Found Short Stories, Volume 1

(Found in Biological Science: A Molecular Approach, ed. by Hugh P. McCarthy.)

The simplest kind of maze is the T-maze, where only one choice is involved. Flatworms and earthworms can learn to make the "correct" choice of turns in this maze. Earthworms, for instance, are given the choice of entering a dark, moist chamber or of receiving an electric shock. The earthworms in an experiment took about 220 trials in the maze to learn to make the correct turn.

Press the A Button to Continue: Playing the Greatest Story Ever Told

One hears a lot these days about the confluence of video games and movies: there are scenes in the Matrix and the Spiderman franchise films, for example, which one feels at a loss watching without a joystick in hand. And then there are the Tomb Raider films in which Angelina Jolie played (or plays? - Are they done yet?) a video game character. We seem to have moved beyond making films about video games (Tron, War Games) in the 80s to making films of video games. But in all this talk about the videogamification of movies and the cinematization of video games, we often miss what is happening to the lowly book.

Hyper-text fiction aside, the most videogame-like books may well have been the "Choose-Your-Own Adventure" series that came out during the rise of the video game, culminating, perhaps inevitably, in the creation of a "Choose-Your-Own-Adventure" video game. For other books, the transformation of the text into a video game is more difficult. What would the video game of The Great Gatsby be? The Man Without Qualities? We may never know, but we can now play The Bible Game, which was published last year by a company called Crave Entertainment. I have not yet played the game (and believed until recently that it was a something out of a dream, since I discovered the game manual on Halloween night in a strange apartment in the East Village while listening to a reggae song by the Olsen Twins called "Broccoli and Chocolate") but the reviews on Amazon on mixed.

The Bible Game shows us the dangers of a distorted reading of "The Greatest Story Ever Told" : you (or your children or someone else's children) end up on the David & Goliath level, where according to the manual your mission is to "hurl stones at Philistine targets!!!" Later in the game, you compete to smash the most stories to destroy the Tower of Babel, presumably to humble mankind on behalf of an angry God. The best part of the game may be its novel definition of the grace of God as a game show bonus round, a round, which by definition none of us can truly deserve:

The final round is played after time has run out during the previous round. It is a completely unique round that gives everyone a fighting chance for first place - if they are willing to risk it all.

It's not clear from the manual what you may be risking (your score? your money? your soul?) but the game is clear about who you're up against:




The game is rated E, for "Everyone."

Famous Last Words #1

"Yes, I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?" Or so I thought.

Then he went over and sat down on the unoccupied twin bed, looked at the girl, aimed the pistol, and fired a bullet through his right temple. Or so he thought.

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. Or so he thought.

I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. Or so she thought.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past—or so we think.

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty. Or so I think I think.

His hands lift of their own and he feels the wind on his ears even before, his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs. Runs?

The Editors Have Made Their Decision

Congratulations, she said, the editors have selected you to contribute a volume of essays on contemporary poetry to our prestigious annual book series The Empirical Poem. I'm sorry, he said, editors? At the university press, she said, the screening process is a highly competitive one each year; fierce, even, some might say. I think you have the wrong number, he said, or maybe you're mistaking me for someone else; I'm an attorney, you see, not a poet. Ah, like Stevens, she said, both in your choice of vocation, I mean, and characteristic modesty; it's quite charming. Thank you, he said, but seriously, I have never written a single poem in my entire life. This is a great honor, she said, and perhaps you misunderstood me—the book will be a volume of critical essays, not poems, goodness no. You know, I think the last poem I ever read, he said, was that business about the wheelbarrow and the wet chicken. Are you suggesting, she said, that the editors are just out here playing knuckleball? So much depends on, he said, something something. Do you think the editors are fucking around, she said, flinging around a career-making commission like this willy-nilly, for a book series that has included Pfliegman's shrewd analysis of Dylan Thomas's correlative capability, Schopenhauer's award-winning study of Manxian praxis, and Rosenbaum's astonishing discourse on the poetry of babies? Something something, wet chickens, he said, I always did like that one. You decline an accolade like this, you don't just embarrass yourself, she said, you're telling everyone who's ever written a book for The Empirical Poem to go fuck themselves. I'm sorry, he said, it all sounds very fancy. The university is handing you a free meal, she said, and you're shitting on the cutlery. It's been a long day, he said, and I don't mean to sound ungrateful. I'm offering you a goddamn tenure track to Sittingprettyville, and you're forgetting that there's a difference between the outward appearance of grandiosity, she said, and the truly grand; I mean, don't lawyers fucking understand intuitively that in order to get sausage, you have to break a few eggs? Trust me, I know an egg from a spitball, he said, but where my head is at today is, if an independent pig farmer in Kentucky gets a tip to short the Chicago pork market from his growth hormone dealer, does that constitute insider trading? It would depend, she said, on whether you were talking about pork futures or pork hedge funds. See, he said, now we're talking. That is, she said, just one woman's opinion. Don't be so modest, he said, I've got a proposition for you. Okay, she said, I think I smell what you're cooking. So long as most of the essays, he said, will be about wheelbarrows and wet chickens. So long as most of my securities fraud work was in beef, she said. You know, he said, I'm an alumnus of the university. I was a litigator in Lubbock, she said, in another lifetime. Please convey my gratitude to the editors, he said, really, it's an honor. It's the curveballs, she said, that delight.

The Common Reader: A Confession

When it happened I was standing in a bookstore reading. I had stopped at Three Lives on the way home ostensibly looking for a particular book, even though I knew that the store is so small, so demurely civilized that it almost never has the book I am looking for (not even when I was looking for Jonathan Franzen's collection of essays which features - on the cover! - a photo of a woman standing in Three Lives reading), and there was little chance that it would have George Steiner's book, The Uncommon Reader. The real reason that I was there was that stopping by a bookstore on the way home seemed like a special privilege, a way of turning the inevitable commute into a late afternoon stroll. As it turned out, Three Lives did not have the book I was looking for, or even the other book I was looking for, or even the new reissue of Eichmann in Jerusalem that I'd considered buying when I saw it there only a few weeks ago laid out neatly next to the other attractively packaged volumes in the Penguin “Great Ideas” series. I thought about buying a book by Orhan Pamuk and then felt embarrassed about being a part of the Nobel Prize-winner's "bump" in sales. I ended up reading E.L. Doctorow's new book, The Creationists – his short essay on Dos Passos. I was thinking about the opening of U.S.A. when I heard a man yelling. What was he saying? The word I heard was that unprintable, unmentionable word that one seems to hear all the time, on the street, on the radio, in movies, apparently stripped of its earlier violence. He shouted it again. The doors of the tiny bookstore had been left wide open to the street, inviting in passersby. As the man walked past the open door, I saw his face clearly, though all I remember now was that he was old and white, and did not look especially insane. He was dressed in a puffy winter coat and was carrying what looked like a laundry bag. I looked around. The woman who had told me a few minutes earlier that the store could “special order” the Steiner book was standing nearby, nervously facing the same direction. I tried to go back to reading the essay, back to Dos Passos, back to my admiration not only for his work, but for the life of the author, his ambition and productivity and commitment to putting himself in the center of the action, but then I heard the man's voice again, and I could not read another word. What would Dos Passos do? I had just been reading about the Spanish Civil War, about Hemingway and Dos Passos splitting over the murder of José Robles. I thought that I should walk over and punch the man in the face. This seemed like the brave act of principle until I reminded myself how little courage it would take to hit an old man. I could not tell if he was talking to anyone in particular. Whose defense would I come to? "You filthy, no good n-----." I couldn’t see the old man any more but I could still feel his presence. I listened for a response, waiting for some evidence of a victim, some sign to tell me how to act. Was reading cowardice? A young, pretty mother walked past the open doors holding her daughter's hand. The girl said something I couldn't hear, and then the mother who was like so many mothers in the neighborhood – finely dressed, composed, and well-married – said to her daughter, "Well, I don't like that word either." The wind picked up, colder than anyone had expected it to be. I couldn’t hear the man’s voice any longer. The store clerk went back to the cash register. I looked back down at the book that was still in my hands, unable to think of any surer response than this.

