"An Ex-Mas Feast" by Uwem Akpan

New Yorker fiction -- June 13 & 20, 2005 issue


Nothing kills a piece of fiction faster than asking the reader to feel bad for your poor, poor characters. Ethan said something like that once in workshop. I'm always impressed by writing that manages to deal with abject poverty, for instance, without once getting sentimental or hand-wringing about it and without ever asking for sympathy from the reader. Angela's Ashes is a good fairly recent example. This story is another. Both feature impoverished, retrospective, first-person narrators in which the action happens to the narrator-as-child -- in this case, Jigana, an 8 year-old Nairobi beggar -- but the narrator telling the story is the adult writing with the perspective of years. Letting the narrator grow old before the telling adds necessary heft and interest for the reader, whose understanding of the world is (hopefully) much advanced beyond that of a child's.

So Jigana describes his street family living in a shack in the bad part of a dangerous town with neutral matter-of-factness. Jigana as the eldest male is "the hope" of the family -- they just need to figure out how to pay for him to go to school. Want to write a story? Have a character want something. Jigana wants to go to school. How will he get the money for it? Well, his mother says he needs to get it from his sister Maisha, a 12-year-old whore and the family breadwinner. But of course this causes complications. Bang: a story.

His father is a lazy thief, who sleeps through much of the story. His mother is your basic stay-at-home glue-sniffing drunk who has caught a pregnant dog and is hoping to sell the puppies to pay for Jigana's schoolbooks. His other sister, Naema, at ten years old, is an apprentice street whore being trained by Maisha in using makeup and condoms. There are two young twins who flop around the shack and scream in their sleep. And there is Baby, an object, whom they shove in people's faces in round-the-clock shifts to help extract coins from tourists.

It's Christmas day in this happy household. Instead of figgy pudding, though, they have shoe glue, kabire -- highly prized stuff because sniffing it kills hunger. (To be fair, on Ex-Mas Eve there was a bonanza of three cups of rice and zebra intestines, scrounged from an N.G.O. party). In the story, the family is sitting around the shack waiting for Maisha to return with the "Ex-Mas" feast after a hard night of shagging white men and their monkey. Maisha, though, is getting restless and has hinted that she is leaving home to hook full-time, complicating Jigana's quest to go to school.

Notice that, for the moment at least, we do have an intact family here! And it really is a Christmas story. Are there gifts? Sure! The glue was a gift (it's for youngsters only, though Mama indulges). And some neighbors bring over a new pen and pencil for Jigana -- and forgive his father's four-year-old debts, thanks to Maisha, who persuaded them. When Jigana asks Mama what they are getting for the neighbors, she says (high on shoe glue), "half a litre of petrol." Jigana informs us that this is shameful, that petrol is culturally beneath glue as a gift. Merry Ex-Mas.

Let's get all Chad and talk structure: We have ten sections, separated by DSBs (double-space breaks). DSBs are to stories what stanzas are to poems. They are supposed to show passage of time or changing of POV character, though the New Yorker especially loves them (I suspect) because they chop the story nicely into bite-size chunks and allow for eye-catching 36-point initial caps. Here are the sections:

1. Introducing the family, setting up Maisha as the "magnetic" or "mysterious" character. "...none of us knew how to relate to her anymore." Baseline established.

2. Scene with Jigana and Mama sniffing glue, fighting (he bites her), then making up. Here is where Jigana's goal of convincing his sister to provide him enough money for school is declared by Mama. And here is where the neighbors forgive the family's debt. Tension: way up, then down a bit.

3. The only flashback section: Jigana hangs with Maisha on the street. We see their relationship, which is chummy and childlike ("We were not afraid of the city at night. It was our playground.") until he makes the sudden mistakes of using her real name and mentioning their parents, thus revealing on the street that they are related. "She ignored me for weeks." Tension slackened, then cranked back up.

4. It's raining outside the shack. Dad (Baba) wakes up. Jigana describes Maisha's disappearing with white men in a Jaguar. Mama starts the Ex-Mas ritual -- reading names of people she thanks God for, including Maisha's white clients. Tension stable.

5. Naema returns with Baby from begging, says Maisha is moving out, that it's time for her to start whoring full-time. Jigana blames himself because he needs the money and has been the reason for the pressure on Maisha. If he had only joined a street gang, he wouldn't need the money, and there'd be peace in the family. He becomes angry at her white clients. Tension up.

6. Jigana has a talk with Baba about quitting the school plan, which is rejected. Jigana sniffs more glue and has a psychedelic vision of going to school ("I was floating. My bones were inflammable. My thoughts went out like electric currents into the night ... I saw the teacher writing around the cracks and patches of the blackboard like a skillful matatu threading his way through our pothole-ridden roads."). Tension up and story expanded via vision.

7. Maisha returns in a taxi. Baba picks the driver's wallet, but Maisha makes him return it. Tension up. (This scene could have been cut, I think.)

8. In the shack, Jigana tells Maisha that if she leaves, so will he. Everyone tells him to shut up, that the matter is off the table, that the school fee is already arranged. Maisha and Mama have a reconciliation, but it seems Maisha's still leaving. Tension up.

9. A kind of vigil, Maisha's last night. Mosquitoes attack. Misery deepens. Tension up.

10. Naema emerges as the new Maisha, says will take care of Jigana, pay for his school. Then she remembers that Maisha brought the feast after all, bags of random foods all but forgotten in the sadness of her impending departure. They all gorge, including beer. A great line: "The twins fell on their backs, laughing and vomiting." Taxi arrives, Maisha leaves. Jigana sniffs more glue, destroys his pen and pencil, gets dressed, weeps. Street kids circle their bounty, making off with the balloons and cards Maisha had also brought. Jigana uses the occasion to slip away. His last memory: "...the twins burping and giggling," the Ex-Mas feast at last. Tension released.

This is not just a Christmas tale, then, but a coming-of-age story. Jigana tells us which development he wants (school) in the story, and the action shows whether he's going to get it -- he's not. He's going to have to get things for himself. He bails on the situation, following the example of his sister. It's hard to gauge whether he does the right thing. A family splitting apart is not good, though it could be argued he's already at rock bottom here. Still, it's a bit abrupt, as we've spent a lot of time getting to know the family with all its weaknesses and difficulties, and he plainly loves them, but in the end he simply ditches them.

Ambiguity like this is good in a story, done right, and in this case I like it. Eight is a bit young to strike out on one's own -- and of course a perfectly natural reaction would be horror at the tragedy that has led to this small child running off into urban who-knows-what -- but within the context of what has happened, it's understandable. (And as he says, the city is his playground.) As a reader, I am rooting for Jigana as he vanishes into Nairobi. Is there much hope for him? Well, he is telling this as an adult, and with good English, and so we know implicitly that he in fact does make it out there.

One fascinating thing about this story is it was written by an ordained Jesuit priest, a Nigerian currently studying at the U. of Michigan MFA program (the New Yorker Web site has a short interview with Akpan). Uh, did he not get the memo from the Vatican that preaching abstinence and the value of not using condoms will solve all these troubles? Akpan has strayed from the script to say the least. More power to him. I hope there are ten thousand Akpans out there.

The story doesn't just confirm the worst of the (American) reader's fears about the chilling situation of African children, it depicts a world much further degraded than the one we imagine: the sheerest squalor, the adolescent as sexual cash cow, the collapse of everything decent and civilized that typically sustains a family, the crooked depths of cynicism and survival -- yet not despair. The reader is denied the mind-closing luxury of despair. As a fictionist, then, Akpan holds up his end of the bargain admirably. By facing the bleak truth and giving us a POV character who, in the moment, doesn't know any better (as McCourt did in Angela's Ashes), by never caving to a desire to wring tears from the reader, he creates a world where the situation on the ground can be glimpsed, however briefly, on its own terms, without the usual distancing filter of pity; its failures and successes can be judged within their own contexts, its characters appreciated directly for their struggles. And this is what fiction is for -- it may be the one way to sneak such information intact past our pre-framed conceptions. It makes us see people, no matter their circumstances, as people. In this way, characters such as the ones presented here magnificently transcend our carefully constructed stock images of Africans as hungry, blank-eyed accusers and fly-covered appealers for relief -- and thus people we will likely never meet can at least be gathered into the common humanity of our imaginations, where they belong.

New Yorker Poetry (June 13 & 20) Cheaters Edition

I wasn't wild about any of the poems this week. I didn't think any of them were bad, but all three have pretty big flaws. “The Mare Out on the Road” borrows some of the effect of the pantoum (more on this) but the experience is confused and many of the lines that get repeated are pretty weak. If you're going to say something twice it better be better than “Sliding fast with the brakes shoaling gravel” or “Five meters down, and would the car capsize?” I guess a poem about a crash should feel less arranged.

“An Elegy for My Mother,” take out the first three stanzas and the poem is about the same. Also a bit melodramatic”--language, language--”

“Steady Now” is the best of the three with good control, but too poetic for my taste, “Updraft of oblivion” “world of rain” “rock of ages.” Everything is abstract. We don't get to smell the grass, we “feel the smell of grass greeting.” These are all ideas and I posit that experiencing the world rather than thinking about experiencing the world might solve some of the stability issues. Have a seat on one of those rocks. Pretty stable.

