, but a walking, running, tackling, blocking, dodging, hitting, hiding, sliding, diving game where everybody dies before they find out it’s just a game. But he was twenty-three when he understood what he would for the rest of his life refer to as the truth, even with his patients and his colleagues, according to 14

the truth, he would say, according to the truth you have six months to live, according to the truth your wife will leave you, the truth never unraveled, clarified, solved or explained, never defined, never deciphered or illuminated, but the truth, it coming to this, that according to the truth A=A is not the same thing as A is A, and may A have mercy upon your pathetic, wretched, tortured, immortal soul, according to the truth. Why don’t you get along with your brother? Well, he left his first wife for an Italian woman. But it wasn’t what you think. Aside from the hair, of which she had an abundance, she looked like Benito Mussolini. I have trouble with him because he then left her for a French woman who looked like the Italian actress Monica Vitti. You found this morally objectionable. Not at all. It made me jealous. And that’s okay. According to the truth, it’s just fine. You know what the problem with life is? It’s that we can write our own stories, but not other people’s. Take you, for example. I have a wholly different story charted for you. Of course you do. There’s no need to get an attitude. In fact, I’ll decide that you don’t have one and so it will be. How’s that? Makes things easier. That’s more like it. I should never have become a doctor. You’re not a doctor. Not now. What’s that supposed to mean? I’m an old man. You tell me. Regardless of what you’ve heard, wisdom does not come with age. Wisdom comes from periods of excessive sexual activity. I think I knew that. That’s the you I like. The funny you. Not the you who mopes around wondering how you’re going to take care of the sad business at hand. What I wouldn’t give to get laid. Dad. I know my pecker’s dead. So am I. But I don’t know that, I guess. Tell me, tell me, tell me true, tell me I’m dead, all frozen and blue. Tell me I’m rigid, stiff as a board, and playing croquet on the lawn with the lord. You see I don’t even capitalize TLR

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god when I’m speaking. Did you just make that up? What the fuck does that matter? If you must know, it’s from Hamlet, act twohundred, scene fifty-nine. You see I have this one finger that works, a shutter finger and so I want a camera, he said to me. Both of his hands, as a matter of fact, worked, along with much of him. I want to start taking pictures he said and I told him that was a great idea and so I bought him a camera, a digital Nikon as all cameras are digital now, he making a mock complaint about wanting film, I want the chemicals and all, he said, but finally made nothing of it, holding the camera in his lap, failing to look through the eye piece or at the little screen and snapped away. I’m chronicling all that I, rather my lap sees, indiscriminate and unjudging, no framing, no pictorial editorializing, just mere reception of, if not reality, then the constituent elements of what we call or choose to call the world. It’s a camera, Dad, I said to him and he nodded, turning the thing over and over as if he’d never seen one before, tilting it up to photograph whatever he thought occupied my space in his so-called world. The physics are still basically the same, he said, computers notwithstanding. Light in, image captured upside down. Every painting has its own lawfulness, its own logic, its own rules. It could have been that I established such logic for my canvases, but I admit that I really do not know. To even consider this away from any singular painting is the cruelty of abstraction, a cutting into the flesh of reality, for as I abstract toward some understanding I necessarily lean toward some example and as I so lean the whole foundation of my argument topples over under the weight of the sheer inadequacy of my example. No one thing can represent all things. Not even within a class it turns out. This may or may not be true. The hardest thing for me was the judgment that there was no need for any one of my paintings to exist, their own inherent rules of logic notwithstanding. I would argue to myself that my expression was but a small participation in the human attempt to move beyond the base and vulgar, purely animal (as if that were a bad thing) and short existence on this planet. And I would do this all the while attempting to commune with, rejoin with, celebrate the base, vulgar and pure animal part of myself. Just as modernism’s logical conclusion has to be socialism while ironically relying on and feeding on the construction of an elite class, so my paintings and the art of my time could only pretend to culminate in anarchy while, strangely not ironically, finding it impossible to exist without markets and well-defined cliques and 16

order. I have finally circled about, hovered, loitered enough to recognize that my only criterion for the worth of a painting is whether I like looking at it. I no longer say that this painting is good or bad, it might be sentimental, it might be bright, it might be muddy, it might be a cliché, but it is neither good nor bad. Do I like looking at it? That is all I ask? That is all I now answer. I walk the hills behind my house happy because I have

Tell me, tell me, tell me true, tell me I’m dead, all frozen and blue. Tell me I’m rigid, stiff as a board, and playing croquet on the lawn with the lord. You see I don’t even capitalize god when I’m speaking.

learned this. I learned it as I turned my life into a camera obscura, putting a pinhole in one side of my world, letting the scene outside come to me upside down but with accurate perspective. I was feeling rather smug thinking this and enjoying a cup of tea when I saw a head bounce by a window of my studio. I stepped outside. There was a young woman standing in my drive. She was of medium height, a little heavy, her reddish hair in short curls. “Gregory Lang?” I nodded. “My name is Meg Caro,” she said. She stepped forward to shake my hand. “What can I do for you?” “You’re the painter, right?” “Some say.” “I’m a painter, too. At least I want to be. I want to be your apprentice.” She stood straighter. “This is not the middle ages,” I said. “Your intern then.” “I’ve never seen your work. I don’t know you. You might be dangerous. For all you know, I’m dangerous. I don’t take on apprentices or interns.” “I have some photographs of my paintings,” she said. “I don’t care. I’m flattered, but I don’t care.” “Please, look at them.” I looked down the dirt lane and wished that my wife would drive in, but she wouldn’t be home for another couple of hours. “What will it hurt to look?” she asked. “You say your name is Meg?” “Meg Caro.” TLR

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“How old are you, Meg Caro?” “Twenty-two,” she said. “That’s old enough to know better than to visit a strange man all alone.” “I know.” “Where are you from, Meg Caro?” “Miami.”

“Let me see the pictures.” She opened her backpack and handed me a ring binder. I opened it, but couldn’t see. “I’ll have to get my glasses,” I said. “They’re on your head.” “Thanks.” I looked at the pictures of her paintings. “These are pretty good.” “I studied at the Art Institute of Chicago.” “That should help me like the paintings more?” “No, I just thought.” I’d stepped on her a bit, so I said, “I like the work. Of course, you can tell only so much from photos.” The paintings were young, not uninteresting and nice enough to look at. “Photos are so flat.” “Oh, I know,” she said. I studied her broad face for a second. “Come in here,” I said. I led her into my studio. “See that big painting on the wall.” I had a ten-by-twelve-foot canvas nailed up. “Tell me what you think?” “I like parts of it,” she said. “It reminds me of another of your paintings. That really big yellow one in Philadelphia. Somehow this seems like two paintings.” I stood next to her and stared at the work. “The under painting seems somehow warmer on the left side. Is there some blue under there? Maybe some Indian yellow.” She stepped back, leaned back. Her movements were confident, perhaps a little cocky. “Would you like some tea?” “Please.” I went to the sink and put more water in my little battered electric pot. I glanced back to see that the woman was walking around the room, looking at drawings and notes and canvases. “What is the painting about?” I studied her young face and looked at the canvas until she turned to view it again with me. “This painting is about blue and yellow. Sometimes yellow and blue. Do you think it’s about more than that?” 18

She didn’t say anything. “Are you always so neat?” she asked. “I didn’t know I was. I’d ask you what kind of tea you’d like, but I have only one kind.” “That’s fine.” “It’s Lipton.” “That’s fine.” “Are your parents still in Miami?” I asked. “My mother is.” “Does she know you’re here?” “I’m twenty-two years old.” “I forgot.” I poured water into a mug and dropped in a bag, handed it to her. She took it and blew on it. She told me she really loved my work. I thanked her and together we looked at what was on my walls and floor. “Like I said, I don’t have a need for an intern.” “You wouldn’t have to pay me,” she said. “I didn’t even think of that,” I told her. “There’s really nothing around here for you to help me with.” “I just want to be around you while you work.” “As flattering as that is, I find it a little weird.” I looked at her and became nervous, if not a little frightened. “Maybe you should leave now.” “Okay. I didn’t mean to come off as a stalker.” “All right, I believe you, but you still have to leave.” “I understand.” “Will you think about it, though?” She put her mug on the table and started for the door. “Thanks for stopping by,” I said. I walked out behind her and made sure she walked down the drive and past the house. She wasn’t the first person to make the walk from the road. Usually it was men looking for work and I gave it to them when there was something to do, but a young woman coming up seemed different. I could imagine my wife coming home to find that I had taken on an apprentice. I would tell Claire about her when she came up and she would listen and I would tell her that I had been uncomfortable and she would tell me I was employing a double standard, that I would not have had the same reaction if she had been he. I would agree with her and then say the only true thing left to say, “Nonetheless.” TLR

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Is this supposed to be my story? The story I’m supposed to write or would write if I were a writer? My, but you are dumb. What is this? Who is Gregory Lang? You’re Gregory Lang. This is what you would write or should write if you wrote. Like I said. I don’t write. Who is Meg Caro? I imagine she is the daughter you don’t know you have. I see. Why don’t you just admit that you’re working again? I don’t know. Maybe I am working again? Tell everybody I’m workin’ again. Doctor said it’ll kill me, but he didn’t say when. Lord, have mercy, I’m workin’ again. If I could, I’d get up and do a little jig to that. I love that line: Doctor said it’ll kill me, but he didn’t say when. Did you know that a camera is just a box with a little hole in it? As a matter of fact, I did know that. Dad, why all this writing for me. Why don’t you write it yourself? I’m an eighty-year-old man. What do I have to say those assholes out there? And people my age, well all they read is prescription labels and the obituaries. That’s not quite true. Nor is it quite false. Why do they print the obits so small? Listen, you’ve got a sharp, strong mind. Try wrapping your fist around that in the morning. Dad, you realize that I’m dead. Yes, son, I do. But I wasn’t aware that you knew it.

POETRY

O n tio di rg t E .o in ew Pr vi in ryre e bl era ila lit va the .A . nt ww te w on . C Now ed e ur ib at cr Fe bs Su

A.P. Sullivan Opus Contra Naturum

The cheetah runs at Guinness World Record speed. At less than Guinness World Record speed the gazelle runs. Predating, however, the inevitable chase and capture was the common ancestor, victimizer and

victim, spooning happily in the same hammock of chromosome fibers. Do you recall the rapture? Further back, something for no reason that conferred advantage: chemistry! Blinks became winks, how

TLR

our natural order began. More recently, something for reasons that confer no advantage: I loathe myself in this figure. And now, finally, my point: though my log-on password remains “cheetah,” I’m

SHORT STORY

O n tio di rg t E .o in ew Pr vi in ryre e bl era ila lit va the .A . nt ww te w on . C Now ed e ur ib at cr Fe bs Su

Elena Poniatowska Chocolate Translated from Spanish by George Henson

“If he doesn’t come today, I’ll go and look for him tomorrow.” “But, where, Ma’am?” Aurelia frowned. “You remember he said they lived in Colonia Santa Fe, right?” “Santa Fe is a whole hill, Ma’am, really big and tall . . . . There aren’t even streets, just lots.” “It doesn’t matter. I’ll go.” A chocolate-colored dog with the name to match his color had appeared one Friday. He was big, strong, and wooly, with white sock feet and a spotless chest. His eyes, which were just like his coat, were more expressive than Emiliano Zapata’s. Abuela—my grandmother—who was waiting on the corner for a taxi, called to him, “Dog? Dog!” then instructed Aurelia to bring him a biscuit while she watched him rummage through the trash. “Aren’t you going to give me one, too? I’m Chocolate’s owner,” said a beggar, walking up to her. And so began a ritual, not just on Fridays but every afternoon between noon and one, Abuela would go out to the corner. When Chocolate saw her, he would run over, his eyes melting. He’d lower his head as he approached Mamá Grande and brush it against her legs, rubbing against her until she soothed him: “Okay, Chocolate, okay, Chocolatito!” Then he would move his head and put his wet snout in Abuela’s gloved hand. She would give him his bread. “Are you thirsty?” she’d ask. Aurelia would bring milk in a bowl, and Chocolate’s owner would get a few coins. “Fer my cigarettes.” “Fer a little drink.” The conversation never went beyond “How’s Chocolate today?”

POETRY

Nicholas Samaras Psalm for the Song and the Singing

I The beginning of all dialogue is listening. The beginning of elevation is understanding. The elevation of text is the fullness of praise. II If song without resonance is not song, then how do we elevate the text through singing? III We want an inflected language, speech with a bit of singing. We have souls in our speaking. We donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t sing like typewriters. We donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want the swallowed sounds. We want ekphrasis. We want the light and lyrical sounds drawing in, a coloration and a brightness to them.

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Our warm singing is not volume. Our singing is not performance, but invitation to join. We deliver a text that allows listeners to ponder in their hearts. IV For great energy is required to convey something softly. For gentility requires strength. For our voices lean into the emphasis. For our singing is a journey to greet the Lord. Our prayers are a chant to the Lord, climbing to Him by our voices, climbing as the wafting of sweet smoke and incense rises in its ascent. Our chanting is a way to live in our prayers. Our singing is our confessing. Our singing gives commitment. All song enables the full sides of the mystery. 48

V In the phenomenon of perfect harmony, the voices disappear. In accord, our voices approximate the Lord. By making our singing human, at the same time, we make it divine. Listen to the beginning of all dialogue. Listen in harmony and approximation. Give us the energy of your attention. Hear our voice in the name of the Lord, this invitation to ascend, this song, this ringing of the living bell.

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The Kidnapped Child Learns the Fundamental Structures of Music Theory The man hit me on the syllables of his screaming: “Don’t. You. Ever.” and then, raked me on the rhythms of his breathing, the grunting timed with every strapwhip. What could I do but take those rhythms into my red and purple skin? It was the cycle I knew as deep as epidermis, sinew, and muscle. You could become a cleft, a signature of time, a syncopation of consequence. You could hear yourself as a separate creature, a symphony of flesh, bone, blood. You could make a kind of music out of it.

M USIC B LOG

Alex Abramovich Too Far Gone?

One of the perks of being my dad is getting to answer the stupid questions I sometimes come up with: How do calculators work? (It’s something to do with zeroes and ones.) What’s the best age to be? (The best age to be is forty-three.) Did he ever smoke pot? (You know, there wasn’t a lot of pot in Russia.) Why aren’t there any stories about alcoholics in the family? (It’s that Jews don’t really drink like that.) Oh, but they do, and to get a sense of how much, think back to the other night, when the mostly Jewish guests at our Astoria dinner party ran out of whiskey and switched ever-so-skippingly to tequila. Or consider the fact that, somewhere along the line, my father’s son became Slate magazine’s vodka expert. I don’t even drink vodka. Not really. Mostly, I drink Wild Turkey, or something slightly fancier. Not so much that it gets in the way of whatever I’ve got to get done. I hit my marks, make my deadlines, deal with crises as they come. My balls

“TOO FAR GONE” MY DAD IS DEAD THE TALLER YOU ARE, THE SHORTER YOU GET HOMESTEAD, 1998

Originally published with audio annotation on moistworks.com.

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are all airborne, my feet are roots, and I function much better than the functional junkies I worked with twenty years ago, when I lied about my age and got myself a job at Tower Records. Those guys would quote Chaucer in Medieval accents, cast interactions at the Customer Service Stall in terms of the master-slave dialectic, rattle the names of Coltrane albums off in alphabetical order, whilst sitting on the shitter with a belt between their teeth. Me, I never went in for the junk. I was holding out for foxy. I didn’t drink much, either. Not then, nor in college, nor for a few years afterwards. I didn’t drink that much last month, or the month before. But I did drink a lot last week, which was in some ways a terrible week and in some ways a lovely week, and in most ways an exhausting week, and in one way, a week in which I really let go of the rope. Really; the rope. I’m not asking you for a do-over. But tell me: Have I looked deeply enough in the mirror? J. and I are talking—wondering, really—about how strange it is to go to bed one night feeling like a teenager, and wake up the next morning—a thirty-something, a future home-owner, a husband, a wife, a bestower of proud familial names, a real woman, or—for imaginative purposes, and keep in mind that I don’t know you personally—a full-grown man. (Raymond Carver wrote one of his shitty poems about this once. Or was his about death?) This is not a subtle change. Calling it a shift in perspective is like calling the pelican a shift in crows. But if it does come it comes suddenly, and it’s not entirely unwelcome, and the reason I’m bringing up the rope, my grip, all the whiskey I drank last week, and what it’s really like to finally feel like an adult, is because, unlike the twenty-somethings running around my neighbor-

“RESPECT YOURSELF” THE STAPLE SINGERS BEALTITUDE: RESPECT YOURSELF STAX, 1972

hood, I know I won’t be drinking so much next week, or next month, when I turn back to the life at hand. The something I’m getting at here has nothing to do with my drinking problem, or yours. I’m not interested in confessionals—one of the things I like so much about Joan Didion is that, up until her last book, her first-person was always a feint, and no matter how personal it felt to read her, you walked away knowing next to nothing about her. So, among other things, any drinking I might have done last week was entirely incidental. A. and I are having this same, grown-up conversation, when she mentions Didion’s essay on self-respect (written, if you can imagine such a thing, for Vogue). Which she (A.) remembers as being about the things one learns to let go of. The necessity of streamlining one’s activities, interests, and personal ties, and sheltering some essential part of yourself from the world and all its demands. She’s right, but when I read the essay (which is called—and, oh, the authority it takes to write like this!—“On Self-Respect”) it seemed to me that there was more to it than that. “Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about,” Didion writes midway through it. “They had it instilled in them, young.” She goes on, “To have that sense of one’s intrinsic self-worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.” This stops me dead, in part, because the paradox Didion describes seems so familiar, and it seems familiar because what Didion’s doing is, she’s casting something we used to call “despair” in secular terms, for Vogue readers.

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When I say “despair,” I mean what Aquinas meant in the Summa Theologica: Sin against the Holy Ghost. Or, the one damnable sin (which is to say, the one sin God Himself cannot forgive). And the most paradoxical sin (because, paradoxically, the arrogance it takes to think that you are past hope—that you’ve sinned so badly that God Himself can’t forgive you—and, therefore, that God’s power is somehow limited—cuts you off from God in such a way that God’s power actually becomes limited). So, if humanity loses something when we start thinking entirely in secular terms, then, among other things, Didion’s essay seems to me to be an attempt to point to something we, as a people, have lost. (Selfrespect.) But one more, slight, digression before I get back to my point (believe it or not, I’m coming around to talking about music). I don’t mean to say that “despair” as I’ve described it is a purely Christian concept. (For one thing, it’s the flip side of pride, which the Greeks had plenty of.) Nor do I mean to suggest that despair went out the window when people like me stopped going to shul. To me, despair’s not a bad word to use if you want to describe the state of our nation’s ghettos, or the mental collapse of your downstairs neighbor. The depressed person really felt that what was really unfair was that she felt able . . . to share only painful circumstances or historical insights about her depression and its etiology and texture and numerous symptoms instead of feeling truly able to communicate and articulate and express the depression’s terrible unceasing agony itself. —David Foster Wallace, “The Depressed Person”

Maybe despair’s nothing more than the feeling that goes with being locked in an untenable, inescapable, position—a paradox—and Aquinas only articulated 54

“MOOD INDIGO” NINA SIMONE LET IT ALL OUT PHILIPS, 1965

INTERVIEW EXCERPT MARVIN GAYE LOST AND FOUND: LOVE STARVED HEART MOTOWN, 1999

it especially well. But despair explains the ghosts of Richard III’s murdered relatives, who gather around him and whisper “despair, and die” (they want to make sure he’s damned first, and dead second). And it explains a lot of things about rock and roll—which burst out of Pentecostal churches where the whole point was to work yourself into a state the Holy Ghost couldn’t help but inhabit, but stripped the ceremony of its religious connotations in a way that barred the Holy Ghost from the equation. (Which is pretty close to Aquinas’s definition of despair.) It’s clear to me that the thing we’ve come to know as the “rock moment” has a lot to do with spirit possession—or what’s left of spirit possession once we make room for Blackberries, antidepressants, anatomically correct sex dolls, and four dollar lattes—and if it’s not clear to you, consider Iggy Pop’s take on the music: “It’s obvious that rock and roll is a religion,” Iggy said. “It’s formatted exactly as a religion.” Or Jerry Wexler, who claimed to have come up with the phrase “Rhythm and Blues” (which is bullshit, but I’ll let it stand), then turned around and said that, if he’d known better, he’d have called the music “Rhythm and Gospel.”

“MARY DON’T YOU WEEP” SWAN SILVERTONES THE SWAN SILVERTONES VEEJAY, 1959

I know this date is going badly; I’m throwing a lot of shit at the wall. My inflections are off, I can tell. But really— you’re the only girl I haven’t lied to yet. So if you bear with me for one moment more, I’ll tie up the threads and get back to Joan Didion on self-respect.

“SLEEPWALKIN’” MODEST MOUSE BUILDING NOTHING OUT OF SOMETHING UP, 1999

Slim Harpo—the sly and slinky Louisiana bluesman who is I suppose best known for writing “Shake Your Hips,” which the Rolling Stones covered on Exile on Main Street—had a song called “Tip On In,” which went:

“TIP ON IN (PT. 1)” SLIM HARPO SLIM HARPO: THE EXCELLO SINGLES ANTHOLOGY EXCELLO 7”, 1967

Ah, lay it on me, baby— Don’t stop now! Let your hair down, baby— TLR

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We ain’t goin’ to heaven no-how. I’m ready to burn, baby— Right here and now!

I submit that what Harpo was describing is a form of despair. IMHO, “Walking with Jesus,” by Spiritualized, also describes a form of despair. J. Spaceman reworked “Walking with Jesus” obsessively, both in Spacemen 3 and Spiritualized. Here, it takes the form of a gospel song.

“WALKING WITH JESUS” SPIRITUALIZED ROYAL ALBERT HALL OCTOBER 10, 1997 LIVE ARISTA, 1998

Like “Mary Don’t You Weep,” “Time for a Witness” is a straight-up call for divine intervention. Without it, everything in the world Glenn Mercer describes is unmoored, and uncertain:

“TIME FOR A WITNESS” THE FEELIES TIME FOR A WITNESS A&M, 1991

Well it might be my salvation It might give me some disease

When Ray Charles flipped through his hymn book and find-and-replaced every instance of “Lord” with “girl,” something funny happened. Meant to be prayers, these songs kept their form, but lost a big part of their function. You can fall in love with a girl, or even pray for a girl to fall in love with. But you can’t pray to a girl, because—unlike wishes—prayers aren’t things girls go around granting. The songs Ray Charles ended up with might have been powerful, but in a strange way, they were also cut off from the source of their own power: Ray Charles is always praying because his prayers are never answered. And his prayers are never answered because he’s sitting in the wrong pew. Ray Charles, too, is in some sort of despair. And the paradoxes multiply as you zoom out to look at the music itself. Here, for instance is Michael Lyndon, writing in Ramparts

“I GOT A WOMAN” RAY CHARLES ATLANTIC 7”, 1954

twenty-something years before Kurt Cobain blew his brains out: Rock and roll is not a revolutionary music because it has never gotten beyond the articulation in this paradox. [Lydon’s just described rock musicians, and their followers, being “torn between the obvious pleasures America held out and the price paid for them”.] At best it has offered the defiance of withdrawal; its violence never amounted to more than a cry of “Don’t bother me.”

I’m going to quote a bit more from Joan Didion and (because Didion’s a hard act to follow) leave you to go about your business: If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are particularly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others is an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course I will play Francesca to your Paolo, Helen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan; no expectation is too misplaced, no role is ludicrous. At the mercy of those we cannot but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair [!] at the urgency of divining and meeting the next demand made on us.

“THANK YOU (FALLETINME BE MICE ELF AGAIN)” SLY & THE FAMILY STONE SLY & THE FAMILY STONE'S GREATEST HITS EPIC 7”, 1970

It is the phenomenon sometimes called “alienation from self.” In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt, that answering it becomes out of the question. To assign

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unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw; one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one home.

Oh, and for the record, forty-three is the best age to be because “you’ve finally begun to figure out what life might just be about, and you’re still young enough to do something about it.”

FLASH FICTION

Noah Elliot Blake How Saying Is Sometimes Saying All Is Right in This Universe On the couple’s weekly double date, Noah served a plate of young pickled herring and minced autumn herbs to snack on. Immediately, the sex vibes in the room started vibing on overdrive, meaning that Mary took off her shirt, waved a hang loose sign enthusiastically, and shouted, “Oh sweet Lord, that is pickled herring!” What else is there to say? Diane was in a similar state of arousal and she was also pantless. Kenneth, in obvious shock from the overdriving sex vibes, shook his bloodless jowls and said “Whoa. Whoa.” Though he extended a stop sign in Noah’s direction, Noah proceeded to masturbate with practiced vigor, pausing only to deliver the second course. What else is there to say? Noah’s French onion soup was a perfect success. Mary took up a bottle of banana yellow nail polish and started doing something to Diane’s ass with it. “This is a delight,” Diane screamed. “The past is undeniably non-existent outside of the present,” Noah yelled, poking Kenneth in the face with the head of his agitated penis. Meanwhile, Kenneth rocked to and fro behind Diane and giggled like a mad Barbary ape. It appeared he was in the mood at last. Throughout the dinner service, Diane hid her head under Mary’s bottom and buried a stream of exclamations there that described her sex vibe level and the altogether ordinary conditions of her upbringing. “My mother worked in a high school cafeteria! I’m as wet as April! My father was a phone man at C&P!” TLR

Mary thought this discourse very funny, as did Noah, who was also entertained with Kenneth’s novel use of the bones from his barbecued squab. “May I try that?” Noah hollered. “We are having a wonderful double date,” Kenneth hollered. What else is there to say? By dessert, a homemade white mousse mille-feuille, the couples were wearing down. Someone had set Nashville Skyline spinning on the phonograph and Bob Dylan sang “Lay Lady Lay” to a tableau of Diane and Mary lying spread on the oversized copper couch, their fingers active at some task but languorously so. Underneath Mary, Noah snored. White cream smeared on his lips, he grinned dreamily every time Diane reached over to smack his cheek with a leatherupholstered paddle. What Kenneth was doing with the cat challenged description, other than to say that the cat, a whiny tabby, was singing an awful song in response. “Your family is known for being musical,” Kenneth shrieked. “There are clear records indicating our patriarch was Mozart’s butler,” Diane cried. “The night is still ahead!” urged Bob Dylan. “I am experiencing that very warm feeling once more,” Mary squealed, her hips bucking. “Look how life persists!” What else is there to say?

A Moment of Genius

He is typing a letter to send to a former lover, one who spurned him for the son of a diplomat, a French Canadian named Xavier. He is trying to describe the oppressiveness of his days without her. He must be eloquent and avoid his inherent ardor, which unfailingly manifests in mawkishness. He stops midway into a sentence, after the phrase “like the claws of a trawling net on the ocean floor,” and though he feels satisfied with what he’s done, he knows the sentence requires a second simile to deliver the entirety of the sentiment. He can come up with nothing, but he can feel that a moment of genius is approaching. He jumps in his seat. An incredibly loud truck is passing by, honking at nothing. His windows shake even as he shakes his head at the interruption. He curses the truck and searches himself for the moment. Now the moment of genius is gone. He curses the truck once more, wondering about the species of the world he lives in, what sort could accept such a racket. He looks down at what he has typed. He reads the words “on the ocean floor a truck honks” with absolute surprise. It is now that a truck appears on some indistinct ocean floor. It honks at the relative void it finds itself within. This is when he realizes he will not mail the letter to his former lover. Then the truck honks again, louder.

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Our Father’s Brain

Our father was an unhappy doll maker who shuffled us like cards to ease his profound dissatisfaction with the course of our lives. It didn’t work. With what seemed like caprice, he tailored excellent gowns and handsome trousers for some and rag pile frocks of frayed scraps for others, and with equal caprice he forced us to exchange these garments. He told some of us who were girls that we were boys, dressed us as such, and devised unmentionable tools to enforce his decrees. In a fit of gout, he commanded Jack to leave his position as a Physical Chemistry professor and join a pool of unemployed socialists in a social action campaign against imported vegetables. He knew no limits and our concerns were nothing to his demands. Still, his mood grew fouler with every accumulated year and on his sixty-sixth birthday he began to exercise more dramatic means of stifling it. It is a fact that he amputated Laura’s hand personally and sewed it to Leon’s skull, grumbling about “the discomfiting exuberance of her obsessive knitting” and Leon’s “irresponsible menagerie of hats.” It didn’t help him one bit. In his worst tempers he spent months in crafting dolls that were no less than mutant duplicates of his own children and threw them against his workshop’s cinder block walls. Those children he had currently arranged in his dwelling would shudder at the disgusting sound of their heads bursting open. Acorns crushed under a hog’s foot. Our mothers were rain gutters he beat with a rake. Let us leave it at that. When he died the doctor told the remaining, mangled assembly of us that our father’s brain contained within it a miracle of nature. Actually, the doctor informed us, it was strictly false to associate the object with the natural world. We were flum62

moxed. The doctor invited us to have a look and eyed us smugly as we picked up his tools and sported through the gray alleyways of our father’s hideous lobes, which sat idle like symmetrical halves of a desiccated toad. Gary was the first to lose his patience. He clutched scissors in his three-fingered hand (stint as untrained sushi chef) and brought them down definitively into the brain’s center point, where they made a sudden yell and issued sparks. We looked to the doctor for explanation or encouragement. The doctor pumped his eyebrows at us. We crowded the puncture with our fingers and spread it. A circular tin door, as large as a large drain plug, sat in a rim of concrete, its gold handle addressing us proudly. We turned to the doctor again. His eyebrows moved up and down with incalculable speed, vibrating. “Go ahead,” he said. “Open the door.” One of us curled a fingernail under it, lifting the handle and dropping it. Lifting and dropping. We measured an unspeakable desire in ourselves and couldn’t breathe. Our minds cooked under the hospital halogens and deserted us. “Go ahead,” the doctor said. “Go ahead.”

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You May Tell the Story of Your Aunt’s Death

Since she died tightrope walking, because she was not a tightrope walker by trade but, more embarrassingly, by hobby, and especially seeing as how she was eaten by lions, you may tell the story of your aunt’s death like it is more comical than it is tragic. You should adhere to those details, while discarding others, such as facts about the tightrope (suspended only ten feet from the ground in accordance with safety regulations), the venue (a Missouri State Fair), the size of the audience (eleven people and one horse), and the true identity of the lion (a cougar not much larger than a mastiff, kept illegally as a pet). These, while true, either emphasize the tragic aspects of your aunt’s death or contribute ambiguously to the comedy of it, taking it from the comfort of the plainly hilarious to the realm of the abjectly absurd. With a practiced telling, you may get some hearty laughs. Expect these laughs to come uncomfortably (if at all) when you get to the part you can’t leave out: the unconscionable marriage of your aunt’s widower, your uncle by blood, to the woman who sold him his new Corvette; the marriage and car both paid for with money from the life insurance policy, as if to ensure an irresistible irony. Speaking quickly but clearly is no more essential than it is here, though much less important than keeping secret your father’s unexpected lusting for this new aunt, as it has no place in your telling at all.

POETRY

Dan Gutstein For evening

The cloud, at last, rusty, its windfield and radius. Where a manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fiddler cap blows into the lane, a woman will not pose beside the stack of grapefruit, big as shot, each, dull as a cabbage. A better day for distillation. A better day for dirty paint. Even an airplane, in distortion, squirts out of a windowpane. Passing, passing away. While antennae practice patterns of reception. Patterns of misinformation. The day so hot, it could be cold. The rain so fine, it could be snow. That couple beside the railpipe he forcing a toothy kiss onto her face, even as she twists up,

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this time, into a “Yes,” her palms pushing his curly chest— They are, by darkening, distal. A house of light.