The Possibilities Are Endless

You write a story, but no one likes it. You write a story that people like, but you don't get into intro. creative writing. You take creative writing in college, but discover a consuming love of Scotch upon graduation. You don't have a drinking problem, but you demonstrate an interest in paying the rent every month, so you get a steady job. Your steady job doesn't take up all your time, but you develop a strong loyalty to a number of television programs. TV doesn't interest you, but your other hobbies (e.g., hiking the Adirondacks, teaching skeet shooting to youngsters, and COBOL programming) all prove much more gratifying and rewarding in the long-term. Writing stories continues to be a pastime, but you can't imagine how you'd ever quit your job to go back to school. You apply to MFA programs, but you don't get in. You get in, but you aren't awarded any scholarship money. You get a scholarship, quit your job, and move across the country for grad school, but your work is mocked and derided by your professors. Your professors say nice things, but your submissions are torn ball from socket by your fellow students in workshop like a gang of nicotine-starved hyenas. Your work is steady and good and admired, but you find that, once having tapped the well of adventures of a bitter teenager railing against distracted parents who don't understand, all funneled into a small sheaf of angry, pseudoautobiographical sketches, you never manage the stamina to write more than the first seventy pages of a novel. You complete a story collection and a solid five hundred pages of a novel, but then you're married and the first kid comes along and there's that thirty-year fixed-rate and diapers and a college fund and a revived enthusiasm for vermouth and who has the time? You write your story collection and your bildungsroman, but you have no idea where to send them. You send writing samples to a number of agents, but they all send polite rejections back saying they're not smitten with the work and anyway this is a tough time for story collections. You find an agent who loves your work and wants to represent you but after a while phone calls go unreturned and letters unanswered and eventually he turns up in Brazil, in hock, and addicted to yagé. Your agent sends your manuscript out to a number of presses, but they all gently decline, saying they're not sold on the work and anyway this is a rough season for bildungsromans. Your agent goes down the publishers, rung by reputation rung, until your book is picked up by a small outfit based in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, but your first print run is only three hundred units, all flimsy and curly and print-on-demand, and none get sent to reviewers, and the only distribution this outfit has, you notice, apparently due to a small arbitration case or two and perhaps a few other various contractual contretemps, is from its own website. Your agent sells your manuscript to a respected New York publisher, but your editor is fired before your book's pub date and no one else at the house ever picks it up and your words are consigned to the oblivion of the remainder bin. Your first book comes out and is championed by your publisher but PW, Kirkus, and Library Journal all trash it. Your first book is loved by the trades but Michiko Kakutani guts it with a strange, metaphorical meat cleaver. Janet Maslin calls your writing the new sliced bread, but the book never gets legs and the large print run of the paperback gets whacked by returns. Everyone loves your first book so much that your days are filled with praise and your nights with unceasing debauchery, but when the dust settles you find that you're done, you've had your say, that was it, and you never write a second. You almost finish your second book but one morning while you're out getting coffee your house burns to the ground, the only copy of the only draft of your manuscript inside it. Your second book is lousy. You're proud of your second book but it's universally eviscerated, said to suffer from an inoperable case of sophomore slump. Your first two books do so poorly commercially that you're forced to begin your career all over again under a pseudonym. After your second book and first marriage you decide to throw in the towel and go to law school. After your third book and second spouse and first disappointing film adaptation you channel all your energy into teaching undergrads. After your fourth book and third affair with a former student and second arrest for public déshabillé and first libel suit you move to a remote region of New England, utterly disgusted with the phoniness of the world and determined to withdraw from it forever. After your fifth book and fourth conversion to Catholicism and third stay at McLean Hospital and second Pulitzer and first failed run for office you find you simply have little interest in anything other than angry letters to the editor and herb gardening and that old flame, come back to love you once more, schnapps, sweet schnapps. After winning the Nobel prize for literature you are cursed, damned, as so many claim to have been before you, and you never write another word you're happy with again.

Reading Report #2

Brooklyn climbs itself like an autodidact, like a vine using its own stalk as a trellis, like a bridge being built out across a river with no supports. The streets work the graveyard shift for the squeaky wheels dreaming self-improvement dreams, but the days thwart ambition with an inventory of niggling details: "Beer bottles and beer cans, liquor bottles, candy wrappers, crushed cigarette packs, caved-in boxes that had held detergents, rags, newspapers, curlers, string, plastic bottles, a shoe here and there, dog feces." Or, rather, human feces? This is a civilized, late twentieth-century Brooklyn, but a Brooklyn in which men urinate out into the void from the windows of the upper floors of brownstones. A protagonist reminisces about a childhood hobby of shitting as a group pastime, an outdoor activity. Do the citizens of the borough, bum and burgher alike, take delight in shitting in the gutters, on subway rails, in the parks, on stoops, in the rivers, on sidewalks? Do we all stand and point and howl with the joy of our own unaided manufacture? Who was it who said that this is the only city in the world where the dogs can step in human shit? Brooklyn is a wise child, innocent and depraved, wild-eyed and sleepless, its Brooklynness impossible to box, wrap, or bottle. Brooklyn is a nation of immigrants and exhibitionists, escapees and cartographers, pirate lepidopterists and amateur gang leaders, petty thieves on sabbatical and nice guys who got stuck halfway; in short, life is not entirely wonderful here, and on that point, children and adults can agree, but they always get stuck squabbling over the particulars. Every curve of this marvelous place, a once and future garbage dump; each corner harbors ghosts; every crook vibrates with the history of the culture. (For example, did you know that part of The Warriors was filmed on one of the dead platforms of the Hoyt-Schermerhorn stop?) I love New York.

Positively 4th Street

I've forgotten the party, but I remember the bum, the one in Washington Square, stumbling around singing "New York, New York" to all the tourists and the students and the dogwalkers and dealers, really belting it out; he had a hell of a voice this guy, a boozy, old time Bowery voice, a real charming hounddog crooner, but he only had one note, a sustained shout he threw in anywhere he wanted to: at the end of "New York, New Yo--------k," or in the middle of some other jumbled line. He sang,

If you can make it there
You'll make it anywhere
It's up to you - 8 fucking million
You---------------------

He wore a wool Yankees cap and jean jacket and carried around a jug of chocolate milk he drank from in between songs. He was drunk, but I wasn't sure it was permanent or temporary. For all I knew this guy had a house with a backyard in Queens; he had work boots on; he could have been a contractor or the owner of a trucking company or a lost beat poet, the one in Tangier, sitting slumped in the corner of the room, ignoring the others, picking away at his guitar, mumbling to himself, "If you see her, say hello, she might be in Tangier." What I know for sure, what we all remember, is that this man was compelled to sing and he was making it up as he went along.

Summer and Smoke; or, the Muppets of Tangier

Remember that party back at the beginning of the summer, or maybe it was the end of the spring, the party where at one point I was talking about how I misremember facts, get details fogged and discombobulated, maybe especially when it comes to the biographies or writers, like how I remember the story of Carson McCullers out on Nantucket in the summer of 1946 with Tennessee Williams and his companion, Pancho Rodriguez, and the two writers would sit every morning, all summer long, on opposite sides of the dining-room table, kitty-corner to one another, Tom with his typewriter and Carson with hers and a bottle of whiskey between them, during which stay she wrote The Member of the Wedding and he wrote The Glass Menagerie—except, reading McCullers's biography I realize I've got it wrong, that summer she wrote a play based on her third novel, and he, rather, was working on Summer and Smoke (in a year when Menagerie was still running on Broadway); except, come to think of it, I might not have mentioned that story at all at that party (and I might actually be accurately remembering an old, pickled creative writing teacher's inaccurate recounting of the story), but I think I did talk about my memory of Allen Ginsburg showing up at William S. Burroughs's house in Tangier, finding Bill anesthetized and inconsolable, sprawled on his bed like a lovesick nihilist with a monkey on his back, pages upon loose pages, stained and trampled typescript, strewn about the apartment, which Allen picked up and started to read, and maybe Jack Kerouac was there too, and somehow, in the retelling, Jack and Allen took on the voices of Kermit the Frog and Fozzie Bear, if I'm remembering right, and Bill had the voice of Sam the Eagle, and Kermit and Fozzie thought some of Sam's pages were pretty good, maybe they could put them together in some kind of order, like a novel, and Sam said no, no, it wasn't worth it, life was misery and romance was a crock and boys were fickle and besides, there was no more decent hash to be had in all of Morocco, but Kermit and Fozzie gathered all the pages together and put them in an order that made sense and took them to a publisher in Paris, and that became Naked Lunch (although maybe I didn't mention that story at the party either, maybe it came up that afternoon back at the beginning of the summer when we were talking on West 4th Street, not far from the library, while a bum sang variations on the old jingle our city used to use to advertise itself to the world, "I Love New York," at us)? Anyway, that was a fun party.

The Last Gatsby

One of the bittersweet pleasures of the end of summer is the nostalgia one feels for the promising days only a few months earlier, back at the beginning of the season before the deep heat had settled in, back when the dogwoods and pear trees were still in bloom, and people asked each other about their plans, and all of life seemed projected forward towards the prospect of those three golden months. On a breezy day in May, drunk on my own utopian schemes for the summer, I walked into the library looking for Gatsby. I wanted a summery book, something alluring and corruptible, and apparently I was not alone. The only copy of the book left on the shelf had been thoroughly annotated. The corners of the book’s green hardcover had been thumbed down and some of the pages were missing corners. The body of the text itself was a palimpsest of misreading, layers of ill-conceived attempts at exegesis composed for years of last-minute assignments. Each reader had left signs of his or her ownership of the text: underlinings, coffee rings, phone numbers, questions in the margin – (Symbolism? Sexism!), a haphazard to-do list. One generous scholar had taken the time to provide his fellow readers with Chinese translations of the tricky words: vista (境界), buoyed (纽约), murmur (私语), divan (烟)… I reread Fitzgerald against his readers, pausing occasionally to look out the window at the people strolling through the park below. What struck me this time was the way that Fitzgerald introduces Daisy and Gatsby, the line for line beauty of the descriptions, the forward momentum, especially in this passage:

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragiley bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of the picture against the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out in the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

According to his notes, the Chinese scholar read this brief introduction to Daisy, which contains in miniature the action of the entire book, as an example of foreshadowing color symbolism. Rose, he wrote in the margin, is not a real color. Rose = red+ white. Prepain [?] and bleeding. Red = anger. Represent blood. White = weak. It seems appropriate that this novel on the tragic results of willfully misreading each other – projecting our own desires onto that green light on the horizon – should be so variously and consistently misread. Without disputing whether rose is a color or whether red really equals anger, we can agree that prepain seems a strange and apt term, both for the moment when Tom Buchanan first slams the window shut and for these early days of September when we feel the sobering postpain of the summer and the prepain of what’s to come.

