she plunged below the line of the ocean and
saw lava exploding into the emptiness she saw
sea become land when we came to this place
there were myths and shadows and people and
we joined them becoming lava exploding
into steps that a man could climb
upon and journey to nowhere we saw one day
a white sail on the sea and ghosts
disembarking on the sand they said this
land is not finished yet this land of many
gods and of feathered kings is not finished
yet we were not finished being born we
laid our heads upon the grass and we dreamt
that we were back in the land of mu we
remembered that we were the ancestors just
as much as the ancestors were ourselves we
remembered that one day we would be peasants
and that the ocean would pull us back into
the crag and say we are not finished yet we
remembered that when you cry into the ocean
the tears are like sharks’ teeth we remembered that we
used the stars to sail from home and then to
return home again we forgot the names of our
gods and our ancestors they had no meaning to us
anymore we learned that there are twenty
nickels in a dollar and that trousers must
be buttoned up in front but one day we would have
things called zippers that cut into time like cutting
into black hair with sharks’ teeth we became
lava exploding into the past and sweet
potato roots digging into the earth but there is no
escape we remembered that if you dig into the sand with
your fingernails you might dig deep enough to find
the double-hulled canoes that carried us here
like sharks’ teeth we took lava steps
to see the ancestors fall into the crag
Sean Flood is a writer and poet. His work has appeared in The Bombay Review and Black Ink. Favorite hobbies of his include playing old Nintendo games and daydreaming. Read his poem Hydroquinone in Cleaver’s Issue 17. Hear Sean’s poem and more virtual poetry from Cleaver on our SoundCloud podcast, On The Edge.
Most people think electric eels are eels when they’re, in fact, knife fish. They’re solitary, shallow, made with enough electrolytes to kill a man.
“They can kill a man, but not themselves. Sometimes, they wish that they could.”
Cadence was always saying I never listened to her, when the truth was, I heard everything.
I listened while she rambled about the oceanology books she’d brought home from the library, her actual courses festering in her backpack. She’d cook me ramen or sprawl out on the floor with her sketchbooks, drawing herself into more contained circles. Indie music would flow through the apartment while she told me about the nine things I didn’t want to know that lurked at the bottom of the ocean. If I spoke, she snapped at me for breaking her concentration. Then, moments later, she would turn to me and say, “Hey Ezekiel, did you know electric eels can’t feel their own shock?”
She called out of work. Stopped talking to her friends and didn’t set foot on campus, not even on the days she had yoga or art. I even took up extra shifts at the library to make sure she could still afford her medication. It was hot. But she didn’t want to go to the pool.
Cadence buried herself in long sleeves and a sour attitude, the smile I fell in love with unable to twitch itself to life. She couldn’t tell me what was wrong, because she insisted it was nothing.
Those days she walked around blinded. Mostly.
Half asleep, body curled up against my thigh, her eyes were still zoned and unfocused. Her hand pulsed as I pulled it into mine.
This was the first time we’d spoken in days, since she stormed out of my apartment after a fight. Before I could think, I’d asked her why she was wearing a sweater in June.
That same sweater that stalked out in a rage was still curled around her knuckles today. As I brushed back her hair, my fingers caught in its tangles.
Her lids flew open. She watched my thumb stroke her knuckles.
“Morning, baby. You feeling any better?”
“Hm,” she choked out in response. It was the only noise she’d made in eighteen hours.
I looked over to the window, where I’d left the blinds open. The clouds strained against the sky that built them, like they were fighting to dissolve the skin holding them in place. Stroking her hair onto my leg, I turned her head to see.
She grunted and turned away from me.
“Just thought it was pretty.”
“Hm.”
I reached out to rub her back, but she sensed my movement and pulled away farther. Standing up, I faced the door. “Whatever, I was just trying to help.”
“Heh,” she said. “You call that helping?”
An untrained ear might not have noticed, but the crack in her voice jabbed in my gut. I leaned over the bed and tried to pull her to me. Her shoulders shook as she made her body rigid.
“Cadence, whatever it is, you can tell me. I promise, I’m not going to judge.”
She sniffled and shivered, even in the heat. “Everyone says that.”
“But I really mean it.”
“No.” She sat up, twisting her torso to face me. “Everyone says that they’re not going to judge. But if I don’t immediately feel better, I turn into a burden.” She clenched her hand against her mouth. “And you can’t wait around forever until I get better.”
I’d been with her for a year. I never expected better. The bed leaned as I sat back down and reached for her hand.
She let me take it and brought her knees to her chest. “I started hurting myself again.”
My breath stopped as I did nothing but watch her cry.
“I’m sorry, I know—I know—you said that I could talk to you if I was depressed, but I didn’t even mean to start again, and I was scared you’d be mad…”
She trailed off as I pushed the sleeve up her arm. Gashes and pus-filled burns inched their way around her skin.
I felt stupid as I asked her, “Didn’t it hurt?”
Pulling away, she chuckled. “It hurt like hell.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I said.
A finger traced her unmarked vein. “I don’t know.”
The image of her singeing herself and muffled screams vanished as I pulled her into my lap. I stroked the inside of her arm, felt every knife and flame against my own.
Before I could stop it, my face was wet with tears, and the most harrowing thoughts filled my head. Of sharp knives searching for peace along her skin, trying to pour the pain from her body, taking her wired soul and buoyant mind. Even with the image of her fresh cuts circling my psyche, I realized she wasn’t trying to hurt herself. She was draining the synapses that popped in her head, sending electrical storms through every physical system that was cognizant enough to feel her hurt.
“They can kill the man,” she always said. “But never themselves.”
Even with my hold and reassurance, Cadence was gone.
Anna Keeler is a poet and fiction writer living in Winter Park, Florida. Anna Keeler is the assistant editor for The Chaotic Review, and was the 2016 recipient of the Arden Goettling Academy of American Poets Prize. Anna Keeler’s work has been published or is upcoming on Poets.org, The Writing Disorder, Sick Lit Magazine, The Yellow Chair Review, Peacock Journal, and others.
Its shadow is helpless here
festering the way your fingers
lean over the watermarks
not yet covered with paper
though left in the open
this wall could heal, the butterflies
gently circling down
and under the painted leaves
the empty branches and wings
—you thin this paste
as if one arm works the other
till what you turn in
unfolds toward painful corners
and days without a sea
making room for you.
Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The BPoems published by Poets Wear Prada (2016). For more information, including free e-books and his essay, “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities,” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com. Read more poetry by Simon in Cleaver’s Issue 14.
We took seats in the back of the planetarium. I glanced over at you, my face warm with anticipation. You leaned back and looked up. When the lights went out, would you cover my knee with your hand as a deep, slow voice described which stars we were seeing? Would I rest my head on your shoulder, at peace with the world and the universe, as Orion moved West, poised to shoot?
You kept your distance. We examined placards in Space Command. The fifty million year old meteorite, the gravity well. I asked if you were happier without me and you said you’d been lifting weights.
We came to the giant, papier-mâché heart. “Remember when we tried to have sex in here?” you said. We’d finished a late-night showing of Star Wars in the museum’s IMAX theater, and rather than leave, we’d taken our own after-hours tour. We’d made it as far as the right atrium when a construction worker had found us and sent us away. The exhibit had been under repair. “We were so close,” you said. “That woulda been legendary.”
We wound our way through the maze of the giant heart, which was crowded with children on a Saturday. You led the way, took the pace of the kids, which was slower than our natural pace. At one point you turned, trapping me too close to you, your mouth inches from mine. My own heart hammered, and I stepped back.
In the giant brain, I hid from you. The brain exhibit didn’t exist when we were kids. It was new to me that October, my favorite part of the museum. Made from translucent strands of plastic and ethereal LED lights wound around clear disks, the perfect size to perch on. You stood at the bottom and I climbed. I pulled myself to the top and ran down. I invented a jumping game with two brothers I met, under-five aspiring construction workers with neon vests. A security guard asked me to please control my sons, as we were intimidating the other children.
I returned to you. “I have to go,” I said. “I’m meeting someone at three.”
“I guess I’ll stay here,” you said. “Look at more stuff.”
We exited through Optical Illusions.
“I heard you broke a glass in the garbage disposal at Cameron and Emily’s new place,” I said. “It’s weird ’cause we got together at the same time as them, and now they moved in together and we broke up.”
“I mean, we were never gonna live together,” you said. “We weren’t on that trajectory.” I thought about you asking me—eight times? Nine? to move in with you, my soft rebuttals.
◊
Our breakup was a surprise. In August, I had taken a red-eye home from a week-long vacation. I got a cab from the airport and then biked to your place straightaway. You hadn’t left for work yet. You made us eggs for breakfast. I gave you a blowjob in the kitchen. You left and I fell asleep in your bed.
You came home and didn’t kiss me hello. “What do you want for dinner?” I said. “I was thinking we could go for a picnic.”
You crossed to the fridge, pulled out several mini Twix bars. “Candy,” you said. “I want candy for dinner.” You smiled at me.
“No thanks,” I said. “I want to do something.”
We went up to your roof, arranged ourselves on waterlogged deck chairs. You had a clear view of the PECO building, which projects the time all day in dull neon. I sat facing you, looked out on the spires of the Baptist church across the street. I told you several long stories about my vacation, but stopped when I realized you weren’t talking. You stuck your tongue out at me like you were gagging. Clouds rolled overhead. I felt gently disconnected from the world, the product of too little sleep and all night traveling.
“I want to break up,” you said, and your voice cracked.
“What?” I laughed.
“I’m sorry,” you said. “I thought about this a lot when you went away. I don’t want to do it anymore.”
“Is this a dream?” I said. “I’ve had this dream before.” Could I win a race downstairs to your knife drawer? How badly would a leap from your roof injure me? Would broken bones postpone this feeling to another day?
“How long have you known?” I said.
“I decided yesterday.” You slipped a tiny candy bar into your mouth.
“How the fuck can you eat candy at a time like this?” I said. Mid-chew, you looked up at me. “I’m leaving.”
“Wait,” you said. “Stop.” You grabbed me, half-hug, half-restraint.
“What!” I said. “What do you want me here for?” You looked over my shoulder. Several over-forty women were watching us from a neighboring roof. They could hear every word I said.
Since the day we met we’d slept together, wrapped up like a shell around an egg, four nights a week. Two months before I left for vacation you’d moved to a new apartment, away from a roommate who hadn’t liked me, and we’d started spending every night together. I had a key to your place.
I sat back down.
“This feels wrong,” you said. “Us being together. And I was really happy with you for a while. But, I mean, we’re so different. We always said we weren’t forever.”
“You always said that,” I said. “I said I was happy. And I mean, are we really that different?”
“We’re from different neighborhoods, we’re different kinds of liberals. We think differently, we talk differently. We’re not even the same kind of feminist.” You have a spreadsheet to keep track of every girl you’ve fucked. The rows list women’s names and the columns bear different sexual acts. At the end of each row, there are “comments.”
“Yeah, but I mean, we both like going to concerts, biking, walking dogs. We do a lot of cool stuff together.”
“And that was good for a while,” you said. “I just feel like something’s wrong. I’m happy when I’m with you, but when you leave, when I’m alone, I feel—not good.”
“But I’ve been worried about that, too,” I said. “I keep telling you how I’m worried you haven’t been seeing your friends enough. And you don’t like your job, and so now it’s like, you’re gonna give up the one thing that you do like? How’s that gonna work?”
In your kitchen, I cried so loudly you came in to check on me. “I’m not breaking your stuff,” I said. “If that’s why you’re in here.” You looked at me. You went in the other room. I followed. I sat on the couch next to you.
“Legs,” you said. Nobody calls me that anymore. “I’m sorry to do this to you.” Your eyes were sad. I put my hand on your knee, my head on your shoulder. You put your arm around my waist.
“I know you don’t mean to hurt me,” I said. “You’re a nice baby.” We stayed on the couch like that for a long time.
You asked for your key back when I left. “Goodbye,” you called, and I didn’t say anything, and the door closed.
◊
I haven’t seen you in the six months since we stood outside of that slanted-wall room in Optical Illusions, made to trick museum-goers into thinking the floor is crooked. You were wearing a yellow t-shirt, so handsome it was painful for me to look. We haven’t run into one another since then, which is odd because you chose your apartment specifically for its proximity to mine.
You want to rewrite the past. Every time I saw you, I realized, as I biked away from the Franklin Institute, you might try to change a different memory, starting with how serious we’d been, negating our favorite things about one another, what we’d done together. I wouldn’t have you back, that was clear, but did being friends with you mean the slow erasure of the love we’d had, your desperate attempt to ease the pain of the loss of me?
We texted sometimes, still, after that.
“How are you feeling?” I’d say.
“The same,” you’d say. “Fine.”
We texted about how much we could dead-lift nowadays, our weight training regimens. A poet and an engineer fall in love, what had we been expecting? Numbers, at least, could not be misconstrued. When we broke up I said I would call you when I could bench 185. In January I exchanged lifting weights for swimming laps.
In April I saw your stepdad walking your dog in the park. She hugged me, twice, her paws on my chest, crying, dog hair everywhere. It was the first of many seventy-degree spring days, global warming or urban canyon effect, or the start of an early summer. Summers for us had meant outdoor parties at the drum circle in Fairmount Park, bring-your-own-forty. Saturdays at the Italian market, searching out the freshest fruit. I wonder if you still do those things, now that you work in an office. I wonder if you ever wander up to your roof deck for a joint or glimpse of dim city stars and think of me.
Allegra Armstrong is a Philadelphia-based writer. Her work has previously appeared in Steel Toe Review, Underground Pool, and The Same. You can find her at the public library, the rock gym, or biking fast through traffic. She reads original poetry aloud at armstrongallegra.bandcamp.com.
Martha McCollough JEROME IN THE WILDERNESS by an unknown painter
In a God’s-eye
view all the edges …are sharp
Tiny but distinct
Jerome
picnics on a ledge
with his apocryphal lion
sunlight falling
on him in particular
does he wonder
if God might prefer him …….unwashed
in stained starving rags
as he has recommended
to the Roman matrons …….some now (presumably) …….in heaven but no
he’s wearing rose silk
he’s brought along his tall crucifix,
a skull, the egg-shaped
stones he likes
the elegant apparatus
of his project
his hat’s a red bright
circle on the grass
behind him
from a stony spindle
green hills
tumble to the horizon
there is
so much to see
the light
that burnishes
the sawtooth
edge of every leaf
small castles
punctuating the wilderness
and in a corner
awkward camels
crossing a narrow bridge
the lion
dozes
Jerome
kneeling half out
of his robe
holds up a stone
ready to hit himself and
to go on hitting
hard
until God pays
attention
Martha McCollough is a writer and video artist living in Chelsea, Massachusetts. She has an MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Baffler, Cream City Review, Crab Creek Review, and Salamander, among others. Her videopoems have appeared in Triquarterly, Datableed, and Atticus Review.
Image credit: Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon, Portugal. Via Wikipedia
but nowadays your garbled barbles never tasted better. no matter how much your bog moss makes love to the gutter, you still wonder what’s next once you ditch the catfish trap house, with all its iridescent claws a-clash. not everybody can handle a bottom feeder’s garbage trundle, but me? i’m of another puddle. the ones who’d rather eat their demons than leave them to their own diseases. the ones who never lost that most primeval thanatoxic fever. with one foot on the cantilever and the other streaming dirty needles, i pull myself up from the river by my peaty skin and shingles, dripping maladapted tadpoles and the urge to binge on roadside litter, because under every dumpster baby is a mother too tired to keep treading water, and a smoke signal for all the subaqueous fathers who taught her what the thunder said was not for her to ponder, who fed her ageless algae to the alligators just to watch her botched face flounder
Dylan Krieger is a transistor radio picking up alien frequencies in south Louisiana. She lives in the back of a little brick house with a feline reincarnation of Catherine the Great, sings harmonies incessantly to every song she hears, and sunlights as a trade mag editor. She is the author of Giving Godhead (Delete Press, 2017) and dreamland trash (Saint Julian Press, forthcoming). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Seneca Review, Midwest Review, Quarterly West, Phoebe, So and So, Tenderloin, Coup d’Etat, and Maintenant,among others. Find more of her work at www.dylankrieger.com.
The girls never kissed the boys. The boys that walked down the hallway in packs, smelling of Cheetos and drugstore cologne. The girls never went to school dances, out to movies or late night pizza. They never wore jewelry. Never a spot of makeup, their skin fresh like new snow. If their mama caught them trying on her church heels they were beaten. They never showered with the other girls in gym class but snuck glimpses of their breasts. How their nipples were large and not pink like their own. They wore plain dresses in forgettable colors: beige, olive, navy. Their hair pulled back into a bun. Tight. Uncomplicated. The girls sang in the church choir, cooked suppers for the nursing home folks, babysat Pastor Daniel’s kids. Their papa expected them home before the 5 o’clock news and to have their homework done by the weather forecast. One Friday their parents left them overnight. The girls loosened their hair and snuck out the window, scampering down the hill to the abandoned house. A bottle of Boone’s Farm sloshed in one girl’s pocket, in another a pack of stale cigarettes. The girls never noticed Charlie Crick—the man who lived down the alley—following close behind, his breath smelling like the gin mill, his face red and burning. He found the girls inside the empty living room of old Doc Murphy’s house. They were passing the bottle of Boone’s between them, taking swigs and puffing on a half-lit cigarette. He told each girl to get undressed and not to look as he took them, one by one. The girls never opened their eyes but they knew. Some of them bled and some of them didn’t.
Hillary Leftwich resides in Denver with her son. She is co-host for At the Inkwell, a NYC-based reading series and organizes/hosts other reading/fundraiser events around Denver. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming inCreative Coping Mechanism (CCM)“A Shadow Map” Anthology,Hobart, Matter Press, Smokelong Quarterly’s “Why Flash Fiction?” Series, The Review Review,and others.
It started out as a joke in the warehouse. You could buy and build anything you needed for your home at IKEA, at least that was the corporate strategy behind all the useless knick-knacks that made it hard to pack the boxes. It was only a matter of time before they started doing people, they said. What good was your dream kitchen without a dream family to sit around on the INGOLF chairs you’d built yourself and praise your cooking? Surely IKEA could produce a model that was more durable, less flammable than your ordinary family, less likely to be annoyed when you let the jam spill over the side of the jar and then stuck it back in the fridge so that globs of fruit smeared all over the shelf.
It wasn’t long after the higher-ups recalled the LATTJO bat cape. Annika, Gudmund, and Martin had finished their meatball lunch in the warehouse, and they were bored. They were tired of the meatballs, too, but that was what was provided by the company, and none of them ever remembered to bring sandwiches from their home kitchens, furnished at IKEA.
None of the usual amusements seemed like any fun. Going through the boxes and pulling out one screw from every shipment or scratching the fronts of wardrobes or shuffling some of the small items between boxes—all of these normally delightful activities seemed dull today. There were only a few orders to pack up, but if they did that, then people would start to expect their furniture to arrive quickly, and all would be lost.
“Let’s make the IKEA man,” Annika said, wiping cream sauce from the corner of her mouth with the hard edge of one of the cardboard boxes. “The one we always talk about.”
They rifled through the shipments, taking a piece of medium-density fiberboard here, a nail there, until they thought they’d ruined enough orders to get started on their man. If he was to be a true IKEA man, he had to be easily assemblable. “No complicated joints,” said Martin. “Just the obvious parts to make it clear he’s a human.”
This began a complicated philosophical argument about what it meant to be a man, but when the dust had cleared, they had a round piece of fiberboard for a face, a tapered pine body to which they could attach all the other pieces, and a few ambivalent limbs of acacia and beech. They routed down the parts of him that had to meet the other parts of him, added pilot holes, and assembled the screws. He was perfect. They felt like God himself.
Gudmund said, “Let’s send him to the person who got the most boring order.”
“I have a MALM bedframe here,” Annika shouted.
“This one’s a BILLY bookcase and a NYFORS floor lamp,” Martin said, clawing at one of the boxes.
“Good God!” said Gudmund. “That’s the winner. Replace the NYFORS with our man.”
And once they’d packed off their man to his new home, they went back to work, singing and banging things off the pallet jacks happily.
It wasn’t easy to tell what the thing in the box was, but it didn’t take a genius to distinguish it from a floor lamp. Rasmus startled himself by continuing to build what was so clearly not his NYFORS lamp, but after the first moment of cardboard scraping away from cardboard when his stomach curled in on itself in anger (having already waited for his shipment two weeks longer than he’d been promised), he became very curious about this unusual assemblage that had contaminated his order.
When the IKEA man was whole, Rasmus stepped back and stared at him for longer than it’d taken to build. It was so clearly a man, even though Rasmus wasn’t sure if he’d made the legs the arms and the arms the legs. Or one and one. And he hadn’t had a man in his apartment in a long time. A few women, certainly, in and out after he cooked a breakfast of rye toast and boiled eggs, which he sliced in his bright yellow SLÄT egg slicer, or even sometimes women who came and went for months at a time, forcing him to add more variety to his breakfast menu, but men never made their way up the spiral metal staircase.
He worked from home, and he’d never been so good at male friendship. And that was all right. The women provided companionship without invasion, and his mother was always up for a visit when he wanted to get out of the city. He refused to believe that there was anything pitiable about a man without any real friends when he had permanent love in Fjällbacka and temporary love here when he wanted it, too.
But the IKEA man invaded before Rasmus could guard against it. He sat across from Rasmus at breakfast, and he sat by the gas fire at night, while Rasmus read on the ÅDUM rug. Rasmus set up the man with his legs outstretched, working his pine bottom into the macaroni tufts of the high, off-white pile. When the IKEA man lost his butt-hold on the carpet and his fiberboard head tilted into Rasmus’s lap, Rasmus felt a swift, sick swoop through his guts and put his arm around him. Rasmus didn’t consciously carry him from the LANDSKRONA armchair in the bedroom—where he’d set him up with a book of Bo Carpelan poetry the evening before—to the bathroom—where he let him examine himself in the GODMORGON mirror while Rasmus shaved. It just happened. Rasmus even forgot to buy a new NYFORS lamp or to get a refund.
Annika, Gudmund, and Martin spread the word that they had taken the work of God into their and IKEA’s hands. They couldn’t tell their supervisors, so it wasn’t something you could order officially, but people came round the back of the warehouse, shuffling their feet, looking embarrassed, and finally asking for the IKEA man.
Annika, Gudmund, and Martin refined their model. They added hands and feet and even a spiky fringe of medium-density fiberboard for hair. Then on the next one, they made more complicated joints, so the wooden limbs could bend at the knee and the elbow. Soon there was a sizable population of IKEA men across town, and it was common to hear phrases like, “Hold your fork properly, the way the IKEA man is doing,” or “I swear, one more night like that and I’m throwing that boy out and buying a second IKEA man.”
They had five models now, and Rasmus ordered all of them, but none were any match for his first. He disassembled the new ones quickly, but didn’t return them. His IKEA man might want company at some point when he, Rasmus, left the city. Except Rasmus never left the city anymore. His mother kept calling to invite him to Fjällbacka for Easter, and he knew he should go, but somehow he didn’t want to this spring.
“You can move Hjalmar,” Rasmus told a woman, who was looking like she wanted the IKEA man’s JOKKMOKK chair at the JOKKMOKK breakfast table, and he realized that he had named the IKEA man a long time ago, although he’d never given it breath. He congratulated himself on what a perfect name Hjalmar was.
He never saw that woman again. In fact, he became unsatisfied with female companionship altogether. He started sleeping with men, but again, it wasn’t what he wanted. And in the end, Rasmus decided that he was a truly lucky creature, because he wanted just exactly what he had: an IKEA man.
R.M. Fradkin studied fiction writing with Bret Johnston and Amy Hempel and has previously been published by Cherry Tree, Theaker’s Quarterly, and Bradburyesque Quarterly. Recently, she had residencies at Art Farm in Nebraska, Hypatia-in-the-Woods in Washington, and the International Writers and Translators’ Center of Rhodes, and was Writer-in-Residence at the Anchorage Museum, where she finished her first novel. She is also currently affiliate editor at Alaska Quarterly Review.
I imagine he woke up Monday, wearily shaved his cheeks and chin in his bathroom, then stared at his hair in the mirror. Tuesday, the same. Wednesday, with frustration. By Friday, disgust.
Sunday, he stood at my bedroom door with a pair of scissors and a pair of pursed lips, unwilling to verbally admit his defeat. “You swear you’ve cut hair before?”
I nodded, surprised he’d held out as long as he had.
Four months earlier, Christmas Day, my father woke up with shingles in his right cranial nerve five. We assumed a rash and a fever, perhaps the flu; he was eighty and his illnesses had begun to crash with no warning, so we had become accustomed to waiting them out. Three days later, the rash was gone, but post-herpetic neuralgia replaced it, giving way to severe nerve damage. The number five nerve extends like a hand with five fingers, if you place the palm at the ear. One finger wraps around the chin, one below the nose. One on the right cheek, one toward the right eye and eyebrow, and the thumb, running north from the ear. On nerve activity scans, all five lit up in red, which my father joked made perfect sense because it felt like they were on fire.