One train pushes second train

Night gowns the siren and the trees velvet. A rusted rowboat moored to a wood, the rusted cab of an old automobile asleep in a field of winter wheat, heat rising from the dirt and what slows. A man and his inventory. Around him: Molt, malt. It is not Erie, Penna., it is not Lexington, Kent., it is not Juneau, Alas. If Wobble Theory could explain (genetics) then it would be Wobble, simply, or magnetics, and fire does not catch beneath the switchback. What has demographics? A battery of cinquefoil in rolling territory before illness of climate or a frequency, nevertheless, among crisp stars, or a pocketful of miscellaneous treasury notes. Offclap is to sensuous as concuss is to marmalade. Already the highway warms and the storm will not dedicate the bulk of its might. The houses huddle, how newspapers clap lattice-work and the dream will not record. A boy stops a commuter train by throwing a heavy rock that cartwheels, thunka, along car-tops while a switch engine tugs a line of hoppers, thunka, bearing enough ballast to weight most intentions. The city will diffract. It will date and it will deliver. Graffiti reads “Bitches & Blunts” on the west side of a brick warehouse in a precinct either jerrybuilt or gerrymandered. Doors and their penumbrae. One half shade one half bright shade one half seething over the instability of markets. Could be go go bucket, could be street music. The uneasy graves beside an access road. The dead will not have to tolerate the cheesy name—Gateway to blah blah—of the cemetery but they will decay, if that means the various tides of durable particles. The clay in blood, the ebb in stones, as if the wind were hidden amongst our apologies. TLR

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ESSAY

Katherine Lien Chariott Daughters Made of Dust (Collateral Damage)

SNAPSHOT, 1977

Here is a picture. There are four little girls standing on the couch, lined up by height. The one on the end is the smallest of all. She stares straight into the camera, her hand clutching her friend’s, her features matching her friends’. That one face is repeated and repeated and repeated down the line, with only the tiniest of differences. But tiny differences matter, today, so focus on the girl we began with. Look at her closely, and you will see that her face is actually a collage of two other, too-different faces (the same with her friends, of course, but don’t worry about them, just yet): you will see the girl’s mother in the anxious brown of her eyes, in the curve of her cheek; you will see her father in the white of her skin, in the shape of her nose. The combination of these unseen lovers is a good one, you think, though not everyone would agree, certainly not the girl’s grandparents, certainly not the grandparents of her friends. Take a look at those friends now; let your eyes travel down that couch. All four of the girls are so very pretty, but the way they stand is nothing like the pretty girls you have known all your life. They are too awkward, their postures too full of shame, their bodies somehow guessing already things that will take them years to know, and even longer (maybe forever) to understand. But you see this picture through my eyes, so you know more about those little girls than they can, and understand still more than that. You know, for instance, that they are lucky, so unbelievably lucky, to be where they are at that moment. Maybe this is why you can see in that picture things that they are too foolish to feel: the gratitude in their expressions, the prayer in their poses, the way they silently thank God for their spots on that couch on an 68

army base in Japan, instead of in the place that should have been home, where their own families would have shrunk from the accusation that is written on their faces. Oh, their mother’s land, which will never be theirs (thank God for this mercy), that place where their own people would have blamed them for crimes that happened before they were born. SNAPSHOT, 1988

Here is another picture. It is of a typical American house with a typical American girl outside it. Both are unremarkable, but both are surely worth a little of your time. Look at the pinkish-grey brick face and the beige aluminum siding; that heartbreaking chunk of American Dream that occupies exactly one quarter of an acre of America. Look at that girl sitting on the front step of that house, at her squinted eyes underneath a hand that fights to block out the sun, and all that the sun would reveal. She is looking out at the houses that surround her (her own house repeated and repeated and repeated, with only the tiniest of differences, too little difference, she is sure, to ever really matter). That girl’s thoughts are written on her face, but they are written in no language that you can understand, so let me read them for you. She is remembering one day in particular. (She remembers it too well; she will always remember some things too well, while those things she would like to hold on to slip from her grasp, even though she clings to them with an eagerness that is embarrassing.) She is remembering the evening she spent in the family room of the house that she sits outside of now, sprawled out on the floor with a book open in front of her, while her father sat on the couch, with a man from her mother’s country. As her father talked with the stranger, the girl kept her face down, and didn’t show that she was listening (never showed that she had heard or understood, later, either— but that’s another story), embarrassed and confused, suddenly, by her own features, embarrassed and confused by her father, who answered question after question with lies. Without moving, she listened as her mother’s hometown, that poor little village, was transformed into the capital city; as the army base where her parents met became a school and her barely-schooled mother a teacher. That girl (she is our girl) stayed motionless on the floor with her unread novel in front of her (she couldn’t bring herself to move, not even her eyes), as, in the same room, her parents’ love story was rewritten into one so unbelievable that her mother (in the kitchen? or right next to her?) laughed nervously, and her father’s familiar voice became strangely foreign. (But surely it was foreign all along.) The story her father told that night was so very unbelievable, in fact, that the girl understood against her own will that it wasn’t to TLR

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be believed, any more than the love story that her parents had told her since forever (they had told it so many times, as if by repetition alone they could make it the truth) could ever be believed again. Yes, that is the day she is thinking of now, but the fear she felt then (oh, God, it was more like panic) is gone, leaving in its place an anger that only boils into rage when she can’t stop herself from asking what the real story must be, a sadness that only becomes desperation

Look at the pinkish-grey brick face and the beige aluminum siding; that heartbreaking chunk of American Dream that occupies exactly one quarter of an acre of America.

when she can’t stop herself from answering her own terrible question, when she loses, yet again, her daily war against knowing what shouldn’t be true. She can’t stop herself now. She can’t stop herself. That much is clear just by looking at her face. Look at it. Look at the defiant line of her mouth (lips closed tight against words that she must never speak); look at the expression in her anxious brown eyes (they beg you not to make her see the truth that her father and mother tried to hide). SNAPSHOT, 1999

Now it is time for a picture that will probably confuse you. At first, it will seem more like a picture of a place than like a picture of a person, because the image of the woman in front is distorted by movement, while the background is perfectly still, perfectly clear. Focus on the background first, then (it is easier to understand, anyway). You will see an ordinary luxury hotel, the only clue that it is in another country the oriental writing on the sign. A completely ordinary luxury hotel, with no clue whatsoever in its design to tell you that it stands in the middle of a street that was once the middle of a red-light district where foreigners (where Americans, like you, and like me, can you believe it), came to rest and relax, when they took their vacations from war. But you are lucky, today, because you don’t need any clues, because you see with my eyes, straight into the past. Look with me. The hotel is gone, and the street is crowded with people. It is crowded with men, some of them little more than boys, and it is crowded with women, all of them nothing more than girls. Try to pick out individuals if you want to (I know that you will), but, try though you might, you will certainly fail, because there are really only two people on that street, since every man is the same man (don’t worry about who, who doesn’t matter: he has become nothing but color, green, for his money, or for his uniform) and every woman is the same woman (a 70

black-haired girl whose face would look remarkably familiar to you if you could only see it more clearly). That man and that woman are repeated again and again, with too little difference to matter, with such little difference, in fact, that it is hardly worth mentioning at all, a double repetition so powerful that it pushes out of the past, and straight into the present. A double repetition so powerful that even the woman in the foreground of this picture is nothing more than another version of that pair from the background. You could see them both in her face, if she would only keep still. But stillness (inside and out) is an art she has lost, so her features (their features) are blurred by the shaking of her head. That woman (she is our woman) is saying no to two memories at once. The first, a story her father once told her about coming to this very same street, back when it was what it should never have been, a story that she will never understand how a man could tell his own child. The second, a story her mother once told her about this very same street, and that very same time, a story the woman will never understand how a mother could tell her own child. Our woman shakes her head no against words she can fight but will always remember (the only ones she has managed to forget are her own, but, then again, maybe she never actually spoke them, how could she have made even a dumb animal noise after what he said—“between twelve and eighteen,” after what she said—“don’t tell anyone, ever”). She shakes her head no so that all you can see of her are her mother’s dark hair and her father’s pale skin, the closed-shut eyes of a woman who will protect herself at all costs from things she does not want to see, though they are written all over her face, and in her own blood. Look at that face closely, even in this blurriest of shots, they are striking: those fiercely shut eyes. They belong to a woman who knows herself so little that she can’t guess the true reason she still doesn’t see what she must. She doesn’t yet know what we know: that she was blinded before birth, collateral damage from her own country’s war. SNAPSHOT, 2008

This is the last picture, the one we have been waiting for. The one that promises to explain everything. It is of a woman, standing on a street in the middle of a city that could exist only in Asia, you know this with one glance. Which Asian city you are looking at, the picture does not reveal, but which city, exactly, is unimportant (for in some ways too many of those cities are just the same city repeated, over and again, with too little difference to matter), so you can use your imagination this time, instead of relying on my memory. The city is yours to create, but the woman on the street you must let me create for you. She is small, shorter than you are, and thin TLR

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enough so that her body has more in common with the bodies of the women on these streets than the women on the streets of the country she came from. She has long dark hair and dark, sad eyes, that are almost (but not quite) at home here, as well. But that is all you can know of her, because the rest of her features are half-hidden by her own hands. Those hands are raised, palms outward, in a double refusal. (Maybe they want to stop the photographer. Or maybe they want to conceal the evidence behind them. To hide her too-obvious face, with those features that make people doubt her when she says she is an American, from prying eyes like yours that are intent on searching out secret meanings, and reading secret messages. Or maybe, really, those hands just want to cover her own mouth, so that her own poor voice cannot betray her by becoming like mine, a voice that insists on saying too much, on speaking those things that promises should prevent.) She covers her face with her hands, but donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t worry: they are powerless to protect her. We know this woman at once (this is what she fears). She is the blurry head, saying no from that last shot, just as she is the women and the men in front of the hotel, her mother and father on that crowded street, just barely visible in the background of that very same shot. She is the girl in front of the house in America, from the shot before that. She is the child on the sofa in Japan, from the very first picture I showed you, that littlest one on the end, the one who started this all. More than that: she is herself on that hectic Asian street, a woman now, and all that the word means, and she is another woman, and another woman, and another woman, too. (Her friends from that couch, maybe, grown up and grown out of her life, so long disappeared it is amazing even to her that she remembers them still, amazing even to me that she will always remember them.) She is herself repeated and repeated and repeated (too many times for me to understand), but with the tiniest differences, standing on similar streets in similar Asian cities, all of them invisible to you. She is too many women (they have all gone back to their mothersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; countries, back to their beginnings, or maybe they have gone to the country of that terrible war, which is also their beginning, what a surprise for them when they finally understood that), all of them trembling with rage, and trembling with pity, trembling with sorrow and shame. Every single one of those women thinking the very same thoughts (oh why did I come here, oh how will I ever leave), at the same moment, or maybe ten years in the past, or ten years in the future. All of those women, somehow, become children once more, as they try at the same time, as they try across time, to understand what it could possibly mean to be born one of the very luckiest of an unlucky race. Try to understand with them what it means to be

this: a child of West crashing into East, the daughter of a mother who made love out of money (she was only a girl, God help us all, because surely he will never forgive us such an unholy alchemy), when the country that would, amazingly, someday be hers and her daughterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s (it is our country, too) decided to make war.

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POETRY

O n tio di rg t E .o in ew Pr vi in ryre e bl era ila lit va the .A . nt ww te w on . C Now ed e ur ib at cr Fe bs Su

Daneen Wardrop A Walk Is a Way Not To Ask

This afternoon, motel streets, the thin brown tape ripped from a cassette tangled in a branch, brown tinsel in the sun. Let the wind blow the right way,

from a different planet, maybe, and it would run like a tongue across, to hear Eddie Vedder’s voice, “Don’t Call Me Daughter,” as we walk by. You could spangle the street with tinsel, tree by tree— an aeolian planet brooding under three striped moons revolving the wind, playing tangled songs—

the innertube slapping afternoons, at the park, the lake someone has breathed on, and you go out that day without circumspection, worries lying deep in sidewalk cracks, day ordinary as moon under your fingernails.

It shouldn’t be so hard, keeping in tune, when the wind knows how, when every preteen knows a song’s riff:

SHORT STORY

Kelly Luce Rooey

Since Rooey died, I’m no longer myself. Foods I’ve hated my entire life, I crave. Different things are funny. I’ve stopped wearing a bra. I bet they’re thinking about firing me here at work, but they must feel bad, my brother so recently dead and all. Plus, I’m cheap labor, fresh out of college. And let’s face it, the Sweetwater Weekly doesn’t have the most demanding readership or publishing standards. You can tell they’re trying to be sensitive: along with the police blotter and wedding announcements, I’d covered obituaries; afterwards they gave the obituaries to Ryan the intern so I wouldn’t have to think about death all day. I do anyway. Bloody violent death, wakes and funerals and the way a person’s eyes look right before they die, how when you try to close them they don’t stay closed like in the movies. I’ve started adding things to the blotter, things that never happened but that he’d find funny, and the chimp wedding announcement I slipped in—photo included—didn’t get caught until right before press. A few days ago I tried logging into Rooey’s email and got the password on the first guess. (It was “Miyazaki,” his favorite animator. Like a lot of teenage boys, Rooey was obsessed with Japan. When we tagged our suitcases for Hawaii, he’d spelled his name “Rui.” He’d even figured how to write his name in Japanese using the characters for “drifting” and “majesty.”) Now I check his email all the time. I’ve just logged in when Myra, the assistant editor, comes by my cubicle. She’s wearing the same man’s button-down shirt as always. “Hi, hon.” Even when she smiles she keeps her lips pressed tightly together. I’ve never seen her teeth. 80

“Hi.” She opens her mouth and closes it like she’s changed her mind about something. “Maxine, how are you doing?” “Oh, you know. It’s good to keep busy with real challenging tasks at work, like typing up wedding announcements.” She sighs and looks at me pityingly. “I wanted to talk to you about that.” I stare at the screen. She shakes her head and lowers her voice. “I got your point with the monkey thing, okay? I thought it would be best to lighten your workload, but obviously that’s not working. So, Maxine, how about a cover story?” “Great.” I empty Rooey’s spam folder. The screen looks clean and expectant. “Really?” “Sure.” My phone chimes, announcing the arrival of a text message. She nods harder than necessary and says, “Well, great then! Why don’t you think it over this week and we can chat about it on Friday. I’m sure you’re full of ideas. Sound good?” “Sounds great, thank you,” I say, because that’s what the old Maxine would’ve said. Here’s a story: two people are in trouble and the wrong one dies. There’s been a cosmic mix-up, but there’s nothing anyone can do about it, and they all live sadly ever after. The end. I snap open my phone and read Felix’s message. It says “Uijoljoh pg zpv.” He’s used this code before. The trick is that each letter is really the one before it. It says “thinking of you.” I write back “V 3” for “U 2,” close the phone, and go back to my email. I walk to Felix’s after work. He rents a garden apartment which means he lives halfunderground and there’s not much light, but it’s cheap. When we save enough we’re supposed to get a place together, somewhere up high. Back before Rooey started high school our family lived near here, across from the tracks on Burlington in a house with an above-ground pool and a pop-up camper that never moved from the backyard. Mom said she and dad had used it all the time and that I’d taken a few trips in it too, but I don’t remember them and by the time Rooey came along dad was dead and I didn’t remember him, either. There was a small door we could use to squeeze into the camper even when it wasn’t popped up and we’d take turns locking one another inside. The object was to TLR

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see how long we could stay in before getting scared and knocking to come out. We called the game Coffin. It was pitch-black inside the camper and the air was stuffy and smelled of hot wool. Once—I think I was mad because mom had let Rooey get away with something, again—I didn’t let him out when he gave the triple-knock. He tried again. There was a moment of silence that I took to be him getting pissed, and I smiled. Then he started pounding, and after a few seconds, screaming. I fumbled with the lock while the door shuddered. “LEEEET MEEEE OOUUUUT!” “Hang on!” When the door finally swung open my little brother fell out onto his side, his face white save for two spots of color on his cheeks. He stared at me in disbelief, his brown eyes watery. When he stood and came at me, I didn’t fight back. I let him flail his fists and scream himself hoarse. Eventually we played something else. He didn’t tell mom—he never did. That was the last time we played Coffin. There are six stairs leading down to Felix’s door. When I get to the bottom I’m always aware of how much of me is below ground. It’s like a very wide grave, this apartment. Recently I’ve had to fight the urge to turn around and go back up. Felix is cooking with his back to the door and doesn’t hear me come in. He’s got his khakis on from work and no shirt. He has what he calls a “techie tan” which means he is white like recycled paper. He works at an internet dating company fixing the employees’ computers. He finds it exciting. He finds almost anything exciting. It’s probably why I like him. I watch his papery back at the stove and think, he is biodegradable. Then I think that his body mirrors the apartment, the bottom buried and the top exposed to light. He turns and sees me and sings, “Ma-a-a-axine! You don’t have to put on the red light!” I smile and he takes my face in his hands and kisses me loudly. His lips are mushy like old pillows. We have pesto for dinner and he talks about how he managed to solve three peoples’ problems without even showing up at their cubicles.

He looks at me solemnly and I notice his pores. When did they get so big? On his nightstand, turned upsidedown, is a book: When a Loved One Grieves.

“If people would just troubleshoot, it would save so much time. A simple logical process, that’s all it takes!” Since Rooey died, Felix has become even more enthusiastic, maybe to make up for my silences. I tell him about the cover story. He wants to celebrate so we get in bed and drink a bottle of champagne under the covers. “I’m feeling better.” “Yeah?” “About Rooey.” “Good!” “I think I’m getting over it. I think I’m done crying.” “Wow! Well. You know. Take your time. There’s no time limit.” He looks at me solemnly and I notice his pores. When did they get so big? On his nightstand, turned upside-down, is a book: When a Loved One Grieves. “Have you thought any more about trying therapy?” he asks. “Not my thing.” “I know you believe that, but how can you know if you don’t try?” “I’d rather not talk about this stuff right now. Okay?” I slip my hand in his boxers. I could care less about sex with Felix lately and now is no different, but at least it will shut him up. I wonder how he’ll react if I tell him to fuck me, so I whisper it—“I want you to fuck me”—and he blushes; we’ve never used this word before and I realize he doesn’t necessarily know how it differs from what we usually do, what he always refers to as “making love.” But he gives it a shot. He gets on top of me, sticks it in, and buries his face in my neck, biting me, I think, though I can’t be sure. “Harder,” I tell him, squirming a bit, and he tries to pin my arms over my head while holding himself up with one hand, but he loses balance and folds down on top of me. His face finds my armpit for a second and his nose wrinkles up. I sniff under my arm. “Whew. Kind of manly, I know.” He smiles. “No big deal.” “I’ve been using Rooey’s deodorant.” “Oh.” He pauses, traces my bellybutton with his middle finger. “Why?” “Works better. And it doesn’t smell like flowers.” “What’s wrong with flowers?” I shrug. “They’re so girly.” TLR

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We fall asleep. I dream I’m alone, bobbing in a black sea. I don’t know which way to swim and the bottom’s miles below. A fin appears in the distance. I swim away from it, but it catches up and as it gets closer I see it’s Rooey and I see in his eyes that he hates me. I watch helplessly as he speeds closer, teeth and gums bared, and when he finally reaches me there’s a flare of heat in my neck, and afterwards a sensation like dissolving. Only when I give in do I wake up. That giving in is a release so powerful I find myself sitting up in bed, heaving. That giving in is the saddest feeling in the world. It’s been three months and three days. Mom hasn’t touched up her strawberry blond dye job since the attack and the dark roots are like a measuring stick: her grief is lengthening. She sleeps all morning and spends her afternoons shopping and preparing elaborate dinners. She cooks things Rooey liked—curry pork, eggplant parmesan. I’ve come to find comfort in this and, for once in my life, I eat everything on my plate. Mom is the opposite. Once, after filling our plates with salmon ragout, she sat down and stared at the table’s empty seats, two of them now, as if she were expecting guests who were running late. I had no words to offer up; I shoveled down the over-salted food and sat there as long as I could stand it, then stood and cleared her untouched plate. While Rooey looked just like dad, I resemble no one. My face is a little of this, little of that, like a meal thrown together last-minute. When we ran into old friends of my parents’, they would make a fuss over Rooey. “A carbon copy of Dean,” mom would say, mussing my brother’s blond moppy curls. Then they’d turn to me and joke about the milkman. School was my redemption. I was a member of the National Honor Society, Vice-President of the Ecology Club, and a varsity swimmer. When Rooey and mom came to my swim meets they’d always sit in the same place, at the top of the bleachers, laughing and eating Reese’s Pieces. Tearing through the water on the final leg of a race, I would think of them watching me and swim harder, muscles screaming, knowing that if I won, I would for a moment be the focus; I would fill that tiny space between them. At the wake I talked about taking Rooey for driving practice last Christmas. For a kid who liked cars so much, he was a horrible driver. He made a joke out of it. Before leaving the house he’d preface everything with, “Allah willing.” It was an expression he picked up from a movie. “When we come back from driving, Allah willing, let’s get mom to take us to Culver’s.” “Allah willing, I’m gonna parallel park 84

this baby, hard.” It was a testament to Rooey’s good nature that he was able to mock himself, I said; even more than that, though, he never seemed to get discouraged. He had confidence in life; he never whined. The part about “Allah willing” got a laugh. What I didn’t talk about was how mad I’d been when mom told me I’d have to give Rooey my car when I moved out. The Nissan had been a hand-me-down from my grandparents and I’d had it less than a year. I never had a car when I was his age, I’d argued. It wasn’t fair. But Rooey solved the problem—he didn’t want my car. He wanted an old Thunderbird and he got a job helping Roger, a Buddhist hippie guy who lived down the block, in his metalwork shop to earn the money for it. He was a hard kid to resent, and for that, I have to admit, I resented him even more. Rooey’s door has been closed since I got back from Hawaii. Mom’s not ready to open it yet. “It’s too much of him at once,” she told me, crying at the mere mention of his name. But me, I can’t get enough. I’ve been coming in here every night. I lie in bed and wait until mom’s sleeping pills kick in, then creep over the cracked Parquet to his room, my feet instinctively avoiding the creaky spots that, when we were little, would give us away as we snuck into the kitchen after brushing our teeth for a handful of Reese’s Pieces from the green jar. The room is stuffy and smells vaguely of peanut butter. When he was in grade school Rooey had insisted on painting his walls to look like outer space; I had painted Jupiter and Neptune and Rooey’d done the rest, except Earth, which mom did, and after the paint dried Rooey etched our tiny trio in ballpoint pen where he approximated Indiana to be. I haven’t been in here in years but I notice now there’s a tiny chip of paint missing where my head once was. I flop onto his bed and try to imagine what it was like to be him. Rooey’d had something of a girlfriend, though we never called her that; she was just “his friend” Lily. Her parents came here from Japan right before she was born, and gave her a name neither of them could pronounce. Once I walked in on Rooey and her together, in bed. Or rather on the bed—they lay belly-up beside one another, Lily’s arms at her sides, the hand nearest Rooey touching both her leg and his. Rooey’s hands were folded atop his stomach. They both stared at the ceiling. She was a strange-looking girl, with a tiny pucker of a mouth and hair to her waist. Her eyes and nose were just little pinches too, and you wondered how her head didn’t tip back under the weight of all that hair. She had braces—maybe that helped balance things out. At the funeral she cried and covered not her eyes but her mouth. TLR

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The entire night passes this way, me, flat on his bed as if afloat, my mind full of details, all the questions I’d never thought to ask him: what was happening with Lily, and whether he had a clue what he was doing; how his job was going at the metalworking shop; was he any good at the work? The stucco swirls above me, lit by the half moon outside. Then that spot of ceiling, that personal place where the eyes rest when you’re thinking in the dark, whispers answers: Things with Lily were slow moving, excruciating, thrilling; they’d French kissed once after school and it tasted salty; if he were still alive he’d take her to see a movie when he got his T-Bird. When things got serious he’d make her something in the metal shop, a figurine of some kind, and give it to her for her birthday. He was good at transferring the molds and pouring and measuring and scraping, all the intricate business of making casts. He had the patience for it. When the first gray light struggles into the room I open my eyes, or maybe it just feels like I’m opening them, since I haven’t really slept. I wouldn’t call what I do in this room at night “sleep.” It’s more like a nocturnal hypnosis that only clears when the sun comes snapping its fingers. I stand up and go to the closet. CD album covers shingle the door and partially obscure the mirror hanging there. At eye level is the cover for the Vapor’s “Turning Japanese” single I gave Rooey for Christmas last year. I pull the door open and cool, sour-smelling air drifts out. Rooey’s favorite tee shirt hangs crooked on a wooden hanger. The shirt is gray and is noticeably shorter than the other shirts that hang there. The turquoise lettering on the front says “POCARI SWEAT.” He’d come home from school late one day, having stopped and bought it at Teed Off, the tee shirt place downtown. He said he’d looked online—he was always looking up something online—and read that Pocari Sweat was like Japanese Gatorade, and when he called Lily and told her about it she’d laughed and laughed; Rooey held the phone away from his ear and I could hear her from across the room. I yank the shirt from its hanger and put it on. Then I lie on the bed and slide two fingers under the waist of my panties. I don’t fantasize anymore when I masturbate. It’s just a lot of furious rubbing, no imagination required, though sometimes towards the end an image of Lily, sunbathing naked, pops into my mind. Before Rooey died, my orgasms had come in sweet, rolling waves. Now they’re like squalls, the pleasure almost violent. Afterwards I think about my cover story. There was a time, I realize, when I fan-

tasized about this opportunity—my name on the front page, a color photo illustrating my words—but the ideas I used to toss around aren’t appealing anymore. Profile piece on the owner of Ambrosia, the green grocer? A report on the solar-powered nunnery out in Teastown? When did I ever find that interesting? For a moment I think it’d be cool to write something on the guy in town with the Porsche Carrera GT. A half-million dollar car in this town—now that’s news. I close my eyes and imagine I’m driving an incredibly fast car on a circular track, around and around, on the brink of losing control. The trip to Hawaii had been a graduation gift from my grandma. I’d chosen to bring Rooey over Felix because, as I saw it, Rooey and I were at the end of our shared childhood. I was moving out, leaving him for the real world. I wanted to hang on to that life just a little longer. The screaming had stopped quickly. I turned toward him, saw the gray sheen of the shark’s body, saw the red rising in the water—it spread so fast. It expanded around me in rusty clouds. Wait—am I okay? I wondered how I would tell mom that he was dead, and who would pay for the funeral. Punch it. If I punch it it will bite me and it will hurt. How would they see me—had I done enough? They tell me I did the right thing, swimming ashore and yelling for help, but I don’t remember this. I remember sounds: a scream, a moan, then the sloshing of water like kids in a bathtub; I could hear children laughing on the sand while Rooey’s head went under and his forearm drifted away from blond hair that clung to the surface; the fingers that had reached up from the bottom bunk brushed my abdomen while I watched ragged strips of tissue jet blood. I remember turning and swimming away. That I headed for the shore was purely coincidence. I must have dozed off, because when I open my eyes a few hours have passed and I’m thinking of Lily. Her long dark hair, and the way she locks eyes with you when she laughs. My chest aches, and I realize: I miss her. It’s a weird feeling, missing someone I barely know, yet when I think about it, it seems odd I’d feel any other way. Why don’t I go for a visit? I look around the room for something to bring her. I look down and—that’s it—I’ll give her the shirt—the shirt she’d laughed over so much! I walk there, swinging the CVS bag that holds the tee shirt. I’m walking quickly, looking up at the clouds as I go, wondering what Lily will have to say, and whether

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she’ll be glad to see me. A car horn blasts. I jump back and a woman in a Jeep waves me across the street I’d been about to step into. I hustle across, blushing. I’m glad to have an excuse to rush, and I jog the last block to Lily’s house. Mrs. Mizukami answers the door. She’s wearing bright orange slippers. Her mouth drops open at the sight of me, and she keeps a hand on the doorknob as I remind her who I am, though of course we’ve met before. I hold up the bag, full of nervous energy. She ushers me into a dim living room full of ferns, and looks at me with sad eyes. I want to say, don’t be sad! Things are going to be fine, really! Mrs. Mizukami leads me into the kitchen, where Lily is seated at the table, doing homework. She scoots her chair back when she sees me and stands up. I can tell she’s surprised, and I say so. “Yeah!” she says, taking me in. “But, you know, in a good way.” She doesn’t say anything else, but she smiles. Mrs. Mizukami sets a glass of iced tea and a plate of cookies on the table. “Please, sit,” she says, and we do. She shuffles out of the room. “I’m sorry I interrupted your homework,” I say. “I should have called.” “Nah, it’s okay.” Lily pushes an open textbook away and leans both elbows on the table. “Math sucks anyway.” I ask her about school. I watch her mouth move as she answers, then follow the smooth line of her hair down, over her small breasts, to where it puddles in her lap, like a waterfall. I want to touch it. “Are you okay?” she says, leaning back. “Yeah, sorry.” I blush, and fish for something an older sister would say. “Your hair’s great. I wish I could grow mine that long.” She makes a face and bats her hair back, then picks up a pair of red-handled scissors from the table. “I think I’m gonna chop it.” “What? No! It—it’s so pretty.” “Whatever. It’s been long my whole life.” She gathers a fistful. “Time for something new.” I laugh nervously as she slides the scissors open, brings the blades to her hair. “Very funny,” I say. She’s watching me, eyes wide, and then snaps the scissors shut. I lurch out of my chair to stop her, and she laughs. She’d moved the blades at the last second. “I made you pretty nervous,” she said, grinning.

I lean back and take a breath. “You had me for a second. Well, maybe a halfsecond.” “Well, I still might do it.” She pulls a few strands forward and really does snip them off. We watch them float to the ground. She says, “It could be like . . . an offering.” “But—wouldn’t he want you to keep it?” She shrugs. “He’s not here to ask.”

I close my eyes and imagine I’m driving an incredibly fast car on a circular track, around and around, on the brink of losing control.

I look at the hair on the floor and am seized by a desire to pinch it up and hold onto it forever. Then I remember the shirt. I grab for the bag and dump out the tee shirt in front of her. “So, I brought this for you. I thought you might like to have it.” She stares at the balled-up fabric and bites her lip. She blinks back tears, and I lean over and hug her tight. I close my eyes. We rock together, her head on my shoulder and my face in her hair. It feels wonderful. I move my hand on her back, hold her tighter. “Can I—” Mrs. Mizukami slippers back into the kitchen. Lily and I spring apart like two kids caught necking. “Beg your pardon,” Mrs. Mizukami says, bowing slightly and backing out of the room. “I just wondered if I could give you more food.” “No, mom,” Lily says. “No thank you,” I say as she leaves, and though I haven’t touched them I call, “The cookies are delicious, though.” Lily and I look at each other. She looks at her lap. “I should get going,” I say. She nods. “Thank you,” she says, standing up, grasping the shirt with one fist. I stand up too. At the front door, I put my shoes on and say goodbye to Mrs. Mizukami. Lily steps outside with me. “It’s nice to see you,” she says. “Just, you know, a surprise. Sorry I’m all crying and stuff. I mean, he was your brother.” “It’s good to see you too. Someone he was close to, who he really liked. He was very picky about people, you know.” We laugh; she nods and sniffles and catches my eye.