The Belly of the Beast

The new Poets & Writers. Page 125. (This is way back in the "recent winners" listings; past the eternally optimistic "deadlines," heading in the direction of the slightly tawdry "contests," the suspect "personals" and "rentals," the downright unsavory "services.") The bottom half of the page is an advertisement for a graduate program in creative writing; no great surprise there, the pages of this magazine are filled with them, and it's not that the ads shock me with their quantity, I'm well aware that this country is multitudinous with writing programs, it's just that seeing all their disciplines, all their addresses, all their distinguished faculty and recent distinguished guests, it's like putting a face to a name, names to a number. This one, the ad I'm looking at on page 125, has a quote from Flaubert: "Writing is a dog's life, but it's the only one worth living." This is not surprising either; many of these ads are appended with quotes that seem to attempt to summarize a theory, a sensibility, a philosophy; NYU's ad, for example, has E.L. Doctorow, "A book begins as a private excitement of the mind" (an onanistic approach to writing if ever there was one!). But this, the Flaubert's dog one, this one features a photograph of a dog, or, rather, either the right half of a photograph of a dog, or a complete photograph of only the hindquarters of a dog that is lying on some sort of white sheet, as if it's participating in a tasteful erotica shoot, a languid dog, all stretchy leg and lazy tail, perhaps reminiscent of the ubiquitous anonymous women's bodies, all skirts and boots, that have been haunting the jackets of every work of fiction by a young woman about the travails of young women since flying earflap girl ran away from us on the cover of Melissa Bank. And someone—the photographer springs to mind first, or perhaps the dog's owner (Whose dog is this? Is this stock photography, or was this shot especially for the James A. Michener Center for Writers?)—has tossed the manuscript of a novel onto the animal's left side. The words on the manuscript pages are difficult to read in the photograph, but, squinting, the title page appears to read A Blessing on the Moon, by Joseph Skibell, who graduated from Austin in 1996 (so it was not stock?). The printed sheets have fallen apart loosely, some limning the dog's belly, some pushing down toward the darkness between its legs; the top right corner of what looks like it might be page 11 has gotten itself tucked inside the dog's left knee, seeking fur, and warmth, and crotch. A pencil has been placed on the manuscript's cover page, so we are certain that this is a static shot, not one of action, but still, I wonder, is this what Updike was talking about? Must we lie down with the books we want to write like this, like a love between animals and objects, the tasteful pornography of the domesticated and the inanimate, dogs and pages quietly searching out comfort from each other amid the cold air, the bright lights, the ice cubes, the satin sheets?

The Art of the Novel #3 / The Art of Love #1

It's been weeks and I still haven't gotten over the little sentence tucked away in the middle of Updike's essay in the New Yorker on the late works of great authors. I include it here with the preceding two sentences as context:

Hawthorne's inability to carry forward and complete, "The Ancestral Footprint" was, in Adorno's term, a "catastrophe" for him personally. His struggles to find the key—the handle—demonstrate what a precarious feat it is to write a novel, organizing a host of inventions and polished details into a single movement toward resolution. Like sex, it is either easy or impossible...

Does this simile hold up? Am I screwing the wrong book?

So It Begins

At a coffee shop not far from my house, to the right of the cash register, a small clipping from, I believe, The New York Post has been taped to the back of the espresso machine. It's not an original article, but rather a wire service feed from Reuters; the headline reads: "KILLER CHIMPS ATTACK TOURISTS." Someone—the coffee shop employee who must have originally cut out and taped up the article, perhaps, or a coffee shop customer?—has scrawled on the clipping with what appears to have been a ballpoint pen, to the left of the headline, the following words—which, like the headline, are all in capital letters:

SO
IT
BEGINS

On the bottom edge of the clipping, also in all caps, and in what appears to be a different hand, someone has also written these words, all forced together as if it might be a domain name rather than the title of a film:

BATTLEFORTHEPLANETOFTHEAPES

Further complicating the understanding of this marginalia, this palimpsest, is the matter of punctuation. To the left of the letter "B" there are symbols that look like two exclamation marks, bending to the right in the wind, with two additional symmetrical vertical lines shooting down from the double periods, a mirror of the lines above them, twin masts reflected in a lake; to the right of the letter "S" are similar figures, except these look like two bars leaning to the left off the tops of two right-angled exclamation marks, or like two bangs, twice the usual length, that have been cleanly shot by an invisible bullet right through their middles. Perhaps these glyphs are meant to indicate exploding French quotation marks? Maybe they're intended to be a fusion of Spanish and English and French, indicating exclamation, quotation, and bracketing all at once? I don't know the answer to this, nor can I fully explain why the former graffito is so funny, but the latter is so completely not, other than to wonder if perhaps it is a matter of becoming something, rather than just pointing at something, which seems to be a more interesting variation of the old writing-workshop saw to show and not tell, a useless piece of advice if ever there was one; and it also might have to do with voice, perhaps specifically the commonplace of the ominous Lord of the Rings or Star Wars voice, intersecting culturally here with another Hollywood cliché, the random smattering of strange and foreboding isolated incidents seen occurring all over the world that always opens those wonderful movies about the apolcalypse; but even more than these, maybe that great little three-word tag wins because of punctuation, or lack thereof, because it could have so easily been followed by an ellipsis—such an abused mark!—one that ought to be reserved for a trailing off, a "tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther" trailing off, or an actual elision, but all too often seems to be an incompetent conveyor of sense, of seriousness, or an inadequate stand-in for a full stop?

In the University Library on a Wednesday night after the semester has ended

In the library on a Wednesday night after the semester has ended, you try to find an isolated table, but cannot escape the diversity of life that the library shelters in all seasons. The woman with red pants hidden behind a carrel twenty feet away cannot stop herself from burping over and over again. Occasionally, she murmurs, “excuse me” to the otherwise silent wing of the library. A wild-haired man with headphones zips past on his way to the bathroom, never to emerge.

You close your eyes in concentration. You can feel the weight of the pen in your hand. You are listening for the burping woman in the red pants – what could she have eaten? balloons? – when you hear a sudden disembodied voice declare, “Holy shitfucking fuck.”

You whirl around looking for a man in distress. The voice came from somewhere in the aisles of German literature, but you hear no footsteps, no creaking chairs, no other sign of human existence. You think of the story of the PhD student whose laptop – with the only copy of the thesis he’d been working on for four years – was stolen while he was in the hallway, talking on the phone. He put up posters pleading with the thief to email him the files. “Keep the computer,” he wrote in one desperate message, “but, for the love of God, give me back my thesis.” You don’t know if he ever got it back, or if he started over again or if he dropped out of school. You wonder how he felt leaving the library that night after all the fraught and pointless conversations with the staff and security, walking away from everything he’d written into the night.

The worst part of you envies him.

In the library, the ghostly voice does not come back. Life on the 9th floor returns to normal. You shift in your seat uncomfortably, holding tightly to your pen. The woman in the red pants burps.

The Art(lessness) of Fiction

A number of years ago, I read a novel in manuscript form, one that had begun life as a screenplay. The novel had been written by a sibling of a celebrity, and it was, I believe, the worst thing I have ever read. The writing was abysmal at every level, from spelling to sentence construction, theme to stage directions, subject-verb agreement to plot—which, with names and details changed, went something like this:

The story opens with two men driving around the desert, drinking whiskey and smoking cigarettes. The weather is lousy. The desert appears to be rather near New York City. One of the men, called Pigeon, is rather feminine; his companion, Hambone, is masculine. Pigeon and Hambone drive and drive and drive. While they are driving, they talk, for the most part—with occasional digressions regarding vegetarianism, hermaphroditism, and the apocalypse—about how they hate women, as women are all either lesbians or deceitful, if not both; the men also discuss how much they would like to have sex with numerous women, both simultaneously and also cumulatively. This dialogue is interspersed with flashbacks to episodes from their shared past of colorful, complex sexual escapades and drug use. After a while, Pigeon and Hambone find what appears, at first, to be an abandoned farm; they are then surprised to discover that the farm is actually inhabited by an ancient prophet, who tells them, angrily, that Hambone is the Antichrist. He begins to chase them. Pigeon and Hambone drive away from the prophet in haste. A rabid bunny appears in the front seat of their car; the bunny bites Hambone, who blacks out.

Hambone wakes up two years later. All women on the planet are dead, due to a viral infection that only affected women. Most men have turned gay. The world has become, as far as Hambone can determine, a nightmarish, dystopic gay sex paradise, a world full of sadness, pornography, and explosions. Many of the remaining straight men—those who, under these conditions, did not turn gay, or undergo sex changes, and subsequently become transsexual prostitutes—commit suicide. The preserved bodies of dead women are whored out by morgues.