And that was really all he said—avoiding further discussion, he left me fuzzy on the details of his illness for most of my adolescence. I did know that he refused medication to lessen the pain, choosing hours of stony silence spent on the couch with the lights off over opiates. In later years, he’s mentioned to me that the few times he took them, he could barely keep himself awake, and for the first time truly felt old. But to a fifteen-year-old, this refusal, and the diagnosis, seemed inane—as I tiptoed through to the kitchen, I couldn’t understand why nothing was being done; no procedures, no operations, no solutions. “Incurable” made little sense to a girl who had barely had the flu. Yet here my father sat in silence for the third week, his forehead in his hands, because waiting was the adopted treatment. Petulant, teenage me was ill-equipped to partake in this stakeout, so if I wasn’t sequestered in my room with television, I was avoiding the dark living room by spending weekends at my boyfriend’s house.
The detail I was clear about was the status of his hair, which he talked about with a remarkable constancy. His standing monthly hair trim went neglected, and the fringe around the base of his skull quickly grew unkempt. He’d grumble at dinner: “I look like an old man.” “I have a mullet.” “I feel like the back of my neck is wearing a blanket.”
◊
In the early months of recovery, he’d wince if any part of his head was touched, bobbing and weaving in a self-protective two-step whenever my mother or I came near him. We stopped hugging in the mornings before I left for school. My mother, frazzled, stopped calling to find out where I was every day at five. On the nights I did come home, I quickly noted that we no longer ate vegetables (because my father hated them) and that instead my mom made pasta and put in extra meatballs because it was his favorite. Uncharacteristically, I chose not to complain.
I’d hesitate before entering the house, attempting to prepare what to say. In the way that teenagers so often do, I lacked the vocabulary to ask him about how he was hurting or what I could do, regularly scrambling for language that felt appropriate. While I had overheard murmurs of these conversations between my mother and him, emulation seemed impossible, and the strain I caught in my mother’s exhausted whisper was frightening. Scuttling in the house and mumbling a barely audible “hey” as I passed, I’d sheepishly remain hidden until dinner.
There, across the table from me, hunched over the parmesan, he didn’t look much like himself. After months of wordless observation, my gaze alit on his shoulder-length hair, and I found something to say. Between bites of rigatoni and meatballs, I volunteered.
“What?”
“Let me cut your hair.”
“Have you ever?”
“Sure.”
◊
We’re a family of vanity, so what began as tepid acceptance soon turned into a ritual. My father would peek his head into my door in the early afternoon once every third Sunday, after I had finally hoisted myself out of bed. Working up the nerve to state his intent, he’d feign nonchalance as he made his way around my room. He’d walk to the window and pull down the blinds a bit, causing the previously settled specks of dust to sparkle when they caught the redirected shafts of sunlight. He’d organize books and wipe rings of condensation off my desk. In the haze of a recently-woken adolescent, I’d continue watching Law & Order on my computer as though zombified. This round of cat and mouse would go on until he finally broke:
“Do you have fifteen minutes?”
I’d exhale, responding that I didn’t. He’d nod, and turn to leave, when I’d get up to grab the scissors. “Where are you going?”
“You just said—”
“Come on—”
“Not if you’re too busy,” but his fingers, brushed with arthritis and refusing to bend easily, were already toying with the inch or so of hair he felt was too shaggy. Not that there was even much to fuss with: the majority of his head was bald, hair only running from ear to ear, wrapped, as we joked, like a fur head-warmer. He once had thick, black hair that hung long and curly at his shoulders. A denim designer for Sears Roebuck in the seventies, he’d chosen his hair over promotions, leaving to start his own business when his boss pushed him to cut it. Though that hair left him long before I was born, I’d grown up surrounded by photographs on the walls, paying homage to his curls.
When my dad talks about his youth, he talks about his dog, King, whom he swears was half wolf. He tells endless stories about his childhood in Depression-era Brooklyn, where a pickle was five cents and his mother smoked a pack of cigarettes every day. He talks about the girl he tried to marry at eighteen, for whom he hitchhiked from Durham, North Carolina back to Brooklyn only to find her engaged to someone else. And he talks about his hair. For all of these vignettes, I nestle beside him on our living room couch and doze, while he watches the news and resumes his stories during the commercials— in part to me, in part to himself. As a young child, I used to bury my face in his stomach at the same time, listening as much to his voice as to the gurgles in his belly; the two together in harmony sounded satisfyingly alive and reassuring to me, and I delighted in his warmth.
◊
It took just under two years for his nerve scans to move from red to yellow, and then to a sustainable, even ignorable, green. I went to college, and he returned to his barber.
But I can still easily feel the heartbeat in the veins beneath the silk of my father’s scalp, as though my hands are only centimeters away. I remember wondering if the pulsing lined up with the pain of the frazzled nerves, then chastising myself for creating a visible reality for an invisible occurrence. How physically tangible can the synapses of one’s nerves be anyway, or for that matter how real? I didn’t want to ask, probably because I really didn’t want to know.
The muscle memory returns, too: I can still feel the strain in my mouth, tense as I wielded the scissors and refused mistake, and feel how the the rest of my body poised like a statue as I moved the blades around the nape of his neck. I’d take barely an inch off of his baby-fine hair and watch it flutter, like feathers, down into the sink. In this real-life game of Operation, I knew intrinsically the repercussions of allowing the blades to even brush his skin.
He went from asking to demanding; I went from offering to submitting with caustic, adolescent sarcasm. We verbally scuffled every time he would scrutinize to make sure the ends were even. We brought in rulers, occasionally took photos on my cellphone to pour over and dissect how even the cut was in the back, and inevitably fifteen minutes turned into an hour.
“I don’t want to look lopsided, Sara, I’m not some crazy old man.”
“Why would I make you look crazy? Jesus, trust me for, like, one second.”
“Jesus doesn’t know you from a hole in the wall. I would trust you if it wasn’t already lopsided.” Touché.
“I think it’s your head that’s lopsided,” and our eyes would meet in the bathroom mirror. Me standing behind him with tufts of hair in one hand, big gray craft scissors in the other. Him seated below me and obstinately repressing a grin.
“Okay.”
I’d hold my breath and raise the scissors once more, knowing the hair was not even, but also that my confidence was wavering and that my fingers begged for a break. Yet, as I navigated the globe of his mostly bald scalp, he never flinched. Lost in his desire for the hair to be perfect, he’d forget the fiery nerves and the fear of being touched. Perhaps even the shingles altogether.
The truth—I hadn’t cut hair before. Somehow the blades never so much as grazed him.
Sara Schuster is a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. She writes short stories and personal narratives focusing on memory, health, and bodies (especially her own). Her most recent work is a thesis on recovering from anorexia. Other published pieces can be found in the Penn Gazette.
I left a bouquet of fake flowers taped to Water Wheel Stand’s door in memory of Sharon and those long fall afternoons when I lugged pumpkins from the refrigerator truck to the trailer for customers, the afternoon when I was hyper and jabbering about the current rewrite of my book and how she turned to me and said, “Sara, you need a boyfriend,” the summer Saturdays of handing boxes of plums, pears, tomatoes, and green beans out of the truck to open for the morning, the fall evenings my brother would pick me up from work and help us close.
Melanie left a message on the answering machine on a Tuesday in January. Mom played it after we returned home. Melanie’s message said Sharon had gone to the hospital last night from a heart attack but did not make it. I ran up the stairs grabbing the sunset yarn half-afghan from the corner of my bed—a gift from Sharon on a fall day when I did not work. She had asked my brother and me to come to the stand. She had something for us. She gave me her crocheted work saying, “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but you are a plain Jane and I wanted you to have something bright to catch the eye of your knight in shining armor.” A few months later, it was not a sunset for her, but a candle going out suddenly and quickly.
At her memorial service, there were flowers in the front of the funeral home. Her ashes were in a metallic purple urn. There was a poster board covered in pictures. I heard about Sharon in the context of her family, her bell collection, and her care for others. I sat with the others who worked at the stand. Jackie was next to me. In October, during the Open Gate Farm Tour, we had run the stand. The familiar faces did not ease the emptiness.
“Hi, Sara, it’s Sharon. Mike said no work today. We’re not going to open up today because of the rain. If you have any questions, just give me a call. If not, thanks for working this summer. Bye.” The voicemail left on my turned-off cell. I did not hear her message until after she died. I played her final goodbye again and again just to hear her voice.
Sharon—with her hummingbird tattoos sitting in her chair looking out the large front opening holding a diet iced tea and a cigarette. She kept a book on the end of the cash register table—a popular romance with the gorgeous girl and the shirtless guy. She sassed the regular customers, crocheted every kid who worked with her a half-afghan. She teased me relentlessly but taught me to smile when helping every customer, how to run the cash register, and was the one who told me, “You have this one,” when two teens pulled up and the boy was covered in light blue paint.
Sara K. Bennett is attending Cedarville University for a degree in English and creative writing. Her passion is creative writing and telling stories, especially stories with a realistic feel in either fiction or nonfiction. She loves spending time outside, working on writing projects, reading a good novel, and embroidering.
Have you tried Amma’s ghosht tarkari and ghee parathas? Oh, you must. Succulent lamb chops served in earthenware while Kishore Kumar and Asha Bhosle croon through an old radio. She runs a dhaba, a roadside food stall not far from the Yamuna Expressway. Next time you are on your way to see the Taj Mahal, you should try her food. The cauliflower and carrot sabzi is sold out an hour after she makes it. Potatoes, carrots, onions, and cauliflowers grow in her backyard. She doesn’t bother with tomatoes because they require a moist soil throughout the year and water is a scarcity in and around Delhi.
When you arrive, greet her with your hands folded, your head bowed. Amma is always smiling, most of her teeth missing or brown. She’ll point to an iron tube well and ask you to wash your hands and feet while she decides your menu. It could be naan or tandoori roti, with lamb or vegetables. Don’t talk back or argue. Just accept, and you won’t be disappointed. Her dhaba is a tin roof shack, except the walls are not made of bricks but bones. It’s constructed on a piece of land that was a crematory during the time Mughals ruled India. Amma claims she makes use of whatever mother earth provides.
Amma’s daughter-in-law Prema sells bangles and bindis. She’s in her early thirties, with olive skin and dark eyes, her thin wrist covered with bracelets, an orange teeka between her bushy brows. Wears white every day since her husband died in the 1993 Kargil War. She serves food and cleans the tables while Amma sits cross-legged, chewing paan and stirring the lamb gravy, flipping parathas on the stove with her bare hands as if they aren’t coated in skin but iron.
You may be asked to sit on a charpai, a woven cot, next to an old banyan that faces the highway. If you trace the branches of the banyan, you’ll see a figure. Some say the ghost is Amma’s husband, now accompanied by her son. Don’t worry, they don’t bother anyone. They only keep an eye on their women.
Once the food is served, you’ll find an extraordinary appetite in you. As if all you’ve lived so far was to witness this craving. But don’t overeat. It’ll make you sick and nothing will ever cure you. The trick is to stop before you realize you are full.
Oh, and don’t forget to leave a few rupees in the gullak, the tip jar next to Amma’s cushion. It’s for the soldiers, she’ll say. And buy a few colored bangles from Prema, even if you’ve no use for them. She might invite you to see the garden, and past the back door you’ll see a line of urns filled with ash. Prema will lift her fingers to your lips and whisper, it’s the human ash that makes the food delicious. If you appear shocked, she’ll laugh and say, the whole earth is a graveyard, and we’re feeding off it.
When you leave, don’t look back. Even when Amma calls you by your name. Jingle those bangles you bought. Pray for the dead and walk away. There’s nothing you can do now. You’ve consumed her food, you’re connected to her. And the craving you feel right now will bring you back to her dhaba time and again. Until someday you decide to stay and end up as dirt beneath her plants.
Tara Isabel Zambrano moved from India to the United States two decades ago. Her work has recently appeared in Storm Cellar, Lunch Ticket, Moon City Review, Parcel, and others. She lives in Texas and is an electrical engineer by profession.
Krys Malcolm Belc WHILE TRYING TO DECIDE WHETHER OR NOT TO MOVE TO A REMOTE AREA OF MICHIGAN, I ATTEMPT TO CONVINCE YOU TO BUY A TINY KNOCKDOWN HOUSE UNDERNEATH THE EL
We’ve had these fights before, the ones in which the decision we make means a lot more than the thing we buy or don’t buy. Take our car, for example. We almost divorced deciding whether to buy a car to fit five or six; in the dealership while our older boys climbed into and out of fresh trunks, you drummed your hands on your pregnant belly and stared into backseats that couldn’t handle any more of us. When we took our shiny, new five-seater home, it spent its days on our corner, where we could watch it from our living room window, minding it through the hum of Philadelphia life as it stood resolutely through all of Kensington’s comings and goings.
Walking under the El in the thick of summer, I find reasons to go out of my way to look at the house I want to buy: the plastic chairs outside, the cracked stoop, the discolored brick—discolored in a way that looks intentional, like artfully faded jeans. This house–my house—is blocks from the Palestinian ice cream place, the one with the elaborate stone fountain placed strangely in its side yard beside picnic tables. A fence goes up around my house near the end of summer, when someone buys its neighbor and decides to fix their shared, fractured sidewalk. I lace my fingers through the wire and try to peer in. When the El rattles by overhead, everything underneath vibrates: the coins on the sidewalk, the soles of my sneakers, my house’s aged shutters. I send you a link, again. You call my house a knockdown. And who willingly buys a house right under the train, anyway?
We do not buy the house. We move to Michigan. Google tells me there is a bus station 4.3 miles from our house here; a bus is not the same as a train. I do not have an entire day to drive six hours to Chicago to stand under El tracks. Nothing in this town has a broken beauty like the house underneath the El did. I miss the train screeching, the smell of baklava and ice cream, the graffiti and the thunderous noise of Front Street. I want you to know that months after I last walked away I still think about it: the crumbling brown brick, the smell of old things—old carpets, old paint, old owners—that wafted out when I ran by again and again. Feeling the booming train along my hands, down through each finger. The overgrown empty lot next door: beautiful, in its way. A life that could have been. A thousand miles away on a Monday night I look out our kitchen window into the small-town black and see sirens. I pull you outside. Our neighbor’s work van has been smashed by a reckless driver who is standing beside the wreckage of his little car. Our neighbor stares at us as if we are from another universe. I don’t understand how you didn’t hear that, he says. I felt my whole house shake.
Krys Malcolm Belc is a transgender writer and proud former Philadelphia public school teacher who recently relocated to snowy Marquette, Michigan, where he is a first year MFA candidate in the creative writing program at Northern Michigan University. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in 45th Parallel, The Monarch Review, and Reservoir.
My bag disappeared
with my passport, my keys
a little vial containing
a sliver of bone.
I was stalked by an ordinary man.
My bag reappeared on a table
like at an airport.
Stained. Light as air.
All that remained was a plastic comb
and some pennies.
I got separated from my daughter.
I had to sit across from a man
making super-small talk,
trying to keep me there
as long as possible.
It wasn’t my trauma it was somebody else’s.
I couldn’t have my bag back
even though it was only a limp husk.
An official person went upstairs
and threw it overboard.
This happened. There was a splash.
Valerie Fox is the author of several books, including The Rorschach Factory (Straw Gate Books), The Glass Book (Texture Press), and Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets, co-written with Lynn Levin (Texture Press). Insomniatic, a chapbook, is forthcoming from PS Books. Fox has published many poems and stories co-written with Arlene Ang, and has also published Bundles of Letters Including A, V and Epsilon, which is a compilation with Ang. Fox has published work in Painted Bride Quarterly, Philadelphia Stories, Ping Pong, Hanging Loose, Apiary, Juked, Cordite Poetry Review, qarrtsiluni, Mockingheart Review, Sentence, and other journals.
GREAT an original radio play by Parrish Turner performed by Steve Allen directed, edited, and produced by Grace Connolly
Recorded Performance, full text, plus an interview with author Parrish Turner .
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An Interview with Playwright Parrish Turner
GC: What was your inspiration to write this script?
PT: This project started as an assignment in a playwriting workshop. We had three hats to pull from. One hat was our setting; the options ranged from space station to public library. The next hat contained “things that must be referenced” which was mostly historical events. And in the final hat was the number of characters we had to work with, and I had the luck (or misfortune) of drawing only one character.
This was a great exercise as a writer to play around. I often come back to this challenge when I am struggling with some form of writer’s block.
I found myself sitting and wondering what reason would a person be alone at the Pyramids of Giza. And I began to spiral from there.
GC: Who are the main characters in this play?
PT: Great only has one character: the last man on earth. I envisioned him as a generic “every man,” a sort of blank canvas to explore the ideas of humanity’s legacy. As a writer, my favorite part of working in theatre is the influence of collaboration. I like to give directors and actors room to interpret what they see in a text. While I have a huge back story for the character, he is described simply as Man. I am always delighted to see what others see in their own characterization of him.
GC: Why the Pyramids as opposed to any of the other natural wonders?
PT: As I mentioned before, I didn’t exactly choose it, but I remain fascinated by the Great Pyramids and modern humans’ feelings about them. They are so old that we almost consider them natural wonders, even though they are man made. Between the alien conspiracies and mummy myths, these piles of rock are loaded with meaning. But it is hundreds of different meanings.
GC: What playwrights/writers have had a particular influence on you?
PT: I am most influenced by interesting thinkers and those who try to present those thoughts in creative ways. Lately, I have been consuming a lot of nonfiction work, like Maggie Nelson. Eula Biss is someone whose work I am eating up because she manages to talk about tough and dense issues in beautiful and literary ways. Most of my writing comes from me trying to work through my own thoughts on an issue, so I love seeing other writers doing the same in their own ways.
GC: How long did it take you to write this play? How has this piece evolved throughout time, over the course of its development? What has been the development history of this script?
PT: This piece hasn’t changed too much since it was first written. There was a lot of editing to make sure it actually fit the shape I wanted it to be. The first draft was probably written in an afternoon. I tend to be a fast writer when I am in the right headspace for it. There were some factual details that were tricky to make believable. For example, I have done the math on how long it would take to sail to Egypt from the US and doubled that plus some, but people still didn’t believe that he had taken long enough to get there. It is such a grandiose story that it is tricky to strike the right balance of realism.
It was started when I was still in school, so I had a week to turn around scripts for class. It went from there to my school’s short play festival where I was able to see it come to life with a director and actor, although I was out of the country when it was performed, but my friend recorded it on her phone!
GC: Where do you write?
PT: I am a coffee shop writer, which my wallet doesn’t love. I have a favorite coffee shop that is usually full of other writers so I get to feed off of their energy in order to stay focused.
GC: I love the epic journey of this ten minute piece. Would you say that you have an esthetic as a writer you tend to adhere to in your scripts or are there themes in common in which you explore throughout your body of work?
PT: I like the grandiosity of everyday life. I am always exploring the influences that shape our lives, for example religion and gender and sexuality and regionality all shape how we view and navigate the world. We usually don’t realize that other people view the world differently until you are forced to examine that, like when you meet someone new or the world ends. What does it mean to be a human? And how do we approach the ways we tell our stories? You know, the ways that we crop or cherry pick in order to present the image we want to present.
GC: What’s something new you’re working on now?
PT: I actually just finished a masters degree in creative writing, where I focused on nonfiction, so most of my writing as of late has been in that. But now I am free to write whatever I like! I am aiming to finish my collection of personal essays and find new outlets for my work. A lot of nonfiction writing is pushed to be in a sort of clickbait format, which can be beautifully done, but isn’t how my work usually turns out. But I am excited to start some new projects.
Read Parrish Turner’s Script:
[pdf-embedder url=”https://www.cleavermagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Great_A-Radio-Play.pdf” title=”Great_A Radio Play”]
Playwright Parrish Turner hails from Georgia. He is a writer, essayist, and playwright. With his fellow playwrights, Parrish was honored with the Metro Atlanta Theater award for his work on the musical By Wheel and By Wing. He was a Lambda Literary Fellow in Nonfiction in 2014 and received his MFA from The New School. Parrish’s essay “Sound Over Water” was recently featured on The Rumpus. His work centers around regionality, gender, sex, and religion. He currently works with the Lambda Literary Review. .
Grace Connolly (Producer) has developed, staged and performed work(s) at venues including LaMama E.T.C (script development with Obie-Award winner Ping Chong), Primary Stages, The Wild Project, Dixon Place, Bowery Poetry Club, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, The Krane, The Fresh Fruit Festival, Great Lakes Theatre, Idaho Shakespeare Festival and Freddy’s in Brooklyn. Training and Professional Development includes: UCLA, Primary Stages and Kent State University where was the only person ever to complete a year long independent study on Women in the Restoration. Her literary publications include Never Apologize/Year of The Pig (Bluestockings), Flying (Cleaver Magazine), The Fool (Blackheart Magazine), and The Real Bourgeois (The Commonline Journal). Twitter @reforminghpstr.
An Interview by Lisa Romeo A CONVERSATION WITH SONYA HUBER, AUTHOR OF PAIN WOMAN TAKES YOUR KEYS AND OTHER ESSAYS FROM A NERVOUS SYSTEM
I was first introduced to Sonya Huber’s writing through her prescient 2010 book, Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir, about the elusive hunt for affordable care, which I was assigned to review. This writer stayed on my radar, and her newest nonfiction book is a satisfying reward. In Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System (University of Nebraska Press 2017), Huber takes her readers inside for a multifaceted view of her experiences with chronic pain, and how that changes a 30-something woman.
LR: I’ll ask the chicken-or-egg question first: what came first, writing and publishing several essays on the topic, then realizing it might make a collection? Or did you set out to produce an essay collection about pain?
SH: I started writing these essays as a kind of journaling, and for a long time I was not optimistic about even making one essay out of my phrases and sentences. The opportunity to publish one essay on the topic gradually emboldened me to try another, and then whenever I was in particularly bad pain, I would shift from my other writing project into writing pain. It was sort of like an escape hatch or relief, a way to use my bad present experience as research.
When I was starting to accumulate essays, I noticed that the finished essays were much easier to place than anything else I’d written. That was a singular experience, and then the comments from readers and editors was another clue that I needed to continue, and emboldened me to go further. Only then did I think about shaping a book. I saw what topics I had covered and asked myself, “What other hard things are missing?” and then gave myself assignments to start gradually shaping those missing essays. So this book feels very crowd-sourced and shaped with the help of a writing, reading, and disability/illness community.
LR: What about ordering the pieces? Writing bridge pieces? That whole process of turning individual essays into a book flummoxes many nonfiction writers.
SH: It is interesting that a few readers have commented that this reads like a memoir, because I didn’t arrange the essays that way on a conscious level. I can see how it would read that way, though. My most important concern in was variation in tone, style, and subject matter.
Since the topic is pain—often an entrapping and suffocating experience—I did not want to make readers experience that element of pain. Other writers have done that work very well, but I didn’t think I could do it. My priority was to allow for as many breaths and entry and exit points as possible. It’s an intense subject, so I wanted readers to feel they could pick it up and put it down, and some pieces are definitely meant as lighter “breathers.”
I chose an experimental piece for the beginning to let people know that some weird stuff would follow in the book, and that the rule for reading was that there would be few rules, and as a signal to be open-minded. Then came two “overview” pieces as a kind of introduction. Then I grouped the pieces by theme, another layer of internal organization.
After grouping by theme, I had the question of how to order these thematic chunks. There’s some warmer or easier stuff—about love and cooking and sex and relationships—and I decided that should go at the heart of the book, because that’s a reward, I think, to continue reading. (Also I would simply not get through this without my husband, my family, and friends.) Pain is a community problem that has social solutions. I wanted to push back against the stereotype of illness as being an isolated and self-centered subject, because I don’t think it ever is. Finally, because the ending pieces are a point of stress, a lens through which a reader looks back and sees the whole work, I wanted pieces in that spot that I saw as strong and complicated, with the final note as the possibility of seeing and understanding pain, as a kind of hope.
As far as advice, I think I would say that form follows function. I know there are many principles for putting together an essay collection, but I think your subject matter, voice, and tone have to inform the ordering. Ultimately the ordering is a kind of story itself.
LR: You write that you are “…not going to talk about the physical sensation” of pain. I thought, yes, because it’s too easy to go on about what it feels like. I also wondered if you were demanding of yourself—and readers—to think of what’s happening to our bodies as starting point rather than the end. Am I in the ballpark?
SH: Yes, you are so exactly in the ballpark! My own physical experiences meant things to me emotionally and intellectually and socially. I wanted to trace the nerves and implications outward. I think this insight comes partly from the pain community I am a part of; we feel pain on a collective level because some of the pain is influenced by weather. That led me to think of us as embedded in many systems and experiences and common challenges.
Like many people in the United States, I’ve been on a collective healthcare horror show for my entire adult life. Very few people (most of them in Congress) have found respite from the terrible anxiety of finding care; the rest of us have severe healthcare access anxiety. All of the social inequalities are also embedded in our bodies through uneven access to healthcare. African-Americans, for example, die much earlier as a group, and that’s due to individual health conditions but also due to the collective strain of poverty on bodies in all its detailed and sometimes invisible impacts. Healthcare and all its parts really are collective and social issues.
