We Still Like: Manifesto Destiny

We Still Like

Manifesto Destiny Number

of an edition of

100

We Still Like Books Oakland, California

We Still Like: Manifesto Destiny Compiled and edited by Chris Pedler and Sarah Ciston.

Designed and printed in Oakland, California.

Special thanks to Tavia Stewart for publicity and support.

WeStillLike.blogspot.com WeStillLike@gmail.com

The Revolution Is Staying in Bed [Letter from the Editors]

W

hy would anyone start a literary endeavor in this day and age?

Simple: We Still Like Books.

We still believe in the power of language and the importance of sincerity.

Imagine that! We still like saying what we mean, untempered by sarcasm. Secretly, don’t you? We are tired of cowering behind a shield of irony, tired of taking ourselves oh-so-seriously all the time. We are tired of leaving our work’s fate to the whims of a tired industry. We are so tired, in fact, we started this piece of work.

We Still Like will act not as a closed-circuit gatekeeper but as a conduit, soliciting new work not from celebrities but from the plain old talented folks we encounter who feel the same way. Like you! We still like your hungry writing, yearning to be free, and we want to give it a cozier home than that desk drawer it’s been rotting in. We believe creation leads to more creation, that sharing writing inspires making more, that it shouldn’t be so hard. We believe that writing should not be used as an empty signifier to establish elitist cred; art can engage real people and real ideas about our real lives (Really!). We know we don’t need permission to say what we think, and we don’t want it. We are happy to ignore, thank-you-very-much, the voice of that internal editor (why is this guy always German?) who says polished and perfect and profound and properly published is the only route to success (which successfully leaves us with nothing to show for ourselves).

We still like saying something true — which shouldn’t be radical, but when language has been cheapened and sentiment (god forbid sentiment!) discredited, speaking in a bright, clear voice becomes an act of revolution. We declare war on being too cool to like things, on being afraid to risk contributing something meaningful. This is The New Sincerity.

We will not submit! Neither to Snooty Literary Journals nor to the Mass Hysteria of Everyday Life (both of which ask us to dull our passion and narrow our interest to suit them). We are no longer content to like only what we are told is edgy enough or moderate enough. Despite the easy cynicism born from headlines and hipsterdom, we still like being earnest. Despite the digital deluge, we still like books. And in this spirit we bring you a most American revolution: Manifesto Destiny. We’ve circled the wagons, we’ve set out for the future and we’ve got the coastline in our sights.

Now we hear you asking (and it’s not just the drugs): Why make manifestos? Isn’t that, like, SO last century? What is this, steampunk? But it’s that sort of thinking got us here in the first place: stuck with the world that we have as opposed to the one we desire, and too cool to care. How’s that working out? We still believe in the imperative to manifest a vision of the lives we want to be living and the world we want to inhabit — and we suspect this impulse

is more powerful, requires more responsibility and offers more opportunity than we realize.

And maybe the idea’s so dated it’s fashionable again. Like hair metal.

You are holding almost 100 pages of your compatriots’ thoughts and art. You are holding this because we manifested it, because we had an idea and didn’t just stop there. But again, you protest: Ideas are easy — everyone’s got them and most of them suck – but I have four jobs already, one more than I can do, two more than I need and three more than I want. Us too! But here’s the magical part: From impulse to execution, this magazine took just a few, lazy months and only the tiniest effort from everyone involved to turn it from Someday-I’d-Like into Look-What-We’ve-Done. And the dirty secret is that YOU did all the work. Thanks for that! You’ll notice it doesn’t say The Best American Short Stories on the front, but so what? We didn’t want to wait for Penguin to stamp its fat seal (or penguin) of acceptance on it before we put these ideas in the world.

Through We Still Like, we are realizing how quickly a little idea conjured up one morning in bed can jump-start everything else in our lives. We’re realizing that, whatever we’re scheming, it will never be easier than it is right now. We will only be noticed for doing something if we actually do something first. This kind of revolution is small but important and may be the best way to go about actually changing the world instead of just discussing it and then getting depressed.

It’s counterproductive to think of our revolutionary destiny or ideal life existing at the distant end of an impossible process or rainbow. We don’t need to be Certified Enlightened to begin living our own lives. We don’t need to wait on the demise of capitalism to begin shaping the world we want to exist in, and we shouldn’t. We will never be more free, more able, more ready to live the life we’ve imagined than we already are right now. Every problem is both too large and too small not to begin solving it immediately. We say, start now!

Go! Sincerely, Sarah Ciston & Chris Pedler

Taxonomy of Contents The Revolution Is Staying in Bed. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 We Still Like Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 The New Sincerity: Instructions for Use. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 Art Hyperbolic Chamber. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Bradford Earle The Quasi-Daily Journal of Jedediah Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Jed Johnson Human, 2009. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 Gina Caciolo Artifacts Correspondence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17, 28, 33, 59, 73, 85 You, Me The Millennium Ten Years Later. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Linda Charles, Morgan Fryer, Dan Gilels, Les Motherton Instructions for Taking Up Arms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 Situationist International “Keep This Name For When I’m Famus”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Tavia Stewart Criticism Band on the Run. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Rick D’elia Please Reconsider Beauty. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Tye Pemberton An Assertion That My Decision to Be Neither For Nor Against Beauty Is Not an Admission of Neutrality. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Tye Pemberton Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, or Why Are Nazis So Trendy These Days?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 Chris Pedler

Investigations Things I Learned Bushwacking through Redwood Rainforest. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Chris Pedler Why I Hate Send. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Kathleen Nye Flynn Jacob’s Manifesto. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Jacob Evans Baby, It’s About Damn Time. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Gina Caciolo Dear City of Berkeley. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Kathleen Nye Flynn Almost Manifested . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Sarah Ciston Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15 Vinh Truong Body of Empathy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 Annie Pentilla Prose San Francisco’s Been Chucking Rocks at Me from the Other Side of the Moon. . . . . . . . . . 24 Zulema Summerfield No Expectations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Dustin Heron Proposed Bio for the Novel James Joyce’s Truck Stop by Tupelo Hassman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Tupelo Hassman To Be in Love with a Dentist. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Zulema Summerfield Fuck Everyone But Us. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Sarah Ciston Dust . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Tupelo Hassman

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Things I Learned Bushwhacking through Redwood Rainforest [Chris Pedler] 1. The rules are chiefly bullshit.

I drive north on 101 in search of the world’s biggest trees. I will not find them tonight. It is late. I am tired. I have heard this CD at least twice. NPR alternates between loud static and some show worse than loud static. Forget about the rest of the radio. I decide driving long distances alone is fucking boring. Also, exhausting. Once upon a time I would have just driven till I fell asleep at the wheel, but at some point I realized I liked being alive.

So I get off the freeway. Down a windy forested road, I stop at the little state park booth at someplace called Hidden Springs. No one is here, but I look at the bulletin board and that goofy yo-yo sound plays in the back of my head while my eyes pop out like Bugs Bunny.

Slack-jawed, I gape at the sign. The invisible ranger demands 20 American dollars for the privilege of setting up my tent. This fact seems at first impossible. My own personal tent. On public land. So I can sleep for five hours, get up at dawn and continue, of all things, driving that ugly rented Chevy by myself.

I forget my exact thought (you know how hard it is to reconstruct things later) but I’m sure it went something like: Fuck You. I think for 60 seconds. I get back in the car. I do not pass go. I do not pay the State of California one score US$. I do not sleep here. I drive down the road again, looking for a turnout and a little square of relatively flat earth. A mile later I find a sub-par site candidate about 30 feet off the road, just barely big enough, uneven, with pointy branches and underbrush poking the air. The choice is either move on or stay here. There is nowhere else to go.

I retrieve my tent and sleeping bag, begin setting up, engine still running, highbeams sort of cutting the darkness. I hurry. For some reason, I am nervous I will be accosted if someone, some authority figure, discovers I am camping where clearly I am not meant to camp. I don’t know why I feel this way. Two passing trucks prickle the skin on my neck.

I think vague thoughts about panopticons. When you know enough Foucault or Marx to quote in bars to impress people, it is easy to believe you are above the forces they describe.

This now seems overly optimistic. It’s possible that the extent to which I think I am above, say, self-censorship or the unconscious internalization of social authority proportionally mirrors the degree I am wholly ensnared by this problem. We believe we avoid it, this selfsurveillance, only because it cannot be differentiated from all our daily lives’ details. I think it is nowhere when really it is everywhere. I get anxious by the road, on land I ostensibly own, and I realize how far I am from feeling free. Also that I am way too out-of-practice with (even modest, insignificant, unpunishable) rule-breaking. The two are connected.

Breaking the rules underlines how limited is the space for so-called normal, accept

able or legal behavior. The sphere of possible actions extends much further, perhaps even infinitely so, beyond what habits and laws allow. But cops and cultural norms are the least of our oppressors. The real authority — and the most sinister — exists in our heads. Breaking the rules makes obvious how unthinkingly we follow them anyway, how internal our nation of laws really is. No ranger or secret police patrolled that empty road in the redwoods last June. It wasn’t required, and isn’t now. I’m positive no one has camped there since. It just never occurs to anyone to try.

The rules comprise a psychic barrier, the edge of the known world. Most of the time, we naturally remain in the protected space where things are mapped and defined. Outside are chaos and maybe dragons, certainly danger, the ground unsteady, insecure, shifting. But also open, in motion, malleable. Once there, I make things up as I go along. I am suddenly original. I take existential action. Breaking the rules forces on us a profound responsibility — this act is mine alone — a responsibility that is, because it releases our potential into the largest world, the foundation for a deeper freedom. We can never be truly free until, at the very least, we are awake to what we can do.

2. Don’t assume what looks like the ground is really the ground.

Redwood rainforest generates massive biomass — new branches, sprouts, ferns, firs, bugs, birds — so much that last year’s dead stuff does not fully decompose before this year’s dead stuff piles on top of it. The ground gets higher over time, burying the big trees’ roots (which is good because redwood roots spread horizontally, not like other trees’ taproots straight down, so this (the piled-up stuff) makes them (redwoods) harder to topple (yay)), but this rising ground often fills in hollows between roots or covers fallen logs or otherwise makes pitfalls invisible. Add to this that the aforementioned explosive amount of growing stuff makes seeing your own feet sometimes impossible, not to mention whatever is ten feet (or three feet) in front of you. And because it is a rainforest, a lot of the piled-up stuff is rotting; so unlike, say, the forest in New England, that log you’re about to step on might not act like you’re accustomed to a log you’re about to step on acting.

All of which is to say that if you’re not careful you will fall through holes, trip over roots you can’t see, grab vines and branches for balance that suddenly disintegrate, almost poke your eye out several times after falling while trying to grab a branch for balance, fall through solid-looking logs into creeks, fall through solid-looking logs into holes. You will do all of these things even if you are careful — careful in this context meaning: test everything before putting any weight on it. Don’t trust, verify. Look closer. You might discover you’re walking six feet above what here counts as solid ground. The redwood definition of solid is different from elsewhere.

This is tied to a broader problem of our language and the anxiety I felt in the forest 10

that first night. Camping for the Forest Service means extorting cash from people who think camping means parking an RV in one of 50 spots along a narrow asphalt track near nature trails and a visitors’ center, possibly building a fire and definitely drinking lots of Bud Light — but Please Keep Quiet after ten. This in no way resembles camping as I’d have it defined, which hopefully involves in some way or other getting scared shitless by forces beyond my control, e.g. grizzly bears or a mapless jungle.

The Forest Service definition has a lot to do with managing experience. Under the guise of public safety no doubt, authorities funnel the public into a circumscribed location where we can be monitored and protected (mostly from ourselves). Controlled. And this strategy holds for words a lot more loaded than camping, which is ultimately pretty marginal and trivial. Think freedom — which, as a concept, floats in the air we breathe and, as a word, more often than not refers to something like its opposite.

Words’ common definitions — the way they’re most commonly used — have more to do with how we are meant to behave (or believe) than with any more meaningful meaning.

And while some words, like camping, are easy enough to redefine (when not much is at stake), others, like freedom, are difficult to even see through the haze of mystifying bullshit surrounding them. Some politician from Texas tells me I live in the most free country ever, yet I can’t camp where I want in a state park — or must pay for the privilege of doing so. This seems the opposite of free. A disconnect exists between the word’s usage and its meaning. Or the meaning that I’d give it. Yet often we accept these phony meanings, believe they have weight and solidity when they merely float as invisible boundaries between us and the world they purport to describe, divorcing us from our potential. We perpetuate this circumstance by using words in corrupted ways and keep ourselves penned within the rules encoded in the very language we use, a language refusing to even mean what it says. Freedom isn’t free, goes the slogan — but nor does it cost 20 dollars.

We are left like the prisoners in Plato’s allegory. I squint through smog into blinding light, barely making out undefined shapes dancing like shadows on the walls of a cave. The real world is out there, somewhere, and fits perfectly our set of possible choices. But from here it looks blurry at best. Recognizing the bullshit infecting our definitions begins the process of correcting our vision, but it is only a start. The real work commences in replacing them.

3. Maps must be tested against the places they represent.

I learn this the hard way. After several hours of forcing my body through overgrown vines, scraping my arms on spiny bushes, crawling under logs across a little creek and falling down over and over, I find what I’m looking for. The first hint is a pair of giant logs atop each other spanning the trickling river. These things are huge, of a whole different order than everything around them. They rise like a castle wall in the air. I get dizzy looking up and 11

hustle past on hands and knees, a bug beneath the feet of a monster.

Another big log blocks the other side and can’t be climbed or ducked under. I walk around to the right, up an incline, and I suddenly, involuntarily, discover the meaning of the word jaw-dropping. Easily the largest tree I have ever seen stands there, not saying much. The world does a lap around my head. I gape, both at the tree and what it reveals: that the world can still stagger me with wonder, unfeigned shock, a pure white strike of lightning.

Something approaching 30 feet across, this tree. This fact seems at first impossible. I circumnavigate. That wide on every side. The trunk splits in two a few feet in the air and shoots out of sight. It is several minutes before I realize my mouth remains open, literally hanging.

Desire to do anything but stare at this tree — which has a name, big trees have names and this one is Screaming Titans — drains out of me. I look around. Across the creek, which softly runs over rocks, another tree is maybe bigger, with a thicker trunk. Several others look successively larger than that. They are all very tall, over 300, maybe 350 feet, but I can’t say for sure.

This is the Grove of Titans, a collection of humongous trees — really of unbelievable size — that together, in terms of sheer mass, are the biggest in the world. It is not on the map. These trees might be 3,000 years old. Nobody knows. The grove’s botanical significance can’t be overstated (most titanic coast redwoods were clear-cut and turned into money long ago). It is unique, a word that shouldn’t need emphasis but is perpetually misused to mean cool — a symptom of how, in our circumscribed lives, the horizon creeps in: a boundary of rules and routine occludes the wider view, so we react hyperbolically, assign more meaning to things (for example, to be shocked, shocked, about camping fees) than we would with a broader perspective. And the uncomfortable truth is we might need to do this to feel bigger than our circumstances warrant.

At this point, I feel oddly disembodied, suddenly lighter than air. Objects this big fuck with my sense of gravity. Next to these, I weigh exactly zero. I float around, bounce from tree to tree. This has got to be the biggest. That one is even bigger. This one was gutted by fire. I walk around for maybe an hour, maybe more. I lose track of time. I sit and eat.

After a while the shadows get long. I think about how to get out. Coming in, I didn’t really know where I was going, so my path was indirect. Going out, it will be easier to just follow the creek till it hits the road, near where I parked the car. I swallow more water, stand up, look around, recognize nothing.

I don’t see the Screaming Titans. I don’t see the giant logs over the creek. I don’t see the water, I don’t even hear it. The forest looks completely different. I am confused. I move down the hill I’d walked up. The brush is thick and hard to move through. I cut left, the way I came in, thinking this will help. I look for the big tree I saw first. Everything looks more or less the same, and not at all familiar. I crash downwards. Ferns seem to grow up around me, 12

blocking my view. I get stuck in a bush. I am surrounded by greenness. I can’t see. I plow through more ferns. I don’t look where I’m going. I fall in a hole. I fall in another. I still can’t find the creek. I panic a little.

I have just gone from lost to lost. The word’s meaning shifted. Or I became properly aware of it for the first time. When I began, I had no idea where I was or where I was going.

This did not bother me. I was lost but not really, because there was no exact location where I believed I was or was trying to be. Turns out this is not what lost means. When I think I know where I am and how to get where I want to go, only to discover, all at once, I am mistaken in that belief, I am then lost. This is not a pleasant feeling, this shifting definition. I have passed an invisible limit, gone beyond what I knew certain words to mean. Language maps our mental world, and mine is now forcibly redrawn. The world bends as I look at it, grows, boundaries bleeding and undefined. Horizon now applies to a spot further out. I understand what grandeur means. More things seem suddenly possible. I have more space to walk around in but, at the moment, a longer distance to go.

4. When confronted by obstacles, you will instinctively try to go around them, but sometimes it is quicker, easier, simpler to just go straight through.

On a normal hike, when I run into an obstruction — a log, a boulder — I walk around, which is easier than spending energy climbing over it. I find myself inclined to do this while walking out through the overgrown masses of ferns. I hit a wall of twisted vines, I back up. Quickly, the futility here becomes obvious. There is nowhere to go. The whole forest is a near-impenetrable mess. I am always surrounded by walls of twisted vines. This place wasn’t made for walking around in and does not really want me to be here. But the shortest distance is still a straight line, no matter how slowly drawn. I breathe in, breathe out, put my head down, and scrape straight through the berry bushes scratching the skin off my arms, one step at a time.

I move amidst a blur of ill-defined words. There is no trail. I don’t know, can’t see a destination. Everything looks different from how it looked on the way in. And harder, somehow, to navigate. Such is the sensation when words slip free their meanings. Or when their meanings, as we’ve come or been taught to understand them, no longer describe the world we are or want to be living in. Our writing suffers because of it. We only ever circle ’round and back to where we once began, always seeking the source of our words and the place where they matched exactly the world we need to describe. Every essence slips. The poem or story never gets that mirrorlike shine, the thinness, perfection or clarity of mile-high air.

Mostly in vain, the poem seeks its double in the world. Or the opposite of that, maybe.

The world yearns for a poem adequate to itself. Something equally real. Or even more real than a world that is mostly, if not imaginary, mostly something less than true. Our language 13

fails us. Or we fail language, abusing and abandoning it, mocking its inadequacy, its arbitrariness, its caught-up-ness in the fuzzy matrix of French theory that calls everything into question, even the existence of socks and solid ground. I think we can all agree that socks exist. Yes? So let’s use that as a place to begin.

