Famous First Words

This is a negative way to begin, I know. Let me stress that my main impulse is not to poke fun (the sentence, by the way, is a pastiche […]).

A pair of examples might make my point more obvious. The first is a portion of the opening passage of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady:

Now here is the opening paragraph of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier:

I would like to explore this transition by looking at the opening passage of Saul Bellow's novel Humboldt's Gift:

Consider the squared-off diction of the opening sentence of Wilson's 1925 review of a work by Mencken:

Pynchon's opening sentence is, it's true, arrestingly declarative:

Breathing Lessons opens as follows:

He announced his new prose in On the Road's first lines:

Boris Pasternak chose to begin his memoir, Safe Conduct, with a curious description of an incident:

With the opening sentence Mr. McFarland not only situates us, but also plants the subliminal conviction that Francis is wrong, that there will be some other metamorphosis and that the 'slow, affable decline' will be anything but.

Here is a fairly random sampling of some opening lines:

I could go on, but the point is made.

(Sven Birkerts)

An Op-Ed for the Chairman

Guy in government exclaim that no reading which is fun equals not doing good in school on grades. Also fewer money in life after school. Also not "communicating clearly." He say "fact" is number people reading say "I am enjoy books" who are rich. Like dorks with flashlight in bed i.e. unathletic. This guy spend dollars from people pay taxes! For this tax money? Not right. This guy has write books around poems. Maybe he also write poems? I not knowing. But basically what is? Is government poetry. Is such right? No is not right. Thus I contain many questionings. I demand knowing! Why government having poems instead of more extra wars? Why not one more very small war in tiny country for more gas? My gas costing many more dollars. Maybe I pay less taxes to government for more wars not poetry? Hey is this threat? No no threat is simply one idea I am suggest. Is free. So federal poem guy you exclaim reading "fun." Well I am disagree. Also I am make money too which I spend on like excellent big television. Is this not being patriot? Hey I thought dollars were for helping America not for nagging America in re book reports. Whoa the truth "hard"? Easy. I just "call a spade a spade." Perhaps you are from olden times when all had was books. Well excuse me this is now when we are watch athletic television and are make more money than you did in times of old. Hey government poet this is way things are why not "wake up and smell coffee." As they say this is not your grandfather's "fun"! What it all boils down? Welcome to America now get out. Really why not you up to Canada? Canadites all sit inside and read books and get sickly. Canadite government has lots of tax dollars but Communist bad medicine! Not like America! Maybe in olden times there was equation "reading for pleasurable equals later make money." But not modern now. Read your report? I have not. I skim article on Internet. If there one thing I learn while schooling? I am important. I matter. If skim something? Therefore opinionated. And robustly! Then I am voicing democracy. Ergo "hell and damnation" if my dollars going for your poems! Are we back to tax dollars thrown for artists smearing selves with chocolate inside the hot and tangy? I am vote no on chocolate book report! Go back Soviet Union Mister Poems because we are have had it! For you I am "communicating clearly" enough?

Know Nothing

A full-page ad in The New Yorker. The May 21 issue. A young girl, staring confidently at the camera, smiling. The copy at the top of the page, the copy ostensibly transcribing this girl's voice, reads: "I just saw my first Broadway show. Now I'm writing one, too." I see this, and I just want to punch a wall or something. Is this what it's come to? You only need to experience one of something before you're qualified to create one of those things? The usual comparisons spring to mind, the usual clichés: brain surgery, rocket science. Ah, but yes, of course, the beauty of the arts is that you don't need to have experienced any of them in order to create one of them. You don't actually need to have read a single novel in order to sit down and string a hundred thousand words together. But what is writing supposed to be? Is it just self-expression? Is it just therapeutic? Is it some kind of psychic equivalent of taking a dump? You don't have to be in awe of the pile of shit that humanity has already created in order to add your own small contribution every day. You don't ever need to consider it. You make yours, you get rid of it, you feel better, you feel like you've accomplished something. Is it Weinberger who mentions casually in one of his essays that in Egypt three thousand years ago there was an entire school of poetry devoted to the subject of anxiety that everything had already been said? Everything has already been said, but if you don't read, if you don't go to the theater every night, if you never go to the library, if you never go all the museums you can afford, go to them over and over again, if you don't have any awareness or knowledge of the mountain of everything that's already been created, if all you are is empowered, then you don't have to even know that everything has already been said, you don't have to have anxiety about it, you don't have to be concerned about where your play, opera, poem fits in the magnificent, aggregating, oceanic temple of what has come before, you don't have to even worry about ever having a reader, a viewer, an audience, all you need do is sit down, and let it out, and feel better. (My conscience: Is my worrying here just one miniscule reiteration of the long war between the Classical and the Romantic?) This ad is an ad for an investment firm that funds some sort of theater program in the schools. The girl in the photograph—is she a model, or could she actually be a beneficiary of this program, could these actually be her words?—is (partly?) of African descent; I am (mostly, as far as I know, but who knows?) of European descent. Do I have a right to complain in any way about any amount of money shuffling from Wall Street to (presumably) underfunded arts programs, to kids who benefit from those programs? (From yet another corner of my conscience: What about the irony of complaining about the celebration of empowerment and self-expression on a blog post?) And yet, and yet, there's some great wrong here. Does this have something to do with The Cult of the Amateur? (Why do I have this sinking feeling that the contemporary celebration of the untrained has something to do with a Will Rogers populism mutated by Ronald Reagan economics into a new and subtle way of keeping the citizenry crushed under the heel of its own proud ignorance?) In this same issue of The New Yorker, Louis Menand writes: "In commencement speeches and the like, people say that education is all about opportunity and expanding your horizons. But some part of it is about shrinking people, about teaching them that they are not the measure of everything. […] We want to give graduates confidence to face the world, but we also want to protect the world a little from their confidence. Humility is good. There is not enough of it these days." Is this what's missing? Do I want the young girl, rather, to be saying, "I just saw my first Broadway show; I feel humbled and in awe of this dying art, and I'm immediately writing my senators, even though I can't yet vote, to urge increased funding for the arts; and I'm going to get an after-school job in order to pay for my new habit of going to see Broadway shows, because in the next few years I'm going to see a hundred of them, and then, if I'm lucky and I work my ass off, I'm going to go to Tisch, and I'll keep writing all this while, but I'll know, from all my reading and theater-going, that my work will surely be nothing in comparison, because as Jean Rhys said: 'All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. And there are trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.'" But investment firms presumably don't have any interest in funding awe; and I don't want the world to revert to what it was before Free to Be, You and Me, because that was even worse; but maybe my real subject here is this: Shouldn't the teaching of writing really—secretly, ultimately—be the teaching of reading?

My Housemate

(After J. David Stevens's "The Death of the Short Story," originally published in North American Review, collected in both Flash Fiction Forward: 80 Very Short Stories and Stevens's Mexico Is Missing, the latter of which appears to be available in its entirety on the Ohio State University Web site.)

The night I first met the short story it had just been beaten up pretty badly by a couple of these aggro publishing kids. You know the type: they had their own lit mag, they had distro and a blog, they had a tire iron and a bone to pick. What is it with these Young Turks, always needing to take a brick to the skull of one genre or another? A generation ago they nearly killed the short story and the chivalric romance in one fell swoop in a bar brawl up in Oregon somewhere. This time around, the kids tried a sucker punch, invited the story to a release party for some new anthology they'd put together, at a swank restaurant down on the Bowery, they said—except there was no anthology, no party, no restaurant, and that's where I found it, bleeding adverbs all over my stoop.

No, the short story is not dead; it is alive, and well, and shacked up in my living room, actually, in a kind of mother-in-law apartment situation I've set up for it. It's constantly hearing reports of its death, though, has been hearing them for forever—or at least since around the time Collier's closed up shop—which, in spite of how often it's been jumped, kicked, pummeled, and stomped, it finds perpetually surprising.

"Like Mark Twain reading his own obit," says the story.

"Word to that," I say.