LR: In “The Alphabet of Pain” you write, “Pain has hardened me into a different version of myself—me as if I were a desert, as if I were a house built by Frank Lloyd Wright.” I love the visual and tactile images conjuring an uncompromising landscape and harsh taskmaster, and yet—both can be beautiful. What was it like to write about something that has so many variations, degrees, and can feel different at different times?
SH: I loved writing about pain! It was a huge release for me to see pain as not the enemy or real cause of my suffering. That might sound terrible or delusional, but the cause of my particular pain is a disease, the inner workings and causes of which are still unknown. Pain is the effect; it’s my response. In a weird way I wanted to honor and humanize myself and everyone else who has pain. We are not aberrations; pain is a universal for humankind. I let myself find any conceivable metaphor for pain, to explore it, to honor the pain experience as normal, as structured according to logical cause and effect, and as intimately human as a thumbprint.
There is massive and crushing stigma about chronic pain and chronic illness, and it is very easy with our judgmental Puritan backgrounds to see aberrant bodies as wrong, as evil. But we are as beautiful, intrinsic, and fantastic as any other manifestation of life in the world. I wanted to proliferate those images because pain experience is not simple. Pain is a mystery, multifaceted and holy as any other element of life; stressing the infinite and proliferating manifestations of it helped me underline the fact that it is complex and that people in pain are worth listening to. We assume we know pain, but I don’t think we do.
LR: I have (less severe) chronic pain problems too, and like you get sincere but ill-informed advice. In “The Cough Drop and the Puzzle of Modernity,” you consider how challenging it is to be “…someone who will not get well, an unsolvable puzzle,” and that “We must chart new understanding based upon the body’s lived experience, yet we still long for neat, easy solutions.” I admire how you made this essay not about misinformed advice-givers, but about a larger phenomenon—the goal of every essayist: begin with the personal, find the universal. Can you talk about the process of getting to that point, of considering a personal experience, and writing through to what makes it not-only-about-you?
SH: Getting beyond my own resentment was therapeutic for me. I needed to find larger meaning and research to understand my own experience. So I was driven by self-interest to find those universals. I’m pretty much a ranter inside my own head. Every single essay—or many of them—start in rant mode. That’s great for a paragraph, or for fuel to begin writing, but then I would come back to those paragraphs and see how dull they were to read.
On revision I knew I had to unfold those strong emotions to make them real for the reader. I have learned to do that mainly by reading essays by other writers; doing a lot of that gets the “essay mode” inside one’s head. Every time I’m at a dead end of frustration with a personal experience, the essayist voice—which is developed through that repetition and training—asks, “But what else might that mean?” and then takes the topic at hand from a 46 degree angle.
Lee Martin, who I was lucky to study with in graduate school at Ohio State, has a great blog post about the “Felt Sense” of revision, that gut feeling that something might be missing. As Lee advises, I read drafts and then check with my gut, asking whether there’s an emotional range in each piece. Often when I’ve gone on for too long in one vein, something else in me gets agitated and wants to explore the flipside. So it’s a lot of gut-checking and turning things around, and I think that naturally leads one outward.
LR: The essay, “From Inside the Egg” looks like poetry on the page, reads like a lyric essay, and morphs back to prose at the end in appearance and form. Can you take us through how you arrived at the final structure? What went on as this piece began and evolved?
SH: That was one of the last I wrote, and it came from a persistent dilemma. Many disability activists stress that they do not need to be fixed; they are perfectly whole and fine human beings who should be accepted as they are. We are all fighting against this strange idea of “normal,” which easily becomes an ideal, with outliers to be shunned or put to death or, in our present era, to be merely denied care so that they die quietly. Finding the disability activism community was central to my survival, my adaptation, and learning to not be at war with my life. I learn from the writing of disability activists every day.
At the same time, my chronic illness is progressive and not understood, and the talk within my treatment community is the dream of a cure. Other portions of the disability community have wrestled with this, such as the d/Deaf community and the supposed “cure” of deafness in the form of cochlear implants, which many saw as the potential destruction of Deaf culture. This raises the question of how rheumatoid disease is an illness and a disability; but many activists fight to have disabilities not be seen as illnesses in need of cures. It’s complicated.
Although I am getting comfortable with pain, I would also happily have it completely extracted from my life. The medications I take are an attempt to quiet down the disease process and the symptoms. So I was trying to explore these two frameworks—cure versus acceptance—and to make them both true. I can’t pick one framework. Trying to express the two opposing goals was challenging for me, so I reverted to typography and layout to express how disjointed these two frameworks are for me.
LR: Some of your essays are styled after existing forms. I loved the the list essay “Vital Sign 5” where you cite empirical statistics about pain and pain treatments, comingled with your personal pain stats. What do you like about these borrowed (or so-called “hermit crab”) forms?
SH: I loved using these forms as essay containers because each form asks a different kind of question and allowed me to interrogate pain in a different way. “Vital Sign 5” allowed me to wedge in some research that wasn’t fitting in elsewhere but that I felt was important to have as part of the book. Also, numbers are the realm of science and empiricism, and it was satisfying to write a form that looked like a lab test. (Ahhhh, a lab test! I should have done one of those as an essay!! Pain Woman returns for more). Also, I think each form has a different voice, and seeing an issue through a new voice and question always unlocks something hidden for me.
LR: What are you working on now?
SH: I have a memoir finished and am in the early stages of shopping around; that was the book I was writing when the pain essays came together. I would take “recess” when I was stuck on that book and write pain essays. I’m also in the middle of a book about socioeconomic inequality in Fairfield County, Connecticut, where I live, and that feels like it’s going to take a decade.
LR: Might sound like a dumb question given the topic, but: did you enjoy/ have fun writing these essays, assembling them into the book? Was it satisfying in ways beyond creative impulses?
SH: Oh gosh, yes! As I mentioned, writing this book felt like play. It was a joy to bust out of one narrative voice and try on several different voices like a costume party—and to know there were more and more voices that would help explore a hard topic. I think it will take me a while to understand all the reasons why this book was so fun. I have spent a good part of my life treating myself as a mind that produces things, so it was fun to come back to my own body and ask it questions. And the book comes out of love for the pain and disability communities, which have provided so much support.
Also—this is a tangent but connects: this was my most fun book because a lot changed in my life and I could relax. My material life conditions changed, and even though it’s about pain, the book clearly comes from a position of privilege, as pain can destroy one’s ability to work or function to varying degrees, and I am not in that place now. I have health insurance. I got out of a stressful situation and re-married. I got tenure at the institution where I teach, after a long period of precarious finances, which meant I no longer felt like I had to prove my intelligence or my seriousness. Tenure and other forms of economic security make a huge difference for writers and artists and everyone, and we need to expand those protections and other safety nets. People make amazing things without that security, but I can see the difference in my own work when things got easier for me personally. I guess I have always been wound really tight. The rule I set for myself with this book was to be as weird as possible, and a little bit of life security allowed me to loosen up.
Sonya Huber is an associate professor at Fairfield University, teaching in the English department and in the Fairfield Low-Residency MFA Program. She’s the author of five nonfiction books, and many essays and articles that have appeared in The New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, Fourth Genre, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Washington Post Magazine, and other places. Her work has been listed under Notables in Best American Essays 2014 and 2015. Connect at her blog, or on Twitter. You can order Pain Woman Takes Your Keys on Indiebound. Visit her website here. .
Lisa Romeo is on the faculty of the Bay Path University MFA Program, and works as an independent editor. Her work has been published in the New York Times, O The Oprah Magazine, Brevity, Hippocampus, Under the Sun, and is listed in Notables in Best American Essays 2016. Her memoir, about reconnecting with her deceased father during the grief journey, is due out in 2018 from University of Nevada Press. Connect via her blog and on Twitter.
SOME FACTS ABOUT ALTERNATIVES by Bruce Robinson Featured on Life As Activism
What they have done is a desecration —Kevin Baker
There are alternative readings; there are alternate routes;
There’s an alternative to president, which is dictator;
There are alternative realities, used to be in the movies,
There are choices we were presented with,
but demurred. As politely as possible, perhaps not,
but there was an alternative. There’s an alternative
to acceptance, handed to you by the dictionary,
somewhere around acquiescence, well, no,
but search the thesaurus, the alternativists’ bible,
under antonyms. There’s even an alternative
to persistence, just as there are options
on the menu, we realize you have many options
for your travel accommodations, and we
thank you for choosing acquiescence
to the facts that are silly putty in our hands.
Recent work by Bruce Robinson appears in Mobius, Fourth River/Tributaries, Panoplyzine, and dispatchespoetry. His poems were part of the ”Shake Your Windows and Rattle Your Walls” cabaret sponsored by the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition.
I have a friend who is forever posting his game scores on social media. This seems harmless to me. He knows that doing well in a game does not make him a better person, or anything—he just likes to have fun showing off and talking trash. And I do think he is proud of his skill at games.
But lately he has gotten into word games and puzzles, and is trying to suck me in. Keeps sending me challenges and telling me that I could never match his scores and so on. The thing is that I am a total ace at most games and puzzles involving words, and based on what he has posted I am way, way better than he is. I do not want to burst his bubble by showing him that, to take two examples among many, my average Words With Friends word score is 32 to his 19, and I solve the Times mini-crosswords in about half the time it takes him. Yet part of me wants to show him and our mutual on-line friends that I am a word goddess, and certainly not afraid to play him. What do you think? Would it be wrong to blow him away?
—Tempted in Tempe
Dear Temp,
I think that, unless this fellow’s ego is fragile to the point of mental illness, there is nothing wrong with accepting his invitations to play against him in two-player games, or playing your best once you do accept.
It is totally understandable, especially given the way your friend has been goading you, that you’d want to show off a little, maybe even take him down a peg—especially if you suspect that he is underestimating you because of your gender or for some other annoying, short-sighted reason.
But public bragging at his expense is another matter. I do not think you should post or otherwise bruit about the results of any contest between the two of you. Nor should you publicize your scores in crossword puzzles, or any other games where you are basically playing against yourself, if your primary aim in doing so is to compare your scores to your friend’s and show him up. If your friend pushes you too far, I could see (though I would not exactly commend) your using some private means to set him straight about your relative abilities at crossword puzzles and other one-player games, if only to put an end to his trash talk. But publicly flaunting your superiority over him in particular would be unkind, to say nothing of tacky—unless you are absolutely certain that your friend is bragging and cajoling you totally in fun, and it does not sound to me as if fun is the only thing that’s going on here.
Sometimes it is hard to be way, way better than other people. Being a word goddess entails a certain level of responsibility. Don’t hide your light—but don’t be a jerk, either. If you examine your motives case by case, I am sure you will know where to draw the line.
June
P.S. Morality aside, it may not be wise to take your friend on: such lopsided play is likely to frustrate him and bore you. Your friend might even grow unpleasant and resentful. If that happens, I advise you to stop playing him. Be gracious in victory, and tactful about giving him the boot. But promise me never to minimize, explain away, or apologize for your superpowers. All too many goddesses—and a few gods, too—fall into this trap.
Dear June,
My sister is about to have a baby girl—her first child. For privacy reasons I don’t feel that I can tell you the actual name she has chosen for her daughter. Suffice it to say that my sister wants to name her kid after the drug she credits with making the pregnancy possible. She says that the name is interesting, and will be a conversation starter! What has actually happened so far, conversation-wise, is that my mother nearly had a coronary when she heard the name, and my brother had to run out of the room to control his hysterical laughter. I have told my sister several times that it’s wrong to inflict a name like that on a kid. She tells me to butt out. Is there anything I can do?
—Apprehensive in the Big Apple
Dear App,
Normally I would advise against interference, or even disagreement, with a parent where baby names are concerned. But unless there’s some fertility drug named Madison, or perhaps an erectile dysfunction remedy called Brittany Sue, your sister’s plan strikes me as borderline abusive. I hate to think of poor little Cialis during roll call in middle school homeroom. Or little Bromocriptine struggling to find a shorter version of her name, one she can live with. I suppose that little Clomid or Pergonal might survive childhood and adolescence with nothing worse than some discreet snickers from a few adults—but I doubt even that, given how mean some kids can be, and how much time they spend typing words into search engines. And what if your sister owes her success to Viagra?
I note that you have not mentioned a father or other co-parent. If there is one, I strongly advise you to enlist his or her aid. If not, I suggest advising your sister to poll the sixth- and seventh-graders in her part of the world so she can get some idea of what her daughter’s life will be like with a name like Gonadotropin or Serophine. (Actually, that last one’s not so bad. If she plans on naming her daughter after that particular estrogen-blocking drug, you might want to back off and content yourself with calling the baby “Sara” whenever possible.)
Does your sister especially like any of her medical providers? If so, and if one or more of these people have reasonable names, you might suggest that she could better express her gratitude by honoring a fellow human instead of a non-sentient chemical compound. Or perhaps you could get out the old photo albums and try to drum up support for a beloved grandmother, or a recently-deceased great aunt? Or how about suggesting that, as is the Jewish custom with the names of departed loved ones, she honor the medication (or whatever the hell it is she is doing with it) by giving her daughter a name with the initial of the drug instead of its full appellation: Victoria for Viagra, Luisa for Lupron, and so forth?
I am grasping at straws here. Frankly, your sister’s proposal is so, um, unusual that it is hard to imagine how one might reason with her about it. And I hesitate to advise your seeking outside help from her clergyperson, mentor, midwife, etc. Your sister would resent such active interference, and might even become estranged from you just when she and sweet baby Repronex need you most. You may just have to hope that, as you sister’s delivery date approaches, the idea of giving her daughter an embarrassing, laughable name will start to seem less attractive.
In the meantime, think of a good, totally inoffensive nickname for the baby and try to get everybody around your sister to start using it.
Cleaver’s in-house advice columnist opines on matters punctuational, interpersonal, and philosophical, spinning wit and literary wisdom in response to your ethical quandaries. Write to her at [email protected]. Find more columns by June in her attic.
LILLI DE JONG by Janet Benton Nan A. Talese, 352 pages
reviewed by Joanne Green
“When I write, I forget that I don’t belong to myself.” So observes Lilli de Jong, whose journal entries narrate Janet Benton’s impressive debut novel, set in the 1880s. Lilli is as spirited and determined as Jane Eyre, as sensible as Elinor Dashwood, and as downtrodden as Little Nell. Yet on the subjects of reproductive rights, affordable day care, and the cost of motherhood for women the book speaks directly to readers, today.
Pregnant, abandoned by her fiancé, and dismissed from her Quaker home and teaching position, Lilli finds shelter in the Philadelphia Haven for Women and Infants. Benton picks up where Dickens left off, and, in the form of entries in Lilli’s diary, describes both the multitude of these unwed mothers and the lack of assistance or sympathy for them. These unfortunates include a maid taken advantage of by her master, a daughter raped by her father, and those like Lilli, “female and unlucky…and a near idiot in the ways of amorous men.” The well-meaning Haven offers these women a chance to “return from disgrace by giving up her offspring and denying its existence ever after.”
With the passion of Jane Eyre, Lilli is thunderstruck with love when her infant, Charlotte, is put in her arms. But unlike a Victorian love story, this love of a mother for her child is at the novel’s center. “The doctor cut the fleshly cord that connects us, but an invisible one has taken its place…that can be neither cut nor broken,” Lilli asserts in a journal entry. When the Haven’s superintendent advises, “It is best to consider the baby like a tooth that must be extracted,” Lilli understands the baby’s survival depends on this tie that can’t be broken. She records closely observed details of the newborn’s smell and feel, and both the overwhelming work required to care for the young infant and the power of a mother’s love. The novel reveals the difficult road Lilli travels to keep Charlotte and to stay alive.
The choice of Lilli as a narrator provides much of the novel’s modern feel. As a Quaker, Lilli questions society’s norms, and listens to “the light within.” She writes, “I’d been taught not to conform to the world as it is…but to live instead as if the world were what it ought to be.” Lilli’s voice is in the Friends’ plain speech, addressing others as thee and thy, and avoiding the use of titles. The Quaker language places the story firmly in the 1800s, despite the modernity of Lilli’s thoughts, a delicate balance for the writer of historical fiction that Benton artfully maintains.
The other women Lilli meets in the story provide insight into the narrow options available to all women at the time. Lilli becomes a wet nurse for a well-to-do family, the Burnhams. Although Clementina Burnham enjoys considerable freedom from the burdens of motherhood, she is also limited in realizing her ambitions, and jealous of Lilli’s connection to her son. Others from the Haven are crushed by shame. The maiden ladies who run the shelter are impoverished by their own gentility and lack understanding of the powerful love between mother and child.
Janet Benton
As a Quaker, Lilli received an education, uncommon for a woman of her time. Reading John Stuart Mill in the Burnham’s library gives her deep insight into the limitations motherhood imposes. “‘We can pursue our true wants,’ Lilli reads, ‘only when doing so harms no one to whom we are obliged.’” Obligated to her infant Charlotte, Lilli finds freedom only when writing in her journal, a sentiment as modern as Virginia Woolf. “When I write,” she says, “I forget that I don’t belong to myself.” Lilli’s education ultimately leads her to independence and survival.
But independence comes at a cost. At a time when cow’s milk was not a safe alternative for infants, childcare is dangerous and expensive. The details of childcare is one the novel’s grim fascinations (the author indicates in the book’s acknowledgments that Janet Golden’s A Social History of Wet Nursing in America provided both inspiration and information). Babies would suck on rags soaked in sugar water and laudanum, Benton observes, “bound to a board and placed on the highest shelf…to keep away the rats that do eat children.”
Benton, who has worked on documentary film and is an exhaustive researcher, provides a glorious, if dark, portrait of 19th century Philadelphia. She takes Lilli to the Old Blockley Children’s Asylum, to Broad Street Station (the largest rail terminal at the time in the nation), to a skating pond in the Wissahickon Park, and to the Burnham’s luxurious summer home in the suburb of Germantown. These details vividly invoke the past, while Lilli’s fresh passion and insight give the book a voice that is lively and modern. Lilli de Jong is beautifully written and completely absorbing.
Joanne Green lives and writes in Philadelphia. She is the author of Peach (Gemma Media).
HERE WE ARE: FEMINISM FOR THE REAL WORLD edited by Kelly Jensen Algonquin Young Readers, 218 pages
reviewed by Kristie Gadson
Feminism. It’s an ideology that has long been approached with trepidation, met with both skepticism and controversy. There have been countless articles, papers, films, and books exploring and defining the concept. However, Here We Are is more than a series of essays on feminism. It’s a collection of stories, blog posts, comics, drawings, and interviews featuring an array of different voices – each more unique than the last – describing what feminism means and how it plays a role in our lives. Each page encourages readers to think about how they, as individuals, can relate to a belief that strives to unite us as a whole.
“The people and the world around us shape our individual path to feminism…The journey is always changing, always shifting, and influenced by our own experiences and perspectives.”
The book is structured like a scrapbook, having a combination of calligraphy, designs, and doodles drawn across the pages, accenting each chapter. Not only is this visually appealing, it creates a sense of comfort that softens the intensity of the subject matter. Through its playful design Here We Are creates an atmosphere that fosters openness and spares judgement – in a way, the book itself functions as a safe space where readers can embark their own experience.
Kelly Jensen
Forty-four voices all come together to share their perspectives on multiple aspects of feminism: what it means to them, how they came to accept it, how they identify with it, and how they advocate for it. However, what sets this book apart from the rest is its inclusion of a kaleidoscope of narratives that show “…the truth about feminists: they come in all shapes, sizes, and colors.” It succeeds in offering an intersectional view on feminism by including the stories of men, disabled women, both transgender men and women, and women of color.
In Matt Nathanson’s essay “Privilege” he expresses his frustrations about benefitting from a system that devalues not only women, but those who don’t fit into the category of “white” and “male”. He takes issue with the fact that his daughter, while acknowledging that she also has privilege, has “a set of hurdles in place that [he] never had…she is heading out into a game that is fixed.”
Angie Manfredi’s “The Big Blue Ocean and My Big Fat Body” explores the negative effects of body shaming and how society views body type as a standard of worth. Through feminism she came to accept that being fat doesn’t mean that anyone isn’t deserving of love or acceptance.
Amandla Stenberg’s “Don’s Cash Crop My Cornrows” looks into the damages done by the appropriation of black culture, specifically when it comes to black hair. She points out how hairstyles like cornrows, originally used to keep black hair neat and away from the elements, were ridiculed and seen as “ghetto” on black people but were later seen on high-fashion runways and music videos, rebranded as “urban” because they were worn by white models and musicians. She begs the question “what would America be like if we loved black people as much as we love black culture?”
Kaye Mizra’s “Faith and the Feminist” reveals the politics surrounding a Muslim woman’s decision to wear her hijab, how cultures with a lack of understanding feel the need to label the practices of other cultures “backward” or calling their women “oppressed.” Mizra comes to terms with her personal choice and how the right to choose is indeed a feminist act.
Through exploring their vulnerability, struggles, and triumphs the book offers a more human view of feminism through the lens of these individuals and their personal circumstances.
As I poured over the pages, connecting with every image, essay, and story, I found pieces of myself scattered throughout the book. I saw my desire for inclusion in Brandy Colbert’s “In search of Sisterhood.” I relived my gender-normed past in Sarah McCarry’s “Girl Lessons.” My activism was re-ignited in Mia and Michaela DePrinces’ “Feminism is as Feminism Does.” Although my experiences are my own, I believe that any reader who picks up this book will develop a personal connection to, at least, one of these stories. Readers can challenge and expound upon their current views of feminism, allowing them to add to the ever growing, ever shifting dynamic.
Here We Are shows that feminism isn’t a monolith. It’s a collection of experiences, stories, and narratives that contribute to the betterment of all. This collection succeeds in getting the conversation started and it’s left up to the reader to finish it.
Kristie Gadson is a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor’s in English. But, formalities aside, she knew that children’s books would become her passion when she found herself sneaking into the children’s section of Barnes & Noble well after she turned eighteen. She is a strong advocate for diverse children’s books, and writes diverse children’s book reviews on her blog The Black Sheep Book Review.
TURNING OUT THE LIGHTS On Cuba, Writing, and the Ecstasy of Planetary Topography by Tim Weed
The blackout was a revelation. It happened at around eight PM, in Trinidad, Cuba, on one of those moonless tropical nights that fall so suddenly you barely notice the dusk. This was several years ago—before the loosening of travel regulations that occurred under President Obama—and the number of American tourists remained small. In common with many others who’ve dedicated their lives to the dream of producing enduring literature, I’ve had to make my living by other means. I was a Spanish major in college, and through a series of happy accidents I ended up developing a parallel career as an educational travel guide with specific expertise in Cuba. Before the resumption of diplomatic relations, organized cultural travel programs provided a highly sought after legal method for Americans to travel to the country, and my knowledge base was much in demand. At the time of the occurrence described in this essay, I was traveling to the country with cultural tourism groups at least half a dozen times a year.
Trinidad is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a remote city nestled into the base of the Sierra de Escambray mountain range, overlooking a notably depopulated part of the Caribbean. For much of the Spanish colonial period it was a wealthy sugar capital, but in the second half of the nineteenth century—with the end of slavery and the economic devastation that came with the wars for Cuban independence—the city entered a long period of desperate poverty and near-total isolation. This period only ended with the construction of the first highway linking it to Havana in the 1950s, and the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 ensured that Trinidad, along with the rest of the island, would remain closed off from the main currents of the late twentieth century world economy. As a result of all this, the city is a living time capsule. Horses clop along the cobbled pedestrian-only streets in the hilly upper reaches of town. Through the wood-grated windows of the high-ceilinged colonial houses one can still see the original nineteenth-century furniture. In a few of the interior courtyards horse-drawn buggies remain parked, as if waiting for their owners to come back and rig them up.
Cuba is not a brightly lit country to begin with. The electrical system is antiquated, and although blackouts are less common now than they were during the deep economic depression that followed the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in the 1990s, they do still occur. Trinidad is far removed from any other source of ambient light, so even without a blackout, on a moonless night, the stars emerge in a brilliant textural canopy.
When the electricity cut out I was “off the clock,” eating dinner on my own in one of the dozen small restaurants near the Plaza Mayor. There was a moment of cave-like blackness accompanied by silence. Then the quiet conversations around me resumed, and a few candles flickered to life in the surrounding establishments. Before long the center of town was dotted with spheres of trembling amber light. A horseman trotted by, the iron-shod hoof-beats ringing clearly across the square as if to complete the illusion of having traveled backwards in time.
Finishing dinner, I wandered out to sit on the coral-stone steps of the cathedral. A pleasant breeze blew up from the sea. The steps still radiated the warmth of the tropical sun.
And the revelation?
Well, before I can describe it, I have to explain something about my state of mind. Making a living as an international travel guide may sound like a sweet gig, but like any other repetitive job, it can get old. You’re always “on,” for one thing, which is a daunting prospect for an introverted writer: Imagine hosting a nine-day cocktail party. Then there’s the boredom of following the same crowded itineraries, meeting with the same interesting locals, and participating in the same festive activities year in and year out. In my personal life I treasure the opportunity to be active, but most high-end cultural programs are surprisingly sedentary, featuring long air-conditioned bus rides, a great deal of passive spectating, and twice daily, multi-course group meals in five-star restaurants. So even though my “day job” was bringing me to some of the most interesting and picturesque places in the world, I was only half-experiencing them. I was preoccupied with logistics, small talk, and the draining, insincere gregariousness the host role demands. My off hours were spent walking in numb distraction, dining alone at a familiar bar, or hiding behind potted plants in a hotel lobby checking my email. I’d become jaded.