Hambone encounters two gay men, Shakespeare and Listerine, who have hybridized Christianity and Islam into a new strain of millenarianism. The nihilistic practice of their amalgamated faith involves blowing things up. Hambone joins them in their quest; together, they blow up a number of important landmarks. During a shootout with the authorities, Listerine is killed; Hambone finds tickets to Argentina in the dead man's shirt pocket. Hambone, alone, flies to Buenos Aires.

Later that same day, Hambone takes a bus tour of the pampas for fun. At a rest area, he leaves the bus and wanders out into the plains by himself for a while. Jetpack-clad policemen appear, hovering on the horizon; Hambone runs; the flying cops give chase. A sculptor named Rocky appears, pulling Hambone into a secret cave in the ground, saving him. Hambone and Rocky drive to New York on Rocky's motorcycle; there they cross paths with Pigeon, who has become a transsexual prostitute. Feeling ashamed, Pigeon commits suicide. Hambone and Rocky return to Argentina. Hambone confesses to Rocky that he loves him, even though he, Hambone, is straight. The two men fight each other with spears for some time; Rocky, after both men are exhausted from their spear fight, reveals a number of things to Hambone: that he is actually a she, the last woman alive on Earth; that she loves him; and that she is the second coming of the Christ.

Off in the distance, Hambone and Rocky can hear the sound of approaching jetpacks.

(The novel, to the best of my knowledge, has never been published.)

Burrito-Town is Loserville

This is not your best night. You're on your own, hungry, stuck somewhere in the middle of an unending project you never wanted to do. After 9 o'clock, you leave your apartment to wander the streets in search of something to eat. Did you even eat lunch? You can no longer remember. All around you, the streets are crowded with people determined to have a good time. You, on the other hand, end up in Burrito-town, population 13. The menu board shows off the Burrito-town chain's sense of humor. Pains have been taken to give each Burrito-town burrito a funny name. There are burrito's called, "Mr. Bean," "No, Woman, No Cry," "Pulpo Fiction," "CBGB (Corn, Beans, Garbanzo Beans)," "Old Yeller," "Holy Mole!," and "Dude, where's my chorizo?" Each of these burrito's come in multiple sizes, ranging from "Gi-normous" to "Webster."

You have a profound need for sustenance.

While you eat you watch the tv screwed into the wall above the cashier. There are a few scenes of people keep getting in and out of cars, followed by a lunch at a country club cut short by an angry outburst. Because of the bad reception and inaudible volume, whatever story the images are trying to tell is impossible to follow. Instead, you enjoy one of the many mixed pleasures of living in this city. You listen to a stranger describe his novel. There are two guys in the booth beside you. One of them is eating a "Holy Mole!," the other is just eating chips. The guy with the chips is almost finished his first draft.

"It's about this guy," he says. "He's a regular guy, he's got a job, an apt, whatever, but one day - and I'm really sure yet exactly how this happens, but I think it involves getting into a car accident with the Devil - the guy ends up with this amazing power. Everything he wants to happen, happens. He can, like, control everybody with his mind. He goes to the office and he gets a raise. Just because he wants it."

The other guy with the burrito interrupts him, "What does he do with this power? Does he become President? Does he figure things out in the Middle East?"

"Whooah, that's way out my league. This is my first novel." He dribbles some green salsa on his chips. "What the guy really wants is to get a girlfriend."

"Shouldn't be too hard."

"It isn't. But that's the problem. I mean he can get any girl he wants. There's no challenge anymore. The moral of the book is, kind of, be careful what you wish for - and there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. After a while the guy gets fed up with the mind control. I mean, he realizes that the girls don't really want him. It's not real. He ends up getting really depressed. He just sits in his apartment and watches tv all day. Pretty much what he was doing before he got the special power, only now his apartment is a lot nicer, because he makes, like, mad bank."

The "Holy Mole!" guy nods. "If I had more money, I'd buy one of those hd plasma flat screens."

"Yeah, totally. And get digital cable."

You've eaten half of the burrito and you're full, but you stay to hear the guy with the chips explain how the book ends.

"Well, one day the dude meets a girl he can't control, and the whole question is like, 'is she the devil or is she the love of his life?"

"That's some profound shit. Which one is she?"

"Both."

"Wow."

"Yeah, originally it was a screenplay. But I got a lot of feedback on my blog about how the plot was hard to follow. So I figured I would make it into a novel."

"Cool."

It's time to go home and write.

Instructions for Reading Your Work in Public

First, schedule your reading somewhere, anywhere, that is extremely not easy to find. An alley behind a derelict girdle factory. A fallow field along a disused state highway. A hidden alcove on one of the upper floors of the condemned records building of an abandoned steel town. This is the critical first step to making sure you will have an unsuccessful reading. Next, remember to never tell anyone about the event, especially not your relatives or closest friends. If a mention of your upcoming reading accidentally slips out, deny what you have just said. If denial fails, plead drunken confusion. If you are clearly sober, sabotage the friendship. If your friends turn out to be social masochists and your bridge-burning attempts only increase their desire to hear you read, change the venue, making sure to move it by a distance of at least ten miles; also change the time of day by at least six hours, the date by at least three months. If you become worried that you might slip again, consider keeping the details of your reading a secret even from yourself.

No matter where you end up having your reading, make sure it is nowhere near a bookstore. Ideally, your reading should likewise be in a dry county, in a state that has no truck with literary culture. Sobriety and willful ignorance will be vital to the failure of your event. Next, get a job you hate, one where you are worked to the bone, drained dry at the end of every shift, with no energy remaining for creative endeavors. Make sure that the job has glimmerings of practicality, but only faintly so; your parents should be somewhat relieved, but still concerned. "The beef rendering industry isn't going away anytime soon, that's for sure," they should say, smiling nervously, "but do assistant sluice managers have any room for advancement?" Whatever your vocation, make sure you have no time left over for writing: take extra shifts; bring work home with you; sign up for a correspondence course. If you have not done so already, develop a taste for alcohol. Let your love grow, but not like a well-tended flower, more like an ignored and sturdy vine, weedy and ferocious in its impulses, the tendrils of your habit entwining with the ramshackle chicken wire of your self-loathing. Lose money. Forget your passions. Forget, if you can, that you ever even wrote a word. Go to seed. Become pasty, disheveled, untucked. Be prone to haphazard spasms of knowing, disgusted laughter. Eat the leftovers of others from the break room refrigerator. Steal medicines you have no use for from the pharmacy. Begin a collection of old newspapers; keep them fastidiously folded in paper bags, hidden inside the Murphy bed in the basement apartment you call home.

When it comes time for your reading, let it take you completely by surprise. Frantically dig the manuscript of the first chapter of the novel you began as a sophomore out of storage. As you bang up the stairs and out through the screen door and across the crumbling pavement and eager dandelions, skim your pages, your eyes crusting over with nostalgia. Such early promise! Head out to your reading—in the far corner of the empty mimeograph repair shop, at the bottom of the dry quarry, under the neglected wharf—both horribly late and deeply satisfied at your own fragmentary genius. Drive into the early evening sun remembering that time you got into an argument with your ex—back in college, when you were still going out—about all the unpublished work Hemingway's first wife lost in that Paris train station. Wasn't it a damn shame? Wasn't it a great loss to literature? "Oh, no," you replied, smiling wistfully, "Don't you see the beauty of it? That no words can ever be as good as those which can't ever be read?"

The Future of the Book of the Future

The first to go will be the editors, although this won't happen immediately; the end will be a slow decay, not unlike the legend of the frog ignorant of its own boiling. Editors will, with all the best intentions, stop making it to the ends of manuscripts; then they'll drop the skimming of sample first chapters; and then, finally, realizing that it is not only possible, but preferable, to conduct their business without the distraction of print at all, the editors will no longer even bother with pitch letters. The only employees remaining at the publishing houses who actually consider the words contained inside the objects those houses produce will be the typesetters, who will no longer be native speakers, necessarily, but rather the cheapest purveyors of this service, depending on the strength of the dollar and other sundry global market forces: one day the typesetters of diet books in English may be Bangladeshi, vice versa the next; Argentinians will typeset Danish poetry; Ethiopians, Mexican political tracts; and so on. Once the agents realize that the editors are no longer reading, they shall follow suit, and instead will only pitch the works of their most attractive clients with the sexiest-sounding ideas. Hard on the heels of the agents will be the writers, who never much liked the grunt work of stringing sentences together anyway, greatly preferring to lounge around fashionable saloons, or their own living rooms, complaining to friends and strangers and colleagues and pets alike about the monumental and laborious difficulties of their chosen trade. Writers shall, instead, simply cobble together documents as random collages of appropriated texts, cribbed willy-nilly from their own correspondence, the stories they wrote in graduate school, the essays they wrote in college, various novels of yesteryear that may or may not have entered the public domain, maps, weather reports, stock tickers, and the Bible. Soon the only professionals remaining in the publishing world who still read books—actual, physical books; books from beginning to middle to end—will be the critics. They will rant and rail, vent and brickbat, sputter and spleen at these paper gallimaufries, but the newspaper and magazine owners of the world will discover, through scientific polls, that not a soul cares for the book reviews anymore, preferring, instead, to spend their valuable time ingesting interesting new facts, such as how fighting crime can aid the shedding of pounds, how renouncing freedom can lead to a pointier chin, a more savage nose. The critics will throw up their hands in submission and willingly dance on the grave of literature, but no one will notice, because their employers will have long since moved on to more promising schemes, like investment real estate and amateur pornography. The interesting facts still printed in the newspapers and magazines will blur around the edges, fray at the seams, then finally explode in a colorful, lusty, mouthwatering display of mixed metaphors. Without fiction still extant as its natural counterpoint, the word "fact" will come to mean "something extremely delicious that maybe you can buy right now with money." The word "truth," lacking novels to tell deeper versions of it, will evolve until it means "attentive ladies offering extraordinary special massages for discerning gentlemen." Dictionaries—the books still referred to as "dictionaries"—will entirely consist of advertisements for call girls; grammar will slink off to the dusty cemetery where propriety, etiquette, socially progressive taxation, high-fiber diets, spelling, and whalebone foundation garments lie waiting for its arrival; and the streets and alleys of the cities of the world will be full of joyous humanity and all the naked alphabets and ideographic systems of all the human languages, rutting continuously and without shame, letters and fluids and ink strokes and dead skin shedding into the gutter like so much unnecessary baggage, like the struggle to find the right word, leaving only, in its place, a magnificent collage.