But it’s not just the French that have bastardized English. For eight years we suffered a political rule that, in its every utterance, said exactly the opposite of what it did, used words like freedom to justify a war that killed more people than will ever be counted, claimed to care, support and work on behalf of schoolchildren, soldiers and old people, etc., while systematically undermining all social mechanisms that would, in fact, care, support and work for them. It was down the rabbit hole with us, a mind-bent meaning-fuck so twisted that, in addition to political speech, even words like fury, protest and democracy lost any meaning they previously held.

Poets and sorcerers have eternally sought the ultimate book, a redemptive tome containing everything, writ in a language finally adequate to the world’s piercing beauty, its inexorable there-ness, both outer and inner, a phrase to say just what we mean. A musical collage, sounds in harmony with the silence echoing between Grand Canyon walls. A language that, when spoken, would close a circle, cross a line, break the boundary between the world and our experience, would make our fingertips tingle and flood with the blue California sky, would reduce the innumerable quantity of things to just one. You, me, that tree, this day in the street plunging forward in time, sitting still while undifferentiated seconds tick by, going nowhere but where we’ve always wanted, where we’ve always already been.

Of course, such a teleological dream can make progress impossible. We need not necessarily learn some absolute, essential, unchanging, timeless, a priori meaning of words (unless you want to ask for that from Santa this December), but rather always refine our definitions, define words harder and truer, make them mean what we want them to mean in the context of the life we’d live given infinite resources — think freedom — then live that life, embody those words, make those meanings real with our conspicuously finite resources, work at this by breaking rules and pushing into the protean space where something new might be created. And while we may not reach an ever-receding horizon, in the process we will discover this is the only meaning that matters.

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[Vinh Truong] 1. it’s winter and you abandon lost things. because you feel something deep happening. even when you’re standing up. pointless and all that stuff. well, i guess you can say, poor people who never get their teeth fixed get their nose fixed. things don’t quite fit. have you ever walked down a street and thought how sad this street is. it might be the light, the poverty of the place. it might be in a rich neighborhood. it speaks its emptiness. nothing to please the eye or soul. a fence is put up where you expect to see a fence. a bowl of fruit and their signs. fetishes of paranoid citrus. they all carry their own sign. it speaks something odd. the mystery and the melancholy of the street. a girl rolling a hoop. the porticoes on her left. shadows on her right. something familiar about it where we don’t expect it to be. a stranger in the scene that’s a little odd. that’s so odd. there are mysterious things in this world we can’t explain. read into them in ordinary things. he’s a normal enough person. writes a lot about things. recognizes the emptiness of shapes. finds dark things funny. very simple. not without weight. you get the idea. there’s a reason his friends look at him funny. things don’t quite fit. everyone knows how much fiction happens. everybody’s been there, etc.

15

[Vinh Truong] 2. she’s a charming rascal. expressive. sassy. hip-type personality. avoids triviality, disgrace. and still seeks disgrace. a real american. we work our way through the drab overcoat. drive through the south to a tiny town. woods sinking back in the scenery. erotic and predatory in nature. glistening seed inside the husk. and people talking interesting things to each other in ways we don’t understand. she explained it to me. but i forgot. she’s funny, you know. kinda snappy. she doesn’t put her aggression forward. i carry my big stick expressing myself. watch it forwarding. play into shapes and stuff. (i’m a little leery of it.) there are tractors outside. comedies that support the same thing over and over again. the roundness of it tilted on the ground. it’s like flashes of visuals. but they never stand out. too many aside and i forget where i am. i didn’t expect that to happen. silence doesn’t seem like much of a claim. sound itself is neon bent. messaging us because that’s what we want. the seething machine of noise. we worry and disappear in it.

16

the river runs... how many ways?

Chris Pedler <ChrisPedler@gmail.com> Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 4:25 PM To: Sarah Ciston <SarahCiston@yahoo.com> This is this. It’s better. Perhaps not done. But what is “done”? “Done” as a concept deserves more critical scrutiny. Discuss. (Or don’t. That’s fine too.) (horizon.doc) Sarah Ciston <SarahCiston@yahoo.com> Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 9:07 PM To: Chris Pedler <ChrisPedler@gmail.com> i did finish the mansion story. at 6 pm today. so disgusting. being productive sucks and i wouldn’t recommend it even to my enemies. [...] there is no done, only perhaps a tugging interest satiated. we will always have unfinished business with our words. [discuss] Chris Pedler <ChrisPedler@gmail.com> Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 12:18 AM To: Sarah Ciston <SarahCiston@yahoo.com> [...] this whole idea of unfinished business with words is far too true and frequently annoying. ‘it is impossible to say just what I mean!’ if we could conjure the language in our minds and create those giant monuments peopled with the exemplary figures of metaphor as easily as thinking of the strange lives of postage stamps we’d all be Homer and no one would write at all. and yet we persist in this sprinting marathon along an unmarked course while racing shadows birthed and murdered by the fevers of our own imaginations. and we call this life. and life in fact lived right and, dare I say, complete. but how should I presume? [...] neglected tropical diseases Sarah Ciston <SarahCiston@yahoo.com> Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 5:45 PM To: Chris Pedler <ChrisPedler@gmail.com> [...] and now, as a newly annointed someone-who-has-finished-something, i can tell you that even when one doesn’t care a butler’s pantry about the words the concept of done is fraught with complicated emotion. meanwhile (not that that is nearly as hard as writing a story about a house) tupelo is sending her book’s final revision to her editor tomorrow morning (celebration forthcoming on Fri night) and we talked a lot yesterday about this “done” business, the post-novel empty-nest syndrome, the detachment that happens (has to happen) is natural but hard. being disgusted with what you’ve basically bled out for is pretty traumatizing. and yet, as you said so well, we call this life lived right. how do we per17

sist in this, sustain projects in progress knowing they will fall away from us, finish anything or start anything or continue anything at all? it’s a mystery to me, and yet we do, we must. *i can’t go on, i’ll go on.* i think i am printing out my dusty old novel again tonight so i can hack away at it again. then again, i am supposed to be at a birthday party tonight, so i may just drink some beer and talk about books instead of making them. [...]

Sarah Ciston <SarahCiston@yahoo.com> Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 10:54 PM To: Chris Pedler <ChrisPedler@gmail.com> [...] i wish you and your comrades would finish those grisham novels so we could quit all our jobs already. i have my first employee review tomorrow afternoon. when she asks me what i think i can improve on, shall i say “actually doing stuff ”? all right, be in touch soon with some sort of hope for the human race, won’t you?

Chris Pedler <ChrisPedler@gmail.com> Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 3:58 AM To: Sarah Ciston <SarahCiston@yahoo.com> Yes, at your eval. you should say you could improve by “actually doing stuff ” or perhaps “writing articles that incite worldwide revolution against our capitalist overlords” or, better, “burning this fucking building to the ground, bitch, how do YOU think I can improve?” All of those would go a long ways in turning you into someone who might be featured on t-shirts someday just like Che Guevara. Which is really what all of us secretly want, after all. Viva la revolucion. [...] In light of this, I think the real relevant question is: How does one (at least in your case) become a young genius/prodigy/next-great-new-thing? Seriously. How must you and I spend our days such that at the end of them we become the object of mass public worship? This is a question worth answering.

But some other time of course. This weekend I’d be thrilled to attend the big BBQ and eat my prescribed amount of leftover sausage. I live for sausage. Perhaps also Saturday night we could meet in the east bay or west bay or a dark alley somewhere to exchange indecent insights into the deep reality of contemporary life. Or just talk about space and time and infinity.

Speaking of which, did you know that around 4 billion years ago it rained constantly for several hundred million years? How crazy is that? When the earth’s atmosphere cooled after the first birth-pains of asteroid volcano chaos, all the water vapor in the thing that 18

wasn’t yet called ‘air’ condensed, and it rained rained rained and never stopped till giant puddles in a dry wasteland formed what we now call “oceans.” Amazing, huh? Once upon a time, all the water in the Pacific fell from the sky.

I think these are the things of great literature. What do you think?

See you soon. Chris Sarah Ciston <SarahCiston@yahoo.com> Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 12:18 AM To: Chris Pedler <ChrisPedler@gmail.com> [...] In answer to your question about becoming a wunderkind, I’m working on a theory.

How’s this: Don’t worry about doing something worthy of public adoration. Make the tshirts first. Glory follows. And the work worth glory follows that. Isn’t that how celebrity worship works in this day and age? [...] re: facts! poems!!

Sarah Ciston <SarahCiston@yahoo.com> Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 12:51 AM To: Chris Pedler <ChrisPedler@gmail.com> tonight the air smells like old college try, the evening version of that morning recess smell i was talking about earlier. it smells like staying awake all night to finish a paper; it smells like thinking words can change the world. [...] and speaking of rape and pillage, thank you for the interesting fact about women in greek literature. [...]

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Band on the Run [Rick D’Elia] Writing should, at all costs, try to emulate the 1973 Wings’ classic, “Band on the Run,” from the album of the same name.

Some critics believe “Band on the Run” was Paul McCartney’s glorious effort to use a deeply constructed extended metaphor to comment on the state of poetry and writing, and there is much evidence to support such accounts. After all, during a widespread creative shortage, McCartney remarked, “Let them eat books.” McCartney, himself, said that while composing the three-part structure for the song he would eat pages of Shakespeare. There is photographic proof of this event on the internet, and the pictures have been verified by experts as authentic.

The song is 5 minutes and 10 seconds of pure bliss, which one will probably never find in any other medium, besides 30-second porn clips on the internet. The first time I heard the song itself, it gave me blue balls. This is not to say that it becomes excruciatingly painful to endure or that you will walk like you are riding a horse to avoid any further aggravation after hearing the song, because that is clearly not true. Every movement and every harmony can cause earth-quaking orgasms. But like a young teen who dry-humped a leg a little too long, or one that ran through every baseball roster in alphabetical order, I too tried to resist and prolong the inevitable. Writers take note: You want to encourage the reader to have multiple orgasms before the first line or sentence is finished.

In “Band on the Run,” McCartney introduces a soft melodic lull that is sweet, comforting and bordering on sentimental, but after 1 minute and 18 seconds, the melody shifts into the second part of the structure. The song evolves into a more aggressive thrusting rhythm that is accompanied by the symbolic phrase, “If I ever get out of here.” Writing should also try to pose such questions; but more importantly, shifting rhythms almost unexpectedly (although jarring at first like during sex) can ultimately keep the reader or partner’s attention, can cause them to take notice. This is where McCartney’s true brilliance as an artist lies.

And just when we, the listener, get used to being suitcased, legs over our shoulders, crunched tight to the hard line of McCartney and company as they pummel us, the song shifts again from the quick syncopations to the longer, more fluid, euphoric rock pace that sustains us for the next 2 minutes and 3 seconds. Also, it is of utmost importance to note that, during this part, McCartney sings of subjects like the sun, jailer man, sailor Sam, undertakers, rabbits on the run, a county judge and townspeople searching for evermore. These are some of the most profound subjects to write about by themselves, but to include any combination of such will ensure the reader will be captivated and copulated.

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The Millennium Ten Years Later In May 1999 the Edinburgh Endowment Committee at Mary and Pierce College sponsored a two-day symposium on Contemporary Arts and invited artists and critics from around the country to give readings and talks, lead classroom colloquia and hold informal panel discussions during the course of the symposium. What follows here is a much-abbreviated version of the A.M. panel discussion that took place the second day on the topic of American Thought at the Dawn of the New Century.

Moderator: Good morning, everybody. Did everyone get his or her coffee? Morgan?

Morgan Fryer: I did, Aaron. Thanks.

Moderator: I’d just like to thank you on behalf of The University for coming to the annual Adams McCarthy panel on the arts, which the man at the back is gesturing to me that I am obligated to remind everyone is called American Thought at the Dawn of the New Century.

Les Motherton: Thanks, Aaron.

Linda Charles: Yes. We are all happy to be here.

Dan Gilels: Speak for yourself, cunt.

MF: For posterity, I’d just like to remind everyone that Dan’s a visual artist. [audience laughs] Moderator: I think that’s the perfect starting point. Art. Baudrillard published an article in FOCUS last month where he noted that technology makes the artist impossible. We’re pretty well along into the technology of the future, here. Now, with the internet, The Gutenberg Project, Nick at Nite… the art of the past is in direct competition with the present for readership. How do you think technology is affecting the currency of the contemporary artist as cultural pilot?

DG: Peachy.

LM: I’m not entirely sure it’s changed much. I mean, popular culture has definitely taken over in a big way, making the artist “irrelevant” and so forth, but that’s been going on for a very long time. To me, the consumers of art have always been there, and they’re pretty much the same people. They’re still going to find new art, find new artists — because they’ve gone out looking for it. Perhaps something like the internet makes it even easier for them to do so.

LC: Aaron, the question is wrong. Maybe what it wanted to ask was: How is technology affecting the future for women? Obviously, Flaubert didn’t care much either way, technology or otherwise. [audience chuckles] What we can all care about is a misguided sense of knowing in the face of evidence that clearly shows us the disaster of our choices. When we choose to chase our own tails down the rabbit hole of what is admittedly a construct of mass consciousness, we 21

choose to tell ourselves not only that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes but that we, too, remain naked to our best ideas.

MF: Why do women live in a ghetto in the future? I think what we should ask ourselves first is just what is this population that’s making the popular? Pop Art is a product of poor working-class kids getting their hands on the culture-wheel in the seventies. And the people they were taught to admire were rich men. Talented rich men, no question, but the entire model of art since then has been a democratization of oppressive style.

These seventies kids, they just took elitism and capitalized the entry fee so breeding wasn’t paramount anymore. Taste was everything. But popular culture, re: Pop Art, is still dandy snobs laughing at your sister’s t-shirt collection.

LM: Yeah, but you’re talking about the seventies and I question how relevant any of that still is. I definitely see strains of cultural elitism in the way art, and not just pop art but legitimate popular art, gets used. The question was about — Moderator: — how do you think technology is affecting the currency of the contemporary artist as cultural pilot?

MF: Can we move on to the next question? I’m kind of burnt-out on popular culture lately, to tell the truth.

LC: And believe me, I’m exhausted from talking about women.

DG: Believe me, I’m exhausted from you talking about women. Personally, technology gives me more options. The fact of the matter is, paintings never had audiences the way books and movies do. And it’s not like I get a royalty check every time someone looks at one of my canvases. So the internet and technology, they give me access to what I’m really doing this for. To get people to look. And it gives me new things to get them to look at, too.

Moderator: What options has it given you?

DG: For getting people to look?

Moderator: Yeah, or the other. How do you want to answer?

DG: I’m working with video now, and interactive installations. Technology is really helping me move my work into new places. It hasn’t hurt my “currency” at all, Aaron. I’m arguably more successful “culturally,” than I ever would have been in 1913, say.

LC: That’s probably why Camille Paglia called your Mother III canvas “prosthetic.” But your first comment is proof that all of this technology is still in the hands of a sexist hegemony.

DG: Look, I’m just speaking for myself.

Moderator: I think it’s pretty obvious that the trajectory of this discussion so far has carried a lot of the baggage of twentieth century politics. We’re on the dawn of a new century.

Do you think we are going to be exorcising these ghosts of the past for the next hun22

dred years, or will there be new ones?

LC: New? Here’s what art has to look forward to: niche and aspergill: baptisms of Never Never lands. People who want art won’t want anybody else to have very much akin to what they have. It will be as if comic book hunters, as opposed to comic artists, ransacked all of culture. Either it will all be trash or it will be indiscernible from trash: a new kind of apocalypse. It will be as if we never made it from this moment, like all art was generated in 1999, as if the future couldn’t happen or hadn’t been allowed to happen. And those who don’t like it will joke that they’re too poor for the good stuff even if it comes at no cost. You know, kind of the way they joke about the Watchtower pamphlets. But in the future, irony will only be funny for artists.

MF: You’ll never move beyond politics because art is always political, whether you like it or not. This is the case for a variety of reasons, but the simplest of all of them is that art involves taste, and taste is political. Not that you have to obsess over politics every time you create something, but it’s probably always naïve for any artist to say that their work is “apolitical.”

LC: I don’t know. I agree. To some extent, no. We’ll always be stuck with the ghosts of the past. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that artists don’t write manifestos anymore and I don’t think it’s coincidental that every car looks the goddamn same. I mean, when somebody wants to make a “remarkably new car” it’s always some the same old car. Like a fucking PT Cruiser. We’ve just sort of run out of new ideas or maybe it’s not that.

There’re always new ideas. Maybe it’s that newness is starting to overstay its welcome.

Getting back to that point about Nick at Nite and history and everything from the past that’s been published being available on the internet, or someday it will be, I don’t know that we need new anymore. We already have more than a lifetime thousands of times over. If human beings never make anything new then there will still always be something new to read. The drive to make things is probably — and this is by no means a new idea — a drive to make significance. People will keep making art because they feel like they have to, but if you think about it from the world’s perspective, maybe culture just doesn’t need new artists anymore. It’s just artists who need new art.

Participants Linda Charles is a cultural critic and Adjunct Professor of Rhetoric at the William and Mary University.

Morgan Fryer was a book reviewer for the Pasadena Weekly at the time of the symposium, and is currently enrolled in Columbia University’s MFA in Nonfiction. Dan Gilels is a painter and installation artist, and founded the Snake Mountain School with Linda Charles in 1991. His last installation, fACElimbo, was on display at Aldo Castillo Gallery in Chicago in May of 2007. Les Motherton is a short story writer and lawyer out of Boulder, CO, and has relocated to Seattle since the symposium in 1999.

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San Francisco’s Been Chucking Rocks at Me from the Other Side of the Moon [Zulema Summerfield] San Francisco’s been chucking rocks at me from the other side of the moon. This is real conflict. It’s like having animals descend upon you, alighting on your outstretched arms, your face turned up to the sky… but then they turn on you and tear apart your face, shoot venom into your mouth and claw out your eyes.

San Francisco’s chucking rocks at me, also shooting guns into the air outside my window, stealing my mail, posting shit about me on MySpace. The internet breeds conflict between San Francisco and me. A trolley car rolls over the vulnerable side of my heart (the tender side, the side that lives in fear, the side that’s already swollen and bruised), and the city just stands there, points and laughs and stares. I think, Maybe it will be better if I move? But prices are too high, and really, there’s nowhere else to go.