But the first poem did put me in the mind of reading some pantoums and perhaps my favorite is this one, by our own Donald Justice. If you read the brief note before the poem you'll see this is a form that requires a ton of repetition and that's something we're all contending with in some form or another.

I think Dean said something like repetition only being interesting once variation arises. In the case of the pantoum, the line stays the same (or nearly the same) and it is the context (the lines right before and after) that change. So the repeated line gets held under two completely different lamps. Despite my downplaying of subject matter previously, look how perfectly the form manages the Great Depression here. The lines are slow and the repetition introduces the mundane inevitability of “going on and on.”

“Our lives avoided tragedy” is a radical beginning for a poem about the Great Depression. We're not talking about Hoovervilles, stockbrokers, or dust clouds. “Oh there were storms and small catastrophes” but why not leave those alone—you've heard all about that before (Seabiscuit). “Simply by going on and on,” the second time around, isn't, in itself, anything too special, but there is a pleasure as it is now the beginning of a sentence, rather than in the middle of one. It leads into the cut and dry, “We managed. No need for the heroic.” The heroic, along with “tragedy,” “chorus,” “verse,” and “story” puts us in the presence of the Greek plays, which, if I remember right, generally involve some pretty bad stuff. But he doesn't “remember all of the particulars.”

When this line first occurs, it is commenting on the storms and small catastrophes, when it returns, about “ the usual celebrations, the usual sorrows.” This is as anti-sentimental as you can get, which isn't to say unfeeling. You can hear, in the monotony of the repeating lines, the regular line lengths, a desperation and quiet acceptance. You can also feel the mind dwelling, concentrating. “And if we suffered we kept quiet about it.” All of these lines are end-stopped, most by a period. It takes forever to read this poem out loud. Further down the spectacular, “We gathered on porches; the moon rose; we were poor.” So emphatic and some of the only imagery and fellowship in the poem. I love “gathered.” It has the same quality of inevitability. We're people; we're social; we gather.

The two lines that follow this one are interesting. First, it's followed by a question (which was a statement in it's earlier iteration) which feels pleading, amazed, and sad because it has transformed into a question. Perhaps the statement hopes for its opposite, that the story would get told. The question then confirms the truth that it won'y. The second time it (the “We gathered” line) is followed by the first metaphor in the poem, “And time went by, drawn by slow horses.” That's just beautiful. The “We gathered” line changes from being emphatic, almost proud, to being a condition to bear seemingly endlessly. In both cases, it is combined with, “beyond our windows shone.” So even the moon is mediated by a barrier in a sense. This is the great part. The first coupling of the “we gathered” and “Beyond out windows” (6th stanza) is in an abstract setting (pity, fear, audience, story). The second coupling (7th stanza) is full of imagery (moon, slow horses, windows shone, fog). When you finally get to “The Great Depression,” the thing in the background, the tragedy, it is practically cinematic. It is full of sorrow and acceptance, but gorgeous.

Next stanza you have the two imagistic lines, with two more abstract lines. We're winding out of that climax. We end up in the present tense in the final stanza. To be reductive, what got said doesn't change because the Depression ended. Or better, the feeling of the Depression didn't end for those who lived through it. The piling on of the mundane difficulties, day to day life, is somehow more transformative than tragedy. Finally that uneasy rhyming of “tragedy” and “poetry.” No story gets told here. Life ends up being a condition, not a story. I suppose we do tend to think of life as a narrative and this poem undercuts that. But what is the poem saying about poetry? The ending is baffling—any takers?

I had hoped to talk more about repetition, but the poem is fucking hard. It is really resistant. It just means what it means. Maybe I should have savaged one of those other poems.
One more quick thing. There is an AIG insert with poems! in the magazine. The first is perhaps the most American poem, “The Road Not Taken.” American I say because it is has been appropriated for a certain cause while being completely misunderstood. The facing page has the prototypical, rugged individual who has chosen to be unconventional and will thereby become wealthy, happy, and successful by swimming against the current. But the poem isn't called “The Road Taken,” its called “The Road Not Taken.” The obsession is with what could have been (“I shall be telling this with a sigh / somewhere ages and ages hence”). Second guessing (or even analysis of facts), as we're learning, is decidedly un-American. Also, as for being unconventional, the poems says, about the two paths, “Though as for that the passing there / Had worn them really about the same,” or, to modernize it, “Everyone has a pair of Doc Martins.”

I adore the irony here. It's an ad for insurance, loans, and retirement which says, “We can help you prepare for the road ahead.” Oh, and also, the road ahead is full of regret; initial here, sign here, initial here and here. How did/does this happen? It's a clear commentary on the times. There is absolutely no pressure on anyone to pause and think.

The Old Negro Space Program

Oh my. Brilliant fake documentary. Think Dave Chappelle doing Ken Burns. My stomach still hurts five minutes later. Not safe for work (or turn it waaay down - language).
Likely to offend if racial sensitiviy set to 5 or above. A setting of 4 or lower is recommended.

Kerry Egan interview

Kerry Egan is the author of Fumbling: a Pilgrimage Tale of Love, Grief, and Spiritual Renewal on the Camino de Santiago, a memoir that recounts the author's pilgrimage along a medieval route to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, where the remains of Saint James are supposed to have been buried. "With introspective artfulness," says the National Catholic Reporter, "Ms. Egan matches up the landscape of her soul to the landscape of the journey." Publisher's Weekly calls her writing "confident, sharp and engaging," and Booklist says Fumbling is "compassionate and unforgettable testimony." Earth Goat caught up with her after a softball game in Iowa City.

EG: Your book is about a pilgrimage in Spain that you and your then-boyfriend, Alex (aka Señor El Gordo), took a year after your father died. Was it hard writing a book that is so brutally honest?

KE: It was very hard. I remember one afternoon especially. I was sitting in the Java House trying to write about my Dad. I had just moved out to Iowa City from Brooklyn, I had no real friends yet (apart from El Gordo, of course), I had no idea how to write a book, and I desperately missed working as a hospital chaplain. As I was trying to write, I started crying. One of Alex’s fellow workshoppers came over, introduced herself, looked at me closely in the darkness (that’s the reason I don’t go in the Java House anymore—I can’t take the gloomy, cave-like atmosphere) and suggested I take a break from the computer because my eyes were so bloodshot. I cried a lot while writing, but it was really helpful. I feel like the writing process was a necessary part of my grieving, as necessary as the pilgrimage was.

I think that memoirs can easily fall into the trap of navel-gazing. The question for me is always, why should my story be meaningful to anyone else? People have their own stories to tell. Why should I presume to write about mine? For me, the answer came in that brutal honesty. By going back down into those dark, sometimes shameful memories of grief, by reliving those experiences and putting it on the computer screen, I think I connected with readers. At least I hope I did. I’ve received a lot of letters from people who read the book, and I think in 9 out of 10 people have said that they wrote because they experienced many of the same things I described—anger, shame, meltdowns—and thought they were the only people who felt that way, and thought they had to keep this awful secret.

As painful as it was to re-feel all that stuff, I think it’s a necessary part of writing a memoir. I really dislike memoirs where the writer is trying to show just how very cool he is by mocking his own experience or the reader with flippant ironic detachment. I think it’s just self-indulgence. And I think most readers can tell when you are faking it. Another thing that was hard was distinguishing between what were my stories to tell, and which stories really belonged to my dad, or siblings, or Alex or my mom. I think that there’s always that risk, in writing nonfiction, that you will trespass on someone else’s story.

EG: Americans, more than almost any anyone except perhaps Saudi Arabians, overwhelmingly regard themselves as believers in God. Yet many of our actions as individuals and as a nation -- from practicing capital punishment to waging war to tolerating poverty, homelessness, and lack of medical care -- would seem to indicate otherwise. What do you think this gap indicates?

KE: I think it indicates that many Americans don’t think very deeply about what it means to “believe in God.” I think it also indicates that the organized churches to which these people belong are choosing to focus on certain issues, at the expense of others. Economic issues are moral issues, but they are much more difficult to talk about and act on than questions of sexual ethics. It’s easy, if you are, say, a middle class, married parent of three, to tell young women that they cannot have an abortion, and to declare that premarital sex is wrong. It’s much harder for that middle class parent of three to accept personal responsibility for the health and well-being of a baby born to a poor teenager.

Few people are willing to give up their second cars and vacations and eating out at restaurants in order use that money to help feed their fellow human beings. It’s much easier to focus on sexual ethics in our hyper-sexualized, materialistic society than to focus on the real message of Jesus, which was “give up everything, heal the sick, ameliorate suffering, and preach that the kingdom of God is here.” I’m not saying that I actually do that. I still lust for an Audi station wagon. But I think that the almost-pathological focus on sexuality by the Catholic Church and the evangelicals, the two biggest religious blocks in our country, is distracting “people who believe in God” from the deepening crisis of social justice in the US.

EG: The National Catholic Reporter described Alex, your companion on your trip and husband now, as "a saint." Any comment?

KE: It’s true. He is a saint. And he reminds me of this every time he doesn’t want to change the baby’s diaper.

EG: The inevitable question: What was it like being a workshop spouse and working on your own book? Did anything Alex brought home help you, or were you on your own, private path to writing?

