Last night, well after dinner, the saddest thought hit me: no matter how much we work to preserve Michael Brown’s memory, no matter how much we’ll use his memory to spur positive social change, he’ll eventually be erased from our memory.  Or, if not erased, replaced by the names of other unarmed African-American boys who will fall victim to over-reactive law enforcement officials and open carry white citizenry who see “demons” rather than the innocent boys they are.  Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice.  The list goes on. 

~~~

My mother’s been staying with us for a few days.  We were talking about how different my children’s K-12 school curriculum is from our own.  My mother was educated in Buffalo’s parochial schools in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and though she got good grades, I gathered she had no particular fondness for the nuns who taught her.  Last night, she mentioned that in her senior year of high school, one of them took her aside and chided her out for not making more of her intelligence.  Her classmates had just taken IQ tests and she scored highest among all the young men and women of her graduating class.  Until that moment, she never had an inkling she was so gifted.  Not a single one of her teachers had ever provided her particular encouragement.  Given the mindset of the times, they saw her as just another working class girl rather than a bright mind worthy of encouragement.  Though my mother eventually became very active in her local union, she never pursued a college education.  She doesn’t have regrets about this, but hearing about her IQ tests made me angry at her old school teachers.  Had someone early on in her schooling really tried to impress upon her how much potential she had, she might have—who knows—gone on to cure a disease or helped eradicate poverty.  She might have done any of the things that, as a parent of young children myself, I hope my own children might do.

                                                               ~~~

This thought’s a bit iffier.  Through a link in a friend’s blog, I came across this short article about “gaslighting.”  Briefly speaking, “gaslighting” is the practice an emotionally abusive partner employs to erode someone’s confidence in their own perceptions, feelings, and sanity.  The term stems from a 1938 stage play during which a husband gradually lowers the lights in a room while denying to his wife that the room is getting dimmer.  Over time, after being told she’s crazy for thinking the room’s not as well-lit as it once was, the wife begins to think her husband must be right.  Over time, the wife loses faith in her version of reality and accepts his judgments and opinions.

Quoting from the article, gaslighting techniques include,

Countering: the abusive partner questions the victim’s memory of events, even when the victim remembers them accurately. Ex. “You’re wrong, you never remember things correctly.”

Blocking/Diverting: the abusive partner changes the subject and/or questions the victim’s thoughts. Ex. “Is that another crazy idea you got from [friend/family member]?” or “You’re imagining things.”

Trivializing: the abusive partner makes the victim’s needs or feelings seem unimportant. Ex. “You’re going to get angry over a little thing like that?” or “You’re too sensitive.”

Forgetting/Denial: the abusive partner pretends to have forgotten what actually occurred or denies things like promises made to the victim. Ex. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” or “You’re just making stuff up.”

Reading the article,  I kept thinking, wow, this sounds so familiar.  The reason?  These are exactly the techniques perpetrated by Right Wing media commentators to belittle or dismiss the concerns of those of us who do not belong in the 1%.  We’re too sensitive.  We’re wrong on any number of things.  We just don’t understand. 

Earlier this month, 1,001 Americans were asked to name the current unemployment rate.  At the time, the unemployment rate was 6.1%, yet the average response was a whopping 32%.  Somehow, people believed the state of the economy was much worse than it is.  Only an America that has substantially lost faith in its ability to judge the reality around itself could make such an outrageous assessment. 

So the question is, has the right wing succeeded in gaslighting America? 

Ellie, my nine-year-old daughter, chose to wear her Martin Luther King tee shirt to school today.  We bought it a couple of years ago while visiting the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta a couple of years ago, a trip I heartily recommend for any family with young children.  We haven’t talked about the Ferguson case much in our household, and last night we didn’t watch the news coverage of the announcement that police officer Darren Wilson would not be indicted for the murder of an unarmed African American teenager, but this morning she must have glanced at the newspaper, for she intuited that the MLK tee shirt was the appropriate thing to wear today.

The hardest thing teach to a child is that nastiness exists in this world.  Fairy tales expose them to witches and monsters, and kids’ movies expose them to the grotesquely greedy captains of industry who willfully pollute the planet or threaten to tear down a Muppet theater for personal gain, but, generally, those villains are so far removed from the people they’d encounter in real life, or are so comically warped that, even in a nine-year-old’s imagination, they’re hardly believable.  So it’s hard for them to gather why nastiness truly exists.