So I escape into the forest for a few days, survive on foraged mushrooms and squirrels I hunt myself with a slingshot my brother gave me. A couple of hours later, a ranger shows up. He’s got a telephone whose cord stretches all the way across the forest, to the far horizon where his cabin is. I can see the lights blinking there.

The ranger shakes his head, clucks his tongue. “Them mushrooms’ll kill ya.” He hands me the phone. “Sfer you.” He’s the kind of man I’d have loved in another life — moustache, doesn’t talk much, hides things under the bed. But then he walks away.

“Hello?”

The city is buzzing on the other end of the line.

“You can run but you can’t hide…” I think I can hear the sound of knuckles grinding, or at the very least being popped.

Birds are out here somewhere. They’re just shadows in these shadowed trees. Those birds? There’s no getting away from those birds. They’re all just waiting for their chance.

But god! My eyes are so tired. Vigilance is costly. Vigilance is a million dollars on which I haven’t got a hold.

24

No Expectations [Dustin Heron] The other day I was having trouble with the Dark Elf, even though Edward’s stupid TwinHarp was supposed to neutralize the magnetized cavern and allow me the use of my Mythril Sword. I just kept dying. I’d stumble along until the Dark Elf turned into some kind of dragon and he would obliterate me. It was another gray windy San Francisco summer day. I went down to the library, returned some books. On my way home this little old lady with an empty shopping cart kept veering into my path and when I finally got in front of her the cart caught the back of my foot. I turned around and she said, “Sorry, sorry,” and I said, “You stupid fucking bitch.” I walked a few more steps and looked back again and said, “Watch where the fuck you’re going.” The rest of the way home I kept thinking about how I should have pushed her cart back into her, knocking her down to the pavement. Who would have said anything? I was looking for a fight with someone my own size.

If I could write a story that was capable of saying everything, or anything, it would say something about that greasy feeling you get on your face after watching TV all day, and it would draw a thread between today and that summer I spent in my bedroom running the swamp cooler playing Mario Tennis and listening to Kid A. Right now, I don’t know what I would say about the literary world, that world where characters start making their own decisions on the page and where we talk about memories as Memory, as in, “Right now, I’m really interested in Memory.” I’m no longer comfortable with a world where the act of writing is seen as a noble endeavor. It’s a silly, bloated hobby, masturbatory and absurd. Literature seems like such an excessive thing, 500 page novels where we listen in on the hearts and minds of invented people, complex characters revealed in long passages which sculpt their memories and motivations via tangents to express the emotional implications of why B buys low-fat milk instead of whole (she was molested as a child). I’m more interested in the Comfort Wipe, the first major evolution in toilet paper since 1880.

I was at a bar with some writers once and someone said, “I don’t even use quotation marks anymore!”

— I don’t even use quotation marks anymore!

I don’t even use quotation marks anymore let’s get another round who’s buying the light was dim and smoky and when the jukebox stopped the bartender sang an old Irish hymn all a cappela and shit have you read the latest McCarthy?

When I got home that damned Dark Elf was waiting for me. I was faced with the prospect that I had come all this way only to be defeated by some dickhead in a magnetized cave. It was something that I really didn’t want to think about. Sitting there, I realized that there was a lot I didn’t want to think about. I didn’t want to think about my dwindling job 25

opportunities or the ongoing attempts to salvage the dregs of capitalism or the unopened loan statement on my desk, or the fact that my grandparents are getting so old, that cousins and friends are having babies I’m not sure I’ll ever know, that California is so broke its going to close all those beautiful parks that make it meaningful. I didn’t want to think about malaria or refugees or genocide or war or nuclear weapons or fixed elections or crooked politicians.

I went up against the Dark Elf again and gave him everything I had, and, again, I lay dead on the crystal floor.

I think of writing as this mysterious thing, as black Courier type on yellowed paper, big rounded letters sparse on the page implying ideas, ideas that catch up the characters and force them into some kind of inevitable and surprising destiny. I think of a story as an edict handed down by a pantheon of gods. Or a single god, with many moods. I don’t want my characters making their own decisions or doing things that surprise me and make the story veer off into some unplanned direction. I want to know that the writer has complete control, not just on his characters or his words but on his ideas. Because I want complete control when I write. Try as I (sometimes) might, I don’t begin that exercise program, I don’t cut back on beer, I don’t save money, or return phone calls, or clean my apartment, or remember to call my grandma on her birthday. I am a lazy, out of control, relapsing motherfucker, and if I can’t believe that when I sit down to write I’m going to be in charge, for once, then I can’t see the point in even trying.

Someone at a party once said to me, “What are your stories about? Because I think every story should have a moral. You should learn something from it.” This guy was really into jets, and went to every movie centered around or largely including jet planes, no matter how bad he knew the movie would be, because he wanted to ensure that the “market was there.” I don’t know if you should learn something from a story. I don’t know if it should be required, but its a nice bonus. But I do think that if you like a story that includes jet planes, then you damned well better go listen to that story, because at the end of the day a story is only as good as its audience. At the same time, it’s dangerous to think that just because you want to hear the story then it will be told. I want to tell you a story about fighting the Dark Elf and the long, repetitive formless days of the summers of my life because I want to hear it. I want to see it take shape, to believe that maybe it has a shape, that if it were made visible it would be a story I would want to sit through. I have to believe that it’s a story worth telling, and the only way to make sure is to tell it.

In the commercial for the Comfort Wipe there’s an uncomfortable string of testimonials. There’s this big fat guy who says, “Being a large man has its advantages, and its disadvantages. This is a great product.” In just two short sentences this guy opens a window onto his whole existence — an existence made immeasurably better with the invention of a long plastic stick, designed to fit the contours of your body, used to wipe your ass — hinting at 26

vast possibilities and limitations known only to him. It’s a little haiku, a little vignette, full of hard-luck and hope. It almost makes you believe that, you know, ass-wiping technology has been lagging behind everything else: it’s about fucking time. Technology is expanding the possibilities of everything we do and shrinking the world to this tiny thing you could shove into a processor smaller than a fingernail clipping, and here I am still holding my toilet paper in my hand to wipe my ass. And yet. When I imagine myself dabbing at my ass with a wad of toilet paper stuck into a plastic stick, it’s just another increment of distance added between me and myself. I’m playing Six Degrees of Dustin Heron and the more degrees between me and the thing I am the better.

Of course, you have to wonder. Here we are near the end of the page. Time has collapsed. How long have you been sitting there? How long have I been here? No time at all, really, not compared to, say, the life of a rock. Then again, it is already years from now, and I am long dead, and you, reading this, like me, writing this, are waiting for your laundry to finish drying. You might be curious as to how I finally did destroy the Dark Elf, or you might not even be paying attention, barely skimming the page, or the screen, or the holographic eye-zap through which your reading is done. I don’t know. I don’t know you, and I can’t. All I can do is put some version of myself, honestly shaped, timestamped and fully authorized, out into the world and hope that when I am picked up and dusted off there might at last be some clarity.

27

Chris Pedler <ChrisPedler@gmail.com> Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 5:25 PM To: Sarah Ciston <SarahCiston@yahoo.com> Certainly if we’re to possess more books we should write them ourselves. There’s a kind of honor in that, albeit from a demented hermit perspective. I once had ideas that ran in this vein — tightly-coiled thoughts about self-reliance and the need to be completely original, free from the influence, the traces or the crutch (as I would have said) of all the writing that preceded our little moment here, a kind of militant stubborn chip on my shoulder that I must become wholly self-produced (which of course all of us are and are not). Not that I feel entirely differently now. I don’t walk around the world thinking, What I really want is to be a wholly colonized subsidiary of the Academy of Unoriginal Ideas and The Way It’s Always Been. But there’s something I guess more confident — I suppose I feel like I have less to prove to myself than I did when I was in college, though sometimes I miss the sense of urgency, the real emergency of not having a fixed identity in the way we don’t (or I didn’t really) at age 20, when certain ideas felt like they could save my life. Is there an idea out there that feels that way anymore? [...]

Sarah Ciston <SarahCiston@yahoo.com> Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 2:15 AM To: Chris Pedler <ChrisPedler@gmail.com> [...]

Which brings me to my next point, something about too many books and tightly coiled thoughts and influence and freedom. As you said, all of us are wholly self-produced and simultaneously undeniably influenced, an idea which expands to include not only creative undertakings but also the whole of the human endeavor in which we exist because of each other, need to make contact with each other, but are no matter wholly and solipsistically alone.

Confidence is exactly what is required to be able to acknowledge dependence, be it influence or vulnerability. It would be much easier to argue for literature/love in a vacuum, for things that can be militantly controlled and contained, narrowed and distilled, but doesn’t that ignore all the interesting mess of it, the incomprehensible of it all? Maybe it takes more responsibility to shoulder the balance of incompatible opposites, the immortality of an individual through her own work versus the immortality of an individual through her participation in a cannon, to be able to accept that just because you create something great it is not “yours” and never really was?

An awareness of that influence is imperative, whether working within it or outside it. To 28

deny influence on you in the interest of creating Truth from Scratch seems just as foolhardy as blindly participating in the Academy of the Unoriginal. For me these days the only ideas that feel like they could save my life are the ones that acknowledge the tension between the two extremes â&#x20AC;&#x201D; offering a kind of freedom to grow outward from that space. Alternately humbling and empowering, but urgently stimulating to be sure. ...much like this conversation, after which I intended to leave room for other thoughtful thoughts on the piece you sent, but they shall have to wait for tomorrow when I get my thoughts back from wherever they go while I sleep Hope this email made some sense. I was just reading about the new Nobel Prize in physics and am probably going to dream about hidden symmetries.

Meanwhile, be in touch with more from and before the Thursday of Hip Plans and Infinite Answers, Sarah

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Why I Hate Send [Kathleen Nye Flynn] Lord, give me a bottle of wine before I ever have to press send. In this era of message boards and texts, twitters and updates — let alone email — pressing “send” has become, for me, a dramatically disabling hurdle, a paralyzing requirement that squelches productivity, a weapon of massive insecurity that nearly every time brings me to my knees. Seriously, I am not kidding.

I spend my life staring at the tiny arrow that is my cursor as it quivers over my Yahoo’s “send” button, unable to make that final, rigid motion of pushing down my index finger and hurling whatever feeble, helpless words I have written into that stinky swamp of the internet, where I know they will wind up vulnerable and misinterpreted, alone in an inbox, awaiting excruciating judgment.

No, I cannot do it. Most often, I press “save” instead. Saved, in the “draft” box, where my words are tucked securely into my own device, ready for me to review, rewrite and retract them whenever I please, where I alone can judge and malign them (which I do). There, they can collect a formidable amount of internet dust that I trust will inevitably bury them for good.

Nearly every somewhat official, potentially embarrassing, remotely significant email I have sent has at one point been saved as a draft. My text message draft box on my cell phone is perpetually filled. When I can’t save, I destroy. I delete 9 out of 10 Facebook updates, twitter tweets and other online social networking what-have-you-nots that I write, and that’s after I’ve spent half an hour constructing them in my head.

The worst — the very essence of torture and despair — comes when I have to email a pitch to an editor. As I hover over that send button, I grow more convinced that I have spelled her name wrong, or my name wrong. Or that somehow I will press send only to realize moments later that I put her email address on the wrong letter and, in 10 seconds time, she will be reading the note I wrote to my coworker about how much I hate my job.

I am afraid of commitment, of failure, of rejection, of lack of control and of being the butt of the joke. I have all of those messy self-help-aisle quandaries, and they all get wrapped into that one tiny, casual motion: Send. As you can expect, I am not adjusting well to the information age. Rapid-fire commentary? Not possible. Emailing a pitch? It takes me longer to press send than to write a story. Leaving messages on the Facebook walls of people whom I find even vaguely intimidating? Not worth it.

Yet I’m a journalist! Writing is my gig, so is writing fast, and so is writing for an audience!

Why don’t these old-world skills transfer into this new communication era? For starters, I fear not having an editor. Personally, I think the internet would be a much better place if it 30

required mandatory editing. Editors are willing to jump in front of your shallow analogies, tangled clauses and mismatched pronouns and save you from your own dim self.

If Twitter hired an editor to ensure that my spelling was correct, my references were astute and my @’s were at-ing where they should be, I’d tweet all day long (although, a good editor would probably put a stop to that, too).

But what I am most scared of, what truly thwarts my participation in this new, worldwide dialogue, are the words “Me” and “I.” Being personal — sharing my innermost thoughts, my voice, my observations and, even worse, trying to sell myself — is much more difficult than writing about some bloody accident or corrupt banker.

It’s also heartbreaking, how these private thoughts that can sound so good in my head and mean so much to my heart can look so trite and awkward when put in an update box.

I glare at each sentence I write that begins with “I” and ask myself: Is that what I really think? Is it something a smart person would think? Hasn’t that thought already been thought a million times over? Who even wants to read about that thought, especially since they’ve probably read it before, and it wasn’t very interesting to start with, and really, who am I to be thinking it anyway? These little sprees into the vortex of second-guesses are utterly exhausting.

Still, I try. Slowly but surely, I continue sending out pitches. I update my Facebook page, I send text messages and, every once in a while, I even tweet. Why? Because, in the end, it’s exciting. Despite the frayed nerves, it’s exhilarating to communicate, to put your ideas out there in hopes that they are discussed, critiqued, supported and maybe even bought. Frenetic dialogue is an opportunity to listen, talk and be connected. And I am well aware that nothing — not misspelled names, not misconstrued emails — can feel more lonesome than a dusty draft box full of unread words.

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Proposed Bio for the Novel James Joyce’s Truck Stop by Tupelo Hassman [Tupelo Hassman] To Be Published Posthumously Tupelo Jeremé Hassman was born in Santa Cruz on 9 May 1973. She was one of a large family raised by a single mother described by her social worker as “adequate.” Hassman was educated at Sun Valley Elementary School and later at Foothill Continuation High School, Reno. She did well in school, being interested in permanent markers, insects and the alphabet. In 2002 she went to the University of Southern California, where she studied English and Social Work. She was interested in theatre and in 2004 built nameascar.com on the worldwide web. In July 2004 Hassman went to New York, but returned to California in 2008 as her true love was driving. She taught driving at a school in Los Angeles until she married in 2009, when she and her husband went to Kentucky and later Tennessee, where Hassman taught language in the Berlitz School.

Hassman returned to New York in 2013, when she made an unsuccessful attempt to publish girlchild privately. She spent the Next World War in Hackettstown with her husband and two children in great poverty, but was helped by a grant of £800 from The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She lived in Hackettstown from 2021, and published in 2023 The Secret Life of Pitbulls and in 2028 The Hassman Family Experience, a fully interactive Country and Western album. She died in April 2029.

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Chris Pedler <ChrisPedler@gmail.com> Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 3:46 AM To: Sarah Ciston <SarahCiston@yahoo.com> [...] I agree with the idea that honestly dealing with the process of creation, with being a creative person, requires accepting an endless series of paradoxes. Only by absorbing everything we can handle from the world, from novels letters poems little scraps of insight scratched on a desk in the library can we summon the capacity to say anything original about the world. And I’ve come to realize everything else exists in the same sort of tension that you were talking about. The battleground of our lives is scarred over and over by the advance and retreat of armies like fear and desire, ambition and boredom, fury and inhibition, a fuzzy state of delusion and a glimpse of some shard of the truth about what it really means to be a human being in this world, what’s meaningful about that, and how we can make something like sense of it. All of this seems to move like tides, in and out, back and forth in crashing waves, sometimes drowning pummeling waves too violent for our little bodies and souls and sometimes waves just perfectly in tune with where we are moving so we shoot through the world, bodysurfing, in an arc of indescribable grace.

And yet inevitably we land again, so mundane, and do things like go to work, attend classes we don’t really care about, pass a day, three days, six weeks in forgettable conversation with nobody, periods punctuated with blips of brilliant activity that remind of us of what we’re doing here, enough to keep us going but less than we really need. The trouble is the world wants us to keep away from the edge of opposites that’s at the bottom of things — or really what’s more sinister is we’ve created a world that avoids this tension intentionally. We’re afraid of this existential third rail (and honestly, it’s scary) so we’ve collectively over the multi-millennial history of (un)conscious human activity sought not to confront it except by proxy, to build civilizations in which daily business carries no trace of the dread insecurity anxiety and consummate ungroundedness of any individual’s life, societies in which these epic concerns are segregated into religion, philosophy, art, the human sciences that nowadays can hardly see straight enough to formulate the basic questions anymore.

So we’re left where we are now to figure it out for ourselves. And how are we to know?

No institution remains credible in its answers to the most important questions. But we are too-schooled Enlightenment thinkers to trust even our own intuitions even as we absolutely must. Entirely nothing is certain. It reminds me of walking across the Alaska tundra, when tough plants sprayed six ways a set of stubborn roots from the ground that arrayed fan-like swaths of branches in our faces and over our heads, always wet and pushing back, so thick we could not see our feet as we stepped (a weird experience) or know what was 33

more than two feet in front of our eyes (for instance, bears). Life, if we pursue it honestly enough, requires a similar but more extreme act of faith — to decide to plant our feet on land that may or may not exist. It’s both harder and easier than we give it credit for. Too much protects us from a frightening wildness that might finally help, an exhilaration of risk and growth. Perhaps what we need more of is blind movement shouting “Hey Bear!!

Hey Bear!!” in the middle of nowhere, far from help, to ward off danger and tell each other where we’re at — and to be bound by the understanding that each other is all that we have.

So I don’t know if you wanted a treatise on the nature of reality but you sure know how to get it out of me. Which is something wonderful and important. It’s suddenly gotten very late though, and I must sleep if I’m to wake up in time to meet you tomorrow. I haven’t had any worthwhile insights about what to do, but I’ll be in touch tomorrow. I think it’s worth hitting the Mission if for no other reason that I haven’t spent enough time there and we might as well hang out somewhere new. I’m sure there’s a variety of literary events we could attend if that’s what you feel like (I’ll recheck my SFSU emails tomorrow and send you relevant ones) or otherwise we could just sip whiskey and try to impress each other with stupendous feats of eloquence about solipsism, etc.

See you in a few hours. Chris

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Jacob’s Manifesto [Jacob Evans] 1. Manifestos are supposed to be declarative, but there are too many doubts to declare anything. Besides what can one say with any real level of confidence in this day and age? One could say the following with some certainty. This is Jacob’s Manifesto. Jacob is a man. Jacob usually writes, but on occasion he also eats, sleeps, shits, fucks and dates neurotic women.

One day Jacob will be dead and the problems of relevancy or readership will not matter, if indeed they ever did.