KE: I never thought I wanted to be a writer, so I knew nothing about the craft and discipline of writing. Alex’s experiences in the Workshop helped me realize that the only way to learn to write is through a lot of practice. And that was an important thing for me to realize. The other important thing I learned from Alex was something he learned in Sam Chang’s class. She suggested that writers “map out” stories and novels they admired. I did this with about five or six books that I really liked. This was very early in my writing process, and it helped so much. People have commented on the way I weave different times and places and ideas through the narrative, and I learned how to do that through mapping other people’s work.

For the most part though, writing nonfiction about religion and grief kept me pretty isolated, as a writer, from the workshoppers. Many of them would just look at me blankly when I told them what I was writing about. But of course, El Gordo says the same thing. I write about relics and saints eating scabs and drinking the pus of the wounded. He writes about flying monkeys and Baba Yaga. People look at you funny. Thank God we found each other.

Deconstructing Franzen

Anyone else find themselves groping about in JF's memoir/essay "The Retreat" in this week's New Yorker? At Large Vibrating Egg, guest blogger "Mr. Gnossos Pappadopoulis" brutally eviscerates it in a four-part close textual analysis (scroll down for links to all four parts).

Tag, we're it

Check out Vutopia's response to the book meme over at Iowablog. He's tagged Babies and Goats (is that fair? Supposed to be five people, not dozens! But bless you, Vu). Put yours here if you like. I may do so later today. It's also fun to click through the links to see the alleys through which this meme has skulked our way...

Book abandonment

Title of Book: Mason & Dixon

Author: Thomas Pynchon

A. Total pages: 773

B. Page reached: 326

Percent finished (divide B by A): 42%

What was happening on the page where you stopped? The man who gave Dixon the magic watch called the Chronometer that never has to be wound and was never to leave Dixon's side found out that it had been stolen and was mysteriously laughing like a maniac.

How long did you try to read the book? Three weeks.

Reason(s) for abandoning: Requires absolutely rigid concentration to even get through a page, and I feel like I "get it," it doesn't grab me anymore, it seems to be more about author's brilliance than about characters' story. My reading time is limited. I can't spend the whole summer turning 773 pages and after each one muttering, yes, you are very clever indeed, Mr. Pynchon, but caring less and less what happens to Mason and Dixon.

Have you abandoned a book by this author before? Yes, Gravity's Rainbow. And V.

For the same reasons? Pretty much.

Have you finished a book by this author before? Yes, The Crying of Lot 49 and Vineland.

Is there anything that would get you to finish the book? Well, sure, if Pynchon came over for dinner or a beer or something. Or consented to his first interview. Or let me take a picture of him.

Is there another book you're planning to read instead? Yes, Cloud Atlas. I started it last night and it seems to be what I was looking for when I picked up Mason & Dixon.

Do you think you'll ever try again and finish the book? Maybe in a different phase of life. Retirement maybe.

New Yorker Poetry -- June 6, 2005

To answer dunkeys' questions, when prose is really good it gets called poetic. Many of you have heard the story of a certain Goat who had written a particularly prosey poem and was assailed for having “committed prose.” Kidding aside, I think that the music and the emotional tenor (probably something like diction or the particular word's natural habitat) of the language are vastly more important than subject matter, characters, setting, or situation. That is probably not true for most prose. Also line breaks are units of meaning that prose doesn't use. They are as important as commas or periods.

What makes a poem is tricker, but I don't think what makes a poem has changed since the advent of free verse. A poem is made by setting up expectations (rhythmic, sonic, intellectual, emotional, cultural, etc.) and either confirming or upsetting them in a meaningful way so that we can be made to feel something otherwise ungraspable. Part of the reason why poetry is difficult for many people to read is simply because they are not attuned to the rhythmic and sonic expectations. Kenneth Koch refers to poetry as a foreign language and the metaphor is a good one. If you can't hear the trochee in the third foot, you're missing out on part of the creation of the meaning. Part of the reason sub-par poetry flourishes is because it spends most of its time using emotional and cultural expectations. So, “I didn't expect to see that couple snogging in the cemetery.” I think I'm paraphrasing Richard Hugo: once the poem begins to attract itself more to what it should mean/say rather than how it should sound, it is dying.

I was going to do both poems but got carried away with the Merwin.


"Just This"
W.S. Merwin

15 lines. 10 syllables apiece. A whole shit load of anapests (syllables lined up unstressed – unstressed – stressed; often an anapest manifests itself in these patterns: preposition, article, noun (in the rain) or -ing, preposition, verb/noun (-ing the wall or -ing to run). Well, here are sounds making meaning at least. Let's investigate further.

Anapests are kind of rhythmic banana peels. You slide through the first two syllables and land hard on the stress. They are part of the reason why this poem jerks around a lot trying to settle itself, but moves into further reaches of its contemplation. And this poem is about thought and the movement of thought -— its fits and starts, its inability to stay still. The line late in the poem, “this reading by lightning” describes the main effect of the poem. The nouns and verbs get a lot of power; they go off like flashes, little explosions that provide meaning —- always partial. In reading poems that are particularly concerned about meter, one always feels that iambic feet (or several in succession) mean stability, safety, or comfort. They are the norm; some think of the beating of the heart -— we heard this pattern once we grew ears in the womb. Unstressed/stressed, unstressed/stressed. The ten-syllable line is to iambic what the color green is to leaves. Usually, other rhythmic patterns are scattered about runs of iambs so that you can feel the aberrations, then return to the calm of the iamb. This poem won't allow many iambs to collect anywhere so the search feels unsettling, chaotic.

First, look at the anapests in the first three lines “of the patience” “in the dark” “it was night.” Then something funny happens. “Light came” is a spondee. Two stresses in a row. Think of how powerful the slogan “Raid Kills Bugs Dead” is. Four stressed syllables in a row. Anyway, the first light we see in the poem is an explosion of stress. Night is something like being in Plato's cave. Then the anapests in the next line “at the speed it was born” before another bombshell, “born to.” So both the light and birth are the agents of power, agents of stress. The anapest “in the world” then another spondee, “fly through.” Also now he's rhyming, which is another agent of stress. So it's the thought/consciousness, it's genesis, and it's flight that are getting us all worked up.

The next line flirts with being iambic; this makes sense given the “not concerned.” The line is kind of the smoke break of the poem. Thought is always happening to us. Only when we really notice it does it begin to alarm or call attention to itself. Then we're back to our pattern “of the first stars.” This anapest followed by a stressed syllable is a kind of iamb on steroids, really unstressed-unstressed-stressed-stressed. The next two lines end trochee (stressed – unstressed), trochee. There are more anapests in there. The sounds are married to the meaning -- a flowery two lines. Ending the lines in the unstressed syllable speeds up the sound, letting you drift into the next line more easily. The hard stress at the end of a line is jagged, jarring. Then two anapests in a row in the next line “and the ages of rain.” Gorgeous. Two more lines in a row that end in trochees to recall the earlier two lines. Yes, we're still meandering around. Our thoughts are the genesis of universes. Still, when I paraphrase it, say what it “means,” it loses much of its meaning. The meaning is very much in the sound. The definitions of the words need to be thought of in the context of their pattern.

Then a rhetorical shift. The question is “how.” Appropriate for this poem as the how is much more important than the why. We're watching the dance not the dancer. Line ends, spondee – iamb. Lot of pressure, release, a little pressure “this little time.” Then the next line begins anapest (stress on time again) spondee (“this read-”). Another anapest (“-ing by light”) and a final unstressed syllable “-ing.”

There are 9 -ings which also keep the poem rhyming throughout. Vines to swing on though they come not regularly, which is a way to stay in constant motion, but haphazardly -— catch them if you can.

In the last line, the poles switch. The final six syllables are stress-stress-unstressed, stress-stress-unstressed. The ying to the anapest's yang. I had to look it up to see if it had a name, but it seems not to. It feels so emphatic but it has also moved from those early spondees to allowing this little release valve at the termination of the line. A move from the power of assertion, power of thought, to the acceptance and bliss of the inescapable imperfection of thought? The preference of this faulty bliss over the bliss of non-existence/total consciousness (after all, “patience” in the first line seems good)?

I don't know, but I can feel the mind moving behind the language. The mind is trying to find somewhere safe to land and cannot really light anywhere. I don't know. On the first few reads I was rather dissatisfied with the ending —- it felt pat to me. After beating it up a little though I can hear it singing and find it extremely accomplished and ultimately beguiling. By the end, the speaker is asserting, but it is emptiness that is found. Paradox, but one we're used to. Heaven is so loaded and I love “reading by lighting” more. I think it is a completely satisfying poem until the last word. It feels like it couldn't resist the urge to mean, to pronounce. Ultimately, the flip flop of the anapest signals the change in feeling, so I guess saying “heaven” makes it redundant. What if the last word was “cosmos?”

"A Mouthful of Cut Glass" by Tessa Hadley

New Yorker fiction -- June 6, 2005 issue


A tale of two British classes colliding amid an early 1970s college romance. Neil grew up in a condemned Birmingham slum with a wall that leaked so much rain he and his sister had to sleep in their parents' room (she on a cot, he in their bed). Sheila is from a professional, educated household, daughter (one of five children) of a vicar in Suffolk. These two get involved at university in Bristol and both of them romanticize the other's background. Then we are shown how the collision plays out. There are two long scenes, the first detailing Sheila's visit to Neil's parents' home, the second his visit to hers.