Earlier today, on Facebook, I posted a note about how proud I was of Ellie for wearing her Martin Luther King, Jr. tee shirt today.  Predictably, a number of friends “liked” this status.  Which was nice.  But then a friend I’ve known for most of my adult life wrote something to the effect that it would be nice if the Ferguson protesters were as peaceful as MLK.  To which I responded,

“And she’s a lot more peaceful than Darren Wilson.”

Yeah, I admit it: I had momentarily confused my daughter for Martin Luther King Jr.  Hence, the “she” instead of “he.”

When the discrepancy between reality and the grand jury findings is so vast, it’s hard not to believe the social compact has been torn asunder.  Even a child can pick up on that.  So how does one go about explaining such an egregious error?  Such a brutal murder? 

Errata #1: Last weekend, I came across this fantastic essay by Melissa Febos on the public reception of her 2010 memoir, Whip Smart, and about the need for generosity among writers.  It’s an essay everyone should read.  A few choice nuggets:

“Writing is an insecure profession, affected by factors beyond talent and intention and hard work, factors over which we are powerless.”

“It is hard to give when you don’t feel you have enough. The beauty and miracle of being human is that we can be afraid, and not act out of fear. I promise you, generosity costs nothing. It is an investment in your own security. It is how we build the world we want to live in.

Don’t stand in the back of the reading and talk shit. Don’t hoard contacts or job leads. Don’t hesitate to share all of your information, all of your opportunities. Announce your awards, and those of other writers. Nominate them. The solution to scarcity is more, not less.”

Errata #2: Here’s a neat Leslie Pietrzyk story, “What I Could Buy,” just published today at Hobart.

Errata #3:  My mother arrived in town last night to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with us, which is great.  Because she lives in Arkansas, we don’t get the chance to see her as often as we like.  Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday.  Here’s a Thanksgiving piece I wrote a few years ago.  I hope your holiday is filled with peace, kindness, and charity. 

Late Errata:  On Wednesday (11/26/14), Entropy Magazine published a personal essay, "My Salami Heart: Reflections on the Convergence of Art, Generosity, Success, Sex, and Law."  It's about my attempts to make a go of it as a fiction writer, and my quest to reconcile all those loaded terms in the subtitle.  Because it touches on a couple of hot-button issues in the alt-lit community, the editors asked that I put together an addendum of sorts touching on censorship and victim shaming.  The Addendum is included at the end of my essay.  

Pictured here are a few things I’m working on now.  It’s been an eventful week for me, with a few different things of mine now online:

1)      My review of Lance Olsen’s THEORIES OF FORGETTING is now up at The Collagist.  I loved Olsen’s “destructuralized” novel, which reflects so heavily the theories and work of earthworks artist Robert Smithson (especially his Spiral Jetty).

2)      An interview I conducted with Julie Lawson Timmer is now up at The Rumpus.  Timmer’s debut novel, FIVE DAYS LEFT, deals, in part, with a woman suffering from Huntington’s Disease.  My interview focuses heavily on Timmer’s research techniques, but should also be interesting to those writing about characters in states of suffering.

3)      My flash of satire, “[Title Withheld Pending Naming Rights Negotiations],” is now up at one of Entropy magazine, one of my favorite websites that have sprouted up in the last year or so. 

Anyways, do take care

A woman I know is shamelessly pursuing John Cusack, the actor, from afar.  Cusack, now 48, starred in the film comedies that she loved in the late 1980s and early 1990s, back in the days when she was an aspiring singer/actress.  Now she is the mother of teenage daughters, and though I don’t know the particulars, I sense that in some vital way, her marriage is no longer in a healthy state. 

The Cusack thing arose when she posted a comment online about one of his films.  From what I gather, he was not particularly pleased with the comment that somehow came to his attention.  He tracked her down through social media outlets and private-messaged her with none-too-flattering accusations of being a troll.  It was the type of message that most people would shudder at receiving.  But my friend, she is clever.  Wickedly smart, and wickedly funny, she drew him out into a conversation that—who knows?—may lead to somewhere.

In truth, seeing this play out makes me slightly jealous.  Not that I have designs on John Cusack—or anyone else for that matter—but it’s the excitement, the intrigue that makes me jealous.  If life was a Hollywood picture, one can see her Cusack thing developing into a screwball comedy, my friend taking the place of Claudette Colbert or Carole Lombard, and Cusack’s role being filled by, well, John Cusack. 

But this post isn’t about John Cusack.

Lately, someone has mistakenly been sending text messages to me.  They’re coming from an area code in the Midwest, several states away, and are obviously intended for someone else’s attention.  They ask if I want to meet for lunch, or thank me for a chocolate pie, leaving it to me to invent the contexts behind these messages.  I’ve been tempted to phone or text the sender that they’re sending the texts to the wrong number, but such is the dearth of excitement in my life that I don’t want to surrender the fascination they offer.