2. It’s sometimes really hard to walk down the street as a human being. One must imagine that dogs do not have this same problem.

3. Ask yourself, what isn’t human? Make a detailed list of your findings. Make a concerted effort to not be any of those things. It is not enough to say, be human.

4. Even though one doubts and nothing is certain, it’s still important to have opinions and beliefs. They help lend narrative and meaning to what would otherwise seem to be a random and possibly meaningless existence. That being said, be careful about what you believe. Sometimes, a belief says more about you than it does about the actual world.

5. Also, go fuck yourself.

6. Most things in this world are worth loving. Unfortunately, one spends the majority of one’s life loving things that are not worth loving.

7. Broken glass is more beautiful on the street at night than it is on the kitchen floor.

8. It is a commonly held misconception that focusing on one’s career is a virtue. This contradicts a primary truth of existence: We all die and we all die sooner than we want.

9. Having facial hair is not a lifestyle choice, it’s actually a product of testosterone. This has been a great cause for contention and confusion as of late.

10. No matter what happens, don’t fuck your roommate.

11. Eat some raw foods, some cooked and some fermented.

12. I can’t stress this enough, just as suburbanization was toxic for America, so is gentrification. Moving to a city and then proceeding to transform it into a sterile mini-mall is hardly the answer. Pushing the lower and middle classes into the suburban wasteland created

by American industry and fed into by the great white flight does not solve the problems of class inequality, crime created by the needless prohibition against drugs or the lack of education and social services for all but the elite.

13. Everything is fiction. You are living a story. You are living in someone else’s story and you live on after death as a story to be told, remembered and retold. The only thing that’s true is the observable and the repeatable. 1 + 1 = 2. Everything else is fiction, even that which resembles the truth.

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The Cautionary Tale of The Shortstop [Posted in Journal Pages on August 7, 2009 at jedediahjohnson.wordpress.com] The Shortstop used to be uncool. That was probably when it was the coolest but we didn’t realize it. Then it got a little cooler and it was way cool and we thought, “this is really really cool.” Soon everybody knew it was really really cool and all the “cool” people who like to look and act cool started coming and it got really uncool. Now it’s not even cool to the cool people and everybody there looks like they just came from church or the office. It makes it seem really uncool. Which probably means it is actually the coolest it has ever been. All I know is I used to love it and now I never go there.

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Indiana and Ohio Are Next to Each Other on the Globe [Posted in Journal Pages with tags art, baseball, baseball love, indiana, journal, Ken Griffey Jr., love, ohio, photography on August 14, 2009 on jedediahjohnson.wordpress.com] My tattoo is of Indiana. Amy Walls’ tattoo is of Ohio. This is us doing our best to put them together as they would be in real life. The picture beneath is of the Ken Griffey Jr. commemorative bat that Amy’s father bought for her. I feel that I could probably love her. I doubt I’ll get the chance. I’m just saying I could.

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What’s the Matter? You Don’t Like Singing and Fun? [Posted in Journal Pages with tags photography, journal, art, ladies, chicks, sadness, nudity, humor, drinking, karaoke, pajamas, girls, making out, anger, alcohol on August 18, 2009 on jedediahjohnson.wordpress.com] This was a great night possibly. I’m not really sure. It was karaoke so I’m sure I destroyed the crowd. But I don’t remember what I sang. I am very confident though that what ever it is that I did this night was loads of fun. And, confidence is high that the three ladies I was with had a good time.

Yes it is highly probable that the evening of March 22, 2009, and part of the morning of March 23 was filled with excitement for one and all. But, due to large to medium quantities of alcohol consumed by most of the people on hand, combined with the passing of time between then and now, there is no way to be certain of any of the specific emotions felt on this particular night/morning.

One thing is for certain though. At the end of the night I DIDN’T have to literally carry two of these girls out of the bar and down the street to my car, picking one up and moving her several yards then putting her down and returning to move the other several yards, and so on and so fourth for a couple residential blocks all the while shushing them to keep 38

from waking the inhabitants of this particular suburb, who, if they were any kind of decent citizens would have called the police to arrest me if they had been awakened by screams and saw me dragging two apparently drugged white girls past their garbage cans. I also didn’t have to drive these two girl to one of their apartments and carry them up the stairs before putting them to bed and promising them I wouldn’t leave so that I could take them to their cars in the morning. I didn’t have to hide their cell phones so that they wouldn’t call dudes to come over for sex or drugs or something. I didn’t watch one of them get undressed and put on some PJ’s that were so transparent that I wondered why you would even wear pajamas at all. I did not then crawl into bed with both of them and spend the entire night having absolutely no sex at all. And I didn’t fall in love with one of them that night. And I didn’t wake up and take a picture of me in bed with one of them with my cell phone before they too woke up and told me that I could go and that they didn’t need me to take them to their cars after all.

I didn’t do any of these things this night. And it’s a good thing too. I would be soooo angry and sad if that had happened. But it didn’t, on this night.

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Blah Blah Drawing Room. Hot Girl Blah Blah. Blah “In Love” Blah [Posted in Journal Pages with tags art, beauty, Caitlin, humor, journal, life, perfection, photography, terrorists, torture on September 16, 2009 on jedediahjohnson.wordpress.com] So on April 26 I went to the Drawing Room, AH-gain. And There we a bunch of good looking females, AH-gain. This time was slightly different. Because this girl Caitlin was there.

Now, I can’t imagine this happening. But it is always good to plan ahead so I’ve given this a little thought. And, if terrorists kick down the door of my bedroom someday and drag me outside to where they have made a medium-sized campfire in which they have been heating up a steel spear and they tie me down and hold that red-hot spear just inches from my eyes, singeing my eyelashes, and then demand that I name for them the most perfectly gorgeous girl that I know then I am going to immediately tell them that it is this girl Caitlin. Because they are terrorists, they will all have seen “Who wants to be a Millionaire?” and they will ask me “Final answer?” and chuckle to themselves. I will say yes and they will look at pictures of her and maybe meet her a time or two and they will have to agree that she is quite possibly the most perfectly gorgeous girl they have ever seen as well. Then, unless I miss my guess, they will make me their leader. Anyway this is the girl.

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To Be in Love with a Dentist [Zulema Summerfield] for Sarah Ciston 1.

To be in love with a dentist is to wake up with the drill in your mouth — oh that electric surge! — the sky wheeling above your wheeling room, your turning heart.

(Your heart in your chest like a fist fighting for space.)

2.

To be in love with a dentist is to wake with the whole universe inside your mouth, the crack of stars, too much coffee and your asteroid’s turning black. Your tongue is curled like this around the moon. And him, what does he know? He’s the gentle giant, he’s the guy swinging his arms, face pointed down, he’s the guy as seen on TV. 3.

To be in love is to be in love with everything: the world and how it faces every direction, raccoons that have toppled the outside trash, your mother getting a tattoo of your mother on the top part of her back, jealousy as spelled any way (all ways), back and forth. To love is to carve out a new biorhythm of the heart. It is to bend the heart to your will, to sit on the heart once you’ve wrestled it to the ground, elbow in the heart’s back, you pinning heart’s hands behind heart’s twitching back, to hogtie the heart, or say never never now never (or at least just once a week). To love is to put your hand through glass, to call your sister and rage against your sister, to push a seashell into someone else’s eye, to tie knots from someone else’s insides, (tender insides), their veins the color of someone else’s veins.

4.

Strutting now in the desert of someone else’s heart.

5.

To make cabins of meat. Fruit flies and they’re buzzing all around. To think of radios and meats, antennae and bologna, to tell stories or wind up dead.

Ack! To wind up dead!

6.

To hold it all in. To consider this: to bathe the dead. To cradle parts of the dead in the lap 41

between your palms. To oil the dead. To bless the dead.

The dead are zombies of the dead. They’re pushing buttons. They’re making trouble.

The dead are so troublesome and they never get along. How to creep up on us when no one else is around? How to gaze (chin up) at those hospital walls? How to scale back over those hospital walls? How to carry themselves? How to communicate with themselves (the dead)?

7.

What kind of raft will this death require? What number of flaming arrows?

The way the lurching happens, the way the flinging about of the arms??

The body is a playground.

The body is a truck stop.

The body will never leave you alone.

8.

In the end, there will be the breaking of things: those seashells we’ve been talking about, the jars, the new microwave, the nose inside your face.

The dentist in the hall; there’s sadness eating up your face.

9.

Sadness, chewing on your face.

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Fuck Everyone But Us [Sarah Ciston] for Zulema Summerfield We find each other on the Internet, friends turned strangers made friends again through photos of lives we donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t recognize, portraits in strings of secret code and song lyrics. We need these archives. Or else cannot destroy them. We will find the people we are surprised we donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t remember, who a decade or more ago seemed like the most important thing. When we remember you, we type you in and look you up, and we discover that there are thousands of other people with your name (the sound that made you you is shared by even less familiar strangers with families with children with jobs with the same Ikea furniture). We can peek into living rooms of doppelgangers, a portal we have opened and cannot close. Bridget Harris married a dentist. Dave Dent is still alive. These are people not meant to exist in the realm of the still-possible. These are phantom names, like limbs, that ring in our ears after they are gone, that when spoken after vows of silence will fit right back in their old spots in the hollows of our ears, that have been moving through the same world just so much as we have been â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and so what phantoms have our names created, where are our fates that end in dentist, our On Kowara incantations met with surprise at how people who are more names than people are people after all.

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Fuck Everyone But Us [Sarah Ciston] We use them anyway, but our words are growing inexact. We use “thing” for everything.

Adjectives are stripped to pacifiers, “sorta,” “kinda,” “ish,” and hyperbolic opposites of “awesome,” “wow,” and “huge and shit.” Our vocabularies are failing us. The words erode from the salt water in our spit, pockmarked with what we have dissolved into flavor and swallowed. What replaces them is flavorless. What replaces words are genetically modified modifiers and chemical-sprayed nouns, easy to transport vast distances in trucks and ships, easy to preserve and serve in heavy cream sauces, but difficult to remember how they used to taste, how they used to feel against tongues and sliding down throats. We wash these new words down with other words to ease their diet-soda aftertaste.

We need a drink of water, a palate cleanse, we need the language of a still-wild wilderness to put us back in service to these words and to the concepts they sustain, concepts that sustain us. We have pulled up their roots and asked them to grow from nothing — to suck nutrients from the thin and smoggy air into which we have transplanted them. We dress them up, bears in circus side shows, and ask them to perform tricks, trigger that same wild feeling they used to give us.

We do this with people as well, take a spark, a thrill of uncertainty, nail it down. We ask them to make us safe and permanent and then we ask them to make us passionate and reckless again. Then we blame them for not being both and everything, for not being the words we had decided they should be long before we knew them, before we knew what definitions could be used against them.

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Fuck Everyone But Us [Sarah Ciston] We do not make the most of situations.

We do not follow advice from parents or well-meaning friends. We let our bad attitude be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We do not write back to friendly emails. We do not want to hang out with you, we just want to know that we could if we wanted.

We do not get involved in organizations or clubs. We cry in public at inappropriate times. We cry in private and maybe drink in private too and write it all down even when it is awful.

We do not send out finished work.

We do not ignore the fact that, somewhere, out there, there are great geniuses, not us; we do not know how not to let that intimidate us. We let that stop us.

We do not say the phrases that would smooth things over.

We do not ride bicycles or bring our own reusable bags to the grocery store. We recycle plastic containers, but ignore the fact that we should not have bought them in the first place.

We do not call ourselves smokers. We smoke cigarettes one after another and then do not smoke for months so we can call ourselves non smokers.

We get paranoid about protection; we still take risks, but panic afterward. We know the unthinkable has no ultimate prevention, that people get knocked up all kinds of ways, hit by cars or unexpected news, though we like to think we would know what to do if that happened.

We do not know what we would really do.

We do not sing at karaoke even though our voice is probably fine.

We do not stop you when you tuck our hair behind our ear and whisper something into it. We will not stop you when you do not talk to us again.

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Fuck Everyone But Us [Sarah Ciston] We set out only to say something. No. Only to mean something. It didn’t matter what.

Only meaning meant anything. What would it mean to truly mean what we said? To mean it fitfully, violently, transcendently, the way we jump off bridges and crash cars and limbs into other cars and other limbs, the way trees grow up and grow down at the same time.

We wrote it down to pull it out of us — long rainbow handkerchief of guts spilling out and out. Or, we talked about it, even if we did not, as it were, actually do it.

We were champions of the suffix. Violent amenders. We were convinced the teleology of terminology was a dead end, that definitions could never be shared, that words did not mean.

We did not always operate like this. Once, before language came between us like landscapes, like distance, Once, we believed that if we said a word and you heard a word, they were the same word, meaning the same thing, found in the dictionary, in our every exchange.

We may not remember such a time (or may claim not to) but that barely means anything now.

We existed instead in the era of -ish. Our totem suffix marked imprecision and impermanence, the inability of meaning to mean anything, the vague existential what-the-fuck of it all.

We decided (though there was no committee, no consensus, of course) to nevermind, for the moment, that our tendency toward -ish — toward hedging, toward fudging, toward noncommittal nods to the transient universe — would be our downfall. Our violent acknowledgment of imprecision, of absent solid ground, would become an enactment of it, leading us toward lives and jobs and relationships that embodied painful transition and groundless shifting ground, that created new false floors from our own psychological trap doors, telltale hearts thumping underneath to give us away, to stave off any chance of mutual connection or meaning or purpose or hope or feeling with the insistence that all was -ish, could only be -ish, until calling it made it so.

We would kill our darlings. We would take our red pens and wage war. What couldn’t we cross out? What wouldn’t we grade? What wasn’t placed in our paths for us to tear down, or rather, detour to avoid. It was easier to talk about what we would do, if only we were not bound by this constraint or another — poverty or tragedy or temporality or our own failed skins or a childhood too kind to us or a party next Friday night — it was much easier to talk about what we would do than to do anything else. This is how we would kill darlings, with future tense: Someday we would be alive, someday we would be really traveling and really loving and living and someday would be put off and off again. We would never age inside these cities. We would die, but we would never age. We were twentysomething. We were thirty, and still. We were telling ourselves that, by the time we were old, people would live to be older.

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Fuck Everyone But Us [Sarah Ciston] We will decide too late to be good. This is called regret.

We make it our own, dress it up with excuses and write letters to it, but we cannot send it away. We will build monuments to it instead. We will need something to tear down, after all.

We are desperate for confetti, for the shredded paper scraps of everything. We will do whatever it takes to increase surface-to-volume ratio.

We would be all rough edges if we could be â&#x20AC;&#x201D; we cannot be whole, so we must try to be raw and be hollowed â&#x20AC;&#x201D; it is our volume, dark center, which has always been problematic. If all surface, impossible to hide, if we could see every inch of each other inside and out, if we could make edges and surfaces from all the intangible stuff that forms from firing synapses and buried knots, perhaps. If we could see the entire world in a map, make what is too small larger and what is too large smaller, lay the metaphor of a year or a lifetime over geologic time without crumpling, if:

47

Fuck Everyone But Us [Sarah Ciston] We are not sure. We probably never will be sure. We never were sure, it was just a feeling that snuck up on us, it was the signifier we attached to any signified — this is just a theory we are working on, but one can never be too sure. What would sure look like? We are equally compelled by the concept and sure it does not exist. “You just know.”

We wonder if we might always get pulled in all directions like we do now. Sometimes we feel too much like Pangaea, still cracking its bones apart to want in all directions, still drifting across the water to split the ocean into its three or several parts when water really just wants to run together, every secret wants to know about every other, every love about the next, in case it is more, when really it is all the same everything, not in a generic way but in a transcendent way, and so of course we are sure — but it will take us years to realize, and by then we will be aching for new oceans to form between our reaching fingers.

We are not sure, and yet we expect to be, as though we could know the future before it happens. We expect to be able to tell how you will go about unmaking us.

We are not sure, or perhaps we are sure, that this is what sure is and what it turns into; and perhaps that is how we know something is working, when it falls apart and takes us with it. That is how we just know.

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Fuck Everyone But Us [Sarah Ciston] We hear this is what happens. We hear people sink into one another until they cannot imagine what it would take to escape their gravity, and yet. We have seen once or twice, through a misplaced word, how easy it would be to let something spark off and cool too quickly, not war or fireworks, just a few days of silence, and then.

We have seen how tenuously the ground is balanced on the edge of the sea, how the Department of the Interior can try to hold it back with mesh and reinforcements against fate, its suicidal desire to rejoin what will destroy it, picking up debris and us with it to spill into its own chilly womb.

We have seen how tenuously the earth clings to its orbit, what scraps of planet keep other scraps of planet from floating off into the sky.

We have seen what conversations we are not having, the ones that keep this thing teetering instead of falling into the sea, sucking the ground from beneath our feet.

We have heard these conversations already, the ones about past and future, stories with pronouns omitted, futures with faces left off, gray manuscripts left unilluminated. These are the unsewn edges, frayed and waiting for us to tug at their strings, to unravel everything.

When we have these conversations, when they sneak up on us in the worst possible moments to deconstruct whatever bliss we have temporarily uncovered, dismantling the assumptions we fought so hard not to make in the first place, we will finally begin to see where something new that we could never have imagined being like that something old may be the same thing after all, that all of everything is just a matter of what we say, how we choose to replay these same scenarios in the next version of the loop. Letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s have these conversations now, forget that they can demolish our little buildings with strategically triggered explosives â&#x20AC;&#x201D; better to destroy something merely verging on existence, better to know if, in fire, we will melt or harden.

We wonder if we are just trying to prove that everything breaks, that everything was already broken in us, flawed, unmendable.

We wonder if it is only because we are trying to prove that everything breaks that we make this broken statement true, manifesting our own entropic vision, our own breakdown and the crumbling around us.

We are not to be mended. This cannot be amended. The versions of this in which everything works out seem too impossible and empty, in spite of being too full and beautiful, but.

We are slowly beginning to uncover secret places where possibility is possible, where the earth confirms its promise to us and, for a time, lets us stand our ground. We are having 49

more nights like this; the nights begin to bleed into days we stay awake through the entirety of the sky’s dark rotations, awake and tingling in a place where conversations feel more real.

Though we Reject the notion of Real or Authentic (there’s that word, capital letters again), we have yet to find other words that better describe the difference between these nights and the once-and-usual world we previously inhabited and will probably, soon, inhabit again.

We hear this is what happens.

We hear the earth will soon sink back into the sea. And so we visit wild places and marvel at how the world could crumble beneath our feet, how it is already crumbling.