Almost more troubling than the reports, past tense, of its recent death, are the predictions of its imminent demise. The story gets this horribly anxious look. I tell it not to worry. It's okay. These are just death prognostications, I say—it's not like they're death threats! That thought usually just makes the story feel worse—what's the difference between a prophecy and a fatwah, when you're at the receiving end?—but it always pulls itself together quickly. That's not naïve optimism, that's just science, just the nature of a ruthlessly efficient little body with a spine of infinite possibility running through it.

Is it dead? No. Unwell? Hardly! But is it feeling a little apathetic, a little resigned, about all the diagnoses and prognoses it gets, the perennial baseball bats to its plots? The story shrugs.

"I meet a lot of people," it says.

And it's true. Some of these meetings are as long as the frequent one-night stands the story has. Or weekend-long benders. (I don't even bother asking for it to call me to let me know it's not coming home; I know now how resilient the story is; whether it's off fighting a distant war, or holed up in some hotel with a hooker, a bottle, and a copy of Stephen King's On Writing, I know it'll be back soon.) Sometimes people only meet the story for as long as it takes for it to buy a pack of cigarettes at a deli. Or hold up a bank. Or sprout wings and fly out through the emergency roof exit of the crosstown bus. Or have a quiet epiphany—in the living room, at the county fair, over dinner—about its drunken father and the meaning of life. So many drunk, absent fathers the story has! A million damaged childhoods! So many sad mothers who had to abandon it in the dark of night on the doorstep of their local creative writing program!

And so many quiet epiphanies! It's fun, all these crises, all these realizations; although I have to admit it gets a little exhausting, emotionally speaking, just from crying so much. We both cry a lot.

And yes, sometimes I get confused, living with the short story; sometimes it seems like it's trying to prove something to me, or like it's reverting to some very juvenile stage, where it wants to be smarter and more difficult than it is, where it wants to obfuscate all meaning, all sense. Where it wants to be cool.

Like last night. We were hanging out, having a mellow evening, watching some television. The story always likes to watch these great half-hour dramas you get these days—they're its grandchildren, after all. It's very fond. The story got this funny look.

"I worked for Kristin," it said.

"What?" I said. "Who's Kristin?"

The look got even funnier, like it wanted me to understand what it was talking about, but couldn't, or wouldn't, explain it directly. The story looked the way it often does, like its compact little self was bursting at the seams with meaning.

"Jeff thought I was fucking hilarious," it said.

"Do I know Jeff?" I asked. "Do I know these people?"

The story shut up again.

"Are these people you know from a workshop?" I said.

It waved at me, as if to say, forget it, I'm done with explaining what I'm on about for now. Then it pointed at the television. Check it out, I think is what it was telling me. This is good stuff. There was an hour-long dramatic series coming on—one of these shows with multiple, interwoven plotlines playing out over the years, bloated and baggy, but beautiful, impossible not to watch.

Then the doorbell rang.

"That'll be the novel," said the story. "It doesn't have cable."

Who am I to say no? These old genres have enough problems.

I went to get the door.

"Men and Women in Space" : Notes on a Reading by Don Delillo

We are waiting for Don Delillo to appear.

As usual for events of this sort, there are multiple introductions. Someone from the 92^nd St Y introduces the writer, Dana Spiota, whose job it is to introduce Delillo himself. The earnest reverence in Spiota's speech is both familiar and embarrassing. She praises his books as "the secret antidote to the depressing consumerist hum we all live with," but it's unclear whether she's suggesting that they stop the hum of consumerism or merely cure us of our depression, and, in either case, the claim sounds false. It might be true if you took out the word, "antidote." And what does she mean by "that particular American longing"? Is that an American quality? Is longing - longing itself, not the object of that longing – specific to a culture? No one asks these questions. There will be a time later for "select" questions, but the questions will be reserved for Delillo. In the ritual of the high literary reading, the introductions are only symbolic gestures; each is an incantation to transport the reader from the profane world at large into the sacred space of literature. The more introductions, one supposes, the deeper we go into the world of the book and the less we actually listen to the meta-language of praise.

The applause begins when she says his name.

Don Delillo is bigger in person, leggier, than what one expects. He's almost athletic as he walks to the podium. In his green buttoned-down shirt and brown pants, the author looks like a middle-aged man who has dressed himself. Maybe his wife tried to stop him – doesn't that look too earthy? – or maybe she's given up on trying to change his mind.

"There's a novel, and there is a reading," he says into the microphone. We are quiet. The audience has been awed by his books into a silence some of us believe is holy.

You think of the opening to Underworld: "He speaks in your voice American and there's a …" but he doesn't speak in your voice. His actual voice is not the voice that you heard in your head – why should it have been, when even your own voice doesn't match that sound? Don Delillo speaks in the voice of an old woman who's been smoking for so long that the years of ash and fumes have ravaged her vocal chords to something mannish, but underneath the velvet and gravel, there remains a fundamental womanliness. At times, you wonder if he has a lisp; there's a cottony thickness around some of his consonants, the word "troop" seems to have more letters, an extra 'h.' You hear it again in the end of the first chapter, which sounds stickier than when you read it by yourself: "Call or fold. Felt or baize."

He sniffles.

There is a novel, and there is a reading. The sentence sounds odd; it would be easier to hear if he'd used plurals. He tells the audience that he has reordered the novel for the reading, choosing two characters, Keith and Lianne, and following their stories chronologically, alternating back and forth.

It's surprising to hear people laughing. You never laugh reading his work. Nothing escapes that dire tone or your awareness of his work as the performance of a writer.

He pauses to drink. The microphone picks up and amplifies the fleshy, gurgling sound of a man swallowing. Smacking his lips. The way he might say "Pafko at the Wall."

He says "police" instead of "priest." He is the high priest of American letters, but he looks like the guy sitting across from you on the subway. He shifts back and forth on the balls of his feet as he fields questions from the moderator, questions written by the people in the audience on blank, white index cards that had been tucked into their pamphlets.

In response to one question, he says that he was not happy about the idea of including a terrorist in the novel. He says, "I felt I had to. I felt it would not be a fully responsible novel if I did not include a terrorist." He doesn't elaborate on what he means by the novel's responsibility, except to say that he had to try to understand the individual inside the structure, the individual "bonding with a group of more or less like-minded men…this blood connection that becomes more important than politics or religion finally." He doesn't elaborate on what he means by "finally."

When the moderator, that same boyish, bearded man from the 92^nd St Y who gave the first introduction, asks him a question about architecture, Delillo says that he thinks that his novels are more three-dimensional than others' are. It's hard to know how to take this, except in a literal sense as a joke, and he isn't joking. "I don't tend to feel as comfortable," he says, "with abstract thoughts as I am with men and women in space." This answer catches some people by surprise because it goes against the mainstream criticism of Delillo as a brilliant, heady writer more interested in cerebral dialogue and aphorism than in the way real people interact with real objects in the real world. A friend turns to you and arches his eyebrow. Of course, what makes Delillo feel comfortable is not necessarily what ends up in his books, and what ends up in his books rarely makes us feel comfortable. His books do not stop "the depressing … hum" of the present, but they make the white noise seem meaningful, and that is all the comfort we can hope for.

The moderator, who has been sitting all this time at the edge of the stage in a little chair at a respectful remove from the "talent," thanks the author, and the crowd claps. Some stand in ovation, others gather their things to reach the book signing line first or to catch a cab home. Delillo disappears to the sound of applause, and the holy temple of literature falls apart, but those who leave believe they bear with them its sacred aura like a stone from the ruins.