Introducing Neil first is neatly deceptive, as it's gradually understood that he is a mysterious character for Sheila, and we draw closer to her as he becomes more distant. She loves him "quite desperately," especially for his "reserve, like a strength witheld," when it comes to his reluctance to exploit his humble background to score points with politically active students -- but the story shows how she has probably drawn the wrong conclusions about this. She is the one who wants to visit his parents, and imagines them as honest, blue-collar, salt of the earth folks. She is looking forward to it as a contrast because "for all her family's crowded closeness, neither her parents nor her siblings were any good at intimacy." Sheila "prepared a perfect openness for her visit to Neil's home, ready to offer up her real self at last."

The first visit appears to go well at first. She finds plenty to romanticize once she arrives in Neil's home, even the "cheap thin towels and bathmat," which are the same as the ones at her parents' house, except these had been "cherished and ironed." She recalls Neil saying his mother had been his confidante, staying up late talking to him and the friends he brought home. She envies this, but misses the Mama's Boy Alert. After dinner, in bed (she is lodged in his sister's room -- who is apparenly gone, unclear where or why unless I missed something), she becomes lonely and sneaks to Neil's room. There she tries quietly to initiate sex, and he'll have none of it. He's uncomfortable, as the walls are thin, and this is the first sign of tension. She gives up, and on her way back overhears his mother complaining, in a different voice "that must be her real voice 'How can I talk to her?... with that accent like a mouthful of cut glass.'" It's a little disappointing that we don't get much reaction from Shelia about this. She merely muses that Neil's mother has mixed up "talking through a mouthful of plums" and "an accent like cut glass." The overall impression is we have an only son with a close, protective mother. I would have liked more of Shelia's thoughts about these revelations.

But we're off to her house, out in the countryside, a messier, more chaotic, more "natural" family. She is disappointed that Neil gets along with her dad the vicar and talks intellectual stuff with him. In her family, the children, deathly afraid of a sermon, have cut off the parents from any intelligent conversation. She despises her mother's plain cooking; nice detail: a French cookbook she gave them as a gift sits unused on a shelf, "its pages gummed together by the steam of hundreds of pans of boiling potatoes." "How can you not see how awful they are?" she asks him. And, she accuses, "You closed your eyes when he prayed at the table last night."

By now the reader is completely drawn into Sheila's POV, and Neil is still really a stranger. I love how the author manages this. It's all given in carefully selected physical detail and dramatization. Except at the beginning, when we are getting background in a hurry, I think there is only one time in the whole piece that the author stoops to telling us what Sheila is feeling. Otherwise, we see it through action, as we should. "Sheila was walking backward ahead of him on the path, in her eagerness to convey to him the truth about her parents." And the way his father "was paying her subtle harmless attentions ... spooning sugar into her tea and smoothing creases out of her coat when he hung it up." Great stuff like that. Lots to re-learn about the supreme value of concretizing details in this story.

Unlike his family, she believes hers avoids intimacy, communicating in "evasive codes, fumbling and deflecting contact." This climaxes in a game of charades, which the stoic, industrial Neil has never played. He can't get the hang of it, but Sheila's family throws everything into it: costumes, props, and mounting, eccentric excitement. Neil is assaulted by (and the reader treated to) the vicar parading about in a green dress, for example. The POV switches briefly to Neil to underscore his discomfort at feeling "strong stirrings of desire" as he watches Sheila, in her father's silk robe (which she lets fall open) playing the part of a hairdresser, trying to kiss her own mother, who is dressed up as a shy boy with a moustache penciled in. A game of charades is a darned handy thing to have in a story. When the family is done, they sit "flushed and panting" and emit "shamed giggles." Yet even as the "Issues!" bell is going off in the reader's head, the sense is that this family is in some ways more authentic with their feelings, even if they have to couch them in theater. Sorry, theatre.

Then out in Nature, Neil believes they are alone and it's his turn to ask for sex, and it's Sheila's turn to get uncomfortable, sure that someone has been tracking their movements. Neither is comfortable being "sexy" on their home turf, then. And this is a little weird true thing that surely many of us have noticed in our own lives. There is a lot going on sexually under the surface of this story -- from Neil sleeping in his parents' bed to the cross-dressing and desire he feels at watching his girlfriend basically trying to seduce her own mother. The couple in fact never has sex in the story.

The final scene brings Sheila herself closer to reintegrating with her family, as she goes off to town with her sister Hilary to do something with Hilary's "mousy hair" (note she has kept the hairdresser character in this neat detail). As they slog through the damp, verdant countryside on their way home, the author (mistakenly in my opinion) does "tell" rather than "show" her transformation: "For the first time, Sheila experienced a rush of strong feeling for her home and past." No! We get it through the action. Trust the reader. Anyway, the two girls spy Neil through the window in the vicar's study as he listens to one of their brother's records. Outside the earth is choking itself on humid country imagery of decay, with "dead weeds" and "water seeping" into their socks; "the silky seed heads of flowers and swollen blackened pods, slashed down by wind and rain, lay dissolving in the earth." Hilary begins chucking rotten apples at the window to annoy Neil, and Sheila joins in, and this is the last image: Neil, in their father's study, separated more than ever from everyone, "a stranger" now, being pelted by rotted fruit. (Note to Ms. Hadley: Should be plums.) And the final image echoes the first one: Neil being assaulted by intruding, wet, messy Nature. In Birmingham, he was able to take shelter from the elements in his mother's bed -- in Suffolk he is trapped and isolated as Sheila and her sister join Mother Earth in trying to get access to him.

As for their relationship, it seems rockier at the end than at the beginning. I think maybe they don't make it, that Sheila has discovered more about herself. Neil, even in the house's "inner sanctum," is only paradoxically more remote from her in the end -- is in fact an object of ridicule and mockery. The two visits have destroyed each other's illusions and highlighted what they each turn out to have valued of their own childhoods.

The main problems I had with the piece were Sheila's lack of reaction to Neil's mother's overheard disparagement of her. What did that mean for her? Did she tell Neil? It seems she didn't. Couldn't that have sharpened the divide between them, bringing more to a head -- or is Sheila's own stoicism being advanced, and we are to respect her for overlooking this petty and disappointing event? That and more Hilary -- Hilary turns out to be important in the story, as she initiates and takes part in the final action. Hilary is suddenly revealed as the missing link to Sheila's rediscovered bond with her own family. Would have been nice to have a bit more of her earlier, so we have an even better idea what her imagistic combination with Sheila means for the story. And Hilary's strong ending presence reminded me that we know little of Neil's sister Chris, who'd be another chance at contrast -- but maybe the story is complicated enough as it is.

I like that the author basically takes some archetypes/cliches (Country Mouse, City Mouse, Oedipus, Wacky Rural Family, Blue-Collar icon -- he almost seems a socialist realist painting) and mixes them all up but good to see what happens. I think the story does a lot of things right in terms of foregrounding the action and playing visually and physically off the sharp differences between the families. There is a great deal of characterization of a number of people via slim but well-chosen details.

The story gained a lot from second reading. I don't know if that's good or not. Frank Conroy said you should never expect a second read, and if something comes through on a second pass that didn't on the first, it's a sign the thing isn't quite done. Then again, Frank was surely one of the greatest readers in the word, and I'm not. I can't really think of a good piece of writing that didn't get better in subsequent reads. Lots of details slip through the fingers of my brain on a first read and are put in a different sort of memory that enriches a second one. I appreciate a story like this one that pays off more than once -- I liked it better on second read. But in the end, I most admire the author's choice to tackle the subtle and maddening little habits and ruts of family life that weigh so heavily on one's preception of oneself.

(For another take on the story, check out The Marvelous Garden.)

A different kind of movie review

Um, if you haven't already, you might want to check out Brando's latest piece, called "Gene Shalit's parasitic twin reviews Revenge of the Sith." Yeah, you probably want to do that.

"Our mother didn’t help matters by dressing us in the same outfits," explains Shalit's abbreviated brother 'Harry.' "So we escaped to the dark safety of the movie theater, where I could detach from him for a couple hours without a lot of screaming and fainting." In case you were wondering about the hair thing, Gene's signature frizztop "...stores vital nutrients I could only otherwise get by digesting his internal organs."

Dark, dark stuff. (TLB, what the hell is in y'all's medicine cabinet?)

Got a Wal-Mart story?

Or better yet, a digital camera or video camera? Be part of Robert Greenwald's next movie, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price. You may remember his last film, Outfoxed, which did an end run around corporate distribution and wound up selling 100,000 DVDs. Greenwald writes in the Huffington Post about how his new project came to be.

How many plots are there?

I thought this mostly positive review by Denis Dutton in the Washington Post Book World was interesting. He's reviewing a book I hadn't heard of: The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, by Christopher Booker. It took Mr. Booker 34 years to write it. Then I read this mostly negative review by Carolyne Larrington.