These places remind us that our homes are crumbling, perched on impossible land — the cliffside highway no different from the fault line, the landfill we have built cities upon — we are just clinging, to each other, building clinging to building, hammered nails digging in and seams popping from the strain of a question, how to stand on our tiny islands, and yet.

We are mesh upon the surface of nothing, holding back the continent from the sea.

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Fuck Everyone But Us [Sarah Ciston] We memorize each other this way: constellations in the freckles of new skin, markers for navigation, strategies for familiarizing travel.

We are cartographers, made from unfolding maps. Constellations follow us.

We build predictions on the positions they tick through. The night sky dips against the land. Our hands traverse its distances, between swirling points, approaching and expanding space.

We are in need of pocket reference. What waits to be read off your skin, what myths of yours will toss themselves into expanding heavens? These are just dots — dot matrix printer crunching its way through paper down your back. These are just dots — halftone ink droplets on newsprint, cyan, magenta, back far enough to let specifics blur. These are just dots — punctuation, pinned to map paper, perforating oceans and running small cities clean through with specimen needles. How else but through dissection can we discuss the cells that divide in us, what divides us? All continents shift.

We are tagged and archived. Geography makes words for these formations, and so we find geography against each other.

We make claims on surfaces with lines and letters until we think we know our own compass direction. Still, tectonic plates and days move beneath; blood pumps hot magma under our thickening crusts. Words are anchors that do not hold, scraping shifting ocean floor.

We begin to count on skin like we begin to count on land to stay put.

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Fuck Everyone But Us [Sarah Ciston] We read too many articles about the cosmos. Then we find ourselves interchangeable, for all our separate tics and idiosyncrasies. We get baffled by our own responsibility to this insignificance, our fractured fractaling. We are not snowflakes. Or if we are snowflakes, it is only our cumulative effect that makes a difference. How do we begin to cover the land?

We may be unique but are still only white spots tugged down by gravity to melt against the ground in a suspended instant of uncapturable, unendurable magic.

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Fuck Everyone But Us [Sarah Ciston] We still like each other. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m as surprised as you are, surprise hidden too well, shoulders shrugged as though everything were nothing, and is â&#x20AC;&#x201D; because all we can say about the universe is nothing, is that it is, is that it is big. All we can say about each other is announced to the wilderness: Ground grows beneath my feet, so I must learn to expect hope (beneath feet, before ground, vulnerability). We have been trained to ignore the ground, both what is solid about it and what shakes. These tricks keep the inevitability of heart attacks and buses crushing us from crushing us, keep curveballs from curving every permutation into useless calculus. But let us find the lines that curve toward us and let our feet be surprised at finding the ground. Let our necks crane our shoulders unshrugged so that the sky can fill the hollow between with a kind of awe that undoes molecules. We will all be hit by buses (no matter the inbound or outbound line); there is no purpose in prediction. But for a time, until then, we have still, and we still like each other, and other such surprises, the ground beneath our feet.

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Please Reconsider Beauty [Tye Pemberton] From the Desk of Tye Pemberton September 20, 2009 Brooklyn, NY 11231 Dear Everyone, Please reconsider beauty. In January The Believer ran a transcript called “The Sentence is a Lonely Place.” It is possible you saw it. Gary Lutz said the things that The Believer later typeset for the wider set, or more accurately, Gary Lutz wrote the things then spoke the things in public, and they took them down to paper again. I suppose it is possible that he just emailed these thoughts over to the home office when he was done appearing along-side them. I am a fan of Gary Lutz and was in a position to go to this convergence of the man and a collection of his sentences, and did not. Or, more accurately, I am a fan of the stories with which Gary Lutz shares a byline, but suspicious of what people do in public. It is, perhaps for me, a childhood hang-up. Superman and Clark Kent shouldn’t presence the same room. Or, more accurately, Superman shouldn’t put glasses on in public.

Many local writers of the sentence-filled room disagreed with me when I explained my absence later, said Superman looks great in glasses. Clark who?

I am happier with the sentences now that they’ve roosted back to the page. But Gary Lutz should never have double-billed with them. He brought them to Columbia University and mustn’t have seemed like more than their salesman, unpacking them from his suitcase: this one does this. Lifetime warranty. If quality is what you want, these are the sentences for you.

They were all very good sentences, and not just his own. I am also a fan of a great many of the other products he carried: Christine Schutt, Diane Williams, Don DeLillo, Ben Marcus, Barry Hannah, Sam Lipsyte. If you liked these products, contact Gordon Lish at the home office for a full catalogue. Irregularities are proof to you that each sentence has been hand-made by the honest, hard-working person of a marginalized culture.

The Believer is a magazine about the joy of reading. “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” belongs there, because it is a lecture about the appreciation of the beauty of language. In the smaller room, it was a lecture about the craft of writing, because the people in the room are told annually that the room and the building and the people who are inside are for writing.

And so when Gary Lutz said his beautiful sentences to the room, he made a lecture about how to write beauty. Or, more accurately, he made a demonstration about what written beauty 54

should be. By pretending his page was a stage, Gary Lutz was forced into an ancient, false advertising: one size fits all.

Gary Lutz’s sentences are a thing and when I read them I experience beauty. Reading Gary’s sentences is an experience. Sentences are things. Many readers do not find Gary Lutz’s sentences beautiful. Beauty is an experience.

OK, so fine. Or, more accurately, I resign myself to thinking Gary Lutz and the local writers in the sentence-filled room are a demonstration of the experience of beauty.

The local writers of the sentence-filled room are all about beauty. I am, too. I am in writing for the beauty. The local writers of the sentence-filled room go about their beauty and I go about mine and somewhere, now, Gary Lutz goes about his. Perhaps that is the best we can do.

But I wake up untimely or can’t sleep. I am bothered by sentences. There are so many possibilities for sentences. They are all potential experiences. I have read the sentences of Gary Lutz’s lecture and they just stand beside candidates of my own, which are waiting to be writing. The Lutz sentences will not take charge of my own, won’t call any of them to arrangement or service. They are just approximate things to each other.

Perhaps the local writers of the sentence-filled room who missed me don’t stand wakeful above the same disorder.

Sincerely yours, Tye Pemberton

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An Assertion That My Decision to Be Neither For Nor Against Beauty Is Not an Admission of Neutrality [Tye Pemberton] I. Introduction: Intermission Thanks in large part to Gordon Lish, we are enjoying a renaissance of language-driven fiction, a fiction that derives its thrust and interest on the sonic level in particular: the way words orgy around each other, making authority for the writer by their incest; the odd, naked morpheme standing in the midst, all elbows — surprising to the reader and unmouthed by the rest. There are a great many people who have found relief in the appearance of this fiction; these stories have offered a long-needed respite from the heartbreakingly carnal goings of an ardently communicative realism, a realism whose priorities have always seemed to be understanding first, and beauty second. But the approach Gary Lutz has put forth in “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” and the mode by which many other students of Gordon Lish operate: via fixation on the sonic, has made me curious about the implications of this opposite extreme.

To an extent the extremity is necessary. Our reading faces have been forced everywhere else: to story structure, to pop psychology after pop psychology, to history and a vague, biblical sense of symbols. And now the moment has arrived when, like other arts well before this, writers are taking the liberty to pursue the essential matter of their craft. Lish and company seem determined to talk themselves into a Fiction that will be cobbled-up of phonemes first and morphemes only subsequent, a literature of sounds more than words. If Hemingway is to Cézanne as Austen is to Rembrandt, then Lishians are to Robert Coover what Jackson Pollock is to Picasso; the latter pairing may have abstracted and exposed the underpinnings of representational art, but the other is in the process of disassembling it altogether.

But what happens when representation is stripped away? Two things, possibly: 1) the art becomes essential in itself. For painting, this means a unmediated appreciation of color, texture, dimensionality, line and contrast; for literature, something akin to how Lutz describes the significance of the letters l and k in a sentence from Christine Schutt’s story, “Young”: “flirtation between two letters and their eventual matrimony.”

2) The action of the art, rather than the subject it might have represented, becomes its meaning. A Pollock canvas is frenetic, atomic; it is unintelligible in the strictest sense. It lays claim to nothing and no one but itself; interaction between the canvas and the viewer is consensual; the viewer will not apprehend the painting unless she willingly applies her attention towards it. It is Democracy in these respects: rebellious; individual and thus interpretive; personal and impersonal, simultaneously; impartial and balanced; Godless; created but unauthored.

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What would a step like this mean for literature?

Lewis Carroll may have already answered this question many times over with Jabberwocky; he had, more than any author at easy recall, a love of seeming sense, the utterance of the unimaginable, rejoicing in the power of nonsense to feel like meaning — which is, of course, the most terrifying commentary of the human condition possible. When one considers the Lishian school in light of this strange ghetto of Victorian literature it becomes clear that nonsense (and thus, pure sensation) is not its intention. Communication is still a part of its pursuit. It is simply that communication and reader’s ease have been subjugated to the author’s linguistic and sonic predilections.

This can have a value, insomuch as stories by the late-date Lishians — Lutz’s in particular — communicate an inimitable sense of isolation and alienation. In the Lishian mode, language is a barrier, not a bridge.

The problem with this method is of course that it verges towards oblivion. When one falls in love with and then reads a great deal of these authors, the stories within one writer’s oeuvre may all begin to dispense the same sensation. At even greater length, writers from the same school may sabotage the reader’s appetite for their classmates.

This type of fatigue is, I suppose, simply the way of novelty; the old way ceases to yield sensation, a new mode arises, we wear it out, the search for a new way begins. The two problems with the Lishian mode, however, are: 1) it is not terribly versatile and, 2) with what remains. I find myself wondering if the Lishian mode produces work that is ultimately doomed to be disposable (at one time I considered writing a separate essay entitled, “On the Half-Life of the Stories of Raymond Carver”), and then I find myself wondering why we should even care.

II. On the Experience of Beauty Like flowers, Lishian sentences contain the possibility that someone may find them beautiful, and I find myself wondering if their ability to impart this experience is meaning enough.

Is beauty so rare, its experience so critical, that those who pursue its manufacture should be revered? Or, at the very least, that its manufacture should be the topic of institutionalized study?

Elaine Scarry, Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics at Harvard University, believes so. In her book, On Beauty and Being Just, she posits that the value of beauty is that it “seems to place requirements on us for attending to the aliveness or (in the case of objects) quasialiveness of our world, and for entering into its protection.”1 The problem with beauty is that it is not a fixed sign. It is subjective,2 and while this may not be problematic for an individual reader enjoying the subjective beauty of a work of art in her own subjective way, it is the problem of any writer who hopes to make the acquaintance 57

— through beauty — of strangers.

“I am writing for myself and for strangers,” Gertrude Stein wrote.

The question, then, is whether it is realistic to imagine we can intentionally create beauty for others with any likelihood of success. I am afraid the answer is no. What we talk about when we talk about beauty is its experience; what we mean when we attribute beauty to an object or a person is something that does not exist. It is not inherent to the thing that brings us rapture. It is in ourselves.

Most people I asked to describe the experience of beauty used the word “comfort,” as in, “I am comforted in the presence of beauty.” A friend of mine replied that beauty was revelatory of certain “universal, biological preferences for symmetry as an indicator of human health” and, analogously, rightness in the natural world or works of art. Still others found the language we use to discuss beauty so difficult and nonspecific that they refused to describe a single feeling; instead, they insisted on describing several, depending on the beautiful entity: a tree, a work of art, a lover. My own wife told me that beauty makes her feel “lonely.”

This inquiry leads me to believe that beauty starts with the viewer, the reader. When we assign beauty to something in the world, we are expressing a value for something we already recognize to be true, but whose truth we can only assert for ourselves. And if I am at all correct, then the success of the Lishian mode — and perhaps all stylistic pursuit — is perhaps arbitrary.

Which means that the sense we leave behind, and not the style, is the only chance our writing has of translating across the boundaries between us and the reader.

“Translation,” Jorge Luis Borges wrote, “seems destined to illustrate aesthetic debate.”

I have no issue with the Lishians as practitioners of their art. For my own part, I find them beautiful and thus, valuable, and more so I find the subconscious undercurrent that runs beneath many of their stories to have a clear sense and a poignancy. My fear is that in teaching younger generations like myself to value style over content, we might be swayed.

And if swayed, the future of our literature might bleach clear of that sense, those attempts at communicative poignancy. And while we may have as much chance at beauty — and thus value — as does a flower, part of the world’s necessity for us may be forgotten. Perhaps, given the power of amnesia, irretrievably.

Value nothing above all else.

1 On Beauty and Being Just. Elaine Scarry. Princeton University Press, 1999. ( p.90.)

2 To those who disagree: our very disagreement proves the point, I’m afraid.

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Sarah Ciston <SarahCiston@yahoo.com> Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 2:02 AM To: Chris Pedler <ChrisPedler@gmail.com> [...] but tonight left me wondering will we ever really be able to connect to each other or anyone else, how we so manage to talk at each other rather than with each other and why whatever deep vein of intimacy we do have or can find is still tempered by so much in which we are ultimately alone in our thoughts to an incredible, painful degree. I suppose it didn’t help that she was more drunk than I think she will realize even tomorrow. Still, it is a hollowing feeling. But for what it’s worth parts of that conversation seem to harken back to these email exchanges of ours which I enjoy so much so I thought why not put it here, as rough and tumble as the thoughts still seem. Perhaps because I remain convinced these connections are still possible, that 9 times out of 10 when we do unpack our baggage for each other (how rarely we are able to get even that far is another story) we find the same types of things in our little unbearable suitcases, even though tonight seemed to be more about dumping them out on people’s heads. I still hover on this existential third rail of yours (love that term) between knowing people connect and help each other and then also knowing how painful and complicated that all is and do individuals ever “solve” any of it? In our transcendent 5 am conversations and in rare other instances I feel like we do, that the mere acknowledgement of the unsolvable but striving is enough, not in a bare minimum way, but in an everything way. But, right now, I feel like, how do I even talk to my friend tomorrow? How to keep from crawling into a cave somewhere, maybe go hang out with some bears?[...]

Sarah Ciston <sarahciston@yahoo.com> Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 11:49 PM To: Chris Pedler <chrispedler@gmail.com> attached are last Saturday’s shenanigans. i meant to send these photos to you a week ago. somehow the flu happened. oops! i’ll be curious to see we had photm thursday as well. bottom line, there ought to be more document. which brings up whole conversations — document-as-artifact, document-as-substitute, document’s-(in)ability-to-document — that we can have later, or just imagine we’ve already had. and documented.

Sarah Ciston <ciston@gmail.com> Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 12:42 PM To: Chris Pedler <chrispedler@gmail.com> The SparkNotes piece is funny. you definitely catch the obnoxious tone of those things, simultaneously academic and, um, retarded, if that’s possible. ...that sounded bad but I meant it as a compliment. I can see a whole series of these. Just how grandiose can our statements about humankind through critical analysis get? Just how much can we make it all-about-us? It’s fascinating.

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Sarah Ciston <ciston@gmail.com> to: Chris Pedler <chrispedler@gmail.com> Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 3:12 PM [...] everything else seems small compared to big sur. we are now giants trying to handle tiny breakable lives. small lives need big plans and small. east and everything Sarah Ciston <ciston@gmail.com> Sat, Nov 29, 2008 at 12:52 AM To: Chris Pedler <chrispedler@gmail.com> [...] don’t life and novel overlap enough to make dual purpose writing downright utilitarian? i’m at 48,000. now that is epic. what else did we do with our lives before nanowrimo? what will we even do together when we hang out? can you imagine big sur without novels? the coffee shop up the street without novels? your house in the middle of the night without novels? we will have to begin new projects to fill the gap, to make use of these novels we’ve uncovered — projects like reading 2666 and going to see will sheff as much as possible, projects like getting the word out about all these words we just got out. i was glad we were able to talk about that earlier today. it might just be the most important thing to talk about. it is too easy to forget how engaging and inspiring it can be to participate in something. whole story is what i keep coming back to for the memory of that feeling, but even that, as recent as it was, is already forgotten in the junk of all this bigger picture stuff i keep using to pretend that sharing work and connecting with people over one’s work is impossible for me. i don’t want to get to the sour grapes point where i convince myself i don’t really want to share or connect, where i disconnect from the pleasure in the process of it, too. i doubt that either of us is in any danger there, but i think it is important to keep handy the people and things that remind us. this seems short for an epic, you’ll have to forgive me for that as well. instead of writing novels or emails i ended up skimming novels for fodder for emails and vice versa. i find myself just 2000 words shy of done and wanting to drag it out, like each word matters too much now, because everything i have to say about everything has to be said in just the few words left. we cannot think this way! this is also why we need many projects and why we need to put them out now (now!); each part cannot seem like everything or else we’ll accomplish nothing. but it all seems too fragile now to share more excerpts, though i know you complained i don’t send you enough writing (thank you for your complaint!). so i’ll keep the email short and not too brilliant so that you won’t delay in writing back. be in touch with what you think about ...everything. plus all the usual catch up stuff. tell me about this east coast i keep hearing exists somewhere! is it anything like the east bay? i hear the east bay is lovely this time of always.

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Baby, It’s About Damn Time [Gina Caciolo] Running out of time, time management, time to do the dishes, time for dinner, is it time yet?

When I was little I used to think, “What if I decided I work on a 25-hour-a-day schedule?” Then I could stay up to watch South Park in the arms of my mom instead of laying tummy down against the door, my ear suction-cupped to the half-inch gap between bedroom and hallway, hoping to hear Cartman say “fat ass” and chuckles from my mom and step-dad.

But then Sunday mornings would fall and my mom would say, “It’s time to go to church.

We’re going to be late!”

My white-patent pitter-patters would slip down carpeted stairs and I’d say, “But mom, we’re going to be early!”

Her pale, large-pored face reddened as she slid “conservative” three-inch heels on and yelled, “You’re not funny,” thin, aggressive blond hair flipped behind unwelcome ears. “Now scoot!”

I was “Sugar Bear” when I did things right, but not in instances such as this.

Now, I find ways to bend and imagine time. Acid is one of them. Festivals are another.

Combining them results in the ultimate development of my search for making time a fuzzyto-the-touch experience. Time is no longer minutes and seconds and hours. Life outside the festival doesn’t exist. For the 12 hours I’m tripping, I don’t have parents, two brothers, a sister, a car, a job or a room in my dad’s apartment. I have a tent, LSD, some friends, beer, a relationship, pot, a grill and someone probably brought glow sticks.