"Help Me Get Home"

I sat in Washington Square reading Bolano’s novel, The Savage Detectives, and thinking about the aura of genuineness created by all of those raw, rambling monologues, some of them purposefully inarticulate, others insane or visionary. The book wasn’t what I’d expected from all of the praise – from Susan Sontag, from John Banville, Francisco Goldman, Francine Prose, Der Spiegel, Les Inrockuptibles – it was something wilder, more varied, duller, looser, and funnier. I couldn’t read the book without thinking of what had been written about it, in part, because the book designers at FSG had put out an ugly yellow-and-black hornet of a book, striped with scribbled bands of praise, and, in part, because of the mystifying nature of that praise, in particular the puzzling, almost koan-esque blurb from Ignacio Echevarria that ran in El Pais, in which he heralded the book as “the novel Borges would have written.” You could sit on a mountain for twenty years drinking dew from the moss of your cave and meditate on that mantra; it might lead you to satori; it might leave you insane. Either way, it probably wouldn’t help your writing.

While I was reading, turning from that maddening dust jacket back to the chapter at hand, a blonde-haired boy sat down on the bench across from me, took out his guitar, and laid out a mat that said, “HELP ME GET HOME.” He was wearing a sleeveless concert t-shirt, a pair of blue scrubs, and a straw cowboy hat. He was barefoot.

I read while he sang a song about everything that was wrong in the world. Politicians lied. The military dropped bombs. People had to work too hard in miserable, unrewarding jobs. It wasn’t a very good song, and he wasn’t a very good singer. The chorus was something about waiting for love to set him free.

When he was done singing, no one clapped. In the relative silence of that small part of the park, you could tell that he had been expecting applause. In its absence, he struck up a conversation with a young girl reading, Lady Chatterly’s Lover. She was bored with Lawrence. He was in his gap year. Living on the streets in New York was easy, he said, if you didn’t mind sleeping on a little mat. The girl was impressed with his performance if not his singing. She closed her book. “It’s like camping, but everyone pays for your food and clothes,” he added. There was bravado in the way he smiled then. I looked back again at his bare feet. Love was not going to set him free, but I couldn’t discount the possibility that if he was dedicated enough to his art or to his own artful image of himself, the singing barefoot poet, that one day, when he was good and ravaged, he might write an ode to the stupid heroic self-destructive self-proclaiming sensual poetic bravado of his youth, a sprawling, nostalgic “Non, je ne regrette rien” epilogue to an old manifesto, which someone in their tearful exuberance might call “the novel that Borges would have written.”

Found Short Stories, Volume 3

(Found in an essay entitled "Political Commitment in the Past Two Decades of Swedish Poetry" written by Gunnar Harding and published in the "Art and Guns" issue of Poetry East)

A boy ran up to me
I ran up to my father
Your son is burning, I said
My son came up to me and said: I'm burning
First we have to put out the fire, I said
My father went up to me and said:
can't you see that the boy is burning?
First we have to put out the fire, I said
My son ran up to me and said:
a boy ran up to me and said:
I ran up to my father and said:
can't you see that your boy is burning?
My son is my father, a boy who is running
I no longer see anyone, I said: it's burning
We've got to put it out: you and I are disappearing

(translated by Gunnar Harding and Frederic Will from the Swedish original, "Napalm," written by Bjorn Harkannsson)

Coincidence in the Novel

From William Logan's wild ride on the tails of Pynchon's Against the Day in the VQR:

The Novel as Juggernaut

A long novel is as difficult to shift from its course as an ocean liner; and Pynchon is no novice captain of the stout tug Coincidence, the favorite of every clumsy novelist since Thomas Hardy, if not long before. (The line of coincidence starts with Oedipus Rex—Shakespeare, Defoe, Charlotte Brontë, and many another have kept it alive.) Novels are famously more conservative in their social physics than in their propriety; random acts offend the reader’s expectation of a moral fate and undermine the Whig view of history on which much modern fiction is based. Novels that embrace the Mode of Perennial Accident—sometimes generated, like the productions of Oulipo, by chance method—often comment upon fiction in a meta-novelistic way. These are gestures of an art fatally uneasy with its means.

The Novel vs. The Short Story #1

A good portion of Elif Batuman's inflammatory essay in N+1 on the death of the short story seems unfounded, but this paragraph seems worth consideration:

Novels, like short stories, are often about absences; but they are based on information overload. A short story says, “I looked for x, and didn’t find it,” or, “I was not looking anymore, and then I found x.” A novel says, “I looked for x, and found a, b, c, g, q, r, and w.” The novel consists of all the irrelevant garbage, the effort to redeem that garbage, to integrate it into Life Itself, to redraw the boundaries of Life Itself. The novel is a fundamentally ironic form; hence its power of self-regeneration. The short story is a fundamentally unironic form, and for this reason I think it is doomed.

In the Beginning #1:

From a Review by Richard Gehr of James Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand :

This is how Don DeLillo's epic Underworld opens: "He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful."

And this is the way The Cold Six Thousand, the second volume of what James Ellroy has called his "underworld U.S.A." series begins: "They sent him to Dallas to kill a nigger pimp named Wendell Durfee."

Note the contrast.

Published in the Village Voice.

So You Want to Be a Writer

So this early Christian sect, the Syphileans, after life on the outskirts of the late Roman Empire had become completely unbearable, and they simply had to get out, the Syphileans wandered east—not unlike, they thought, the old Israelites in the desert—ending up, many years later, on a small island off the coast of India, a place where life was really, really miserable, in some ways even more miserable than it had been for them back when they'd been living under the thumb of Rome. The irony in all this was that, back in the old country, the Syphileans had been the strictest of any of the early Christians when it came to their religious laws; they stuck to the Bible's injunctions more rigorously than just about anybody. Remember, in that area at that time—I mean, the basic promised-land region—it was full of all sorts of different groups along the Jews-and-Jesus spectrum, who were all asking things like What do we do with this dead Jewish prophet guy? and What do we do now that there's no Temple? And they all had different answers, naturally; but the Syphileans were hard-core, so much so that when British anthropologists discovered the Syphileans a hundred years ago—having missed out on, you know, the Council of Nicea, Luther and his Theses, the Spanish Inquisition, whatnot—they were almost unrecognizable as Christians. They were like some old, beautiful, Middle Eastern fly, or flies, caught and preserved in amber. And one of the ways in which they were stuck in time was how throughly they were still sticking to all the laws about how to punish people who'd messed up. The trouble, though, was that the one copy of the Pentateuch that they'd been able to smuggle out of the old country with them had gotten sopping wet on the trip out to their new island home, and had partly rotted away in places, had completely fallen apart in others, and had had to get gently patched back together, with a little bit of educated guessing going into the patching, such that—and this was partly what was so confusing to the anthropologists—they still had all these strict laws, and they adhered to them strictly, but they'd gotten garbled up a bit. Did a man who sold doves for a living lie with his brother's wife after her monthly seclusion, but before she'd taken her ritual bath? Then they had to stone him to death. Did an angry woman drive her uncle's cattle to market and sell them for an unfair price to the priests? Then they had to mock her in the town square for three days, and then stone her to death. Did a man with a red or green boil on his skin forget to wash his clothes for a week before going to battle? Again—and, to be fair, this was how things usually played out in the original, pre-remix version, too—stoning. The great difficulty for the Syphileans was that, on this tiny little island in the Indian Ocean, there weren't any stones. And they couldn't find any adequate substitute either, like, say, coconuts, or a nice winter squash. Their island was all soft sand and dirt, and the trees were all rubbery, and the fruits and vegetables were all sort of pulpy, like ripe tomatoes. So what were they supposed to do? The priests all met to discuss the problem; after a while, they decided that, following the principle of an eye for an tooth, a tooth for an eye—some parts had just gotten slightly off—their god would accept a punishment that, even if it wasn't quite what was being asked for, was almost exactly as unpleasant. And they still had a knife they'd managed to bring along with them, and so when someone screwed up—carried burning food across running water, fondled his uncle on the Sabbath, and so on—after a brief trial, one of their judges would take the offender, cut open his stomach with the knife, and then gently slip into the incision one or two of the island's tiny, toothy, and highly irritable mongooses. Then the guy would get chased down the beach, around the outside of the island, by his family members—parents, ideally, if they were still around, but if not, siblings or children were okay, too—until, after this miserable, horrendous combination of the worst physical torture, and public humilation, and this high-school gym-class discomfort of exercise on top of all that, he died.