Sometimes, I can’t help but read assignations into the messages.  Yesterday, for instance, I was asked,

Is anyone in the office with you right now?

leading me to wonder what the texter had in mind if I was, indeed, free at that very moment.

At other times, the message is simpler.  Thank you can mean so many things, but it is sent so often as to be slightly scary.  Why is the texter so thankful all the time?

Earlier today came this message:

Hey.  What was the name of the place where you said to get the keys for gas lights?

The gaslight keys.  It sounds so quaint, like something you’d need to enter into one of those treacly Thomas Kinkade paintings that some people find so comforting.  And yet, gaslight flames being so anachronistic and mysterious to our 21st century way of life, it makes me wonder if something more is going on.  Have I inadvertently been invited into a Dashiell Hammet mystery?  Was the previous key stolen to cover-up a murder, a theft, the disappearance of a cache of exotic amulets?  Does Peter Lorre lurk in the background?  Is the gaslight key needed to unlock a steamer trunk recently offloaded from a ship en route to Shanghai?  Film noir is on my mind—some darkly-lit B-movie in which dapper perps and whiskey-wise detectives race and outwit each other in pursuit of the vital piece of evidence.  It makes me want to dig through the closet for my old trench coat, cast aside all present-day concerns and troll for a locksmith who can provide, for a steep price, that mysterious gaslight key.  

A friend emailed me about my blog post of the other day.  The gist was that we shouldn’t censor artists on the basis of their personal failings.  He went on to say that the world would be much impoverished if previous generations suppressed Pablo Picasso’s work out of some PC concern that he didn’t treat all women with proper respect.

Because I am sensitive to censorship issues, I seriously thought about deleting that blog post.

The person who sent the email is a longtime friend, someone I respect.  In the past, he’s given sound advice on a myriad of concerns.  As far as I know, he’s never met any of the people mentioned in that blog post.  He doesn’t have a particular axe to grind, and yet he was disappointed in my conduct.

Admittedly, I’m not terribly familiar with the particulars of Picasso’s life.  I’ve been blown away by Picasso exhibits (most notably, Picasso: The Early Years 1882-1906, which I viewed on multiple occasions at The National Gallery of Art in 1997), and have seen hundreds of his paintings. I know he was a philanderer.  I know he’s not exactly a feminist icon.  But was he ever accused of physical, sexual, and/or psychological abuse?  That, I do not know.

But let’s just accept, for argument’s sake, that Picasso was guilty of the worst one could suspect against him.  While those crimes may have been tolerated a century ago, must we tolerate them today? 

What if, in 1900, gallerists told the 19-year-old Picasso that his work could not be exhibited unless he purged himself of abusive behavior?  Knowing Picasso’s ambition and hunger, would he have allowed decency to be imposed on him for the sake of furthering his art? 

Would he still have carried on many affairs with consenting partners?  Probably.  Would he have been abusive towards the women in his life if he knew it carried career implications?  Probably not. 

People are adaptive.  If financial and artistic ambitions are jeopardized by abhorrent behavior, most would ditch that aspect of their lives PDQ.  Or, to put it another way, a genius like Picasso would be smart enough to tone down his behavior. 

There’s nothing essential to Picasso’s art that obligated him towards abuse.  What’s scary is that we’ve allowed his example to absolve others’ sins. 

Where has this gotten us?

Just as Picasso’s example hovers over us, the lives of today’s artists will be used to rationalize artists’ behavior in the next century.

I agree with my friend: artists should never be censored.  If those who get their ya-yas out by abusing sexual partners want to write a novel, so be it.  If commercial publishers choose to bring that novel out into the world, so be it.  But a conscientious audience should not be obligated to embrace that novel. 

What makes the Oprah decision so galling is that, unless I’ve horribly misread her brand for all these years, I thought she represented an idealized conscientious and socially progressive audience.  There’s nothing empowering about sexual abuse.  I can’t understand why she and her people are not more sensitive about the many allegations that swirl around an author she’s chosen to promote. 

Simple as that.

Thank you for reading this far into my mini-diatribe.  I appreciate your consideration.  I’d also appreciate it if you’d read a bit further and perhaps consent to signing this online petition.  It may not make for a better world today, but it could improve the world for our children.  Thank you.