It seems (I don't know, I haven't read the thing) that Booker's contention, relying heavily on Jung, is that there are seven basic plots ("Rebirth," "Overcoming the Monster," etc.) and that these are hard-wired into our psyches. Something went wrong 200 years ago and we have "lost the plot." Larrington's criticisms that Booker ignores or dismisses women writers, modern writers, non-European and non-American writers are serious, so I don't think I'll be reading this in my struggle to understand just what the hell it is we think we're trying to do as writers. I'll stick to Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, which boils everything down to one plot and utilizes stories from every corner of the globe to do it.

The desire to categorize plotlines into a manageable number of manila folders -- as biologists have categorized life into kingdoms -- is one I share, I guess because it would make my job easier if it were really that basic and templateable. But I also wonder whether trying to bring such unconscious archetypes to the surface through study of their structural similarities might not defeat the whole purpose of allowing those unconscious archetypes to bubble up through the writing process. Notice the workshop has virtually nothing to say about "archetypes" or "mythological themes." To coin an analogy, that institution is much more concerned with the mundane details of carpentry than the lofty ideals of architecture.

I guess I'm saying I just realized it's much easier and more immediately satisfying to come up with a theory of X number of plots than to actually hammer away at one until you're fairly pulling out your hair in confusion and defeat (at least Booker finished his book). Come to think of it, it's easier to blog, too. It's easier to do just about freaking anything -- unless you're Joyce Carol Oates.

India bans smoking in films

If it was your dream to puff a cig in a Bollywood movie, you have till August. Old films with smoking scenes will now have to include scrolling health warnings. Poor Phillip Marlowe. I wonder, is it only fictional tobacco that fictional characters won't be able to smoke onscreen? What about yogis toking hashish or datura? What's next -- no depictions of skydiving, driving without a seatbelt, or living in Iraq? And how will they stop at films? If your book features smoking, and it's published in India, will it eventually have a Surgeon General's warning sticker on it?

New Yorker Poetry-- May 30, 2005 issue

I'm going to start trying to do the companion piece to Grendel's fiction review. Hopefully I can manage to be as consistent. Anyone know what the rules are on offering the text of the poems here? I'm not going to jail for poetry. Though I suppose I had to get a job because of it. I don't think they are available online.

"Tennis Ball"
Donald Hall


The narrative poem by Donald Hall describes the speaker's walk through a graveyard on a nice day. His dog notices a couple doing it and then dog and master walk back to the car. The poem is called “Tennis Ball” because the dog has a tennis ball in his mouth.

I've heard the word “accessible” used in reference to poems like this. It is that. It is very clear, not to say lucid, and after reading it one's feels as if one has read a poem. Unfortunately, there is almost nothing here outside of subject matter (death, sex, flowers, trees, and leaves) that makes it poetry.

After several reads I begin to assume that the speaker is visiting the grave of his wife. Very little emotion of any kind is betrayed throughout the poem, so I begin to also assume that part of the point is that death/loss becomes quotidian. A stretch. There are plastic chickens on one of the graves. This gives us the good line in the poem and it sole source of real music, “(Somebody loved somebody who loved chickens.).” This is an interesting bit of psychology and is part of the reason why the dog is along at all; perhaps the dead person loved the dog too. It's hard to tell. The speaker is so removed from the scene that nothing is felt. This is further demonstrated by the flatness of the language. I'm okay with plain language and normal syntax (I'm thinking of Stafford and Justice) but I don't really ever feel the intelligence attaching to the language in such a way as to render emotion. Everything here is passivity. I think I would have liked to have felt acceptance, which requires engagement.

Or surprise. Then the dog notices “a woman's long bare legs” and “a man's body / heaving between them.” “Heaving between them” is not bad on second thought. What is bad though is that there is no surprise or affection or even a realization that they are people. They remain body parts “a man's body” instead of “a man.” Wouldn't it be great to see some people boning in the graveyard? “Boning in the graveyard” would be a pretty good name for your garage band. But the speaker simply, “became the source of coitus interruptus.” Anyway the contrast is pretty obvious. Living and the Dead. They seem to be already dead though, so many arms and legs and later “her / head riding up and down” after the speaker peeks at them from a distance—the only way you'd know he cared at all.

Then I get a little angry at the return to the world of poetry (to be read with an English accent), “It was a fine day, leaves red.” The inversion there lets you know that we're ramping up. Finally, Gus the dog refuses to give up his tennis ball. Like much of the rest of the poem, it is an imaginable observation.

So back to accessibility. If it is, what are we accessing? There is no life on this planet. No one feels anything for anything. I respectfully suggest golf courses after dark over graveyards during the day for amorous trysts.

"Her Creed"
Sharon Olds


The Olds poem is a conversation between a daughter and her aging mother who is “near the start / of the end of her life.” They are discussing cloning (the mother thinking it's a bunch of gobbledygook and tomfoolery), the miracle of birth, and the afterlife. It is a playful conversation with the speaker in quotes and the mother in italics.

There are some nice renderings of the mother, “a delight that lies near / the center of her nature” and “going gaga so slowly / she makes it look like a natural return / to a state of grace.” And that last one is a nice bit of music with “gaga” glancing off “grace.” I also like the idea of the irrational worry about current events that the elderly sometimes have—especially about things that have almost nothing to do with them. They've lived in the world so long it is more theirs even as they lose, perhaps because they lose, the ability to affect it. My own grandmother is getting more and more confused as the months go by, but has a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of the Michael Jackson case. Such is life.

I feel though that the italic wisdom is pretty cliched. “Not real flesh, she assures me—the men cannot make happen / what happened in her body.” And later, “Not a living / cell with a soul.” Besides that, it's just the chronicle of a conversation. They decide, if they can, that they'll meet on the mother's birthday in the year 3000 (in the year 3000!) to visit the earth.

This might be a good time to talk about Politics and Poetry. There's no indication that they're South Korean, but who knows. The problem is that the poem simply brings up the issue. Cloning. There's a religious angle; it's called “Her Creed.” The word “flesh” is all over the place. And it starts with “I believe” as opposed to “We believe” which is the beginning of the Apostles' Creed? I could be wrong. Anyway they say it at church. But she just thinks cloning won't work, when, to all appearances, it certainly will. Also, there isn't any overt religious argument. So is a poem political if it doesn't take a side? Asking that question felt very Sex and the City. If so, what is this poem saying? “Old people don't like cloning because they are more likely to be religious?” “God doesn't like cloning?” The speaker, our traditional guide through the poem, has no opinion on the matter. Instead there is a rambling conversation where the speaker posits playful impossibilities. On the one hand it brings up a Big Subject and on the other it backs away from it. No Big Shadow.

There are some nice moments in the poem, but it doesn't add up to a lot. I feel like the poem could have been about anything and the relationship between the speaker and the mother would have been the same. I think it's a poem about the mother's decline and the cloning stuff is just running interference.

"The Russian Riviera" by David Bezmozgis

New Yorker fiction -- May 30, 2005 issue


Bezmozgis writes like a seasoned master, not a rookie upstart. In this story, there is no flash, no dazzle, no showing off or trying to impress. There is only the fluidity of deftly drawn realistic characters, a compelling story, subtle humor, and a sense of effortlessness in its execution. If it were up in workshop, I believe there would be nothing to say. We would adjourn to the Fox Head and toast the writer with pitchers of PBR. Hence, the blue traffic signal, which, ever since I first heard "The Wind Cries Mary" ("The traffic lights, they turn blue tomorrow"), has been for me an image of the rare and the unlikely. I guess for these reviews it will indicate the appearance of what, to me, is by all appearances Real Literature.

Because I can see nothing whatsoever to criticize in the story, I will not waste time trying to scrounge up something to make me feel smart. Saves me a lot of time this week. Does make me wonder who did this. Googling reveals that Bezmozgis has a book of stories out called Natasha and Other Stories, which certainly would appear to be worth picking up. He is a 31-year-old Jewish Latvian immigrant to Toronto and, somewhat obnoxiously, not the product not of an MFA program but of USC Film School, where he avoided taking any creative writing classes. What we have here is sheer natural talent, but far from raw, and surely Going Places. Velvet smooth, understated, chin-up honest, unflinching, unadorned, back-to-basics, the real deal, a Zen gusher spouting from that wellspring I myself lose track of ten times a day: the Beginner's Mind.

More Fun Than Old Confession

I don't know if this public confessional is "collaborative art," as the Times would have it, but it's kind of cool. Contributors mail their confessions anonymously on a 4-by-6 card. Typically, they illustrate the card in some fashion. Predictably, some are much better than others.

Barrelhouse currently reading for Issue #2

Mike Ingram, current 'shopper and editor at Barrelhouse, alerts Goats and Babies that the magazine is looking for submissions for Issue #2, which should appear by the end of this summer. You may recall TLB's alerting us to this new journal's birth last month.

"We're especially on the lookout for nonfiction that touches, in some way or another, on pop culture, whether that be movies or television or music or spelling bees or professional aerobics. One of the reasons we started the journal was to give writers a space in which to explore their pop-culture obsessions. In Issue #1, we published essays on punk rock, Magnum P.I., and the state of the movie-making industry."

Does that not sound like fun? More submission guidelines on the site.

