Found Short Stories, Volume 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




The game is rated E, for "Everyone."

Famous Last Words #1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Editors Have Made Their Decision

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

The Common Reader: A Confession

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

The Possibilities Are Endless

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

Reading Report #2

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

Positively 4th Street

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

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

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

Summer and Smoke; or, the Muppets of Tangier

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

The Last Gatsby

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

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

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

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

The Belly of the Beast

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

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

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

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

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

So It Begins

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

SO
IT
BEGINS

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

BATTLEFORTHEPLANETOFTHEAPES

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

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

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

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

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

The worst part of you envies him.

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

The Art(lessness) of Fiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Burrito-Town is Loserville

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

You have a profound need for sustenance.

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

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

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

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

"Shouldn't be too hard."

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

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

"Yeah, totally. And get digital cable."

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

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

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

"Both."

"Wow."

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

"Cool."

It's time to go home and write.

Instructions for Reading Your Work in Public

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

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

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

The Future of the Book of the Future

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

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

Reading Older Stories

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

The Neuroscience of the Dead

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

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