This gets us back to the blackout—and the revelation I had while sitting on the steps of the cathedral in Trinidad. After my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, I was suddenly overcome by a sharp awareness of my relationship to the physical landscape. Not just the abstract knowledge of where I was geographically. Not the conjured image of a point on a map, nor even a self-conscious awareness that I was sitting in a socio-politically unusual location: a remote, historic World Heritage Site in a poor region on the south-central coast of the western hemisphere’s only communist country. This was different. Suddenly, I had a visceral sense of my exact location in the three-dimensional topography: sitting at the head of the cobbled plaza at the center of a centuries-old town, at the base of the towering karst mountain range that formed a jagged ink-black wall in the night sky at my back, on a sort of elevated shelf overlooking a tropical sea that glittered faintly in the distance beneath the overspreading stars.
The intensity of this shift in perspective took me by surprise. All at once I’d recovered a sense of connection that I hadn’t even realized was missing. It was a big, reassuring, exhilaratingly physical feeling of communion with the land and the sea and the universe of stars.
When the electricity came back on, the three-dimensional majesty of the nighttime topography evaporated, leaving me with a sense of emptiness and loss. We’re used to blaming our technological gadgetry for keeping us at arm’s length from what we call “real life,” but for me, the blackout was a reminder that the problem goes deeper than the latest generation of smartphones. Electricity itself—that clever sine qua non of advanced industrialized society—is a force that imprisons us, because it prevents us from seeing out into the darkness. The live current we’ve tamed and channeled may provide a reassuring background buzz, but it keeps us from experiencing the sublime truth of the material universe and our precise location within it.
◊
Absent fortuitous blackouts, depending on the kind of person you are, receiving this kind of visceral reminder of the true nature of existence may require either drugs or a deep-seated commitment to silent meditation. Wilderness camping might do it for you, as it often has for me, especially for multiple nights in a row. Even for a brief time, immersing yourself in one of out planet’s sublime landscapes is also a good bet. I’ve had moments of heightened awareness blossom back into my consciousness on hikes in the red rock deserts of the American southwest, on skis in snow-blanketed Rocky Mountain conifer meadows, and sitting at the rail of a small ship cruising through the Beagle Channel as the jaw-dropping peaks and hanging glaciers paraded magisterially by. If you haven’t been fortunate enough to experience one of these jolts recently, it’s possible that you may have become jaded. As with any rigorous pursuit, unused muscles can atrophy. Sometimes you have to exert your willpower to rekindle the connection.
And this is where writing comes in. I once heard the poet David Baker say that literature can be divided into two categories: the ironic and the ecstatic. Ecstasy is transcendent, mystical, implying a state of trance, vision, or dream. Irony, on the other end of the continuum, is social, worldly, rooted in the intellect. In blackout terms, irony is electricity, and ecstasy the unmediated tropical night.
Irony is essential in literature as an antidote to sentimentality, but in my view the most immersive writing is to be found on the ecstatic end of the continuum. When we write, we want the reader to forget all about those black marks on the page and tumble headlong into the narrative as one would fall into a trance. Good descriptive writing is what triggers this loss of conscious control, this benign fugue state; it’s what puts the vivid in John Gardner’s “vivid, continuous dream,” and it’s my belief that in order to produce good descriptive writing a writer must, at least intermittently, have access to something analogous to my blackout revelation. She must be able to turn off the electrical currents of irony and intellect and connect to the surrounding world in a way that is intuitive, instinctive, and ecstatic.
◊
These days, if I happen to be talking to a group of aspiring writers, I may be tempted to give them some version of the following advice. Close your laptop. Turn off your smartphone. If you’re lucky enough to find yourself in a blackout, don’t forget to look up and notice your surroundings. And if there’s no blackout, just turn out the lights.
Tim Weed is the winner of a Writers Digest Popular Fiction Award, and his first novel, Will Poole’s Island, was named one of Bank Street College of Education’s Best Books of the Year. Tim teaches at GrubStreet in Boston and in the MFA Writing program at Western Connecticut State University, and is the co-founder of the Cuba Writers’ Program. His new collection, A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing, was a finalist for the 2017 International Book Awards (Short Story category).
ROMEO AND JULIET IN PALESTINE: TEACHING UNDER OCCUPATION by Tom Sperlinger Zero Books, 144 pages
reviewed by Beth Johnston
Trust the Brits to find the humor in anything. Tom Sperlinger’s Romeo and Juliet in Palestine, a brief memoir of a semester the author spent as a visiting professor of English literature at Al Quds University in Abu Dis in the West Bank, deploys wry wit to combat the absurdities of living and teaching in a place of controlled chaos. Take this retelling of an exchange between Sperlinger and a security guard at an Israeli checkpoint:
“Are you Jewish?” “My father’s Jewish.” “And your mother?” . . . “She’s Christian,” I replied. “Where is she from?” “Belfast.” “Why did your father marry her?”
I didn’t think this was a question I could answer.
At Al Quds University, Sperlinger’s students remain dubious about the benefits of the courses he offers; they want to learn the English language, but feel profoundly disconnected from English literature. On one of his first days at the office, Sperlinger encounters a student who actually likes studying English literature, but doesn’t like the department. “If you were head of the department, what would you change about it?” he asked her. Maybe she would provide valuable insight.
She thought for a second, and then spoke in a deep, even tone. “I would close it,” she said.
This general sense that students and others he encountered in Palestine didn’t know what to make of Sperlinger and his point of view pervades the memoir. When Sperlinger gives a talk at Al Quds, the professor who introduces him, who is not a literary scholar, notes, “I am sure this will be a very interesting talk. I don’t know anything about George Eliot, but I do know she was a Zionist.”
Tom Splerlinger
Sperlinger’s keen feel for the absurd provides much-needed relief in an often grim story. If, like me, you don’t know much about the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, this memoir will open your eyes to Palestinians’ perspectives on the conflict. Sperlinger, whose grandparents fled Vienna in 1938 to escape the Holocaust, is quietly appalled by what his people on the West Bank endure. As he sees it, “Palestinian lives are disrupted in endless small ways, day to day.” His students face drawn-out commutes to the University (thanks to checkpoints) and constant interruptions of their studies from strikes, protests, and faculty pay freezes. Because various legal regimes maintain jurisdiction over different parts of Jerusalem and the West Bank, some students are effectively divided from family, friends, and even lovers. And because of a strange technicality in how Israel accredits Palestinian universities, Al-Quds degrees are worthless in Jerusalem. Still, there are much bigger disruptions. In one assignment, Sperlinger asks his students to retell a family story or folk tale and analyze it using the literary techniques the class has been studying. The resulting narratives are chilling for the reader: a grandfather publicly executed for possession of a gun, a seven-year-old killed for throwing rocks, a father used by soldiers as a human shield. When, at one point, a student asks Sperlinger if he’d like to see a picture of her brother and he agrees, she shows him a wanted poster.
Despite the challenges they face—indeed, Sperlinger suggests at points, because of them—the students offer fascinating insights about the texts they read in class. Part of this is surely as a result of Sperlinger’s sensitive and talented teaching. In a conversation about how Shakespeare adapted the Petrarchan sonnet for an English audience, Sperlinger makes the lesson concrete, telling the students, “I want you to imagine that I am a musician. . . . I’m visiting from England, and I have brought this new kind of song with me, which everyone in England is playing. You’re a group of musicians too. But you haven’t heard of this song, and when I play it, you want to start making your own version in Arabic. How would the song change?” He allows his students great freedom of thought, telling them that “they should not take for granted that [Shakespeare’s] works were great or special. Their job, as readers, was to discover whether he seemed like a great writer to them.” And yet the students don’t always (or perhaps even often) do the reading. Sperlinger responds by giving them an excerpt from Malcolm X’s autobiography, where the Civil Rights leader famously explains how reading opened the world for him; then he distributes a French novelist’s “Readers Bill of Rights” and asks the students what they would add or subtract. At times, understandably, he grows frustrated with the students and wonders whether he should be stricter; just at that point, one of his best students explains, “I’ve been at the university for five years. I’ve never been asked to do this before—to come and have opinions, to do the reading only if I want to. . . . It’s just a big change.”
While anecdotes like this one are rich in meaning, the book is sometimes frustrating to the reader. Sperlinger has unusual pacing; sometimes he stretches stories out over a dozen pages, doling out a little bit of information at a time, digressing to another topic, and then spiraling back to something he let drop. This can create a productive sense of foreshadowing. For instance, in the powerful first chapter that gives the book its name, Sperlinger intercuts shreds of ominous violence with his students’ responses to Shakespeare’s tale of two warring houses, to profound effect. Other times, a story simply gets abandoned; the reader waits in vain for a payoff down the line.
More fundamentally, Sperlinger doesn’t have much material to work with; a single semester is not a lot of time to fully understand his students or his environs. Still, Sperlinger wisely refrains from spinning his tale out for longer than it warrants. At 144 pages, this novella-length memoir flies by. And just as Sperlinger arouses his students’ curiosity about literature, he whets ours for a greater understanding of a people whose oppression is too often overlooked or misunderstood. More, Sperlinger made me want to read or reread not just Shakespeare but Edward Said, Malcolm X, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper¸” Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist,” Irish and Palestinian poets, Israeli playwrights—and, indeed, whatever Sperlinger writes next.
Beth Johnston trained as a lawyer before earning an MFA from Bennington College. She has written about books and law for The New Republic, Legal Times, and other publications. She lives in Washington, DC, where she teaches writing at George Washington University.
FAMILY LEXICON by Natalia Ginzburg translated by Jenny McPhee New York Review Books, 224 Pages
reviewed by Robert Sorrell
Right before falling asleep, my father becomes totally incoherent. If you speak to him, he will respond with words, they just won’t make any sense. Neither will he have any memory of your conversation. (He passed this trait on to me; often to my detriment, I employ it regularly.) Once, when my dad had floated off into this near-unconscious state, he started talking about the Secret Service. From that point on, to spout these nocturnal babblings has become known in my family as “Secret Servicing.”
Families, social groups, and even workplaces often have phrases and words just like these. “Inside jokes” is a common term for some of them, but not all fall neatly into this category. For many of these words and phrases, a new definition or usage, with nuance beyond the punchline, has been created for a small group of people. This idea is the cornerstone of Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon.
Now in a new translation by Jenny McPhee (and with a new English title), Family Lexicon is Natalia Ginzburg’s Strega Prize winning memoir/novel of life in Italy before, during, and after World War II, Lessico famigliare, first published in 1963. Ginzburg is known mainly in this country for being a “writer’s writer,” a phrase which is often used to compensate for an author’s lack of fame. But in Ginzburg’s case, perhaps there’s a bit more to it; her essays are often assigned on writing workshop syllabi alongside favorites like Joan Didion, James Baldwin, and George Orwell. A quick Internet search for “Natalia Ginzburg” and “syllabus” turns up countless options. In fact, it was in a creative writing class where I was first introduced to her work, the devastatingly simple essay “He and I.”
The essay begins, “He always feels hot. I always feel cold. In the summer when it really is hot he does nothing but complain about how hot he feels. He is irritated if he sees me put a jumper on in the evening. He speaks several languages well; I do not speak any well.” Ginzburg continues this way for a few paragraphs. Yet somehow out of these clichés and simple sentences, Ginzburg draws a complicated portrait of a relationship. As in Family Lexicon, the way Ginzburg is treated by men is disturbing. And in her exacting narration, it’s never clear whether if the relationship produces much love.
But as simple as much of Ginzburg’s prose may be, she has a great ability to slip in poetic sentences or paragraphs that cut straight to the emotions of a piece. She writes later, in Dick Davis’ English translation of “He and I,” of her first meetings with her husband (“he”), the intellectual Gabriele Baldini:
If I remind him of that walk along the Via Nazionale he says he remembers it, but I know he is lying and that he remembers nothing; and I sometimes ask myself if it was us, these two people, almost twenty years ago on the Via Nazionale, two people who conversed so politely, so urbanely, as the sun was setting; who chatted a little about everything perhaps and about nothing; two friends talking, two young intellectuals out for a walk; so young, so educated, so uninvolved, so ready to judge one another with kind impartiality; so ready to say goodbye to one another for ever, as the sun set, at the corner of the street.
Natalia Ginzburg
Ginzburg is often lauded for her prose’s “artlessness,” a trait which makes her ever more fashionable in creative writing circles given the current fetishization of “spare” writing, prose without an extra comma, or god forbid, an adverb. It is true that Ginzburg’s prose is, for the most part, quite spare, and in her nonfiction it is remarkable how little she shares about herself. She serves, most often, as narrator, not protagonist, of her essays. Her own personal thoughts, actions, or words don’t intrude on the narrative of Family Lexicon until around page 120, and she only uses one sentence to tell readers of her courtship and marriage to Leone Ginzburg. And yet, despite this extreme simplicity and her almost monotone narration, as in “He and I,” every now and then she slips in moments of reflection. This is particularly true of her writing on the war. World War II remains in the shadows for most of the work but in moments it appears, as in this paragraph right above a conversation between Natalia and her brother about whether they feel more or less rich now that they are married. She writes:
For years now, Turin was full of German Jews who’d fled Germany. Some of them were even assistants in my father’s laboratory. They were people without a country. Maybe, soon, we too would be without a country, forced to move from one country to another, from one police station to the next, without work or roots or family or homes.
Ginzburg intersperses little paragraphs and sentences like this throughout the book, and they are in part what allow her to do so much with so little. She doesn’t reflect much, but when she does, she makes sure it counts.
In Family Lexicon, Ginzburg also proves to have been a keen observer from a young age. The work (which has alternately been called a memoir, a novel, and an autobiographical novel but, for all intents and purposes is “true”) covers around thirty years of Ginzburg’s life, from her childhood in Turin in the 1920s and 30s, through her first marriage to anti-fascist Leone Ginzburg, through Italy’s reconstruction and reorganization after the end of World War II. Along the way, the story of the Levis (Natalia’s parent’s name and hers until her first marriage) and their wide circle of acquaintances and friends is narrated chronologically, with the “family sayings” acting almost as mantras throughout the work.
These sayings are part of what must’ve made Family Lexicon a particularly difficult book to translate, and are certainly part of what makes it an odd book to read in translation. Many of the sayings consist of puns, plays on the way a word is spelled or sounds (the Levis say “lend gear” for “lend an ear”), and silly or nonsense words. In Jenny McPhee’s translation a choice selection of these come across as “nitwittery,” “dribble drabble,” and “doodledums” (as well as the word “taradiddling” which to many readers, myself included, may seem to be a made up, but is not). Many come out of the mouth of Ginsburg’s father, Giuseppe Levi, a man who looms large in Family Lexicon and contributes more than his fair share to the long list of family words and phrases, one of his personal favorites being “Jackass!”
Giuseppe is a bit of a tyrant, a contrarian with the loud mouth and strong hand to ensure that he is heard over all others. He is constantly criticizing his children and his wife, Natalia’s mother, Lidia. He is also resistant to almost any idea had by someone else. After one of his sons Alberto becomes a doctor and Lidia says she should visit his office for some ailment, Giuseppe says things like, “Do you think that klutz Alberto knows anything? … I’ll give you a pill!” Late in the book he is asked to hold a political rally since he is running for office. He was told he only had to lead one rally and could say whatever he liked. A prominent biologist, he decides to spend the entire speech talking about science. The crowd is totally bewildered until at one point, Ginzburg reveals, he “happened to mention Mussolini and the fact that he usually referred to him as the ‘Jackass from Predappio.’ The audience erupted into resounding applause and my father looked around him, now stupefied himself.”
An equally idiosyncratic moment occurs during an air raid, when Lidia begs Giuseppe to come down to the cellar. “‘Nitwitteries,’” he replies, “‘If the building collapses, the cellar will certainly collapse too! The cellar is hardly safe! This is an utter nitwittery!’”
This moment is an accurate portrayal of their relationship, which is both combative and oddly loving. The book’s great mystery, as discussed in Peg Boyer’s afterword in this edition, is how Giuseppe becomes in many ways the story’s hero. Toward the book’s end, his sheer exuberance and energy overcome his despotic tendencies, making his outbursts oddly endearing. Yet while Giuseppe is an intoxicating character, I think Boyer and others don’t give credit to Lidia and the other members of the Levi family who are occasionally pushed off the page by Giuseppe’s loud voice or strong arm. They are, nonetheless, what gives the story its texture and its unexpected insights. Giuseppe is a cartoon; Lidia is a person. Lidia is also the source of much of the text’s joy. While Giuseppe is busy giving his opinions (usually negative) on anything he sees, Lidia sings made-up songs like the family favorite, “I am Don Carlos Tadrid, and I’m a student in Madrid!” And left untouched in the Giuseppe-friendly afterword is the strange fact that a prominent anti-fascist led his family in such a (there’s no other word for it) fascist way.
In McPhee’s translation, Giuseppe’s rantings, Lidia’s songs and jokes, and the rest of the Levi family’s sayings are vivid and entertaining. The characters leap off the page in 3-D, making the experience of reading Family Lexicon far more enjoyable than what one might expect of a memoir about the life of a family of Italian Jews under fascism and German occupation. This new edition also comes with extensive notes, which anyone without an encyclopedic knowledge of Italian political and cultural figures of the time will find very useful. It is also useful in explaining some of the more uncomfortable word choices, particularly the word “negro.” Giuseppe throws this word constantly at his children at his wife, at strangers, and its use is frankly alarming in the work. (Past translations have taken steps to avoid this particular word, rephrasing it as “yahoos”–Woolf’s 1997 translation entitled The Things We Used to Say–or using the Italian “negrigura”–D.M. Low’s 1967 translation, Family Sayings–in Italics.) McPhee explains her choice in the endnotes, noting that while “negro” and “negrigura” were commonly used in the Judeo-Italian Venetian dialect Ginzburg’s father absorbed as a child, and that according to the director of the Venice Center for International Jewish Studies, Shaul Bassi, the words “never had overtly racial content,” Ginzburg “was very aware of the words’ racial significance,” and McPhee didn’t want to lose any of this potential meaning. McPhee took a similar approach with the title. Originally titled Lessico famigliare, the work has previously been translated as Family Sayings or The Things We Used to Say. McPhee’s title, Family Lexicon, has a certain technicality to it, but it also manages to capture the simplicity of the original while squeezing a bit more meaning into those two words.
This characteristic gives the text a somewhat academic feel in its approach to language and its extensive notation, but the tone and character of McPhee’s prose is airy and crystal clear, just like Ginzburg’s, or at least, just like translations of Ginzburg’s work I’ve read by other translators. And this is good because Family Lexicon is a deeply funny, charming, and human work. There is hardship, plenty of it—Natalia’s first husband, Leone Ginzburg is tortured to death by Nazis towards the end of World War II—but at its core Family Lexicon is written with the kind of humor and deep humanity that could only be mustered about such topics by someone who’d actually lived through them.
Early in Family Lexicon Ginzburg writes, “If my siblings and I were to find ourselves in a dark cave or among millions of people, just one of those phrases or words would immediately allow us to recognize each other. Those phrases are our Latin, the dictionary of our past.” Family Lexicon brings the reader inside the family, teaching us this personal Latin. What Ginzburg achieves in the work is not necessarily a triumph of pathos or empathy, or even one of intellect. She simply allows us to feel that we are part of an experience. She welcomes us into her family, through language. And yet, at the same moment, this closeness is mitigated by the fact that we are reading in English. Don’t get me wrong, I deeply enjoyed McPhee’s new translation. But maybe one day I’ll learn Italian, so that maybe I too can speak out and be recognized as part of the family.
Robert Sorrell is a writer and photographer living in Philadelphia. He recently graduated from the University of Chicago’s English program and has a piece of narrative nonfiction forthcoming from Mosaic Art & Literary Journal.
A few months ago, a couple I’m friends with lent me their old but totally functional standard-shift car while they were away on a three-week vacation. When I told them that I had driven a stick shift car before, I did not add that it had never really gone well. Anyway, the third day I had the car I totally wrecked the clutch, so I had it replaced. The mechanic who did it is competent and honest, and a friend, but getting a new clutch still cost real money. When they got home I thanked them and returned the car, clean and vacuumed and full of gas and clean oil, but never mentioned the clutch.
My boyfriend says that I should come clean. I really don’t want to. What should I do?
—Red-faced in Red Hook
Dear Red,
I am of two minds about this. On the one hand, it is good to be honest with friends. And the knowledge that they have a new clutch may be of some value to them—perhaps by reassuring them that their clutch is in good shape, making it more likely that they will save some money by holding onto the car a while longer before replacing it; or, if they do decide to sell it, by helping them get a slightly better price. On the other hand, telling them might make them feel as if they should pay for the new clutch, which I assume you do not want them to do. I also assume that coming clean, especially now, would create some embarrassment and awkwardness for you, and might even put a strain on your friendship.
If I knew more about cars in general, or your friends’ car in particular, I might have a firmer opinion. For one thing, I would know more about the financial side of things—so I will just assume that the replacement was a major, but not a ruinously costly, repair, and that the car was otherwise reliable enough to be worth fixing. I would also have a better idea of how likely it is that your friends will find out that they have a new clutch—which could be awkward indeed. Too bad we can no longer ask Click and Clack about this. I did call a friend of mine who works in a garage, and she said that the clutch is not that easy to see in most cars, even by a mechanic unless she is looking for it—which rarely happens unless there is some issue with its performance. On the other hand, she adds, most drivers should notice a change—more play, better response—when a clutch is replaced. Since it appears that your friends are not all that observant where their car is concerned, there is a good chance they will never find out what happened unless you tell them.
I suppose they may, in fact, have noticed changes in their car’s responsiveness and might know, or suspect, what happened, but that they are as reticent as you about the situation. That would be odd indeed—but, as the one who actually knows these people, you may want to consider it. Have you picked up on any new strain in your relationship?
Well, then: assuming that your friends have no suspicions and are unlikely to learn the truth unless you tell them, we must decide which wins out: being honest, and perhaps conferring valuable knowledge, or avoiding embarrassment, and perhaps preventing your friends from feeling beholden and even forcing money on you?
Knowing what little I know, it seems like a tossup to me. If you insisted that I choose, I would advise you to tell them, since I value honesty and knowledge. But I am not the person who’d have to deal with your friends’ responses. These could be quite muted—“No kidding? Oh, well, no harm done”—but they could also include anger, amusement (and endless retellings of the story), disappointment, a sense of obligation, a sense of resentment over the sense of obligation, a sense of deeper resentment if they end up paying, a loss of trust in your driving and your honesty, etc. In fact, I am not sure I would take my own advice in this instance. It is hard to admit to being a bad driver and a secret car-repairer.
I therefore counsel you not to tell them if you are sure that they will insist on paying and will also somehow prevail upon you to accept the money, and if it seems that they do not have much money to spare. Otherwise, do whatever seems best to you, and don’t feel bad either way. It sounds as if you had mixed motives—generosity and fear of embarrassment—for getting the clutch repaired and for keeping the repair silent. But at least one of those motives was a good one.
P.S. Are you sure that clutch wasn’t ready to go already? A sometimes-reliable source tells me that it is not all that easy to destroy a healthy one. You do not seem to want to factor in the economic cost to you of a fairly major repair, which is generous of you. It is even more generous if the repair would soon have been necessary anyway. Of course, you made the repair not just without telling the owners afterwards, but also without asking them first, which complicates the situation somewhat. Still, if your friends have plenty of money and you do not, and if they are close friends, it would certainly not be wrong to include your own costs in the equation.
Dear June,
I have fallen horribly in love with my neighbor, who is my co-chair at our community theater company and has been in many productions with me. She does not know anything about it, and I will never tell her. I can’t think of any way I could get my family to move away, although I would almost like to, so that I would not have to see this woman any more. I have no intention of breaking up my family. I am happy enough with my wife and we have two kids and wish I could take a pill, or get hypnotized or something, to make this go away. What am I to do?
—Far Gone in Fairlawn
Dear Fargo,
Yes, you should indeed find ways to see as little of your neighbor as possible under the circumstances. You should also seek counseling right away.
I could not help but notice that, although you spoke of pills and hypnosis and moving away, which are all apparently impossible, you said nothing about quitting the community theater, which I am guessing is not all that hard to do, at least logistically. I am sure you have had wonderful times there, and leaving the theater may be a terrible emotional wrench, but your marriage may require it. If quitting is at all possible, and I am pretty sure it is, get out. I suggest that you announce that you need to go on indefinite leave because your job and family duties just don’t leave you enough time. Then make your announcement true by spending more time with your family.
Although I don’t always assume that feelings for some third party must be a sign that something is wrong with a person’s primary relationship, this is often the case. Your saying that you are “happy enough” with your wife does make it sound as if your problem is not only too much attraction to your neighbor, but also too little joy with your wife. A good counselor can help you explore whether this is true, how serious it is, and how you and your wife might start trying to fix it.