(See also: "End of the World of the End," Cronopios and Famas, Julio Cortázar.)

Reading Older Stories

"It's like," he said, tapping the end of his cigarette on the edge of the ashtray, "it feels like there was this whole world, see? I mean, what I mean is, a whole world of stories. Geez, I don't know if I'm making any sense." He stubbed out his cigarette, got up from the couch, and walked to the kitchen. "You want another beer, honey?" he asked. She nodded at him from the couch. "Okay. Okay, I'll get us both a couple beers," he said. "I'd like a beer," she said. He got the beers from the refrigerator and walked back to the couch. "What do you mean when you say it's like it was a whole world?" she asked, grinning at him. "You're not going cuckoo on me, are you?" He pulled the tabs off both beers and dropped them in the ashtray with the dead cigarettes. "Hey, I'm no loon," he said, gently punching her in the chin as he handed her one of the beers. "It's just, it's like all these old stories, see, it's like they were supposed to be these mirrors, but it's more like they were windows, you know?" He sipped his beer. "Windows on this world where all these gents and dames talked alike and all, all natural-sounding and such, all in this crazy mixed-up world that wasn't real, even though it was supposed to be real. You know, a world where it's like all they do is smoke and drink and the dames are made of cardboard! And nothing ever happens! Ah, nuts," he said. "See what happens when I try to go and make sense? I get all, what's that word, I get all cockeyed." He took two cigarettes from the pack in his pocket, lit them both, and handed her one. "Screwy, is all it is," he said. They both took drags on their newly lit cigarettes at the same time. She turned in her seat and slid down, resting her head in his lap. She balanced her beer on her belly. "What's wrong with smoking and drinking all the time?" she asked. "That's like, well, I mean, that sounds pretty swell to me." He stroked her hair with his cigarette hand. Her hair caught fire. "Geez," he said. "Honey," she said. The flame quickly spread to the couch, the area rug, to her body and to his. They both tried to put it out with their beers, but the beer did not extinguish it, but rather fed the fire. "What the," he said. He held up his burning arm. "How come," he said, inspecting it. "How come it doesn't hurt?" She sat up. "I've never been on fire before," she said. "It's kind of, it's kind of nice, I think. Don't you think?" They looked at each other. They looked at the room, now completely engulfed in flame. "Well now, I don't know what I think," he said. "I mean. Not exactly, is what I mean."

The Neuroscience of the Dead

There's an advertisement in the back of the current issue of Poets & Writers (on page 97, to be precise) for a new book called Against Workshopping Manuscripts. The ad is, to be generous, homemade-looking. The copy, in part, reads as follows: "Shall we admit that workshopping stymies the imagination? —Resulting in leathery thought and actual harm."

The passive-aggressive quality of the first question makes me want to hurl the magazine across the room (Shall we admit that your copy jumps to conclusions about our opinions on the matter, and has the gall to presume that we are simply hiding them from the world, cowering in fear of conventional wisdom?); that odd and amateurish em dash makes me feel—how shall I put this?—more charitable, say; but the marvelously appealing image of thought being leathery (I want my thinking to be tough and waterproof, like tanned animal flesh!), and the idea that writing—poor, neglected writing!—could ever actually cause harm, in this bright and glaring universe of amphibious space tanks and night-vision sonar guns and street-legal off-road military transport vehicles and the kids, the kids, they're killing each other every day with their poisoned school uniforms and samizdat mobile phones—and yet, looking at the website of this two-lady publishing operation, and seeing that this book (with its strangely generic ocean waves on the cover!) purports to challenge the hegemony of the workshop with "upper cortical re-entry" and "plucking wounded young people from the herd," well, I am as charmed as I was when I first heard about the book People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves To Unsuspecting bystanders and what to do about it. Whether their conclusions involve wearing a tinfoil hat or not, I look forward to the neuroscience of us all becoming better writers, and getting this damn dead person off my back.

Searching for a Fax Machine in the Air Conditioner Factory

I wanted to find out if a particular phrase a friend made use of the other day had actually originated with a particular artist or not. The following is a loose sampling of the results Google returned to me:

Sometimes I'm reminded of a postcard I saw long ago. It was a sort of Lichtenstein, pop-comic-book style card. There was a woman talking on the phone, and she was saying, "Oh my God, I forgot to have children." When I was twenty, a friend gave me a T-shirt bearing a comic strip frame of a glamorous woman weeping dramatically, over the caption "I can't believe I forgot to have children." You know that illustration with a stylish woman talking on the phone, saying, "Oh my God, I forgot to have children"? There is a funny cartoon of a middle-aged woman, hand to head, exclaiming, "Oops, I forgot to have children." It was one of those 1950s cartoons of a glamorous brunette, with a speech bubble saying: "I can't believe I forgot to have children." It is kind of like the Roy Lichtenstein cartoon-style painting, which is of a woman on a bus, and she says in a balloon over her head: "Oh no, I forgot to have children!" And one day I suddenly realized that T-shirt where the woman says "Oh my God, I forgot to have children" was me. Headlines like "Hey, I forgot to have children!" cause some of our listeners to hyperventilate. Others have seen the cartoon of the woman exclaiming, "Oops, I forgot to have children," and decided it wasn't such a joke. The cartoon of a crying woman saying "Oh my God, I forgot to have children" is more applicable than ever. Charlotte: But we're 38! These are the years. Carrie: Yes, I know, I've heard. I'm running out of time. I don't even have time to eat this cookie. Charlotte: How is it? Carrie: It's so good I forgot to have children.

And I have realized that the Web is only as reliable as our own memories, only as smart as our own minds, only as good as our own senses of responsibility and codes of ethics; and therefore, I have concluded that we are all doomed to hell.

The Art of the Novel #2 / The Art of the Podcast #1

Is Christopher Lydon the thinking man's Charlie Rose? While he may not have the pull of his older colleague, he's definitely sharper and more web-savvy. Lydon's mp3 interviews played a major role in popularizing the podcast. His new project, Open Source, is a radio show, podcast, and a blog. In the past month, Lydon has interviewed Philip Roth, the critic James Wood and Mark Greif of N+1 on the NY Times Book Review's Great American Novel Survey.

Philip Roth discussed the Art of the Novel, the elemental joys of the Jersey Shore, and how his father picked up a woman using the line, "Hey, You're in Dr. Horowitz's spot!" In their conversation on the Times Survey, Lydon prompted Wood, Greif, and Moby Lives / Melville House publisher, blogger, podcaster, Dennis Loy Johnson to speculate on what the next Great American Novel will look like. Yesterday, Lydon talked with John Updike about sex, god, and New Jersey.

The Art of the Profile # 1

The celebrity profile is not an ancient art. The formula for the integration of the interview with a survey of the celebrity's life was devised by a German mathematician sometime after Einstein's annae mirabilis, 1905. Not much has changed since then, aside from the flourishes "New Journalism" added during the 60s. Mostly, the profile falls into the tried-and-true magazine model of the bait-and-switch. The magazine cover announces an in-depth interview with the celebrity subject, but aside from a provocative close-up photo or two, we see little more than the obvious. There are notable exceptions of course - occasions when the writer's talent and commitment overcome the conventions of the genre. Mostly this happens when the subject sexually propositions the journalist, as in the case of the stupendous profile of Principal Stanley Bosworth in New York Magazine and the Guardian's profile of Michel Houellebecq, in which the celebrated controversialist poses the question, "Would you like to be in my erotic film?"

(See Also: the self-hating, self-portraits on Houellebecq's web journal).