So you see what I mean? That is what writing should feel like. Otherwise, what the hell are you doing? Masturbating with a self-help book? Getting busy with a typewriter? That might be fun for a while with an old manual, like a classic Underwood or something, but definitely not an electric, no, because eventually, you come to the automatic carriage return, and then you'll know for sure you're not writing, because then, zip goes the platen, and, well, you're fucked.

The Diets of the Novelists (A Roman/Pompeston Collaboration)

We writers are all familiar, from our days of rote memorization back when we were apprentices just starting out in MFA programs, with the list of those legendary novelists who would, and did, consume everything under the sun. The canon of the gourmands starts with Rabelais and moves on down to Cervantes, L'Abbé Prévost, and, not the least among them, Defoe. Who can forget how our writing instructors drilled these giants into our minds? Who doesn't remember their names on the chalkboards, their images raised up before us as icons, beacons of how we, too, should grow up to write everything and eat everything, our words spilling off the page like our fatty soups, our bellies gorgeously bursting the confines of our pants?

For writers, we are taught, excess is second nature. We devour the whole enchilada; we disgorge the kitchen sink; we admire most those novelists who set the bar of superabundance high. But in our private moments, we worry: Can any of us novices ever really be Dos Passos, eating everything and vomiting it all back out again on the page? Why bother aspiring to models like Melville, when it is now not just inadvisable but actually illegal to eat whaling ships in their entirety, from the hard tack to the sea anchor to the first mate to the mizzen? We throw up our hands; we cry out: We will never be Bellow!—consuming great platters spilling over with feasts of blood and offal, fabulously obese widows and skinny young shop girls, juice-soaked copies of The Forward and the Declaration of Independence—and so we hide in our basements, jotting down self-loathing haiku in pencil, weeping softly, nibbling on leftover matzo.

But the truth! The truth liberates. And time reveals all. So many of the models our writing programs hold up for us—these spectacular, all-devouring gods of the world of letters—were, in reality, we discover much later, considerably more human than the myths that have been built up around them. Young writers all know that Joyce's hunger was legendary—but are any of them ever taught that his taste was limited, quite literally, to the scatological? Tanizaki liked vast, seven-course meals prepared for him by gangs of prostitutes, it's true; but as scholars have recently discovered, he only ate the appetizers. Alas, if only more young writers knew that, although Kerouac indeed did swallow all the road kill he could find from New York to San Francisco, he didn't chew, more of them might still be around to tell the tale! Balzac claimed that he ate, drank, smoked, slept with dozens of women, and wrote—all at once—for sixteen hours a day, but almost all of his ninety-seven novels, as recent biographies have pointed out, were outsourced to Bulgarian temp agencies. Are any young writers ever taught that Hemingway, in all his many adventures around the world, only ever ate dry toast? And Dickens—magnificent Dickens!—ate anything he could find lying about in the streets of London, or abandoned in the gutters, or stuck to the insides of his chamber pot—but only if it was thinly spread on a sliced-open half of a muffin.

And what of the less omnivorous novelists? The picky eaters, the allergics in the attic, the vegetarians squirreled away in their garrets? These careers—the lives and diets that do not humble us into inaction—are even less well known. If only our writing programs would make mention of, say, the life of Fielding, who ate a reasonable three square meals a day, or Sterne, whose only dietary sin was a minor addiction to mercury! Then there's Diderot, who abused nothing but oyster shells, or Rousseau, who occasionally ate small parts of himself. Writing teachers! Don't you see that we are all of us particular in our sins, each of us unique in word, deed, and food? Thomas Wolfe smoked banana peels, had a thing for French girls wearing paper bags on their heads, and never did like the taste of anise seed; Wallace Stegner loved turned milk, smoked Gauloises from the age of six, and all his life insisted that his mother cut the edges off his sandwiches. Steinbeck was a lifelong virgin who bit the heads off ducks; Iris Murdoch painted Communist slogans on the flanks of cows as they slept in their fields; Conrad couldn't get enough of his beloved Mexican-jumping-bean-and-French-fry stew. Willa Cather led a double life as a born-again traveling icebox saleswoman with four husbands in three states and a fondness for opium; Flaubert started each day with whiskey on his corn flakes; Edith Wharton repeatedly contracted bad cases of the clap from shared bottles of near beer.

We could go on—we might mention the secret dinner parties thrown by James, Proust, Mann, and Woolf, where the four greats ate and drank nothing but air; or the cookie recipes swapped back and forth between Nabokov and O'Connor, their ingredient lists limited to ground chickpeas, sand, and the shorn wings of insects. But we'll stop here. Perhaps knowing the truth could give you some comfort; perhaps these examples could offer the young writer shoes that his or her human feet might actually fit? Perhaps this realistic glimpse of mortal, restrained, dietetic lives might provide some of you with solace—as it has done for us.

Dire Warnings #5

Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. But the Genius which according to the old belief stands at the door by which we enter and gives us the lethe to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday. Sleep lingers all of our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir tree. All things swim and glitter.

Emerson, "Experience."

Exempli Gratia (A Blogger Labels, Google Maps, and Mac Stickies Improvisation)

It was fall, and I was on vacation in Kansas City, riding my scooters around town. I own more than one scooter, and when I go on vacation I like to bring them all. Comparing the relative merits of different conveyances in new places is one of life's great pleasures.

As I buzzed about, I searched my electronic map for a good place to get pizza. The town was new to me; how was I supposed to know where to find a decent pie? Perhaps I could have asked one of the many locals I kept wheeling past, but I prefer computers—the anonymity of a screen, the honesty of cold data—to actual human interaction. This is my way. I like to think that it's the way of the future.

I hadn't had an acceptable slice since my last vacation, when I was in San Francisco, staying in a hotel down on Market Street. There's a fantastic pizzeria there—at 10 Market St., specifically, if you ever happen to be in town, and the place still exists, whenever it might be that you read this. Isn't that one of the funny things about writing, that it can outlive its subject? Just ask any of those Greek and Roman guys, or other historians from other empires that no longer exist that you learned about once, either in school or on the Internet.

Anyway, all I wanted to do was find a business, some business that sold pizza to its customers, but this was proving somewhat difficult as I whizzed up and down the narrow roads and twisting alleys of the fine Midwestern city in which I found myself on this particular vacation, even more difficult than the proverbially onerous task of finding a good hotel near LAX—which is, really, the needle in the haystack of the online generation. I know one—I mean, I know a really, really excellent place to stay near the Los Angeles airport—but I don't hand out free advice to just anyone; I like to play my cards close to the vest.

My trouble in Kansas City was, in part, logistical. I had to keep one hand on the scooter's handlebars, hold in my other hand the digital map device on which I was performing my search, and, on top of all that, keep the widget in my ear from falling out, the widget connected to the telephone I was using to call Lou. Lou is my friend with the answers. He also happens to have the most unmemorable telephone number ever: 555-7361. It's a number I always have to jot down, no matter what. Lou is my answer guy, when the non-human networks fail me. He's the guy I call when I need to connect the dots—like, say, when I want to understand why Seattle and ZIP code 98109 are not perfectly coterminous, and how exactly to get from one to another—if it's even possible to get directions from some place to a place inside it—or when I need to figure out what JFK was doing at 350 5th Ave. in New York City the day before he was assassinated. That sort of thing.

Lou, I said on my portable telephone, what does a modern, digital, scooter-driving fellow like myself need to do to get some repectable pizza on his fall vacation in Kansas City?

You need ingredients—e.g., eggs, maybe milk, Lou said.

And then? I asked.

And then you need to figure it out from there, said Lou. That's as far as I can take you. Or as far as I want to take you, he said.

Eggs and milk, I said. Very helpful examples! You're a good friend, Lou, I said, in so many ways; e.g., your always dependable advice.

No problem, said Lou. Anytime. You know the number.

Eggs, milk—good stuff, I said. I'll write myself a note.