Years ago, clicking through the remote in the wee hours, I stumbled upon cable rebroadcast of a 1950s-era sitcom.  Starved for vapidity, I settled my butt on the couch and watched.  The show wasn’t Leave It To Beaver but, depicting the lighthearted adventures of a middle-class family, its dynamics were similar.  In this particular episode, the family’s precocious son mistakenly believes a neighbor lost his job.  When the neighbor sends the family television set out for repairs, the boy thinks it has been repossessed.  The boy tells his family, tells other neighbors.  At first, people want to help the neighbor, provide him job leads, and maybe bake a casserole so his family can enjoy a hot meal despite their diminished circumstances, but when they track him down on a Saturday morning, they become incensed: the deadbeat ne’er-do-well is golfing! 

Why isn’t he out pounding the pavement looking for work?  Why is he squandering his remaining cash on greens fees?

Of course, the ha-ha moment comes when it’s revealed that reports of the neighbor’s pink slip are greatly exaggerated.  He remains gainfully employed!  In fact, he’s thriving!  And that precocious boy?  He’s just so damn cute and lovable that everyone laughs off his ugly allegations of impeding penury doom and embraces him in one big warm fuzzy.

But me?  I shuddered.  One needn’t be cynical to imagine the confrontation had that man really lost his job.  The worst aspects of Eisenhower-era conformity would be imposed on him.  Harangued and shamed, he’d be made to feel like a reprobate.  Should he remain jobless, he would be shunned, for ostracism was the exclusionary tool of choice that kept WASP-ish communities lilywhite, god-fearing, respectfully Republican, and free of the destabilizing threat of radical Otherness. 

Increasingly, a New Ostracism is emerging that uses “virtual” medias to bring social shame and exclusion on individuals in the larger “real” world. 

Un scandale recently hit the alt-lit writing community when a popular poet was accused of being a serial abuser of women.  A spontaneous online campaign against the poet, aimed at disrupting his professional standing, brought success: publishers pulled his titles from their catalogs.  Last month, allegations against others in the alt-lit community were made.  An editor and a fairly well-known indie novelist were outed as also being serial abusers of women.  The outrage seems to be taking a similar path.

 

Other examples of “The New Ostracism” abound.  Community activists use sex offender registries to hound down and harass neighborhood offenders in hopes of driving them away.  “Bad boyfriend” sites invite women to write-up abusive or cheating boyfriends so other women might be spared the agony of a relationship with them. 

Whereas old-school ostracism sought to ignore or exclude their targets (as William James aptly described the phenomena, victims are made to feel as if they’ve been “cut dead”), the precipitating online acts against New Ostracism victims do the opposite: publishing addresses of sex offenders and blogs about how that person physically abuses lovers are acts of recognition.  Yet the intent behind these very public acts is to deprive victims of the dignity that comes from having a sense of communal belonging and social companionship.

When the target is a poet whose social and professional circles, presumably, are filled with people who like to believe they have a social conscience, New Ostracism can be very successful.

But how about other circumstances?

Consider the case of Ray Rice.  Earlier this year, a video of the All-Pro running back punching out his then-fiancée surfaced on TMZ.  Football fans may not be particularly PC, yet the reaction was swift: Rice was released by the Baltimore Ravens, his club, and indefinitely suspended by the NFL.  So embarrassed were the Ravens by their association with the player that they took the near-unprecedented step of offering to exchange whatever Ray Rice jerseys fans purchased for jerseys of other Ravens players; so embarrassed were Rice’s former fans by his actions that almost 8,000 took the team up on this offer.

Can ostracism, which traditionally has been employed to preserve status quo hegemonies, be used to help enforce positive social change?  The answer is messy.  Attempts to curb domestic violence are noble, but on the internet, a medium where hoaxes and scams are not unknown, undocumented allegations bandied by specious and/or anonymous parties quickly take on the vigilante appearance of a witch hunt.  Stoking outrage and courting invective, New Ostracism rides a wild unpredictable path. The campaign against the poet?  Before it snowballed into a putsch to derail his career, it began as a plea not to support a crowdfunding campaign to pay for his OCD therapy.

And yet, sometimes witch hunts lead to actual witches.  Jian Ghomeshi, the wildly popular CBC talk show host was  recently let go by that network following a wave of sexual assault allegations.  If the allegations are true, the man is a beast whom we should all choose not to associate with. 

Through New Ostracism incidents like this, society is hopefully, if gradually, being transformed.  After the Ray Rice scandal broke, the former General Manager of another NFL franchise said that the league had systematically hushed “hundreds and hundreds” of domestic abuse allegations during his 30 year career.  Given the Ray Rice backlash, one suspects the NFL will not be so quick to cover-up domestic violence allegations in the future.

 

Which brings me back to the poet.  His name is Gregory Sherl.  Although small independent poetry presses have largely washed their hands of him, his debut novel was published earlier this year by a larger commercial press.  This month, Oprah.com features it as one of their “recommended” reads.