Do not hate me for telling you that this is my hope: you may just be having a difficult adjustment to the long haul of marriage and kids. If that is the problem, and if you truly do want to make adjustments, you should be fine. I hope that, by this time next year, your hopeless longing has dwindled to an occasional, bearable, maybe even pleasant frisson of attraction, and that all will be well with you and your wife as you ferry the kids to soccer and ballet, sweat over bills, and check each other for deer ticks. Or maybe, in your part of the world, it is driving the kids to hockey, sweating over chemistry homework, and coping with each other’s deafening snores and sleep apnea. But you get the idea.
Good luck! And get some counseling as soon as you can.
Cleaver’s in-house advice columnist opines on matters punctuational, interpersonal, and philosophical, spinning wit and literary wisdom in response to your ethical quandaries. Write to her at [email protected]. Find more columns by June in her attic.
Scientist of The Lambs Scientist on the western front
Scientist I’m hunting rabbits
Scientist speak no evil
Scientist not at the dinner table
Scientist after 11pm
Scientist curfew in effect
Scientist silent majority rules
Scientist not your voice in anger
Scientist secret ball gag
Scientist John Cage 4’33”
Scientist awkward joke
Scientist leaves you hanging
Scientist frog in your throat
Scientist of the lambs
Scientist dog whistle
Scientist sensory deprivation pod
Scientist falling in the forest
Scientist sound proof room
Scientist mortgage and two kids
Scientist questionable patriotism
Scientist still says grace out loud
Scientist conspiracy theory of evolution
Scientist still gets cold in the winter
Scientist cat got your tongue
Scientist Badlands twitter account
Scientist relic of the past regime
Scientist scapegoat
Scientist golden
Scientist breaks
Scientist deafening
◊
Badlands “Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king, and a king ain’t satisfied ‘til he rules everything” -Bruce Springsteen
In a dystopian future, the Badlands twitter account goes rogue 404.93 ppm / 650, 000 years / Ocean acidity up 30%
The number one driver for species loss is habitat loss
There is a darkness on the edge of your national park service Plains bison in 1880 / Standing Rock / Now hiring social media manager
Scientists have been told not to speak to the press
Back to business as usual, as unusual as it seems Pictures of mountain goats / Caption this photo / #motivationmonday
#Bats can fly up to 60 mph. #Dangerzone
Everything dies baby, that’s an alternative fact
Aaron Simm is a writer and performer living in Victoria, British Columbia. He is the author of one book of poetry, two chapbooks, two full-length fringe shows, and one hip-hop album. He is the editor of oratorealis magazine and his writing has been published internationally.
DON’T BE A DRONE
Manipulating the Reader Through Pitch and Pace
A Poetry Craft Essay
by Grant Clauser
Pacing in poetry can be used as a focusing technique. Both fast and slow pace equally have the ability to draw in a reader’s focus in slightly different, but complementary, ways. A sudden shift into high gear can raise our excitement or anxiety, while hitting the slow motion button compels us to look with greater scrutiny and concentration. Either way, pace is a kind of volume adjustment–by turning the volume of the poem up or down you force a shift of attention upon the reader.
Try this experiment–recite the alphabet out loud. First, start out slowly. Then speed up. As your recitation gets faster, your voice will involuntarily rise in volume. If you do the opposite, start fast and end slow, your volume will decrease. I’ve actually tried this experiment with my kids using a sound pressure meter, and their voices changed by a few decibels. Both shifts cause the listener to adjust their attention. The first causes the listener to sit up straight, triggered by the excitement of the louder voice. The second causes the listener to lean forward, paying extra attention to the details.
In many poems, pace control is achieved through syntax and diction. Essentially, any change in syntax or diction is a cue to the reader that pace and/or volume is also changing. A shift from long sentences to short ones, or description to metaphor, all signal that the poem is getting louder or quieter, faster or slower.
One of most obvious ways to impact pace and volume is the command. It’s the direct address to the reader that wakes us up and asks for our attention. Richard Hugo uses this frequently, as you can see at the end of “Farmer, Dying” where he piles on a series of commands in one stanza:
And we die silent, our last days loaded with the scream of Burnt Fork creek, the last cry of that raging farmer. We have aged ourselves to stone trying to summon mercy for ungrateful daughters. Let’s live him in ourselves, stand deranged on the meadow rim and curse the Baltic back, moon, bear and blast. And let him shout from his grave for us.
When we get to “Let’s live him / in ourselves, stand deranged on the meadow rim…” we can hear the pitch rising. If you’re reading it out loud, you’re standing up at this point as if in the throes of an anthem. The words “scream” and “cry” a few lines up act as signals for what’s coming. A command in a poem provokes an almost instinctual response in a reader. It’s the most active voice possible, and the hardest to ignore. When you hear a command you either oblige or resist, but either way, you engage with the words.
The next hardest to ignore is the question. What’s the most natural response to hearing a question? Answering it, of course, which you just did in your mind. Poets, like trial lawyers, sometimes use questions deceitfully. They know the answer, or at least their answer, but they want to trap you into answering it for yourself. That way you’re captured by the internal logic of the poem. Turning to Hugo again, this time in “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg,” he uses the entire third stanza to hound the reader with a series of questions that are more-or-less rhetorical:
Isn’t this your life? That ancient kiss still burning out your eyes? Isn’t this defeat so accurate, the church bell simply seems a pure announcement: ring and no one comes? Don’t empty houses ring? Are magnesium and scorn sufficient to support a town, not just Philipsburg, but towns of towering blondes, good jazz and booze the world will never let you have until the town you came from dies inside?
Being a master manipulator, Hugo follows up that question stanza with a command “Say no to yourself.” However, the questions in the prior stanza are the primary volume controllers. Each question feels louder than the rest. Each one asks the reader to question their core values. It’s like a parent berating a child, wearing him or her down with questions that are really accusations. Readers can’t help but respond .
Even when a poem doesn’t answer its questions, and many do not, it still hooks the reader in the search. Readers are like cats following the light from a laser pointer–they can’t help themselves. Jennifer Givhan’s poem “Polar Bear” works on this principle with a rhetorical question that compels the reader to the poem’s conclusion phrased as another question. After the initial question we come to a long sentence constructed of pancake-stacked clauses that speed the poem along:
… We are on my bed crying for what we’ve done to the polar bears, the male we’ve bonded with on-screen whose search for seals on the melting ice has led him to an island of walruses and he is desperate, it is late- summer and he is starving and soon the freeze will drive all life back into hiding, so he goes for it, the dangerous hunt, the canine-sharp tusks and armored hides for shields, the fused weapon they create en masse, the whole island a system for the elephant-large walruses who, in fear, huddle together, who, in fear, fight back.
And then the rush stops on line 22 with a period, and a hard emotional stop that coincides with a change in setting (from the description of the polar bear attack to the speaker’s son), which is also where the author brings up the ends of the metaphor and ties it in a knot for the reader.
Kim Addonizio’s poem “What Do Women Want?” starts out with strong declarative statements, “I want a red dress. / I want it flimsy and cheap,” which you probably hear in a moderate pace and volume – not whispering or shouting, not dragging or rushing. The hard and medium-hard end-stop lines keep you from moving too quickly. A few lines later the poem picks up speed thanks to the the shift from short statements to a longer sentence that goes on for seven enjambed lines. The effect is like a creek, burbling along, and then it tumbles through a waterfall, speeding up along the way for those seven lines. But what always happens at the bottom of a waterfall? There’s a pool where the water, or energy, gathers, stops for a moment, then moves again. Directly after that seven line waterfall, Addonizio slows us down with shorter lines, shorter sentences, and more end stop lines that make it hard to rush through.
Maggie Smith’s poem, “Good Bones,” which has become something of an anthem for the times, uses these techniques and others as it pushes and pulls the reader along. It controls the reader so expertly that you feel you’re a car on a roller coaster, and your only choice is to follow the rails. The opening short, end-stopped, declaration, “Life is short, though I keep this from my children,” acts like a thesis statement for the poem. It’s followed by a much longer sentence, broken up into enjambed lines that use repetition, all of which speeds the poem along and raises the emotional pitch. Directly in the middle, Smith alters the pace with two emotionally-laden statements achieved both by startling images and an ecclesiastical-sounding sentence structure:
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake.
That’s an interesting moment in the poem, because it’s a gut punch. Midway through the experience we are forced to reconsider our place (as reader and as people in the world) and reorient ourselves. Getting back to the roller coaster comparison– this is the moment when the car is paused at the top of the ride, and you’re looking nervously at the park down below. The very next sentence is the dive to the bottom, propelled by three enjambed lines. Then the poem continues to repeat phrases from the first half, lifting and turning its imagery, jolting the reader back and forth until the poem rolls smoothly back to ground.
So why all this attention on pace and volume? Because poetry shouldn’t be monotone. It shouldn’t be the white noise you fall asleep to or the drone of the late night TV news anchor. Why do TV commercials blast their volume? Because the change gets your attention of course, and getting attention is the first step in getting you to engage with the content. As in advertising or marketing, poetry can be (and I’d argue that it should be) manipulative, and a poet who knows how to control a reader’s attention and emotions is a poet I enjoy reading. A poem that hooks you by the nose and pulls you down the road is one you’re going to remember.
Poetry craft essays editor Grant Clauser is the author of two poetry books, Necessary Myths (Broadkill River Press 2013) and The Trouble with Rivers (Foothills Publishing 2012), plus the forthcoming collections, The Magician’s Handbook (PS Books) and Reckless Constellations (Cider Press Review Books). In 2010 he was named the Montgomery County Poet Laureate by Robert Bly. In 2014 he was a guest poet at the Sharjah International Book Fair in the United Arab Emirates. Poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Cortland Review, Gargoyle, The Literary Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry and others. He also writes about electronics, teaches poetry at random places and chases trout with a stick. His blog is www.uniambic.com. Email queries to [email protected].
I go to a very nice local dentist who charges rather high prices but sometimes gives struggling families a break. Over a year ago my husband and I both lost our jobs, right after we had bought a house that was kind of a stretch. Suffice it to say that our finances are a total mess, and I told my dentist that we were switching to yearly cleanings for the kids, and that I would rather just have my tooth pulled instead of getting a root canal and crown, because we simply could not afford it. He said that he would give me a lower price and a payment plan, but I could not afford that, either. So then he gave me a drastically reduced rate, practically free service, which I thought was really sweet. But then a neighbor of mine, who is—I know this is complicated, but this is how gossip works in my neighborhood—the cousin of the wife of one of my dentist’s partners, told me how sorry she was to hear about my financial problems, but said how thoughtful and generous it was of Doctor Bountiful (not his real name, although I am tempted to use it!) to be helping me out. So he must have been telling his wife and perhaps other people about my family’s money situation. Is this ethical? He may not have said anything much about my actual treatment, except that he must have mentioned that I had a crown put in because my neighbor knew that. But even talking about the financial stuff, is there a duty of confidentiality? The fact is that I care much more about people knowing what desperate condition we are in than knowing about whether I had my tooth fixed!
Is there anything I can do about this? I don’t want to sue or file a complaint or anything, even if I had a chance of winning. Even just talking to him I would be worried about antagonizing him, since he has been so nice to me. And I might need him to be nice to me and the kids again in the future. But I still wish there were some way I could let him know that he should not be behaving like this.
Thanks,
—Embarrassed in Englewood
Dear Em in En,
Dentists and their employees, like doctors, do have a duty to protect their patients’ personal health information (PHI). Federal law requires it. The general, somewhat oversimplified rule is that, unless you or a court of law asks for it, your dental-care providers can only release PHI for reasons that are relevant to providing treatment or securing payment. The American Dental Association has its own privacy rules, and local professional associations, as well as state authorities, usually also have longstanding rules about privacy and confidentiality that apply to health information, medical or dental.
Whether information about billing and payment, and information about your personal finances, count as health information is more of a grey area, to me anyway. I believe that they do, for several reasons. But this does not really matter, since whoever told tales also let it be known that you got a crown from Dr. Bountiful, which is clearly covered by privacy rules. And you do not plan to take any formal action anyway.
The real questions, then, are whether what was done to you was wrong, and what you can do about it.
It was wrong, of course. Even if the law and rules of professional ethics did not forbid this violation of your right to privacy, basic human ethics certainly would. Most people want to keep their financial situation private, especially if they are having difficulties. Many people would also just as soon not have it be known that they’ve been the object of charity. There may be good reasons for discretion—someone’s reputation, perhaps even their livelihood, may depend on whether this information is revealed, and in what way. But there does not need to be a reason: we should all respect one another’s privacy in areas where we know, or should know, that people value it.
Dr. Bountiful, or somebody who works with him, behaved badly. They may have been careless—by, say, letting themselves be overheard, or leaving papers out where they could be seen by an unauthorized person. Or they may have been heedless blabbermouths who placed their desire to gossip over your right to privacy, which I find worse. Or they may have actually thought about what they were doing and decided that giving somebody treatment for free destroys the right to privacy, which I find worst of all.
Actually, it may be worse yet if one or more of the divulgers was not just gossiping about being charitable to you, but actually bragging about it. I am a big fan of heeding Matthew 6 and not doing your charitable deeds “before men, to be seen by them.” Matthew tells us that when being charitable, you should “not let your right hand know what your left is doing.” His main focus is on getting your reward in heaven, while mine is on not being condescending and generally tacky, but we end up in the same place—as does the great Maimonides, by the way.
While I’m at it, let me add that, from a treatment perspective, loose lips like those at Dr. Bountiful’s office create a loss of trust that could interfere with the dentist- patient relationship in the future—or that might, in fact, discourage you and your family from seeking treatment from him or anybody else until your situation becomes dire.
Yes, you are thinking, but is there anything I should do about this? Anything I can do?
What you obviously can’t do is undo the harm Dr. Bountiful’s practice has already done. You can try to contain the damage by downplaying your anxiety if anyone mentions it again—say something like “yes, that was nice of Dr. B,” and have a change of subject ready. You can also ask trusted friends not to discuss the matter with anybody new, and to minimize your current financial problems if anyone else raises the topic.
I do think you should say something to Dr. Bountiful, unless you believe that bringing the matter up at all, ever, will make it harder for you to get affordable treatment.
One reason you should talk to him is that he may not even know what’s going on. The leak may have come from somebody who actually had an acceptable reason to know about the situation—his partner, his business manager, or the person who handles the billing—and Dr. Bountiful may be both blameless and ignorant. Or he may be less blameless—say, if he blabbed to his hygienist, or told his wife but swore her to secrecy—but still ignorant that the information went any further. In either case, you will be doing him and your fellow patients a service if you tell him how far the story has travelled. He may even be grateful, although I would not hold my breath.
But the main reason to tell him, of course, is to get him to stop—with you and with any other recipients of his generosity. He needs to know that your privacy and dignity matter.
If you have any reason to believe that he or those around him are still talking about the matter, it would make sense to get in touch with him now. If not, you can take your time to contact him, even wait until your next visit so you can speak to him in person, and perhaps less formally. (I prefer letters, but tastes and talents differ.)
Unless you know, and you know he knows you know (etc.), that he is the source of the gossip, I would talk or write to Dr. Bountiful as if he has no idea what happened. Here are some talking points, in letter form.
Dear Dr. Bountiful,
First, thank you so much for your generosity and skill. I will always be grateful for it.
I wanted to alert you that someone in your office somehow let it out that you put in a crown for me at very low cost because my family is in financial trouble. (I know this because a neighbor mentioned it to me.) Needless to say, my husband and I are trying to get back on our feet and do not want the details of our situation generally known. Like most people, we value our privacy and our reputations very highly.
I am less concerned that one of my neighbors somehow found out about my crown—but I can’t see why my personal health information [that’s the technical term, which it’s good to let him know you’ve seen] is their business!
I am hoping that you can speak to your staff about this. I’m sure you understand how important privacy can be, especially in hard times.
Thanks again for making it possible for me to get the crown, and for your great work. The crown looks good and seems to fit just fine.
Please give my warmest regards to Mrs. Bountiful. Hope Little Bountiful aced the regionals.
Yours, etc.
If you decide to speak to him in person, I’d take the same basic tack, but probably be a bit more effusive in your thanks, and detailed in your concern.
By the way, are you quite sure you want to continue going to this dentist? Are there more affordable options, at least for routine work? Is there a nearby dental school with a clinic? You say that Dr. Bountiful is “really nice,” but when you write about not antagonizing him, and needing him to keep being nice to you, he sounds more like the godfather, or the proprietor of the company store.
If you do feel that his office is the only choice for you, I hope that he is indeed a “really nice” person, and not the sort to take offense at hearing the valid concerns of a patient who happens to be in straitened circumstances. If he is a good person, a few words from you should ensure that he and his staffers do not “sound a trumpet before them as the hypocrites do,” whether for “glory among men” or gossip among neighbors.
Dear June,
Yesterday night my husband and I got into a big fight. This morning I found an enormous, perfectly ripe avocado in our crisper and instead of saving half of it for him, as I usually do when we have a finite amount of fruits and veggies, I ate the whole thing myself. Was I wrong?
—Remorseful in Reading
Dear ReRe,
Depending on how much other good food there was in the house, and how much your husband is known to like avocados, you were either not very wrong or not wrong at all. On the whole, it sounds as if you are doing just fine morally. In fact, if this is the sort of thing that fills you with genuine remorse, you are probably some kind of saint.
I suspect that, for you, the avocado in question is not just any old veggie-like single-seeded berry, but a symbol of one or more problems in your marriage. Try to bear in mind that, unless you come to blows or somebody gets verbally abusive, marital disagreements are normal and can even be healthy. But if you really are worried about how things are going between you and your partner, it never—well, hardly ever—hurts to talk the matter over with your spouse or, if you believe or know this will not work, with a professional.
How about going out and buying some more luscious avocados? You can give your husband enough to assuage all lingering avocado-based guilt, and still have plenty of avocado flesh left over for guacamole or trendy toast.
By the way, be sure never to cut an avocado in anger. You could hurt yourself. For reasons I fail to understand given the state of our democracy, the polar ice cap, and the Doomsday Clock, avocado-cutting safety seems to be a hot topic on the Internet these days. There are some great YouTube videos about the best way to cut and peel avocados. If you are not a master avocado cutter already, check one out. You may save your fingers, and you’ll learn about this fun thing to do with the edge of your knife.
Cleaver’s in-house advice columnist opines on matters punctuational, interpersonal, and philosophical, spinning wit and literary wisdom in response to your ethical quandaries. Write to her at [email protected]. Find more columns by June in her attic.
TIME HEALS, EVEN YOUR DRAFTS Three Key Realizations for Revising Your Novel A Craft Essay by Wendy Fox
At the end of 2016, my debut novel, The Pull of It, launched. It’s a book about coming to terms with one version of adult life that includes marriage, children, and work. One reviewer called it “palliative care for the neurotic American attachment to routines of housekeeping, childrearing, and career building.”
This novel was a project I had started working on a decade and a half earlier. For years, the draft was something I fiddled with, reworking the same 60 pages, but when I finally got serious about it, the manuscript spun into something truly book-sized.
And then, it was rejected over and over again. I did a rewrite, and the rewrite commenced to be rejected even more, sometimes very aggressively; with other projects, I had become used to hearing nothing, or receiving form responses. With The Pull of It, I got quite a bit of commentary on the personality of the main character, Laura, and her actions. One agent sent me nearly an entire page about what was wrong with Laura as a human; another agent called her “entirely unsympathetic.” It was becoming clear most people struggled to care about Laura. So, I put the project down. In the meantime, I started a new, very different novel, and when I thought I was finished, I started yet another one.
Cultivating the ability to turn a critical eye to your own work, and listening to trusted readers are both undeniably valuable, and for most of us, it’s something that we learn how to do, through workshops and patience and practice.
Yet, with my first manuscript, even thought I had gotten reader feedback long before it made the agent rounds, and I thought I was trying to look at it objectively, I couldn’t pinpoint what the heart of the problem was. It had to be more than just an unlikeable female protagonist, which as The Atlantic has noted, really raises the hackles for critics and readers alike: there was something inherently flawed in the pages themselves.
Still, I kept working at the writing life. I pulled together a book of short stories, which won a national prize and got into print, and I continued to have stories and essays picked up. This felt good, to see my work in print and start to build an identity as an author, but my old manuscript always tugged at me.
When I finally picked it up again, there were sections I didn’t even recognize as having written.
It was the passage of time which showed me that I had a bigger problem with how my novel was built, and it was time that helped take me through a final revision that ultimately led to the manuscript getting placed.
Being away from, and then returning to, a dormant work helped me come to these three realizations:
#1: Everyone Grows Older, Except Your Characters
Even as we writers move through chronological time, our characters stay fixed and static in the place where we wrote them. Certainly our characters can traverse their own experiences with aging, but they will still always stay nailed to the page.
For example, when I started writing Laura, I was younger than she was, and there was more in her character that was motivated by my own fears about getting older than there needed to be. In my last revisions of the book, I had passed her age, and I started to understand why she was read as cruel.
In the end, she remained a difficult character, but in the final version there’s much more explanation of her actions, and a great deal more context and backstory. There’s less asking readers to take her actions on faith.
There’s a parallel, here, I think, with the way friendships change over months or years—how someone who might have been important to you (or someone to whom you may have been important) fades or intensifies as life moves on. Just like our characters, who cannot move outside of the time or age we create for them, our friendships may also not move out of the parameters of college, or childhood, or a job we’ve left behind.
One must ask: are these relationships fundamentally important, or were they only important during a certain moment? And, it’s okay if the latter is true, as long as you’re frank. When it comes to characters, even when your pen has not been with your people for a while, can you still care about these folks? Can readers care? It’s fine to understand that that not everyone is going to love your characters, but they have to at least resonate with some readers, and at the bare minimum, with you.
Distance can help a writer see her characters for who they really are, for better or for worse. Claire, for instance, might have meant everything to me the summer I was twenty-seven, but who is she to me now?
In my case, even though some of the earliest passages were truly cringe-worthy as I revised, I still did find something to love about my character, and I tried to focus on bringing this to the surface for readers.
#2: Is the Plot Thickening or Thinning?
If someone says they’ve never written anything that’s based on something that really happened with a thin veil of fiction, they’re probably fictionalizing again.
That doesn’t mean that plot based in your own experience can’t hold up; it means that it’s worth examining why this is compelling to you, and how it can be compelling to readers. You write a breakup story after you realize you’ve left your favorite coffee cup behind and there’s no way you are going back for it. You write a health scare when you are convinced you have a brain tumor, even if it turns out to be just a sinus infection. For me, the practice of writing has a way of absorbing everything around me—I write my friends’ layoffs, I write my family’s dramas.
Even tightly constructed plots can still suffer from this absorption factor, and therefore plot may benefit from the distance of time the most. Outside of the urgency of every day, it’s easier to identify plot elements that are superfluous and those that are required: it’s easier to cut.
Scenes that may have felt downright essential in moments of drafting can become backstory that are only important to the author and don’t need to be in the final draft. Time can clarify the writer’s emotional processing against what is realized for characters.
Maybe you very deeply cared about the experience of being trapped in an airport during the blizzard of ’07, and you wrote it into your draft. Ten years later, when no one remembers, is this inexorably important to your plotline, or is it noise?
Parts of my novel are set in a Turkey, where I was living when I began it, but there were massive sections I had to remove because the heart of the book is not about Turkey, specifically. The distance Laura creates from her family is important, and the details about her location contribute to her experience, but did readers need to know about my experiences going to the dentist? No, they definitely did not.
#3: We Built this City on … Wait, What?
Especially with larger projects, writers may feel married to structures, like the alternating voices or the short and long chapters they used to shape drafts, This scaffolding can be useful in getting through the initial challenge of tackling many pages, but once some time passes, the writer may discover that the structure of a work has more fluidity than she first imagined.
Over time, structural revision is more compelling to complete, because sometimes that’s where the meat of the work is. It’s easier to re-arrange bits of dialogue than it is to rip a project to the seams and then re-stitch it. It can also be more genuine, when the writer has come to an understanding about structural problems herself, rather than responding to an external mandate from readers. With time, I had the chance to read my work and reconsider how it was put together. This was a very different experience than being absorbed in composing.
With time, it’s easier to understand what is a device to buoy you through page counts and what is meaningful to the manuscript as a whole. Maybe you don’t really need that epilogue. Or maybe you do need it, but it’s a prologue. Ask: is the chapter structure inflexible, or with the perspective of time, can it move some?
Most of the structural work I did with The Pull of It was collapsing chapters that were much too short into longer, more cohesive sections, and front-loading the manuscript with Laura’s history instead of trickling it out. I was surprised how much of a difference this made. Readers still found, and will continue to find, Laura an awkward and sometimes exasperating character, but they’re also not as annoyed or outright angered by her as in earlier versions.
Finally, while it can be frustrating to see projects spin into weeks and months and years, do consider returning to manuscripts and drafts and putting new pressure on the pages. Some works—I have many—are never going to progress, and no amount of distance will solve this. Still, time can do a great deal in terms of perspective, and if it was worth writing in the first place, it’s surely worth at least a second look.