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“I dunno, this is weird, but when you walked in, I thought it was him. I could’ve sworn it. Isn’t that messed up?” I shake my head. “I think I see him all the time.” She nods, bites her lip. “I just . . . miss him.” I think of them lying on the narrow bed together, touching without acknowledging it, and think of me lying there with her instead, what that might feel like. I want to tell her this, but what would I say? She’s looking at me again, really focusing, like she’s looking for something she dropped. She takes a deep breath, shakes her head, and hands me the shirt. “You should really keep this.” I say no and reach for it anyway. “Really, I’m definitely sure.” Her eyes are watering, her tiny nose pink, as she backs into the door. It’s shut, and she fumbles for the handle while keeping her eyes on me. “Thanks again.” She turns the handle and takes a step backwards, into the shadows. “I’ll see you around.” “Yeah,” I say, and force a grin, a wave with the shirt. “Allah willing!” I walk home slowly. It’s only September, but the sidewalk’s already full of leaves that crunch underfoot. It seems like the leaves are always falling. I don’t know how the trees keep up. It’s Friday. My meeting with Myra is not going well. “I’m not saying the story on Metalfest is a bad idea,” she’s saying. “At all. Just not right for our readership.” I can tell she’s not wearing a bra under her light blue blouse. I wonder what her nipples look like. “How about the comic book convention?” “Well . . . I mean, it could work, my only concern is that, well, it raises the same issue as the music festival. Japanese comic books are certainly popular these days, but for most of our subscribers . . .” She licks her lips, slowly. Her tongue is plump and pink and her lips shine. “You know,” she continues when I don’t respond, “didn’t you mention something once about a profile of that lady who owns Ambrosia?” Something is happening inside me, a wild building energy like a wave. The AP report had read like a Mad Libs: “Died of blood loss.” Nope: Cardiac arrest. 90

“Swimming alone.” Wrong: It could’ve been me. “The victim was sixteen years old.” Wrong again: he was fifteen. If he’d been sixteen he probably would’ve stayed home, peeling around corners with his friends. He’d be a different person. He’d be alive. “Oh, fuck it,” I say. “Fuck journalism.” Myra jerks back in her chair. “I don’t give a shit,” I say. I get up and walk away, all the way to the door, and out into the blinding afternoon sunlight. On the drive home I get a text from Felix. “rinned ta iva lebla?” it says. I’ve been avoiding Felix since our awkward night in bed and whatever the message means— probably an invitation of some sort—I’m not in the mood to figure it out. “Call u later,” I respond. When I get home, mom’s not there. I go to Rooey’s room, the only place that really feels like my own anymore. The shelves are lined with Japanese comics and language learning manuals. I slide one of the thin books from the shelf. In the cover illustration a blue-haired, starry-eyed girl holding a red ball reaches out to a boy swathed in tentacles. The boy’s teeth are clenched, his face fierce. The girl is saying, “Swallow this orb to reverse the spell!” The title is 101 Japanese Phrases You’ll Never Use. My phone rings: Myra. I don’t pick up and she leaves a voicemail suggesting that I take a week off, “to think things over.” She wants me to know that I am in everyone’s prayers. As soon as I’m done listening to her message, Felix beeps in and I answer without thinking. “Hey,” he says. “You didn’t call.” “Oh yeah. Sorry. I got sidetracked.” “Everything okay?” “More or less.” He’s silent for a second, then says, “Did you figure out my text?” “Oh. No, I forgot.” “Aw. Well I was suggesting dinner at Via Bella. We haven’t been there since our anniversary. I’m going through withdrawal.” He laughs. “Ah.” “It was an anagram,” he adds. I pick up Rooey’s guitar, a red electric with frets worn down past the grain. “Can I call you back in a few minutes?” TLR

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“Sure, babe.” I hang up and cradle the guitar. Despite all my accomplishments in school, music has always eluded me. Band’s the only activity I’ve ever quit. But Rooey’s guitar feels right. Its slim weight against my chest is a comfort and the curved wood nestles into my thigh. The neck is thin and the strings soft. I know no chords but find it soothing to close my eyes and let my hands wander, the smooth woodgrain cradling my fingertips, and occasionally I hit upon a combination of strings that sounds like a choir. When it gets too late to have dinner, Felix texts me, Are you OK? I pick up 101 Japanese Phrases You’ll Never Use, open it to a random page, and respond back with the first sentence I see: Ebi wa dashi ni yuukan na tatakaimasu ne! It means: How valiantly the shrimp struggle in the broth! They’d held Mass at my grandparents’ church. While the deacon said things like, “The Lord takes first whom he loves best” and “To die young is a blessing,” images of that day slide-showed through my mind—Rooey’s head, just above water, snapping back on his neck, Rooey’s eyes wide and black as he had looked at me that last time, while I treaded water a few feet away. I wondered if he knew he was dying, that when he closed his eyes on the pain, they would never reopen. I thought of this as the deacon droned, as my mother’s pale jaw clenched and unclenched, her eyes like ice—she had not cried yet—and I stood up in the pew and whispered, “Bullshit.” My voice rang through the church. I began to sob, and the sound echoed off the rafters and the stained glass window where Jesus hung on the cross with a trickle of blood on his palm and a serene smile on his face. Him, not me, though I was just ten feet away. Him, not me, though it had been my idea to swim out that far in a race we both knew I’d win. Not me, though I’d been on my period that day. It doesn’t take much blood to draw a shark. I stood there, shaking, everything in slow motion, while the deacon wrapped up the homily, in his calm gravelly voice, and I only began to move when he descended from the podium. He never looked in our direction. When I sat down, my mother shed her first tear. I’m still playing the guitar when there’s a knock on the front door. I go to answer it: Felix. He looks worried. “Hey,” he says. What’s going on?” I shrug. 92

“Can I come in?” I let him in and lead him into Rooey’s room. We sit on the bed and he looks around. His gaze stops on me. I don’t meet his eyes. It’s not a comfortable silence, but it’s not uncomfortable, either. “I’ve never been in here before.” “I like it here.” He nods, slowly. “I realized that message was in Japanese, Romanized, so I translated it but I don’t know if I got the words all right because sometimes there are a few different meanings for the same word.” “Good job,” I say, and pick up the guitar. He grunts. I strum indiscriminately and suddenly he throws his arms around my neck. “Max, I feel like I’m losing you.” I let myself be held by this guy who feels at once familiar and strange. Finally I say, “I saw Lily today.” “Oh yeah? Where at?” “Her house.” “You went over there? That was nice. How is she?” Cute, I want to say. Crazy cute and wonderful. Instead I say, “I can see the attraction.” He laughs. “That’s good, I guess. Did you talk much about Rooey?” I shrug. “A little.” “She misses him too. It’s good to talk about it.” “Yeah. If only there was a way to bring him back.” He hugs me tighter. “Have a do-over. Let mom keep the child she really needs. And Lily. Let everyone keep the person they really need.” “Max, don’t say that. Your mom needs you now more than ever.” “That’s not really true. You can’t understand.” He pulls away and looks at me. “Make me understand,” he says. I shake my head. I feel dizzy. “I just want to help.” “You can’t fix me,” I say. “I can try.” I sigh. “It’s like . . . I’m a different person.” He nods. “After what you went through, that’s totally normal. Of course this will change you. It’s okay to let it change you.” TLR

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“I’m afraid.” He takes my hand, kisses it. Then I’m crying, sobbing into my palms. “She’s going to cut off all her hair,” I say, and sniffle. “Who is?” “Lil-Lily.” “I see.” He hugs me tighter. “Let it all out. It’ll be okay.” “And . . . I don’t want to move in together.” We sit in silence after that. After awhile I notice he’s crying, too. “It’s not your fault,” I say. “No, no, it’s okay. You’re confused right now and that’s okay,” he said. “This is my fault, I shouldn’t have tried to be so cheery. I’m going to find some help for you. A good therapist, or a group or something.” “I feel sick,” I say, and I do. “Do you want something to drink?” “No. I think I’ll just lie down. I’ll give you a call later on.” “You want me to go?” I nod. “I’ll call you.” “If it’s what you really want. Is it?” I nod, yes, yes. He’s barely out the door when I start to gag. I run to the bathroom, where I empty my stomach of water and some half-chewed bread. It feels good to do that, to cleanse myself of the unnecessary. Afterwards I call Lily, but there’s no answer. I leave a message: Thanks for today. If you ever need to talk, or want company, please give me a call. I really hope you will. The cotton of this shirt is worn so thin it’s silky. I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Lily was right. I do resemble him. My hair has gotten lighter. From being out in the sun, Felix says. It’s also developed a wave, for the first time in my life. I remember something Felix told me, something out of his book: “Grieving and healing go hand-in-hand. Cut yourself a wide swath. Things will get better.” “Fuck that,” I say to the mirror. “I don’t give a flying fuck if I get better.” I like that, “a flying fuck.” Rooey used to say that. “Fuck getting better. The sooner I get better, the sooner someone else is going to die. It’s all bullshit.” It could’ve been me, and maybe it should’ve. After all, it was my scent in the water. It was my idea to race. It was my graduation trip. 94

Could’ve been me, should’ve been me. Hell—maybe it was me. I look in the mirror. Are my eyes getting darker? I lean in close to the mirror. Brown speckles the blue. I sink to the floor. The boards creak. I entertain the notion that I am dead. True: I have not had my period since the attack. True: I haven’t slept in days. True: I no longer desire anything. Well, no, that’s not exactly true. I am horny as hell. From the floor I can see under the bed. There are so few things under there, I can count them. Seven—eight, if you count each hockey skate. Two shoeboxes, a sock, an orange peel, a measuring tape, an unopened bottle of Corona. I reach my foot under the bed and nudge the big shoebox toward me, the one that had originally housed the hockey skates. It’s heavy. Stuff clinks around inside. Tools, maybe. I lift the lid, feeling strangely ceremonious. The box is filled to the brim with figurines. The ones Roger makes in the metal shop, little Buddhist statues about an inch tall . . . what are they called again?

(Jizo)

Juzu? Something like that?

(Jizo)

I close my eyes and the explanation comes: They’re called jizo. Like a combination of Jesus and Bozo. Jizo. I pick one up and examine its face. Two crescents arch across the smooth metal face to form eyes. The ears are overlong; the earlobe grows out of the jaw. I think they have something to do with Buddhism, but beyond that, I realize, I have no idea. I set the figurine down and fetch my laptop. The online encyclopedia tells me that translated from Japanese, “jizo” means “Earth Treasury” or “Earth Womb.” “Traditionally,” says the article, “jizo are seen as the guardians of travelers, firefighters, and children.” Children. I should bring one to Lily. Lily would like one. I read on: “In particular, jizo are said to tend to the souls of miscarried or aborted fetuses, or any child who precedes his parents in death. It is said that children who die in this manner are not allowed to cross the sacred river to heaven as penance for the pain they have caused their parents.” If I focus all my willpower I can bring him back, I think, staring at the jizo’s sleepy face. I just have to want it enough. TLR

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I focus on the statue’s face so long it begins to move. It wriggles in my palm and the lips move to speak but before I hear the words, mom’s voice cuts in. She is standing in the doorway. What she says is, “Hi sweetie.” “Look,” I whisper, holding out the statue. “Did you know? He’s the guardian of children.” Without a word she crosses the room, wraps her arms around me from behind, and begins sobbing into my hair. In the mirror I watch as she clutches at my hair, pulling and twisting, and each time she releases a handful it is blonder and wavier than before. I close my eyes. When I open them, my vision is blurry, like that of a newborn. Suddenly I know the truth of my death, that despite our best efforts we live in a naturally violent world. We rule but are not untouchable; we live among sharks and serial killers; we live amongst ourselves. I’m almost glad for the way I died. Not the pain or fear of my last moments but the primal nature of it, the reduction of human to animal; the same feeling that drew us inside the camper, where no matter who was waiting outside you had to go in alone, and there was no guarantee you’d come out, and that was why we did it. “Oh Rooey,” she says. “What are we going to do without her?” I hug her back without turning away from the mirror. I gaze at our reflection, her arms around the figure in the gray tee shirt. “It’s okay,” I whisper. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to stay right here.”

POETRY

Nina Soifer To the Writer on the Elevator

You refer to me as Hildegard, the double bass player who lives on the seventh floor, the protagonist in your new novel. You’ve been studying me for over a year, so now it’s time to discuss how the story’s coming along. Have you considered my life? Or, should I just let you plop me on a sofa at the shrink’s office to salvage your plot. I know your style, and, frankly, it’s jaded. With a name like mine, I’ve had my share of wounds, but who hasn’t? Spice me up!

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Ship me to Yugoslavia to strangle a lousy lover. I can steal rubies from a pimp. Let me fox trot with a killer, guzzle bourbon with a miserable drunk. Give me chutzpah! On Thursday night, put me in the Requiem Theatre, watch me bow the hell out of Verdiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Rigoletto. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not too late. You might understand what I mean in the scene from your next chapter, the one before you almost give up. Alter me.

POETRY

Jørgen Leth Boredom: Seven poems around a theme Selected and translated from Danish by Martin Aitken

right now i want to be able to write a short poem I’ve paper in the typewriter I sniff my arm I sniff my arm again I think about what I want I’ve finished I’ve written a short poem

From Glatte hårdtpumpede puder (Smooth Inflated Cushions), 1969.

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there’s a mess outside some houses that don’t become each other a sky not worth talking about birds flying back and forth a meaningless section of a mountain a mishmash of human voices with nothing to say to each other sounds of all sorts of activity I don’t care to know about only here is there order music that can be changed a lamp casting an even light on these words I’m arranging in lines

From Glatte hårdtpumpede puder (Smooth Inflated Cushions), 1969.

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there is nothing else but what there is and what kind of a thing is that to say, so instead I will say that today I have exchanged caresses with my loved one and have taken part in two meals with my children and have propelled my body backwards and forwards within these rooms, and that today I have sat motionless for a long time and watched people moving and speaking in image after image, and that I have now situated myself alone amidst the calm to let the life from the television flow through my brain and out into emptiness onto this sheet of paper.

From Det g책r forbi mig (It Passes Me By), 1975.

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Crime

Feelings passing over the lipsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;wholes or halves or fourths or nothing at all By means of a tracking shot measure the distance from first word to last word I am bored therefore I smile therefore I shave therefore I visit the tailor therefore I spend money therefore I abandon myself to the sweets of crime

From Det gĂĽr forbi mig (It Passes Me By), 1975.

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Why don’t I just sit down

Why don’t I just sit down to write that story, just anything at all—it’s night in Port-au-Prince, it’s been raining in Port-au-Prince, the dogs begin to bark every night at three in Port-au-Prince, and I have placed (a lifetime behind me) my body heavily in a space without walls, without edges, without cover, a darkness filled with junk labeled and detailed in the naked light from an electric bulb hanging from the sky by means of a cord and there I try to align my double shadow against the shiny detached monument of a fridge and to fix in my mind the sound of the night birds and of plastic sandals in the gravel on their way from one point in the darkness to another maybe on the fringe of the melancholic From Hvordan de ser ud (How They Look), 1987.

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arrangement in the back garden, three tables, no chairs and I regret now not having eaten red snapper a good fish, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m sitting alone here though illuminated and itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s night in Port-au-Prince, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s been raining in Port-au-Prince, the dogs begin to bark every night at three in Port-au-Prince, just anything at all

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This is a hardboiled egg

This is a hardboiled egg I peel off its shell I eat it I like eggs I eat eggs every day I like hardboiled eggs the best I love to peel a hardboiled egg add a little salt but no pepper I alone decide what I want to think about I hate being bored I eat hardboiled eggs I say I eat hardboiled eggs

From Hvordan de ser ud (How They Look), 1987.

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New tires

The white man fucks the black woman. Amid vodou and death. That’s how simple I see it. Let me go on. The palm tree trembles. The sea prostitutes itself every day. Animals murmur in the inner sanctum. The gate is closed all day and there’s no water in the pool. I buy four new tires and arrange a repair of the chassis. That’s all.

From Billedet forestiller (The Image Represents), 2000.

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SHORT STORY

Alex Stein Blackberry Thickets: A Conversation with Josan

Josan is the pseudonym, or more accurately the alter-ego, of the writer Alex Stein. “At times,” Stein says, “I feel that I am Josan, and at times I feel that Josan is some ‘other.’ The point, I believe is not to disentangle, much less to delimit, identity, but to achieve something like the art one imagines possible in setting about the pursuit. With Josan, a dialectical dynamic can be occasioned to which, without Josan, I simply cannot rise.” Alex Stein Do you ever feel embarrassed that you wound up as a poet? Josan A lot of people would give up a lot of what they have for the kind of relationship I have with art. But isn’t it true, too, that no matter how nubile the bride, once he has had her a hundred times, the groom’s eye will wander. I am reminded of a story told me by my then girlfriend Kate about one of her previous boyfriends. Of an afternoon, he had given her eleven orgasms, using a vibrator. They were trying to determine how many orgasms, of an afternoon, she was capable of having. “Shortly thereafter,” she said, “he broke up with me. I think it was more truth than he was able to bear.” One pursues art, overturns her, finally one makes her one’s whore. Where, after that transformation, can come the satisfaction of bedding her? How many poems does one need, finally? Especially in the face of History, which assures us that even of the very greatest poets, only a few works will retain significance. Mark Keats, mark TLR

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Wordsworth, mark Shelley. Of their independent, voluminous outpourings, what remains indefatigable? From Keats: “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” and ten more pages; from Wordsworth: “The World is Too Much With Us,” and a dozen more pages; from Shelley: a few lines from the prose (“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”) now laughably naïve, if no less electrifying in their rhetorical stance. I except only someone like Shakespeare from this tragic conception, but what poet really believes that he will be a Shakespeare, after it all has shaken out? Alex Stein How long does it take you to write a book? Josan It took me twenty years to write Weird Emptiness. Or, rather, it took me twenty years to compile the thoughts that were later ordered into the book Weird Emptiness. I was paid no advance by the publishing house that took a chance on it and thus far I have not received a dime in royalties. In fact, about a year after its publication, the publisher sent me a dunning, damning email, asserting that “publishing is not magic,” in case that I thought that it was, and suggesting in strong terms that I buy some of the press run back from him, to offset the cost of the printing and mailing and advertising that he and his house had footed. Twenty years, mind you, it took me to write this book. And the best of myself. One must believe, of such an enterprise, that this late humbling episode is not its end. Alex Stein How do you feel about the seasons? Josan I don’t like Winter. I’m sure it is necessary; I simply don’t care for the aesthetic. A lengthy Autumn, culminating in the kaleidoscopy of fallen leaves, followed by an overnight, miraculous transmutation into early Spring and blossom. That’s how I would have it, were it up to me. Alex Stein What is it about winter that you so dislike?

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Josan The indignity it imposes. The sufferance with which one must bear up to it. Alex Stein The wet feet? Josan More the dampness of spirit, I should say. Alex Stein Surely, that is a matter of how one engages the thing, is it not? Josan Well, naturally, but I prefer not to feign virtues of which I have more reason than capacity to possess. It is desire, after all, and not logic, to which Being is in fealty. Alex Stein You write haiku. Josan Not anymore. Haiku is koan. Spontaneous spiritual insight. Without a master, or except that one is a master, to pursue haiku is ruinous. So fine a line exists between what is, and what is not, nor ever will be, haiku, that only an illumined mind, a master, can distinguish it. Alex Stein What is an illumined mind? Josan One in which the reverence is not constructed of philosophy. Alex Stein And you have had access to such a mind?

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Josan I have communed with the dragonfly, oh, yes. I have seen how, lightly, lightly, the shadow from the flower falls. In the absence of a master, it is my opinion, no poetry can be made that matters. Alex Stein Who decides what “matters?” Josan Oh, yes, that is the question that those who have never experienced a master will indignantly ask. Alex Stein When did you meet your “master?” Josan Everything of what you might call a metaphysical nature started for me in Seattle. I had fallen in love with, or more likely a spell had been cast upon me by, a young . . . what would now be called Wiccan, but who referred to herself, then, unashamedly, as “a white witch.” I recommend the sex, by the way, should you ever encounter one of these marvelous creatures in a state of abandon. One can feel the erratic pulsations of their overwhelming desires, beating through their vaginal walls, when entering, at the ripe moment, into them. From that physical ecstasy to ecstasies of a more transcendental nature, it was simply a matter of kind passing into kind. Or so it seemed, since in the same frame of time that I was feeling wash over me the energy of fierce female orgasm, I began, also, to realize what you might call visions of higher mind, manifesting as a wry, spry, aged monk on a paradisiacal grounds, whereon were also a belled temple and a number of meditation cells and halls. As to the cells and halls, I should add that I was neither encouraged toward, nor discouraged from, meditation. “What is it that you will not be thinking of?” the old monk jibed, when I entreated him with earnestness for advisement. Any time I entreated him with earnestness, he teased me fondly. There would come times when he would answer my questions directly, but only “as poems,” and it was as poetry, not as spiritual lesson, that I wrote out his answers. For the lyric or wit of them, that is, not to document some truth. In this way, against my native flippancy and knee-jerk comic self-deprecation, I was coaxed toward insight. If the work I did at that time 110

maintains any currency, it is only because it did not mean what I thought it meant at the time in which I thought I was meaning it. Alex Stein Do you have any recollection of your childhood? Josan The neighborhood in which I was raised, had it never been developed, would have been an immense blackberry thicket. Where-ever the land was still let wild, blackberry bushes flourished. Walking home from school, if one did so thoughtfully, one could fill one’s belly on blackberries and never go more than a few hundred feet out of one’s way to do so. There is really nothing more to this story. Only that wild fruit is something that once one has encountered it, one never really rids oneself of the expectation of encountering again. Something to do with Grace, I suppose. The unconscious recognition that we are fallen from the Garden. I hope to go back there, some day, where the blackberries flourish. But not before my time. Other than that, no, I have no recollection of my childhood. Perhaps he . . . the “other” does. Alex Stein You and I seem to have a lot of the same ideas about poetry, but I don’t want to continue to ask you about poetry because I’m not sure that poetry is very important anymore and I know that it isn’t interesting. Poems are interesting. In their isolate incidence. But poetry, not so much. Like Wordsworth isn’t interesting, but “Tintern Abbey,” interesting as hell. Josan You think “Tintern Abbey” is interesting? Alex Stein For example, I mean. But not per sé. I mean, really, if the last known copy of “Tintern Abbey” was on fire, I might not piss on it, to put it out. Except that it would then be a priceless artifact. Not though, from sorrow over its loss to posterity. I might piss on the last copy of the “Rubaiyat,” solely for the sake of posterity. Yeah, I would. Come to think of it. And I’d piss on Rilke’s “Duino Elegy Number Five.” But, as I say, these are isolate incidents, and speaking purely of statistics, not indicative of poetry as a whole. TLR

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A frozen turd is more indicative of poetry as a whole than is “Duino Elegy Number Five.” Though, let no power willfully misunderstand me. Josan Oh, I understand you. Alex Stein That’s Frost, from Birches. “Let no power willfully understand me and carry me away before my time.” Josan I got the allusion, and I get that you are not saying that all poems are shit, but only that on a continuum, more poetry is closer to shit than it is to divinity. Alex Stein I think it was a transcended master who when asked what was the Buddha replied, “a frozen turd.” That’s probably where I got the figure. Josan Nice transposition. Alex Stein Thanks. Josan So who is interviewing who here? Alex Stein I think that sort of thing is best played by ear. Wittgenstein said: “Can anything be more remarkable than this, that the rhythm of a sentence should be important for exact understanding of it?” What does this mean to you? Josan That language and meaning are like trains that run along parallel tracks, meeting only at infinity, which is to say only at the last possible point where either language or meaning or anything else for that matter can have any distinct existence at all. 112

Meeting only at that point where, not just language and meaning, but all things come together. And that rhythm, by which is meant music, is the only thing prior to that point that brings these two distinct engines close enough to one another that they fool the naked eye into seeing them for a moment as one. Thus is poetry revelation, and thus is that revelation just a richer variety of illusion than that to which one usually succumbs. Alas! Alex Stein The poet H.L. Hix writes: “Thought, my Moses, leads to a promised land it may not enter,” and: “Can any poem atone for its mortal sin of being a poem.” How say you to that? Josan Exactly! Can any poem atone for being a poem! All the obeisance of the poet, all his vaunted humility in the offering up of the fragile, winged thing, all his humiliation at being a poet at all, none of this is relevant. The poem exists independent of the medium through which it is born, and like every born thing must take itself in sorrow and poverty to the throne of judgment and there stand naked and await. As to the former, if it does not seem self-explanatory, no amount of explanation will make it any the more clear. Thought is thought. Thought is promise. From promises, only more promises can come. As for the gift, the deed, the land, one must already be in possession of it, in order to attain it. Perhaps thought can make one aware of what one has already in one’s possession, but I doubt it. Thought principally misleads, rather than leads—except that it return, honorably, to itself. Alex Stein That same Hix wanted me to ask: “What do you mean, the idea in a play, or behind a poem?” Josan I suppose you want me to answer that the play is an idea, the poem is an idea. That the poem is an idea in the shape of a poem. That the idea behind the poem, separate from the poem, is its own thing and if drawn from a poem, justified only inasmuch as it meets or exceeds the aesthetic standards of the poem from which it is drawn. Otherwise it is, even if only unconsciously, an exercise in malice. Criticism does not do honor to poetry by genuflecting toward it. Criticism does honor to poetry only by TLR

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adopting its standards and mien. Any criticism of poetry that is not in itself authentically poetic, tells its reader that it is fundamentally incapable of understanding the thing that it has set about to analyze. Alex Stein In an essay on Charles Bernstein, Hix says that “poetry, like pi, refuses completion or closure.” Josan Right, whereas I think poetry should insist on completion and on closure. Since it is not possible, the effort toward completion and closure adds dynamic tension. Most poetry is slack because it is not pushing against anything. A poem needs a villain. My poems always close. Not because I believe there is such a thing as an ending, but because, as a reader, I want to witness the clash of swords that tells me two honorable foes, the inward and the outward, here struggle to reveal not their distinction, but their indissoluble union, and thereby the ineluctable nature of our Being. Alex Stein Merwin writes: “Men think they are better than grass.” Josan Right! And Hix writes: “Even the blind, sessile anemone knows the reef with repletion.” Alex Stein Your point being? Josan Why remove the pearl from the oyster? Where does it end? Inside the pearl is another oyster. Inside that oyster is another pearl. And so on, ad infinitum. Where will there be an end to all these pearls? What is their purchase, finally? What have we understood, truly, tugging at them with thumb and forefinger, until the tissue in which they had been cradled and nourished releases them? Alex Stein You’ve always been able to write, haven’t you? 114

Josan The thing is, there’s writing and there’s writing. I’ve always been able to turn my sentences toward surprise, without turning them away from clarity. Writing is nothing without surprise. Art is nothing without surprise. Love is nothing without surprise. Consider the marital bed, then ask yourself, as a reader, besides exactly the same thing over and over, what is it that you most crave from a piece of writing? Besides the very thing that you were expecting, what is it that you most want a writer to offer you? Something both unexpected and, somehow, familiar. The more unexpectedly familiar, the better. Those pieces of writing that are the most unexpected and yet familiar we call revelatory. That is what we want from writing. The revelation of that thing we have always known, arising from that thing we did not know we knew until just that moment. It has been, for me, from the beginning, the offhand matter of a moment to provide this to my reader. Alex Stein But, you are not proud, right? Josan It has always seemed to me a suspicious thing that a person like myself, someone of as shady a character as mine should be capable of, or the conduit for, revelation. It, as I said earlier in a different context, casts a peculiar light on the whole notion of revelation. Though I suppose thieves and derelicts are no less creatures of god than saints and benefactors and in the matter of Grace there seems to be something like a celestial lottery being played out for which simply to have been born is enough purchase to gain one a ticket. Alex Stein Now, this self-deprecation, is it an effort to charm? Josan Well, now, that is the key, is it not? The appearance of effort undermines charm. I’m not trying to be self-deprecating, I’m trying to be clear about the distinction between what people perceive about writing and what is actually the case. The poet Hix writes: “Attention creates the void out of which ideas are drawn.”

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Alex Stein What does that mean? Josan Writing is a state of being. State, in the sense of a territory that the writer inhabits. It’s a condition of mind, writing, to which the writer accedes un-begrudgingly; or, rather, without any thought that there could be anything to begrudge. The writer is simply . . . well, the poet Katy Byrd speaks of “the reflection in the eye that sees itself.” To me, that is the writer. You and Katy Byrd should meet. She was an acquaintance of the poet Baudelaire. I think you’d enjoy her conversation. Alex Stein I’d like to meet her. Josan I’ll give her your number.

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The Mundane, the Glorious, the Cat Familiar: A Conversation with Katy Byrd

It is curious how often the stories of Katy Byrd find her the sexual adventuress. I wonder if she would present herself differently if I was a female. I am sometimes sorry I am not two sexes, if only to understand more fully that divide. We meet at a café. She has made the choice. I prefer not to record in a public place. Background noise can be unpredictable and it is always the miraculous sentence that is obliterated by truck blare or beat box or the rise of a moment too near at hand. Fortunately, Katy Byrd speaks loudly and clearly and as if there is no one else present. And before long there is no one else. And my voice, too, is clear and sharp and the barista who attends us is like one of the graces. Alex Stein Say hello to the folks, Katy. Katy Byrd Hello. I’m Katy Byrd. A poet. I live in New York City. I’m sorry, but that’s where I live. It doesn’t help me to pretend I am not a city person, even if that does live too exactly up to the public perception and tacit expectation. Propriety all but demands that public poets begin their careers in big cities. It just so happens that such a demand falls upon me with no pressure, correlating as it does so neatly with my domestic tendencies. Alex Stein Do you live with anyone? TLR

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Katy Byrd I live alone. I have a cat familiar, but you cannot see her. Alex Stein How do you know? Katy Byrd She has been upon my lap all this while. Alex Stein Ooh! Cool! Katy Byrd I know. I used to totally freak, but now I’m used to it. I’m attended quite frequently by animal spirits. Some people get scared. Alex Stein Well, the telling is a bit scary. One wonders if you are driving at something, or just making it clear that you are this exceptional creature. Katy Byrd It is hard not to be vain when you have pierced the veil between words. Alex Stein I would have thought it would be hard not to be humbled. Katy Byrd And that’s why you have not done it and I have. Alex Stein How do you know I have not? Katy Byrd Is this how you ordinarily conduct your artist interviews?

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Alex Stein No. Sorry. I don’t know what gets into me. You were saying? Katy Byrd I live alone, but I have spirits that I talk with and the cat. Alex Stein Yes. I mean, it sounds very cozy. Katy Byrd It is. Alex Stein And I can see you would get a lot of writing done. Katy Byrd A lot of writing. Yes. A lot of poetry. Yes.

Your poetry?

Alex Stein

Katy Byrd And the poetry of some others. Those spirit companions. Second souls. Whatever you want to call them. I call them by their names. See, that’s how it gets so friendly between this world and the world of spirits. An exchange of names. Then of pleasantries. Then a pursuit of commonalities. Each spirit is distinct and sacred and eternal and separate. That is how I go into the poetry. Alex Stein Don’t you get fooled pretty often, living that way? Katy Byrd Often enough, yes. Alex Stein Can you tell me about Baudelaire?

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Katy Byrd Everyone wants to know about Baudelaire. He was Charles, to me. I bewitched him, you know. He used to come to the café almost every afternoon, trying to get his courage up to tell me how bad he was. How dangerous. I could see right off that he was a sweetheart. Too sweet for me, I knew. I would wind up cradling him in bed and stroking his forehead and whispering hush, hush, I just knew it. One of the other girls who came in the café frequently was a prostitute. She told me she had slept with him. He had been prompt and gentle and then he had rolled off her and washed himself. Then he had got back into the bed and she gave him oral pleasure. Then he made herpleasure herself while he watched. Who wants that? I let him suffer over me. I made good and sure he suffered. Alex Stein Any memorable conversation? Katy Byrd Charles? And me? Conversation? The most eloquent of the modernists I now hear him called. He was so tongue-tied that I told him if he had anything to say to me he had best put it in a poem. “I write so many poems,” he told me. “Funny I haven’t seen any,” I said. Oh, I knew where a man like that burned. Alex Stein That would make you his muse? Katy Byrd Your call. I don’t say. But I do tell you I knew right off by his poetry that he was going to be someone special. Alex Stein But even that didn’t make you want to sleep with him? Katy Byrd He looked like a hooded reptile. His eyes were cold. I expect he was a drug addict of some kind and compiling that with the absinthe, and then the high perspiring forehead and the thin lips. No. Never.

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Alex Stein But you did sleep with him. Katy Byrd Eventually, yes. Ah, who am I kidding. I slept with all of them. But it happened more or less only one time and by accident. He had begun the habit of dropping into my quarters with new poems. He wore velvet gloves he never removed. I expect he went home and imagined himself caressing me with those gloved hands. I never gave him any reason to think that I would sleep with him. I carefully explained to him that I was too debauched. His poetry, though, I said, he could penetrate me with that if it would help him. “Help what?” he wanted to know. He asked that, but he knew. I just looked at him. Like clockwork he came and he read more poems. If you want to know the truth it was a little boring. But I think it was helping his confidence. But I got too bored, finally and I wound up undressing him. As if for amusement, at first, but then I put his hand between my legs and let him feel just how wet I was. “Is this the result of my poetry?” he asked, his mouth pressed to my ear. “In a sense,” I replied. Alex Stein Did you think . . . what? Katy Byrd I thought, this man is a genius and his lot will be hard and I thought of my own pleasure. Alex Stein Did you ever have an artist lover to whom you did not feel superior? Katy Byrd It is not a matter of feeling superior, it is a matter of being oneself and nobody else. Alex Stein Yes, that does tend to infuriate people. Katy Byrd There is a divide, a shadow, between men and women, and a theatre, a love dance,

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is carried out in that divide. Sometimes it is a farce, sometimes a tragedy. The love dance in the shadow that weds flower and stone. Alex Stein I don’t understand. Katy Byrd The man in you says that. Ask the woman. Alex Stein She doesn’t understand either. Plus, I think she is soused on rum. Katy Byrd That happens when you don’t pay enough attention. Listen! What does she say? Alex Stein She says that she wishes it were all much more simple. She never wanted to make it so complicated. She says farewell. Katy Byrd Keep listening. Alex Stein She is crying. I cannot believe it. She is crying. Katy Byrd Ask her why. Alex Stein She says onions. Katy Byrd Ah, yes, the infinite layers between our mundane selves and our glory. Alex Stein I was going to ask you, how does one tell the dancer from the dance? 122

Katy Byrd I was going to answer if you did ask. Alex Stein It’s a shame we missed out on that opportunity. Katy Byrd Oh, yes. But you can ask me something else. Alex Stein Okay, then. Who is it that responds when your name is called? Katy Byrd Katy Byrd! That was simple. Ask me another one. Alex Stein No, wait, well, hold on just a minute there. Katy Byrd No, I shan’t. Will you clip my wings to keep me? Alex Stein Just one more question. Katy Byrd Just one? Perhaps then, I should ask it. Are you trying to be insane or is this just what you call conducting a dynamic interview? Alex Stein Just a second, I think the tape’s run . . .

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POETRY

Maxine Patroni The Problem of Describing Unrequited Love after robert hass

If you hold an orange, you cannot talk about the orange. You cannot say fruit or that you picked it yourself. Never say that it can fit in your palm. You can say sweet only if it could’ve been sweeter, only if the one you wanted was on a branch you couldn’t reach. If you’re by a lake, don’t talk about the lake. Don’t speak of mirrors or ducks lifting from the surface. Think before you mention sailboats or the man who caught a fish. You may say water only if it’s choppy, only if there’s a fool who swam out too far. If you’re sitting on a bench, you should understand by now.

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You cannot say afternoon or squirrel running by. Never say bird

boots

gravel.

Here you may say daydreaming only if you wish you weren’t, only if you imagine a clearing with two deer and one of them has run off. And if there’s a storm coming, you may whisper storm because it means you’re packing up because it means you’re leaving. But never mention cloud or umbrella. Here you must never say tree unless it’s in a forest with only one tree.

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Here you may say rain if it reminds you of a shower that the one you love isn’t in. And you can say wind

only if it’s strong,

only if it’s heading in the direction you’re not.

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A Poem about Wind the wind is so free isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t it? nobody tells it where to go. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;my mother

A horse rests by a barn. Her white coat outlines her imperfections. She is dying, just like the grass around her. A breeze comes from the north. The wind is everywhere the horse is not. It flows toward the hills as she settles her head down. The black clouds spread in. This is when the horse falls asleep, and she may dream of open fields, her strong withers caked with mud. Everything in the dream is brilliant and alive. The earth knows when something is about to die, and the wind is always there when the body stops taking orders.

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The air on the horseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lips, that fills her, was once in the trees and in the mountains. It is the first to know us and the last.

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SHORT STORY

O n tio di rg t E .o in ew Pr vi in ryre e bl era ila lit va the .A . nt ww te w on . C Now ed e ur ib at cr Fe bs Su

Rachel Swearingen Woman in Blue

Fury brought me alive, not the artist’s stitch. Nine months I spent in the womb of Frau Moos’ hands, my swan skin pricked and stuffed, my tongue and sex shaped, and all the while dumb and void. For that unknowing, I am grateful, although I dream sometimes of a journey in a crate of wood shavings, my unmuscled legs cocked around my ears. I never did fit, not the crate, nor his fevered visions of her, his unrequited, his Alma, his Murder, Hope of Woman. Make her perfect. Make her luxurious, covered with hair. Certainly, not of feathers. Poor Frau Moos, in my dreams I hear her singing Leise, leise, leise, and then Leide, leide, leide, as she nails down the lid. My mother-to-monster send-off—to Dresden, to a soldier-artist with a head shaped like a shovel. To be Kokoschka’s insipid courtesan? His silent player of elaborate erotic charades? His effigy of hate? Always and only to be, never to possess, not even a beating pulse of shame, not even the love of the Göttingenerin servant girl he hired to attend me. My Hulda. Dare I call her mine? Life bringer, dress buttoner, hair brusher. She possessed me, if only for those moments when we were alone and she twirled me about his cold room, kicking my misshapen legs so that I too could dance. Hulda, my child-woman with the brown skin and the light steps of a village Tänzerin. Don’t look at me like that, she says, one day when K. is out to the cafe. She has unbuttoned the maid’s uniform he dresses her in for our games and pulled the muslin down on her still growing breasts. Look, she says, look what I have done. She turns me from my chair in front of his easel. I miss nothing. My eyes are painted forever open, my lashes are spiders that threaten to march away. She is not 129

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POETRY

Peter J. Cooley Rijksmuseum: Poem One

Why is the art museum full of sex Sunday afternoons, couple on couple, hand in hand before the flagellations Christ undergoes or the red beheadings Judith doles out Holfernes, frame-on-frame? Profiles of the couples: 25-ish, all good-looking, inevitably in black. They could stand up in a NEW YORKER ad except for the too-intertwining hands, the feet which dance about another’s feet . . . I do not study faces, just contortions. The afternoon wears on. I pass through rooms, Christ dies, rises, ascends, gazes from heaven. What massive aphrodisiac his gaze!