Oprah?  Giving support to an alleged creep?  It makes no sense, does it?

It’s incredibly easy to write articles bemoaning the bad behavior of others when that bad behavior has no direct connection to your life.  Outrage is easy when you don’t risk anything by expressing it.  This past week, we’ve all read reports about the woman who was catcalled a gazillion times while strolling through Manhattan.  A story like that gets a lot of buzz because a) it’s so shocking, and, b) catcalling is indefensible.  No one risks being made to feel out-of-touch if they write about what a horrible injustice that woman has been made to feel.

But to out a fellow writer?

Because the alt-lit and MFA worlds are relatively small, and because I suspect most people who frequent my blog are part of the alt-lit and MFA communities, I suspect a lot of people reading this will be at least somewhat familiar with Gregory Sherl. 

 

As you probably guessed from the title of this blog post, people are petitioning Oprah to drop the book from her lists. 

I admit it: when I first saw the petition, I was conflicted.  As a would-be novelist myself who would love to be published by a larger commercial press (and would be overjoyed if Oprah fell in love with that novel), my first thought is that I should stay clear of this petition, that I shouldn’t rock the boat.  Why would I, a would-be novelist, want to do anything to put me at risk of being labeled as a trouble-maker within publishing circles?

Because I have children.

I’ve done some digging.  As near as I can tell, at least 5 women have come out with very troubling and very similar stories of abuse.  Here are a couple of them:  one and two.  Please be advised that these are not for the faint of heart.  


As essayist and novelist Roxane Gay (BAD FEMINIST, AN UNNAMED STATE) commented on the HTLM GIANT blog piece that first raised allegations against Sherl,

“I was taken aback by the original post, because I've known Greg Sherl for years and in fact, blurbed his novel last week, which feels quite uncomfortable now. Witch hunts serve no one's best interests but this doesn't feel like a witch hunt. I hope Sherl gets the help he clearly needs but I'm not going to doubt victims or belittle them, or get cute with cherry picking their statements to make some kind of vague point, as you have done.”


If these are true, Gregory Sherl is as a bad monster as Ray Rice and Jian Ghomeshi are alleged to be.  

I swear, hearing stories like this keeps me up at night.  I’ve got three children: two boys (ages 13 & 15), and a nine-year-old little girl.  My daughter is incredibly bright (she scores off the charts on logic, reasoning, and problem-solving tests) but she also has a learning disability that affects her self-confidence.  I worry about her.  Actually, I worry about all my children: it’s part of being a parent, no? 

I worry about what might happen if, some day, my daughter falls prey to a sexual predator, a spousal abuser, a creep like any of the men I’ve written about above are alleged to be.  I wouldn’t be able to control my anger.  I’d probably do something incredibly wrong-headed, like attempt to take-out my anger on whatever jerk was doing my daughter wrong.  I can only imagine how I’d feel if that creep was allowed to thrive because people refused to sign a petition that would bring his horrible behavior to the light of others.  I’d be mad at those who didn’t sign that petition.  And I’d be mad at me if I didn’t sign it too.

Please consider signing the petition.  We need to change the world so that domestic violence and sexual abuse are things of the past.  The actions we take today have an effect on all our lives for years to come.  We’ll be protecting our daughters, our sisters, our nieces, our friends, and all their grandchildren.  Abuse of any kind should not be tolerated.  

Addendum: I just realized that Mr. Sherl's publisher, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, are also the publishers of the finest novel I've read so far this year: Amy Rowland's THE TRANSCRIPTIONIST (click here for my review of THE TRANSCRIPTIONIST).  I feel bad for them: alleged creeps can, apparently, pop up in the best of houses.

My boys, Stephen and Sebastian, would have been five and three when these pictures were taken.  I had taken them to Dinosaur Land in White Post, VA in early 2005 weekend.  Ellie, my daughter, would have been only a few months old at the time and was home with her mother—my wife, Alison.  In a few months, Ellie will turn ten.

Time.

Where does it go? 

I’ve been thinking about these pictures ever since I recently stumbled upon them in a photo album Ellie keeps.  What they were doing there, I don’t know.  She obviously doesn’t remember anything about the pictures.  Nor, at this date, do her brothers remember ever going to Dinosaur Land. 

For the record, I remember it.  I remember the kids having fun.  Dinosaur Land, built in the 1960s, is one of those unique old-fashioned roadside attractions that you just don’t see often enough nowadays.  Two dozen life-size-ish fiberglass dinosaurs are scattered around the small wooded park.  They stand in ferocious poses, flashing their teeth and claws as if engaged in battle with one another.

It’s the type of place one can enjoy if one has small children.

Both boys were big  into dinosaurs back then, and they ran about the grounds yelling out the names of all the species they could identify.  The T. Rexes, the Triceratops, the this-asauruses and that-asauruses. 