Point in time, nap time, bath time, time to wake up, time to shine, face-time, I don’t know when the last time I saw you was…

At one time, in pure elementary school days, I would question why a calendar has to be 365 days and, more so, why everyone just went along with it. My mother had a rule when it came to time as well, but it had nothing to do with minutes and seconds. It was: First you do the things you have to do, then you do the things you want to do. This rule never sat well with me. Why did my time have to be spent in this particular order? What if I wanted to do what I wanted to do now and then I’ll get work done. I remember yelling multiple threats of “I’ll never ever say that to my kids” and then purposely following the opposite in college. It was absolutely immature, but it had more to do with the fact that I couldn’t understand how time had to be placed in such a specific manner.

My father lives by time. You are on time if you are 10 minutes early and you are late if you are on time. Once I started taking sides in the constant fight that is divorced parents, I followed my father’s rule to strict orders and made it my own. This fell away once I learned 61

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I was unhappy a lot. This began my descent into the way I am now.

Time sheet, period of time, egg timer, time zone, that time of the month, “this isn’t the right time…”

On sunny, dry days my boyfriend and I hike in the woods. We pack a couple of joints, a few bottles of water, salty cashews and almonds and blueberries, and get lost in a blur of wrestled branches and wide unassuming skies. I turn off my cell phone and leave it in his car. After trekking over fallen trees, through windy uphill paths, we burn one of the jays and then get lost for three hours. It never feels like three hours. I have trouble deciphering the length of hours without a digitized clock telling me.

Now a moment of irony: I make eco-album art clocks. The “functionality” of the clock aspect is something others have to continually explain to me. The hands don’t serve as forms of minutes and seconds. It’s why I stray from placing “markers” of hours unless I truly feel the image being repeated best represents something pertaining to the message or idea of the clock. Those hands function as movement and capture a way of sectioning off certain pictures and sections of pictures at different random… (ugh) times. As the minute and hours roll by the pictures come into focus.

Summer time, “time in a bottle,” space-time continuum, free time, just in time, prep time, lost time, “There’s a first time for everything…”

Every time I look at a clock I feel trapped in a snow globe. The seconds rolling by become flakes of false snow swirling and inevitably falling back down. Always calculated, always constrained and mercilessly mandated. (This may not be your view of snow globes, but being forced to collect them from a young age gave me a perverse view.) I’ve gotten used to the fact that time will refuse to be anything but an unnatural imaginary number system in my mind and that those ideas sound crazy to anyone I speak to.

I can’t help but think of how time gives way to everything. When your ass hits a toilet seat and pushes out feces while impatient hands mindlessly flip through a crinkled porno magazine, there’s been an average amount of minutes and seconds that your flesh has rested flat against the porcelain ring. After you answer your telephone and place the pinprick-holed speaker up to your ear, your conversation will inevitably end and commence again, allowing earwax to seep into its mechanical parts, and then be averaged into moments of your day. When you massage the greasy cheap shampoo you buy at the local pharmacy into your scalp, rinse, then repeat under scalding hot water, it could be calculated into numerical units. Here’s the thing that bothers me — it’s each movement, action, speech, all the moments and micro-moments of your day. Time will always be a factor. Whether the boss wants your crappy proposal by the end of the month or you’re taking a nap, there is no escaping time. The majority of society is going to press time upon you, and squeeze the air out a little more.

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Body of Empathy [Annie Pentilla] You are a horrible anorexic with your crown of thorns for this you’ve given your body for lashes, lashes

lashes, lashes —

sweet marks of my adoration.

O my object of contemplation, each wound makes a point of entry on your exquisite corpse.

Daily I contemplate your mouth and eye, push back the rosary beads — walk among your ribs like a ship yard.

How I go around town wearing stigmatas.

Each broken bone in my wrist, its torn ligaments muscles pulled back like the opening of a field of roses, makes a moment of my inquiry — the investigation wild, bright eyed.

Passion, compassion — our surfaces are interrelating one pelvis merging into a thigh, one spirit overtaken by possession the world dissolving into sameness into his one image (his) into his one body (his) into the self that sings, and is thus comprehending.

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Instructions for Taking Up Arms [Situationist International] If it seems absurd to talk of revolution, this is because organized revolutionary movements have long since disappeared from the modern countries where the possibilities of a decisive social transformation are concentrated. But everything else is even more absurd, since it is limited to what exists and to the various ways of putting up with it. If the word “revolutionary” has been debased to the point of being used in advertisements to describe the slightest piddling alteration in some ever-changing commodity, this is only because the possibility of a real, desirable change of the whole of one’s experience is no longer being expressed anywhere.

Today the revolutionary project stands accused by the tribunal of history — accused of having failed, of having engendered a new alienation. But all this means is that capitalism has been able to defend itself, on all levels of reality, much better than revolutionaries expected.

Not that it has become more tolerable. Revolution simply has to be reinvented.

This poses a number of problems that will have to be overcome, theoretically and practically, in the next few years. A few particularly important points can be mentioned here.

Out of all the new groupings appearing on the far left wing of the European workers’ movement, only the most radical are worth preserving: those whose program is based on workers’ councils. Nor should we underestimate the number of confusionists and other trendies starting to ponce about in this debate.

The most difficult problem before groups trying to create a new type of revolutionary organization is that of creating new, human relationships within the organization itself. The forces of the society exert an omnipresent pressure against such an effort. But unless this is accomplished, by methods yet to be tried, we will never be able to escape from specialized politics. The demand for participation on the part of everyone often degenerates into a mere abstract ideal, when in fact it is an absolute practical necessity for a really new organization and for the organization of a really new society. Even if militants are no longer mere underlings carrying out the decisions made by masters of the organization, they still risk being reduced to the role of spectators of those among them who are the most qualified in politics conceived as a specialization; and in this way the passivity relation of the old world is reproduced.

People’s creativity and participation can only be awakened by a collective project explicitly concerned with all aspects of lived experience. The only way to “arouse the masses” is to expose the atrocious contrast between what life today could be and what it actually is.

Without a critique of everyday life, a revolutionary organization becomes a separated milieu, as conventional and ultimately as passive as those holiday camps that are the specialized terrain of modern leisure. Sociologist Henri Raymond, in his study of Palinuro, points out 65

how, in such places, the mechanism of the spectacle recreates, in the form of play, the normal relationships prevailing in the outside world. But then he goes on to praise the “numerous human contacts” which are fostered by such holiday foci, without seeing that a merely quantitative increase in the number of people one meets leaves meetings just as insipid and inauthentic as they were before. Even in the most antihierarchical group, communication between people is in no way guaranteed by a shared political program. Sociologists naturally support attempts to reform everyday life, to organize compensation for it in leisure time. But the revolutionary project cannot accept the traditional notion of play, of a game limited in space, in time and in qualitative depth. The revolutionary game — the creation of life itself — is opposed to all memories of past games. To provide a three-week break from a year of work, the Club Mediterranée and its holiday villages draw on a shoddy Polynesian ideology (a bit like the French Revolution’s presentation of itself in the guise of republican Rome, or like today’s revolutionaries defining themselves by the Bolshevik or some other militant role.

The revolution of everyday life cannot find its poetry in the past, but only in the future.

Marxist emphasis on the extension of leisure time has, quite legitimately, been criticized in the light of the empty leisure produced by modern capitalism. It is clear that, if time is ever to become really free, then first and foremost it is work that must be transformed. Its conditions and its purpose must become quite different from those of the forced labor which has prevailed until now (see the French journal Socialisme ou Barbarie, the English Solidarity, the Belgian Alternative).

But those who put all the stress on the necessity of changing work itself, of rationalizing it and of making people interested in it, who neglect the idea of the free content of life (that is, of developing materially equipped creative power quite apart from the traditional “work day” and apart from the time allotted to rest and recreation) run the risk of providing an ideology to cover up for the rationalization of present production methods in the name of higher efficiency and profitability, without raising the question of the experience spent in this production or the necessity of this kind of life. This must be challenged at the most elementary level. The free construction of the whole space-time of individual life is a demand that will have to be defended against all sorts of dreams of rationalization in the minds of aspiring managers of social reorganization.

The different phases of our own activity up till now can only be understood in terms of the reappearance of revolution. This revolution will be social as well as cultural, and right from the start its field of action will have to be far wider than was ever envisaged before.

The SI does not want to recruit disciples, but to bring together people capable of applying themselves to this task in the years to come, by every means and without worrying about labels. This means, furthermore, that we must reject not only the vestiges of specialized artistic activity, but also those of specialized politics, particularly the post-Christian masoch66

ism characteristic of so many intellectuals in this field.

We do not claim to be developing a new revolutionary program all by ourselves. We say that this program being formed will one day become a practical threat to contemporary reality, and that we will participate in this opposition when it comes. Whatever may become of us individually, the new revolutionary movement will not be formed without taking into account what we have sought together, which could be summed up as the supersession of the old theory of permanent but limited revolution by a theory of permanent and universal revolution.

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“Keep This Name For When I’m Famus” A High School Yearbook Manifesto, Everything You Need to Know to Have a Bitchin’ Summer (Solid Advice Compiled from Four High School Yearbooks) [Tavia Stewart] [Creative Producer: Tupelo Hassman] Lay off the sugar.

Stay Sweet.

Don’t fall down any more stairs.

What can I say?

Be good [?]

Stay warm [?]

Stay cool [?]

I can say Pennywise rules.

Please don’t forget me.

Please don’t reject me.

I want to watch your cat grow up.

Stay wacko.

Stay away from poison ivy.

Stay away from snakes that kill, Poisoned things, Cakes that say EAT ME. Don’t be a stranger.

Don’t become a housewife Or an unwed mother.

Your mom should date more black guys.

Always remember.

Call me whenever you feel like having a good time.

Don’t drink too much Jolt.

Don’t drink too much.

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Remember the pill.

Someday we’ll sit on a log And sing hippy songs together.

Don’t go skinny dipping in any pools While intoxicated [In the mean time].

Don’t get lost.

Don’t smoke so much.

Don’t drink coffee (J/K!).

Don’t go crazy While you’re in Mexico.

Keep praying for your dad.

Don’t ever walk away from the Lord.

Always remember my flying pterodactyls.

Live well, and forever think about your thoughts.

Remember to lock the door.

Have a kinkie summer.

Have a bitchin’ summer.

Have a bodacious summer.

Have a great life if I don’t see you This summer.

Keep this name for when I’m famus.

Hate, Jenny P.S. — Don’t get pregnant. *misspellings are accurate.

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Dear City of Berkeley, My mother always said, if you want to be taken seriously, take yourself seriously. I know, Berkeley, you take yourself very seriously, but you’d never guess it by the way you look.

Berkeley, you have so much going for you. You are a beautiful, successful and vibrant city. You are home to some of the most intellectually advanced minds and the most politically advanced perspectives. You are creative and strong-willed. You are rooted in radical thought that helped to progress the entire nation. I understand that these same free-thinking roots were what once gave way to your avant-garde clothing. Back in they heyday, tie-dye and hemp were edgy and forward. You dismissed high heels and ties because that’s what they wore, those mainstream sheep, and you were not them.

But, Berkeley, it’s 2009. Consider this your intervention, because it is time for you to take a long look in the mirror. Notice anything strange?

Female Berkeleyites: You are wearing socks with your Birkenstocks, to start with. And above those socks you are wearing a long, neon-yellow peasant skirt, the kind that could house an entire family underneath it, but really, who would want to live there? The buttons on your polyester-rayon blend, saggy floral shirt don’t match up. Your hair extends to your waist and apparently you burned your brush along with your bra back in 1971.

Males: A pair of elastic-waist jeans hold in a protruding belly covered by a faded KFOG, 98.3 FM shirt. You wear a wide-brim hat with a chin strap that is really only meant to be worn when spelunking in a dark cave where nobody can see you. You match this hat with hiking boots, but guess what, asphalt really doesn’t require such enthusiastic treading.

You wear sweatpants that are too short, giveaway t-shirts that are far too big. You wear tiny backpacks that went in and out with a flash during the 1990s, for good reason — or even worse, you wear their nightmarish predecessor, the fanny pack, which is the equivalent of strapping on an extra-bloated belly.

Every once in a while, you will wear a brand new outfit, on which you will have spent a great deal of money at a store on Fourth Street or Shattuck Avenue. The price tag might be misleading however. Although well-made, your coffee-colored skirt is block-shaped instead of A-line. Your khaki-colored pants are reversible and waterproof. Your jacket has more zippered pockets than a Jansport backpack. Your beige sweater has no darting, structure or embellishments. Frankly, you just spent a small fortune on clothes one should only go camping in.

Also, Berkeley, you have let your shape go. Somewhere among those high-minded, idealistic decades you adopted a gender-free round lump of a figure (is this some unintended side-effect of the equality wars?). I know it’s hard to hear, and insensitive for me to point out, but really, I am only writing this out of complete love and concern. Put on those bras 70

— they really do have a purpose — and build some muscle around your sloping spine. You offer plenty of healthful food options here, and lots of pleasant hiking trails too, where you can really use those boots. I believe you can look fit, and feel better because of it too.

I would feel bad for telling you this, but I’m pretty sure you relish your rebellion against what you see as the commodification of personal style, the perpetuation of gender norms, or, more simply, just conforming to the man. It’s obvious that you garnish your sloppy, frumpy outfits with a giant chip on your shoulder, in the form of a superior smirk. If a bumper sticker existed that said, “I haven’t bought a new piece of clothing since 1986 and I’m proud,” lord knows one would be front and center on your Volvo’s backside.

Well, guess what Berkeley, there is nothing to be proud of here. While you allow yourself to be swallowed by rectangle-shaped muumuus and your baggy college sweatshirts, you are outdating yourself into oblivion. Sure, you still get notoriety for some of your political activism. Like that stunt you pulled last year, when you refused to allow military recruiting on your streets — Fun! But, honestly, how effective do you think you are being when you look like a relic of a stereotype? The truth is that you and I have had a long, romantic relationship.

You are my old stomping grounds. I went to Berkeley High. And I am happy I had that childhood — it was a blast, and I was free of those social norms that inhibit children in so many other cities. I didn’t feel pressured to dye my hair blonde or tan my legs to skin-cancer brown or starve myself or make up myself. It was a terrific time — freer than I have ever been, and my friends and I took full advantage of the creative lifestyle you allowed us to lead. We wore long hippy dresses over baggy jeans. We matched dirty black hoodies with dirty blue beanies. We wrote slogans on our shoes, covered our backpacks in patches and studded our belts with metal spikes. We were proud of our independence, our creativity and our overall filthiness.

However, Berkeley, I have since grown up. I have realized that nobody really listens to you when you look like somebody who hasn’t read the news in ten years. In fact, I have realized that wearing your politics on your sleeve, which I say literally — I have seen your tattoos and buttons — is the fastest way to turn people off. I have since observed that the more disengaged, removed and ill-kempt you appear, the more invisible you become.

I see other cities — New York and Los Angeles of course, but also Portland and Austin, even your next door neighbor, Oakland — slowly stealing away your younger generation.

Your sons and daughters are leaving, Berkeley, and your Cal students aren’t sticking around.

When all your stores only sell over-priced smocks or yuppie kitchenware, what do you expect? The only twenty-somethings who seem to hang with you are the ones made in your dumpy image — but really, don’t you wish better for them? Many of your children want to come home, but you’re making that an embarrassing decision.

So, Berkeley, I advise you — no I implore you — tear off those sweatpants and peasant 71

skirts, chop off that long grey hair (especially if it is framing a large bald spot at the top of your head). Toss those clogs and REI fleece jackets that have pilled themselves beyond repair into the same flames that once took your braziers and draft cards.

In my wildest dreams, I envision recruiting the team from What Not to Wear (it’s a show on cable — I know you don’t watch it) to drag you off the street, Berkeley, throw the entire contents of your collective closet into the trash, and send you into the chic boutiques with a newfound respect for your appearance and renewed desire to present yourself as an up-todate and participating member of society. You will emerge in fitted jeans, knee-length skirts, contoured blouses and handsome blazers. Keep your color; show off your independent designers and hand-made exotic jewelry. I want you to walk a fine line where you discourage conformity and encourage individuality, but also take pride in looking hip, modern and withit. I would never tell you to change your politics, but instead I suggest you present them in a way that makes people actually want to look at you, and just maybe, to live with you.

Next, we can start talking about your personality. Really: Café Gratitude?

Sincerely, Kathleen Nye Flynn

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no fight club reference but Chris Pedler <chrispedler@gmail.com> Fri, Dec 26, 2008 at 9:46 AM To: Sarah Ciston <ciston@gmail.com> This email will likely be of varying coherence. I was reading the book and it got me thinking (because this is something it is partly about, though I’ll keep it vague w/r/t plot details, etc.) about reading and writing and why we do either. This also came up in the (second, better) review slash general discussion of his work that I read, which I’ve over the past day been trying not to remember, but in any event I’ve been beginning to have some thoughts so I figured I’d share them such as they are.

This second review said something to the effect that Bolano believes (and I quote loosely from memory) “literature is too desperate an enterprise to bother with being well-written.”

Leaving aside the fact that this guy seems to have a funny idea about what “well-written” means, he’s getting at something important that I’ve personally forgotten or that’s been pushed aside in favor, first, of a weird personal obsession (ask about that later) and second the complex influence of the MFA program, the effect of which is not 100 percent good. The thing that’s pushed aside (and it’s possible we’ve talked about this in slightly different, specifically ‘literature can save you’ context) is one of the reasons we or everyone or at least me got into this business in the first place, which was to say something original, something I profoundly had to say in multiple senses, because I found the forms, methods, contexts in which language was used to be derivative and hollow, emptied of meaning or connection to anything real. By putting words together in certain ways language could be refreshed and a new relationship established between itself, ourselves and the world around us, which would be suddenly more vibrant and alive — another way of saying that we would be more vibrant and alive. But along the way I was put off from this idea, which for lack of echo or success came to seem a little grandiose (which it no doubt is) and “unrealistic,” which it also no doubt is. In the sickest twist I think experience in the MFA program confirmed this reading of The Way Things Are rather than encouraged the irrational, which is maybe reason enough you should regard them with suspicion.

That said, this semester — especially since Nanowrimo, and you deserve credit for a lot of this — I’ve begun to remember a lot of the ideas that I’d had when I began writing years ago and that got swallowed up as I got distracted by other projects in writing and life — the whole remythologizing the American landscape thing stems from the summer I hitchhiked across the west, for instance, but hadn’t really been heard from since. And then there’s Bolano and other people like David Foster Wallace, who, sort of in direct opposition to a lot of what I’ve read in school and how we tend to talk about that writing, 73

remind me that the point of this kind of life is to be a little desperate, to invite the kind of pain that comes with being vulnerable and letting enough of the world in to say something original about it, to be mad and sad and have unproductive, socially unacceptable emotions and responses to things that are frankly unacceptable yet that occur so frequently we become numb to them. Fuck that noise.