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Caravaggio, “The Supper at Emmaus,” The National Gallery, London —but you know what boys too much talk about. That’s what they were, here, trying to talk about, shouldering each other, small shoulderings, their beards wisps if they appeared at all, their bodies expelling that rank odor boys savor alone and hate in public. It smells of cum, they think, but they are wrong. No, I think the stink is like wet, black earth. Thirteen, fourteen. I remember. The docent has been trying hard— a small woman, she keeps raising her voice. She’s on the verge of giving in to them— but now she lifts her hand up to Christ’s hand her tiny hand, his like a jungle flower. She speaks the words she doesn’t have to speak how Caravaggio shows miracle “just by size of body parts, just by size.”

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These are the moments a young boy’s life is changed. I came into this room to write a poem about Rembrandt, found Caravaggio who didn’t fit my plan: two self-portraits, one early and one late, contrast Rembrandt’s. I’m sitting down, I’m writing out this poem. How many years have I sat here? They’re gone.

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ESSAY

O n tio di rg t E .o in ew Pr vi in ryre e bl era ila lit va the .A . nt ww te w on . C Now ed e ur ib at cr Fe bs

Chip Livingston Trashing Andy Warhol

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The poet collected porcelain and carved hands, postcards, cobalt glass miniatures, world’s fair memorabilia, contemporary art. Twenty hours a week, I worked as his assistant, managing his calendar and his townhouse and his art collection, as well as the more domestic routines of buying groceries and cooking dinner, unless he was dining out. My obligations were strictly part time, because as he’d made clear in the interview for the position, he considered me a poet first and foremost. Having come from old money, he’d never known traditional employment himself, and had always hired young writers to help him. The poet never recognized what I did as employment. In exchange for my twenty hours a week, I was given an introduction to the New York City world of artists and writers I had only dreamed of, growing up on the Florida-Alabama border. I was given a handsome honorarium— and the fourth-floor loft apartment of his West Village brownstone, rent free, with a front wall of windows overlooking Greenwich Avenue, a view straight down Jane Street to the Hudson River. The poet lived in the three levels downstairs during the fall and winter months. He had a writing office streetside, an art office in the middle, and his bedroom in the back of the third floor; a piano room with leather couches, an extensive library, and guestroom on the second; and his living room, dining room and kitchen on the garden level, which opened to the garden and an unused greenhouse. The walls throughout this enormous house were covered with paintings. Artwork angled up the four flights of stairs and filled the halls and landings. I passed forty-seven pieces just climbing up to my apartment from the front door. My favorite was the two-by-

POETRY

Laura McCullough Sometimes I Ache for Disambiguation

It’s not that ambiguity isn’t sexy, and I get paradox as an evolutionary shift, but the accordion in this poem has asthma, and I’m wheezing. Can’t someone just put a point on the canvas, that stands for chaos and mark another one off center for stability, and let’s stand between these two points, become part of the composition, the contrast between our bodies as points and the points as points a fine joke on the theory of contrasts, and let’s say this all happens in Second Life, so we can be disambiguated, links

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to our other selves and other points hot-linked right on our skin, and you are blue-skinned with white hair streaked with silver and I am, today, maybe a squirrel with a dress made of music, and later, when someone gives us the program for sex maybe weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll have some, or maybe weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll go shopping or design a building someone else will be in while not being here at all.

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Women and the Syntactical World

Would it help to know I’m a little in love with your husband? Or that I’m in love with my own, and I’m not going anywhere? Or that the version of me you hear in this poem is a version of me that loves mostly poets, a few artists, one tile-guy, and a couple of older doctors, including William Carlos Williams whom a lot of women loved

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and a lot of men have loved, as well? If he— and now I’m speaking of your husband—loved me, say, outside by those falls, the one hard to find in the city, it only would have enlarged us both. There is that one letter written as a poem about cell division as a metaphor for communication, but my news for you is that all poems

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are love poems in my book. Can I kiss you? your tongue standing in for his tongue, your ear delicious in its resistance. I ask only because I want to sidle up to the hips of this world, bend it over at the waist, check the small bones of its back, whisper into the concaves, oh forgive me, forgive me. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve tried to hide this, keep my mouth closed, but the world pried me open

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long ago, and I chose not to fight back, selecting instead, the pleasure of giving in to what I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t explain and simply wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t apologize for.

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God Is Queer must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy. . .? â&#x20AC;&#x201D;friedrich nietzsche, the gay science

Listen to the breathless carrying on, one choral group after another, the harmonies, librettos, musical scores, and something like god stirs in the guts. What we need is a queer god, not Republican queer, all self-loathing and denial, but queer as the top-sizing of Moby Dick, of Jesus as black-skinned, Trans or, better, Intersexed, and singing like a black throated swan, all snorkeling croak, surprising in his her-ness, or she wearing a manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tux. Oh, sing choral groups; oh, solder

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on you stained glass makers; oh, rich, get as rich as you want; thinkers think; cooks cook; run mad with word processing you poets: question everything; believe in nothing, everything we design gets away from us.

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SHORT STORY

John Oliver Hodges Troutsky’s Parade

Brian is Jewish by blood, but he goes to Asheville in Lisa’s black Lexus, with Lisa, who is Brian’s roommate, a blond-haired Aryan beauty whose family is in jewelry. Lisa lives with Brian in an old shotgun shack in Tallahassee, and Lisa, being she has a friend in Asheville who is dying to see her, takes Brian to Asheville in her black Lexus with her. In Asheville, Brian drives the Lexus down a downtown alley to where Lisa’s friend, Deziray, currently lives in a spacious state-of-the-art music studio to be identified by the Xeroxed Grenade pasted over the door, an easy find. Lisa knocks, and Deziray opens and says, “Hey hey!” and, looking at Brian, says, “Oh, you cut off your beard.” “For that smooth feeling,” Brian says. “I just had my hair cut today, see?” Deziray says. “You like it?” she says, and bounces her curls and plays with her bangs. Deziray opens a bottle of organic blackberry wine and pours three glasses. The toast is to friendship. Deziray is quite the drinker. Deziray had passed through Tallahassee the month before, and the three of them drank an enormous amount at Posey’s Raw Oyster Bar on the gulf. Once back at the shotgun shack, Lisa passed out and Brian and Deziray rolled in the grass before the bonfire, hugging and kissing. Brian loved the smell of the girl, and her happy face, and was charmed by her style. She wore a knit sweater with sleeves down to her fingers, and Brian loved that she piled firewood logs into her arms without considering the dead bark and dirt that got all over her—and she wore a knee-length pleated skirt above leg warmers. Sort of a big-bones girl, Deziray, pale and giggly and somewhat squeaky. Brian ran his hands up and down her thighs TLR

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and stuck his fingers into her leg warmers. It was beautiful by the fire, but they went into his room where the clothes came off, all but for Deziray’s legwarmers, yes, there she was, on the bed, beneath him, her legs wide apart. She pulled out her tampon, as though giving Brian permission to fuck her, or perhaps eat her out, but you never know these days. Casual sex with strangers, no matter how pure and beautiful they might look, no matter how charming, how soft, how special and whatnot, is not the best idea. Deziray’s tampon left a stain on Brian’s sheet. Deziray does not know this, or maybe she does know this, but Brian cut off his beard in order to, should the chance again occur, eat her pussy out with great feeling, none of that crazy beard hair to mess things up. Deziray takes her visitors to a nearby bar, and buys them several massive Pabst Blue Ribbon cans, what are called oil cans. At the bar, Deziray keeps talking about her boyfriends. By the way Deziray talks, she must have ten boyfriends. Deziray’s last steady boyfriend just broke up with her, and Deziray wants to get “superdrunk” tonight to celebrate. The bar tender does not seem to like Deziray much, even though Deziray dumps a ton of bills into her jar after buying Brian and Lisa double shots of Lord Calvert. From the bar Deziray and Brian and Lisa walk a dozen blocks to see a hardcore show at a house that is packed inside with punks and hairy-headed people. The band plays fast and loud. The floor bounces as though it could bust, and there are so many heads. Brian can barely see the band at all. He squashes in a little closer, and sees the singer’s face and part of his shirt. The singer is a midget, Brian thinks, but then realizes that the singer is also the drummer.

He’s seen poets and writers, Poet Laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners. What these people are doing is better. There is more expression, more feeling, more aggression.

So this is Asheville! What a wonderful place! What a wonderful scene! In the kitchen are cases of found food, and many of the punks and hairheads walk around with black books in which their observations and musing are jotted. Brian sees how important they feel, as though involved in a great cause. NO WAR! FUCK BUSH! Solidarity is in the air. All the flyers and posters, what he’s seen on walls and stapled 150

to posts since he and Lisa arrived, are political, take-a-stand type stuff. And Asheville produces what is claimed to be the only Leftist newspaper in America, the Asheville Global Report, in which Mad America and His policies are exposed and denigrated. The AGR is released all throughout the city every Thursday. The AGR is sponsoring a benefit tonight, Deziray says, so from the show they pile into a car with a bunch of punks and feminists and anarchists and head downtown to the Asheville Community Resource Center, this huge bottom floor of a building that is used for giving out free bicycles, for yoga classes, talk groups, classes in homeopathic healing, and for teaching women how to defend themselves. The outside doors must be twenty feet tall, makes you feel grand walking through them. What a place! A huge open space, concrete, and all these people standing and sitting around a stage from which a young woman poet delivers her message of NO WAR! and FUCK BUSH! Brian is so tired. Brian has not slept for thirty hours. There is a cozy chair in the corner. Nobody is sitting in it. What the hell. Brian plops himself down and watches as one poet after another takes the stage and shuns Bush and the approaching war. Everybody gets a turn. There are some speeches in which the local government is ridiculed, and a collection bag is passed around. A man strums a guitar, singing of how great marijuana is. And there are rappers, first several white rappers, then some Puerto Rican rappers. All of them are sure to mention the catchphrase: NO WAR! Brian’s been to some readings, he’s seen poets and writers, Poet Laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners. What these people are doing is better. There is more expression, more feeling, more aggression. But then some guy, one of the leaders, it seems, for he is older and dressed more professionally than the others, gets on stage and sings yearnful and hopeful about the day when “democracy” will be true and rule. The song makes Brian nervous and upset, just hearing that word, “democracy.” Has not democracy invariably in the past represented the interest of the most powerful groups economically, that are also the groups that are the most powerful politically? It’s just a huge fraud, democracy. There is no government of the people, by the people, for the people. Whether it’s in a socialist country, or a so-called communist country, or under fascism or any form of government. FUCK democracy! Brian thinks. And he’s thinking, since democracy is a fiction, at least burn a few cop cars, spray paint the walls, bust the windows of food chains and department stores. The people gathered seem ready for action against the state, yet here are the leaders saying dreamily “democracy” as though quite in love with, not only the myth, but the word itself. * TLR

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Lisa donates three dollars to democracy, comes over with a large cup of wine for Brian, compliments of the organizers. The wine is flowing, and the creative juices flow freely. Brian and Lisa love the woman who reads a poem about how fat she is, how shitty it is that she is castigated by society for it. “I want everybody to know that I was abused as a child,” she says, and says that Feminism taught her to be strong and proud of her body. At that, Brian’s eyes water up and he nearly sheds a tear. Indeed, tired as he is, Brian is caught up in the communal spirit. What the hell. As the last stragglers take the stage, Brian puts his name on the list. He is called. He takes the stage, nervous and exhausted. His voice comes out cracked and unsure and soft at first. Brian says, “I heard this guy talking about democracy.” He clears his throat. “Democracy,” he says, “claims to represent the interests of the people. But the term ‘people’ is so abstract that it includes everybody, and there is no such thing as the representation of the interests of everybody.” All ears are perked. Brian has an audience. They are not heckling him. “Besides being a total fraud,” he says, “democracy mobilizes large masses for wars, more so than any other form of government. It’s when democracies appeared on the political horizon of the nineteenth century that World War One appeared shortly thereafter, followed by World War Two, mass holocausts, the greatest horrors. What is worse than exploitation? DEATH! All in the name of the people!” “Hell yeah!” somebody shouts. “In the past,” Brian says, “prior to the appearance of democracies, it was clear to most people that there was an underclass that was exploited, but the underclass, at least, was not mobilized for war. Since the French Revolution the underclass has been mobilized for war. So you get the worst of two possible worlds, an underclass used as cannon fodder. If it isn’t exploitation that democracies provide a justification for, it’s murder, death, massacres.” “Fuck that,” some guy with a goatee says. The man looks a bit like Trotsky as a young man, tell the truth. “This man is talking fascism,” the man continues. “Fascism smashism,” Brian says. “There’s no need to have an intellectual debate here. All I’m saying is that what we need in the good ole U.S. of A. is Anarchy with a capital A. We need to take back America! Anarchy Anarchy Anarchy!” Brian says, pushing his brotherly fist through the air. They eat it up like flies. “Anarchy Anarchy!” they say, and push their brotherly fists with Brian. Brian enjoys the support, and suddenly he is no longer tired. When the people stop shouting Anarchy to hear what Brian says next, he clears his throat. “All this fear,” he says, “of the American public and the American government in the 152

year two thousand three about weapons of mass destruction and the need to fight a war in order to eliminate the appearance of weapons of mass destruction? That’s fucking bullshit, man! That’s all the product of democracy! There were no instruments of mass destruction prior to ‘the people’ appearing on the scene and becoming the supposed focus of political power. In the name of the people anything is justified!” “You come from a different people,” the Trotskyist says. “Why don’t you tell us what planet you’re from? Dude, you need to get down to earth.” “Okay,” Brian says, “go ahead. Sacrifice your life in the name of freedom. Give all your support to Jesse Helms. Isn’t old Jesse your hero in Asheville? Isn’t he all about Freedom? Democracy? Don’t you feel satisfied and exalted when you raise your bird-blasters to splatter whom? Why, your own brother’s and civilian sisters.” “Oh, he’s getting beatnik on us now,” the Trotskyist says. “The failure of democracy is the failure of capitalism,” Brian says, “because capitalism is supposed to be the economic form of democracy. I’ve been listening to you tonight, and I’ve noticed that many of you speak out against buying and selling, yet in the same breath you laud democracy. Am I mistaken in thinking I’ve been listening to a gaggle of hypocrites?” “Beware of the wolf in sheep’s clothing,” Brian’s esteemed heckler announces. “Listen,” Brian says, “the greatest tyrant in world history was Abraham Lincoln, your apparent hero. He was responsible for a war that took a million fucking lives in defense of a democratic government. Do you think of old Linc’s assassin as a hero? As someone who eliminated a tyrant responsible for the greatest war machine in world history? Of course not. You’re a Demo-Trotskyite, by the looks of you, two terms that don’t go together without an element of humor.” Oh yes, a lot of the people out there laugh at Brian’s little joke. They clap hands and his bearded heckler is definitely the heckled now. Brian sees his face squash up with doubt, and feels sorry for him. Brian is a compassionate person, all for the people, and so pities the poor ignorant fool.

Today’s daughters of the American elite work menial jobs as waitresses, cashiers, even mechanics, as though making up for the crimes of their parents.

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Nevertheless, lifted up by the support of the majority, Brian rags him out further. “Listen,” he says, “if the Confederacy had survived, it’s very unlikely that there would be plans for a war on Iraq! I rest my fucking case!” With mock-disgust Brian leaves the mike and joins the people who, sorely confused over this last statement, give him nods of approval. He can tell they want to join his party, whatever it may be. Somebody hands him a DIY beer in a bottle, and the beer is very good, as only homemade beers can be, with all the hops and yeast, no stinting. Rich and full. Deziray Boot steps up and hands Brian a big cup of red wine. She says, “That was Harold, my new boyfriend you just trashed.” “Whoops,” Brian says, and is about to say something about her taste in men, but Let’s not be cruel, he decides. “He edits The Red Trout,” Deziray says. “Doesn’t surprise me,” Brian says. “It’s a communist rag,” Deziray says. “Obviously.” “You’re such a crab,” Deziray says, “but you’re badass, I got to admit it. That was great. I loved your speech. It was awesome.” Harold Trout, or Troutsky, whoever he is, comes up with one of his sidekicks, and he says, “I think you’re one of us. What’s your name, compadre?” “Adolf,” Brian says. Harold’s whisky breath is blasting all over the place, a strong one, him. “Hey, that’s good,” Harold says. “I agreed with everything you said, you know. I was just giving you a backboard. We’ve got to work together,” he says, but Brian’s thinking Anarchy will never, never, never in a million years happen to a consequential degree in the United States. The “people” are under the influence of beer. What need to fight, except in the social aspect of getting together and pretending to share a cause? That does nothing. The people are under the influence of beer, Brian thinks. And tobacco. The people are serfs to the capitalist regime, deceived into believing they are cognizant enough to at least want to overthrow the state. But what is want without action? It’s like faith and good works, the one qualifying the other, or whatever stupidity the bible teaches. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that Anarchy in America today is a lifestyle merely. As a political force it is passive, impotent, useless in the long run. There will be no guerilla warfare in the U.S. The U.S., that is to say, US, will go to war. We will fuck ourselves in the ass again.

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A party is to be held at The Grenade, a party Deziray, Brian and Lisa’s eloquent and generous host, is hosting. The man who owns The Grenade has told poor Deziray that she must move out in a few days, but no matter. She’s got enough money, mulah, cash, greenbacks and what have you, to rent her own place. Deziray is a sandwichmaker. Sure. Today’s daughters of the American elite work menial jobs as waitresses, cashiers, even mechanics, as though making up for the crimes of their parents. Even Lisa, whose last name is Jewel, works in a teeth-making factory. Her parents think she is mighty weird. It’s a low-paying job, making teeth, a redundant job. Lisa Jewel of Jewel’s Jewels arrives, not without embarrassment, at the teeth factory in her sleek black Lexus, but who cares what people say? Brian and Lisa drive by the Tallahassee dumpsters quite regularly, pulling out cantaloupes and Hostess cupcakes when she gets off work, packing the veggies and boxes of meat (for distribution purposes) into the trunk of the Lexus. Lisa is a great friend, a Lutheran and, like Brian, a vegetarian. Hopefully, everybody has a friend like Lisa. At The Grenade Deziray puts on music and people dance and drink whiskey and beer and talk. A couple of homosexuals dance a dance that can only be called “The Buttfuck,” and Harold Troutsky comes in with his entourage of bearded followers. He gives Deziray a kiss on the cheek and whispers in her ear. Deziray lilts to the stereo and cuts off the music. “We came to tell everybody about a No War parade we’re having,” Troutsky says to the bunch. “Tomorrow we meet at the ACRC with banners and signs. We’re going to march seven miles through Asheville.” “Yes,” Brian says, “but you’ve got to do something to piss off the police. You’ve got to get the police to fire their guns at you.” “Now what are you talking about?” Troutsky says, and looks around at everybody. “This is Adolf,” Troutsky announces, introducing Brian. “You’ve got to get the cops to fire at you, perhaps kill three or four of you. That’s the only way, as I see it, that you’ll be able to even begin to imagine stopping the war. What America needs right now is an internal massacre.” “Kent State never accomplished anything,” Troutsky says. “That’s debatable, but if that’s what you think, make it better than Kent State. You’ve got to justify rising up and taking arms. Why is everybody so lame here in Asheville? I don’t understand it. Cynically one can see why, but Jesus God Almighty, you people are like a church, you’re like any social institution. It’s all about social exchange, communality and whatall, but that’s where it ends. It’s all selfish, the buttressing of conscience, a complete smokescreen, quite idiotic if you ask me. A No War

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parade without a hidden agenda is like pissing in your face. If it was just innocuous, a powerless display of brotherhood, it would be forgivable, but in reality it supports the enemy because it makes you look like idiots.” “Pure wisdom,” Troutsky says, and says, “Does anybody here want to volunteer as a martyr?” “He’s obviously a violent sort,” a Troutsky sidekick says. “The mind of a terrorist,” Troutsky says. “Force is the only way to achieve revolution,” Brian says. “Even a fool can see that in the case of the United States, the means of taking up arms and killing people will justify the collapse of your hoodwinkage. The trick is to get these people that you apparently aspire to be like to throw the first punch. Make them massacre you!” Brian says, and waves his arms as though everything has been said, there is nothing more to say. If you can’t swallow that most fundamental fact, fuck you! Then, oh, thank the Lord, some smart person, the handy Lutheran, Ms. Lisa Jewel of Jewel’s Jewels, puts forth: “Like Jesus.” “Do you think Jesus was completely naked on the cross?” Deziray wonders. Some of our budding revolutionaries actually laugh at this obscene comment. But one must not blame others for being callow or sheepish. One can blame others only for the degree of denial they possess in relation to their intelligence. “I think Adolf is a Malcolm-X-ist,” a Troutsky sidekick says. “Look,” Brian says. “I thought Lisa’s comment said it all. Like Jesus. Jesus made them kill him, but in Asheville nobody does anything. In Asheville they make hot air for the sake of hot air. Hot air on a hot day. Here we are, going to war, possibly to some final method of annihilation, and everybody is just too afraid to jack up somebody’s shit!” “There isn’t going to be a massacre,” Troutsky says. “Not here,” Lisa says. Lisa Lisa Lisa! “It’s our children that will be coming home in body bags,” an older man with a soothingly deep voice remarks. The older man, baldish and bold of chin, but too fat to resemble Lenin, says, “I’ll be in the parade. Perhaps I’ll bring a potato cannon and shoot off some frozen taters.” “Not in my parade,” Troutsky, that pacifist, pitiful but not pitiable, says. “Then get the fuck out of here!” Brian says. He can be mean, sure. He gets sick of people, people piss him off, their indefatigable fear of learning, of seeing. That’s why, normally, Brian avoids people. Brian, he’s a tall guy. Brian carries a lot of anger inside him, everywhere he goes. Brian’s goddamned dad was, is, a Communist intel156

lectual, an amazing writer but a horrible—was, is—father. It just gets into him. As if to drive his point home, he throws his beer bottle at the wall. It smashes into smithereens, and the Troutskyists leave, then the homosexuals, and finally, everybody, even the old man of the potato cannon. The Grenade has cleared out. “Thanks for crashing my party,” Deziray Boot says, and smiles and laughs and does her quirky dance of jerks. Deziray is about drunk as hell, superdrunk, but she insists that Brian and Lisa go with her to this nearby party. Soon they are standing in a dark alley. Deziray bangs on the door. A guy lets them into a hall where there are three more doors. Deziray tells Brian and Lisa to go on in through the open door, and they go into the room where some young, bearded, rather morose, vacuous-looking men play mandolins. A bunch of other equally stoned-looking people hang around with nothing much to do, and Brian and Lisa don’t know any of them. They try talking to some, but these people are not friendly. There is even a huge aquarium with fish in it in here. “Please, let’s get out of here,” Brian says to Lisa, but where is Deziray? Deziray must have gone back to The Grenade, they figure, so they go back to The Grenade. The Grenade is locked. Brian bangs on the door. Nobody home. It has dropped down into the twenties, and is pretty fucking cold out, so Brian and Lisa get in the Lexus and run the heater, sharing the thin sleeping bag they brought along, and sharing a beer from the Styrofoam cooler. An hour later, when Deziray is still not back, Brian says, “So Deziray just disappeared, huh?” “Yeah, man, I can’t believe she ditched us.” “Is this normal behavior for her?” “I don’t know, why? Do you think something happened?” “Happened?” “Yeah, like maybe something bad?” “She’s probably with one of her boyfriends,” Brian says. But it doesn’t make sense. Deziray is always referring to Lisa as her best friend. It doesn’t make sense that Deziray would suddenly disappear. Brian and Lisa try getting some sleep, but Brian’s mood is bad. He imagines that something bad could be happening to Deziray. Maybe Deziray is, you know, getting screwed, unbeknownst to herself. “She still isn’t back,” Brian says. “Oh really?” Lisa says. “So you think something happened? Maybe we should look for her?” “The last place we saw her was at that stupid party.” TLR

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So Brian and Lisa go back down that other alley and Brian bangs on the door. It is late, after three. A young man opens and Brian is nice at first, simply asking the young man if he knows where Deziray is. “No,” the young man says, in his robe and bare feet. He is tired and starts to close the door, but Brian keeps it from closing and raises his voice: “What about those other doors?” he says. “She came in here with us and disappeared! Maybe you should knock on those other doors!” Somebody calls from a bed somewhere, presumably one of the mandolin guys. “What’s going on out there?” he says. Lisa says, “Hey, sorry for bothering you.” Brian says, “Can’t you at least tell me that she’s not in those other two apartments?” The doors look sinister to Brian, flat gray. The whole place is stale and too secure and reeks of abject cleanliness. “There’s nothing I can tell you,” the guy says. “Sorry for waking you up,” Lisa says, and Brian lets the young man close the door. Brian and Lisa, freezing, hurry back to the Lexus through the fresh-falling snow. They check The Grenade again, in case Deziray came back. Nothing, so Brian starts the Lexus and runs the heater. But how stupid to run the engine all night to use the heater. Brian turns the Lexus off and tries to sleep, freezing all the while. No sleep. Just worry. It gets light out and Brian hears something, sounds like a car letting somebody out, but he doesn’t lift his head. If it is Deziray, he doesn’t want to know. Somebody else ate her pussy, sure. Brian just wishes he was asleep now. He is glad she is safe. Finally Lisa gets out to find a place to pee, and she checks The Grenade. The Grenade is open. Brian and Lisa check Deziray’s room and yes, there Deziray is, asleep in her bed. Brian goes to the kitchen, pours the leftover coffee back through the machine, and reads the B. Traven novel he brought along, finding out after a few pages that he doesn’t much care for B. Traven. The book has a political agenda that is plain as day (what kind of novel is that!), but B. Traven did, after all write Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which must be one of the best movies ever made. Oh, what Brian wanted very much to do while here was eat Deziray Boot’s pussy. Brian had been remembering their night together ever since they spent it. Yes, the bonfire, the grass, and then later, in his bed, the pink sparsely-haired squiggle between her legs, the elegance of her posture, the slight turn of her head, a hint of shyness when he spread her legs farther apart to marvel over it, admire it—but now tired, nervy, zoned-out, Brian smokes and reads until the phone rings. *

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It’s Deziray’s boss calling to say, on the answering machine that is turned up full blast: “Deziray, it’s ten-thirty and there is no cashier at the Green Blouse.” The Green Blouse is a homey food type place for Asheville’s punks and hairheads, a meeting place for democratic-conversations-under-the-guise-of-Anarchy. Deziray walks by Brian to go to the bathroom and soon emerges ready for work. And is gone. Good. Brian lies on the couch, thinking he’ll sleep, but he doesn’t sleep. He can’t sleep. He paces The Grenade, then looks in on Lisa, who is now sleeping soundly, lucky girl, on Deziray’s futon, one bare foot sticking out from under the comforter. Brian slips off his shoes and crawls under the comforter with her, and Lisa wakes up a little, and makes room for Brian to crawl in closer and make himself comfortable. Then she inches back against Brian so that they are two S’s side by side, a Secret Service icon of compromised angles, none of that dagger-like business, that business of lightning bolts to frighten one. Brian drapes his arm over his roommate and draws her close, her body very warm, and his face is in her hair. She smells wonderful. She is not, even, like Brian’s roommate now. They are in a different place, not in the shotgun shack that they are used to, and they could be anybody, not friends at all, but complete strangers, or what if they were in Iraq and were just regular civilians? What if they were in Iraq, just living their lives, a man and his wife, and here come the Americans, invading their home? Brian can’t sleep so he parts her blond hair and licks the back of her neck. The Aryan responds favorably, and Brian holds her closer. He hasn’t slept for what? Fortyfive hours? That ought to be nothing, not a problem, but what with all the partying Brian has done he feels unhinged, his brain is off the hook. It’s natural enough, and it just happens. His Jewish nose is inside her, his tongue. It’s the most natural thing in the world, drinking from a woman’s body. Brian’s tongue has found a beautiful home in her. What a perfect fit. Brian drinks from her softly and the German trembles and then opens her eyes. She pulls Brian up onto her body and tries taking off his clothes, but “We’re roommates,” Brian says. Brian drives Lisa through Asheville in her sleek black Lexus, all around Asheville and down to the river, a lot of old abandoned buildings there, the leftovers from past industries. They smoke a few cigarettes, then Brian drives them to the Green Blouse, where Deziray waits on them and brings them their plates. Deziray apologizes for having locked them out in the freezing weather. “Where were you? What happened to you? Where did you go?” Brian asks. “I don’t remember,” Deziray says, and laughs the way she laughs, then dances

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her jerky little dance, knowing, as she must, whether or not somebody fucked her while she was passed out. “We damn near to froze to death,” Brian says. “I’m sorry,” Deziray says. “I completely let you guys down. I heard that you went to Rick’s last night like at three in the morning and threatened to beat him up. Is that true?” “He was worried about you, Dezzy,” Lisa says. Deziray laughs way too loud. It’s the laughter of a crazy person, a person who uses laughter to hide things from herself. The girl is crazy, Brian thinks. And they are out of there. Goodbye Asheville, but leaving, they see Troutsky’s parade. The punks and punk-hippy-hybrids walk the downtown sidewalks with signs that say the usual: NO WAR and FUCK BUSH. “They ought to have a sign that says RAW ON,” Brian says, noticing the potatocannon guy, potato-cannonless with a cardboard plaque on his bulging stomach that reads: “MASSACRE ME!” A wiseguy, Brian thinks, and drives Lisa to Atlanta, and drives around Atlanta, also known as the Pearl of Dixie, in the black Lexus, looking at things. Brian shows Lisa the cinder block building where he and his old girlfriend once lived, back when he, the exploited, worked in a factory cutting shelf covers and freezer dividers for American supermarkets. Now Brian is a student, hooray! Brian drives Lisa through Cabbage Town, looking for the inbred Appalachians which are known to be living there, and from the Lexus windows they see a few, sitting up on their porch, or perch. The inbreeds rise up and scream at them as they pass. That’s when Brian realizes he’s driving the wrong way down a one way street.