Wendy J. Fox is the author of the novel The Pull of It (Underground Voices, 2016) and The Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories (Press 53, 2014). www.wendyjfox.com
DNA Hymn
by Annah Anti-Palindrome
Sibling Rivalry Press, 68 pages
reviewed by Johnny Payne
Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver
The disturbing cover art of DNA Hymn features a woman whose bloody mouth discharges what appear to be balloons, intestines, or giant molecules. The image seems apt for a collection of poems that freely disgorges both intelligence and emotional wisdom. This book by the semi-pseudonymous Annah Anti-Palindrome waxes conceptual to be sure, but not to the point where each individual poem is negated by an overarching Big Idea. In the introduction, the author explains that “resisting palindromes” derives from her mother’s morphine overdose and her desire as a daughter, both linguistic and existential, to break out of a legacy of violence. The first poem, “extraction,” fittingly takes an epidural as its footnote and birth as its subject: “tooth tile milk moon marrow . clock jaw limb socket hollow ./ split hair curl coil crescent . wet nest yolk part swallow .”
From the first line, we are caught in hypnotic, intuitive sound play, as the poet concisely charts her emergence into a scene of what I can only describe as “traumatic ecstasy.” Many memoirs of personal pain in poetic form exist. What distinguishes this one is its tough-minded decision not to exploit itself, and its tender affection for the upsides of a garish horror show. The book’s emotional honesty reminds us that children will find a way of explaining life to themselves in any circumstance. And this fact gets layered with the linguistic drive of the poet as protagonist, such as this staged scene in utero while the mother drinks booze:
we were a battleground of slippery fetal flesh digestion sounds punctured the fluid of peace as she passed us amniotic, toxic drinks ultrasound waves rocked us to sonic, chemical sleep
The “hymn” portion of DNA Hymn is evident everywhere, nowhere more so than in “middle C,” a portrait of the mother and her familiars in all their glorious and tawdry imperfection:
the women who raised us smoked a lot & punctuated their wet-coughs with laughter
let their tits spill out over elastic tube top fringe wore budget beauty blood-orange mouth paint had pores pooled with poorly matched cosmetic paste
One of the most surprising poems, “early escapisms,” chronicles the innocent eroticism of the pass-out game, in which the speaker and her friend, both young girls, take turns choking each other into near unconsciousness. The episode gets recounted as a minor rapture, an awakening of bodily desire, and metaphorically reinforces the book’s credo that one way of coping with the terror of existence, and having some control over it, is simply to learn how to turn pain into pleasure.
she cut off my air supply & I was in love sunshine-capillary tint through closed eyelids raw, pink, viscous a bowl of salmon roe a ruptured gestational sac . . .
when she shook me awake: pop fizz gasp jolt
a soft & tender, plum colored ache tingly lips and heavy sponge tongue post asphyxia intoxication
One could speak of these poems as feminist, or one could simply say that the poet has keen insight into the human condition (her own condition) and within that, the condition of woman. Nowhere does this reality show more clearly than in the trenchant, witty, poison-tinged “saccharin.”
this gender [is] a tampon full of pop rocks the mace you thought was breath spray the tattoo you most regret a parable …..of faded….. but legible…..mistakes
Annah Anti Palindrome
DNA Hymn, however, contains a great deal of thematic and stylistic variety. There are poems about sunflowers, doorknobs, artichokes, and earwax. There is a well-turned verbal imitation of a sonata. There are experimental poems about chromosomes and palindromes, explorations of the space and structure of the page, of the interplay between figurative indeterminacy and startling clarity. In the end, Annah Anti-Palindrome errs on the side of clarity, and from the decision to take a hard look at everything behind her, is born the book’s sense of urgency.
The most hair-raising poem, the one that most affords a cool pathos, a mocking affection, an unflinching view of the mother who eventually died from an overdose, is “valley to the bay.” In it, the just-emerged fetus sees the umbilical cord and imagines it as a rope. With a cynical tone, the newborn coldly appraises the situation, already trapped in a future hell of a drug-addicted mother:
the first time I met you you were breathless & grey from a navel cord noose ………………. ………………..………………..……………….a low swinging pendulum ………………..………………..……………….heavy as copper ………………..………………..……………….slick as motor oil
everyone in the delivery room was freaking out & I thought— you brilliant little shit
………………..………………..……………….did you just manage to use your own life line ………………..………………..……………….as a prop in your first suicide attempt?
This is mature poetics. The poem turns into a time capsule of the mother’s survival, despite herself, of various suicide attempts.
2010:
found face down on a piss-stained mattress cartoon network blasting from a foil-crowned television set
the hypodermic haunt of poppy sap fermenting the blood
………………..………………..………………..guts full of soma capsule bobbers ………………..………………..………………..in a lake of bile ………………..………………..………………..& chocolate milk
DNA Hymn is a book with clear themes boldly stated, yet it is full of surprises. It has been written in a mood of critical compassion without a surfeit of sentiment. Its final words of qualified redemption leave us in exactly the right place: “there is always a sweet spot / between calloused and bleeding.”
Johnny Payne is Director of the MFA in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles. His most recent book of poetry is Vassal. Forthcoming is the poetry collection Heaven of Ashes, from Mouthfeel Press.
TYPEWRITERS, BOMBS, JELLYFISH: ESSAYS by Tom McCarthy New York Review Books, 288 Pages
reviewed by William Morris
I am writing this on Monday May 8, 2017, the night before Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish: Essays, a collection of the work of British writer Tom McCarthy, will be published. I checked my watch to be sure of the date, and found that it’s a day off. It claims today is the 7th. This small discrepancy is hardly worth noting, except as it pertains to McCarthy’s obsessive treatment of time in these essays. Time is an illusive business, a difficult thing to pin down, as it’s always moving out from under us. For McCarthy, time is a series of refrains and repetitions, arrests and elisions, and he turns to it again and again in this collection.
McCarthy originally published or presented these essays as lectures, introductions to books, or accompaniments to art installations during the last decade-and-a-half. Readers may know McCarthy better from his novels (Satin Island, Remainder, C), in which case they won’t be surprised by the literary and philosophical topics covered in these essays. In “Get Real, or What Jellyfish Have to Tell Us About Literature,” for example, McCarthy writes about J.G. Ballard’s Crash, in which the protagonist orchestrates car crashes for his entertainment; McCarthy’s own debut, Remainder, is about a man who suffers an injury, then uses his settlement money to re-enact this accident time after time. In both, there is the act of recreating something violent and real, as McCarthy says: “a real that’s linked to repetition.”
In the essay “Get Real,” McCarthy argues that our idea of realism as a genre is flawed. He suggests that most profound kind of realism would be created not by semblance, but by showing how authenticity manifests itself in our lives through violence or mishap, much as Ballard’s and his own protagonists create reality through car crashes and other accidents. The most real moment, he argues, is when the matador is gored during a bullfight. He means:
a real of the type that I suggest we should embrace and celebrate punctures the screen or strip of film, destroying it; a real that happens, or forever threatens to do so, not as a result of the artist ‘getting it right’ or overcoming inauthenticity, but rather as a radical and disastrous eruption within the always-and-irremediably inauthentic; a traumatic real.
In “Recessional, or the Time of the Hammer” (yes, the time of the hammer is a reference to MC Hammer—“Stop! Hammertime.”), McCarthy writes primarily of Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, in which the protagonist goes to visit a sick friend “at the sanatorium for three weeks; but, himself diagnosed with TB on arrival, is held up there for seven years.” McCarthy describes time in Mann’s novel as “a complex, spring-like structure […] stretching and contracting such that quite separate moments touch or get embedded one within the other.”
This collection itself is “a complex, spring-like structure” filled with literary and cultural references that recur throughout, often becoming “embedded one within the other.” How else to explain McCarthy’s transitions between Thomas Pynchon and MC Hammer, Don DeLillo and Zinedine Zidane? And stretched throughout the book, an almost constant stream of Mallarmé. There are essays on the weather in London, Kafka’s letters, David Lynch, and J.G. Ballard, making Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish an unceasingly eclectic collection.
Tom McCarthy
My initial encounter with McCarthy was his latest novel, Satin Island, about a man trying to write a report that would cover the entire zeitgeist, the spirit of his time. Despite this hefty task, the protagonist does very little. He watches television, sleeps with a woman, and takes a ferry. I was fascinated by this short novel’s lack of action, the way the narrator’s thoughts about parachuting and oil spills swelled to fill the voids left by his inactivity. Reading his essays, I see a template for some of McCarthy’s concerns in his own fiction. Consider two essays on French literature “The Geometry of the Pressant” and “Stabbing the Olive: Jean-Phillipe Toussaint.” In these pieces McCarthy discusses works from the nouveau roman genre—the new novel. I’ve read none of these books, and have at best a peripheral understanding of their style and concerns, but in McCarthy’s descriptions I feel compelled to read them; I sense a family resemblance between Tom McCarthy and his subjects. He writes, about The Bathroom by Toussaint:
When the hero, in a willed narrative refusal to go out into the world and make something happen, takes to his bathroom and decides to stay there, he luxuriates in the tub’s parallel sides and in the patterns formed by towel-rails and washing wire;
and of La Télévision, whose narrator:
decides at the novel’s outset to stop watching television completely—which of course makes him obsessed with it. Staring for hours at his extinguished set, he reads the TV listings, or looks out of his window at the banked rows of his neighbors’ screens changing the color of the night as they ‘flood’ space.
I see in these descriptions a map of McCarthy’s fiction-writing mind and, more importantly, a philosophy of what it means for fiction to be authentically real. For writers in the nouveau roman style, and for McCarthy, reality is the collision of the will and the world. Toussaint’s heroes enact their will through refusal. They reject the tedium of inauthentic daily life. “The only escape route,” McCarthy writes, “from this [present moment], from its simultaneity, its loops and repetitions, would be violence.” The “irremediably inauthentic” must be punctured with violence to escape life’s ennui.
The essays also offer a summer’s worth of recommended readings. Do you have to be as well-read as Tom McCarthy to enjoy this collection? Not at all. His introduction to Tristram Shandy, if you’ve never read Laurence Sterne’s wild eighteenth-century opus, will make you want to. The essay on Gerhard Richter sent me on a long Internet browse of his work. I’ve never read Toussaint or Robbe-Grillet, but I will soon. In fact, immediately after reading “The Prosthetic Imagination of David Lynch,” I convinced my roommates to watch Blue Velvet. The opening scene of Blue Velvet is perfectly tuned to McCarthy’s sense of reality: soft music, the fireman’s neighborly wave as his truck rolls through town, children walking safely to school under care of a crossing guard; an idyllic moment the viewer might expect to go on into infinity, and then the kink in the hose, the father’s abrupt heart attack. Here is the intrusion of violence, the real puncturing the banal, and then the moment passes.
From David Lynch, naturally McCarthy follows the string to the Japanese artist On Kawara. The following is from the opening of an essay near the end of the collection, about Kawara’s work:
Try to say now. I mean, now: try to say it. Not just to say it, but to mean it too. To truly mean it: mean it in the sense of it being true. It’s just not possible. No sooner has the word been formed […] than it’s already late and, in its lateness, false: as its sound rises to your ears, it’s not now anymore.
The essay, titled “18 Semiconnected Thoughts on Michel de Certeau, On Kawara, Fly Fishing, and Various Other Things,” discusses Kawara’s renowned series of paintings, each of which are of the day’s date, “in the notational shorthand of a host of languages. OCT.15, 1973. 6 MRT.1991. 1 MAR.1969.” Beginning this essay with a rumination on the impossibility of now seems fitting for a discussion of an artist so interested in capturing a series of dates. It also seems appropriate, coming from McCarthy, whose other essays have focused on time in MC Hammer, Thomas Mann, Tristram Shandy, and other works.
This brings us back to my watch with its wrong date, and my writing this review the night before the collection is published. How can I say I am writing this with any certainty when, by the time I’ve struck the keys, the act of writing has become past? And if I don’t finish writing by the end of this evening should I follow Kawara’s example, as McCarthy suggests: “If On Kawara hasn’t finished one [painting] by midnight, he destroys it, since it’s no longer a painting of Today.” I think Tom McCarthy would take issue with my certainty that I am writing this now.
Yet a look at the page of sources at the back of the book leaves me unsure. The last essay (“Kathy Acker’s Infidel Heteroglossia”) “was delivered as a lecture at the Center for Fiction, New York, May 9, 2017.” I check my watch again. It says it’s May 7, which means it’s in fact May 8. If today is the 8th, how was this essay delivered as a lecture on the 9th? This, of course, is an experience I won’t share with most readers, who will encounter the book after its publication. For most, this is a non-issue. And yet, in my pre-May 9 reading, this claim seems monumental. Just think: McCarthy writes about On Kawara’s paintings, the impossibility of capturing Today or now, and in the advance issue of his collection, claims he has delivered a lecture in the future. He is surely a master of puncturing time.
William Morris is pursuing an MFA in fiction at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. His work has appeared in print and online, most recently at Sediments Literary Arts Journal, Fiction Southeast, and Red Earth Review. He divides his time between St. Louis and Salt Lake City, and is always reading. He also works as an editor at Natural Bridge. His other areas of interest include cats, coffee, and cryptozoology.
ATLANTIC HOTEL by João Gilberto Noll translated by Adam Morris Two Lines Press, 138 pages
reviewed by Robert Sorrell
“Love. Call me Love, the Word Incarnate.”
This is the closest that readers get to a name for the protagonist and narrator of João Gilberto Noll’s strange little book, Atlantic Hotel, recently translated into English by Adam Morris. The novel is set in Brazil in the 1980s, and over the course of the book, the unnamed narrator embarks on a beguiling and pointless quest through the country. At different points he will seem to be—or perhaps will be—an actor, a priest, an alcoholic, an invalid. Along the way, Noll will shade his experiences with touches of Don Quixote and Odysseus, hints of The Stranger and a taste of the pantomime and absurdity of Fellini’s early 1960s films (Noll’s unnamed narrator a believable stand-in for the existentially angsty characters usually played by Marcello Mastroianni).
And yet for all the interesting things that could be said about Atlantic Hotel, this review is written in shadow. On March 29, 2017, just a little over a month before the release of the new English translation of Atlantic Hotel, João Gilberto Noll passed away in his home city of Porto Alegre. He was 70 years old. He left behind nearly twenty books and a legacy that stretches from his home country of Brazil to Germany, the United States, Italy, and the UK—all places where he held teaching positions or residencies—and into the many other countries where his work has been published in its original Portuguese and in translation.
As the Center for the Art of Translation, where Two Lines Press is housed, noted in a brief article on his death, Noll was simultaneously an international author and one deeply steeped in his native Brazil. Many of his novels, such as Atlantic Hotel, one of his most famous, are set in Brazil, and rarely the Brazil of the upper classes, or of Copacabana Beach, rich tourists, and ex-pats. Instead, his integration of “lower class” language and characters has made some of his work controversial among critics in Brazil, but it’s also in part what has made his work so compelling.
Atlantic Hotel is no exception. The middle aged male narrator spends the book wandering Brazil from city to city, encountering strange individuals, visiting dive bars, having sex, and overcoming a series of obstacles, like Odysseus on his way back to Ithaca. Except, as far as the reader can tell, the narrator has no Ithaca, no Penelope, and no suitors to defeat. He is a hero without a quest. And, it would seem, without much of a moral compass. Without really any kind of compass.
João-Gilberto-Noll
The experience of reading Atlantic Hotel is a bit like flipping between a very literary, sparse short story and well-written genre fiction. The characters have a hint of the cartoonish about them. Take this bit of narration, “Nelson spoke in enigmas. But all the words he was saying, the house, it all seemed to me like something out of an old film.” I can almost hear Bogey’s voice reading these lines in voiceover, while on screen he walks through the fog filled streets of an ambiguous city. But somehow, the campy quality, the cliché, manages to come off as smart and sleek. The narrator, I feel, is a bit too smart for his own good. He makes the lurid, bizarre world he traverses feel symbolic and satiric instead of hackneyed.
And like many works of mystery and noir fictions, sex and the possibility of sexual violence, haunt nearly every page of Atlantic Hotel. As in a Henry Miller novel, the sex is described in explicit detail, but in a way that is not necessarily erotic. In fact it is often transactional, as in this early passage: “As soon as I had her undressed, she got down on all fours atop the dirty green carpet immediately. I kneeled behind her. My mission: to mount from outside her field of vision. No touching above the waist, just anonymous haunches seeking each other out pathetically.”
At times, Noll’s sex scenes verge on a terrible cliché: using sex to show a character’s “depravity,” and this is one of the most disappointing aspects of Atlantic Hotel. The other is the way that Noll handles the women involved in these sexual acts. Women seem to exist in the novel, or at least in the narrator’s mind, solely for sexual purposes. And in that way, it doesn’t seem like Noll, or his narrator, have come very far from the hardboiled stories of heartless men and buxom dames with which Atlantic Hotel has a strange kinship.
And yet, there is something light, almost effervescent, which hovers above the narrator and gives him just enough anxiety, just enough quirk, to complicate the story. The only other recurring appearance of a woman is in the narrator’s dreams, where he is often a woman. Of one such dream, he recalls, “Sitting atop some dunes … I was a woman from the twenties. But unlike the films of that era, nothing was in black and white. Almost everything was a shade of gold, but with pink splotches.” In the back of a cab, he apologizes to the driver. What for? the driver asks. “For being who I am,” he replies. The narrator’s sadness and humility make his wide-eyed, in-the-moment narration more compelling than it might be otherwise. It is the narrator’s perceived innocence—an innocence that the reader can tell is not wholly truthful—that allows the mystery in Atlantic Hotel to feel like it has some structure beneath it. Noll tells us next to nothing about the narrator’s past, but just gives us enough of a hint to convince us that he has one.
Atlantic Hotel, at its very core, was a book that intrigued me, and that, in unexpected ways, made me care about it, even though I’m not sure I would say I liked it. It reminded me of a comment that Roger Ebert made about director Werner Herzog, “He has never created a single film that is compromised, shameful, made for pragmatic reasons or uninteresting. Even his failures are spectacular.”
And while Atlantic Hotel is far from a failure, it is the kind of book that is unique enough, bizarre enough, that the words “good” and “bad” don’t seem to apply. Reading Atlantic Hotel gave me the sense that I would be willing to follow Noll to all sorts of possibly unsuccessful places. Because even if I wouldn’t entirely enjoy the experience, he’d make it worth my time. He will be missed.
Robert Sorrell is a writer and photographer living in Philadelphia. He recently graduated from the University of Chicago’s English program and has a piece of narrative nonfiction forthcoming from Mosaic Art & Literary Journal.
I don’t see why not. There are some very cultured and attractive accountants out there, and many of them are solvent. Marrying one might be a wise choice for a writer looking for love, companionship, and a steady household income.
But I assume that you have a specific accountant in mind, and I wonder whether your question isn’t really a sign that you’re afraid he or she isn’t exciting, supportive, or intellectually compatible enough to make you happy. If that is what concerns you, I certainly would not rush into marriage. But don’t rule out a whole profession while you’re at it—maybe the next accountant you come across will thrill you and inspire your best work, and you will find yourself downright eager to share a life, a home, and perhaps a Cadillac health insurance plan from the accounting firm with your entrancing new C.P.A.
Dear June,
I am five months pregnant. My partner and are both very happy about it. We have been together for several years and consider ourselves a stable couple. There is only one serious source of conflict right now: I gave up smoking a year ago when we decided to start trying to have a kid, and he still smokes. Lately the second-hand smoke has been making me sick to my stomach. He always goes out on the balcony when I ask him, unless it is raining or something. But he never just does it on his own. He does not have any plans to quit smoking, and I am worried about the baby. What should I do?
—Expecting in Exton
Dear XX,
You should encourage him—not nag him, since that rarely if ever works—to give up smoking entirely. It is hard to think of a better time for him to quit than now, when he has the most compelling possible reason, and a whole new life and set of responsibilities ahead of him. I suspect that this is a long shot, and that you and his mom and his doctor and maybe an ex or two have already tried and failed to get him to quit. Do try again, though, if you think there is any chance at all.
If he can’t or won’t stop smoking entirely, you owe it to the baby to draw a line: there can be no smoking that may affect your child’s health, starting now. That means, at a minimum, that he can never expose your child—or you, while you are pregnant or nursing—to second-hand smoke. No smoking in any enclosed spaces, no smoking near you or your child even when you are outside. The evidence is clear that exposing kids or pregnant women to cigarette smoke is a form of child endangerment, and should be treated as such.
From his needing to be asked before he steps outside, and his feeling entitled to smoke indoors on rainy days, it’s obvious that he is not taking these health risks as seriously as he should—to say nothing of his apparent nonchalance about making you gag. You may be in for some tense conversations, even some conflict. But stand firm. A little unpleasantness beats a child with low birth weight, asthma, lung infections, and increased risk for grave or even fatal illnesses later in life.
It might help to take your partner with you to your next prenatal visit and have him hear about these prenatal and childhood risks from a health professional. If you think you can trust your provider’s good sense and discretion, consider calling in advance to make sure somebody other than you raises the subject and speaks about it forcefully and at length.
I really don’t think there is any room for debate when the issue concerns second-hand smoke and a baby, child, or pregnant woman—or any unwilling third party, for that matter. But some questions remain.
One is the matter of third-hand smoke, which is how some concerned health experts refer to smoking residue. There is mounting evidence that the smoke that collects on clothes, hair, rugs, furniture, and smokers themselves can be an irritant to healthy adults and pose a very serious risk to young children and to people of all ages who already have asthma or other lung problems. I am no authority on this, but you may want to look into it and consult your provider. You may decide that, as long as your partner is still smoking, your household will be doing lots of laundry and rug cleaning, taking down curtains, using air-purifiers, and keeping the place smoke-free even when your husband is alone there. More tense discussions, and more hard choices, may await you.
Another issue is how much second-hand smoke you’re personally willing to tolerate outside the home after your baby is weaned. I don’t feel that I know enough about your health, your relationship with your partner, or your values to advise you here. It would be great if, knowing that you would just as soon not risk getting sick yourself, your partner would simply decide never to smoke in your presence again. If that doesn’t happen, you will have to make some decisions, either case-by-case or by establishing some general rules. As a former smoker, I can sort of—but only sort of: memories of how addiction feels tend to fade—understand how your partner might resent your never letting him smoke around you even when you’re both at a party, or huddling in a doorway, or sitting in a ward committee room, or wherever people still smoke these days. After all, you knew he was a smoker when you got together, and you shared the habit for several years. There are many sensible answers if he expresses his resentment, but being sensible isn’t much of a match for addiction, or even desire.
Good luck to you and your growing family. I hope that, even if he cannot make himself give up cigarettes entirely just yet, you and your partner can agree on rules that will keep your home safer. With luck, these rules will also have the effect of making him smoke less and less as time goes on—until his son or daughter is old enough to look up at him with enormous teary eyes and shame him into quitting for good.
Dear June,
Thanks for the list of favorite poems. I really appreciated most of your choices. But Lewis Carroll? Seriously?? And no Dante, Chaucer, or Pushkin? Not even William Carlos Williams?
—A Fan in Frankford (Again)
Dear Frankford Fan Following Up,
I do understand. Bear in mind, however, that we were talking about a few of my favorite poems, not the ten best poems of all time.
And did you even read “The Hunting of the Snark?” I’m not sure about Dante or Pushkin, but Chaucer would definitely have loved it. Furthermore, consider this Lewis Carroll stanza:
He thought he saw an Elephant, That practiced on a fife; He looked again, and found it was A letter from his wife. ‘At length I realise,’ he said, ‘The bitterness of life!’
As an encapsulation of the human condition, you have to admit that those six lines are right up there with Williams’ red wheelbarrow.
Now—as Carroll writes in “You are old, Father William”—be off, or I’ll kick you downstairs!
Cleaver’s in-house advice columnist opines on matters punctuational, interpersonal, and philosophical, spinning wit and literary wisdom in response to your ethical quandaries. Write to her at [email protected]. Find more columns by June in her attic.
Image credits: iStockphoto (no babies were harmed in the making of this photo!) and (for the Lewis Carroll illustration) Hathi Digital Library Trust, Pennsylvania State University
THE LONG DRY by Cynan Jones Coffee House Press, 117 pages
reviewed by Melanie Erspamer
We are in a Welsh farm. A cow goes missing. Gareth, the owner, spends the day searching for it. It is during days like these and it is in stories like these, of a Welsh farmer searching his property for a pregnant cow while his wife, Kate, stays in bed with a migraine, that we gain greater insight into what life is. We don’t need a great story line or a long adventure to be able to understand the nature of a person. We just need to be privy to their wandering thoughts as they find things to do with themselves on a warm, dry day.
Cynan Jones is a Welsh author who has written several other short novels to acclaim in the U.K. and, in the past three years, in the U.S. He portrays the heartbreak and simplicity of ordinary Welsh people. The Long Dry is his first novel, published in 2006, and now due to Jones’s American readership, being published in the U.S. As in Everything I Found on the Beach (discussed in an essay on these pages by reviews editor Nathaniel Popkin) and The Dig, the language and plot of The Long Dry are as sparse and dry as the landscape being depicted and yet they convey an emotional power I have rarely felt in other books:
Gareth passes the car where his son used to play so much. He has to go back and tell his wife he loves her. For a second he sees the car as if it was new—the times they went for picnics in it—rising from the brambles, and only seconds later does his sense fill in the mouse droppings, and spiders, and the thick dust that is on the windows now.