Dire Warnings #4:

This contention holds that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions. I call this contention astonishing because in whatever way we define the concept of civilization it is a certain fact that all things with which we seek to protect ourselves against the threats that emanate from the sources of suffering are part of that very civilization.

Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, Ch 2, (p 38 in the 1989 WW Norton Edition, translated by James Strachey)

Dire Warnings #3:

The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say nothing and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.

Journals, May 24, 1847, written on the eve of Emerson's forty-forth birthday. According to the footnote (Vol XVII, p.277) Emerson considered it one of his best sentences, but had no memory of writing it.

Dire Warnings #2

For External Use Only.

Dire Warnings #1

From The Death of Ivan Ilyich:

It's as though I was going steadily downhill when I imagined I was going up.

A Smart Man, A Good Book

In the grand reading room of the public library, writers and researchers sit beside less experienced students of the English language. Yesterday, in a moment of frustration I found myself reading over the shoulder of the Korean girl beside me. It was a beginner’s English text book, the kind designed to give an unstuffy introduction to basic grammar and vocabulary. “Look!” it announced:

A PEN ....................... A BLUE PEN
A MAN ........................ A SMART MAN
A BOOK ....................... A GOOD BOOK

I was using a black pen, but I wanted very badly for everything else to be true. Only at that moment it didn’t seem to be a very book that I was writing – and had been writing for years now – it seemed like a mediocre book that I was incapable of finishing. Maybe if I were a smart man, I thought. A smart man could write a good book.
Further down the page, there was an even darker omen:

Do you have a bad teacher?
A stupid teacher?
A bad book?
A big apartment?

For once, I took comfort in the fact that I do not have a big apartment. Maybe there was still hope.

The Art of Survival #4: Worker's Comp

Another entry in the art of survival, this one drawn an old email from a old friend, who is now a businessman:

I had dinner with Aline last night, and she said, “writers don’t die of strokes.” This fine observation came from her real life experience of seeing her boss collapse in the middle of a meeting, and probably in the middle of a sentence earlier that day.

Pathology of the writer: suicide, nervous breakdown, alcohol-related diseases, venereal diseases, boredom, bad luck, TB, dictatorship, drugs.

Pathology of the businessman: stroke, murder, plane crash, drunkenness, exotic holidays, dodgy partners, failure of the heart, failure.

At least there is some choice.

S

The Art of Survival #3: How'd They Do It?

« Comment les roses de la littérature peuvent-elles naître sur le fumier de l'alcoolisme ? »

Thanks to a coincidence of the Dewey Decimal System and the university library’s idiosyncratic purchasing department, the volumes of Writers at Work published by The Paris Review were placed on the shelf next to a book called,Les Ecrivains et L’Alcool, a book which, according to its author, Michel Convin, began as an attempt to answer the question: comment font-ils pour continuer d’écrire en buvant autant? It’s a question for the ages, and one that the interviewers from the Paris Review failed to ask when they had the chance. Convin does not exhaust the mystery of how so many great writers were able to continue writing so well while drinking so much, and he doesn’t take himself that seriously (His epigraph comes from Blondin: “He had officially quit drinking, allowing himself only a few vermouths under a pseudonym.”). Convin is best, however, when he sounds serious, such as when he informs his idle readers, that “Chez Bukowski, le vomissement n’est pas un motif moral.”

The Art of Survival #2

The Department of the Army Field Manual FM 21-76 - which "describes and clearly illustrates a vast array of topics and teaches you how to... make polluted water potable... construct a solar water still... capture amphibians and reptiles... make an Ojibwa bird snare... clean a snake... signal to aircraft with your body... AND MUCH MORE!" - provides this warning to the solitary writer:

Two of the gravest general dangers to survival are the desire for comfort and a passive outlook...

To overcome the first danger - the desire for comfort - you need to change the way you think of comfort. And the key to changing is reasoning: You compare your present discomfort with the discomfort you will face if captured. Your present discomfort is a temporary problem; as a prisoner your discomfort would probably continue indefinitely and be more intense. Knowing how much discomfort you can take and understanding your demand for comfort will help you carry on. Comfort is not essential!

To overcome the second danger - the passive outlook - you should know what can bring it on.

Some physical conditions contribute to the passive outlook. They include exhaustion due to prolonged exposure to cold, excessive loss of boy fluids (dehydration), excessive fatigue, weakness, and illness. You can avoid these conditions by proper planning and sound decisions.

Lack of will to keep trying can also result in a passive outlook. Lethargy, mental numbness, and indifference creep in slowly, but they can suddenly take over and leave you helpless.

Recognizing the onset of a passive outlook in a companion is important. The first signs are an air of resignation, quietness, lack of communication, loss of appetite, and withdrawal from the group. The best way to deal with such an outlook is to stop or counter the physical and mental stresses that produce it.

Following are the enemies of survival... pain, cold, heat, thirst, hunger, fatigue, boredom, loneliness.

You can increase your self-sufficiency - your ability to function competently on your own - with practice. You have opportunities to do so each day of your life: Make your own decisions and rely on yourself; explore new situations and solve problems. You must learn to accept the reality of a new situation or of an emergency and then take suitable action. This is one of the most important psychological requirements for survival. Do not sit down and worry. Stay busy!

The Art of Survival #1

When Kapuscinski was still alive, Rushdie asked him how he had survived being condemned to death so many times.

"I make myself unimportant," Kapuscinski said. "I make myself seem unworthy of the assassin's bullet."

12 Students To Watch Out For In Freshman Composition

The student who, after reading The Odyssey, corners you after class to ask if you also often feel 'like' Odysseus.

The student in your summer section who has a four-leafed clover tattooed on his right calf in green ink.

The student in your summer section who, a week later, also appears with a four-leaf clover tattooed on her right calf in green ink. You notice they start sitting together and, occasionally, giggle.

The student who asks questions that aren’t really questions?

The student who nods her head vigorously as you explicate on the meaning of a text, and then, when you ask her to offer her thoughts on the passage you have just explicated, draws a blank.

The student who was just 'trying to share. '

The student who reminds you on more than one occasion that Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard.

The student who asks if the brown stain on her assignment is a coffee stain?

The transfer student.

The transfer student from Florida.

The student who, in the beginning of her personal essay, pens the following metaphor: Life is a highway.

The student who reminds you of yourself.

A Mixed Metaphor I Am Too Furious to Fix

We should think of rage as a 1979 Chevrolet Corvette, painted lung-cancer black, with a T-Top frame, 195 horsepower engine, and alloy wheels, a car someone bequeathed to you without your asking, in whose backseat you have made steamy love, pushed from zero to sixty in quiet suburban roads, shown, proudly, to your meeker friends, and finally, after twenty-eight years of hard driving, come to feel embarrassed of.

In order to dismantle it, you will have to be strategic, especially during the working week. Plead a migraine and beg your wife to leave you with the lights off. You have a tummy ache. Your middle eye has been struck blind. Lie late abed. Enjoy the silence, for it will pass. At noon, or thereabouts, slip out from under the warmth of the covers into the stiff ruggedness of a pair of overalls, blue ideally, so that while dismantling your rage you will at least look the part. In the kitchen, brew a pot of coffee, then forget about the coffee and get out the blender instead. Salt the rim of your glass. Today will be a special day. You are going to tear apart your rage for good.

Work hard all day. Wield your screwdriver and wrench liberally, like a pirate. Or, cast yourself as a hero of some sort, if this will help. Dig deep into the body of the engine, throwing away the carburetor, the valves, the pistons, the connecting rod, and finally attack the body itself, dismantling it piece by piece. (You will need larger tools for this, of course. Sledgehammer, forklift). When your neighbors pass, raise a wrench in hello. There’s Mr. West again, dismantling his rage. Ignore them. You are used to this kind of talk.

When, later, your wife and child return from school hand in hand, perfectly proportioned beside each other, like cardboard cutouts, and stare at the bones of the car in the driveway, and say, but you broke everything, agree with them and begin to apologize profusely. You didn’t know what you were thinking—exclamation point! You are a fool in middle-class clothing—exclamation point! Well, your wife replies, we will have to get another one, won’t we? Or else how will we get from place to place?