There’s certain sections of the book that prompted this, and you’ll know them when you see them. All of it’s of a piece with the genius bookslut article and a bunch of other things and conversations we’ve had. I don’t know why it took me so long to put it all back together — though I have some ideas, which I’ll have to write down sooner or later. Until then be in touch, and enjoy the book. lost coast lines Sarah Ciston <ciston@gmail.com> Sat, Dec 27, 2008 at 3:35 AM To: Chris Pedler <chrispedler@gmail.com> [...] but i hope you can settle for too-late epic replies (and i hope forthcoming replies to replies) until we can cover this in person. this needs to be dissected in person. though, too, there is something important about Getting It Down, the tangible reference point of having it articulated and documented, and let’s hope “too desperate to bother with being well-written” can be allowed to apply tonight. “to say something original, something i profoundly had to say” yes. where i am not sure i agree, or where i want to ask more questions about this is the next half of your line, because i think it is less a question of language or culture outside myself feeling derivative or hollow. though certainly at any level of intellectual analysis or conversation about anything else, it applies, yes the world is a fucked up place, but on a nonanalytical strictly gut level about why-i-write, this profound have-to-say feeling seems more connected to an internal hollowness. i don’t mean shallowness or solipsism, but just hollowness, our own blind spots and aches for understanding/fulfillment. i don’t think it’s about correcting something missing in the external world. it goes back to this idea of locating oneself in the universe, drawing the connections, fixing the threads, a better model or interpretation, understanding. i guess i mean it’s about meaning itself, but not just making definitions more definite, more like turning up the saturation on a photograph in photoshop, making things pop, come alive with the right words. when your next sentence returns to the idea of refreshing language to make ourselves more alive...then i am back to vehement nodding and bold faced yeses. i suppose the reason i think of it as an internal question is that i am less interested in the us-them separation of railing against the mad 74

world and more in the idea that we are already a part of the mad world, we are already shaping it. and i prefer to ask what we see in it, what do we want to shape from it, and why are we talking to ourselves about all this? but how do we even get to the bottom of what we are pushing aside when we’re so busy pushing it aside? no wonder i cannot articulate the secret yearnings behind my everyday, for how much more unbearable would that make having to exist in said everyday every day? and as for “weird personal obsessions” put between us and productive artistic desperation, is it later enough yet to ask? let me know and i’ll ask. i’ve certainly got my share to share. and why, ugh, stupid world, why does a belief in something more satisfying have to become grandiose or unrealistic? pure western puritanism? utilitarian good? perhaps i am too naive and still refuse to believe there is not a place or a way it is possible. actually, most of the time i do find it impossible, i do the every day and the cubicle and the rest of it (it could be an MFA the effect is the same, there are really not options provided for living this way we are talking about) and i assume that if i am not following the model, if i am unhappy, it’s because i’m just lazy or crazy or otherazy, until — rarely and splendidly — i find myself (and my language) refreshed and more vibrant and alive because of encountering the few other people who have not yet tabled these questions and who want to have long rambling conversations about the world and what is possible. the world becomes alive again in those moments and around those people and with those words, something about the possibility of possibility, the ultimate freedom/responsibility and genius desperation of it, the way we can remind each other that yes it still exists outside of that with which we have placated ourselves. i can count those people on one hand and count you among them. i don’t know if i have managed to put it all together. you seem further along, all that crisp canadian air and also hopefully lots of canadian bacon fueling your endeavor. i’ve gotten as far as admitting i have a problem. that it has something to do with balancing artistic desperation with a fucked-up social contract, that it may involve free sandwiches and quitting jobs (in- or voluntarily) and feeling things too much and surrounding myself with people who won’t let me forget to keep letting the world in for art’s sake and life’s sake. the bolanos and wallaces and many if not all of the people i respect are the ones, as you said, operating in direct opposition to writing/life according to those old rules. we can read them and talk about them to be reminded. we can talk with like-minded individuals to be reminded. but how do we remember to remind ourselves, too, how do we make it stick, how do we really live this way without getting daily sucked back in to that social numbness? we must keep hitting ourselves in the head with it, recallibrating.

75

probably it is a constant balancing act, interplay, it wouldn’t be satisfying to be all one extreme just as we know it isn’t to be the other, the belligerent artiste/auteur of drugged out misunderstood genius is just as much a one-dimensional, hollow persona not really living as the opposite drone we see more of. perhaps we can be constantly seeking out a secret middle ground where we can have unacceptable emotions and be vulnerable and take artistic risk not for profit or notoriety but connection, and make use of that energy not just creatively but also to connect with people and continue this circle of reminding each other of these possibilities rather than becoming automatons or alternately jesters. at the same time that we can and should make our lives all and desperately about the work, it is not about the work at all, but about the reasons we are compelled to make the work: to let the world in. ...i’m opting out of rereading everything i just wrote, assuming it doesn’t make a lick of sense, sending it anyway. but i am sure you will be able to explain to me what i’m thinking better than i can and i look forward to that. let’s talk tomorrow (which is today already?) if you’re available. i’ll be bumming around LA, mostly reading and thinking, and so do feel free to call any time. i defer to your dialing skills; since i can’t call or text you where you are all i can send are these epic satellite pings into the night. soon, sarah

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Dust [Tupelo Hassman] Heartbreak is already in the room, wearing my sweatshirt and wondering why I bothered to quit drinking coffee, “There are decades of ways to hurt people,” it says, and snorts a line of Stevia through a straw made out of biodegradable corn. The straw will be dust in a year but this ending will take longer than plastic. The sweatshirt has words going forward: GIVE LOVE they say to outsiders and when Heartbreak bends to the mirror for another rail of sweetener the rest of the sweatshirt’s words, the ones going backward, are reflected, quickly legible in the glass: THEN TAKE IT AWAY. Heartbreak puts his head back (he is a boy after all) and closes his eyes. I watch his Adam’s apple roll, post-nasal drip, and even though I know he’s leaving (and will probably steal my sweatshirt, and flask, and my scarf, pictures of my dog and all things heart-shaped plus small amounts of cash and unopened bottles of liquor) I reach for his zipper anyway, tug it down before he can move, pull back the left side of his sweatshirt because I have to see what I know is there, it’s my sweatshirt after all, and there it is, a red velvet heart, black cursive in its middle: A l w a y s. But Heartbreak is too high to fuck now. We spend the rest of the morning debating the merits of carcinogenic sweeteners until the sun finds our spot on the carpet, wraps around us, and the dust in the light catches our eyes and our voices and we fall asleep, naked, our noses and lips white with sweetener that whispers its promise not to kill you, it’s 100% natural oath to leave others a chance at your nose and upper lip, at your throat and your insides where all things are heartshaped and ink pumps cursive through your veins.

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2666 As Manifesto, or Why Are Nazis So Trendy These Days?

[Chris Pedler] The question’s inevitable: Is 2666 a bad book? In more than one respect it qualifies. Long stretches of boring writing. Seemingly irrelevant or meaningless major characters. Nazis. An ambiguous ending of suspicious literary value. At times it feels more like a test of wills, an endurance contest or existential challenge, certainly not what fools call a pleasurable reading experience. But a better question might be: Is it possible to write a good book about dead hookers and Nazis? The answer would seem to be obviously not, so perhaps the joke is on us. Perhaps Roberto Bolaño sought out the most absurd constraints possible, plot mechanisms sure to doom any story instantly to pulp fiction. Perhaps. Any attempt at writing about this book is necessarily in the realm of speculation because, despite the assurances of the executors, one never knows what the book would have been had he lived. But let’s go over the specifics.

This book only intermittently can be said to have a plot. Who the fuck is Oscar Fate and why is he here. Same question re: Amalfitano (though, honestly, I like that guy). For that matter Archimboldi? His real name is Reiter. Get it? But what are his books about and why do we care? One of them is about seaweed. The others? Presumably they have something to do with Nazis. And possibly a Prussian baroness. That’s about all we get. Even the critics talk only about talking about the novels. And what is the meaning of their joint appearance?

Perhaps the book should be read as a collage of genres. We begin with romance, continue through variations on the overpopulated Dostoevsky-esque madman motif, a brief sports episode then onto the serial murders in the mystery section. Finally, history with our friends the German fascists. One could be excused for wondering: What the fuck? And also for yawning at the exhaustion of it all. But this brings us no closer to getting it, if there is something there to get.

Which we must assume there is. For sport, if for no other reason. We have no existing thought or literature to guide us in encountering this book. Not to mention Bolaño is no longer alive. He must be watching us with a serious amount of hilarity. The afterword from the executors is a piece of inadvertent genius. I’ve never read its equal in the category of Blind Stabs at Meaning from those nominally in charge of a work of art. It’s clear they have not the slightest idea what to do with this book. And yet they did well! Certainly better than I. Because it means something, that much is clear.

Bolaño has not done nothing. He frontally attacked one of the more sick and outrageous crimes of the current world (there are many) and attempted to make something out of it. Or not make something out of it. Which gets at one of the deeper questions the book raises: How does a person write about the world, meaningful things in the world, the vast 78

fields of death in the world, and what is the responsibility (to hazard a highly pretentious word) of the writer, the Reiter (sorry), and the writing in shaping, naming and saying this has meaning, this is not as senseless as it seems. Or doing exactly the opposite. Saying this is exactly as senseless as it seems except much more so than you currently believe. The meaning is that it’s much worse than you think, and you’re horrible for not realizing this earlier.

Wake up, goddamnit, it’s late and the train is speeding the wrong direction. Bolaño is no doubt saying this, screaming this as loud as can be done in a 900-page novel. But of course the direct evidence has been lost while shuttling between cities in the desert.

But if he is saying this, he is saying hundreds of other things. Let’s consider the epigraph. “An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.” Is this a real Baudelaire quote? Does it matter? Either way it’s the best possible description of the book. What more can be said? It preempts any attempt at plot summary or characterization. I’m not sure why he bothered to write the thing after that. Need I say more about it?

Fine. It is, in fact, from Baudelaire’s poem “The Journey” — a vision of travel as a desperate escape from boredom, time and death itself with the mystical goal “to find in the depths of the Unknown the New!” Baudelaire’s traveler cannot bear quotidian dullness, so he ventures afield — only to find, in addition to the world’s splendorous wealth, all humanity’s various failures. Escape is impossible, in the end, whether one goes or stays, and it makes one so tired to try either way. But we must!

Like Baudelaire, Bolaño has a pessimistic view of things, to understate it a bit. He believes life is a not-very-interesting curse only occasionally punctuated by episodes of disgusting violence. This violence being a salve of sorts to our bone-crushing ennui. He is out to mimic life as he finds it, not pretend it is something better than it is. The idea of literature acting as a means of transcendence, a precious search for meeeeeeaning for Bolaño is not naïve so much as it is the worst kind of despicable lie. Something not worth spitting upon. A crime. The sort of game engaged in by craven hucksters without the dignity to sell snakeoil or run for Congress. How do these people live with themselves? How do we? The idea of wresting meaning from the small genocide of women in Juarez more than mocks the idea of meaning itself. But the idea of not trying is morally abhorrent; it forfeits the game at the start by announcing literature’s impotence.

So Bolaño doesn’t try exactly. That would be too easy. Nor does he not try. The book contains an implicit imperative — that literature, if it is to maintain its self-respect, must at least try to confront real events and create a world adequate to the one that exists. It must not take refuge in fantasy or become lost in the imaginary problems of Manhattan yuppies.

Such novels wither when held next to the events 2666 portrays. But what is the nature of those events? Despite the fact the first and last sections only glance at them, the book’s center of gravity is the killings. Amalfitano at one point even claims that the killings contain 79

“the secret to everything,” which is as obvious a statement of purpose/mission/theme as it is vague. But this phrase is so striking the executors also pulled it out in the afterword, if only at that point to marvel at its obscurity. But is it so obscure as it seems? I admit I was waiting for Bolaño to eventually tell me what the secret is, but by now it should be clear that would defeat the whole point. And in any event, it’s not as hard to fathom as one first assumes.

What are the killings? Mass murder of women with impunity. What do they suggest? A misogyny so casual and so thorough it’s invisible. Many women are also migrants, maquiladora workers, refugees of the global economy trading one kind of desperation for another, and if they are lucky, they will have the opportunity (no sick pun intended, really) to trade that desperation for another in the kitchen of a restaurant in San Francisco, where they will merely take residence upon a different lowest rung. But only if they are lucky. Which most of those we encounter in the novel are not. Most of them are dead.

And if justice eludes them in life, it dances on their graves in death, on the orders of the police commissioner whose “old friend” is a well-known drug trafficker, Pedro Rengifo, who himself survives an assassination attempt by a judicial policeman who is in turn moonlighting as a professional assassin. Viva la Mexico, says Bolaño, and here the killings begin pulling strings within the government and the economy, both of which are dominated in unclear degrees by the narcos. The police are bought and sold, and the only murders that are solved are those committed by angry husbands, boyfriends and the occasional low-level gang member. These killings occur frequently enough to suggest a serious problem with gender relations, but the majority of crimes suggest something much more insidious — that the hunting of humans has turned into a national (or at least regional) sport. It should be no further surprise that the major suspect must be considered the son of Dean Guerra (it’s possible his name should have given that away — Bolaño is simultaneously opaque and almost comically transparent, see: Reiter), who, in addition to being seen driving the kind of black car conspicuously observed at many crime scenes (and also outside Amalfitano’s house as his daughter Rosa leaves through the back door), is protected by dint of his connection with the most powerful people in the city, including the university rector and that man’s brother, the police commissioner, whose compromised loyalties we already mentioned. So don’t expect breaking news out of northern Mexico. The genocide is by definition a gross moral outrage, but the most soul-deadening aspect is the broken record refrain of “and then the evidence was lost” or “then the police gave up” or “everybody at that point lost interest in [insert name here]” or “Juan de Dios held out no hope of solving even one of these murders.” The scale of corruption Bolaño must have observed in Mexico demanded he write this section, which as emotionally brutal as it was only covered the first several years of the crimes. He could have gone on much longer.

But he made his point. The secret to everything is there are certain people who are below 80

the law, who do not exist with full human rights, who are even more ignored in death than they were in life, which even they would not have believed possible. The secret (how bitterly ironic does Bolaño mean to be?) to everything is that social forces conspire to perpetuate these circumstances — though “conspire” is not forceful enough in that it implies secrecy when nothing could be more blatant than the collusion among the authorities, organized criminals and a generalized apathy as ubiquitous as air. The secret to everything is this is more the rule than the exception. The secret to everything is the longer one stares this fact in the face the more one forgets anything else exists.

Hence the title, which Bolaño stole from himself. The year/number 2666 is never mentioned in the book but comes from another of Bolaño’s novels, Amulet, in which he compares a street in Mexico City to “a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else.” The cemetery here, like the killings, lies forgotten by all but the dead or yet-to-born (and Bolaño, of course, who is dead), but nonetheless possesses a gravity sufficient to cause drowning by overattention. An attention that cannot be broken, however, because to ignore reality would be a worse crime than the suicide this attention implies. Sort of a Catch-2666. He cannot look and cannot look away.

And it is here that Bolaño’s project overlaps with Archimboldi’s undescribed novels, which we can safely assume carry the burden of coming to terms with horror. Which circles us back to the unresolved question of what literature can really accomplish and how to go about doing that. Bolaño does not exactly answer this question, but he provides clues. The passage at the end of the second section — in which Amalfitano laments the dearth of ambition among not just novelists but readers — indicates Bolaño favors the ambitious, if flawed, Hail Mary-fight-the-devil approach to writing as opposed to the assiduous polishing of minuscule diamonds. This big book, by its very existence, argues for Big Books that Say Everything. But Bolaño’s faith wavers or, more accurately, is built on a paradox. Writing is an act of semblance — a concept that possesses the book’s final few hundred pages — which is an act of fakery, which undermines literature’s claim to seriousness.

Bolaño’s goal, among others, is the end of semblance. He indicts those who continue living as if circumstances were normal in Mexico, as if the greatest insanity were not being perpetrated there everyday. He indicts writers for writing as if this were the case. In such a context, Bolaño sees most literature as a hazy curtain upon which phony images, scenes and emotions are projected, a haze that obscures the life (and death) occurring behind it. (And, honestly, when does such a context not persist in the world?) Semblance is the lie we tell ourselves (and more criminally, writers tell readers) about the world and what it’s really all about. Bolaño disdains metaphor. He wants the book to be lived, not read. To be sufficient 81

to life by being “everything in everything,” as Ansky notes of Archimboldi’s work. This ambition could be applied to Bolaño’s work as well.

Reiter begins to see himself in combat with semblance, somewhat paradoxically, as he begins to make himself a writer. “Semblance is an occupying force of reality,” he realizes in one of his periods of desertion, the opposite of which is the impulse “toward freedom, toward sovereignty.” Yet the escape from semblance may prove impossible for all but the most committed dreamers, he thinks at the same time. Domestic love. Pain. Youth. Success.

National Socialism above all. Even willpower. All semblance. Reiter concludes that the only things that are not semblance are his love for his sister and Ansky’s wandering — Ansky’s 14-year-old commitment to the “one true revolution,” what he believed was the destiny of the future: the early modern, adolescent yearning for total revolution that nearly everyone casually discards in exchange for the reception into adult society (a welcome that is really a thinly-disguised contempt). Only refusing to grow up is not semblance because growing up, by definition, is the acceptance of certain realities (read: semblances): economic facts, received ideas about the limits of the possible, boundaries for dreams and behavior dictated by the socially influential, i.e. modern bourgeois life.

Reiter’s later life however begins to resemble (no pun intended) Ansky’s, which begs the question whether this means he discovered a way around or through semblance (and by extension did Bolaño, whose life was similarly, if to a lesser degree, peripatetic) by becoming a wanderer, by avoiding the settled domestic routine. The only thing required — the only thing that Ansky had — is a faith in the end of semblance and the courage of this conviction, but Reiter lost that faith and knows it impossible to recover.