The story is told largely from Gareth’s third person personal perspective as he searches for the cow, and Kate, who, upset with her husband, has closed herself in her room with one of her not-infrequent migraines. At times, the point of view shifts to other characters, notably the cow itself as it goes wandering crazily and pregnant through the bogs, and also two unnamed boys who while on a walk make the difficult, uncomfortable decision of violently putting a rabbit out of its misery.
One of the points Jones makes through this medley of uneven perspectives is the incompleteness of a story told by only one character. The inclusion of the two young boys points most directly to this: their segment comes right after Jones describes Gareth walking past the dead rabbit, crushed under bits of concrete. Gareth stares at it, and “it infuriates him that men are capable of such articulate cruelty.” In the boys’ passage that follows, Jones reveals how the killing of the rabbit was an act of compassion, how it pained the boys to do it, the older one realizing “he had to hurt the rabbit and in him was the horrible slow panic of knowing something like this.” Not only does the older boy feel compassion for the rabbit, but also for his younger brother, who is having to witness such an act. Thus Gareth goes on with his day having witnessed what he thinks of as an example of human cruelty, whereas the reader comes out touched by the strength of the two young boys.
Cynan Jones
This is not the only instance of dramatic irony, in which the reader has not only more information than the characters with which to condition her perception of the story, but also the ability to see how greatly incomplete information influences a character’s perspective. One of the greatest sources of unspoken tension relates to the uneasiness in the relationship between Gareth and Kate. They hardly speak to each other throughout the novel—there is not much dialogue anyway—but their thoughts are weighed down by the worry that their relationship is fraying at the seams, as well as by the guilt they endure in having contributed to it. Feeling that she has changed from the carefree woman that he fell in love with, Gareth is largely frustrated with Kate (he believes the change is due to a series of miscarriages she had), and yet angry with himself for viewing her as weak and angry. One gets the sense that he does not truly love Kate anymore, but stays with her because of the convenience of habit. As he walks through the fields, he tells himself, “I must never forget how perfectly built she is […] She is changing now, but it does not matter.” The need he has to repeat these facts to himself, and to try and convince himself that her changes are not for the worst, reveal the difficulty he has in doing so.
Kate instead feels pinned down by a more direct guilt produced by the event that has caused a change in her: a one-time encounter with a farmhand in one of the farm’s barns. After the encounter the migraines appeared and she began cutting herself, and now though partly recovered she allows herself to indulge in her weaknesses, flitting off to her room when she feels the migraines come on, leaving her daughter Emmy to deal with the vet, come over to put down the dog. Jones reveals the disconnect that has opened between Gareth and Kate when Gareth decides he will tell Kate he loves her just how she is as she screams at him because a cow has started giving birth while he has been away. Warm aspirations and feelings that are entertained while each is alone shatter when the couple confronts each other.
The problem, Gareth decides at one point, is that “we live too long […] We’re expected to love too much and too long.” He feels this as he realises he is looking ahead to thirty more years with Kate. Jones does not make the same mistake with his novel, which manages to pack all this tension and emotion in a surprisingly short amount of space. The structure of the novel is quite unusual, as it is diced under different headings that all deal with diverse aspects of the farm and the characters’ lives: “Ducks,” “The Farmhand,” “The Vet.” Through all of these sections, however, run the same themes and the same general plot line: the search for the cow. The clear temporal progression of the story—through the narrative, or telling of the story dips from past to present to future easily—calms the otherwise fragmentary nature of the telling that suggests the fragmentation of thought, memory, and life itself; for it reminds us that ultimately we are all subject to the continuous, regular march of time, even when our emotion and thoughts are shaped in other non-linear ways. The structure of the story, and the way it is clumped around certain, always concrete, events and figures, prevents the prose from being flooded by excessive streams-of-consciousness.
But stream-of-consciousness, with the thoughts of the character in question shaping the events and narrative, feels natural in this format. This is most notable when the story is told from the cow’s perspective: “She kept walking in the sun and grubbed the hedge here and there because now the flies were driving her silly, landing on her face all the time, and the cow was very thirsty.” However the switch into another consciousness is never complete, as would happen with Virginia Woolf: there remains always the overriding presence of the third person narrator, who not only maintains a consistent sparse style throughout, but also slips details into the ruminations of characters that they would not know, such as when the cow thinks that “she hadn’t liked the bog, which for a long time had been full of hide-behinds, which were brought across from the lumber camps of Wisconsin and which Gareth’s father had learned about from the American troops he served with.” Most of all, though, there is the way in which the third person narrator has structured the story into sections with headings, flying in the face of a more fluid depiction of consciousness and rather purposefully crafting the story, bringing these lives into being as if they were part of an intricate puzzle that can be gradually understood the more pieces the reader assembles.
The most tragic moment of the story, and a great instance of dramatic irony, relates to the sudden knowledge, revealed slightly more than halfway through the book, the reader gains of what will happen in the future. I will not ruin it here, although I will say that half the tragedy for me was not the future events themselves—amply tragic already—but the matter-of-fact way in which they surprise you; and then the way in which the rest of the novel seems cruel for the characters who, unsuspecting, are slowly traveling towards this future. The greatest irony is when Gavin thinks back on the tragedies that befell his father and envies him. He imagines “that perhaps a crisis would cure them too—would push away the tiny problems that were damaging them like splinters.” The reader can hope so, too—although the nature of the tragedy to come makes it seem unlikely that it will do anything but hurt. Yet in this rumination the reader is met with the crushing naiveté we all have towards our own lives, unable to see, because of our limited perspectives and temporal restrictions, the greater picture.
The past, like the future, is one of the greatest players on the largely empty landscape that is the present. The role of memory, Jones suggests, as the search for the cow and the simple stream of sentences lumber on, is double-edged. There is the one side of it that inevitably resurfaces, undesired, as one continues through the mundanity of life. This is the side that replays Kate’s liaison with the farmhand in her mind as she lies in bed, or that reminds Gareth painfully of how carefree and barefoot Kate used to be. There is also another side, however, one that is actively sought out, exemplified by the diaries of his father that Gareth reads before going to sleep. Gareth himself is conscious early enough in the novel of why he reads them: “To bring some sound into the stillness.” This is a sentiment that is expressed more completely later with Gareth’s musings on the huge length of life. Gareth and Kate care for each other, Gareth cares deeply for the farm, but they have lost all passion and excitement. It feels sometimes that they do what they do simply because they must do something. Herein lies the small, insidious tragedy of the story: that life seems to produce an excess of pain over pleasure. The characters mull over the various tensions they feel throughout the day and although there are certainly moments of pleasure—for instance, Gareth’s love for his daughter Emmy—there is a pervading sense of life being lived out of habit and not desire.
Ultimately this is a beautiful little novel that leaves the reader reeling with the powerful emotions it manages to render in such a short space and with such sparse language. The simple storyline also gives leave for musings over possible symbolism. For example, what does the cow represent? Of course it could represent nothing in particular, simply a lost cow, one of the millions of small reasons we give ourselves to keep living purposefully each day.
What about the long dry? The last sentence of the novel is: “‘It’s raining,’ [Gavin] says, and [Kate] can hardly hear him.” The reason she can hardly hear him is because she’s crying softly, it having hit her how good and brave and strong of a person her husband is. It seems tempting to say then that this long dry refers not only to the weather, but to the tension in the relationship between Gavin and Kate, and the end of the novel suggests that both of those can be brought to a close. However Jones does not supply this interpretation without offering a layer of ambiguity. Although Kate is suddenly overtaken with strong affection for her husband, there still seems to be the problem of miscommunication, of disconnection, that was present throughout the novel, as when Gavin himself was overtaken by love. Then there is the knowledge of the future that haunts the reader and prevents her from seeing the last page as the end of the story. The novel fittingly ends when the long dry ends, but it may be because choosing an ending based on the lives of its characters is too impossible a task. The cow has been found, the rain has come; the rest—the emotions, the difficulties of the characters—have no such easy finish.
Melanie Erspamer studies English Literature and Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. She is half-Italian and half-American and has lived most of her life near Boston. Her work has been published in The Purple Breakfast Review, Nomad Magazine and Unknown Magazine, and her one-act play was performed at the University of Edinburgh. With her sister, she also has been running an anonymous literary magazine based in bathroom stalls, called Bathruminations.
The other day I called a local politician’s office to talk about an event they were hosting to sign people up for a senior discount program. The staffer who answered the phone chatted with me for a minute or two about one of the politician’s favorite causes, which I also support. Things were going fine until I mentioned that I was calling about the senior sign-up. “For a loved one?” she asked. As soon as I said “No, for me,” her tone changed completely—she switched into this saccharine, singsong, much louder voice and started talking way, way down to me. She asked me if I knew what photo I.D. was and, when I said I did, asked me if I thought a credit card was photo I.D. Before I managed to end the call she had reminded me twice to bring the I.D., and asked me if I had remembered to write down the address she had given me.
When I got to the office I realized that, although I have been over sixty for a few years now, this was the first time I had ever participated in a seniors-only activity. It made me remember why I ran away from pre-school when I was four. The three women who were running the show kept condescending to us and trying to help us do things we were obviously capable of doing, like finding the pens sitting on top of the applications they had laid out for us. What annoyed me the most is that they kept calling us “Young Lady,” or “Young Man,” until finally I said to one of them that there was no shame in being old. She just beamed at me even more relentlessly and said, “Oh, but I bet you are young at heart.” Then I caught her giving a colleague one of those “Isn’t she feisty?” looks.
Am I right to be annoyed by this? And how do I combat it?
—Slighted in St. Louis
Dear St. Louis,
There should be some age-based equivalent to the term “mansplaining.” I was thinking maybe “youngsplaining,” except that it sounds clunky and, anyway, many of the explainers are no spring chickens themselves. (“Oldsplaining?” “Agesplaining?” Can I get some help here? ) I have never been able to understand why so many people, even those who know how to make all the right noises where minorities and women are concerned, assume that the elderly cannot understand or cope with much of anything solely because of their age.
I completely understand why you are annoyed by the stereotyping and apparent condescension of the woman on the phone, and the pen-locating helpers at the office. The right to be taken seriously and the right not to be pigeonholed should be basic social guarantees. I am against infantilizing any entire class of people, with the possible exception of infants. Some older people, and many children, feel hurt or insulted by being talked down to, which is of course bad. Others buy into it and start learning helplessness and self-doubt, which may be worse.
Still, it is not always easy to tell when to speak up against this patronizing ageism, when to combat it by less direct means, and when to just lighten up and let it go.
In the case you describe, one good response would have been to keep things pleasant while demonstrating your non-idiocy in some way—for example, by telling the woman on the phone who asked you about the address that you’d already entered it in your contacts and pinged it. Or by saying, “No need. It’s 7468 West Maple, Suite 25 B, zip code 12345, right?” I am not saying that you, or anybody, should be expected to have a calm, well-thought-out response ready every time you are surprised by rude or thoughtless conduct. But it is wise to remember that keeping things pleasant, at least until you’ve got your emotions under control, is usually the kindest and most effective way to go. Remember, too that—as writing teachers are always saying—you should show, not tell. Show people like the caller that you still have at least as many marbles as you did in 1985. Then, if you think about it and still want to tell them why you are annoyed, and why they might want to take a few extra seconds to draw out older people before making assumptions, you can do this at a later, quieter time.
Of course, if the oldsplainers (seniorsplainers? eldersplainers?) in question are being outright offensive, especially if they are condescending to several people and seem likely to make this a habit, it may be time to speak up. The situation in your local pol’s office may have risen to that level. If you think it would help, you could call or write the pol to thank him for the sign-up session, but add a suggestion that some of his helpful staffers were a bit too helpful. Tell him that you would hate it if simple misunderstandings like this ended up defeating the purpose of his great senior outreach efforts. Add a few details about what happened. If you are feeling expansive, remind him that RBG has been eligible for senior discounts for about twenty years now, and that older people vote in larger numbers than any other group.
You have also come to the right place about “young lady/man” and “you’re young at heart.” Both expressions can be infuriating.
That said, I suspect both of us of some oversensitivity here. In many subcultures and locales—among them parts of the South, the African-American community in my city, and my parents’ friends—using the term “young lady/man” for people of all ages is such a reflex that it is hard to take any real offense when someone says it. (Parents and teachers who say “young lady” in anger, as in “Watch your language, young lady,” present a totally different set of issues that, thankfully, need not concern us here.) It’s still fair to call people on it if it really
bothers you, but I suggest doing so gently, maybe jokingly. “I haven’ t been young since 1975, thank God.” Or: “Thanks, but I’m happy with reality.”
The whole “young at heart” issue seems to me more complex. On the on hand, it refers to an attitude, not a chronological age, so it is not as if anyone is unconsciously insulting who you are by pretending you’re something you’re obviously and measurably not. On the other hand, why are old people who do not conform to norms or stereotypes for oldness “young at heart”? I am reminded of times when, as a young student and lawyer, I was complimented for thinking like a man, when obviously if I, a woman, had done the thinking, I had been thinking like at least one woman.
I have more to say about patronizing and ageism, but this column is already late. Luckily, I have another letter from a vexed older writer who does not want to be “adorable.” So expect more theorizing soon.
I hope you get some massive discounts. You deserve them.
Dear June,
My neighbor keeps telling people that he just got back from “one of the islands.” He was in the Dominican Republic. Why doesn’t he just say that?
I am trying to love my neighbor.
Thanks, Mildly Vexed in Mount Vernon
Dear MV,
Your guess is as good as mine. Since you asked, though, I will hazard a few. Maybe he thinks saying “one of the islands” makes him sound sophisticated—you know, an island-hopper. Maybe he thinks the Dominican Republic, technically half of Hispanolia (which it shares with Haiti),is less impressive or desirable than one or more unspecified other islands, although I cannot imagine why. Maybe, on the other hand, he thinks a Dominican Republic vacation is so much cooler and than going to just about any unspecified other island, and does not want to brag, or to make his neighbors envious and unhappy. Maybe he is incredibly thoughtful, but does not have a very high opinion of your neighbors’ knowledge of geography, and is afraid that, if he tells them he went to the Dominican Republic, their responses will reveal that they think the D.R. is country in South America, or a state in the Southwest somewhere, or a clothing store in the Mall of America—causing them embarrassment.
Maybe he is a baseball scout for the Yankees and does not want the Red Sox to find out where he’s looking. Or maybe he is just a weird private person, perhaps even a bit of a jerk in that indefinable way that some jerks are jerks.
Whatever motivates your neighbor, it is time for both of us to stop guessing. I assume that you and he and the other neighbors will soon move on to other topics. Your problem, in addition to being about as minor as a problem can be, is self-limiting.
Cleaver’s in-house advice columnist opines on matters punctuational, interpersonal, and philosophical, spinning wit and literary wisdom in response to your ethical quandaries. Write to her at [email protected]. Find more columns by June in her attic.
WHILE I WAITED Traveling in Colombia and Ecuador by Sean James Mackenney
Rain hit hard, dirtying the white city of Popayán, Colombia. People took shelter underneath overlapping tin roofs, laughing as they ran in a rare display of urgency. Popayán is a sleepy city where people meander along quaint cobbled streets, acquaintances share an embrace in the main square, adults congregate in groups conversing with both ease and conviction, and children giggle and eat pineapple chunks and taffy from Styrofoam cups. I flashed a smile, looking at people for a reaction. I towered above them, yet still went unnoticed. I tried to involve myself in their joy but it wasn’t mine to share. I was a person of the outside, a dollar sign to some, completely irrelevant to most. I convinced myself of it.
I gave a knowing nod and headed back to the hostel, hoisting my head upright to the clouds above. Rain pinched my face, each drop a quick, cold sensation. I returned to my dormitory, peeled the t-shirt off my back, put it in a plastic bag, and slung it on top of the clothes in my backpack.
“Are you leaving already?” asked an older traveler I’d met the night before.
“Yes,” I replied, before turning to leave. “Limited time.”
“Where you headed?” he asked.
“Ecuador.” I smiled out of courtesy.
“Oh! I’ve just come from there. Whereabouts you heading?” he asked.
“Otavalo. I actually have to run; I don’t want to miss my bus. Take care!” I said, leaving the dorm.
I arrived at the bus station an hour early. Time passed quicker waiting at the terminal rather than the town. Closer to returning home even though I was heading eight hours south to the border, along a road that wove around the green hills of the Andes, a route people were advised not to travel by night because of the bandits that lie in wait. I looked at the calendar on my phone and counted with my index finger the number of days left of my trip. Eleven. No, ten. I’d learned to not count the last day, since I’d be at the airport, excited to be home. When I booked the trip a month prior to leaving, I had the choice of only going for two weeks; instead I committed to a month. I remember thinking how short thirty days had sounded when I planned the trip, perhaps because less than a year earlier I had spent the entirety of spring traveling down the spine of Central America with a man I loved.
I set my backpack against a stool in a cafeteria. The menu featured much of the same food I had experienced between Cartagena in the north and here at Popayán in the south: grilled meat, rice, beans, and a piece of plantain. I ordered a half portion of roast chicken and nothing else. I was convinced any kind of carbohydrate was bad. All I needed was protein. Back home in New York I was a vegan, but with nobody around to reproach me, I cared less. I made excuses to myself. No seitan, no tempeh, no soy, I have no choice, it’s just a temporary fix. The chicken was wet and the meat near the bone was a light shade of purple. I ate the white parts and chewed the small bones, remembering the taste of marrow, the feel of flesh and guilt.
From my stool, I observed the terminal. A blur or noise and movement. I put my hands to my ears and could still hear the blend of people clucking. A man sat directly opposite me, chewing on a rib as he stared at me. Why is he looking at me like that? He scooped up a spoonful of rice, his eyes still fixed in my direction. I stared back, but his expression was blank. I turned around and saw a television screen fixed to the wall behind. The news flashed scenes of landslides that had killed dozens not too far from where I was.
The bus was scheduled to arrive in an hour. I pulled out Kafka on the Shore and read a scene about a man killing cats for their souls. I felt faint, unsure whether the words or undercooked chicken were to blame. A black tunnel started to form at the corners of my vision. I closed my eyes and swallowed air. Please don’t faint. Please don’t faint. Please don’t faint. The last time I fainted was at the vet when I discovered my cat had a malignant tumor. What would happen if I were to faint here? Would people scrum around me and take my money and passport? Would they help? Whom would they call? Whom would I want them to call? I pushed the plate away from me and slowly the feeling passed. I closed the book and went in search of fresh air. You’re fine. You’re fine.
A family of four indigenous women and children sat beside me as we waited for the bus. One woman wore a non-brand navy tracksuit and a cap positioned firmly on her head, with two pigtails poking out the back.
“¿Estas esperando el bus a la frontera?” I asked her, wondering if she too was waiting for the bus to the border.
She nodded and smiled, revealing a single gold tooth. The others looked on inquisitively as they shared a bag of plantain chips. Beside them rested eight worn suitcases with dried palm leaves wrapped tight on top of them. I imagined they had a long way to go. I sat next to them, wanting to talk but unsure of what to say. Instead I looked at pictures on my phone: white buildings, dark skies, and flocks of pigeons. One of the women tapped me on the shoulder, offering the bag of plantain chips, but I declined. Nope. No carbs for me.
The bus arrived twenty minutes behind schedule. I followed the women on and claimed a seat beside the window. I reclined my seat all the way back and rested my chin on the windowsill. The bus edged out through the city, which was no longer white, but a collection of concrete and poorly assembled brick shacks. I was surprised by how long it took us to get out of the city. It had once seemed small and uneventful, but life stemmed from it, right until we got onto the narrow road that would take us south. The untamed landscape of the region came into scope. The road cut through undulating hills, the black tarmac striking against the wildness of the green around it. Well-fed cows grazed the grass on the extremities of the road and street vendors waited for business, they all sold the same fruits: pineapples, papayas and coconuts. The bus weaved between deep gorges and the hills towering above. A farmhouse sat atop a hill in the distance; I wondered what it felt like to live in constant isolation.
The clouds became thick and the rain heavy. The tires turning around sharp bends made a slushy sound, the body of the bus winding recklessly around the hills. Two hours into the journey, the bus curved past an overturned bus on the other side of the road, all the windows were broken, nobody inside, no police or ambulance either. Along with the other passengers, I craned over to see the crash. I wanted it to be more dramatic. Where’s the blood and flames? I decided that if this bus were to crash I’d be ready, agile and with nobody to worry about I’d crawl free from the wreckage. But what are the chances of two overturned buses?
I stared out at the patchwork of greens and browns. An unnerving grey looming above, hills rolling past in a haze, speckles of rain clinging on to the windowpane. Everything was in motion, functioning as it should, except for me. I didn’t want to be this person. My eyes were open and I could see beauty, but it wasn’t enough.What am I doing here?
The bus went as far as the border town of Ipiales. It was as grim as almost every other town on the cusp of another country, but even more so in the dark. I made my way to an overpriced hotel right beside the bus terminal and tried to negotiate a rate. The man at the desk wore a baseball cap low enough that it almost concealed his eyes. He muttered and looked uninterested. It made no difference to him whether I stayed or went. I agreed to the original price and he handed me a key attached to a huge plastic keychain with the room number 617 etched by hand, before giving me a roll of toilet paper. The hotel walls were a collage of faded out blues and grays. The once-white trim of the ceiling was cracked and the wallpaper pulled off at the edges. The buzz from a ceiling fan filled the room. I asked for the wifi code and checked if anybody had messaged me. Nobody had. He hadn’t.
I hadn’t eaten since the purple chicken. With only 12,000 pesos ($4) left, I had to be smart about where I ate. The diner next door charged 7,000 pesos for dinner, meaning, after my meal, I would only have enough money to get a taxi to immigration. Breakfast would have to wait until I could use my dollars on the other side.
I ordered a menu completo, which consisted of grilled chicken, rice, fried plantain, beans, salad, a cold arepa and watermelon juice. I wrapped up the plantain and arepa and saved it in case I got hungry in the morning, then devoured every bit of meat off the bone. I was still hungry so I ate the white rice. It collected in my stomach. I bent over and felt the grains turn the thin folds of skin on my stomach into fewer and fatter ones. I glanced over at the other people in the diner and tried to guess whether they were Ecuadorian or Colombian, why they were there, whether they could tell I was lonely.
It wasn’t the first time I’d felt like that. Loneliness overwhelmed me in the past but the triggers varied. In India it was because I was traveling alone for the first time and the drive from Delhi airport to the hostel proved too much: the people who slept in tuk tuks, the skinny dogs that pulled apart scraps from market trash; the 3 a.m. darkness of the alleyway I had to walk down; the window pane I had to bang on to wake up the hostel owner; the lock on the outside of the metal door to my room; the deathly silence as I lay in bed unable to sleep. In Costa Rica, it was the corner stoop where I sat watching the bus take him off to San Jose, away from me, traveling with him ending with a brief goodbye, the dust that was left and the people at the bus stop who watched me as I cried. This time it was the long, thin light bulbs that illuminated every flaw within the room, the impersonal service, the plastic plate the food was served on, and my lack of interest in doing anything but waiting for him to notice me again.
I carried my shoulder bag and suitcase up six flights of stairs to a corridor of more blue, faded wallpaper. Muffled sounds reverberated through the hallway. I couldn’t tell if people were laughing, crying or arguing; it had been hours since I’d last had a conversation that didn’t involve the cost of something. The wifi didn’t reach my floor so I had to contend with myself. Why am I here?Maybe I should fly back to New York? But I don’t want to quit. Is there anything in New York for me? Why doesn’t he like me anymore? What was it? I couldn’t listen to myself anymore so I put a jumper down on the tiled floor and did four sets of planks and crunches, before turning to the mirror to see if the rice from dinner had burned away. I got in bed, read a couple more pages of Murakami, got bored, closed my eyes, and gave up on the evening.
Before heading to the border, I had planned a slight detour to Las Lajas sanctuary. I crammed in the back of a taxi next to a family of four. I didn’t say hello nor did I say goodbye. I walked down the steps towards the sanctuary, where shopkeepers had set up stalls selling religious necklaces, books and ponchos. Dogs cantered alongside families, desperate for an owner. The steps became longer and steeper and the edge of the valley came into view. I walked a little further down until I was on the bridge that faces the sanctuary; people were piling in to catch a glimpse of the morning service. I poked my head in for a moment, but I felt little. I headed along a pathway that took in the whole site. Once I reached the other side of the valley, I looked for the best angle to take a photo. I tilted my phone upwards to cut off anybody else on the bridge, before briskly walking back to hail a taxi and adding filters to the picture I’d taken.
I packed my bags and headed straight back to the bus terminal to get a collectivo to the border. Otavalo is a market town famed for its colorful merchandise. I wasn’t interested in the goods, but I wanted a pit stop that would allow me to skip the capital city, Quito. I was afraid. I was jaded. I was fragile. I was sick of myself. It was as if all my yearning for him had pushed me to the very edge and my sense of wonder was the first to fall, and then my nerve.
The trip took almost four hours along the Pan-American Highway, and I spent most of it peering out the window. I couldn’t summon the desire to write; I was too far within myself, lost amongst pity. I clenched my fist, rested my head against it with my eyes closed tight. Snap out of this! You wanted this! GET OVER YOURSELF!