Same as It Ever Was (Look Where My Hand Was)

The blogging revolution is the desktop publishing revolution is the photocopier revolution is the mimeo revolution is the typewriter-and-carbons is letterpress is surely some other democratizing technology of reproduction not lodged in my all-too-short historical memory (is the telephone? is the telegraph? is the Gutenberg?):

I've never liked mimeo. Sure, it's fast and it's cheap but it doesn't look like a book. If you can do it yourself, why bother? […] Somebody once described mimeo publication as "punk publishing" and that made it work for me for a while. But not really. […] I like these shiny books: they look commercial, real, they look American. If only the stupid publishers and the brilliant poets could get together. Mimeo skirts all that so the publisher is the poet's best friend or even the poet and that's that. Your family won't believe it's a book but so what. They also are unable to read your poems. So I have only set my hand once to mimeo publishing but it was an act of revenge in my heart—we did an anthology of poems ourselves in response to another slicker inferior one. Mimeo was effective in this case—fast & cheap. It wasn't like killing someone, it was like throwing a beer in their face.

—Eileen Myles, in The Poetry Project Newsletter, March 1982; from A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960 - 1980: A Sourcebook of Information, Steven Clay and Rodney Phillips.

Get off the Internet; I'll Meet You in the Street

From "The Wide, Wide World of Chapbooks," by Tim Kindseth, in American Book Review, March/April 2005 (Volume 26, Issue 3):

Reading Bob Dylan's new memoir, Chronicles: Volume One (2004), I was struck by Dylan's obsessive curiosity as a young man, one that did not allow him to stop with the reading of tattered paperback copies of Balzac and Chekhov—and bound books in general—that were easily at his and anyone else's disposal. Rather, he had an insatiable appetite for arcane knowledge that took him to the far corners of the New York Public Library, where in his early twenties he was scouring newspaper articles written during the Civil War and available on microfiche for song ideas and personal satisfaction. Had he been content with digesting what everybody else was busy poring over, I'm not so sure his songs would have bloomed.

Granted, most of what you'll find in chapbooks written today probably won't be as stimulating to the imagination as first-hand accounts of the battle for Lovejoy Station written with slang long-gone. But there's always a needle in every haystack, and that's reason enough to try to get your hands on any chapbook you can, whether you find it at some local reading, at some ruined pawn shop on the wrong side of the tracks, or through some focused browsing on the World Wide Web.

For me, though, this picture of the young Mr. Zimmerman exploring ignored arcana makes me want to turn off the World Wide Web altogether. Granted, this haystack we've all made is a marvelous thing, like a new layer of brain we've all evolved (ah, if only we could adapt at will, consciously evolve, the things I would do with my extra set of hands!), but I need to go do some browsing at that ruined pawnshop, see what bits and scraps have been left behind. Anyone care to join?

(Direct link to PDF of essay, here.)

The Art of the Novel

“The Amazonian boy is first provided with a breech-cloth when he is five years old. His earliest lesson is in its manufacture, for every Indian fashions his own clothing, is his own tailor and cloth manufacturer. He goes to the bush and selects a tree, on which he makes a space 6 feet long by 9 inches in width, and strips from it both outer and inner barks. He separates the two layers, and cuts the strip of inner bark in two, and carries the pieces to the river where the material is thoroughly soaked. Afterwards this is beaten with a small wooden mallet until it forms a yard length of bark-cloth 9 inches in width. Nothing further is needed, for this makes the breech-cloth and it is sufficient to pass between the legs and tuck securely over the waistband in front and behind. There is no variation from the type or method of manufacture, and this simplest form of clothing is common to all tribes inhabiting the wide stretch of country between the rivers Issa and Japura.

The breech-cloth is never discarded by the male Indian, nor, in sight of a man or a woman, would he ever remove it. When bathing he wades in a sufficient depth before he interferes with its adjustment. Even when a man dies his breech-cloth is buried with him.”
--- From The Northwest Indians: Notes of some months spent among cannibal tribes, by Thomas Whitten, F.R.G.S., F.R.A.I. Captain HP (14th Hussars). NY: Duffield and Company, 1915

Emerson on Immigration

"Native Americans. I hate the narrowness of the Native American Party. It is the dog in the manger. It is precisely opposite to all the dictates of love and magnanimity: and therefore, of course, opposite to true wisdom… Man is the most composite of all creatures… Well, as in the old burning of the Temple at Corinth, by the melting and intermixture of silver and gold and other metals a new compound more precious than any called the Corinthian brass was formed; so in this continent, – asylum of all nations, – the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles, and Cossacks, and all the European tribes, – of the Africans, and of the Polynesians, – will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature, which will be as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting-pot of the Dark Ages or that which earlier emerged from the Pelasgic and Etruscan barbarism. La Nature aime les croisements. "

- 1845 Journals.

Babel in the East Village

This afternoon, I stopped by the St. Mark’s Bookshop to look through the Collected Stories of Isaac Babel on my way to buy groceries for dinner. I found the book in the back of the bookstore, on a shelf below Paul Auster and above Italo Calvino. I knelt down and read about how Babel had been killed by the NKVD, after he was arrested, forced to confess, and shuttled to a prison camp in Siberia.

To my left, beyond the table of discounted books, an agitated man with white-hair and a short, neat beard was talking politics with the woman behind the desk. When he mentioned Rumsfeld, he swung his arm above his head to make a point. When I looked over to him I noticed that I was crouching next to a rack of postcards with photos of the president and his administration. Their faces had been doctored, certain features were elongated, others erased. Rumsfeld was a monster with tiny eyes and a sharp pointed head.

“The people I know who have been shot,” man with the white hair declared, “were shot because they were thoroughly understood.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” said the woman. “It’s better to be misunderstood.”

“I totally disagree,” he said. “I want them to understand me. That’s what’s important.”

“But then they’ll shoot you.”

“Great.” He threw both hands above his head.

“But you’ll die.”

“At least then they’ll understand who they were messing with.”

The Slush Pile and the World

I recommend Sven Birkerts's introductory essay, "Finding Traction," in the new issue of AGNI, issue #63. He starts with the daily tackling of submissions to the magazine:

When I sit down with a huge stack of envelopes, each one containing some hard-won, deliberated expression, I am not the tabula rasa—the fantasied clean slate—that I perhaps ought to be. No, I am a man of my time, a besieged reader, creating a specific occasion within what is, day in and day out, for me as for most everyone, a near-constant agitation of stimuli, an enfolding environment of aggressively competing signs and meanings. And my attitude, when I remove a clump of print-covered pages from their envelope, is not "Send me more and more new information" but "Reach me, convince me that this news is different, that this is the news I need."

And he somehow works his way from there, from the speed with which he's able to make his way through the slush pile each morning, to a consideration of the enormous changes that have taken place in the culture in the past ten years, in which, if I understand him correctly, we have all become robots. Or maybe it's that we're all still human, but our flesh and blood has been mold-injected into the invisible husks of robots. No wait, it's like we all now have little tiny microscopic robots that squat in our frontal lobes, dug in like a first assault, like a world-wide brain tissue Oklahoma land rush. Or maybe it's just that AGNI refuses to publish stories and poems written by robots, even though robots pretending to be humans are submitting to the journal all the time, but they give themselves away, because robots always use Tyvek envelopes, and their manuscripts are covered in little metal shavings, the residue of their tears.

The Paper Cut

After alcoholism, heart-disease, near-sightedness, divorce, bankruptcy, and depression, the paper cut is the most serious occupational hazard of the writer. Its menace passes largely unnoticed, and we are all its silent victims.

All paper cuts are not created equal, but each is nasty in its own way. The truly painful paper cut seems to hurt more than it has any right to. We understand the justice of bruises, burns, and scrapes - the pain we feel seems proportional to the evidence of the injury, but the case of the paper cut confounds us. A little epidermal slice, a spot of blood, are all we have to show for our affliction. Any calls for sympathy are in vain. The paper cut infantilizes the writer. We suck our fingers in disgrace.

Moreover, the paper cut is the painful reminder of the physical nature of the book. As much as we may wish to believe that in the beginning was the Word, we know that things were here first, and that they will remain long after the last remnants of language have disintegrated.

Kafka Was the Rage

"The competition was friendly, laced with admiration and respect, but it was as fierce as only a match between close friends can be, and it brought out the best in them [...] It was, in fact, competition as much as collaboration that linked Ashbery and O'Hara and Schuyler and Koch so tightly that they acquired a group identity with a collective force. 'Collaboration, a direct extension of O'Hara's mode of living, is a good metaphor for the manner of his relationships--an intimate competition in which each participant goads the other toward being at his best,' the poet and art critic Peter Schjeldahl perceptively noted. Or as Koch advised the young poets who came to him for instruction at Columbia, 'Have some friends who are so good it scares you.'"

--from David Lehman's The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets, p. 71 (in chapter two, "Band of Rivals")

Note also, in the author interviews on the One Story site, Andrew Foster Altschul's answer to the question on writing advice and the importance of having friends who are also writers, as well as Kelly Link's answer to the same question, about the importance of having friends who are not writers (or rather, friends whose lives are melodramatic; I'm jumping to the conclusion that writing and melodrama are mutually exclusive, which was certainly not the case with the New York School).

He Also Did The Crossword (in Pen)

The latest piece of evidence submitted in the case against I. Lewis Libby Jr. includes articles from the Times, the Post, and the Chicago Sun Times, as well as an image scanned from Cheney's copy of the Joseph Wilson Op-Ed piece, "What I didn't find in Africa." Written above the title are a few jotted down notes in what Fitzgerald believes is the VP's neat, confident handwriting, including the question: "Did his wife send him on a junket?" The image was printed in Sunday's Times, and is available online (together with the rest of the evidence) as a pdf.