Reiter lost his faith in the war, of course, along with the rest of Germany and much of the world, “for once the nakedness of the slaughterhouse was achieved, everything else was unacceptable theatricality.” Everything after Auschwitz is semblance because a certain extremity had been reached and left far behind. Once the bare bones of death are exposed, everyday pettiness can never be taken seriously again. No one enjoys themselves in postwar Germany, yet life inexplicably continues, drenched in shame and self-loathing. Everyone fucks even as if sex is but a slightly more interesting game of tic-tac-toe, as if to take any pleasure at all, to feel passion or desire would be such a phony pose, an act of such unwarranted fakery or play-acting that it would be not simply absurd but beyond conceiving. The very idea cannot be imagined.

Of course, even as he assaults pervasive fakery, Bolaño (engaged as he is in writing a novel) necessarily works in the realm of metaphor. The post-Nazi theme is an allegory of sorts for the insulation from the deep hard bones of reality (the long list of dead women, corruption, etc.) he sees free-floating in the air in northern Mexico (and presumably elsewhere). Despite this contradiction in method and message, what Bolaño calls for is a raw 82

belief, a stripping of the velvet curtains of literariness, phoniness and convention in the name of a more profound, full-bodied engagement, a two-handed clutch on the bars that imprison us and separate us from the revolutionary world at the end of the imagination: a world in which we neither ignore the worst nor the best of our potential as people alive in the world, a world in which we might collectively act to oppose the violence and evil around us. But this idea is not unproblematic, implying as it does a clarity of vision and purity of will — as if a writer or work is self-justified by dint of its heroic, comprehensive intent, the coherence of its ultimate form and its transformative power — an idea made just slightly more problematic by its context here in Germany, 1945.

Bolaño distances himself from this as he is drawn toward it, remaining agnostic about the one ideal he might (or might not) allow himself to believe in. And there the work stays, in unsatisfied tension. Bolaño walks a tightrope between two poles of twentieth-century thought: at one end, the totalistic urge that gave us fascism and Infinite Jest; at the other, the postmodern technological explosion that democratized information and drowned out our lives in its noise. At both ends are the ideal and its shadow, and in between, the place where we live. Bolaño did not live to work this problem out, and possibly neither will we. But his failure is only a measure of how far humanity has not yet come.

A last word, of sorts, is reserved for the old man who rents Archimboldi his first typewriter. Having considered the book’s thoughts on the purpose of writing, we might leave the rest to the old man, who has a lot to say about how writing lives in the world. The old man is a writer who quit writing and found his salvation in reading. To him, writing is a trap, a hopeless and narcissistic quest, an exercise in the limitless vanity of petty humans chasing their own inflated visions of themselves. But even as writing is folly, someone must do it, for otherwise there would be nothing to read, and the old man would have no reason to live at all. The trouble is, he says, the only works worth producing are masterpieces, which are few and, worse, sometimes hard to see for all the lesser works crowding the view. But each masterpiece must rise on a tide of other works; they don’t come out of nowhere, alone.

Another vexed paradox.

Here it’s worth thinking about the novel’s critical reception. 2666 has been universally hailed, granted awards and brought its author rare posthumous glory, but no one in the invisible atmosphere of literary decision-making seems to know why, in fact, this book is good or not. The reviews are laughably vague and often profess their own confusion. In their defense, it is a large book, with plot tendrils spinning in various and not-entirely-connected directions, and one gleans a sense of purpose and worth even if one does not understand why. This, finally, might be its profoundest lesson — and its most comic — about the operation of literature in the world: No matter what a writer does, no matter the time and blood spent squeezing his soul onto a page, the success of a book is a question of luck, a 83

combination of serendipitous and, sometimes, asinine circumstances irrelevant to what’s actually between the covers, which mostly gets lost in the general clamor. The book’s reception becomes its essential meaning. How it operates in the world substitutes for its subject, a social fact that is always depressing but much worse in the case of a very ambitious book about genocide, no matter how confusing and flawed.

I imagine Bolaño alternately weeping then laughing and stamping his feet at these critics who embrace him without really knowing why, without bothering to think the book through, who focus on everything but the ongoing killings in Mexico. Bolaño would despise such creatures just as he mocked the narcissistic critics in the first section and poked fun at their jockeying, their performances at conferences with self-important names and their work — which is reduced by the end to a missing persons search they end up being too lazy to actually prosecute, a vacation of whiskey-drinking and sex with minors, minors they, critically, abandon to the abyss of violence they are too self-involved to see ripping the skin of semblance before their over-trained middle-class eyes. They come and go from Mexico, leaving only empty promises, hard currency and the sentence of death they could hardly be bothered to face when the opportunity for (an albeit inadequate) redemption was offered, never to be heard from again.

Not that they would have been saved had the critic Espinoza taken Rebeca to Spain or had Pelletier insisted on finding Archimboldi and learning whatever secret drew him to Santa Teresa, Mexico. That is not an option given us to choose, salvation. But to do other than try — and this is Bolaño’s essential approach to the world — even while trying is but guaranteed failure, is to sin against life and one’s fellow prisoners of war in the ongoing losing battle we fight against death everyday. Here he overlaps again with Baudelaire’s traveler from the epigraph, who ventures into a world certain to disappoint him for the chance at producing something new. This is our choice: We must tilt against windmills, write big books that attempt at least to be a counterweight to inevitable doom, or submit to being even more compromised than we already are. A grim vision, to be sure. And Bolaño doesn’t need to opine on how most people choose for us to know what he’s trying to say.

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Chris Pedler <chrispedler@gmail.com> Sun, Dec 28, 2008 at 9:57 PM To: Sarah Ciston <ciston@gmail.com> You’re definitely right about the derivative/hollowness being an interior phenomenon, and certainly a reason I began writing originally was that the act of creation turned out to be the thing that made me feel whole — and the only thing that did that. I used to get jazzed about having political arguments in the street when I was selling Communist newspapers of course but nothing that made me feel so satisfied, as if I’d done something actually worthwhile, as even spending 20 minutes writing what would inevitably turn out to be a forgettable poem.

And I think you’re on to something in the idea that really only with the help of other people can we always remember the reasons we do this. It’s not something I can do for myself certainly — or when I try I tend to get tired and forget before dragging myself a few feet forward again. It shouldn’t be this hard (and it isn’t most of the time) but during those periods when writing seems pointless it helps to have as many people as possible to talk me out of it.

But reading the Bolano book — as well as a couple things I read online that I’ll find again and send you or post on the blog — led me to think that inasmuch as what we’re talking about, the marginalization of writing and creative life generally or, the opposite side of the coin, its co-optation (is that the word for that?) into the regime of work and productivity and jobs, inasmuch as this is a real and ever-encroaching part of our lives it might help to write about this, which might have the effect of if not neutralizing the problem at least putting into a perspective we can learn to live with as oppose to something that shadows our days like a sickness, vague enough to seem like something inescapable that we have no control over.

Sarah Ciston <ciston@gmail.com> Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 1:33 AM To: Chris Pedler <chrispedler@gmail.com> [...] i don’t know that the act of creation ever makes me feel wholly “whole” but i think the pursuit of that question of what makes us feel whole is itself a fulfilling endeavor. spending 20 minutes, or in my case 3 years, on what might turn out to be forgettable work, the idea of being in the work, or in the process of the work, is (when it’s going well) a place where i don’t worry about feeling whole or not whole, i just feel good and i’m not questioning it (is that what feeling whole would be?). to me feeling whole is that place (often in work or the sharing thereof) where we are acknowledging what does not make us whole, what could make us whole, where we are engaging on the subject of engaging with the world. this is 85

perhaps what you were getting at suggesting that we talk and write about the marginalization and the co-opting of that process (interesting that they are simultaneous!!!! let’s talk more about that), but too let’s keep talking about what’s behind that too-easy-to-lose-track-of process, why engaging about engaging is so... engaging? stop me when i’ve said that word too many times. it is not just that we need other people to remind us of this in moments of over-self-marginalization or over-self-co-optation so that we can return to our solitary work of writing and desperate creativity; we need other people to connect to that work as well. it’s work worth doing at any cost and it’s work worth sharing — because it brings us to more of those engaging, vivid moments, with others and alone and as part of this bigger thing with which we are and which we are. meanwhile i’ll pick you up at 830 in oakland and we can *ahem* engage on this some more. ring me when you’re back in real america and let the unpuzzling begin. sarah

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Almost Manifested [Sarah Ciston] Thank you for writing. Your manifesto will be processed in the order in which it was received. Please enjoy some abandoned manifestitos while you wait.

Manifesto Against Caution It’s really hard to do anything. It’s extremely hard to do everything. But do you know how tired I get of people telling me I can’t do everything? So tired that I have to take a nap instead of doing anything.

While I sleep I dream about all the things I am not doing, the words I am not saying, the conversations I’ve already had about everything worth having but only in my head, where all my futures are and won’t come true. I walk up the street because I have nothing to do, because I don’t know what to do, because everything is left to do, because it won’t matter if I do anything at all, have you noticed how it doesn’t matter if I do anything at all? Have you noticed or were you doing something?

You and I, we are too ambitious to take anything accomplishable seriously.

We are too unambitious to accomplish anything big.

Don’t do things.

Be afraid of how they will hurt.

Do everything just so, just so so you won’t get hurt.

You’ll probably never ever die.

But somehow you will slip up. You will say the wrong thing, even after agonizing over every permutation for too long.

This is where you will slip up.

This is how you will get hurt.

You will get it wrong and then like everybody you will die.

I’m afraid you are like me. Your greatest fear is that you are afraid of everything.

Manifesto Against Being Against Everything or The Hipster Is Dead, Long Live the Hipster Fine. So I’m a hipster. If you’re reading this, so are you.

We cannot begin to address the problem of the Modern Urban Hipster (MUH, the sound uttered by many a MUH in the face of the unbearably banal (read: stuff other people like)) until we admit that we are the problem.

We are the problem, but this is not a problem!

If hipsterdom is defined by disengagement with mainstream society to the point of 87

disengaging with the term hipster itself, then declaring oneself a hipster is our only course of action to revolt against this art(less) form.

Yes, sometimes my skinny jeans get turned inside out when I take them off because the ankles are tight enough to tuck into boots, even though I’d never dare tuck them into boots (that’s what a hipster would do).

Yes, I already know about your bootlegged B-sides of the final tour of the original lineup of… (sorry, I stopped listening to myself).

Yes, I’ve already read that book, twice in fact, and no, I didn’t think it was very good.

But also, yes, I am interested in art and music and progressive politics and sustainability.

Yes, I care too much about obscure literary movements that speak only to themselves.

Yes! And yes, I know this is partly because I can afford to care about these things. I admit that I have lucked into a certain degree of privilege, white-and-educated enough to be allowed to starve for art. But wouldn’t it be worse to deny that I am in such an advantageous position, to refuse to take advantage of all that it offers? I am extremely lucky to live in an expensive city where my neighbors are hipsters, too, where they consume (and hopefully create) a little culture.

Yes, I’m gentrifying the fuck out of this place. I’m making it into a world I’d like to inhabit.

So I admit it. Fine. I am a hipster. (Cue echoing chorus from the other anonymous members of this meeting.)

But that doesn’t mean I have to be an asshole. Does it? Surely it doesn’t, and it mustn’t, or else this just might be the end of the world after all, if the only people allowed to like cool stuff have to be insincere fuckheads.

After all, hipsters don’t have the monopoly on phoniness (see also, the US Senate).

Let’s take a sample of any demographic group in the phylum — good drivers, christians, writers or hagfish (the only member of our chordata phylum to have a skull but no vertebral column, also empirically proven on Wikipedia to be the most disgusting of sea creatures).

I’d theorize only 2 percent of the sample would be even close to sincerely embodying the qualities professed by the group with which they self-identify (the percentage of hagfish might be significantly higher).

So: If, as in all other social sets, only 2 percent of hipsters are actually cool like cool was meant to be, I’ll stick to those slim-pickings and not mix company with the towering majority, hipster or no. I’ll opt for the cream of the crop who aren’t even hipsters at all (that is, the ones authentic enough to even call themselves hipsters (it’s very confusing, I admit)). I’ll stick to the folks just trying to live something real that suits them, even if it doesn’t fit into a so-called scene. I’ll stick with people who value the collective (that’s you!)

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and the heartfelt and the expressive instead of the competitive and the cynical. I’ll stick with the sincere hipsters (wherever I encounter that rare breed), who like what they like not because it’s counter-culture, not in spite of counter-culture, but because they really fucking like it.

This is a shout-out to that 2 percent. I hope I can find you out there. Perhaps, to identify each other as comrades-in-arms, we could perform some sort of secret handshake — and can we help it if we happen to look extremely cool when we meet?

Manifesto Against Flarf When I ask Google about myself, Google asks back: “Did you mean Sarah Liston?”

“Sarah Liston is a writer,” says Sarah Liston’s website. Sarah Liston writes articles for Marie Claire magazine about how she wishes she had a “button nose.” For “far out shopping” (needs a hyphen), Sarah Liston recommends the San Francisco’s “eclectic” Mission District.

There is a reason that flarf rhymes with barf.

What does it say about me that my doppleganger sounds like such an annoying bitch (who gets more Google hits than I do)? Don’t answer that.

I was going to write a flarfobiography, so that one day I would be famous, but Google protests that this will be impossible because I do not exist, and that this nonexistent I must have meant to google someone else. Clearly my doppleganger is doing a better job of being me her. So for the time being, I will allow it.

But if we ever meet — nay, when we meet, in a dark alley in the eclectic Mission District perhaps — I have no doubt I will punch her in the button nose. And hark, on that glorious day, when Sarah Liston googles herself, Google will ask back: “Did you mean Sarah Ciston?”

Manifesto Against Not Losing My Shit I will stop losing my shit all the time, stop running around like a lunatic when the littlest thing sets me off, stop conflating past issues with current situations until injury is all I can see. I will stop losing my shit, especially in public, especially in front of you. Stop embarrassing myself (the awareness of which causes me to lose my shit even more). I will Pull Myself Together, whatever that means (it would have been helpful if you’d offered up instructions along with that unkind suggestion). But I will do it, I’ll Show You Pulled Together. Admittedly, it’s hard to show you when you’re gone. But I have done it. And I can tell you now: I’ve stopped blowing things out of proportion. I will say out loud that everything is not connected to everything else by a flow chart that points to Doom. Even if it’s true, at least I am trying to stop reminding everyone of this fact.

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Manifesto for a Marriage Falling in love is the ultimate act of revolution. Love transforms the world — it impels us to leave our shells, to risk being honest and spontaneous, to connect to each other in profound ways, to make sense of our existence. If we could set down all our responsibilities and our common sense, raise the stakes and dare to pursue our wildest dreams, think what a place the world would be. Love makes such impossibilities possible. And if there is even the slightest chance that our hearts’ desires could be realized, then, of course, the only thing that makes sense is to throw ourselves entirely into their pursuit. Too often, we do not do all that is possible to remember all that is possible. But, if we are lucky, we get to share the world with other people, specifically the people who remind us of all the potential energy in the universe, who remind us of gravity: of that which has weight, of that which pulls us together. If we are very lucky, we find the people who make us feel even more like our favorite versions of ourselves, like the people we aspire to be. The “One” is not the person who gives us everything we are looking for, but the person who helps us find it in ourselves.

It’s a revolutionary concept as old as humanity: whether it’s “Namaste” (the light in me acknowledges the light in you) or else, “I’m a Lebowski, you’re a Lebowski” — regardless of its origins, this idea has its own gravity; it sustains us. And so let the myth of love be rewritten. Let it be declared: we will know each other this way, we will love and live this way, we will nurture what is most true in each of us, we will shout it from the rooftops, we will believe in all that is impossible, together.

Manifesto Toward the Impossible Why make manifestos? Why is it so important to declare, to reinvent?

In this brave new era of breakdown, we see opportunity! We have a chance to shed the status quo for everything we’ve always wanted. Why not? Even our most tempered, realistic expectations didn’t work out quite the way we were told they should, so we refuse to temper our expectations any longer.

We want. We want everything — fully, openly, more.

Why want this?

Because there is nothing else.

Because everything will quickly fade.

Because both the pain and the bliss of life will pass from us too soon.

Because it is no longer worth being patient against what you deserve.

We will ask for and expect nothing less from the world. We will no longer listen to naysayers who speak of the impossible like it can’t be done, like it does not exist as much or even more than anything else.

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We Still Like Contributors’ Facebook Status Updates [Because official one-sentence bios wouldn’t do them justice either] Gina Caciolo wants to know: if paradise is everywhere, then why do I keep losing it?

Sarah Ciston has one hand on this wily comet.

Rick D’elia had a great time in Vegas, wish I could have stayed another night...

Bradford Earle he’d do all kinds of sweet shit.

Jacob Evans is getting a motorbike. Vroom.

Kathleen Nye Flynn really does have a ton of clothes.

Tupelo Hassman [clearly does not exist.]

Dustin Heron [is not Facebook.]

Jed Johnson might be getting sick. Or I am super lazy. I bet it’s a little of both.

Chris Pedler Three poems and a Call to Destiny.

Tye Pemberton will not viral.

Annie Pentilla Confessions: I never wash my lettuce. I hate it when lettuce is wet and your salad’s all watery. I guess I should get a salad spinner. But then, not only would I have to wash the lettuce — I’d also have to wash the salad spinner. Think about it.

Zulema Summerfield is feeling incredibly blessed and so very very young! Happy birthday to me and happy birthday to all of you — speaking metaphorically, of course.

Tavia Stewart wants life to go on forever and ever. Stupid laws of physics (or whatever).

You’re really getting me down.

Vinh Truong [is not on Facebook.]

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We Still Like

Gravity WeStillLike@gmail.com

The New Sincerity: Instructions for Use • Don’t hedge your bets!

• Do the thing you have secretly always wanted to do but publicly acknowledge is frivolous or impossible!

• Don’t pay your dues, just do!

• Bring back sentiment!

• Tell people why they are awesome!

• Get out of town!

• Go to town!

• Make meaning not money!

• Make bumper stickers!

• Make points!

• Make exclamation points!

• Believe the world is a decent human place, not a pointless vacuum!

• Take compliments!

• Don’t be afraid to ask for what you want!

• Don’t be afraid to get it!

• Talk about the future like it’s real!

• Your life is currently lapping you! Run faster!

• Be happier learning than knowing!

• Finish what you’re afraid to start!

• Call bullshit on bullshit!

• Dance on irony’s grave!

• Say what you mean!

• Refuse all consumerist cooptation of revolutionary ideas!

• i.e. Stop wearing that fucking Che t-shirt!

• Stop pretending not to care!

• It’s so hard!

• It’s so much easier than it looks!

• Get drunk!

• Say something true!