But me?  I remember it being a relentlessly overcast day, and chilly to boot, the kind of day that can depress me regardless how well everything else might be going for me at the time.  I remember being preoccupied with work-related things.  I had invoices to write up, regulations to research, client presentations to prepare.  Yes, I was glad the boys were enjoying themselves, but I was filled with anxiety over all the things I could not do because I was out chaperoning my sons through under-trafficked tourist trap. 

Now though, I can’t get these photos out of my mind.  The scale just amazes me.  How big must the King Kong statue have been to make my boys look so small?  But I’m also amazed at how cute my boys were.  Now teenagers, they both look like young men.  Good-looking young me.  But they used to be so small. 

Lines from “Sunrise, Sunset” (from Fiddler on the Roof) come to mind

Is this the little girl I carried?
Is this the little boy at play?

I don't remember growing older
When did they?

When did she get to be a beauty?
When did he grow to be so tall?

Wasn't it yesterday
When they were small?

But the photos.  As miserable as I felt that day, I never expected they would one day fill me with such joy.


ERRATA #1: I reviewed Megan Martin's NEVERS (Caketrain Press, 2014) in the latest issue of The Collagist.  It's a good book and published by one of the best small independent presses out there. Consider checking out my review, and consider reading Martin's book.

ERRATA #2: Earlier this summer, one of my short stories, "What We Remember When We Remember the Great Loves of Our Lives," appeared in The Cobalt Baseball Issue 2014.  It's kind of a fun story, especially if you were a Baltimore Orioles fan in the late 1980s/early 1990s.  

“A Night at the Opera,” the opening story in Gabriel Blackwell’s CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON (Noemi Press, 2012) takes the form of a post-9/11 Department of Justice (DOJ) memo on the sadistic interrogation of three suspected terrorists: Groucho, Chico, and Harpo Marx.  It is, quite simply, the most inventive and funny story I’ve read in the last few years.

Blackwell’s diction and form so closely mirrors what we’d expect in an actual Bush-era interrogation brief that I wouldn’t be surprised if bits and pieces were lifted verbatim from actual leaked memos.  I say this not to accuse Blackwell of plagiarism (he’s much too inventive to slouch to anything so prosaic) but to marvel at his tight, legalistic prose. 

“Evidence suggests that pressure on the heel [of a detainee] while held in this position causes chronic, fulgurant pain in the detainee when so held for the recommended 24 out of 28 hours.  Musculature of the leg must be kept tensed in this position to relieve pressure on the calcaneus, reducing the likelihood of the contravention of auxiliary protocol(s) and retarding decomposition and atrophy.

“[…] detainees may be held so immobilized for as much as 86 per cent of time under detention, or 24 out of 28 hours, with an upper limit of 28 out of 28 hours, provided detainees are given inadequate or nonexistent nutriment, a median ambient temperature of 55 degrees Fahrenheit is maintained, and all such periods occur consecutively.”

Go ahead.  Read those paragraphs over again.  An upper limit of 28 out of 28 hours?  Inadequate or nonexistent nutriment? Who amongst us would be surprised if this came from an actual US DOJ memo outlining the treatment of Guantanamo Bay detainees? 

 “A Night at the Opera” however is not just another humorless diatribe on Bush-era crimes, for it bristles with wit.  Blackwell is a master ventriloquist, nailing perfectly the Marx Brothers’ voices. 

Consider Groucho’s response when asked about how long he can undergo the above-mentioned enhanced interrogation techniques:

“[Detainee Marx, Groucho reports that he could go 29 out of 28 hours if you gave him a head start and a broken clock; oh, and while you’re at it, he wants to see his lawyer; more than that, though, he wants to see the Cubs win one; more than that, though, he wants to see his wife again; more than that, he wants to see your wife again.]”

Here’s Chico, adlibbing after his interrogators discuss “auxiliary protocols”:

“[Detainee Marx, Chico reports he knows a pro to call, but she-a charge too much]”

And Harpo, not to be outdone, appears as well:

“Detainee Marx, Harpo, questioned separately and simultaneously, removed administrator’s headgear and attempted to set fire to it.”

Now, I admit being a Marx Brothers aficionado, and it’s possible that people lacking a passing knowledge of their personas will be mystified by the story’s references, but the Marx Brothers’ shenanigans underscore the absurdity of what the real-life US DOJ was perpetrating.  Parts of the story work like a scientific lab report (à la George Saunders’s “93990”).  Overall, the story is chilling and, in its way, believable, a perfect piece of social commentary that both entertains and causes us to think of the greater issues at hand.

I had hoped to review CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON (thoroughly solid collection that works in a myriad of modes, models, and styles) when it was first published but my relationship inexplicably collapsed at the outfit that I thought was going to run the review. 

Hell, Blackwell even redacts parts of the ersatz DOJ memo as the story progresses.  What’s not to like about that?