Also: "We're always reading for the web site. Same basic rules, but shorter. About 1,500 words or less." And: "We're hoping to be able to pay contributors to Issue #2, but there's no guarantee (and in any case it won't be a whole lot). We will, however, buy beers for contributors, and last time I made everyone a [censored to protect the guilty -ed.]. We also provide contributor copies, of course."

Giving the world the finger

In case you missed it, this neat global analogy is from Indra Nooyi, President and CFO of PepsiCo, in remarks before the Columbia Business School graduation a couple of weeks ago:

First, let’s consider our little finger. Think of this finger as Africa. Africa is the little finger not because of Africa’s size, but because of its place on the world’s stage. From an economic standpoint, Africa has yet to catch up with her sister continents. And yet, when our little finger hurts, it affects the whole hand.

Our thumb is Asia: strong, powerful, and ready to assert herself as a major player on the world’s economic stage.

Our index, or pointer finger, is Europe. Europe is the cradle of democracy and pointed the way for western civilization and the laws we use in conducting global business.

The ring finger is South America, including Latin America. Is this appropriate, or what? The ring finger symbolizes love and commitment to another person. Both Latin and South America are hot, passionate, and filled with the sensuous beats of the mambo, samba, and tango: three dances that – if done right – can almost guarantee you and your partner will be buying furniture together.

This analogy of the five fingers as the five major continents leaves the long, middle finger for North America, and, in particular, The United States. As the longest of the fingers, it really stands out. The middle finger anchors every function that the hand performs and is the key to all of the fingers working together efficiently and effectively. This is a really good thing, and has given the U.S. a leg-up in global business since the end of World War I. However, if used inappropriately –just like the U.S. itself -- the middle finger can convey a negative message and get us in trouble. You know what I’m talking about. In fact, I suspect you’re hoping that I’ll demonstrate what I mean. And trust me, I’m not looking for volunteers to model.

Thanks to traca de broon for finding this link.

Good thing I had my camera

How to have a light saber duel

and wind up in the hospital:

1. Get yourselves two light sabers (long, cylindrical fluorescent light bulbs should do).
2. Fill them with gasoline.
3. Light them on fire.

While we're on this, anyone have any comments on Revenge of the Sith? I thought that -- once I gave the film a pass on the wooden dialogue and stiff acting (Lucas has only had nearly three decades to improve these) -- it was barely okay. I came out feeling satisfied that the series had filled the gaps, brought the whole thing rather poetically full circle, and explained much more than I wanted to know about why mannikin -- sorry, Anikin -- went all DV. However, the last two films had lowered my expectations nearly to the floor, so on balance, as a film per se, like any other film, I'd have to say it very nearly also sucked, though not quite. And it was nice to have the Senate nuclear option happen in a galaxy far, far away that is not called Washington, D.C. -- an 11th hour deal by moderates would have so ruined that climax.

Notes from an Abject Cine-dork

This new Time magazine Top 100 movies poll didn't anger me as much as I thought it would (City of God? Rock on), but it did get me all listalgic and stuff. So - pants down, red-faced - here's my top 10. And I invite you all to chime in with yours. I'm curious, darnit.

1) Citizen Kane
2) The Decalogue
3) 8 1/2
4) Touch of Evil
5) The Seven Samurai
6) The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
7) The Seventh Seal
8) The Thin Blue Line/The Fog of War
9) 2001
10) The Exorcist/The Exorcist III

"Two's Company" by Jonathan Franzen

New Yorker fiction -- May 23, 2005 issue


I really dug this story for a few reasons. For one thing, it's short -- roughly seven New Yorker columns -- and the pace is careening, rollicking, the style relaxed and informal. It's almost a yarn, a little bit like some of Annie Proulx's stories, like a transcript of overhearing the author tell it as opposed to coming off as soberly crafted. My favorite kind of writing. And it's funny.

Pam and Paul, the "perfect couple," are vividly rendered (without much physical description). Here's a pair who married before they even got out of college and hit it big together as cowriters of an NBC sitcom that sounds a lot like That 70s Show. I like how the two pieces they are (mostly) separately writing now act as microcosms of their own relationship. Pam is working on a romantic comedy film about the perfect couple; Paul is having trouble with a pilot, based on "comic literary vignettes" from his high school notebooks, for a TV series about a high school couple whose parents die and who then have to run the family businesses in a big mansion. Rather like the 30-acre spread in the mountains that Pam and Paul have recently purchased after retiring from their hit show. Another "spread" is that of Pam's girth of late. Leading naturally to...

Paul's hankering after the young actress Tracy Gill -- which he consummates using her photo in the guesthouse bathroom, and whom he wants for unspoken but surely prurient reasons to cast in his pilot. Paul's desires are unwittingly cropping up in Pam's script, wherein the perfect couple, "Sam and Paula," are on vacation in Maui, and Paula suspects that Sam is interested in a dumb blonde bombshell named Kimbo who is also vacationing there, but he's really not interested in her -- misunderstandings abound, hilarity ensues, etc. "Why can't he be?" asks Paul when she lets him read the script. "Why can't she be like Paula, only younger?" That combined with Pam's hostile reactions ("Because she's a big-titted dolt" and "...because that wouldn't be funny. Apart from that one little problem, its total lack of funniness, it's a great idea.") are all the reader needs as a setup for the rest of the plot. The reader gets it that their creative endeavors are no longer fictional from here on, but a way to work through their problems without having to deal with each other.

Of course Paul brings things to a head with Tracy Gill -- immediately, which I appreciated as a reader. No lengthy subplots, no dinner parties where their tensions are further cranked up. Paul sets up a lunch with Tracy Gill, gets in his car, and meets her at Starbucks. The 20-year-old Tracy has brought her mother to this meeting, crushing Paul's plans and leading immediately to the crisis. The mother has four questions for Paul: "What exactly does the phrase 'pre-meeting meeting' mean?" "Where's your wife?" "Why aren't we meeting in your office?" And "Why did you not want Tracy's agent here?"

The crisis beats him home, for the mother has simply phoned Pam, who kicks Paul out. His typical male reframing is priceless: "You're splitting up with me because I had coffee with Tracy Gill and her mother?" I love how the karma kicks in, in which Paul has to sign away all rights to her movie, which goes on to gross $110 million, the first of a string of hit "comedies for an older female audience." Pam's "higher tolerance for cliche," which even he acknowledges as the source of most of their commmercial success together (even though he is the "funnier" writer), continues to be a source of success for her, while he, with "the whole nation" against him, moves to New York. "You could see him at a certain type of party, standing near open windows, wearing black, smoking cigarettes, and hoping to talk about his favorite subject, which was the badness of his ex-wife's films."

Pam's working out of her marital issues through her film script is based on her erroneous belief that she and Paul actually are the perfect couple. She is oblivious to the turmoil gurgling within him. This innocence, ending up handsomely rewarded, stands in stark contrast to Paul, who in his attempt to escape the confines of his co-writer-wife reaches back to high school for his material, a period when he was more purely himself, the only time in his life when he was apart from Pam.

It's tempting to speculate that Pam and Paul (and the possibly unconscious and revealing gender-bent Sam and Paula) represent the two Jonathan Franzens that appeared to coexist at that certain cultural moment we're all thinking of, and if it's true, it makes the story even more interesting. The author's very public and awkwardly handled brush with mainstream popular bestsellerdom could conceivably, had he gone that way, which he wouldn't have, led toward more of a Pam-esque career. The narrowly avoided Oprahfication and commercial pigeon-holing can be seen as the equivalent of turning out "comedies for an older female audience." And the dark-clad writer standing around at New York parties needs no interpretation. Is this story a kind of hashing through of that what-if instant in Franzen's life, when his previously serious literary image was briefly and bizarrely eclipsed by the what-the-fuck-is-going-on influence of a TV show book club? It's certainly fun to think that.

The only thing that nagged me during the enjoyable seven minutes it took to read the story is the vague sense that the author was not being compassionate to his characters. This also bothered me with The Corrections, which I thought was brilliant and hilarious for about 80 pages but whose finish line I ended up limping across with a grudge. It's a fine line between biting satire and being dismissive and sadistic toward your creations. A few times I thought, "He's making fun of these people, he's too distant and cold toward them." However, by the end, for whatever internal reason, I decided I didn't much care, and that the tale worked for me as entertainment anyway. Is it "literary" or autobiographically symbolic or merely frivolous and fun? Who knows. Maybe you can tell me.

It takes a Brit to stand up to the Republican juggernaut

George Galloway yesterday before a Senate subcommittee (the mainsteam media snippets are the tip of the iceberg):

I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims, did not have weapons of mass destruction.

I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda.

I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001.

I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.

Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.

Read the whole transcript. Blistering!

Michael Cunningham Running the MFA show at CUNY Brooklyn

Came across this surprising interview with Michael Cunningham through Maud Newton's Blog.

Surprising that he's taken on the administrative duties of an MFA program, and that in many ways he's trying to fix what he sees as the deficiencies of other programs, including Iowa's. I don't know if I buy everything he has to say. Something about the diversity and income issues seems a little too... I don't know... politically correct to me. But he has some interesting ideas. Class size is small. And I'm curious how he's running his novel workshops, something that seemed to be a real concern in the IWW Director's search. Also interesting how everyone is always saying the atmosphere at the Iowa Writers Workshop has changed over the decades. Was it really that different, I wonder, or do the war stories of alumni across the years just make it out to be so?