Evening will fall. The dogs, rabid and hungry, will begin to bark. Perhaps it will even start to rain, as in the movies you have seen, although the theatre of this moment will offer no comfort to you. Certainly darkness will arrive, the shadows of the streetlamps lengthening into pools, the lamps themselves hissing and bursting into fluorescence, lowering little islands of light down onto the tempestuous seas.

The rain ends. The clouds part. The universe, above you, wheels like a confusing poem. You find it dizzying, nauseating. Yes, it is all coming back, all of it, as you knew it would. So: open your toolbox and remove your screwdriver and wrench. Notice the way they glint, like knives. You are still a hero, my friend. After all, you have done nothing wrong, nothing that has not been done before. Tomorrow, as they say, is another day, and with your tools ready, bending on your hands and knees, begin to put together what you have broken, and work long through the night.

The First Lady (Redux)

I admit for the record – though I’m not sure that there is such a thing or that this reading would constitute an entry in it if one were to exist – that the other night, the night of the President’s long-delayed announcement of his “new strategy for success in Iraq” I dreamt I was in bed with his wife, the first lady. It was an innocent sort of affair, if affairs can be called innocent: we were in a log cabin, under the covers, while her aids waited on the other side of the door. For a woman old enough to be my mother, the first lady was remarkably child-like. Her innocence allowed her to do things that would make less innocent people cringe. I don’t mean that we did anything especially awful; there wasn’t any sex, in the strict Clintonian sense of the word; we were only cuddling under the sheets, but this was extramarital cuddling, with someone who did not vote for her husband and did not respect him - it was not conduct that would be considered fitting for a woman of her stature. For me, it was embarrassing, even at the time, the way that one feels embarrassed for people who are making fools of themselves, no matter how much one dislikes them, though I was also making a fool of myself, since, in my embarrassment, I got into bed with her.

Still, I’m not sure if this qualifies as an erotic dream. It was more of a sleepover party. At one point when we were cuddling, I remember, she said, “I think I need to masturbate now,” a sentence which one rarely hears these days, even in the most intimate situations, and it embarrassed me, as it would naturally, and I didn’t know what to do. I think I encouraged her to express herself, I don’t know, I’m a teacher: that’s the sort of stupid thing I might say. I know I didn’t stop her. I also know that she wasn’t naked, she might have been in her underwear, she might just have taken off her pants and shoes to cuddle more comfortably, she might have kept on her socks, I have no visual memory of this, but I remember thinking that she was going at it, so to speak, as if this were the first time, like the song “she’s a maniac, maniac, on the dance floor, and she’s dancing like she’s never danced before” that always stuck in my head when I was younger because it suggested two perfectly opposite interpretations. As does this dream, since I can’t figure it out if it was treasonous or dangerously patriotic.

That was the last thing I remember clearly. I think we came out of the bedroom into the foyer where her aid, a young girl with brown wavy hair and an air of Washington professionalism, was waiting with a clipboard. I greeted her with an embarrassed grin, as if only she and I understood what her boss had just done, and, for that reason, neither of us could say a word. The first lady, still oblivious, gave me a quick, girlish hug, saying something about how she hoped we would “play together” again soon, and they drove off in a black SUV with tinted windows. The next morning I was still humming “Maniac” when I read the president’s declaration that “our success in this war is often measured by the things that did not happen.”

The Art of the Novel #4:

ANOTHER AMUSING ANECDOTE IN WHICH I PRESAGE MY OWN DEATH BUT DISPLACE THE BURDEN ONTO A LITERARY CHARACTER TO AVOID MY FRIENDS AND FAMILY CALLING ME WITH FEIGNED CONCERN

Whoever said that nothing human is alien to him never lived in upstate New York. I bought a boat last weekend, a big boat. I offer this information to illustrate just how very far a man can fall. When I visit the boat on Saturday at noon with my family, I wink, and, shining in the sun, the boat winks back. We are in a great and secret communion, the boat and I—the deep blue sea, the message in a bottle, boys to men, these are metaphors which are false. I was once quite deep within the problems and question of metaphors. When I lived in Manhattan, for example, its own misleading metaphor, a city I also grew to distrust and dislike, like a sentence that cannot just come out and say what it means, I intended to write a novel, and I knew shit about boats. I said that word often, novel, and it became imbued with a sense of deep suffering whenever I mentioned it, as if, every time I went to work on my novel, I was secretly going to chemotherapy. My son, Butch, (yes, I know), often asks me about this, usually when we are boating. When are you going to finish the novel, dad, he asks me. Just as soon as I have sucked back these beers, son, I reply. It is a great joke between us, the kind of joke that makes you sick to your stomach, like when Butch pours bad milk into my cereal on April Fool’s day, or my wife forgets to look at her watch on Friday night when she is out with the girls, or when my neighbor snickers and guffaws over rising gas prices. Look, buddy, I never meant for this to happen. I wasn’t the kind of person who said buddy. I was the kind of person who said “my friend.” I am, I want to be honest here, terrified at the prospect that I no longer know myself. Alternatively, I am terrified by the prospect that I know myself all to well, and this is who I am, a man who boats, and so I have grown up and into myself, like a hand into a baseball mitt. I would rather, at the end of the day, remain mysterious to myself, for it was another wise man who said the day was darkest before the dawn, whereas in own my case I have found the day is darkest at noon, when the prow of my boat is beating and pulsing across the waves, and the beers are finished, and my wife and youngest daughter are waiting for me on the shore, waving wildly, holding up juice bottles or mock pirate flags to signal me home, and I want to do something reckless, very, very badly, but there they are, my wife and child, cheering at me, happy on this fine summer day, wanting Daddy to be brave.

Sent in from the Field by Luke West

We Thank You (A 21-Note Bricolage)

(1) Many thanks for thinking of [our literary journal] for your work. We aren't able to use this piece for the magazine, but we appreciate the opportunity to consider it. All of us at [our literary journal]. [sic] Thank you again. (2) Thank you for allowing us to consider your work. Though we find we are unable to use it, we consider it a privilege that you thought of us and regret that the volume of submissions precludes a more personal reply. (3) Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider your work. We regret that we are unable to use it at this time. We wish you the best of luck placing your manuscript elsewhere. (4) Thank you for letting us consider your manuscript. We regret that it does not suit our present needs. (5) Thank you for sending us your work, but I'm afraid we can't use it in [our literary journal] at present. (6) Thank you for sending your manuscript to [our literary journal]. We will not be able to accept it for publication, but we appreciate your interest in the magazine. (7) Thank you for submitting your manuscript. We regret that we are unable to publish it, but we appreciate your interest in [our literary journal]. (8) Thank you for submitting your work to [our literary journal]. Though it doesn't meet our current needs we appreciate the opportunity to consider it for publication. We wish you the best of luck in placing it elsewhere. We are doing everything we can to reply to manuscripts in a timely way, and hope that we haven't been too slow in considering this one. Keep up the good work! (9) Thank you for submitting your work to [our literary journal]. Unfortunately, we are unable to accept it for publication at this time. We wish you the best with your writing and thank you for your interest in [our literary journal]. (10) Thank you for the opportunity to consider your manuscript. We've read it with care but have decided not to accept it for publication. Best of luck placing it elsewhere. (11) Thank you for the opportunity to consider your work. The editors have read your submission and regret that it does not meet our present needs. We wish you the best of luck placing your manuscript elsewhere. (12) Thank you for the opportunity to read your work. We regret to inform you that we will not be able to publish it. Because we understand the time and effort that goes into writing a story, we're sorry for the brevity of this reply. (13) Thank you for your recent submission. We have given careful consideration to the material but we regret that your manuscript is not suited to the current needs of the magazine. We thank you for giving us the opportunity of reading it. (14) Thank you for your submission to [our literary journal]. Unfortunately, we must pass at this time. Best of luck placing your work elsewhere. (15) Thanks for sharing your fine work with us. We receive a large number of submissions but can publish only one in a hundred. Since our space is limited, we must often turn down well-crafted writing. We wish you the best of luck in placing your work. (16) Though your work has been declined by our editors, we thank you for allowing us to consider it. (17) We have read your submission carefully and found that it does not fit our current editorial needs. However, we do appreciate your interest in our magazine. Thank you for sending your work to [our literary journal]. (18) We regret that the manuscript you submitted does not fit our current editorial needs. Thank you very much for sending us your work. (19) We regret that we are not able to place your work in our magazine. We're sorry to disappoint you, and we thank you for submitting to [our literary journal]. (20) We thank you for having given us the opportunity to read your manuscript, but regret that it does not meet our particular needs at this time. (21) We thank you for the opportunity to read your manuscript. Unfortunately, your work does not meet our needs at this time. Because we know how much effort went into this submission, we regret the use of this form. But the volume of manuscripts we receive makes a personal reply impossible.