~~~

A while back, shortly after reading CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON, I fell into a bit of a depression.  “A Night at the Opera,” or, rather, the world’s failure to take notice of it, was the reason for my funk.  It galled me that the story hadn’t received greater acclaim.  It should have been reprinted in the major anthologies, talked about on countless lit blogs, been on the lips of everyone who cares about innovative fiction.  In short, it should have made a star out of Gabriel Blackwell.

“A Night at the Opera” is a dazzling, dizzying whirlwind.  The story totally put me to sea.  As a writer who kids himself into believing he’s written a couple of half-decent stories, I was in awe of Blackwell’s talent.  I felt like one of Leonardo’s lesser contemporaries gandering a look La Gioconda for the first time and realizing, by comparison, the inadequacy of my talents.  I wanted to bow down before him and hail my hosannas.

Reading this story again tonight, I felt that same dizzying respect.  Consider this blog post a hosanna.  And do yourself a favor: search out this story, and search out CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

In 1986, I took my first fiction workshop as an undergrad with Frank Conroy.  It was a mixed experience.  I wrote about this elsewhere, but one of the things that came out of it, for me, was a half-decent story draft that Frank seemed to like.  Indeed, in my recollection, it was one of the few pieces presented in our workshop that elicited even a modicum of praise from him. 

Is anyone familiar with Lou Reed’s “Coney Island Baby”?  I just love the way that song starts:

“You know, man, when I was a young man in high school
You believe it or not, I wanted to play football for the coach
And all those older guys
They said that he was mean and cruel, but you know
I wanted to play football for the coach
They said I was a little too light-weight to play linebacker
So I’m playing right-end
I wanted to play football for the coach”

Yes, Frank’s workshop was mean and cruel but his faint praise kept me going.  Had he condemned the story, as he did with many others submitted for his consideration during the workshop, I probably would have never tried to write again.  For almost two decades, that bit of praise was all I had to bolster my belief that I might actually amount to something as a writer. 

