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.

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?