Interview: A Retrospective

In light of my recent EWP interview, I've been reflecting on past job interviews. Here are some of the highlights:

Smith-Craine Finance, San Francisco, 1999: Receptionist

Ed Craine: The job requires a lot of Xeroxing. How do you feel about that?

J: I feel good about it. (pause). Great. (pause). I actually find the sound of the Xerox relaxing. The smell of toner is not at all offensive to me.

Interaction Associates, San Francisco, 1996: Assistant to Office Manager

Inspired Office Manager: Interaction Associates wants to inspire. Our job is to inspire. Your job is to keep the candy tray full.

J: Yes, I see.

Inspired Office Manager: Any questions?

J: Do I need to fill the candy in an inspiring way?

Alta Vista Car Wash, San Diego, 1994: Guy who stands in the middle of the car wash while wearing a rain slicker and scrubbing the cars

Racist Jock: I usually hire Mexicans. They're good workers.

J: I'm a good worker.

Racist Jock: But you're not a Mexican.

J: I used to work at Taco Time.

Taco Time, San Diego, 1994: Cook

Girl with a face like a day-old enchilada: You have to wear this stupid visor.

J: That's okay. I like it.

Girl with a face like a day-old enchilada: And this stupid t-shirt.

J: Lovely.

Girl with a face like a day-old enchilada: Do you have a girlfriend?

J: I just want to make tacos.

Edwards Cinema, San Diego, 1994: Guy who rips tickets

Sad 46-year old: You get free movies.

J: Great.

Sad 46-year old: Yeah, and free popcorn.

J: Even better.

Sad 46-year old: It's really not so bad. I've seen True Lies 23 times. Do you maybe want to see it later?

J: Is this an interview?

(I was later fired from my position and replaced by a retarded person).

The Great American Novel *

* - As determined by a plurality of votes from the hundred or so judges chosen by the NYTBR, a number of whom (according to A.O. Scott) "declined to answer, some silently, others with testy eloquence."

From the Times website:
"Early this year, the Book Review's editor, Sam Tanenhaus, sent out a short letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify 'the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years.'"

Their list of "literary sages" includes everyone from Harold Bloom to Aimee Bender.

The results are posted here.

A.O. Scott's effort to make sense of the results is worth reading.

An Oral History of Our Time

Thanks to Joseph Mitchell's book everybody knows Joe Gould's secret. The great project he told everyone he was working on, the oral history of our time that would encompass the chitchat at artists parties in the Village, the political speeches at rallies at Union Square and the talk in the hallways of flophouses on Bowery, that grand work that would make him the equal of Gibbon, was never realized. The dime-store composition books he left behind contain only a spotty diary account of his own habits:

June 7, 1946: I saw Bele De Triefant. He said he had a pair of shoes for me. I had an ale at the Minetta.
June 8: De Triefant had not brought the shoes. I had a drink at the Minetta.
June 11: I saw De Triefant. He had shoes for me. I took them. I went to the Minetta. I drank.
June 12: I went to Goody's. I had some beers. I lost my shoe. I went to the Minetta.
(from Charles Hutchinson & Peter Miller's article in the Voice)

The books are now housed on the 3rd Floor of Bobst.

There a few brave souls today who seem to have taken up his project. Like Gould, they believe that "what people say is history." One of these brave souls, of course, is the guy behind OverheardinNewYork. Another is whoever put up this story from a rapper named Saigon:

"I was at 23rd and 9th Street, that’s where everybody goes after the club," Saigon told HipHopGame.com. "I’m out there with me and my man. My man is 135 lbs. soaking wet. I have an $18,000 chain on. I guess someone thought I was food. They were probably scheming the whole time. I didn’t even realize it. One of them asked my man if he sold weed. My man was like, “Nah.” We were with these girls. One of the kids walked up to me. I thought he was a fan. He snatched the chain right off my neck. I took it right back from him and my man knocked him out. My man dropped him. We’re stomping this nigga out thinking he’s crazy that he’s going to come and snatch my chain.

We didn’t know he was with somebody else. His homeboy came behind me and stabbed me in my temple. I lost a lot of blood. When he stabbed me, I started fighting the nigga but I was losing a lot of blood. I faked a jack like I had a ratchet on me. I didn’t have no burner. I was like, “Hit the nigga, hit the nigga.” They started running. Me and my nigga were standing there and they ran.I had my chain and both of their cell phones. They dropped their cell phones when they started running. I’m out there like, “Yeah nigga!” but at the same time I’m losing a lot of blood..." [More]

Saturday Night Minutiae

When I finished reading the last sentence of my story, I took my two pages, which I'd folded over two or three times to fit in my back pocket, and I smacked the lectern with the vertical crease, as if to indicate "the end," or "I am done reading now." I smacked on impulse, not thinking about it. It felt appropriate, although the gesture might have been so small as to not even be noticeable to the audience. I don't know.

Immediately after, as I squatted next to the bar, my hands still shaking, I thought about Will Ferrell's line from Old School: "That's the way you do it! That's the way you debate!" Maybe some variant on that, I thought, would be the best way to end a reading.

It could certainly be beneficial to writers facing the conundrum of having brought their serious material to a almost entirely humorous event.

Or it could turn the whole proceedings into something not unlike kabuki?

Which, in the world of readings, would not necessarily be a bad thing.

Reading Report

The old man got up to the podium. He said a few words before he read his two poems by the dead poet, the poet whose memory this reading was honoring. He said the dead poet would have been great without the disease. The disease that was the poet's subject, a subject that spanned three books. He said he'd made this comment before to the poet's companion, who was there, sitting in the front row. But where did this comment's emphasis lie? I wanted to give this old man the benefit of the doubt, I wanted to believe he meant the emphasis to land on the "without" (I'm paraphrasing here, I think he might have actually said "hadn't had"), meaning that the greatness existed regardless of the subject matter, rather than what it sounded like he was saying, what I feared he was saying, which was that the poet's work had been hamstrung by the singularity of the subject. When he sat down, the air of the room shook with the sound of the old man's sheaf of poems, which he struggled to cram back into his inside suit coat pocket, his hand shaking uncontrollably, a Parkinson's tremor, his face locked in the expression of an old man's revulsion at his own crippled body.

Right of First Refusal + Rejection Note = Refusal Note

(an attempted reconstruction of a collective effort)

Dear Sir/Madam:

A pox upon you for submitting your work to our journal. We receive a large number of submissions every month, and none of them compare to the contemptibleness of yours. We have read your pages with disgust and horror. No, no, a thousand times no, we shall not consider publishing such garbage. Our current need is that we might forget the stain your words have left on our retinas. If we could cause this self-addressed, stamped envelope--the one enclosure with any sense in your most objectionable mailing--to projectile vomit onto your shirtfront right now, believe us, we would indeed. We do not merely pass on your work; rather, we kick you, and your work, dead on in the nut sack with our steel-toed editorial boots. Your pages are not fit to wipe with, and yet we have, because we felt we must, and thus our bottoms are riddled with inky little paper cuts, but we are glad of this, because it is nothing compared to the torn and bleeding flesh you have wrought upon our minds. We do not wish you luck placing your work elsewhere; rather, we earnestly pray that you never write another word again, burn every page that has regretfully dropped from your wretched bunghole to date, and do penance for the harm you have caused us, and literature, preferably involving violently painful flagellation, from this day to the one on which your corpse is blessedly lowered into the ground.

Regards,
The Editors

Eleventh Street in the Times

Eleventh Street is all over today's Times, from Jane Jacobs's barstool at the Whitehorse, where she argued that the city of the future should look a lot like the West Village of the 60s (as opposed to the West Village of the present where, according to the paper of record, the red benches of the White Horse are filled by "graduate students from nearby New York University and would-be writers"), to the 11th Street Bar, where Chuck Klosterman mulls over his latest humiliation.

The Strange Story of Our Earth

The library here, in this creaky old hunter's cabin by the side of the road, is a weird mix of books about machines, nature, and Christianity--with titles such as Bear!, Fix Your Chevrolet, Cowpokes Ride Again, Old Gun Catalogs, Best Ways to Catch More Fish in Fresh and Salt Water, Is the Bible REALLY the Word of God?, and Father Smith Instructs Jackson, a instructional manual for Catholicism written entirely in Socratic dialogue form.

But my favorite so far is The Strange Story of Our Earth, a science book for kids, published in 1952. It reads like science written by Nabokov's Kinbote; in other words, you might hope that a book about something "strange" would answer questions, but instead it leaves them dangling and convoluted, the author preferring to pick fights with unnamed enemies. I can't imagine a kid reading this and not wanting to run the hell away from science, screaming.

This is the book's final paragraph:

If the ancient inhabitants of America domesticated the Megatherium why shouldn't they have domesticated other creatures including the horses? At all events even if some scientists will not admit that the first Americans originated in America they must admit that the Americans were the first men to domesticate large animals, for as far as known, dogs were the only animals domesticated by the men of the Old World at the time.

Why should they not have indeed? replies the 10-year-old in the early fifties, making a mental note to give the humanities a closer look.