"The Room" by William Trevor

New Yorker fiction -- May 16, 2005 issue



A meditative, deceptively complex character study is how I'd describe this. Trevor seems to excel at intense, intimate looks into the lives of ordinary folks going through their crises in Ireland or England. This one takes place in a cheap London flat, the "temporary accomodations" of a married woman's married lover, who is never named (even she doesn't seem to know or remember his name). Beginning as a straightforward tale of a loveless affair, the reader is gradually let in on the darker reasons that have led her to get involved with another man and then released along with her in the end, after nearly scraping bottom, as she believably comes to a fateful decision.

Nine years prior to the action, cops showed up at her door to talk to her husband Phair (how about that -- "a Phair") about the death of a woman of leisure that he had been seeing (note: never pay a whore with a check). Phair was accused of the murder and arrested, even though Katherine "instinctively" lied to the officers about when he came home two Thursday nights ago. With no corroborating evidence, the case then hung on the word of one witness, the old landlady who identified Phair from a photograph. Eventually, though, her memory and confidence faded, and the judge threw out the case.

Katherine finds herself telling this story for the first time ever to the complete stranger she's sleeping with. The surprising and interesting thing is that she's still with this husband, still claims there is love there. They have gotten through it. It's in the past. Can you imagine? "You're fairly remarkable, you know," loverboy says. "To love him so deeply still." "And yet I'm here," she replies. But it's not even revenge that's driven her into another man's arms. As she says, she was merely curious about deception. And now she knows "what it had felt like for Phair." As the bland affair drags on, it seems she's more drawn to this man's room (see story title) than to him. The details of the room are as follows: books, boxes, open suitcases, word processor that "had not been plugged in, its cables trailing on the floor," clothes hanging on the back of a door. And a giant anatomical study of an elephant on the wall, with "arrows indicating where certain organs were beneath the leathery skin."

The room, rented by the man during this trial separation from his wife, appropriately squalid and joyless for an affair, becomes for Katherine a sort of dry run at leaving her own spouse, something that had never been brought up between them before. This realization sneaks up on her and the reader at the same time. Boxes and suitcases, once visualized, become possible for her. The elephant, dissected on a poster there, would appear to be a symbol for the grisly guts underneath the leathery skin of her marriage. She begins staying in the room after he leaves for work, making up excuses for her husband when she comes home (she has lost her job and says she's looking for work -- her sudden unemployment also may have precipitated this "variation of the order and patterns"). She loves to sleep in the room -- a ten-minute nap there seems boundless. She is testing the waters of leaving, but this doesn't occur to her until the end of the story. That's one of the cool things about "The Room": somehow Trevor is able to keep a lot of emotional stuff under the surface of his POV character, letting it dribble out, and the character is as suprised as the reader is when it does. Another neat thing is there is no sex at all, and yet the sordid atmosphere of afternoon sex with a stranger in a shabby flat is very much present nevertheless. She drinks coffee at a cafe across the street and finds as much pleasure in it as she had in the afternoon's romp. Trevor knows you can fill in the sex yourself.

The nine-year-old unsolved murder case nibbles away at her throughout the story, as if once she has talked about it to someone, once it has escaped, it gains a life of its own that eventually gnaws away at the remaining shreds of her marriage. Her thoughts about it and memories of it creep more and more into the present action until they begin to directly interrupt and hijack paragraphs. After six months, somehow she knows it's over one random day after they sleep together. "They had not said goodbye, yet as she went downstairs, hearing again the muffled gabble of the racecourse commentator, she knew it was for the last time. The room was finished with. This afternoon, she had felt that, even if it had not been said." The words echo an earlier scene: "They didn't embrace before he hurried off, for they had done all that." This is not an intimate affair, not something done for love, but an ongoing event that is allowing her to break her pattern and see herself anew for the first time in a long time.

She decides on this day to leave her husband. "It wouldn't be a shock, nor even a surprise. He expected no more of her than she'd given him, and she would choose her moment to say that she must go. He would understand; she would not have to tell him. The best that love could do was not enough, and he would know that also." So, she suddenly understands that just because you still love someone doesn't mean you have to stay. And also that by staying this long she has already exceeded her husband's expectations for her loyalty and continued commitment. It's quite a complicated working through of emotion for such a short story.

The tone is as flat and dead as her affect, which would be classically objectionable in a story for workshop, for example ("I want to see her emotions more" or "numb characters make poor points of view"), but Trevor pulls it off somehow anyway, in my opinion. Something about the subdued ... everything ... makes it okay. Maybe because it's such a contrast to the scandalous subject matter at hand: extramarital affairs, a murder, an arrested husband. Maybe by tackling such large, loud stuff so quietly, Trevor is able to transcend both cliche and reader boredom. At least that was true for this reader.

Money for nothing and your chicks for free

Hey, kids, check out this database of grants for writers and translators.

Cross Promotion at the Hy-Vee

Many of you, if you were in the IC this past winter, might remember seeing Larry Baker's novel "Athens, America" in the produce section of your local employee-owned grocery. Here is Larry's take on how that came about. Of course Moby Lives always gets the skinny first, but just in case you missed it...

On a more personal note, Mr. Baker lives across the alley from me and has a nice wife and two very small dogs, as well as an ivy-free lawn after which I lust in my sinful heart.

McSweeney's open letters

McSweeney's is soliciting "Open Letters to People or Entities Who are Unlikely to Respond." (This has your names written all over it, Roper, SER, Gwarbot, Segall, Brando, etc. Speaking of Brando, there's some great new content up at Circle Jerk at the Square Dance.)

"Along the Highways" by Nick Arvin

New Yorker fiction -- May 9, 2005 issue



This story by Nick Arvin, (workshop class of 2002? 2001?), simply combines a love triangle and a car chase. How does it get away from the cliches of each? I'm not sure it does. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em? But let's see. We have a neat-freaky-geeky code monkey named Graham, who has an unreciprocated thing for his widowed sister-in-law, Lindsay. In the middle of this comes Doug, a friend of Graham's. Graham spies them in a convertible and follows them. And follows them. They notice. Cell phones are employed. The lovebirds were going to her parents' place "on a lake up north," but skip this when it's clear that Graham is not giving up.

I like that the story attempts to deal with that awkwardness of the wedded one of a deceased relative, in this case his brother's widow. What to do about her? Graham doesn't have much woman sense. One kind word from Lindsay years ago sparks a fantasy that he, Graham, will end up with her. He likes Doug, for all his paunchy garrulousness, but because Doug is not the insular, socially awkward geek that Graham is, he doesn't understand why Lindsay would take up with him. I guess.

And that's pretty much the story. There's a lot of predictable dialogue, the wrenching working through of the situation we've all seen done many times. The difference here, and perhaps the problem, is that they drive all night. The car chase lasts all night until Doug's convertible runs out of gas (I did like the goofy parts where they both have to stop for gas, warily eyeing each other by the pumps). But doubtful that that would really happen. And it doesn't have to, it turns out, because at that point the bulky Doug simply overpowers -- beats up -- the weakling programmer Graham and takes his car, leaving him God knows where. Couldn't have expected that! What is to be learned from this? I don't know. I didn't learn much. I guess programmers are social misfits and get beat up when their obsession for someone else's woman hits the red zone. Why we are enlisted into Graham's POV to find this out is unknown. What of Lindsay -- is she perhaps the key? No, turns out she's a cutout -- who actually roots for the bigger Doug to beat up Graham harder. "Knock him out," she calls. So much for Lindsay.

There is a neat flash near the end as they are tussling, where Graham is reminded of his brother. So Doug is a brother-surrogate, and they fight like brothers. Graham's brother, also bigger than Graham, also beat up Graham when they "wrestled." But this is standard story stuff. You gotta throw something like that in there. Something to make it more poignant. Incidentally, he has also done with this story what I've always wanted to do: have all the action take place in cars.

But in the end, as I watched Graham watch the lovers drive off in his car -- which, luckily, does have gas in it -- and then take his revenge on the convertible's hood, I had to wonder, so what is the resolution here? What's been gained, added to the human specturm, what in the arc of this situation made it worthwhile for me to follow it? Has Graham's character been altered or enhanced in some way? No, he's reduced to hammering away at metal, as he hammers away at code in his work life. He is pathos.

The last line, "He felt very much awake and not at all himself," is too little, too late, in my opinion. No, you gotta not just show that, but show why we should care, no? Does it reveal something about the human condition, does it dispense a shard of truth in a way no one quite has before? Does it have a single surprise in it? That's one thing -- it's so conventional that it actually sets up an expectation of something amazing happening in the end. Needless to say... This story is like a typical workshop story, it seems to me, needing further reflection -- further meditation on the text, as Frank might have it. Why it's in the New Yorker ... you'd have to ask them. That's the question I wanted to find out by reading and responding to the fiction every week. So far, not much clue here. Am I missing something?

Close call for Danza

Many have expressed a perverse fondness for -- or at least a fascination for the overlongevity of the career of -- Tony on this blog. Seems he was nearly injured when his go-kart flipped during a taping of a Tony Danza Show segment called "The DayTony 500."