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POETRY

O n tio di rg t E .o in ew Pr vi in ryre e bl era ila lit va the .A . nt ww te w on . C Now ed e ur ib at cr Fe bs Su

James Richardson The Stars in Order Of

The stars in order of magnitude, of age, of Pisces/Taurus/Gemini, of stature, tilt, and priceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; I mean hot Sirius and gaudy Mars, historic stars, and not those pinpoint whites we hurry under, no, not those

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pixels. I mean stars like dimes some kid threw into the mall fountain, or large and soft as dandelions or right here that scatter of heat on your faceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;yes, feeling, what harm, spreading out? *

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SHORT STORY

Aaron Shulman Guide to the Boulevard of Foreseeable Museums

The Boulevard of Foreseeable Museums has been drawing throngs of visitors since time immemorial, or at least since the Museum of Recorded Time was founded, which might have been only last year. (Despite repeated censure, the nightshift janitors at the Museum continue to play a drinking game that involves spinning the hands of the clocks, and we are frequently unsure of the chronology.) The Boulevard’s attractions are numberless—literally, perhaps—so what was it that drew you here? Was it your curiosity about the scandalous remarks echoing through the halls of the Museum of Things Better Left Unsaid? Maybe you’re a history buff, eager to play witness to the heroic victories and tragic defeats at the Museum of Narrowly Avoided Wars. Or are you an unreformed navel-gazer, unable to resist the draw of the Museum of Shoulda Woulda Coulda? Whoever you are and whatever brought you here, let us help you find your way around. Arriving at the majestic front gates, you will confront the dramatic vista of the Boulevard. Like a lesson in perspective, the rolling green grass of the concourse zooms out before you, receding into the interminable distance. On the banks of this great verdant avenue stand the Museums, a picturesque symmetry of Greek Revivalist architecture fronting the Boulevard on both sides. In the square immediately inside the gates you will encounter over a dozen identical kiosks where entrance tickets are obtained. Payment for entry into the Boulevard is technically optional, but we recommend you adhere to the suggested donation so as not to incur the obliquely splenetic wrath of the Curator of the Museum of Passive-Aggressiveness. When not sticking post-it notes redolent of underlinings and exclamation points on bulletin TLR

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boards, he is known to roam from kiosk to kiosk muttering to no one in particular, “Am I the only the one around here who understands that suggested is a nice way of saying required?” While rules against littering are vigilantly enforced, security can be counted on to look the other way if your ticket stub should happen to end up on the ground. Indeed, they may even encourage you to toss your stub onto the sidewalk or grass. The Museum of Discarded Tickets is always on the lookout for new items to add to its Permanent Collection, and the Curators are known to give kickbacks to guards for every one hundred gathered. (Other similar exceptions are made in conjunction with the Museum of Belly Button and Pocket Lint.) While a strict code of conduct reigns along the Boulevard, reflected most visibly in the long lines wrapping around the Museum of I Told You So, visitors’ sundry needs have been anticipated and accounted for. We owe thanks to the Museum of Food Cravings, whose satellite operations ensure that food carts, refreshment stands, and outdoor cafés with tome-like menus dot the Boulevard (before requesting a dish not on the menu, appraise your proximity to the Museum of Nervous Breakdowns where Chefs of the Boulevard can often be found). Benches and picnic tables are always just a glance away, trumped in their convenient profusion only by the multitude of entrances to the Museum of Where Is a Bathroom When You Need One (baby changing stations are found in both the male and female restrooms). Next to the interactive displays inside the Museum of Where Is a Bathroom When You Need One you will find an exhibit on loan from the Museum of Germaphobia. Both paper towel dispensers and hand dryers are provided. If you are traveling with your family or in a large group, you may be wondering what to do should a member of your party go missing. Simply head straight to the Museum of Lost Visitors, located next to the very popular Museum of Failed Practical Jokes. These two Museums share gallery space due to the number of mischievous children who sneak off to scare their parents, giving them an ill-welcomed fright. (Nota bene: Special tickets for the Museum of Failed Practical Jokes on April Fools’ Day sell out months in advance.) On passing through the atrium of the Museum of Lost Visitors, you will hear the public address system announce your arrival—“So and so, please meet your party at . . .”—at which point you need only wait where you are for the lost member of your party to appear. As for lost articles, it may at first seem counterintuitive for the Lost and Found not to be housed in the Museum of Lost Visitors, but this is not unintentional: In the past, when the Lost and Found was located in the Museum of Lost Visitors, children were often thrown into vast daylong tantrums at the sight of a parent expressing more joy at retrieving, 174

say, a scarf, than at being reunited with the lost child. Hence, you will find the Lost and Found across the Boulevard in the Museum of Extinct Flora and Fauna, located between the wooly mammoth cage and the coatroom. As you begin your stroll down the Boulevard, the endlessness of it may at first appear daunting. Don’t fret: The pathways to the Museums are exceedingly well marked, with posted placards found at regular intervals displaying detailed directions and user-friendly maps. The story behind these signs is a famous item of Boulevard lore and is still a juicily discussed piece of gossip among Museum Employees. As the story goes, the placards might never have seen the light of day due to a bitter turf war between the Steering Committee of the Museum of You Are Here and the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Bad Directions. Thankfully, the Museum of You Are Here won this Inter-Museum standoff, but only after making a Pyrrhic concession: that the directions to the Museum of You Are Here be hopelessly confusing. Sure enough, a triumphant replica of these Byzantinely poor directions is prominently displayed in the Special Collections wing of the Museum of Bad Directions. (For more Boulevard gossip, we recommend the tunnels of the Museum of Employees Only, where fruitful eavesdropping can be had outside the Break Rooms.) Let us now focus on the must-see attractions of the Boulevard. Most visitors begin their day by paying a visit to the Museum of Pleasant Surprises. This is understandable. After all, who does not want to start their day with a Pleasant Surprise? In fact, chances are you will encounter members of the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Bad Directions there in the morning, still tickled by how negotiations with the Museum of You Are Here turned out. But beginning your day at the Museum of Pleasant Surprises is anything but a surprise, and not a particularly pleasant one at that. Practically all visitors kick the day off there. Consequently, the hordes rule, making passage through the galleries slow, crowded, and inadequately ventilated. (The Museum of Flash Photography Is Permitted is a similarly ill-advised place to begin.) We suggest—it is nothing more than a suggestion, we do not wish to require that you do it—that you bypass the Museum of Pleasant Surprises and save it as a dependable treat for later in the day. We recommend the Museum of Cities That Do Not Exist as an auspicious place to begin. As you approach, do not be put off by the traffic jam of moving trucks jockeying for space outside the entrance. This is normal. Every day, dozens of families, not to mention small businesses and corporate franchises, uproot themselves from unhappy residences in oppressively Existent Cities, immigrating to the frontier promises of a City That Does Not Exist. First-time visitors to the Museum are often struck TLR

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by the limited number of cities found in the curatorial space: nine. While in theory the number of Cities That Do Not Exist is indeed infinite, in practice this is not the case. As the rentable audio guide explains, there is in fact only a limited number of Cities that are unable to Exist. Critics of the Boulevard, to say nothing of dyspeptic travel writers, make a hobby of railing against the epistemological paradoxes of the Museum of Cities

Lamentably, the thrilling and highly sought-after exhibits have been closed indefinitely due to a pending Interpol investigation, thanks in no small part to concerted pressure from fine-arts insurance houses.

That Do Not Exist. Yet their intellectual organ, the Journal of Foregone Critiques, reveals itself to be nothing more than a playpen for callow minds uninitiated into the infinite (back issues can be perused in the subterranean stacks of the Museum of Libraries). Before leaving the Museum, make a point of eating at one of the many Non-Existent dim sum restaurants in New Hong Kong. Next to the Museum of Cities That Do Not Exist is the Museum of Stolen Artwork. Lamentably, as of winter, the thrilling and highly sought-after exhibits have been closed indefinitely due to a pending Interpol investigation, thanks in no small part to concerted pressure from fine-arts insurance houses (as a countermeasure, fundraising for the Museum of Uninsurable Items has been ramped up). With the Museum of Stolen Artwork off limits, move on to the always maddening, sometimes moving, Museum of Complaints. There you will behold an endless array of headphones hanging on the walls, waiting to be taken down and listened to. Piped through them is a ceaseless stream of audio artifacts airing every grievance imaginable. Let us listen to a young mother complaining about her newborn baby: “It’s not like I didn’t know what I was getting into with this whole motherhood thing, but once, just once, couldn’t the kid change her own diaper? I mean, could she be more selfish?” While visitors are often heard guffawing at the monumental pettiness of friends, neighbors, and perfect strangers, rare moments of tenderness and reconciliation can be witnessed as listeners hear the wrenching, bottled-up concerns of loved ones voiced for the first time. The Museum of Complaints also houses the Boulevard’s Office of the Ombudswoman. An epically harried administrator, the Ombudswoman is never without her wireless 176

set of headphones and an attentive grimace, terminally circulating between the different Museums with her Secretary, the former Director of the Museum of Frivolous Lawsuits, in tow. It is a matter of great speculation as to whether the Ombudswoman herself complains (many claim she is biologically incapable of compliant) and if these complaints were to exist, if they would be permitted to play on the headphones in the Museum. This lack of transparency is really quite vexing—and it is fine if the Ombudswoman hears us say that. At midday, groups often wish to split up temporarily so members can explore the many wonders of the Boulevard individually. To do this without consuming too much time or allowing the group to spread too far apart, we suggest spending a few hours jumping around the twenty-five floors of the Mall of Museums. Highlights of the Mall include but are not limited to: the Museum of Inadvertent Bon Mots (the level of laughter in the galleries is bothersome to many older visitors); the Museum of Hangovers (highly recommended for college kids, thirty-something wastrels, and aging libertines); the Museum of Ungranted Birthday Wishes (candles are not provided); the Museum of Too Little Too Late and Better Late Than Never (don’t be caught off guard if you run into your ex); the Museum of Unfinished Business (enjoyment usually depends on whether you are finisher or finishee); the Museum of Clichés (on exiting, visitors are often heard to exclaim, “I wouldn’t have missed that for the world!”); the Museum of Stains That Will Not Go Way (complementary red wine is provided); the Museum of Sleepwalking (warning: somnambulists are not responsible for their actions); the Museum of Awkward Silences (. . . . . . . . .); and the Museum of Mispronounced Words and Phrases (beware of: e-pi-TOME, OldTimer’s Disease, flamingo dancing, expresso, for all intensive purposes, and a blessing in the skies). Once you have collected the members of your party and regrouped, why not make Romance Row your next destination? On Romance Row you will find the Museum of Unsent Love Letters. In this one instance, feel free to ignore the Boulevard-wide fiats of the Museum of Please Do Not Touch. Open the display cases, remove the amorous contents, and read to your heart’s content. But proceed at your own peril: Employees of the Boulevard refer to this Museum as the Museum of Unpleasant Surprises. Steel yourself for the painfully adoring words written by lost loves, and go alone if you have a jealous significant other. Boxes of Kleenex are found in deliberate abundance; total strangers are often observed comforting each other with kindred hugs. It is no coincidence that a glassed-in skyway connects the Museum of Unsent Love Letters to the Museum of Shoulda Woulda Coulda. TLR

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If your mood needs lightening, make the Museum of Lousy First Dates your next stop. The candlelight inside is relaxing, the syrupy saxophone music is kept at a low volume, and the many live exhibits on display are endearingly hilarious. But if you have come to the Boulevard on a first date and find yourself here, be advised to exercise extreme caution. If you are not vigilant, in just a few short seconds you and your date may find yourselves turned from viewers to viewed, with a ring of onlookers laughing smugly while commenting out of the corners of their mouths. From there, you and your date might as well head back to the Museum of Awkward Silences. There is much more to see on Romance Row, but before continuing, consider dropping the kiddies off at the Museum of Happily Ever After (easily recognizable by its many empty towers from which damsels have been rescued). The steamier side of Romance Row is not recommended for children’s eyes—or ears. Some parents drop their kids off after the Museum of Failed Birth Control, as this route is more convenient for walking, but we suggest hazarding this itinerary only if there are no details you wish to remain secret about your children’s conception. Unsuspecting sons and daughters brought to the Museum are known to have loud public meltdowns on finding out that they were an accident, conceived by the machinations of, say, a broken condom, or during an imprudent moment in a public restroom, which is startlingly common. (The Museum of Where’s a Bathroom When You Need One DOES NOT have condom dispensers.) If squalling offspring are not quelled in a reasonable amount of time, a trapdoor will open and chute them to the Museum of Shhh! where librarians from the Museum of Libraries work on rotating shifts. When you are ready to move on, the Museum of Sultry Looks is just a short jaunt away from the Museum of Failed Birth Control, an agreeable pit stop before making your way to the Museum of Inopportune Erections. For men reluctant to tour the Museum there is a commodious waiting room near the entrance to the East Wing. The Ombudswoman can often be found here, reassuring nervous male visitors that should they be victims of another Inopportune moment they will be guaranteed discreet passage off the grounds via the Museum of Hidden Compartments and Secret Passages (entrances can be discerned by the presence of out-of-place bookshelves and wall-mounted candelabras). The last stop on Romance Row? Yes: The legendary Museum of Faked Orgasms. While this is perhaps the Boulevard’s most titillating attraction, Ladies, please be judicious in deciding to bring your man here. The atmosphere of erotic candor combined with startling revelation fostered by the exhibits, and intensified 178

by the dramatic track lighting, can wreak havoc on a relationship. If your sweetheart finds out that you manufactured even the smallest squeak of pleasure just once, chances are there will not be any Erections in the near future, Inopportune or otherwise. In fact, many hotheaded boyfriends and husbands exit the Museum dragging their significant other to the Museum of Cities Which Do Not Exist, where divorce laws are laxer and the legal system less congested. Your day on the Boulevard is winding down. Like many other visitors, the wealth of wonders you have experienced today will have left you in a meditative mood. Where, then, to quench this thirst for contemplation? Look no further than the Museum of Trees Which Fell in the Forest That No One Heard. Many visitors say that after the wondrous day spent on the Boulevard, the leafy, splintering crashes which reverberate through the sonic forest of the Museum make you question whether the Trees might not in fact be falling inside your own mind. You may gain unexpected insights into your personal history, such as how an Inadvertent Bon Mot could have saved you from a life of Shoulda Would Coulda. And do not be surprised if you find yourself magnetically drawn to the Lost and Found. There you can claim previously unheard articles of your self. By now you are deep inside the Boulevard, replaying the day’s marvels in your head, perhaps even feeling the press of the Museums’ endlessness around you. You will wonder how long you have been here, but no one can tell you. The nightshift janitors at the Museum of Recorded Time are still at their game, swilling drinks and spinning clock hands. As night falls and closing hours approach, do not panic. You have two options. Your first is to walk still further down the Boulevard, and simply stay—stay forever, we hope. Your second option is to find one of the numerous access stairwells marked: Museum of Foreseeable Museums. This will deposit you back at the front gates. From there, simply follow the path back to your car at the Museum of Miraculous Parking Spots. On your way, consider making a stop at the Museum of Gift Shops, where you can pick up other versions of this guide (we have come to believe that our guides too are infinite). If this is the option you choose, we hope you have enjoyed your time at the Boulevard and that you will return soon. But we understand if you are not able to make it back right away.

TLR

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NOVE L EXCE R PT

Marco Candida Dream Diary Translated from Italian by Elizabeth Harris

In 2006—I don’t remember the exact date—during my first counseling session, the psychiatrist gave me a prescription for an antidepressant called Cipralex. I went to this psychiatrist because I’d been having violent panic attacks for three months or so—I don’t recall the exact dates here, either, or exactly how many attacks. For two of them, I wound up in the emergency room. The first time they gave me ten drops of a sedative. But the second time they diagnosed me as having hallucinated and at this point they thought I better go see a psychiatrist. I read the emergency-room diagnosis, and I could hardly believe that those cannons going off in my chest and my troubled breathing were just hallucinations. These things really happened; they weren’t fantasies: they were muscles inside me, constricting and relaxing, all entirely beyond my control. My first attack occurred at my apartment in Genoa. About a week before, I’d finished my first novel and sent it off to a few publishers. It took two years to write, and nearly half of it (the book ran over three-hundred pages long) I’d written in the last two months. To finish the book and get it sent off as soon as possible—the time was right, I couldn’t wait—I’d downed enormous amounts of caffeine. Now, I think you should know that I’m a very anxious person. So starting at around age nineteen, I’ve avoided caffeine and other stimulants. I don’t smoke, either. Smoking makes me feel like my throat and esophagus are closing up. I’m also careful about hard liquor because it raises my blood pressure and increases my heart rate. So I’m thinking my panic attacks were brought on by all that caffeine in the last two months I was draft-

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ing my book—my blood pressure’s fairly high—even though it’s very likely there were other things going on as well. In 2005, a few months before I started seeing the psychiatrist, one of my best friends died, and for at least fifteen days I kept bursting into tears. Plus, about a year before my panic attacks—February 28, 2005, to be exact—my temporary factory job ended, which I’d had for two years and three months, and with just a few embarrassing exceptions, I haven’t held a job down since. This meant, or at least I think it meant, that at the end of January 2006, when I slipped my manuscript into the envelope to mail it to some potential publishers, I hadn’t just slipped what you might call general ambition into that envelope but something else as well, something even more general, unexplainable, and melodramatic: my survival was in that envelope, my entire sense of being. If no one accepted the manuscript, if at age twenty-seven, I didn’t become something, then now, with no college degree and no job, I’d be nothing. I didn’t even have a girl. All I had was a story claiming to be my love story that was really just a sequence of senseless encounters stitched together. So at the end of January 2006, my life depended on what others decided for me—and maybe I was justified in thinking they’d decide in my favor (I really felt the time was ripe), but if they didn’t, I’d be destroyed. A short time after that, even though it took only fifteen days to learn that the book was almost certainly going to be published—that was February, I signed the contract in June—I went to see the psychiatrist for the first time and he prescribed the Cipralex, one pill a day, every day for six months. The technical name for Cipralex is escitalopram. It contains—in my case, in 10 milligrams, but there are stronger pills as well—oxalate escitalopram, mycrocrystaline cellulose, colloidal anhydrous silica, talc, croscarmellose sodium, stearate magnesium, hipromellosa, macrogol 400, and dioxide titanium (white 171), and I don’t know if it’s the mycrocrystaline cellulose or the stearate magnesium or the dioxide titanium, but there’s clearly something in this small white capsule, because after taking it for two months, I started dreaming. I’ve had more dreams and dreamed more intensely this year than I have in the last ten. My dreams are extremely clear, like images projected onto a screen—more than that—like a virtual reality. For almost a year now—as I write these words, it’s January 22, 2007—when I wake up, I remember everything. My dream stays with me all day, more than a day, like perfume—or some other smell, I guess, if it’s a nightmare. I’ve even had dreams based on dreams I’ve already had—especially now that I’m getting more sleep. I’ve had characters that recur from dream to dream and char-

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acteristics that recur from character to character in my dreams and nightmares. I’m also starting to draw some broad conclusions: dreams are taking shape even when we’re awake and we dream with our eyes open, only we don’t realize it unless we’re paying close attention—which has happened to me at times, and which I’ll go into later. Though I’m pointing this out, I don’t mean to suggest I have something new to say about the dream that’s any different from ideas developed in the last century or studies going on today. I’m just talking about my impressions over the last year since I became such an active dreamer. Sometime after all this dreaming started, I began keeping a dream diary. This was only natural as I always write down everything that happens to me, pouring my experiences onto the page in every possible form, from a minute-by-minute log to long prose poems. My dreams were experiences, too, just as interesting and real as any trip or new job or new girlfriend. And when I started my log, I didn’t even know that dream specialists recommended keeping one, something I found out later—after I began writing these pages—on the Internet. Since I’m used to writing, I’m also used to doing some preliminary research before I throw myself into something, to see if my idea’s occurred to someone else, and if so, in what form and what direction it’s taken, and then how it’s been developed. The first thing I do is check out various search engines. Then I’ll do some more traditional library research. Sometimes I’ll ask friends of mine who have a lot of cultural expertise. While I was searching on-line, I found this: The Dream Log Every single dream is only one fragment of an enormous fresco composed in the colors of our private symbols. Over time, a dream log can open up a vast world for the dreamer. It can also serve as a catalyst for more energetic dreaming, for richer, more intense dreams. Start your dream log with a loose-leaf notebook, a pen, and a bedside lamp. This will help you to remember your dreams and record them before you’re fully conscious and your dreams disappear like paper on a fire. But not only this. Daily attention to our dream activity can make our unconscious perceptions that much more acute and can provide greater communication back and forth between the cerebral hemispheres. Over time, the successful dream diary allows us to comprehend our extremely personal symbolic language, to recognize consistencies and refrains. A dream diary will let you map out an interior landscape that you’d otherwise find inaccessible, except perhaps for the occasional brief, incomprehensible foray.

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The first thing you should do is title and date your dream. Then jot down the basic emotion and plot: use shorthand, don’t try to fill in any gaps. Do this right when you wake up, when you’re still half-asleep. You can put in the details, from setting to various associations and feelings. As embellishment, you might add drawings or photos or clippings of pictures or poems or memories. Or entries from your waking diary, for emotional-symbolic effect. When you dream, each character is a part of you. And certain places, facts, and things will keep returning—a house, perhaps, or a car ride, or a few umbrellas. Don’t try to figure out what the symbol means; just put it down on paper as it appears. Let yourself feel its meaning. Don’t rationalize it. You’ll wind up with a dictionary of sorts, a dictionary of personal and universal symbols. And these symbols might even emerge during the day, surprising us in what’s termed “synchronicity.”

I started my dream diary at once, and it wasn’t just a log, because when I woke up I actually managed to write down quite a bit—at least ten pages every time. Plus, at first—at least with those pages from the first month, in the first twelve dreams—they weren’t merely entries, but seemed to be making some sort of aesthetic claim as well, and that first month I did toy around with the idea that maybe this could be a literary work of some kind. But more than likely, I thought of this in order to persuade myself that I wasn’t doing something utterly useless—like anytime I write something that has nothing to do with my writing. So something that basically, according to my own convictions, is useless—on-line diary entries, private exchanges I’m barely aware of, just chats—in short, every time, so to speak, that I’m wasting time. [pg. 18] For my dream diary, I use plain A4 white notebook paper—not ruled or graph paper—and a thick black Bic Permanent Marker. I use this marker because I like how it squeaks on the page when I wake up and start writing like someone possessed and also because I like the smudges it leaves next to the letters (mostly by the “a”s, “l”s, “t”s, “s”s, and “g”s—especially the “g”s ). The noise of the black felt tip on the white paper makes me want to write and it might also help me remember my dreams more as I write them down. When I wake up, I reach with my right hand for the notebook on the nightstand while my left hand presses the light switch above my head (this is no small lamp; it’s more like the beam from a lighthouse); then I grab my glasses off the floor with my right hand, I put them on, and I pick up the Bic Permanent Marker and start writing. I do this when I’m shivering cold, when I’m too tired to get out of bed, if it’s early

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morning and still dark. Otherwise, if I have the strength, if it’s a warm afternoon out, I scoop up my things, head for the desk against the wall, turn on the sconce, and start writing. I have all the time in the world to write since, as I’ve already mentioned, I haven’t had any real work since February 28, 2005. I’ve just committed these words to paper, but they sound so disrespectful to the work I do every day, the work of writing and rewriting, that I can’t believe I wrote //no real work// without even thinking about my writing. When I was eleven, twelve, I thought writing was the only real work possible, then later, when I was sixteen, seventeen, I toned it down a bit to the only real work possible for me, and to do this //real work//, I’ve had to give up a number of things that over time, with my youth slipping away, I’ve tried to hide from myself and from others, probably also because I don’t even realize how much I’ve given up in order to stay home and write, huddled over a sheet of paper on my desk, or later, sitting up straight in front of a sheet of paper in a typewriter, or later still, in front of a digital page on a computer screen, though when I think about it, there might be three things I’ve given up that matter more than all the rest: a college degree, my job at the cable and fiber-optics firm, and then my girlfriend, though thinking about it, I actually lost her, and all for writing, which meant everything to me—and still does. No, I really can’t believe I wrote those words, //real work//. It must have been a lapsus calami, even a lapsus mentis. So let’s say then that since February 28, 2005, I’ve dedicated myself to the only real work possible for me, though it’s unpaid work, at least at my level—maybe I could do better, but I know my limits, and I feel lucky even that at age twenty-seven I’ve managed to sign a contract with a small (but in my terms) respectable publishing house, one a writer can be a part of and call himself an author and others will, too—and by not having a paying job, I’ve had the chance to dedicate myself to the only real work possible for me and not only that: this last year has also given me the chance to sleep and dream.

Just before I wake up, the woman says: “Now I’m ready for you.”

[pg. 32] Even if my dreams don’t proceed according to logic in a diachronic or spatial sense, I still can say they often have a sort of logic to them—a very elementary logic. This seems fairly clear with my dream on October 25, 2006 of the woman who 184

inserts food up her vagina. This woman and I are in a bedroom. On the nightstands by the bed are some large cream pies—ridiculously large—and on the floor are trays of roast capon, stuffed turkey, lobster slathered in mayonnaise. The woman in bed is almost fifty. She’s completely naked, with blond pubic hair, and her thighs are spread in front of me. The woman spreads her thighs some more and I scrunch down on the bed, my chin on my hands, and I can see the vaginal opening and there’s a set of slightly parted teeth, sharp, pointy teeth. The woman in the dream has a second mouth in her vagina, and in a moment, I realize the mouth is moving on its own. The woman looks at me and says: “You want to see something?” With her right hand, she reaches down, tears a leg off the turkey on the floor, and brings it up to her vagina. The vagina sinks its teeth into the turkey leg with a noise like a fart, tears off a big chunk, and chews. Meanwhile I can see the mons moving all around like an amoeba. The vagina with teeth demolishes the turkey leg, lets out a prolonged fart—in the dream it sounds like a liquid fart—and then runs what must be a tongue around its small and large lips, cleaning them. Then the woman takes a garnish potato from the roast capon and inserts it into her vagina, then a wedge of cream pie that’s at least twenty centimeters tall. The vagina dentata gobbles it all up, spilling, wiping itself clean with its tongue like a fleshy sponge. Then the woman does something different. She tears a wing from the roast capon, but it’s not for her vagina, she brings the wing up to the slit under her left arm—she’s shaved her armpit just for the occasion. She lowers her arm to her side and I hear the armpit chewing the meat and nibbling the bone, and her left shoulder shifts up and down as the armpit swallows. When the armpit’s through, the woman pulls the bone out like a thermometer, and she tosses it across the room saying, “Great chicken!” Without going into much more detail, on those pages from October 25, 2006, besides inserting food into her vagina and armpit, the woman also shoves some food up her rear-end (a bit of lobster), into her right ear (some crab meat), and into her left nostril (a fried minnow). Just before I wake up, the woman says: “Now I’m ready for you.” [pg. 86] Now, however, I want to get back to what I was talking about in the first place, before I interrupted myself with all these dreams and ideas. Meaning, I want to explain, if I can, how these dreams I’m writing about come to me, where and how I’m sleeping while I dream, my sleeping positions, and what I eat before going to sleep. First off I’ll talk about my room, so to do that, I’ll describe a dream I had on April 6, 2006—or I should say that I wrote down on April 6, 2006, but I could have TLR

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had the dream before midnight, so, obviously, on April 5, 2006. I say could have because on April 6, 2006, I wrote down two dreams that I very likely had at two different times during the night. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of someone having two dreams in the same sleep. So more than likely I woke up but didn’t write down my one dream and then I went back to sleep and had another, woke up again, and I wrote down both dreams one after the other as if they were part of the same sleep cycle. This must be how it happened, and it’s the only time it did happen in the entire diary. In the first dream from April 6, 2006, my room is a very normal seven-by-four meter room with a wooden dresser to the right of some French doors off the back balcony. On top of the dresser, there’s a fifteen-inch television and a CD case with fifteen CDs—there’s mostly 1970s music in my room. The dresser has six drawers, the bottom three full of files, manuscripts in Times New Roman or Book Antiqua, and the top three are full of underwear, socks, and the T-shirts I only wear around the house. There’s a white computer keyboard, black letters stamped on the keys, and clippings from books and newspapers are taped to the back of the door: a Dante poem, Aphorism 84 from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, an article on Pablo Picasso, a couple of paragraphs from works by Martin Heidegger. I think our dreams are often fragments from the furthest reaches of our imagination, and that’s why, even with the dreams that seem the most normal, the most real, there’s also the feeling that something’s wrong. Take a landscape from a dream, maybe a bridge over a river running through some fields and hills is the bridge we saw four days ago in some TV movie on some channel, and the river running through those fields and hills with the bridge across it might be a stream instead of a river, the Ossana Stream, to be exact, which runs through Tortona and flows into the Scrivia River, and the two banks of the stream might not be the banks of the Ossana Stream, which runs through Tortona and flows into the Scrivia River, maybe they’re the sides of that pit that was dug out some five years back for the foundation and plinths on the site you were supervising for your firm, meaning, the place you used to work, and that landscape of fields and hills with the river running through it and the bridge across the river might be a landscape of fields and hills from an impressionist painting in a show at the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa that you happened to catch a few weeks back, and the stars reflecting off the water, the stars in the sky, might be the drops of condensed milk that landed on your blue pajama top when you had that attack of hyperphagia in front of the TV at two in the morning, and . . . even so, that dream from April 6, 2006 seems to include, down to the last minute detail,

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everything you’d see in my room, my very own room, without any feeling at all that something’s wrong. Aside from the fact that in the dream room everything is breathing. Yes, that’s right, I can’t think of a better word for it, in the dream room, every single thing breathes in and breathes out. Every object in the room is swelling and shrinking, swelling and shrinking, systematically—swelling and shrinking every few seconds . . . and something else is happening: everything is oozing some sort of fluid that’s—how to put it?—that’s greasy. It squirts out, spraying the entire room, and if it’s a book or a wallet, it’s greasy drops, but then there are the walls, the bed, the floor. And with the breathing, greasy floor, you can’t keep your footing, you need to hold onto something, but that something’s also breathing and greasy. And because the ceiling light is raining grease, I slip and fall on my face. But before falling on my face, I try to hook the table with my right hand, but I only manage to grab onto a book, my 1987 New Abridged Zingarelli Dictionary. There on the floor, the New Abridged Zingarelli Dictionary disintegrates in my hand, and that’s when I see it. First, the Zingarelli hasn’t disintegrated. What’s really happened is that at the center of the cover there’s now a hole with some kind of pudding inside—a sunken pudding—and this pudding is sending out a silver light. I see things in this light. Inside the soft Zingarelli pudding, there’s a ballpoint pen—the pen I use for underlining my books. I have no idea what my pen’s doing in my Zingarelli, but there it is. I watch it bobbing around a while in the glowing pudding before I reach to pluck it out. Right away, something else takes its place: the yellow notepad I use for scribbling down ideas and stories and right beside the notepad, there’s my old wooden globe from when I was a boy, that wound up in the trash after my brother chucked it at my head and gave me a lump almost as big as the globe itself. I can’t imagine what the globe’s doing in my Zingarelli Dictionary. And I try to pull the notepad and globe out, too. But I realize the globe is much too large to come out of the hole that’s opened in the cover of the Zingerelli, and it’s also a little deeper in the pudding than the pen or notepad, so I have to insert my whole hand, almost up to the elbow, inside my dictionary. I’m wiggling my fingers around trying to figure out how to grab hold of the globe and pull it out, when I realize the book’s turning into a sticky sack—and inside the book it’s hot, like a hot water bottle—and the deeper my arm goes, the more the book stretches, widens. The hole in the book cover’s growing, and I pull out the globe, and then the hole shrinks up again with a sound like a creamy cake going splat against a wall. As soon as the globe’s out, there’s another object, a

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yellow sweatshirt with a white star sewn on the back. Of course I recognize it: it’s the sweatshirt I wore from ages twelve to sixteen whenever I sat down to read or write. I put it on every time, maybe thinking that the star on the back might help me. So I keep this sweatshirt tucked away in the dresser or in a box in the closet—and once in a while, I’ll look for it. When the sweatshirt’s out, I see something else rising to the surface that’s important to me, or used to be. And I’m beginning to realize that if I don’t stop, I’ll just keep pulling things out of my dictionary, and then I have an idea. I set the Zingarelli on the floor and I take down the stuffed-toy dog that’s hanging on my wall. The dog swells and shrinks in my hands and oozes grease. I can’t figure out how it’s taking in air: maybe its grease-soaked fabric is really porous; still, I feel like I’m holding a live thing, a living object. I poke the stuffed dog and my finger sinks into something like putty or plasticine. I scrape out a furrow then make an opening and once again a silver light comes pouring out. Inside there’s a red rubber ball like the kind from the toy store down the street that my brother and I used to buy when we were little to bounce on my nonna’s balcony. Behind the ball there’s a human hand. It’s wrinkly, with long, red fingernails, and it’s covered in cafélatte–colored spots: it’s the hand of a lady who’s getting on in years. I start pulling on the hand, but there’s an arm attached and a shoulder and a neck and a head. I feel them though I can’t see them. There’s an entire human being in this stuffed dog, and I’m pulling with all my might, trying to drag her from an opening some ten centimeters wide. And while I’m pulling, the person inside the dog starts saying, Stop that bouncing, you little monsters! You’re destroying your nonna’s plants! And my geraniums! You rotten little boys! I know that voice. That’s the voice of the lady who lives above my nonna’s apartment, and whenever my brother and I bounced our rubber ball around on our nonna’s balcony, she’d go out on her own balcony (which was tiny in comparison to ours) and she’d start in with her Stop that bouncing, you little monsters! You’re destroying your nonna’s plants! And my geraniums! You rotten little boys! Who knows, I tell myself, maybe if I get her out, Signora Iolanda (from upstairs) will still be gripping the bamboo rod in her left hand that she always used to beat her rugs, and she’ll start chasing me around with it, whacking at my back and behind. Even so, I tear the stuffed dog open some more, stick both arms in and straining quite a bit, I start to pull her out. First her right arm. Then her whole head—and as soon as her head’s out with her eyeballs all dirty and those mint-green curlers in her irongray hair, she sputters, Stop that bouncing, you little monsters! You’re destroying your nonna’s plants! And my geraniums! You rotten little boys! Then her chest pops out, 188

those big, fat tits under her flowered housecoat, then the rest of her. Once she’s out of the stuffed dog—which makes a noise like a creamy cake going splat against the wall, then just like that is back to normal—Signora Iolanda starts pacing up and down the room with all of its breathing, greasy things just like she used to do years ago, pacing back and forth on her balcony every time she heard my brother and me bouncing our red rubber ball on our nonna’s balcony, and every six or seven steps, saying exactly what she used to say: Stop that bouncing, you little monsters! You’re destroying your nonna’s plants! And my geraniums! You rotten little boys! Pulling Signora Iolanda out of the dog has made me realize something: every time I pull something or someone from something in my room, I’m literally pulling out something or someone that makes up the memory that this thing in my room (for reasons I can’t always explain) stirs in me. Then, at the end of the dream, I’m searching for the things in my room that hold the memories of my grandfather. Nonno died some years back. I miss him terribly. Maybe he’s in my guitar, I tell myself in my dream, or in the television or the hi-fi or the mirror or the door to the closet. Or maybe the memory of my nonno—who was actually born on April 6—is in one of his gifts: the binoculars he gave me, or the saber, or the coin collection. In the dream—and also right now—I want to hold him, hug him, and even if he’s only like Signora Iolanda, even if he’s only restricted to memory, it goes without saying that my memory of him would be vast in comparison to hers. My April 2006 dream is the mirror opposite of the ghost I’ve had running back and forth across my mind ever since I lost my job and that’s made me think that all of us, we human beings, we mortal beings, so all of us, human and nonhuman, we’re all living things. Maybe this ghost first showed up when I took to spending my days in bed or on the couch, waiting to fall asleep, to dream, and I lay in a position more like a thing, more like an inert body than a living one. I started thinking that just because we breathe doesn’t mean we’re any different from things. Some people might say this is just the foolishness of a depressed mind, and aside from everything else, meaning, aside from the fact that we can move and blush and grow pale and reproduce and lose blood and make feces and grow fat and grow thin, aside from all of this, what

Stop that bouncing, you little monsters! You’re destroying your nonna’s plants! And my geraniums! You rotten little boys!