Despite the rejections I’ve accumulated, in some weird psychological way, I always wanted to prove that his praise was not misplaced; I wanted to play football for him.

Needless to say, I’ve revised and re-written the story many many times over the intervening years but looking at it again today, I’m surprised by how many of the elements of that original draft remain in the story.  Back in 1986, I was in the thrall of Bret Easton Ellis’s just-published LESS THAN ZERO, which I thought was “golden” or “gaga” or whatever silly expression I was using at the time to convey extreme like.  So that draft (then called, “Summertime”) had that affected minimalism which was then in vogue.  In its more recent drafts, I’ve added a layer of retrospection (à la Stuart Dybek) and substantially polished the prose. 

So why am I mentioning this?

It’s been twenty-eight years… and… I’ve changed the title to “Somewhere Around Then”… and…

Well, the story has now been published in installments at Five Chapters.  Here’s the first section.  [And here's the second part, the third part, the fourth and the last part.]  



Frank, wherever you are, thank you!

Errata #1: Can you believe it?  According to the Amazon listings, FSG is publishing two different Stuart Dybek collections next month!  ECSTATIC CAHOOTS (what a title!) will bring together fifty pieces of Dybek’s flash fiction, while PAPER LANTERNS will collect a number of his longer stories.  This is surely going to be one of this year’s remarkable events in literary fiction.

Errata #2: Although I’ve published 30 or so short stories, I never really thought I had a “collection” in me.  At times, I’ve assembled a few of them together and sent them off as a manuscript to various short fiction contests, but never did the stories mesh well to form a coherent collection.  Individually, some might be good but, together, they’re a mish-mash of combating aesthetics and passing fancies. 

I’ve been working on new stories over the last couple of months.  I finished another one last week, and it finally occurred to me that, yes, maybe a few of them would work well as a distinct collection.  Only time will tell, but I’m thinking of sending this collection out under the title THE FUTURE WAS OURS.  Maybe… maybe… I can still play football for the coach.

So yesterday, in the course of my mindless web surfing, I stumbled upon this short Slate piece by Alison Griswold about Taco Bell's attempts to make an impact in the fast-food breakfast wars.  I'm no fan of McDonalds, and Taco Bell ranks even worse in my mind.  And, frankly, anyone who steps into either establishment seeking a nourishing breakfast is just plain stupid.  

But what got me about Griswold's article, which critiques Taco Bell's recent commercials, is this last paragraph:

Plus, for all that Taco Bell is trying to paint McDonald's as boring and old-school, the commercial's final shot—of the middle-aged male character munching a fast-food wrap all alone outside his cluttered garage—seems more like an advertisement for poor life choices.


Um, what exactly is it that makes Griswold think a man, alone in the morning, is "an advertisement for poor life choices"?

I mean, gee whiz, if Griswold's preferred breakfast is an Egg McMuffin, how much calorically worse can Taco Bell's offerings possibly be?  Nor can his "cluttered garage" really be held against him.  I mean, really, who's garage isn't the teensiest bit cluttered?


Please tell me I'm not alone in detecting a sexist undertone to Griswold's criticism, but what seems to drive Griswold's animus is that, well, there's this middle class-ish and seemingly capable forty-something year-old male who is "alone" (i.e., unmarried and un-coupled).  

Which, ipso facto in her mind, must mean he's made "poor life choices."  Otherwise he'd have a wife and family bristling with little children.  He'd be a dad, a husband, a life partner, a provider. Implicit also in Griswold's judgement is the thought that, well, this otherwise decent-looking man must have really done something wrong-- "poor life choices"-- to cause him to be separated from whatever previous people were in his life.

So, is a man's marital status reason to condemn him?  Have we now chugged into so moralistically strident times that a single male deserves condemnation?

Okay.  If you think I'm over-reacting (as I've sometimes been known to do), imagine the genders being flipped.  Imagine an ad featuring a woman alone eating her breakfast sandwich outside a cluttered garage.  Would anyone use that image to accuse her of "poor life choices"?