Poll results

Well, the poll about whether to allow non-contributor comments was at 69% in favor, 31% opposed when I yanked it. Of course, as a few people pointed out, it was fairly worthless and perhaps self-defeating. 55 votes is substantially more than the membership of EG (and BAF combined), meaning many non-directly involved folks voted, predictably for allowing themselves to post. And this is natural, I suppose. From the beginning, though, the poll started out even and then stretched into a rout for openness. Barring more abuse from gadflies, then, the status quo shall remain for the time being. Thanks for voting.

Frank remembered in the NYTimes

For those of you who just can't get enough Frank, and/or did not have enough of him when he was alive, here are James Salter's fond Frank memories.

What's been missing

I can't believe I've had a blog for five months and never shown pictures of my pet! Except for my profile, I guess. Anyway, here's his Dogster page, and now I can relax a little more, knowing I'm doing my best to keep things fresh and interesting. Only the best content for you people!

Robert in Paperback, Robert in the NYT Book Review (again)

Our Robert has a nice little note in Sunday's "Paperback Row" section of the Times Book Review. For those of you too broke to purchase "Rosenberg's vibrant first novel" in hardcover, you now have a paperback option (the lovely Mariner). Robert, you get the coolest covers. We should all hope for such funky, colorful covers.

It's not going to be an orgy

Excuse the self-pimpin', but I wanted to mention that I've started one of these blog thingies myself: Circle Jerk at the Square Dance

I have thought about starting a humor blog for quite some time. TLB, wearying of my comedy routines at 7:47 a.m., has repeatedly encouraged it as well. I have been posting at Frau Roper's excellent, clever Jane's Calamity (like Shouts and Murmurs, but funny). But I wanted a room of my own where I could explore my humor more deeply, post some skectches and other pieces I'd like to share, and remove my pants.

So if you're looking for a cheap laugh, head over and take a look. I'm just getting started, but there are a few things up, and I will update the blog at least a couple times a week (including Top Ten Tuesdays every week). I also plan to clear any ethnic humor with Synthetic before posting.

Debate on Earth Goat's future

In case you haven't been following the thread ... a feisty, pseudonymous Synthetic has suggested a different way forward for this blog. I'm fairly sure how I feel about it, but I'd like input from others -- howzabout some of you lurkers? I'm open to changing my mind. (So I guess there is democracy after all -- who knew.) The questions are age-old: Who are we? Why are we here? Where are we going? Who's going with us? Who really gives a flying you-know-what? The story so far:

At 11:15 AM, May 02, 2005, Grendel said...

Synthetic, would you mind emailing me and letting me know who you are, and I can return the favor? I'd be much obliged -- you can get my email from my profile. Most everyone who regularly posts here knows who's who, and if you'd like to be included, the same should go for you, I reckon.

At 7:24 PM, May 02, 2005, synthetic said...

Gee, I dunno, that sounds kind of clubby, Grendel.

At 8:56 PM, May 02, 2005, Roper said...

Putting a name/face to aliases builds trust and respect. What's clubby about that?

At 7:08 AM, May 03, 2005, Grendel said...

It's a collaborative blog -- a community, not an anonymous posting station. You missed the meeting five months ago. All the contributors are to be known to all of us. I don't think it's too much to ask for the identity of someone who posts so much here. (In fact, I am revising the rules in the fine print, the last thing in the right-hand column.) It's a matter of knowing who is regularly saying things on this blog that I started and that will be linked to my and other contributors' names. End of story. It's not anarchy here, nor libertarian utopia, nor commune. It's not even democracy. It's a benevolent, informal Grendelocracy. You don't like, free to get your own -ocracy. So come on, Synthetic, we don't bite, unless roused, and all the kids have done it.

At 10:04 AM, May 03, 2005, synthetic said...

Oh, I don't know. It seems to me that if you want that kind of control, they have things called intranets and private servers and phone calls and gated communities and Team Blog Only. I like Grendelocracy as is, it's on a bench in the Tim Berners-Lee Municipal Park.

If you do go Team Blog Only, though, then in all seriousness I propose changing the name of the blog to "TinPot EarthGoat".

Jane: I've never seen online community need Names! Names! in order to build trust and respect. The quality of posts and moderation determines poster and community reputations. See Slashdot and The Decembrist, both of which remain open and anonymous, because that's how you get smart, perceptive people you don't already know to come and keep things from getting stale and...clubby.

But can I get a cut of the action figure sales?

No advance, no hard edits, but Macmillan will publish your novel and give you 20%. I say if someone's stupid enough to publish a young author without serious edits ("freelance"? pah!) then they deserve whatever they get.

A racist, a gay guy, and a Chinese protester walk into a bar

I was writing late at the Java House Friday and began walking home around 12:30, dodging packs of stumbling, singing youths in matching bar-crawl tee-shirts. I walked up Linn to Market Street, where I noticed a car swerving and a guy running out in front of it, blocking the car every time it tried to go around him. "I love you!" he was hollering, slamming his hands on the hood. Somehow the car squirmed around him and took off.

That's when he turned his attention to the Greyhound bus barrelling down on him. He calmly stepped into its path, in the middle of Market, hands waving in the air, until the bus hissed to a stop right in front of him, a la Tienanmen Square. Guy started smacking the bus windows, yelling, "I love you! I love you!" He walked around to the driver's side and was nearly clipped by a car cruising by in the left lane. When he was out of the way, the bus roared to life again and left him, bereft of reciprocating bus love, in the middle of the street. Backed up on Market were stopped cars, their drivers waiting to see what he would do next. By now I had crossed Market and was standing in front of George's. The dude, facing the glare of wary headlights, finally dropped his hands, turned, and began staggering in my direction.

Naturally I slipped into George's, took a seat at the bar, and threw anxious glances out the front window. But the guy did not come in. The bartender, Jenny, asked what I wanted. I found two dollars in my wallet and ordered a La Crosse.

"Hey, did you see that drunk out there flagging down traffic?" I asked her.

"Scrawny, tall, goatee?"

I nodded.

"I just tossed him out of here!"

"What happened?"

"He wouldn't leave Steve here alone. Kept pawing at him, saying he loved him." She grabbed a thick stack of bills from behind the bar. "On his way out, he threw fifty-six dollars at me. Idiot."

"Probably in the drunk tank by now," observed Steve. "Or the ER." He and I then got caught up in a muted, captioned Sandra Bullock movie.

Down the bar to my left, an old guy slapped a friend on the back and wheezed, "You know the difference between a Jew and a Gentile? A gentile goes out and looks for work. A Jew waits for an offer."

"Hey, who's the racist down there?" someone on the other side of me piped up. "Racism is ugly and ignorant."

"I'm not a racist," the old man protested, though he sounded somewhat chastened. He sat down beside his friend and nursed a beer.

"Sounds to me like you are."

The matter was dropped. Back to Sandra Bullock, some lame crime flick on the Oxygen Channel. I finished my beer, and Jenny approached.

"Another one?"

"No cash, I'm afraid."

"Here, let's let the asshole buy you one." She peeled bills from the stack and replaced my glass under the tap.

"If someone had told me," I said, "while I was watching him stop that bus, that he would be buying me a beer within fifteen minutes ... there'd be no way I could have imagined how that would work."

"And yet it did," she said, pushing the glass toward me. "Fate is funny."

As I sipped that one, I heard two guys talking in low voices on my right -- one of whom had called the racist on his lame joke. "That's rididulous. He's not coming down here." "What if he does?" "All I said was the truth." "I want to leave." "Don't be so scared!" "I don't like it." "Look at him, he's pathetic." "But I'm uncomfortable now." And so on. From their voices, I inferred that they were gay, maybe a couple, maybe not. Which made the guy's challenge to the racist all the more admirable.

I drained the beer bought for me unknowingly by a man who was likely getting used to a jail cell and on my way to the door, on a whim, stopped beside the two guys.

"Who's the one who called that guy on being racist?" I asked.

"I have no idea," said one with a weary smile.

"I did it," the other said, turning on his stool. "I called that fucker a racist. Why?"

"I just wanted to say I admire what you did. Most people don't say anything when they overhear something like that."

"Why don't they?" He was looking at me fairly severely.

"I -- I don't know," I said. "They want to avoid conflict and tension. Take me, I was sitting closer to him down there, and I never made a peep."

"Why didn't you?" He was definitely frowning at me now. He wasn't letting up. It seemed I had made a mistake in stopping to say something.

"W-well, I'm not proud of myself. I grew up with that kind of stuff, and I guess I just found it not worth calling him on. But I just wanted to say I respect that you did. That's all."

He just shook his head at me.

"Okay, well," I said, backing away, "I'm gonna get going now."

He just stared at me. The other one raised a half-hearted hand and turned back to gaze philosophically at his beer.

I walked home feeling slightly uneasy. Why hadn't I said something? At what point would I step in and correct the stupid and the foolish? And why had I stopped to praise someone who had done what I had not? Was I trying to ingratiate myself, to let a little brave behavior rub off on me by association after the fact? I was only in the bar at all to duck a confrontation with Mr. Tienanmen Square in the first place. Like a pinball, I had been passively bounced about, winding up with a free beer on the one hand and a nagging conscience on the other. The free beer was good though.