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really makes us different from things is that we can think. On the other hand, that ghost crouching in the crevices of my brain tells me that there are things that move automatically (robots), and there are things that blush and grow pale (dolls), and our blood’s not so different from gasoline and other fuels, and as for thinking—are we really so sure we think? Aren’t we more like stones falling and accelerating at the speed of 9.1 meters per second, who think and want to fall at 9.1 meters per second, or are we more like trees who only think and say the word “tree,” or leaves who only think and say the word “leaf ”? In the end, aren’t we simply living things that breathe and move and feel, but still we’re things and so, sooner or later, aren’t we destined to go back to being things exactly like a leaf, a stone, a doll, a robot, or gasoline? And really, won’t we grow obsolete much faster than many of the things I’ve mentioned? Maybe this is why—because we’re growing obsolete much faster than other things—that we worship God with a symbol that’s just a thing. We kneel in veneration before a thing that resists the intrigues of obscurity—that doesn’t wrinkle, doesn’t break, doesn’t change, or if it does, then slowly, much more slowly than we things do. We observe things, we want them, study them, buy them, learn how to use them, and maybe all because we really want to be like them: we want to be the guitar hanging on the wall of our room, one of the pens in the penholder, pages full of words on philosophy—we want to be a book, probably. We’re things that revere other things, that look at other things with love, with envy, because we’re living, breathing things and when we become things like any other thing we’ll have crumbled into a million bits and won’t even have the dignity of a chair, a table . . . a book. Of things that survive. [pg. 101] On December 24, 2006—and I remember I saw William Friedkin’s The Exorcist on December 23—I dreamed about a girl possessed—not by the Devil—but by an angel. This angel enters a twelve-year-old girl who up until that point was snotty to her parents, used dirty words, talked back to her teachers, pulled her friends’ hair, tried poking her friends in the eye with paper airplanes, and now this girl starts to help old ladies across the street, tries to settle quarrels between her classmates, helps her mother with the laundry, hangs it out to dry, irons it, and she sets the dinner table, clears the dishes, washes them, does her homework, and meanwhile, she also vomits occasionally, pees her pants, has her period two or three times a month, and her mother’s worried by all of this, has never seen her daughter like this before, and the doctors don’t know what to say, maybe it’s her temporal lobe, they say, some trouble 190

with her nervous system, and they do some tests, stick her full of needles, but there’s nothing wrong, nothing wrong at all, and then two holes show up on the girl’s palms, signs of mystical ecstasy, and they realize the girl’s possessed by an angel—she even talks about her angel—and they want to call someone in—they’re concerned. But who do they call? A psychiatrist? An exorcist? Whose job is it anyway to drive an angel from a body, to bring that body back to normal? And is it really worth it, bringing back a hostile, surly child—even if she’s healthy, healed? In the dream they finally call in a Devil priest who does a reverse exorcism, pressing an upside-down cross into the girl’s forehead and reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards to drive that blessed angel from that cursed body, but the only thing the Devil priest manages to do is call forth a demon who possesses the angel, and they merge in the girl’s body, so now there’s an angel possessed by a demon and a demon possessed by an angel, and as a result the girl appears absolutely normal, and so when the angel guides her to do good deeds, the demon intervenes, corrupts her, so what she does isn’t entirely good, and when the demon demands wicked deeds from the girl, the angel intervenes and what she does isn’t entirely bad. The dream ends with the girl saying: “You want to drive out this angel and this demon, but you really don’t understand: it’s like liquid in a bottle or coins in a piggy bank: they’re not possessing me—I’m possessing them. This is no possession by a demon, no possession by an angel: this is a possession by a human.”

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POETRY

O n tio di rg t E .o in ew Pr vi in ryre e bl era ila lit va the .A . nt ww te w on . C Now ed e ur ib at cr Fe bs Su

Robert Carnevale Woodgrain

I. Sunlight fell on the tabletop lighting up the back of your hand and one square of this relief map over which your fingers were moving like a party gone ahead, already dowsing or testing the soil, already a bit patriotic.

The cafĂŠs have all been extinguished, not a single candle left burning to Simon Bolivar or to Lord Byron. But three, four, five in the morning, always a few lights are still burning. And you

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still see them as what happens when one darkness eclipses another.

POETRY

Kelly Cherry What the poet wishes to say

What the poet wishes to say cannot be said, in part because it has been said, and often, before, but this was true when only the second poet wrote. It becomes no truer with time. The bigger reason the poet cannot say what she wishes to say is that she wishes to say something that seems to be a kind of music, a word-field of music, as it’s less a text and more a space of time profoundly charged by feeling, like the awe attendant to our modest place among the huge events of universal import: stars and novae, the initiating burst of Many from the One—the one what? Impacted point, or god, or some computer-generated simulacrum? In any case, the whole of it. If everyone could speak the whole, then everyone would speak poetry, but Moliere’s gentilhomme was perfectly pleased to learn he had been speaking prose. TLR

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Even for those whose language is poetry, the task requires a life of: practice, contemplation, prayer. (The latter two are sham without the first.) This life begins in echo and extends into apprenticeship, a period that may be short or long but always ends, if it ends, with the achievement of a vision or “showing,” as Julian of Norwich called her visions of Jesus Christ, but we prefer “a view.” (Transported as we are by art and music, the leap to faith remains a leap to faith.) So say “a view,” a world view if you must, but know that you are only halfway home. Even with the view. Even speaking poetry. Because poetry is not the only language you must master. You must also learn the personal language that will convey your view, and since your view, so similar to the ones you love, also differs from them, if only because the time in which you live and write is different, you must invent that language, 200

hoping a few readers follow on the same path and perhaps they will and perhaps they won’t. But how to make a language of your own? In short, the process has to do with rhythm. The racing rhymes of Dante’s terza rima so magnifies the interlocking of hell, earth, and heaven that the universe, the medieval universe, becomes one verse. And Chaucer’s Wife of Bath is like a laugh so full and deep it shakes the ground of England. And Will, whose way with words created English, creates as well the tense, or rueful, clash between the life of action and the life within the skull, that secret, teeming world. Or consider a poet less removed in time, whose reputation for that reason is hard to know, yet Osip Mandelstam, arrested and in exile, begging food and blankets, honed the razor of his lines. Discussing Osip, poet Joseph Brodsky TLR

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notes, “Whatever a work of art consists of, it runs to the finale which makes for its form and denies resurrection.” This is true and not true, as it is, too, when he writes, “After the last line of a poem, nothing follows except literary criticism.” Both statements are rather more clever than correct. What follows a poem is often a poem in response. It’s possible to write a poem that enacts its own resurrection. As for the poet, the poet aims not at immortality of self or reputation but of what he or she wishes to say, the world as it was, or seemed to be, on that day in mid-October when the hills were still green, the wildflowers scattered like birdseed from a hand not seen nor felt, and the various, changing, falling leaves swirled up again, caught in a sudden updraft, then settled on the ground like immigrants, a huddling, a community of color. 202

A day when a small boy rushed to open the door to shout â&#x20AC;&#x153;Bonjour, Madame!â&#x20AC;? to a woman whom heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d never met and waked in her a feeling of sheerest joy, salvific and abiding. The poet wishes to say what life was like here on the planet in the twenty-first disturbing century and might, to do so, think of her beloved Beethoven, who, deaf and lonely, brought his art to such sublimity, it is as if he wrote his music among the spheres of music, working at a desk of sky, the innumerable stars for lighting, a gust of solar wind sending manuscript flying. In the late piano sonatas, you hear the composer placing his notes, solid and silken as they somehow manage to be, without hesitation but with deliberateness exactly where they are supposed to go, thereby fixing the apparatus of heaven God had let fall idle.

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BOOKS

Thomas E. Kennedy In the Company of Angels By Andrew McKay

Thomas E. Kennedy dedicates In the Company of Angels to “those who have endured what I can scarcely begin to imagine; and for those that will not be indifferent.” Torture—the unspeakable pain and fear suffered by victims of brutality and violence— is the subject of his novel. A master of inhabiting the interior lives of his characters, Kennedy bears witness to the physical and psychological pain endured by survivors of torture, aggression, and abuse and uncovers the fear hidden within those who commit these atrocities. His unique emotional perspective draws from a vast library of cultural references including literature, music, art, history, politics, and psychology. The protagonist, Nardo Greene, is a Chilean citizen and teacher who is arrested by the Pinochet regime for teaching his students the poems of Domingo Gómez Rojas. (Rojas, a political activist, was arrested by the Chilean government during “the trial of subversives” in 1920. He died at a young age while in police custody.) Nardo is beaten at the police station, imprisoned and tortured. In the depths of his suffering he is visited by angels who momentarily transport him outside the prison walls as a vision and promise of freedom. The angels, however, must return Nardo to his cell, as his day of deliverance is yet to come. Kennedy’s scenes and images are gut-wrenching for their frank detail. Describing his breaking point in prison, Nardo says,

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They bring in a little girl. She is five, six, perhaps. She is naked. Then they bring in the mother. She is pregnant. She is naked. The little girl tries to run to her, but the yellow tweed suit holds her back. He caresses her black hair. Mustache is holding a piece of cable. He says to the woman, “If you cry out, we whip your daughter, too. Simple. You decide.” Frog-eyes steps across and takes the little girl by the hand. He watches me. “This is your show, Greenebag,” he says. “Here we have a piece of paper for you to sign. The paper says merely that you wish us to stop doing this. Sign and we stop at once.”

Nardo is eventually released from prison. His wife and child are desaparecido, disappeared. Broken in body and spirit, on the verge of psychological collapse, he flees Chile for Copenhagen where he struggles to come to terms with the loss of his family and imprisonment. It is Kennedy’s wonderful ability to create images of human grace, dignity, strength and compassion within this landscape of overwhelming cruelty that provides the book’s most moving sections. While at a cafe in Copenhagen, Nardo becomes drawn to a woman with “eyes like blue fire.” Her name, he later learns, is Michela. Ultimately, she is his move toward inner freedom as foretold by the angels. Michela and Nardo have led different lives yet they share the same source of pain: male aggression and violence. Michela has fled from her abusive husband, Mads, and is now in an abusive relationship with her boyfriend, Voss, who is nine years her junior. “Why do men hit me?” she asks herself. Her tyrannical father verbally abuses her from his deathbed, and she has lost her mother to dementia. Voss belittles Michela and explodes with rage as he descends into perversion and drunken madness. She grieves over the death of her child years earlier. But despite her difficult life, Michela’s retains the ability “. . . to believe in goodness, to nourish it as one can, to hold it gently.” Michela speaks to the hope Kennedy places in all women and their power to nurture and protect humanity from its own evils. Michela reaches beyond her fears of violence and abuse to get inside the heart of Nardo’s anger. He screams, “Go away! Do you not see? I have nothing for you!” She responds, “No. I won’t. Not like this.” Michela becomes a force for restoring Nardo’s dignity and sense of self. At Nardo’s weakest moment, Michela tells him, “You are a man . . . . You are a man for me. You are strong. So strong.” She is his champion who “touched his broken face with love.” As Nardo and Michela begin to reclaim the lost and shattered pieces of the other, Kennedy writes, “Now they turned back upon themselves and made of this TLR

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moment something worthier. For it was precisely what they had been in each other’s arms—he had been a man for her and she a woman for him, and that was so now and could not be undone by the past and was perhaps even more so because of the past, his and hers. All mistakes, pain, stupidity, injustice, preparing them to become something new together, something more certain and genuine.” Words, both written and spoken, provide a path towards healing, redemption, and salvation. Michela shares the sorrow of her daughter’s death with Nardo. It is the first time she speaks of her pain and she begins to feel release. Nardo gives voice to his suffering and tells her of his imprisonment and the story of the angels who visited him. His story awakens Michela to her inner strength and powers of insight, “. . . it made sense to her suddenly, Mads and Voss and the violence they let loose on her. It was not her weakness, it was theirs.” There are very few places to rest in this book, and Kennedy persistently keeps his readers off-kilter. The visitation of Nardo’s angels is described in terrifying terms. When Voss becomes fearful of his own thoughts and actions and cries out for help, it implicates the reader in sympathy, belying any certainty about who is the true enemy. As an American, it’s impossible to read this story without thinking of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, the secret operations in other countries, those who told us America does not torture and those who believed it. “We are all to blame,” Michela says, echoing Nardo’s words. There’s nothing easy or comfortable about In the Company of Angels. Kennedy awakens us to the suffering of others both close to home and far from sight. He makes us aware of our fragile hold on goodness and the courage, compassion and determination of those who risk all to try and undo the damage. In the Company of Angels will move readers to action.

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BOOKS

Gilbert Sorrentino The Abyss of Human Illusion By Jeff Bursey

There have been a few authors whose work has inspired me to think in new ways about writing. This is familiar to most readers. Also familiar is the sensation that hardens over time into a conviction—perhaps by dint of not wanting to be taken over by a book (i.e., by another’s consciousness)—that this can’t happen (shan’t happen) as we get older. We build ourselves into sophisticated readers less and less open to ravishing by this or that poem, novel or play. An editorial will spark a letter, a government policy initiate a petition, but a sonnet? Oh, we’ll be stirred for a few minutes, but then we’ll calm down. By inspiration I’m thinking of kinship, of writers who formed a family of mentors. It wasn’t until university that I started reading what you’d call literature. The curriculum hardly compared to those I stumbled upon. Philip José Farmer’s “biography” of Doc Savage contained quotations from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, a title that stuck in my head. Months later I came across a tattered copy for under a dollar, read it, and everything changed. From the first paragraph I felt I was holding my breath. That someone could mingle dreams, whorehouses, Paris, roaches, hunger and miserable conditions, syphilis and art, was interesting on its own; but the language and conceits existed on another level entirely, as did Miller’s rough and confident disregard for authorial niceties. In time another U.S. writer came along, Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, Minn., 2010. Other Sorrentino works discussed: Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971), The Orangery (1978), Mulligan Stew (1979), Aberration of Starlight (1980), Red the Fiend (1995), Gold Fools (2001), Little Casino (2002), The Moon in Its Flight (2004), Lunar Follies (2005), A Strange Commonplace (2006).

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William Gaddis, whose books changed how I would look at arranging themes, and who resembled Miller in showing what a sentence could contain, and in the sheer brio of the narrative attitude. After Gaddis, no U.S. writer had come close to providing both that immediate rush of excitement and the encouragement—incitement might be more accurate—to innovate until I read Gilbert Sorrentino’s The Moon in Its Flight. Obviously Sorrentino wasn’t the only one writing something different, but he was the one I came across. Dalkey Archive publisher John O’Brien stated recently that Sorrentino was an “utter master of contemporary fiction who has yet to be discovered and appreciated.” With its dismantling of stories, The Moon in Its Flight completely overturned my view of what a story could look like when written by someone who put structure above plot and character. As Miller said in Sexus, from 1949, “People have had enough of plot and character. Plot and character don’t make life.” Miller, Gaddis, and Sorrentino: They’re all no-nonsense talkers when they want to be, at times abrasive, and inventive in ways that appealed to me, and that I needed. The Moon In its Flight came as a relief, and a wonder. The title story has many of its sentences recycled in “Times without Number,” another story from the collection, and their interchangeability matches the interchangeability of themes and characters. In “Sample Writing Sample,” the narrator says: “This is how literature works, if ‘works’ is the word.” Every story, and all Sorrentino’s work, rebuts what we were endlessly taught: Literature contains singular imagery, the perfect word lodged in its perfect spot, rounded characters, believable settings, a confident narrative (if not a confident narrator). This demolition liberates readers, and writers, from stale expectations, and stylistic and aesthetic molds. If you’re not going to make words matter in the way we were taught they should, why spend time trying to make the characters loveable? “He wasn’t intrinsically contemptible,” a narrator says in The Abyss of Human Illusion, “yet there was no way, it seemed, that he could avoid being thought of with contempt, at least not by those who got to know him, men and women alike.” Sorrentino’s men and women, with simple names pinned to them, and dressed in threadbare qualities, come across as what they appear to be—devices. That quality grew more overt in his later work. Whereas earlier, in a novel like Mulligan Stew, characters are sometimes drawn from other novels (e.g., The Great Gatsby, Finnegans Wake). This compares to Raymond Queneau’s We Always Treat Women Too Well, where the characters’ names are lifted from Ulysses. Sorrentino liked Oulipian restraints; he is quoted as saying, in conversation with Publisher’s Weekly, that “form not only determines content, form invents content.” 208

Each of Sorrentino’s books after 2000 rejuvenated my aesthetic thinking. How can one resist the intellectual and smart-ass charm of Gold Fools, a Western told only in interrogatives that mixes time periods freely as five men (two old and three young) search for gold? Was Billee flirting with the ineffable realm of the langue? Or the equally ineffable, and more expensive realm of the parole? Or had he, ’twixt sleep and wake, entered the world of ‘competence’ and ‘performance’? Did Billee know what he was doing, or thinking, or was he the same know-nothing, Jesus-waving sod he’d always been? And yet, had the paradoxes of language somehow chosen him for their own? Their own what?

Now The Abyss of Human Illusion has come out, prefaced with “A Note to the Reader” by his son Christopher, who writes that like most of the late works, it “offers a less apparent and/or more indeterminate structure.” And, its “formal ambitions remain unclear (to me).” We are presented with fifty stories or vignettes bearing Roman numerals instead of titles, followed by a section called “Commentaries.” The structure resembles the fifty-two vignettes of Little Casino—a card game structure—the fiftythree features of the moon affixed to reviews of art exhibits in Lunar Follies, or the fiftytwo sections of A Strange Commonplace where twenty-six titles are each used twice. The Abyss of Human Illusion begins: “Mundane things, pitiful in their mundane assertiveness, their sad isolation. Kraft French dressing, glowing weirdly orange through its glass bottle . . .” The commentary asserts that no one has “suggested a reason for [the dressing’s] strange, pumpkin-like color. It is highly popular.” Being “highly popular” wasn’t likely for Sorrentino’s work, or for him, given his personality. This may be the place to say that when Sorrentino’s third novel, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, came out it, in the words of Joseph Tabbi, enjoyed some notoriety as a roman à clef. It made enemies, it caused a stir, and it was then largely forgotten as the living models for the characters, like the author himself, left the scene. It was read by some for its scathing portrayal of local poets and downtown painters, for its faces and names—the ones dismissed by John Cale and Lou Reed as posers, self-abusers, or ‘just alcoholics.’

(Of course, it is more than that, as is shown by the casebook in which Tabbi’s article appears.) Sorrentino’s popularity—or acknowledged literary presence—according to David Andrews, “peaked in 1980 when he published Aberration of Starlight,” which Gerald Howard, in a Bookforum piece that came out shortly before Sorrentino’s death in May 2006, considers “a book that manages to combine his signature formalism, TLR

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emotional directness, and clearly autobiographical content with a heartbreaking emotional effect.” This book followed The Orangery and Mulligan Stew (considered by Eugene Lim to be “the metafiction masterpiece” and by Paul Quinn as “a contender for the title of the most representative work of literature of the postmodern period”). Changes in taste and in the publishing industry meant that despite these three successive achievements the novels of Sorrentino’s middle years (the 1980s and 1990s) were largely ignored, though he was kept in print by different houses, notably Dalkey Archive and Coffee House Press. He has his devoted readership (you either get him or you don’t, I think), comprised of more, if not many more, than “devoted sons and other deviants,” as his son jokes, or the “devoted, few” Deborah Friedell referred to in 2006 when reviewing a reissue of Aberration of Starlight. Of course, selling himself to get a readership had never been a concern of Sorrentino’s. (“Essentially, the novelist, the serious novelist, should do what he can do and simply forgo the idea of a substantial audience.”) But I think how my reading life changed because of him, and how there are other readers who haven’t felt that shift, but could yet. He is playful with form—and often has fun at the expense of others, though there’s not much fun in Red the Fiend, where a twelve-year-old boy is abused by his Grandma (while Mother and Grandpa look on, or join in). Even in this relentless novel, Sorrentino instills lists, improbable situations, and much else with humor of different colors. “Red goes out of his way to see if anybody he knows is in the park or the lots, and as he walks beneath the peeling sycamores, he sees a bird fluttering amid the leaves. He stops, picks up a sharp stone, and throws it at the bird. For something to do. To add his little bit to the general cruelty. To be in touch with the spirit of the world.” After disposing of the dead bird, Red feels “as if he is, just for a moment, one with the vast entropic rhythms of the earth.” A brutal life, one would say, with a grim humor that doesn’t do one damn thing to reduce Red’s suffering at the hand of his dreadful Grandma. However—with Sorrentino, there’s often a “however”—consider the fact that Grandma appeared in earlier novels, used for this and that purpose, in this and that guise, as have other permutations of the content, so that she and the material are variations on notes and themes we’ve encountered elsewhere in his books. What, then, of the gloss of reality overlying Red the Fiend? Is this a realistic novel after all? If it isn’t, then where’s the abuse? If there’s no abuse, then what’s the source of the anger we feel, or the despair, or anything that might be engendered by black specks on white paper? What we’ve spent time reading was a collection of words—wellcrafted, pulsing with life—but not necessarily the experience of a young boy and his 210

dismal family. It’s fiction, nothing more, and definitely not a bit less: an illusion that has depths we may never see the bottom of. The small stable of caricatures stemming from Sorrentino’s earliest fiction to his last novel include not only permutations of Grandma, but divorced men, soldiers and ex-soldiers, old men who have outlived their spouses and whose children rarely visit, women who committed adultery or have been the victims of it and now live alone, men who like to wear hats, people who play cards, a lot of drinkers, and many kinds of artists (all seen as contemptible). In The Abyss of Human Illusion the artists are charlatans, or written out. “The young actress” who married an older writer “grew bored with the marriage, discovering, after a year or so, that writers are, by and large, even more boring than their books . . .” Steve wants to get his stories accepted by The New Yorker, to which his friend says, “I once suggested that he send his stories to a magazine that was, well, not as impressed with itself but he gave me, as it is said, a look.” Another man has a friend who “is a great success in the small, almost always weaselly world of poetry, its sweaty ambitions, its miniscule rewards, its grim teaching appointments, its pathetic prizes, its insincere enthusiasms.” There’s no privileging any class or vocation in Sorrentino’s world. Nor do the finer sentiments receive an easier time. If a romantic or sentimental view of writing, or love or anything, pops out for a moment, then it is held up against its opposite. But that doesn’t mean that his prose doesn’t carry, “as it is said,” resonance and emotional freight. In “XXXVII” a marriage just a year old already has problems. “Perhaps,” the husband thinks, his wife wasn’t aware of how she treated him, how she talked to him with equal measures of impatience and patronization, wasn’t aware of how she was to him . . . . It never occurred to him that if his wife consciously acted toward him in the manner he thought—he knew—she did, that she might like it, that she might like doing this to him, that she had married him so that he would always be near, waiting patiently to be insulted and demeaned.

When this kind of insight appeared in earlier books they struck me one way, and now they strike me another; which is to say, now that I’m divorced they contain greater power. I would foolishly explain my idea of writing an Oulipian novella to my (now) ex-wife, who had already chosen, though I didn’t know it, not to read any published work of mine (on the grounds it was “private” though that reasoning is still a mystery to me). She then washed her hands, so to speak, of my vocation, and therefore TLR

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of a large portion of me. Coming across the passage quoted above I laid down The Abyss of Human Illusion and walked away. Not because of an exact parallel, but it felt uncomfortably close. My ex-wife stated emphatically that my Oulipian novel would be an “academic exercise” read by no one. There was a snort before that pronouncement. Being in love, and a bit of a fool, as well as dumbfounded—like Charlie Brown having believed that Lucy wasn’t going to pull the football away—I said nothing. To a certain degree I had once shared the imagination of the husband quoted above. Sorrentino’s insight into the dynamics of a marriage suddenly illuminated part of my own experience. The last tale in Abyss, “L,” is followed by commentaries that provide information for each section (a similar device is found in Little Casino). “Some of these commentaries may not be wholly reliable,” the narrator says at the end, after we have learned about or are reminded of products, radio programs and more. Speaking of “X” he writes: “You might wish to make on the fly leaves of this book some of the things you can dream up, if you wish; the reader is the ruler.” In a novel, let alone a life’s work, that stresses the beauty of restrictions and the fecundity found in artificiality, we know Sorrentino has always been in charge, no matter what we may prefer out of sentimentality for a more pleasant ending, or from reading literary theory. A Brooklyn boy who spent time in California (“a reluctant resident”), Sorrentino returned home towards the end of his life. It’s fitting, then, to end off speaking about him by quoting my first literary influence—Henry Miller, “‘just a Brooklyn boy,’ a lad from the 14th Ward” (Plexus) who said—on the subject of writing: “All that the critics write about a work of art, even at the best, even when most sound, convincing, plausible, even when done with love, which is seldom, is as nothing compared to the actual mechanics, the real genetics of a work of art.”

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WOR KS CITE D

Andrews, David. “Gilbert Sorrentino.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 21, no. 3. Friedell, Deborah. Times Literary Supplement. 16 December 2006. Howard, Gerald. “A View from the Ridge.” Bookforum, Feb./Mar. 2006. Kellogg, Carolyn. “Jacket Copy: John O’Brien of Dalkey Archive Press, Part 1.” Los Angeles Times, 16 July 2009. Laurence, Alexander. “Gilbert Sorrentino Interview.” The Write Stuff. Lim, Eugene. “Remembering Gilbert Sorrentino.” The Brooklyn Rail: Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics and Culture, July/August 2006. Quinn, Paul. “The foghorns and the vacant lots.” Times Literary Supplement, June 17, 2005. Tabbi, Joseph. “Matter into Imagination: The Cognitive Realism of Gilbert Sorrentino’s Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 23, no. 1.

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BOOKS

Alina Bronsky Broken Glass Park By Marion Wyce

I haven’t yet reached the age when physical ailments and medical procedures become the routine stuff of cocktail party conversation. But a few days ago, I found myself telling a friend about a recent dental surgery. What motivated me to tell her? We both share a deep fear of dentists, she’s had a lot of dental work performed herself, and, perhaps most important, she’s a close friend, one invested enough in me to listen to all sorts of trivia. She commiserated, but then went a step further: “You should have posted about it on Facebook,” she said. “I bet you’d get a lot of sympathy.” Such a simple transaction: suffer a trauma, tell an audience, get sympathy. She made it sound like the obvious next step, as inevitable as having the sutures removed. Why pick out just a couple friends to tell when I could instead broadcast it to everyone I know? Never mind whether they’re interested, whether the experience is likely to have any meaning to them, or whether I have anything interesting to say about it. The mere fact of my pain was reason enough to make it public. In our confessional culture, we offer up our wounds, our secrets, our misdeeds, small and large, to confidants and virtual strangers alike. To have nothing to confess is the worst confession of all: to be unworthy of attention. Lately, I find myself rebelling. I’ve tuned out from “reality” TV and cut my Facebook updates down to a trickle. My fatigue with confession has even affected my reading habits, as I shelve memoirs and first-person novels in favor of books with

Translated by Tim Mohr. Europa Editions, New York, 2010.

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old-fashioned third-person narrators who don’t crack open their characters’ skulls and peer inside at every turn, who allow people to retain some of their mystery. So I should have resisted Alina Bronsky’s debut novel, Broken Glass Park, narrated in the first person by seventeen-year-old Sacha Naimann, who has lived through a tabloid-worthy trauma and, like any enterprising modern heroine, wants to write a book. Instead I found myself completely beguiled by Sacha’s funny, unstinting observations—and by Bronsky’s skillful narrative that reasserts the power of confession even while questioning and undermining it. The novel follows Sacha’s life in the Emerald housing project with other Russian immigrants; her desire for revenge on her stepfather, Vadim, who murdered her mother and another man in a fit of jealousy and rage; her attempts to create some semblance of normalcy for her much-younger sister and brother; her early fumblings at sex and love with a sixteenyear-old boy and his middle-aged father. But above all, what drives the novel forward is Sacha’s remarkable voice, which crackles from the very first page: Sometimes I think I’m the only one in our neighborhood with any worthwhile dreams. I have two, and I don’t need to be ashamed of either one. I want to kill Vadim. And I want to write a book about my mother. I already have a title: The Story Of An Idiotic, Redheaded Woman Who Would Still Be Alive If Only She Had Listened to Her Smart, Oldest Daughter. Maybe that’s more of a subtitle. But I have plenty of time to figure it out because I haven’t started writing yet.

What Bronsky sets up from these opening lines is a special intimacy with Sacha, who shares with the reader dark thoughts and fantasies that she hides from other characters. It’s a powerful construct, one that made me sympathize with Sacha, and one that reminded me that this is how confession used to be done, in private with a privileged audience: a priest, a spouse, a confidant. The sharing of secrets was something rare and intimate, and thus held special currency. Now self-revelation has become de rigueur, and the refusal of others to divulge makes us suspicious, even outraged. I started reading Bronsky’s book during the media maelstrom surrounding Tiger Woods and his infidelities. As expected, the news commentators chimed in like a dim Greek chorus, giving us platitudes on how to interpret his very public unraveling. An early refrain: Tiger botched Damage Control 101 by failing to confess. And then when he did finally admit to “transgressions,” he was criticized for saying too little, too late. There’s a model for crisis control I learned in a PR job I once held: Admit wrongdoing, express regret and how you will change for the better from the experience, receive the public’s forgiveness. You could say spin doctoring has its roots in the

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confessional—sin, repent, receive absolution—except now the confessional’s doors have been blown open, and everyone wants a look inside. Which is why this one sentence in the statement posted to Tiger’s website caught my attention: “Personal sins should not require press releases and problems within a family shouldn’t have to mean public confessions.” He resisted our rapacious appetite for confession, and his public image took a battering. We might have forgiven David Letterman his affairs, but Tiger committed the unforgivable sin of keeping his mouth shut. In Bronsky’s novel, the people around Sacha are hungry to hear her confess the one thing she refuses to admit: that she is upset and afraid. Weakness, she believes, made her mother vulnerable to the abusive Vadim, so Sacha resolves always to be strong. She sees herself in the words of an old Russian children’s poem: “My nerves are made of steel, no, actually, I don’t have any at all.” But the people around her don’t believe that. When she loses her temper over a trivial incident in the weeks following her mother’s death, her neighbors find comfort in her outburst, but Sacha doesn’t: “I can still remember the look one of the women gave me as I fell screaming to the floor. There was relief in that look. They had been droning on for days about how I didn’t need to keep it all inside. How I could give my feelings free rein. Vent. I needed to, in fact. But I didn’t listen to them.” Of course, it feels like evasion; how could Sacha not be frightened and anxious after witnessing her mother’s murder? Even though I inwardly applauded Sacha’s unwillingness to cop to her pain, another part of me nodded in silent agreement with the novel’s characters who urge Sacha to acknowledge the feelings she denies. Surely she would feel better. Or is it that her family and neighbors would feel better, that we as readers would feel better? Sacha’s predatory neighbor, Peter, is so enraged with her reticence that he threatens her with rape: “It’s fucked up that you’re not scared of anything. I think we need to change that.” Sacha escapes, but her near-miss with Peter causes her to finally confess her fear: “Before, I wasn’t afraid of anything. Until tonight. Now I’m afraid again. I’m afraid of being afraid.” Her confession made me cringe because it feels like emotional rape, the result of coercion—and because I realized I’d been waiting for it, just like Bronsky’s characters. And therein, I think, lies my trouble with all this obligatory self-revelation. Confessions are by nature transactional. We give up something to get something, whether it’s forgiveness, intimacy, a lenient sentence, or a book deal. But what we gain often makes us lose sight of what we’ve handed over in the bargain: an expectation of psychological privacy, for others and for ourselves.