With Our Sincerest Regrets

Dear Professor (and Mrs.) Weitzman:

Thank you for your letter requesting a joint residency at the Cuckchafe Colony. We greatly appreciate your interest in Cuckchafe, and enclose, for your convenience, our actual, paper application for residency, which is required of all our applicants, even those who are, or may once have been, "a household name." We also appreciate the enthusiasm for Cuckchafe implicit in both your demand for "the biggest and ritziest cabin [we've] got," and your avowal regarding the haste with which you intend to drive up to our "Godforsaken backwater" corner of Vermont—hence our speedy reply; our apologies if we've sacrificed sense for promptness. However, we tend to believe that all Cuckchafe applicants often feel "too damn busy to bother with the rules." Many are also, we imagine, equally "sick of the damn undergrads." Thus, we regrettably must ask all our applicants to let us consider their requests for residencies at least a few months in advance, and certainly never as soon as "next week." (I am hopeful, Professor, that you will receive this letter prior to your threatened departure date!) Please also note that in addition to the missing paper application, we also never received a writing sample; perhaps you sent it under separate cover—in which case, perhaps it went missing in the post?

Which reminds me of a further consideration: Professor Weitzman, your enthusiasm for your third wife's "creative spirit" and "untapped potential" warmed all of our hearts. It even tempered some of the ill-will some of us on the committee have harbored for you since your second wife's infamous suicide, not to mention your destruction of her last, unpublished manuscript—although I was somewhat surprised to discover that I was the only member of the committee who has always taken you at your word that the novel you burned was "the embarrassing effluvia of a crazy lady." Nevertheless, we do insist that, however many "fantastic anecdotes" the present Mrs. Weitzman might harbor in her "adorable little noggin," Cuckchafe Colony protocols, no matter how old-fashioned they might be, stubbornly require that such stories exist in material form—i.e., written down—and that the committee have the formal opportunity to consider between ten and fifteen pages' worth of said writing (again, I refer you to the enclosed criteria).

When you do have an opportunity to peruse our application, you'll also note that the Cuckchafe Colony, unfortunately, does not offer such a thing as a "joint residency." We cannot, even when our applicants insist that they need their spouse around at all times, as you so charmingly put it, to "keep the bottle on its shelf and the snake in its pants." Have you considered applying to, say, the Bodhidharma Center for Creative Expressiveness in upstate New York? Although some might balk at the compulsory meditation, as well as the steep residency fees, meal fees, etc., their application requirements are refreshingly unrestrictive. My fellow committee members also insisted that I protest your wife's caricature of Cuckchafe as a "pussy farm;" the portrait drawn of our institution in Grover Jablonski's 1972 play of that name was a gross exaggeration, and besides, the place has mellowed considerably since Dr. Lenox's ouster not long after the play won the Pulitzer.

On a personal note, if I may, Professor Weitzman, all of us on the admissions committee privately agreed that your stunning first novel, The Petulant Seed, was one of the most important and influential books any of us read in our teenage years—who, at the time, did not identify with Harry Seed's rage at a cold world, and an even colder mother? We all share a certain fondness for the book, if an understandably tainted one; without question, its portrait of the archetypal "angry young man" of the era may have been taken far too literally by some readers, but I personally have never blamed your writing for the assassination of Senator Berkholder, or the attempted assassinations of Senators-elect Hobbs and Comiskey. I still proudly, publicly profess my love of the novel, and at every opportunity I take issue with those who agree with The New Yorker's Janet Purser's legendary slandering of the book—with the ease of 20/20 hindsight, I might add—as a so-called "irredeemable template of sociopathic behavior."

I think none of us need convincing, Professor, that since then, your career has, as you mention on page five of your thoughtful note, "tanked." Indeed, it probably was a stroke of luck that you got tenure before "that little Harry Seed-wannabe bastard picked up a gun," although I confess that the extensiveness of the coffee stain on that particular page makes me uncertain that I'm quoting you accurately here. All of us on the committee share your hope that your best work is ahead of you, and your belief that Cuckchafe would probably be a great place for you to "bang out some classy stuff;" and although we sincerely hope we do not see you, your rental car, and your typewriter in our driveway later this week, we unreservedly look forward to you and your wife's timely, correctly assembled, and completely separate applications in the future.

Kindest regards,
The Cuckchafe Colony Admissions Committee

Found Short Stories, Volume 2

(Found in the Wikipedia entry for Albert Speer, the Nazi architect, imprisoned after the Nuremburg trials)

Later, Speer took to the prison garden for enjoyment and work. Heretofore the garden was divided up into small personal plots for each prisoner with the produce of the garden being used in the prison kitchen. When regulations began to slacken in this regard, Speer was allowed to build an ambitious garden, complete with a meandering path, rock garden, and a wide variety of flowers. The garden was even, humorously, centered around a "north-south axis", which was to be the core design element of Speer and Hitler's new Berlin. Speer then took up a "walking tour of the world" by ordering geography and travel books from the local library and walking laps in the prison garden visualizing his journey. Meticulously calculating every metre traveled, he began in northern Germany, went through the Balkans, Persia, India, and Siberia, then crossed the Bering Strait and continued southwards, finally ending his sentence in central Mexico.