Gross Anatomy: The View from the 9th Floor of the Library

The view from the 9th floor of the library extends downtown over the rooftops of Soho all the way to Wall Street. If you stare hard to the Southwest you can make out the blue hills of New Jersey. I often bring my work to the 9th floor, which houses the university science library, and sit by the window. The view offers just the right amount of distraction for me to work. One gray day like today when the city seemed particularly ugly (and New Jersey had disappeared into the mist), I distracted myself reading the mysterious titles of medical books on the shelf in front of me. Wound Care and The Acute Hand sounded like titles of poetry chapbooks. An Atlas of Vulval Diseases…Iowa Head and Neck Protocols… The ambiguous Principles and Practice of Nurse Anesthesia… I put away my work and took Obstetric and Gynecological Milestones ILLUSTRATED off the shelf. Chapter 26 was titled “Thomas Wharton and the Jelly of the Umbilical Chord.” Another chapter was a reproduction of William Hunter’s illustrated Anatomia Uteri Humani Gravidi from 1751, a work of art whose terrifying images of dissection show the body to be both beautiful and monstrous. They make Damien Hirst's Virgin Mother look like a third grade diorama.

Links to Historical Anatomies on the website of the National Institutes of Health.

James Wood on Flaubert

There is a good James Wood and a bad James Wood. The good one sings when he writes about Bellow, the bad one just sulks eloquently. The bad James Wood published a poisonous condemnation of the "New York" novel and its practitioners McInerney, Ellis, and recently Rushdie, in The Guardian on Oct 6, 2001. The headline was "How does it feel?" The good James Wood has just given us a thorough and insightful essay on Flaubert's legacy in the guise of a review of the "magnificent" new biography of the writer.

Wood offers a fine reading of Flaubert's "superb and magnificently isolate" details in this passage from The Sentimental Education:

At the back of deserted cafes, women behind the bars yawned between their untouched bottles; the newspapers lay unopened on the reading-room tables; in the laundresses' workshops the washing quivered in the warm draughts. Every now and then he stopped at a bookseller's stall; an omnibus, coming down the street and grazing the pavement, made him turn round; and when he reached the Luxembourg he retraced his steps.

Flaubert, he argues, "is the greatest exponent of a technique that is essential to realist narrative: the confusing of the habitual with the dynamic... [his] details belong to different time-signatures, some instantaneous and some recurrent, yet they are smoothed together as if they are all happening simultaneously."

Tonight's Featured Act

She was talking about going to hear Dawn Raffel read, but the words formed in my head as Don Raffle. Maybe the former is pronounced the same as the latter? Neither of us were sure. I started imagining what a writer like Don Raffle would be like. A Borscht Belt comedian of a writer. The Fozzie Bear of fiction. "How's everybody doing tonight?" he hollers, stumbling out on stage in his tawdry suit and hat. He's got a martini in one hand, microphone in the other, pages up his sleeve. Is his voice Fozzie's, or Krusty the Clown's? There's feedback from the PA. "Are you ready for some short stories?" The last word drawn out like taffy. Oh yes. It's late, the audience is drunk, it's a long drive home, the audience wants to be entertained. Maybe literary fiction should be more like bawdy jokes about farmers' daughters and popes walking into bars, priests and hookers and presidents on lifeboats. I think I want to be Don Raffle.

More on the Q&A

What I remember: The conundrum of the bumblebee. Cueing fetishes, talismanic pages. Not knowing how to solve the problem of the project until you're inside it. Ideas agglomerate. Roth: job is to make a book smarter than its author. Maugham, Mann: Waiting to write the bildungsroman. "I'm a great believer in bohemian life." The value of the intimate and useless. Trillin on Babel via Wachtel: The human fact within the vale of circumstance. I heard the lyric as "monster eyes." I was so happy the kangaroo was named Shelf.

EL Doctorow on the Research in the Novel (An interview by Ron Carlson)

(This interview with the writer Ron Carlson was done for the show Books & Co on KAET TV in Arizona. I'm posting it here because it seems to have been dropped from its home web server. I found it in Google's cache.)

Ron Carlson: What obligation do you have to your research? Because you've done a lot of research. You've written a lot about different places.

E.L. Doctorow: I don't know if what I do can be called research. It's so idiosyncratic and subjective. I've known too many writers who have researched things so thoroughly that they're stopped in their tracks.

Ron Carlson: That's what I'm asking.

E.L. Doctorow: And I believe when I'm asked this question "How much have you researched," I say, "Just enough." You start writing, and if you are writing well, I think really you create kind of a magnet force field around you. Whatever you need will come to hand. You'll see something in the street or run into -- I'll give you an example. In "Ragtime," I wrote a scene in which this -- the old silhouette artist Tateh and his little girl take streetcars from New York up to Lowell, Massachusetts, on the interurban street lines, which I knew were very widespread in those days, in the 1910s era, but I felt, well, this is really a stretch, and I’d better find out if it was possible to do this. But I didn't know how to go about researching it. So I was wandering around in the New York Public Library in the mid-Manhattan branch through the stacks, and my knee banged into a shelf of oversized books that were protruding from the shelf, and there was one with a big orange cover that was very prominent. So I just picked it up and looked at it, and it was a history of trolley car companies in America. And I’d found out, yes, you could go to Lowell, Massachusetts, from New York paying nickels with each new line. In fact, you could go from New York to Chicago by streetcar in those days, and it was a great system, and it was destroyed probably -- J.P. Morgan bought up some lines that he felt were competing with the new haven railroad. He destroyed them. Then the general motors corporation went around to cities saying buses are much cleaner and better, which was not true. And so trolley cars, streetcar transportation folded. Too bad.

Ron Carlson: But you found that book by accident.

E.L. Doctorow:By accident.

Ron Carlson: So it's a little different now with the internet. Everyone researches everything on the internet. It's all I hear about. People are "Googling" and finding out this stuff. You don't have a research staff? You just do your own research, correct?

E.L. Doctorow: I don't use a research -- one book I hired a guy to get some old magazines for me. I guess that was for "World's Fair." but, you know, a lot of what you make up is simply applying yourself logically to the situation, and there's really not that much trouble. I never corrected the problem in "Welcome To Hard Times." I left it. You know the Hawthorne story, the birthmark, where this man's married to this beautiful woman and she's absolutely perfect, and he loves her, but she has a little birth mark on her cheek in the shape of a tiny hand, and he's a natural scientist, so he concocts a potion and says, "Drink this and the birthmark will disappear and you'll be perfect." Because she loves him, she drinks it and the birthmark disappears and at that moment she dies. So that's why I've left Jenks out eating the roast haunch of prairie dogs.

Ron Carlson: Leave your beautiful flaws.

E.L. Doctorow: You want flaws.

Ron Carlson:Sure, I understand. Talking about research, so many times the question becomes your responsibility to be exact but, I mean, what you're saying is very much more kindred to what I've experienced, that is to say, as you focus on the work, that what you're writing becomes its own research, that you create and find the information you need.

E.L. Doctorow: I think so. You do look things up, but basically you have to trust the act of writing to guide you.

Notes from the Reading by Darin Strauss and Jonathan Lethem:

Washington Square, March 30, 2006.

During the Q+A, Darin Strauss confessed he watched The Godfather 2 twenty times over the course of writing his first novel, Chang and Eng, to study the double-narrative structure. People these days, he argued, are paranoid about plagiarism. A writer should read widely taking what he can. On the other hand, one should be cautious about research. Strauss said that it was only when he was writing his first novel that he discovered the real truth behind the funny response Doctorow once gave to the question: how much research do you do for a novel? - As little as possible, he said.

Jonathan Lethem warned aspiring novelists that “an idea for a novel is not enough for a novel.” He said that his general reaction to reading “apprentice fiction” is “Do more. Do this and something else or 10 other things, but not just this one thing. Do more.”
After the Q+A, Strauss read briskly from his novel-in-progress about an adman in Long Island. As listeners, we sometimes felt forced to run to catch up to him, chasing one biting description after another. In the office scenes, the description was often aphoristic (“Small talk abhors a vacuum;” “The dotcom bubble’s contribution to the world of business was a residue of counterfeit wackiness.”) His metaphors and similes created a strange beauty from the dreary world of office supplies: “The overhead light jiggled. Everyone held still as if they were being photocopied.”

Lethem read from the beginning of a new novel about the breakup of a couple who are in the same band together. He’s the guitarist. She’s the bassist. Both of them have day jobs that take up most of their time. He works at the zoo, cleaning up after kangaroos. Though Lethem read with flair, the first section felt a bit flip – a satire with an easy target: sorta-hipsters stewing in their unrealized ambitions. The audience laughed along in sympathy. Especially the poets. In the scene, the band writes a song together, improvising the lyrics. Lethem sang the refrain, “Keep away from my monster gaze!” It was a real performance. He sounded a little like David Berman from the Silver Jews. The lyrics needed to be improvised because the band’s songwriter was “having a problem with language.”

“What do you mean?” the guitarist asks.

“You know, the place where it comes from.”

The MFA poets in the room laughed until tears came to their eyes.

The later scenes from the book involved an awkward conversation at the grocery store and a kidnapped kangaroo in a bathtub.

A brief reception followed. Refreshments were served.