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For me, that’s the most interesting aspect of Broken Glass Park: how such an ostensibly confessional novel nonetheless preserves and argues for its narrator’s right to withhold her feelings and motivations. The point isn’t that we have to abandon our taste for confessional art; even Sacha herself acknowledges listening to Eminem primarily because of how he reveals himself in his work and how that moves her: “He’s the only artist I’ve been able to listen to in the last two years—for hours on end. And the only one I really believe, the only one who has lived what he describes in his music . . . . I get emotional following his saga in the media, his divorces and marriages all with the one woman and his battle with his own family.” She admits to singing duets with “him singing his lyrics and me singing mine. But the melody is the same, and so is the basic feeling.” Broken Glass Park is, in a way, Sacha singing her story, and being cast as her confessor forced me to consider what I expected from her—especially when she refused to deliver it. In the novel’s final section, Sacha learns Vadim has killed himself, news that causes her to have a breakdown as she realizes her mother is truly gone forever and there’s nothing she can do about it. After landing in the hospital, she returns home and makes the decision to leave, thinking she may head to Prague, a city she visited with her mother when she was younger. She debates leaving a note for her remaining family but decides against it. “It would be an exaggeration to say I’m in a good mood,” she says. “But something is singing inside of me—and the words aren’t Eminem’s.” Sacha doesn’t tell us what those words are; her confession is over. Instead, she reclaims her own narrative by ending this one, by cutting us off as readers. She doesn’t want anything from us, not our absolution or our empathy. She simply departs: “I throw my backpack over my shoulder, turn my baseball cap backwards, and head out into the sun.” What, exactly, is going on in Sacha’s head as she recedes into the distance? I could guess, but I don’t know for certain—and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

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BOOKS

Mary Jo Bang The Bride of E Louise Glück A Village Life By Renée Ashley

I didn’t bite the s.o.b. but if I had it to do over again I surely would. I’m what? Five? Six? Seven, tops? This nightmare of a pediatric dentist drags me out of the dental chair and into his tiny waiting room where, his hairy hand clutching the back of my neck, he screams like a crazy man at my poor grandmother. I bit him, he yells, and she is not to bring me back until I can behave myself. My teeth can rot in my head. He doesn’t need this crap. Goodbye. There’s the door, he says, pointing with his chin. Use it. Now. Don’t talk. Goodbye. That evening my grandmother, as I suppose she must, tells my mother and that’s that. The evidence is in: I am incorrigible and a matter of great shame to those who would love me. What could I have been thinking? But after my first few words in my own defense, I know better than to continue. I’m a child of quick null-affect; it’s a learned response. I am terrified of everything—in particular of those things that might set off my mother’s scandal-siren, which are, of course, all things that others might discover. Back then even my childish anger turned to fear and swiftly manifested as a state of rigored silence, as a permanent floorward gaze, and as stomach ulcers by the time I hit double digits. I didn’t bite the lying bastard. Out of terror instilled by my previous experience alone in the room with the man—he was rough and enjoyed being nasty—I refused to open my mouth. Now I had proven myself to be of inferior stock, had once again humiliated my mother, and she was going to see The Bride of E, Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minn., 2009. A Village Life, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2009. 218

to it that I learned how to behave. She was going to make me into a lady, as she neatly put it, “come hell or high water, goddamnit—you got that?” The minute she could, she enrolled me in charm school. That dentist must be dead by now. I hope he gets no rest. Yes. I can hold a grudge for more than half a century, even as its target flings itself through the afterworld and beyond. It’s difficult now, though, for me to even say the words charm school without breaking into a self-conscious chuckle—charm being something that, as far as I can see, has all but sublimed into an ambient air of unceremoniousness and a great deal of behavioral latitude. In the fifties, however, charm was serious stuff. Charm school consisted of etiquette, of poise. It was white wrist-length gloves with your dress in the daytime—or cheap cotton ones when checking for dust; it was knees scrubbed raw for my age set, or nylon-hosed for the older girls, knees forced together while dangling demurely over the edge of a metal, collapsible chair. It was napkin folding, table setting, and getting in and out of the passenger seat of a 1957 Chevy without exposing one’s underwear, thighs, or just generally appearing to be kin to a bushel sack of rutabagas. Charm school meant hostess gifts and thank-you notes written in elegant cursive. It meant learning how to laugh without flashing the yawning, wet tunnel of your mouth and throat. It was keep your voice down; it was lose gracefully. It was: do it again. We “powdered our noses”; we didn’t “have to pee.” We were students of euphemism in body and speech—what we did, what we said, how we said it, and where we kept our hands while we did and said it, was training for the purpose of rendering us fit for a society of the sort I have yet to experience with any regularity or ease. It was, basically, packaging. And I was only one of many being packaged, whether willingly or under duress. The expectation was era-endemic and my mother must have rigorously economized to make it happen for me; she’d have no doubt given up cigarettes and beer and a lunch of anything but a one-slice-of-bolognaon-two-slices-of-white toted in to work in a greasy paper bag. She would have done it, as she did almost everything, with an earnest, vocal martyrdom. Yet I was never willfully uncooperative nor was I habitually neglectful. I was, however, staggeringly self-conscious. My mind would go blank and I could not get my body to go through the motions even by rote—for fear, I’m certain, of failure and another rousing bout of I-work-so-goddamn-hard-and-you-can’t-even-do-this-one-thing. I dutifully read my ladies’ handbook every night. And I repeated the same months-long course three times before the sympathetic woman who ran the school suggested to my mother and her checkbook that, perhaps, she might not to want to bring me back for another go. TLR

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Bottom line? Girls like me, born in the forties, along with poets like Mary Jo Bang and Louise Glück, likely have a foundation of either ingrained or painstakingly acquired politesse to work from, a sort of benchmark of decorum to emulate or from which to vary. It’s all about demeanor and bearing and becomes a matter of degree and/or distribution in practice: aspects of presence that characterize both a person and a poem whether by choice or by default. Yes. A poem is an appearance and a behavior. Mary Jo Bang’s slightly skewed, energetic poems seduced me slowly over a long period of time, a poem with its legs crossed at the ankles here, a poem with a scab on its elbow there, until I succumbed fully to her curious honesty and good, troubled nature. She is complicated and funny, odd in a smart, vulnerable, internal way. She is, I discovered, metonymically speaking, someone good to spend time with: amusing and serious both, intelligent with no urge to rub a reader’s face in her obvious smarts, and playful enough to toss off the white gloves when necessary and show a little panty on the jungle gym if that’s what it takes. If there are insights to be found on the steep, winding tunnel-slide, she’s there. She’s a poet who makes acute and oftentimes surprising discoveries through trial and articulation—there’s nothing grossly packaged about her. Her intuitions and craft are seamless; she’s unselfconsciously sui generis. And she’s willing to disregard a stray hank of hair that has tumbled out of place or the scuffed toe of a saddle oxford; she may break a hemstitch or two when she snags her skirt climbing the ladder to the monkey bars, but she’s no roughneck, no cheap date either. She doesn’t begrudge the effort to live consciously and with feeling. She can clean herself up later—you can almost hear her say it—but right now she’s got work to do. Her fifth book, Elegy, on her grief at the death of her adult son, won the 2007 National Book Critics Award in Poetry and was named a 2008 New York Times Notable Book. It has, as would be expected, a different feel from her previous books, but the work is not unrecognizable. It is still her intricate, captivating struggle. Her speaker, though, has grown heavy with the knowledge of loss. In Elegy she was working her way, rough cuts and helplessness aside, into knowing more shadow and the questions that arise therein. Bang’s new book, The Bride of E, is an abecedarius that presents both the glimmerings of recovering wit, light and dark, along with the residue of her torment. She presents an Alice-in-Wonderland world of disorientation in which ideas are falling and visions are in flux. She understands about distance, now, and how it both exists

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and is impossible to achieve. In “And as in Alice,” her narrator says

Alice cannot be in the poem, she says, because She’s only a metaphor for childhood And a poem is a metaphor already So we’d only have a metaphor

Inside a metaphor. Do you see?

“They all nod,” the poem continues. “They see. Except for the girl / With her head in the rabbit hole . . . .” And how close to that vision of a Möbius perception of distance, remove-andno-remove-at-all comes “E Is for Everywhere,” which flings open wide the playful E-is-also-for-existential box that Bang is drawing from.

And now, someone is saying, “It’s amazing That an Australian platypus is now a curio On a shelf in a cabinet in a palace in Poland.” All the while you’re wondering

About the man on the curb who waved at you. As if he knew you. As if you have been everywhere. As if you are existence.

And of course you are existence. Despite the as if, there’s no subjunctive there: you are. It’s a magnificent plant of suggestion. The ghost of the nod right there. It’s all existence—and her tonal, innocent charm arises from being observation rather than indictment. One of the irresistible draws of Bang’s work, and of her new book in particular, is that her wisdoms have not yet hardened into conclusions. There still exists for her the suspicion that her perceptions could possibly change. “The mind doesn’t halt but goes halfway up,” she says in “F Is for Forgetting.”

The mind doesn’t halt but goes halfway up In the elevator and then finds itself stuck. This is the entirety. Eternity. Made of a material That is unlikely to change but is forever.

That unlikely is what may save the Bang speaker. There is still room for deliverance. There is still that possibility of liquidity, the ability to suspect. This same redemptive

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insight is stated even more openly in “I as in Justice”:

There is an immense power in uncertainty. There is that story that goes like this: You were a crime you didn’t know had been committed.

That marvelous torquing on the image of the crime! This sense of unknowing, of being taken by surprise by yourself, keeps the poem in quickening mode. “It’s the end and it isn’t,” she says in “O Means Mouth.” “I love you except when I don’t.” Bang evinces her vulnerability because the honest telling of it is part of her search. The work is neither bravada-propelled confessionalism nor is it show-offy oddballism. It is not plaintive. It is not silly-to-no-avail. But it is tender and controlled. Even in its containment it lets you experience some of the messiness of being human—because, after all, being human is a messy proposition. She is malleable and she is generous. And when she stumbles there is no shame. Her defenses—we all have them—have soft edges. She is in medias res on Zeno’s path to a lucidity that pays off along the way but is not the end of the journey. Louise Glück, it would seem from her poems, no longer stumbles; stumbling is in her past. She has traversed the charm school obstacle path, come out on the other side in charge, and is ready to tell you what she learned from her hardships along the way. She is, perhaps, a flinty Red Queen to Bang’s plushier Alice. Glück, again metonymously, has seen the world and is not pleased at all. Her poems, though often magnificently lyric, seem lapidary and unconditional. Her lacerative tongue makes me wince, leaves me feeling deeply cut, the kind of magical wound that never heals. There’s a frightening spirit in there. But powerful, mostly immaculate poems. “Hawk’s Shadow,” a short piece from her second book, The House on the Marshland, published in 1975, was the first to leave its mark on me. Even with my terrible memory, I still clearly recall its image and the impact it made: a couple is “embracing in the road,” the “I” of the embrace watching the combined, single shadow of a hawk hovering above with its kill in its talons. “And I thought,” the speaker says, “one shadow. Like the one we made, you holding me.” I continue to experience the chill and the outrage of that image. The poem is dressed flawlessly, its tailored jacket crisp, the skirt severe, the deep-colored fabric rich-feeling. It’s so

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sleek you know there’s not even any fuzz in its pockets. The poem doesn’t raise its voice; it doesn’t have to. Its statement is so ruthless and so controlled that the reader knows for certain that voice has no doubt, does not even consider the fact that it emanates from a place of privilege and entitlement, a far-away place beyond question or reproach. The poem, despite the displacement inherent in the trope of hunter and prey, has eschewed euphemism for a keen truth-telling. This is what you get if you engage. She’s simply reporting the bad news. You never get the feeling it’s a warning; it’s a fact. And because she knows that it will be what it is whether we understand or acknowledge it or not, I don’t even think she much cares if we listen. But there’s an energy bound in such a bitter and unequivocal statement set in such a bloodless context, one that has the power of a chainsaw and the elegance of a palmed, silver and poisoned, blade. I have come to think of these cut-throat lines in her poems as her dazzle shots, normally a term designated for those single, on-the-mark proclamations of professional psychics, the spot-on revelations that clients (or dupes) think could not possibly have been faked, the details that convince them that everything the psychic has said and will say must also somehow be true. Glück’s a master of her raw proclamations. I’m not the only one who believes she’s brilliant: she’s won the Pulitzer, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Bollingen and Wallace Stevens awards. But in her latest book, A Village Life, her eleventh collection of poems, she’s tried a little something new. The flap copy quotes Langdon Hammer asserting that this new work contains “the type of describing, supervising intelligence found in novels rather than poetry.” Glück? The same Glück? But yes, in a stretch, I can see what he’s talking about. Though I think Hammer’s description is either hyperbole or wishful thinking, I do see the evidence of a broader scope, an occasionally somewhat varied voice and pronoun, and frequently a looser line. The collection tries to ventriloquize inhabitants of the titular village. And though I find this swerve from her more fixed, precipitous mode, these loci of her slowings-down and drawings-out are only interesting assays into something less keen than what has come before. Yet, though a number of her lines may have softened, her basic nature has not. She’s still at her best when she’s brief. And I can still find that mesmerizing voice of superiority and certainty—and those dazzle shots that draw blood. Early on in A Village Life there is a short poem entitled “First Snow” reminiscent of the dynamic displayed so bone-chillingly in her “Hawk’s Shadow.” An anomaly for Glück, the entire poem, rather than a single image, is couched in simile:

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Like a child, the earth’s going to sleep, Or so the story goes.

But I’m not tired it says. And the mother says, You may not be tired but I’m tired—

You can see it in her face, everyone can. So the snow has to fall, sleep has to come. Because the mother’s sick to death of her life And needs silence.

This, for my money, is Glück at her best again—the voice terse and adamant. The control rigorous—there is none of the flailing hysteria that might surround a motheron-the-edge—yet the energy is so tightly contained it feels like a vessel ready to burst. It’s not a poem of euphemism or chit-chat. Its posture is unyielding and its meaning has not been disarmed—not even by the soft shell of its simile. Its closure contains the removed-yet-obvious swipe of ill-temper: “sick to death of her life.” Its gestures are not overly unbecoming, but its conduct could hardly be called decorous. It’s a bit like watching an accident actually. You can’t pull your eyes away. And this is what I read Glück for: her ability to knock me down and leave me discombobulated in a good way. It’s not that I might not have ever thought these things she says; it’s that it wouldn’t have occurred to me to say them—the magnetism of her painfully accurate edge. For anyone still struggling with appearances, this is rough stuff. The poem is perfectly set out; yes, its shoes are polished and its hem straight, but what it contains is shocking—not in content, but in articulation. At table, one might say this poem just passed gas loudly and felt neither shame nor the need to say “excuse me.” I’m not going to be bored with a tablemate like this one—or in this poem’s presence— so I like this Red Queen. I’m fascinated by her brusqueness. The queen, it appears, has balls. It would be both a trial and a hoot to sit next to her, observing her assurance and precision as I fumbled for the right spoon and slopped soup on my chest straight from the bowl in the process. I’d love to do it. But I wouldn’t want to cross her. She’s scary, yes, but if the evidence is to be taken at face value, there is also, it seems, a great weariness growing in the work—not for the work itself but for the world. Because the Glückian speaker already is dead certain about her elevation and remove, boredom seems to have set in. The poems are riddled with participles and gerunds, their –ingy sense of ongoingness a long single sigh that runs through the work. In her poem “Noon” alone I find: shining, wandering, getting, breaking, being, thinking, sliding, standing, being, touching, folding, being, holding, and telling. 224

That’s just two pages and not an unusual configuration. The poems are equally as frequented by negatives, often in the form of contractions: couldn’t, wasn’t, can’t, isn’t, doesn’t, don’t, haven’t, etc. And closures and near-closures ring with negation: “. . . life rots in the heat” (“A Corridor”), “Nothing remains of love, / only estrangement and hatred” (“Fatigue”). In “In the Plaza,” the speaker tells of a man who falls in love with a young woman from across a street, projects their coming together and says yes they will become lovers, and that the woman, by committing herself to this man, will be seen by that man, then, to be of “little use.” The poem closes with the line, “It hardly matters whether she lives or dies.” The speaker’s sense of distance and resignation is enormous, the sense of I have removed myself from these useless endeavors is clear. There is one poem, though, “In the Café,” that seems to have at some point deeply touched the speaker. It embodies what feels like the most obvious and personal, and apparently current, emotional information of the poems in the collection. Or it’s the least guarded. The poem starts like this: It’s natural to be tired of earth. When you’ve been dead this long, you’ll probably be tired of heaven.

It’s funny. But it’s not funny. It’s hopeless and it’s an underscore to all the –ings, all those long-range ongoingnesses that populate the pages of A Village Life. This is never going to end, it tells us. And I recognize the tone. It’s my mother’s, the one she used when she thought I might be working myself up to whining about something: “Goddamnit,” she’d say. “You’d kick if you were in swimming.” She was exhausted by the mere thought of my perceived-as-constant harangues. As in, Goddamnit, will you never stop? But of course it’s true too—you kick in swimming to stay afloat, to keep your head above the water. But I knew what she meant: the world’s going to be what it is no matter what. Every feeling is costly. Why waste your—and my—energy? Just shut up. Suck it up. Village’s copy says that Glück’s long lines manifest “a calm omniscience.” It’s true, I suppose, that the voice is calm and that she believes herself omniscient, but it is a calm that intensely refutes any possible payoff of emotional investment. This is the way it is, the voice seems to say. And it goes on and on and on. And still, for the most part, the poems are beautifully turned-out and pointed, as Glück’s best poems tend to be. There is still the Glückian laceration, the truthspeaking coming from a mind that is raw with angers and resignations. There is no thing unkempt about this queen but her tongue. She keeps her knees together; she’s wearing perfect silk stockings. There is no vociferating; she isn’t waving her arms like

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a wild woman. Her façade seems impenetrable. There is no rage but the cold rage, and her truths still draw blood. The only thing missing, perhaps, are her gloves. She’s taken them off. She threw them away long ago. Charm school today is either the Nelson DeMille novel about a KGB conspiracy or the sexy reality show on VH1—another species of charm school altogether, one replete with a $50,000 first prize. The first prize in our nineteen-fifties charm school was geared more to delayed-satisfaction thinking: when, at long last, we grew into the beautiful young women our mothers kept promising we would become—with our peau-de-soie skin and the bearing of a purebred instead of a lame and lumpen misfit—we would have the advantage of being a lady. And charming or not, we who have been ladied at some point or another are still shaped by how and what we learn and to what degree we choose to display or dispose of that knowledge. By how and when we vary, if we choose to vary, our demeanors, by whether, over time, we change or remain the same. I’m looking for a way to work life out; I can hold a stony, unforgiving grudge. Bang’s Alice is falling down the rabbit hole. Glück’s lean queen is caught in the vortex of her own severity. Whether the draw is our shared vintage and degree of experience or a more common spirit beneath the demeanor of our lives and our poems I don’t know, but Bang and Glück are speaking directly to me. I don’t want to be them—heaven knows I’ve got my own problems—but I want to be with them. To see how their poems are fashioned from what they have seen and know, what they may have become or may yet become. If their manners and modes, their craft and concerns, seem at opposite ends of some continuum of deportment, it’s a convenient dichotomy rather than an absolute one. One makes me wish to comfort her; the other makes me wince. One is confused; one corrosive. One, I’m happy to say, is making her way through a familiar and difficult world and the other appears to have arrived someplace outside that world—if I’m to take her posture to heart. But it’s their devotions and elegances that charm and capture me, their ability to take—or deliver— their blows. They’re essential knowledge.

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BOOKS

Maurya Simon The Raindrop’s Gospel: The Trials of St. Jerome and St. Paula, A Novel in Verse By Paul-Victor Winters

At Saint Peter’s Church on the corner of Fifth and Girard in Philadelphia, the body of Saint John Neumann lies beneath the main altar, encased in glass. A native of Bohemia and a bishop of Philadelphia, Saint John died 140 years ago. To this day, devout pilgrims come from far and wide to worship in front of his corpse. As it happens, this saint’s body is not incorrupt; that is, pieces of bone have been removed from it for use as sacred relics and his body, despite the life-like mask and elaborate garments, decomposes. Incorrupt saints—those whose bodies do not decompose—are said to exist, among them Saint Bernadette Soubirous of Lourdes, Saint Zita, Saint Ursula Ledóchowska, and Saint Francis Xavier. Sister Mary William would be proud that I’ve remembered this much. For ages, saints have been venerated in ways that may seem to non-believers— or doubtful Catholic students—to be cult-like. “Saint worship” is a term that might encourage debate among Christians; some would have us consider the older uses of the word “worship,” a word that can simply mean “to honor.” Catholic treatment of saints—namely, praying to saints and the belief in the supernatural power of relics— however, is considered by many other Christianities to be idolatry and, therefore, an abomination. From any perspective, saints fascinate, perhaps partly because of the commingling of the human and the godly in their sometimes-fabled lives. For many of us, too, the saint as patron is a concept that only works to turn these figures into idols of sorts, and, therefore, prime fodder for artistic investigaElixir Press, Denver, Colo., 2009.

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tion. Maurya Simon’s new collection of poems, The Raindrop’s Gospel: The Trials of St. Jerome and St. Paula, A Novel in Verse, is a sort of apocryphal, voyeuristic look into the lives of two iconic saints. The very concept of the collection is intriguing; while one might see the collection as simply a group of related poems, it is in Simon’s organization of the poems that one begins to craft together a narrative of two lives that are at once tragic and graceful. Yes, this is the Jerome you’re remembering from eons of interpretations by painters—Bosch, Caravaggio, El Greco, and da Vinci among them. Jerome is the scrawny, bald man often depicted in the desert or wilderness, or else translating texts feverishly. Simon’s Jerome is in keeping with the tortured icon. In “The Lost Diaries,” he says, “For sixty years I’ve hauled my diaries with me, / a corrupt penance”; Jerome sees this as an act of penance because the diaries “catalogue [his] most harrowing transgressions,” namely his “passion / for feasting on exotic fruits, ripened flesh.” Here, and in other poems, Jerome uses shame and self-punishment as a tool: “How can I urge my monks away from sin, / if my own secret shame doesn’t singe me?” In several poems, each titled “Rome,” however, we see Jerome succumb. He laments “I am still imprisoned in a body,” and comes to learn that “desire is quenched by desire” [author’s italics]. Ultimately, we see his life as one desperate back-and-forth between an acceptance of desire (if not always an acceptance of actual acts of sexuality) and shame; in Simon’s rendering, he is a study in flagellantism. Like some true Gnostic writings, these poems serve to humanize otherwise aggrandized figures. That’s not entirely new to literature; Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ comes to mind as one work criticized for demonstrating Christ as a person full of very human doubt, fear, and anger. Recent academic work with ancient Gnostic writing and recent pop culture interest in those concepts, fueled by the novels of Dan Brown, force contemporary thinkers to reconsider what may have been learned in Catholic schools. “Saint worship” is a funny thing; we’re asked to consider the lives of the saints as being simultaneously worldly and otherworldly. Ignore those who might criticize Simon as being blasphemous in poems like “St. Jerome’s Prayer” (“. . . O forgive me for making of my longing a noose / to hang myself . . .”) or “Eustochium and Blesilla,” a poem that insinuates incest between St. Paula’s husband and two of their daughters. The irreverence in Simon’s verse-novel— her detailed imagining of the love between these two saints—is reverent indeed; it is in their “sinfulness” that these two humanized icons find redemption, growth, and greater godliness. As Chris Abani says in the book’s afterword, the saints’ “true redemption is the realization that all love is light.” 228

I can’t read much of The Raindrop’s Gospel without thinking of Sister Mary William’s red face. She may well be shaking her fist at me from a cloud on high as I sit and consider some of the things Simon presents: Saint Jerome reeling with lust; Saints Jerome and Paula both masochistically allowing shame to take the place of desire in both their physical and psychological lives; the clear and certain love—emotional, intellectual, and corporeal in nature—between these two figures we Catholics are asked to view only as presented in those archaic works of art, as models of Christly living. This Jerome, upon meeting Paula, nightly imagines her bathing; the poem “St. Jerome among the Widows” is full of erotic, fleshy imagery. But Jerome’s voyeuristically carnal passion for Paula, ultimately, becomes less vital than his passion for her intellect, his admiration of her devotion to God, and for the disciplined, academic coupling the two finally share, a much-celebrated marriage of the minds, so to speak. One might debate whether or not it’s appropriate to call The Raindrop’s Gospel a novel in verse or simply a collection of related poems. There is clearly a narrative arc, and Simon’s thorough research and careful ordering of the poems show the development of these two characters, protagonists not without flaws, who face the formidable antagonist of carnal lust. Cover your ears, Sister Mary William. This is exactly the sort of thing you demanded I pray away. Ultimately, Simon works to examine a duality. Sexual desire and expression can bring a type of enlightenment. But then, so can its repression, as can, for that matter, the shame with which such desire can shackle the devout. In the poem “Last Entry,” Jerome, quickly assessing his life, says, “I have sinned and repented. / I know what light and dark bear in common: / both are passageways . . .”

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BOOKS

Maile Chapman Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto By Jody Handerson

I have always been a slightly stubborn person. Depending on whether you are talking with family members who are fond of me, or those less enamored, I might be wonderfully persistent or downright obstinate. I don’t really like being told what to do. So when the opportunity arose to write this review, I had a mixed reaction. Having recently completed several years of graduate school, with lots of mandatory reading, the nascent optimist in me thought “Wow! A legitimate writing gig!” and the obdurate grump responded “Humph, another reading assignment. . . I’ll do it, but I won’t enjoy it.” About a week later, Maile Chapman’s debut novel Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto arrived from the publisher. I took a quick look, flipped through a few pages, then stuck it back in the mailer and tossed it onto the coffee table, just to show it who’s boss. A few days later I settled in to read. Okay, Henry James plus Stephen King plus Sylvia Plath; the perfect cup of tea for us adamant pessimists. Chapman’s novel is dark, enigmatic, often morbid (have I mentioned I love morbid?) and at the same time evocative of the measured and careful pace in early nineteenth century novels. Set within a private hospital in Finland, the ambiance is pastoral, although the material distance traveled by the characters is minimal. Chapman creates a measured tempo by focusing on the passage of seasons, noting the particular name (in Finnish), character, and significance of each month. Her descriptions of the natural setting are so vivid and suggestive, the landscape Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minn., 2010.

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almost becomes antagonistic: This is the grayest season, in which a thaw may open fissures and rough places in the world, in which loneliness grows stronger, in which rumors are carried in the air as a whiff of damp, at first unnoticed, but persistent. Wet, shifting sounds are heard and then the world outside the building noticeably drips from countless sources; it is dispiriting, this false spring in the sound of water moving in what had been a reliably muffled world.

Bleak. The story offers a seasonally gentle beginning in August, with the arrival of Julia Dey, a former dance instructor who will take her place among the top floor “up-patients,” women who have come to Suvanto with varied and ambiguous complaints, largely minor and often non-medical. From the beginning, she is my favorite; dark-haired, sly, and belligerent with an often cruel wit. Julia is given to caustic commentary and rude practical jokes, precisely the sort of person I find myself drawn to at a deadly dull cocktail party. She is described: “Julia’s smile is really no more than a slightly open mouth over a slightly pendulous lip, and two expectantly filthy eyes.” She is the perfect counterpoint to Chapman’s alternate protagonist, Sunny Taylor, the Head of Nursing for the up-patients. Sunny is as chill as the bleak northern winter, dressed in blue and white, cool, straightforward, and studied. She views her position at Suvanto as a barrier between herself and the unpredictable and often painful life outside the hospital. Two women, dark and light, yin and yang, naughty and nice; the conflict is predictably delicious. Throughout the story, Chapman toys with images of isolation: the quiet of a snowcovered landscape; the murmur of voices in Finnish, a language that Sunny does not speak; and the emotional distance she struggles to maintain from the patients and staff. This sense of distance lends a voyeuristic quality to the narrative, putting a sly and increasing distance between the reader and the story. Chapman describes a snowy bicycle ride, where Sunny stops to watch as Julia—herself watched by another patient—observes a man butchering a pig. In cross section the body is surprisingly vivid, all pink and red and laced with white ribbons and pale chambers like a valentine or a split pomegranate. The head is full of tightly packed stuff, pearly, fresh, the jawbone lean, white, and very long. Buried in the sliced red meat of the cheek is a pattern of something pale—teeth?

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Beauty and revulsion, knitting together the idea of something unexpected and deadly within the everyday. And before we realize it, we have tiptoed away from our expectations and into the surreal. Stability is slipping. Into this stew of emotional Sturm und Drang, Chapman drops another key ingredient. Dr. Peter Weber arrives at Suvanto to treat women with difficult pregnancies and promote hysterectomies for those with delicately referred to “female problems.” It seems the up-patients will be phased out, replaced with obstetric cases, and Suvanto will no longer be the refuge of bored women, discontented with their husbands and everyday lives. Dr. Weber is precisely the sort of man I love to hate, officious and imminently sure of himself. As soon as he walks onto the page, I am making small sounds of disgust and a mug ring from my hot tea on that page. The struggle is imminent. When Julia agrees to submit to a hysterectomy, I have that sense of pending disaster and I begin to read at a breakneck pace, not quite sure if I want to get to the end because I want to know what happens, or I just want the thing to be over. As the novel and the winter months draw to a close, the perceived balance between order and confusion can no longer be maintained and the story spins into darkness, culminating with death. Chapman gives unsettlingly little sentimentality to the passing of her characters. One danger of constant observation is that all the world, even tragedy, comes to seem anecdotal. There are too many people floating in and floating out of the rooms and corridors. A reluctance to say what has happened. Except that Dr. Peter has met with an accident . . . unfortunately. Yet, there is something equally disturbing and compelling about the author’s depiction of these events, it’s as if she were turning to me, one finger crooked, saying: Come along with me, I haven’t yet finished with you! And indeed, the final events in Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto are every bit as unexpected as any moderately morbid, mystery-loving reader might want, and Chapman’s adept and intimate hand with language leaves us breathless and present even to the final word. Okay, I have to admit that despite my inclination to toss the book across the room at the fate of my favorite character, and pausing only to make several trips to the mirror to practice my own “filthy eyes.” I did give myself over, unabashedly, to the sheer enjoyment of Chapman’s broody mystery.

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Anne Carson Nox By Ted Hamilton

Catullus’ Poem 65 ends with one of the strangest analogies in all elegy. Catullus explains to his friend, Hortalus, that a translation he owes him has been delayed by the death of his brother, after which the poet offers the following metaphorical scene about his forgetfulness: a young girl, hiding an apple sent by her lover in her dress, is startled by the appearance of her mother. Rising, she lets the apple fall and tumble on the floor. She blushes. Critics have wrangled over the precise meaning of this passage—is Catullus simply describing a mental lapse? Is it a commentary on the way we forget loved ones once they’re gone? Or is there a larger message here about the making of poetry? There’s no certain answer, of course, as the complex intertwining of grief, memory, and writing leaves us with a bittersweet ambiguity. Anne Carson, in her newest volume, Nox, captures this sentiment in similar fashion. Grappling with the recent death of her brother, Carson explores the mental landscape of mourning through personal recollection and examination of family letters and photos. Taking another Catullus poem, number 101, as a template, she crafts a work that is half documentary investigation, half cathartic confessional, and utilizes the tropes of classical authors to explore a modern version of grief. A professor of classics at the University of Michigan, Carson has translated Sophocles and Aeschylus while bringing the preoccupations of the classical world into her own poetry. Her most well-known work, The Autobiography of Red, for New Directions, New York, 2010.

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example, takes off on the story of the mythical dragon Geryon and the robbing of his cattle by Hercules. In Nox, filtering grief through her reading of Catullus, Carson moves beyond formal and thematic adaptation to inflect her mourning with textual analysis. The contemplation of Greek and Latin literature serves as a method by which to ground the confusion of a brother’s death in more absolute terms. Nox arrives in a box containing a facsimile of the journal in which Carson documented her mourning. Unfolding like an accordion, the book offers images of old letters, dissected photos, and scribblings on the sides of envelopes. This is a material depiction of Carson’s mental wanderings, with brief set-pieces of recollection interspersed among clippings and quotes. The first page is a copy of Catullus’ Poem 101—also about the death of a brother—and sequential dictionary entries for each word of the Latin text give a semblance of order to what follows. Only towards the end of the book does Carson directly address her indebtedness to the Roman Neoteric, comparing her difficulty in translating the poem to the maddening effort to pin down her brother Michael, a vagabond whose quiet death in Copenhagen comes after decades of invisibility. The design of Nox—its physical structure and the looming presence of Catullus 101—preemptively impose an order on an otherwise scattershot approach to memory and mourning. This leaves the reader a bit out of sorts: what in one respect appears to be that most intimate of accounts, a scrapbook, quickly reveals itself to be a scholarly undertaking as well, and the old dichotomy between intellect and emotion rears its head. Faced with commentary on ancient literature, the tropes and sounds of which can seem so foreign, we adjust ourselves to an academic endeavor. Carson’s great accomplishment in Nox is to conflate the intellectual and the visceral, revealing to the reader the kind of emotionally-informed classicism that has been the inspiration for her best work. By the end of the book, when the seemingly cerebral activity of translation becomes an essential step in the grieving process, we have been outfitted with a new perspective on the reading of the ancients. With only the faintest traces of knowledge about her brother’s adult life, she turns to Herodotus, the original investigator of unseen deeds, in order to inform her own searching. Early on, having quoted Herodotus, Carson tells us that “autopsy is a term historians use of the ‘eyewitnessing’ of data or events by the historian himself, a mode of authorial power.” But autopsy is precisely what Carson lacks: all that she has from the last decades of Michael’s life are a few letters from far-flung corners of the globe, a handful of calls. Traveling to Denmark to visit Michael’s widow, Carson

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seeks to clear up some confusion (a rehearsal of Catullus’ own voyage to Asian Minor in Poem 101 to visit his brother’s tomb), but there are few answers in the details. Though Carson might adapt Herodotus to her own project, it is the method, rather than the results, that counts: Note that the word “mute” (from Latin mutus and Greek μύειν) is regarded by linguists as an onomatopoeic formation referring not to silence but a certain fundamental opacity of human being, which likes to show the truth by allowing it to be seen hiding . . . In cigarette-smoke-soaked Copenhagen, under a wide thin sorrowful sky, as swans drift down the water, I am looking a long time into the muteness of my brother. It resists me. He refuses to be “cooked” (a modern historian might say) in my transactional order. To put this another way, there is something that facts lack.

Carson tempers her intellectual flourishes and scholarly approach with family photographs—her brother on a beach, the family living room, silhouettes in a park— and photocopied fragments of lyrically beautiful minutiae (“Fish are abundant yet the nets rest, full of shadows”). The scrapbook style of Nox creates a certain intimacy by reflecting the author’s unordered mental states: there is little chronological cohesion, and the images of chopped-up letters and doodles undercut the formal gravity of the more intellectual passages. As she has done throughout her career, Carson blends a literary-historical worldview with a finely tuned domestic ear to create a sort of suspended space between erudition and sentimentality. When we come across a blank page with only one line pasted to it—“Repent means ‘the pain again’”—we are privy to an observation at once scholarly and personal, whose power is underscored by its stark visual presentation. Late in the book, Carson describes Giotto’s painting of Lazarus, in which a mouthless figure in the background “load[s] this space with muteness.” Pulled between the explanatory power of scholarly anecdote, the stopped time of family memento, and the catharsis of lyrical poetry, we are left with that “something that facts lack.” But this is hardly a failure. Indeed, in depicting the consciousness of mourning, and the literary fashioning of such a consciousness, Carson provides a version of that lost apple in Catullus 65, with memory and history always just out of grasp. Try as we might to hold loved ones in our mind, their death inevitably effaces their presence. Carson picks up the image of the blushing girl from Catullus’ analogy towards the end of Nox, asking, “Why do we blush before death?” A few pages later, the conclusion, “If you are writing an elegy begin with the blush.” We blush, of course,

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when someone learns something that embarrasses us: a liaison uncovered, a secret announced. Perhaps, in our last moments, we grow red with the newfound knowledge of what comes next. We have, on the one hand, the embarrassment of too much knowledge, and on the other the pain of not knowing. But consider that in Greek and Latin literature, the elegiac couplet (the meter of Catullus 65 and 101), was also used for love poetry. In the ancient imagination, then, these two forms—love and death—were so closely related as to require the same rhythmical inflection. Perhaps it is the shared territory of mystery and discovery that unites the two. Similar, too, is the process of writing about each event—unlike in epic, when the subject matter is dead heroes and far-off gods, or lyric, in which the speaker and subject are united, love and death poetry make reference to an intimate who is just out of reach. And simple phonetic connections should not be ignored, either: If in English “love” and “life” sound strikingly similar, the Latin literary mind would have been conditioned by the relationship between “amor” (love) and “mors” (death). Nox’s final pages feature the short speech given by Michael’s widow at his funeral, with death and romantic love aligning at last. Worn out by the haphazard search through Carson family history, classical literature, and far-flung locales, we arrive at a resolution of sorts in which the intellectual and emotional frenzy of the preceding pages recedes. Nox, then, is finally a work of fusion or overcoming: death and love are united, as are the worlds of scholarship and emotion. It’s what we expect from literature at its best: the ability to break down arbitrary distinctions. As we begin to glimpse a knowledge beyond the horizon, we feel the excitement of new connections.