The Return of Nasdaqq

I, Nasdaqq, have been gone a long time. I, Nasdaqq, never went away. Maybe I haven't been gone a long time? Maybe I've been here all the while? You said I "impersonated" (your word!) an impoverished, indigent Venezuelan coffee laborer in my spiritual autobiography I Am the Bastard Daughter of Juan Valdez, which was a best-seller, and which won all kinds of awards before I was "found out," but you hypocrites, you blood-drinkers, every word was true; deep in the bowels of my American heart, I, Nasdaqq, truly am Juanita Valdez, but you can never realize this, you citadel of publishing, you wolves craving pages dripping with my guts, you take me in and pay me your thirty pieces of silver on a platter then cast me out from your prize-lined offices again onto the dark, glittery streets of your magic island, coursing with the vital fluids of all the corpses of the true souls whose spiritual essences you've sucked dry and vomited out again, and I, Nasdaqq, righteous American, champion of the indigenous, gypsy shaman of the forsaken, I see the words you've stolen from me rising up like skyscrapers of hypocrisy! I am alone, I am the alien, cast out, I never really went away! You say I live in East Hapsburg, West Virginia. You say I am a grade-school math teacher named Bob Shlep. You say that I used to write recently "discovered" lesbian erotica from the Roaring Twenties under the "pseudonym" (your word, always your words!) G. Spot Fuzzmerkin. And you claim (you label, you libel!) that once I, Bob Shlep, was found out and exposed as Fuzzmerkin, that then I started writing "fake" autobiographical novels of the high-flying world of the New Delhi stock market with the nom de plume Nasdaqq, and that when I was found out and exposed yet again, I had to retreat back to East Hapsburg, ridiculed by all you fancy New York publishing snobs, but you've played into my hands all along, don't you see? Maybe I wanted you to find me out! And who says Bob Shlep is not really, truly Nasdaqq on the inside? Is it you, you thieves, you original pornographers, you exploiters? I just want to be left alone here, teaching third graders in East Hapsburg! You think I didn't want you to know that Bob Shlep was G. Spot Fuzzmerkin, was Nasdaqq, was Juanita Valdez all along? I wear many masks, I encapsulate multitudes, I tell the truth with the lies you guzzle like wine, I am not what's killing publishing, I am publishing's bitch, I am your willing servant! Get off my lawn! I'm calling the district attorney! Publish me! Stop ignoring me! Send me money via PayPal! You call all my charities "fake," but who are you to say that I am not a home for lactose-intolerant orphans? Who died and left you the one to judge me, to say that I am not a safe house for exiled Bangladeshi Buddhist nuns? I spout multitudinous voices of greatness! I am a secret symphony, strumming orchestras of marginalized voices in the wilderness of a suburban West Virginia public school! Who knows what other ways I've tricked you that you do not know? What books of mine have you published that you do not realize sprang from my greatness? What would you say if I told you that for a quick buck I secretly ghostwrote that Lovely Bones piece of pop trash in my off hours? That I've pulled off any number of magnificently undiscovered international literary hoaxes that may or may not rhyme with "Smadie Zith" and "Lhumpa Jahiri" and "Sonathan Fafran Joer"? That I went on book tour pretending to be a twenty-five-year-old girl and you bought it, shall we say, hook, Marisha, and Pessl? (My wig wasn't even very good, but you wanted me, you needed me, you couldn't get enough of me!) I am voluminous, I am holy scripture, I am Abstract Expressionism, I am marginalia, I am anathema, I am a gay Portuguese filmmaker, I am a blind Turkish watchmaker, I am the great ignored American genius of our time, I am grading a pop quiz on long division at my kitchen table! Can you stomach me, you so-called literati, you printing-press slavemongers, you elitist ivory-tower climbers, you brilliance-ignorers? Give me money, take your television camera crews away, come and get me! Do you want Juanita again? You liked the follow up, My Bones Are Made of Dog Hair and Coffee Grounds, didn't you? You liked how well it sold, you literary bitch whore, right? Do you want G. Spot? Oh, you wanted G. Spot, you adored The Wet Gatsby, and you loved Tender Is the Crotch just as much, oh yes, you hob-nobbers, you bottom-line bastards? You've had your fill of Nasdaqq? Weren't you pleased with the ecstatic reviews for The Ganges Runs Through the Trading Floor of My Dreams? Didn't Bright Lights, Bodhisattva sell well enough for you? You "reject" me now, don't you, don't you know I cannot be rejected, I get up again as soon as I get knocked down? Do you want me to be taller? Shorter? More transgender? More ethnic? More abused? What is it this season? Who do you want me to be who I am not already? I knock on your door, I scratch your windows, I haunt your inbox, I lurk in your mailroom, I infect your slush pile, I sleep in your bindery, I am a leech in the martini at your midtown university club, I am the fly buzzing in your ear at your posh cocktail party in the Hamptons, I lounge in your doorway, I sleep in your car, I want you, go away! I am Bob, Nasdaqq, Juanita, G. Spot, and so many more, and you "caught" me, you think you caught me, you think I didn't want to be caught, don't you want to catch me again? I am Nasdaqq (you love me!) and I always have been (you despise me!) and I am an Amazon of the bile and bowels of the desperate and I am the green-hued chest and feathery soul of a fluttering unborn nationality, I am a legitimate charitable institution, and West Virginia doesn't pay its math teachers very well, I am old as the hills, I have just been born, I am being born all the time; don't you want me? Get away from my double wide! I hate you! I need you! Publish me! Publish me more! Harder! Faster! I am Nasdaqq! Won't you let me be?

The First Lady

I admit for the record – though I’m not sure that there is such a thing or that this note would constitute an entry in it if one were to exist – that the other night, the night of the President’s long-delayed announcement of his “new strategy for success in Iraq” I dreamt of having a sexual relationship with his wife, the first lady. It was an innocent sort of affair, if affairs can be called innocent: we were in a log cabin, under the covers, while her aid waited on the other side of the door. For a woman old enough to be my mother, the first lady was remarkably child-like. Her innocence allowed her to do what would make less innocent people cringe. I don’t mean that we didn’t anything especially awful; there wasn’t any sex, in the strict Clintonian sense of the word; we were only cuddling under the sheets, but this was extramarital cuddling, with someone who did not vote for her husband and did not respect him, and it was not conduct that would be considered fitting for a woman of her stature. For me, it was embarrassing, even at the time. Yet I’m not sure if this qualifies as an erotic dream. It was more of a sleepover party. At one point when we were cuddling, I remember, she said, “I think I need to masturbate now,” a sentence which one rarely hears these days, even in the most intimate situations, and it embarrassed me, as it would naturally, and I didn’t know what to do. I think I encouraged her to express herself, I don’t know, I know I didn’t stop her. I also know that she wasn’t naked, she may have been in her underwear, she may just have taken off her pants and shoes to cuddle more comfortably, I don’t remember, but I remember thinking that she was going at it, so to speak, an act I have no visual memory for, as if this were the first time, like the song “she’s a maniac, maniac, on the dance floor, and she’s dancing like she’s never danced before” that always stuck in my head when I was younger because it suggested two opposite interpretations. That was the last thing I remember clearly from the dream. I think we came out of the bedroom in the foyer where her aid, a young girl with brown wavy hair and an air of Washington professionalism, was waiting with a clipboard. I greeted her with an embarrassed grin, as if only she and I understood what her boss had just done, and, for that reason, neither of us could actually acknowledge it. The first lady, still oblivious, gave me a quick, girlish hug, saying something about how she hoped we would “play together” again soon, and they drove off in a black SUV with tinted windows. I must have been left in the log cabin alone then, though I have no memory of this.

Howling

A Japanese television crew travelled to Utah in search of a lone wolf. They carried with them a special device called a Bowlingual which was designed to translate the sounds of barking dogs into recognizable words. When the television crew finally found the lone wolf and recorded its cry, the translation the Bowlingual offered was surprising: the Wolf was not howling to mark its territory or to call down the moon, it was asking, "What should I do now?" I have been asking myself that question for the past month. Like the wolf, I am getting used to the world's silent response.

The Perfumed Garden

A library, no matter how apparently sterile or stolidly institutional, is a dangerous place to go to escape distraction. Consider The Perfumed Garden of Cheikh Nefzaoui found on the shelf in a university library, a text originally translated into French in 1850 by a French soldier based in Algeria, and then translated into English by Sir Richard Francis Burton. Plucked off a shelf of Hindu philosophy, The Perfumed Garden warns its unsuspecting readers that "the coitus of old women is a venomous meal." Anyone looking for light reading will find no shortage of a metaphor ingenuity. Especially in Chapter XIII:

Know, O Vizir (to whom God be good!) that man’s member has different names, such as:

El dekeur, the virile member;

El kamera, the penis;

El air, the member for generation;

El hamama, the pigeon;

El teunnana, the tinkler;

El heurmak, the indomitable;

El ahlil, the liberator;

El zeub, the verge;

El hammache, the exciter;

El zodamme, the crowbar;

El khiade, the tailor;

Mochefi el relil, the extinguisher of passion;

El khorrate, the turnabout;

El denkhak, the striker;

El aouame, the swimmer;

El dekhal, the housebreaker;

El aour, the one-eyed;

El fortass, the bald;

Abou aine, the one with an eye;

El atsor, the pusher;

El dommor, the strong-headed;

Abou rokba, the one with a neck;

Abou quetaia, the hairy one;

El besiss, the impudent one;

El mostahi, the shame-faced one;

El bekkai, the weeping one;

El hezzaz, the rummager;

El lezzaz, the unionist;

Abou laaba, the expectorant;

El tattache, the searcher;

El hakkak, the rubber;

El mourekhi, the flabby one;

El mokcheuf, the discoverer.