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BOOKS

Tess Gallagher The Man from Kinvara By Abigail Deutsch

I’ve always loved moments of crisis in literature—episodes that force characters to reevaluate and redefine themselves, and to recognize the false pretenses of their previous existences, or of any claim to personal consistency. (One of my favorite lines in Shakespeare is Iago’s “I am not what I am.”) Part of the allure might be the inherent falseness of such moments: one’s self is consistent, sometimes terribly so, and shocks that force a true reforging of character are scarce, if they exist at all. As for shocks that feel as if they do—those, too, are rare, but they surely exist. These nearly paradoxical experiences (how can you feel “you’ll never be the same” unless you believe in a semi-constant “you”?) came to mind while I read The Man from Kinvara, Tess Gallagher’s latest short-story collection, an exquisite account of the confrontation of the ordinary and extraordinary. That confluence brings out Gallagher’s fluency in several American languages. As the narrator of “The Lover of Horses,” she speaks in near-poetry: “I lay awake through the long night and spoke to my father as one might speak to an ocean or the wind.” The male barhand of “Recourse,” on the other hand, sounds like a plainspoken man deaf to his accidental lyricisms. “I felt like picking up my life again,” he observes. “I mean having somebody to love and to be with. But I didn’t want to say anything right then.” The book displays an almost symphonic range of tones that emanate from a variety of distinct characters—characters, I noticed, who often seem to be struggling Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minn., 2010.

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with their own distinctions, with what marks them off from each other, and makes them mysterious to themselves. Throughout her depictions, Gallagher modulates among humor, wonder, and surprise: For although I have heard the story of my great-grandfather’s defection time and again since childhood, the one image that prevails in all versions is of a dappled gray stallion that had been trained to dance a version of the mazurka. The property had been fenced to leave a wide fire lane between our house and the house of a neighbor who called himself the Mad Hatter. He was a middle-aged disc jockey. Ada was half-inclined to think Billie cared more about llamas than she did about people. But then Billie had never gotten much out of people, and she had made it on llamas.

In plot as well as tone, these stories traffic in the unexpected, and capture characters struggling to absorb shocks into their workaday lives. Gallagher often locates action in the home, permitting the space outside to represent the unknown, the threatening, even the magical. In “Turpentine,” the heroine—a woman who fixes up the houses she lives in to sell them at a profit—is enchanted by that most essential of suburban figures, the Avon Lady, who enters her home like an emissary from another world. “King Death” revolves around a couple’s efforts to drive away the drunk sleeping outside their house—a reminder of the husband’s former days as an alcoholic. The story concludes when their neighbor, the so-called “Mad Hatter,” brandishes a gun and fires at the sky, prompting the main character toward this devastating revelation: “I felt like I’d died and come to life in the front seat of a car in a strange city. I opened my eyes and looked up at my house. It seemed far away and nowhere I’d ever lived.” Gallagher writes, too, about the co-mingling of men and women—or, just as often, the meetings of women without men. Friendships, I sometimes think, help constitute your identity, or at least your idea of your identity, as surely as experiences do. In several stories, marriage seems a period in which friendships risk neglect, and widowhood seems an opportunity to reclaim them. In “Bad Company,” a widow visits her husband’s grave and finds a young woman visiting her father’s. Brought together by the absence of men, they strike up a conversation as remarkable for its silences as for its companionable patter. In what may be Gallagher’s most moving story, “Girls,” the heroine—another widow, by the name of Ada—seeks out a child238

hood friend to see if she’s still alive. She is, but after a stroke, can’t remember Ada at all. Ada had anticipated a return to the past, and instead finds herself “alone in their past,” the sole participant in her shared memories with Esther. Here, as in other stories, the unfamiliar intersects with the familiar, the inexplicable with the rational: After Esther left the room Ada raised up on the bed as if she had wakened from the labyrinth of a strange dream. What was she doing here, she wondered, on this woman’s bed in a city far from her home? What business of hers was this woman’s troubles? In Springfield, Esther had always told her how pretty she was and what beautiful hair she had, how nicely it took a wave . . . . But this was something else. This was the future and she had come here alone.

The trauma of being forgotten by a childhood friend foreshadows the trauma of total obliteration, of death—a concern that hangs over many of these tales. And if that’s true, then being remembered by a friend represents the opposite—represents life, continuity. (Gallagher captures that dynamic in “Recourse,” where childhood sweethearts return to each others’ lives.) I think that dichotomy explains what I find so powerful about these stories: friendship, for Gallagher, seems a way of claiming a stable existence, a consistent self. It even seems a way of challenging immortality. So if the self appears as threatened as ever, then relationships seem its frail yet frequent savior. Part of me wants to suggest that the self is not so endangered as all that, that we’re more reliably ourselves than, often, we’d like to be. My own experience with friendship both confirms and challenges this idea: on the one hand, my long-term friendships suggest some permanent quality to both me and my friends (if our relationships have lasted years, mustn’t we be the same as when we met, or have we evolved in a mysteriously exact synchrony that maintains our compatibility?) and on the other, I suspect I need friendships to feel like myself, and to remind myself of who I am. It’s in a similar spirit that Ada, forgotten by her childhood friend, feels so totally disoriented. “This was something else,” Gallagher writes. That “something else” haunts the tales of The Man of Kinvara, and now haunts me.

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BOOKS

The Shortlist

Alix Cleo Roubaud Alix’s Journal Translated by Jan Steyn; New Directions, New York, 2010 Photographer Alix Cleo Roubaud’s head was constantly reeling. Thanks to Alix’s Journal, the newly translated reproduction of her last four journals, I reeled along with her. She pairs her philosophies, daily routines, aphorisms, and scattered thoughts with the photographs she produced based on those ideas. The pairing allowed me to crawl into her head and really see her work as she meant it to be seen, sometimes illustrating the gap between her intention and what she was able to actually accomplish. Written originally in both English and French, some entries combining the two, her words challenge the notion of a language of origin and whether language is fit to determine so much of our world. These journals make you want to look again: at art, at the world. They make you want to reconsider: everything. —JS

Jerry Gabriel Drowned Boy Sarabande, Louisville, Ky., 2010 It may sound perverse, but I’ve always been drawn to short story collections in which the most beautiful passages are also the most devastating. This is the reason that I love William Trevor—and it is the same reason that I could not put down 240

Jerry Gabriel’s Drowned Boy. Committed to the experience of youth in a land “dark from the rain,” Drowned Boy proceeds with unyielding candor, slowly revealing the poverty of post-industrial Ohio. By the end of this book, I was defenseless against Gabriel’s haunting, penetrating prose and prepared to advocate on behalf of his wounded, often desperate characters. In Drowned Boy, devastation abounds, but so too does beauty. —Jesse Freedman

Fleda Brown Driving with Dvořák: Essays on Memory and Identity University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2010 The memoir-essay combination is explored at its best in poet Fleda Brown’s (previously Fleda Jackson) new collection of essays, Driving with Dvořák. In the collection she circles the topics of identity, her memory, her epileptic brother, her unhappy parents, and the lake house where her family spent summers when she was a child. She approaches the topics over and over again, shifting the focus on them, so that like a twisted kaleidoscope shifting its innards, we see each topic differently than before. Her calm, lyric writing draws you in, keeps you reading, allows the subtle meanings of the events of her life to wash over you without being didactic. —JS

Bruce Cohen Swerve

Black Lawrence Press, Aspinwall, Penn., 2010 Swerve by Bruce Cohen is a visionary collection of verse. He deftly and charmingly seeks linkages for the psychological disconnections of everyday, suburban life. My favorite poem here is “The Jerry Lewis Telethon,” which, despite its potentially ridiculous subject, evokes the mysteries of our collective loneliness. The collection’s psychedelic flourishes are reminiscent of James Tate, but Cohen’s poems are more readable and consistently great. Swerve is the best new volume of poetry I’ve read in a long time. —John King

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Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York, 2010 Are you a collector or a hoarder? Maybe you’re just a pack rat? This book will help you understand the differences between them. Not a dedicated self-help book, but a collection of fascinating case stories written clearly and non-judgmentally for the general reader by two experts in the field. If you don’t recognize yourself in these pages, you’ll certainly find someone you know—along with insights regarding their plight. Resources for sufferers and their families in the last chapter. A serious, readable examination of hoarding, its link to creativity, its dangers, and its connections to other mental disorders. —RA

Pierre Siniac The Collaborators Translated from French by Jordan Stump; Dalkey Archive Press, 2010 A high-end literary caper that tells the story of a lost soul who is taken in by a provincial hotel-keeper with a weakness for outcasts and a literary bent, writes a terribly complicated novel of the German occupation, gets tangled up with a publishing grifter, and goes on to make a monstrous splash on the Paris books scene—and by monstrous one means that secrets are revealed, people die, and a double-cross becomes a triple-cross. This 1997 French bestseller is now available in a merry English translation by Jordan Stump. Baroque and verbose in the best tradition of Continental fiction, The Collaborators is like Umberto Eco on laughing gas—great fun if you too are convinced that most important novelists are really running a con. —MP

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Minna Proctor Interview with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

I was convinced, based on absolutely no evidence, that Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s new book 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction would address the sublime (which I had designated the secret leitmotif of this issue). Making art is about capturing the ineffable and articulating the unspeakable—facing the whole of everything, and selecting just those elements that will, with some combining and shaping, become something new. Yet another element to marry into the whole of everything, to baffle, console, and fill us with hope. In this formulation, “everything” = God. “Hope” = the Sublime. By my logic, a novel by an atheist philosopher about the academic career and love life of a soulful psychologist (also an atheist) who wrote a bestseller proving God doesn’t exist would obviously take up the sublime. And it does, in fact—within the opening chapter. Glasses off, staring at the Charles River at four in the morning, the novel’s hero, Cass Seltzer, finds the frozen water catching on the arch of a bridge “an effect that could reasonably be called sublime.” Yes, of course he must begin with the sublime, the reasonable sublime—how else could he bear the terrible burden of having meticulously disproved God? —MP MINNA PROCTOR: It strikes me—in a big loud clanging way—that yours is a novel of ideas in the most classic sense. Weirdly, I didn’t figure that out until the debate at the end of the book, where I realized that the dramatic climax of this novel was a full transcript of a debate about the existence of God. I do think that today’s novel of ideas tends to be wrapped up in a conceit. You’ve gone in a completely different direction. Even though your appendix is a conceit, I don’t think it drives the book. TLR

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REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN: Oh, absolutely not. I actually thought of the appendix as being in tension with the rest of the novel. That’s why all of the chapters are named after crazy chaotic arguments—“The Argument from the Irrepressible Past,” “The Argument from the Longing on the Gate”—this is religion as it’s really lived in our lives pitted against the way we argue about it in philosophy, which happens in the appendix. The two are in tension and somehow truth comes out between them. MP: Wait, are you talking about religion here as the rules through which we interpret our actions? RG: No, I think that it’s religion more in the sense of where people go for their sense of identity, for community, for their existential dilemmas. MP: If you were to describe an atheist bible, it could be this appendix. RG: Yes. MP: Taking that a step further, then, what does the appendix give the lived stories? If we think of the Bible as an ordering system for lived stories. RG: That’s a good question. Secular reasoning has a narrative, though, a lived story. There are the rules of reasoning, the accepted arguments, but there are also the prophets—people like Spinoza and Hume and the trials—Spinoza’s excommunication—and the triumphs such as the Age of Enlightenment. This narrative of rationality is different from a religious narrative, but just as emotionally charged as any other, stirring with a notion of what it is that can save us. MP: So, when you first conceptualized this novel, what was going on dramatically? What was at stake? RG: It was going to be a story about the messiness of this debate about the existence of God, and how so much more is being argued. There is always so much more at stake in the middle of these intellectualized arguments. The idea grew out of my Spinoza book, which had drawn me into the debates around so-called New Atheism. Philosophically, I’m at one with atheism, but I also think there’s far more going on than just a discussion about God’s existence. There are the nuances and the messiness of it all, which just don’t come across. MP: It is in fact a gloriously messy subject—and human. RG: And ever so fraught. It brings up everything about our entire orientation toward

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knowledge, toward mystery. I think that there are philosophical personalities—I’ve always thought that, and that’s why I can’t write straight philosophy anymore; it’s always imbedded in the personal. MP: Can you relate that to your protagonist, Cass, and his soul? RG: Cass is someone who is very alive to the sense of mystery. He’s very often overtaken by a sort of ontological wonder, as he is at the end of the first chapter, standing there on the bridge over the frozen Charles River and getting carried outside of himself in a very expansive and grateful sort of way. That sort of experience can be described in religious language. In fact, it’s the sort of language that comes most naturally to us in trying to describe these extraordinary experiences. Religion has given us a vocabulary, which Cass resists. God is a powerful metaphor and nothing more. MP: He’s an atheist but he’s sort of a fake one because of his tolerance for mystery. RG: I don’t think he’s a fake one at all. He certainly doesn’t think that everything is answered—he’s not a mystery denier, but he thinks that nothing is answered by thinking you have an answer with God. For Cass, God is a way of not being able to tolerate the unknowingness. The spirit of Spinoza hovers over the book. Spinoza really tried to work out a spiritualized secularism. His thought certainly accommodates a sense of mystery and the limitations of our own understanding. You just can’t fill in any answers at all, and God is too much of an answer. If we really want to do justice to the profoundest of mysteries, then we can’t really fill in any answers at all. Also, Cass is a psychologist of religion, which means he tries to answer why we tend to merge our experiences of mystery and transcendence with beliefs about God. MP: Psychology is certainly interested in the mystery of human belief systems. Mystery gets transposed onto feelings and behaviors—why do we keep doing this thing we do? Why do we act this way? Why do we have these feelings? RG: But the real switch came with Hobbes. He was the first one to ask the question, not, does God exist, but rather, why do we keep constructing these notions of God? He was in the middle of the horror of those religious wars (or right after). The philosophers who created modern philosophy were extremely impressed with those horrors, the bloodletting between the various Christian denominations that just went on and on, people thinking they know answers they can’t possibly know . . . Modern philosophy came out of that. Cass is very sympathetic to the religious

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impulse—as was William James, whose Varieties of Religious Experience is a kind of model for Cass’s own book. James was funny, though, because he reveled in mystery and clearly wanted to believe. He did full justice to the psychosis of extraordinary religious experiences, but it’s clear he wanted to have one. Cass has a bit of that dividedness about him. Cass is in some sense the inversion of James because he’s had that large experience—but doesn’t altogether want it. He resists. He’s suspicious. MP: Cass projects less joy, then? RG: Yes, he’s resisting. It’s hard for him to let go. There’s a kind of shame in it almost. MP: So, back to his women? RG: Many, many impulses go into religiosity. Romantic love, for example, is the complete reconfiguration of reality around a chosen one. If that one loves you back then you’re saved. If he or she doesn’t then you are damned. It’s a conversion. Then when you fall back out of love, it’s like, how could I have attributed so much to that person? Cass falls for this quite a lot. He’s a tender fellow. MP: Is he repeating mistakes? Is he looking for something in the romantic love? Or do the women represent different kinds of objective ideals to you? RG: No, they were really just characters who came to me. They were mystifying enough so that a man like Cass could interpret them in the light of his adoration and get them entirely wrong. Though Lucinda did represent something—she’s that extreme of—. MP: —the road not taken? RG: Talk about not having a tolerance for mystery! She doesn’t have a clue. MP: No self-awareness? RG: Anything that can’t be explained by game-theoretic modeling just doesn’t exist for her. She can so misinterpret the man who loves her and who she cares about enough to at least move in with him as an experiment blah blah blah. It’s sort of hateful, but also pathetic. MP: That experience releases something in Cass. RG: Romantic love is always releasing something in Cass, probably too much, whereas not enough is released in Lucinda. I’m sympathetic toward her, even though I think she’s pathetic. There are so many models for her, so many—particularly women—who almost sold their soul to rise in academia. 246

MP: By giving Cass the kind of softer science, in a way, were you giving him a little bit of that female trouble? RG: Well, yes sure. And he’s a loving person—and a loving person often misplaces his feelings—there’s so much creativity that goes into love. You’re always creating a love object—that’s Proust’s great lesson. He gets enthralled. It’s as he says at the very end, “You know, romance can be a kind of religious illusion, too.” MP: His ex-girlfriend, Roz, is almost a Brontë archetype, the one right under his nose who loves him best—and he just has to not be distracted by all these other prospects in order to appreciate her. It’s hard not to adore Roz, especially when she turns him down—it’s so clearly an act of compassion! RG: But it’s an act of self-love too. She sees a man who still has a lot of development to go through. MP: Does she have illusions? It doesn’t seem like she’s necessarily inventing her own love object? RG: Yeah, I’d like to believe there are some of us who love with eyes wide open. That would be Roz. MP: What about her quest for immortality? Can you talk about that? RG: The denial of death is one of those primitive human emotions that gets expressed religiously. Religion offers, in the idea of an afterlife, the most emotionally satisfying expression of the denial. But of course, it being the most emotionally satisfying doesn’t make it true, though it does explain why it’s so often accepted as true. Anyway, Roz, a fellow traveling atheist, is trying to solve the problem of death through biochemistry. MP: Immortality really is the ultimate scientific pursuit. In terms of your novel, it brings up the conflict (that’s also between Cass and Lucinda) between the psychology of the talking cure and the psychology of neuroscience—things that chemically affect the brain versus those silly little thought things that happen at some other level. It’s the idea of changing the brain with neural patterns or science. What’s attractive is the hope that you can solve any of these things—even death. It’s just a matter of figuring out which two wires to cross. RG: Ever since Francis Bacon—there were these two very different views of what motivates science. One is: We’re in this world, let’s discover what it is for the sake simply of knowledge itself. It’s wonderful to know the laws of nature because they’re the laws of nature and very beautiful to boot. The other view is more pragmatic: TLR

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Bacon’s notion that it’s conducive to the wellbeing of mankind to understand this world and use the laws of nature to our benefit. These two ideas can come together, but they’re very distinct impulses. In one, you lose yourself in the wonders of the laws of nature and don’t care about transforming, bending them, while Bacon is all about making nature submit to our will, and it’s interesting he always uses the female pronoun for nature. He feels it’s an outrage that we have to submit to nature rather than the other way around. So there is a part of that notion that science is here to make our lives better, longer, more flourishing. That seemed to fit perfectly in Roz’s character, particularly the view that it’s axiomatic that we should make our lives better and that suffering is evil. She’s so expansive and so life-embracing, so full of joys that she wants more and more. Why not? MP: Everyone in the novel seems to be working on trying to figure out the meaning of evil and especially suffering, but there’s very little actual contact with suffering. It’s a philosophical problem throughout the novel. RG: Well, there’s Azarya. I don’t think that he truly suffers, I mean the sort of extreme suffering that’s the focus of the philosophical problem of evil—but he does suffer conflict as an adolescent, and probably, to some extent, for the rest of his life. He’s clearly someone who won’t be able to live the life he wants. He sacrifices himself for the community even though his loneliness in that community is profound. That’s perhaps not suffering in the way that the problem of evil considers it. But I’ve had readers tell me they find Azarya tragic, the waste of his genius, his loneliness. In a liberal value system, Azarya can, I think, be said to be tragic. MP: It’s sort of anti-American that he can’t fulfill himself. The very idea that he should be able to escape the designation of his birthright because he’s got his incredible gift is antiquated. But it’s also American. It’s related to Puritan fatalism. His character embodies the central conflict of America. It’s somehow related to the liberal-conservative conflict. I’m sure there’s a way to extrapolate this into the health care debate! RG: It is there. You’re absolutely right. All of these issues arouse so much passion. When you’re on one side you think, “How the hell can people think that way?” Of course, when you’re in philosophy there are so many issues where people don’t share your intuition. “How can they not see what I’m seeing so clearly”—you become used to it. You become used to speaking with people who you know are smart but seem to be saying the stupidest things because intuitions aren’t shared. Their sense of the

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world is just totally at odds with yours. It’s one of the most common things you have to deal with as a professional philosopher. MP: As a philosopher, do you have to proceed with faith in the notion that if you explain it right then the other person will understand? Is that the operative ethos? RG: Yes, I think it is the ethos, but it’s not true. It’s not true, and what’s interesting is when it falls in the area of questions that can’t be resolved. They’re irresolvable empirically. So you’re working with—really, intuitions as to what the right answer should be. MP: And that leads you to your argument? RG: Exactly. I think something like that is always going on where there are these questions that are completely irresolvable. Coming back to the appendix—in some sense, the appendix was doing the work of saying, “Well, look, these arguments don’t work. Just stop believing. Now. End of story.” But that’s not the end of the story. That’s why something more intuitive, that core philosophical outlook, is swelling up—to take up the space the argument can’t take up. All of that stuff in the story could only exist because the arguments don’t work. MP: You said “I can’t write straight philosophy anymore.” Is writing fiction a way of approaching those arguments in a saner way? RG: I’m just so convinced that there’s an aspect of personality functioning in these arguments, and that, for me, is the interesting story. Still, I don’t want to say that “I now renounce the ability of reason to make progress in an argument.” MP: But through fiction you get deeper into the personalities that lead to the ideas. RG: I do think the notion of disembodied ideas is a fine working hypothesis—we’ve gotten far on that in philosophy. But in fact ideas are always embodied. They’re embodied in our personalities—and that’s how you can link how a person thinks about one thing with how they’re probably going to think about another thing. MP: You didn’t try to write it here, did you? RG: No, no, no. It’s really blasphemy against philosophy. I got into enough trouble for my book on Spinoza. Well, parts of it. Most philosophers—the philosophers I respect—really liked that book. But, there are a few places where I gave talks and got the party line, which is that it’s the genetic fallacy to criticize an argument by talking about its psychological and historical sources. Of course, that’s not what I did. I

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wasn’t saying that Spinoza’s view is good or bad based on where it came from, but I did say there was a reason that this man, of all men, came to that view. MP: It’s like a critical biography. RG: Yes. But in a way it does dismiss the whole style of analytic philosophy—the dryness of it, the exaggerated respect for precision, the notion of disembodied truth— trying to have no voice in your writing. Objective truth is an impersonal truth and should have an impersonal voice. That’s all built into the discipline at this point. MP: Which brings me back to something you said earlier when you were talking about not being able to write straight philosophy, that theology seems to take up that role with your work—it’s even a kind of homiletics, where you’re dealing with these impossible questions and you’re trying to contextualize them in terms of life and living and personal action, they’re telling stories about the abstract problems. Perhaps not with the same kind of rigor and certainly with a lot more permission for mystery, but there does seem to be a meeting here between coming out of philosophy and finding religious subject here in the novel. RG: That’s interesting. I’ll have to think about that. MP: When you were talking before about telling stories within philosophy, my first thought was, “Oh, well, that’s what religion does.” But, that seems too simple to be true. RG: In philosophy, a good philosophical question is one that you can see many different ways. It’s not a good philosophical question unless there are wonderfully compelling arguments that can be gotten up on various sides. If you want to dramatize philosophy, that’s what you have to dramatize. Religion is different; religion is not trying to get you to see all the different, compelling ways of viewing this problem, but rather trying to make you feel how uncompelling the other ways of seeing the problem are. That’s what religious stories are doing. I should say I was brought up on religious stories. Every Friday night my father would put me to bed and tell me homilies, really. He was a good storyteller. But his stories were always variations on the same themes. There was the beggar in the village, his feet wrapped in rags, someone who makes you feel queasy, who turns out to be the spiritually beautiful person. He had a keen sense of suffering in the world, and he always made you feel what it was like to be the downtrodden. But there was something he was trying to get across, which was that one’s moral and spiritual capacities are what will really carry the day. So, the ones that you think are so pathetic are really

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the ones who should be the models for human nature. He was always pushing that line and it was extraordinarily effective. MP: Were the stories real, or did he made them up? RG: I don’t know. He embellished them, but I think it was part of the homiletic tradition in Hasidic Judaism. My father broke with Hasidism but remained Orthodox. That’s how I grew up. My break with Judaism has been messy. I have a certain lingering love for much of it; I think you can see that in this book. It comes from knowing my father, the sort of religious life he represented. There weren’t too many of his sort who survived. He got out of Poland before the war—but he was the kind of Eastern European Jew who would not have survived. All the survivors I’ve met are people who did things at the right moment. They were gutsy people with an enormous will to survive who took crazy risks that paid off. My father was not like that. There were whole communities supporting people like him—this very impractical kind of man, spiritually pure. I always felt that through my father, I came into contact with a kind of Eastern European Jew that just got wiped out. I feel lucky to have had this intimate relationship with something that existed and flourished and is no more. Our notion of what a Jew is now is so very, very, very different. He lavished a lot of attention on his stories but wasn’t telling them simply for the sake of telling stories. In some sense, I’m like him. This is a great danger in my fiction—that stories come out of other goals, these extra-literary ideas. I can’t let those ideas overtake the fiction. MP: Oh, why not? . . . Everyone has got something to bring to their novel. There are already plenty of fabulous pristine novels. RG: That’s certainly true. MP: You don’t need to be the person who does that. RG: Only if it limits the aesthetic experience. If you get pulled out of the enchantment of what a novel’s supposed to do—and suddenly you’re not involved with the characters because you’re thinking of, oh, immortality, religion, the downtrodden, and that is going destroy the aesthetic experience. MP: Of course. RG: But— MP: But, this is what’s before you to do. You wouldn’t want to not do it, God forbid. RG: To use a metaphor!

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HOW TO R EAD M USIC

Contributors

Alex Abramovich (“Too Far Gone” 51) is a writer and editor in NYC. Martin Aitken (Translator 99) is a translator whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in PRISM International, Calque, AGNI Magazine, and The Boston Review. Renée Ashley (Books 218) is the Poetry Editor of The Literary Review. Noah Elliot Blake (flash fiction 59) is an MFA candidate at The New School. He believes it essential to eke out a moderate amount of affection with his bio. He offers that today you look very nice. Jeff Bursey (Books 207) writes for journals in Canada, the UK, and the US. His first book, Verbatim: A Novel, comes out in the fall of 2010. Marco Candida (“Dream Diary” 180), a young writer from Tortona, Italy, has published four novels in the last three years, including Il diario dei sogni, excerpted here. This excerpt from Dream Diary is his first work to appear in English. Robert Carnevale’s poems (192) have appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and The Alaska Quarterly. He teaches writing and literature at Drew University and Kean University. Katherine Lien Chariott’s (“Daughters Made of Dust (Collateral Damage)” 68) fiction and nonfiction is published or forthcoming in Sonora Review, upstreet, Columbia, and Artful Dodge. She lives in Shanghai. Kelly Cherry (poem 199) is the author of nineteen books, eight chapbooks, and two translations of classical plays. Girl in a Library: On Women Writers & the Writing Life and The Retreats of Thought: Poems were both published in 2009.

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Peter Cooley (poems 131) lives in New Orleans, where he teaches creative writing at Tulane University. He has published eight books of poetry, most recently A Place Made of Starlight and Divine Margins. He is currently finishing a new book, Night Bus to the Afterlife. Abigail Deutsch (Books 237) is a writer from New York. Her work appears in The Los Angeles Times, n+1, Bookforum, Poetry, and other publications. Percival Everett (“Confluence” 11) has written some books. If you write long enough, you win an award or two and so he has. He is Professor of English at the University of Southern California. Jesse Freedman’s reviews (Books 240) have appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Journal of Jewish History. Dan Gutstein (poems 65) works at Maryland Institute College of Art. His first book, non/ fiction, is due out this spring. His poems and stories have appeared widely in journals and anthologies. Ted Hamilton (Books 233) is a writer interested in the possibilities of joining classical sensibilities to modern form. He is descended from the Italian bard Camillo Querno. Jody Handerson (Books 230) has a widely varied background in the visual and performing arts. She currently applies her literary talent as a technical writer and editor for an environmental consulting company. She is a contributing editor to The Literary Review. Elizabeth Harris (Translator 180) is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of North Dakota. Her translations of Giulio Mozzi’s stories appear recently in The Missouri Review and The Kenyon Review, and in Dalkey Archive’s annual anthology, Best European Fiction 2010. George Henson (Translator 34) is completing a Ph.D. in literary and translation studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. His translations have appeared in Nimrod International Journal, Translation Review, and Sojourn and are forthcoming in the Havana Reader. He is currently completing a translation of Elena Poniatowska’s award-winning novel The Train Passes First. John Oliver Hodges (“Troutsky’s Parade” 149) was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 2008. He currently attends the University of Mississippi’s MFA program in writing. John King (Books 241), literary rock star, has just wrapped up his MFA in creative writing from NYU, and earned his Ph.D. in English literature from Purdue in 2003. His fiction has appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Turnrow, Pearl, and Gargoyle. Watch the sky for his next move. Jørgen Leth (poems 99) is an internationally celebrated filmmaker and one of Denmark’s foremost modern poets. His collected poems were published in 2002, and his most recent volume appeared in 2006.

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Chip Livingston (“Trashing Andy Warhol” 134) is the author of Museum of False Starts. His poetry and short fiction appear widely in literary journals, most recently in Subtropics, The Cincinnati Review, The Potomac Review, and Court Green. Kelly Luce’s (“Rooey” 80) story collection is a finalist for the 2010 Bakeless Prize, and the title story, “Ms. Yamada’s Toaster,” was awarded Tampa Review’s 2008 Danahy Prize. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, The Gettysburg Review, and other journals. She is the current writer in residence at the Kerouac House in Orlando, FL. Laura McCullough’s (poems 141) third collection of poems, Speech Acts, is forthcoming. She has been awarded two NJ State Arts Council fellowships and is a doctoral candidate in poetry at the University of Essex. Her work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, The Potomac, and Gulf Coast, among others. Andrew McKay (Books 204) is director of advancement communications at Fairleigh Dickinson University and a poetry reader for The Literary Review. He is currently writing his first book, titled Living Here, which chronicles his experiences growing up in a New Jersey flood plain in the early 1980s. Judy Rowe Michaels (poem 9), a poet-in-the-schools for the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and poet-in-residence at Princeton Day School, is author of Reviewing the Skull. Maxine Patroni (poem 124) is a New Jersey–based poet. This is her first publication. Elena Poniatowska (“Chocolate” 34) is considered one of Mexico’s most important living writers. Her novels include Here’s to You, Jesusa!, Dear Diego, and Tinisima. The recipient of many prestigious literary awards, including the Premio Xavier Villarrutia, Premio Alfaguara de Novela, and the Premio Internacional de Novela Rómulo Gallegos, Poniatowska’s novels and short stories have been translated into English, French, Danish, German, Italian, and Dutch. James Richardson’s (poem 161) Interglacial was a finalist for the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award. His new collection, By the Numbers, is forthcoming in Fall 2010. Jena Salon (Books 240) is the Books Editor for The Literary Review. Nicholas Samaras (poems 47) spent the first part of his life living underground in multiple countries, and he writes from a place of permanent exile. He currently lives in West Nyack, NY and teaches at the Charles Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters in Old Salem, Westchester, NY. Aaron Shulman (“Guide to the Boulevard of Foreseeable Museums” 173) has an MFA in fiction from the University of Montana. He is currently in Guatemala on a Fulbright, working on a novel and doing research on violence against women. Nina Soifer’s poems (97) have appeared or are forthcoming in Alimentum, Chickenpinata, Thema, Mudfish, Sheila Bender’s Writing It Real, and Calliope, a publication of Women Who Write. She lives in South Jersey where she is a freelance food writer.

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Alex Stein (“Blackberry Thickets” 107) is the author of Made-Up Interviews with Imaginary Artists, a genre-bending collection of interviews, interview fictions, and short essays considering the art of the interview as an act of translation. He is at work on a second collection, pieces of which have appeared, or are to appear, in The Agni Review Online, The Bloomsbury Review, and the Kearney Street Press anthology A Tribute to Orpheus II. A.P. Sullivan (poems 21) is the author of the chapbook Islands of Earshot. His poems have appeared or will be appearing in Salt Hill, Saranac Review, and New York Quarterly, among others. He is currently a high school humanities teacher in Fair Oaks, CA. Rachel Swearingen’s (“Woman in Blue” 129) most recent work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Cimarron Review, and Global City Review. She is a doctoral student in fiction at Western Michigan University. Daneen Wardrop (poems 74) is the author of a book of poems, The Odds of Being, and three books of literary criticism, including the recent Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing. She has received Seattle Review’s Bentley Prize for Poetry, the Poetry Society of America Robert H. Winner Award, and the Gerald Cable Book Award. Her poetry has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, TriQuarterly, FIELD, Southern Review, and elsewhere. Paul-Victor Winters (Books 227) is a writer and teacher living in southern New Jersey. Recent poems and book reviews have appeared in The New York Quarterly, Tattoo Highway, and The Literary Review. Marion Wyce (Books 214) has received an AWP Intro Journals Award in Fiction and had her work performed in the Interact Theatre Company’s stage series Writing Aloud.

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