Sitting to my right on a fold down seat was a man and his daughter. He wore a tight white t-shirt and I admired the veins that popped out of his muscular arms. I imagined him to be a manual laborer. He cradled his daughter of about four years old. She hung on to her father with one hand, an ice cream cone in the other. The father looked over at me often. Despite our similar skin tone, I was most definitely out of place. Maybe he knew I didn’t want to be there.
An hour later he woke his daughter who had been hanging limply in his arms. I watched them walk off to a small town of maybe twenty buildings, their size overwhelmed by the hills that surrounded them.
Thirty minutes later and I was hurried off the bus. The driver was in a rush. I was the only person getting off at Otavalo. The bus started to accelerate at almost the same moment I grabbed my backpack from the hold. I walked toward the town with my hand out for a taxi. One slowed beside me, the window rolled down. When I started to walk towards it, the driver sped off. I decided to walk to the hostel. My sense of direction had yet to fail me.
A stout young man called Ramon greeted me at the hostel and showed me around the grounds. The owners, a British man and an Ecuadorian woman, had somehow recreated a quaint English village. On a hill overlooking farmland, nothing but green was visible. There was nobody staying there but Ramon and a pet llama. I decided this was the place to zone in, or zone out. I wasn’t quite sure which. I had to forget about him, but I couldn’t allow myself to do so, I couldn’t stop indulging the fantasy of him even after he was gone. It robbed me off what was happening around me.
Strangers held mugs of hot chocolate with both hands, their backs hunched and facing the fire. It seemed there should have been women congregating in the street, dressed in pleated skirts, thick shawls, fedoras, and knee-high socks, men fastening the buckles to their high-waisted slacks, children playing with a ragged football, birds whistling as the sun beat down on dried paths, but only grey was visible through the window. Fat droplets of rain streamed down the glass pane and the wind echoed through the emptiness of the roof. I had arrived in Sighos, a village near the summit of Quilotoa, the sulphuric lake I would hike three days to reach. My last stop before returning home.
In my hostel were eleven travelers: an Alaskan couple who worked on an exploration vessel in Antarctica, a German couple who kept to themselves, two backpackers from Lithuania (one was a sky diving instructor, the other an advocate for acid), an elderly French couple who didn’t speak English, a cheery English couple, and a Danish guy traveling solo. I wanted to befriend at least one of them because the hike was said to be poorly signposted and dangerous; I didn’t want to get lost or attacked by dogs all alone. I sat in the communal circle and eyed my options. The Germans were dull, the Lithuanians were going the opposite direction, the Alaskans talked way too much about boats and American football, and the French couple were driving. This left the couple from England and the Danish guy.
Niklas, the Danish guy, was attractive. He didn’t look very Scandinavian with his dark features, but he spoke English and had style like every other person I knew from that part of the world. The English couple, Chris and Precious, were from Manchester and had the typical twang to their words. (“Yur fram Lundun, ah yah?!”) They were teenage sweethearts: Precious had been in the electronics department of a supermarket where Chris worked and had asked for an opinion on a computer game she was going to buy for her younger brother. They had been together for twelve years, the last year of which had been spent traveling the world. By the end of the night, the four of us had decided to hike Quilotoa together.
Everybody had something to bring to the group: Precious was as sweet as her name suggested plus she had a functional satellite navigation system; Chris had great British banter and a DSLR camera; Niklas was prone to taking his top off at regular intervals; I was able to endear our group to locals with my fluent Spanish. The trail was famed for aggressive dogs that often terrorized hikers. In preparation, we collected tree branches for walking-and dog-beating sticks. It turned out we wouldn’t need the sticks. At some point a dog with a dirty white coat started following us. He didn’t bark or growl; he just wanted company and was prepared to prove his loyalty by chasing away other dogs. We fed him biscuits ensuring he accompanied us to the next village, Chucchilán.
At dinner, the dog wove between us, poking his head upright in search of food.
“I’ve decided his name is Dolphin,” I said. “He literally can’t close his mouth, and he has the fattest dog neck ever!”
The next day, Dolphin waited for us, along with three other dogs, one of which had a collar. We tried to shoo them away, but they persisted.
“Sabes de quién es estos perros?” I asked a local man dressed in a thick wool jumper, curious as to whom the dogs belonged.
“Nadie y todo el mundo!” He laughed, not in the slightest bit worried about the wandering dogs.
The black-and-ginger dog kept trying to hump the brown-haired dog with the collar. Niklas named the male Charlie and Precious chose Nala for the female. At first, none of us liked the fourth dog, the one who into fields to terrorize horses, cows, and sheep, but eventually we warmed to his idiocy. Chris named him Trouble.
The second day was far more taxing than the first. The trail was muddy and at a steep incline, but the view at the top eased the heaviness in our legs. We sat on a ledge and looked down the barrel of the valley; we could see for miles. It reminded me of the valley in the south of Colombia, only this time I marveled at what I saw, wondering whether the tectonic plates had once shifted right where we sat.
“Where would you recommend I visit in Colombia?” Niklas asked. He was heading there after the hike.
“I would skip past the south,” I said. “There’s not much there.”
“Really? We loved it! Didn’t we Chris?” Precious asked.
“Yeah, Cali is awesome, we danced salsa every night. We went to the Blacks and Whites carnival in Pasto,” Chris said.
“I mean, I didn’t have much time there. I only visited Popayán. I guess I should’ve visited those places,” I said, embarrassed by my judgmental mind-set.
“We straight up loved Popayán,” Chris said. “Everyone was so friendly.”
We were approaching the summit. Would my rediscovered energy fade after reaching the climax? Looking at each of my companions as we made our way up home stretch of the volcano, I doubted I’d see them again, but it didn’t matter. I was thankful to have met them. Through them I once again became the person who had sat in front of his laptop researching Ecuador, eager to make the most of his time there.
The crater of Quilotoa was before us, an eerie spectacle. The still water went from turquoise to algae green whenever a heavy cloud passed by the sun. We sat on a bench and shared our lunch of tuna and crackers with the dogs. The overwhelming presence below stunned us to silence.
After an hour, we ascended to a nearby village and drank cola from a vendor.
“Cuantos veces haces este viaje?” I asked the vendor.
“Todo los dias!” he replied.
I needed to adapt to my emotions the way he did the altitude and hills. A man with a thick mustache offered to drive us to the nearest town in his pickup truck. Dolphin and Trouble jumped in the back and refused to move.
“Don’t worry, the dogs can come! They do this route all the time. They’ll find their way back!” the driver told us.
Charlie and Nala chased behind the car. Precious cried. I felt it too.
“So this is it!” Niklas said as we sat on the highway waiting for the buses that would take us in different directions.
My bus rolled up. We group hugged before I boarded. I sat down by a window, my looking at everything around me. I was part of it: the friends I waved goodbye, the dogs I wanted to take home, the couple smooching in the seats alongside me, the kid peeking through the gap in the seat in front, the reggaeton rattling from the speakers, the smoke pouring out of Cotopaxi volcano, the haze of green as the bus sped by, the rain specks collecting on the window.
Sean James Mackenney is a British writer living in Brooklyn. He is working on his first book, a memoir. Follow him on Instagram @seany.boo
I read your letter from the woman whose date stole a bottle of rosemary from her cabinet, and I thought you could help me with my problem.
Recently I went on a first date with a guy some friends set me up with. He took me to dinner at a very nice restaurant. Everything was going pretty well for a first date. I thought he was cute, if not super handsome, and we had some things in common as far as books and politics and basic life goals are concerned. But then came dessert. I ordered a slice of their famous chocolate cake with raspberry butter cream icing, and he said he would have the same. He asked me if I wanted more wine, and I said no and ordered tea. He ordered a large glass of milk!
I was totally turned off by this. What do you think of a man who orders milk with his dessert on the first date? Am I wrong to object to it? Or not to want to date him again?
—Disappointed in Denver
Dear DD,
Your question perplexes me. I had no idea there were rules about how many dates you need to go on before ordering milk with dessert.
But I am intrigued by why his doing so turns you off. Perhaps you just think it’s totally uncool and unsophisticated to order milk instead of, say, espresso or a glass of chilled Vouvray with what you imply is a fancy cake, in a fancy restaurant. I would disagree: in my experience, milk pairs well with almost any kind of chocolate cake, or cookie for that matter, and the only reason I never order it in restaurants is because they rarely have good nonfat milk. (I know, nonfat milk with rich cake is sort of silly, but it is what I like, and that is the point.) Tastes differ here—I mean, if tastes can’t differ when we are talking about what tastes good, when can they?—and I do not think ordering milk with chocolate cake is ipso facto uncool or gauche. If he had added that his mom still brings him milk and cake every night before she tucks him in, that would be another matter.
Since it seems important to you that this was a first date, perhaps you feel that, by ordering milk, he was not worrying enough about making a good initial impression. But this position assumes that he realized, or should have realized, that ordering milk with cake at a fancy restaurant is a social faux pas, like wearing sweatpants or picking your teeth at the table—and, as I said, I disagree. I actually find it refreshing that your date ordered what he wanted, not what some snooty waiter or patisserie snob might think he should have pretended he wanted. Of course, your date may be such a rube that it never occurred to him that he was flouting any convention—if, indeed, he was. Or he may have realized that not everybody orders milk with fancy restaurant cake, but have already felt comfortable enough with you to be himself. In your place, I would have liked him better for not putting on airs. But, then again, I like milk-drinkers.
If the milk-cake pairing is your only objection to this guy, you may be missing out on a good thing by never going out with him again. Do you really want to discount compatibility where books, politics, and life goals are concerned because of a man’s beverage preference?
All that said, there is no right or wrong here. Nobody has an obligation to go out on a second date. I hope and suspect that his ordering the milk was only part of what turned you off: if you had otherwise found your date charismatic and delightful, the milk might have seemed like a minor lapse, or even a charming quirk. But even if your reaction really was all about the milk, that’s fine. If, for whatever reason, you two did not click, you don’t have to endure another dinner with him. In its early stages, at least, romance is as much a matter of taste as dessert.
Dear June,
Since it is National Poetry month, I was wondering if you could tell us your ten favorite poems—the ones that have had the greatest effect on you. And why you chose them. Thanks!
—A Fan in Frankford
Dear Fan,
I thank you for your question.
I am finding it hard to answer, though—which is why I am getting this in just under the wire, on April 29. For one thing, if I took your question literally, I would probably have to include some pretty bad poems I learned as a kid and loved to recite for many years afterwards. I will therefore omit Longfellow (despite the noble Hiawatha’s mittens, made with the skin side inside) and Joyce Kilmer (even though reading “Trees” aloud was the only time I got to say the word “breast” in nine years of elementary school.) To keep this easy for myself, I will also leave out Shakespeare, since he would probably use up most of my list. I will blackball poems about cats, even though “Pangur Bán” and “My Cat Jeoffry” are two I poems a like a whole lot, because including either of them in a list of ten would just be weird. And I will stick to poems I have read many times, which mostly means old favorites.
Wow, this is actually REALLY hard to answer. I never realized before how much favorite poems are like party guests. How can I not invite William Blake and Edna St. Vincent Millay and Sylvia Plath, who are practically family, but none of whose poems have actually had that great an effect on me? How can I ask a Lewis Carroll nonsense poem if I also want to include a poem about the Holocaust? Will my father forgive me if I don’t include Ogden Nash? Will my mother forgive me if I do? Should I bypass Yeats because he always gets invited to everything, which would leave room for my in-house editor’s favorite poem (“How to Play Night Baseball”)? If I invite Walt Whitman, will he insist on bringing his whole book?
My solution was to choose the first beloved poems I happened to think of one Friday and did not reject out of hand. Hence this miscellany of short and long, single and collected, serious and silly, simple and complex—which segues nicely into the poem I thought of first:
“Pied Beauty,” By Gerard Manley Hopkins. Glory be to God for dappled things! I once made myself memorize this short but very dense poem: now I can say it over and over to myself while swimming and lose track of the world, thereby getting in a few extra laps before I come to. Its imagery and especially its rhythms create a sense of transcendence of which even the most lapsed among us can partake.
“Lycidas,” by John Milton. People were already calling this poem “archaic,” not to mention “artificial,” over 200 years ago. Too bad, say I. I think it is one of the loveliest elegies there is.
Three Chinese Poets, translated by Vikram Seth. I may be cheating here, like including “everything pizza” in the ten foods you could bring to a desert island. This is not a single poem, or even the work of a single poet, but a selection and translation of poems by the Tang Dynasty poets Wang Wei, Li Bai (a/k/a Li Po), and Du Fu (or Tu Fu). I had read some of these poems before, but Vikram Seth’s translation is what opened the door to them for me. Seth uses the music and formal rules of the English language and English poetry to make these Eighth-Century Chinese poems not just more striking, but also quite accessible. Reading them is like being drawn into a conversation.
“In Praise of Limestone,” by W.H. Auden. It was hard for me to choose among his poems. I decided on this one because I am still trying to figure it out, and feel enriched by the process.
“The Art of Losing,” by Elizabeth Bishop. Maybe the best sestina ever. Its formal brilliance makes its irony and sadness easier to bear, at least until you stop and think about what you’ve just read.
“Lament for a Dead Bullfighter” (in Spanish, “LLanto por Ignacio Sanchez Mejías”), by Federico García Lorca. This is a gory (in two senses), hard-to-translate poem about a deplorable practice. But I fell in love with it when I first read it in high- school Spanish, and have loved it ever since, especially its ending, which floats way like a beloved soul. Read it in Spanish if you can, or in a dual-language version. It sounds better, and the heightened emotion seems more appropriate, in its original language.
“Death Fugue” (“Todesfuge”) by Paul Celan. It turns out that it is possible to write a great poem about the Nazi death camps. It is not easy to read one, though. This poem is relentless while you read it and very hard—the last few lines are earworm hard—to forget afterwards. I can’t imagine a translation better than John Felstiner’s.
“Let America be America Again,” by Langston Hughes. No poem could be more timely—a depressing thought, since it was written in 1935. I would defy you to read it aloud without tearing up, but I know what a hard-nosed bunch you lit mag readers are.
“Archeology,” by Katha Pollitt. I count on Pollitt’s essays on politics and society to help me understand my own beliefs and emotions. This poem does the same thing for my hopes and fears about making art.
“The Hunting of the Snark,” by Lewis Carroll. This eight-part narrative saga—actually, Carroll calls it an “Agony in Eight Fits”—has been a reliable source of laughter for me since I was a kid. And it is too a poem: it has meter and stanzas and even a lesson. I should warn you, though: several people I otherwise respect do not share my delight in this tale of the most motley of crews (including and pretty much limited to a Boots, a Broker, a Baker, a Barrister, a Beaver, and a Maker of Bonnets and Hoods) as they hunt for their elusive and totally indefinable prey. I understand that responses can differ widely where humor and nonsense are concerned. But how can you not love a story where one of the characters, who had totally forgotten his name, “would answer to ‘Hi!’ or to any loud cry, /Such as ‘Fry me!’ or ‘Fritter my wig!’
There you go. Ten choices, as arbitrary and ill-assorted as the snark-hunters. No Howl, haiku, or Heaney. No Rilke, Rich, or Rimbaud.
Not even any Dickinson, Whitman, or Frost, and I call myself an American! So before I go, I must shout out to Frost, at least. The more I read and the longer I live, the more I appreciate him. I know you have all read “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” but it is worth reading many times. It may actually be perfect. And try “A Hillside Thaw” for pure joy and “The Ovenbird” for a more complex song.
And maybe just a short nod to Whitman? I can’t resist closing with a snippet from “Leaves of Grass,” in honor of my mute writing companions:
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self contain’d; I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition; They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins; They do no make me sick discussing their duty to God; Not one is dissatisfied—not one is demented with the mania of owning things; Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago; Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.
Happy end of National Poetry Month, everybody! Hey, let’s all try reading some poetry in May and June, while also occasionally doing some off-month thinking about black history and women’s history. I, for one, am feeling inspired to go read some of the poets I left out. Hey there, Edna! Pablo! Derek! Emily!
Cleaver’s in-house advice columnist opines on matters punctuational, interpersonal, and philosophical, spinning wit and literary wisdom in response to your ethical quandaries. Write to her at [email protected]. Find more columns by June in her attic.
BETWEEN TWO SKIES by Joanne O’Sullivan Candlewick Press, 272 pages
reviewed by Brenda Rufener
Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver
When I sat down with Joanne O’Sullivan’s Between Two Skies, I was immediately drawn to the subtle cover design; colorful yet subdued, water meeting sunset. Then the first line captivated me even more:
When I was little, my grandmother, Mamere, used to read to me from a storybook about a mermaid who lived at the bottom of an alpine lake.
From the start, O’Sullivan pulls readers in with well-crafted characters and a beautifully painted setting. She drops the reader deep into the South with Hurricane Katrina looming offshore. The opening pages saturate us with the warmth, hospitality, and food that are so true to this geographical location. But we aren’t allowed to get too comfortable. Not with the bad weather reports and the life-changing storm churning at sea.
Unlike other stories focusing on natural disasters, O’Sullivan takes our attention off of the storm, at least for a moment, and places it on a lovable character. We meet our beloved protagonist, Evangeline Riley, on the eve of her sixteenth birthday. We learn how much she loves her tiny fishing town of Bayou Perdu, nestled way down south in Louisiana along the Gulf of Mexico and how she loves being on the boat with her father, a shrimper, where she spends hours watching the birds, the sky, and the sea. Evangeline’s world becomes ours and we immediately root for her.
Joanne O’Sullivan
Then the storms hits. And with destruction, comes chaos.
One minute, Evangeline is arguing with her sister and managing a new crush on Tru, a Vietnamese-American musician and shrimper. The next minute, when the storm surges and stirs, she’s evacuating her beloved hometown, becoming a refugee, and moving to landlocked Atlanta. It is through this turn of events that we get to know the characters on a deeper level. A truth through pain moment. Evangeline’s sister breaks down, her parents begin fighting, and who knows if her best friend was able to escape the storm alive?
Evangeline’s calm life in her small fishing town is shattered. We see the struggles firsthand through a realistic description that makes us feel as if we’re experiencing the pain along with Evangeline’s family.
We finally get word that we can go back. Forty-eight hours to get in, inspect your property, collect what you can salvage, and get out again.
After the storm settles, Evangeline’s family receives notice that they can return to their hometown. The closer the family gets to their tiny fishing town, the more destruction they see.
There’s an eighteen-wheeler with its back wheels in a tree and the front ones on the ground. A school bus like a crumpled-up soda can. There are cows on top of the levee, alive and dead. The live ones move slowly, grazing under a blue, blue sky.
But that glimpse of blue, blue sky offers the reader hope, even before Evangeline and her family see it.
Thankfully, the story doesn’t end here. A rebuilding process is inevitable. However, the landscape may never look the same.
Between Two Skies is a beautiful and lyrical story that explores the loss and abandonment associated with one of the most historic tragedies in the United States. Instead of using broad strokes and verbose description, O’Sullivan’s gentle touch paints a unique picture of what happens to a family when their world is turned upside down due to uncontrollable circumstances.
In Evangeline’s words:
A strange feeling comes over me—emptiness, but not a sad one. An emptiness that is newness, that’s ready to be filled up with something else now that all that pain has come out.
This is a difficult-to-put-down, gently threaded love story with charming characters that will leave readers thinking about a family, their tiny fishing town, and Evangeline for a very long time.
Brenda Rufener is a technical writer turned novelist. She graduated from Whitman College with a degree in English and writes full time. Harper Teen/HarperCollins will publish Brenda’s debut young adult novel, WHERE I LIVE, in February 2018, with a second novel slated for 2019. Originally from Oregon, Brenda currently lives in North Carolina’s capital city with her husband and two daughters.
LIKE DEATH by Guy de Maupassant translated by Richard Howard NYRB, 240 pages
reviewed by Derek M. Brown
When the modern short story is subjected to the ivory tower equivalent of a paternity test, Maupassant’s culpability is often presumed to be as great as Chekhov’s. Their works featured extensive observations and detailed characterizations that emboldened their literary progeny to think more in terms of character than plot—thus facilitating the bridge from realism and naturalism to modernism. Yet Maupassant’s contributions have been increasingly obscured by Chekhov’s.
Among English speakers, Maupassant—Flaubert’s onetime protégé—is most widely known for “The Necklace.” Noted for its social commentary and characteristic dénouement, “The Necklace” has long been available to audiences outside of France. His novels, however, have escaped such treatment and failed to reach a substantial English readership. Recent translations commissioned by New York Review Books may prompt a shift.
With Like Death, Richard Howard—poet, critic, essayist, and professor at Columbia University—offers a rendering of Maupassant’s Fort comme la mort that, I can only presume, retains all of the lyrical richness of the original, published in 1889. It also offers startling insight into the extent of Maupassant’s influence, which can be found in some of the 20th century’s most seminal works.
Like bookends that support the beginning and end of the 20th century—and rank among the period’s definitive modernist and postmodernist titles, respectively—Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way (1913) and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) contain passages that illustrate the nature and breadth of Maupassant’s impact.
In Swann’s Way, the scent of a pastry—a madeleine, specifically—famously stirs the narrator’s memory as he observes the changes taking place within himself:
Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, has tried to follow it into my conscious mind.
Almost 25 years before, in Like Death, Maupassant had suggested this same sequence—a memory triggered by a sensory event:
Bertin felt memories awakening within him… Of varying nature, they rose so rapidly and so simultaneously that he experienced the sensation of a hand stirring the vase of his memory… He tried to find what caused this upsurge of his old life… There was always a reason for these sudden evocations, a simple and material cause, an odor perhaps, often a fragrance.
Nearing the end of the 20th century, Maupassant returns—now as a gift to David Foster Wallace. Quoting is a particular gesture of postmodernism, and Wallace’s work is rife with such seemingly gleeful appropriations. In Infinite Jest, he transforms this, from Like Death:
In the silence of the night she listened to the pendulum of her clock, which with its regular and monotonous ticking seemed to whisper ça va, ça va, ça va.
to:
I like the fans’ sound at night. Do you? It’s like somebody big far away goes like: it’sOKit’sOKit’sOKit’sOK, over and over.
Guy de Maupassant
Joyce, too, is said to have borrowed from Maupassant. While he undoubtedly named the technique known as the epiphany (steeped as he was in Catholic nomenclature), the moments of profound insight, which figure so prominently in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, are often found in the works of Maupassant and are thought to have originated in his pages. Maupassant’s extraordinary influence on 20th century literature should guarantee his work will continue to feel vital to the contemporary reader. And, indeed, it does.
In Like Death, Maupassant’s protagonist—artist Olivier Bertin—has been coddled by the aristocracy since completing his celebrated painting Cleopatra while “virtually in his teens.” He is the most sought after painter in Paris and is never at a loss for prominent sitters. In one of the many salons he frequents, he observes a lady in mourning—the Countess de Guilleroy, wife to a successful, conservative politician. After making it known that he would like her to sit for a portrait, she readily obliges and their sessions result in an affair that lasts over a decade.
As they age, they do so gracefully. Bertin has a full head of thick, white hair, and lifts weights to maintain his muscular physique; the countess, approaching middle age, possesses a “vividness that gives forty-year-old flesh the savor of ripeness…”
While Bertin’s love for the countess does not diminish, he becomes disillusioned with the “turbid and restless undertow” of la vie parisienne and struggles to find inspiration for his works. But even as the artist remains uninspired, the language and imagery of this novel do not. Benumbed by cigarettes and deliberating over his next sketch, Bertin may disregard the “swallows streaking across the space overhead like an incessant flight of arrows…,” but the reader will not fail to savor such descriptions.
Richard Howard
Bertin is only restored when the countess’ daughter, Annette—whom he has not seen in three years—returns from the country to make her debut in society. Annette resembles her mother so completely that their juxtaposition produces in his mind the impression “of two bodies created successively of the same flesh, of the same woman perpetuated, rejuvenated, having become once more what she had been.” Bertin’s affection for the daughter eventually arouses the countess’ suspicions, but he maintains his adoration is merely the product of his love for the mother. When a sudden death results in a scene of mourning similar to the one that precipitated his affair with the countess, the daughter becomes the lady in black—the one whose portrait Bertin is desperate to complete.
Maupassant weaves numerous philosophical distillations into this narrative. Often delivered in smoke filled drawing rooms, these reflections continue to remain au courant—particularly in this, our current age of mindfulness. For instance:
One refuses to understand such a man because one always attributes to others one’s own way of thinking and assumes the likelihood of behavior similar to one’s own in a similar situation.
Or, as adherents of neuro-linguistic programming might say, “perception is projection.”
Yet some of the most poignant and incisive observations are those regarding the nature of love—particularly as subjected to the influence of time. For Bertin, this experience is conflated with his increasing marginalization as an artist. The panegyrics that once greeted him in the pages of Le Figaro are now reserved for newcomers, artists whose exaggerated styles and doctrines leave him frustrated and perplexed. The countess’s daughter too furthers his sense of exile by embodying the youth that begins to flower around him and mark his impermanence:
Here was a pretty little new person, ready for chances and for love, ignored and ignoring, who sailed out of port like a new vessel, even as her mother was returning, having traversed existence, having loved!
The countess ultimately challenges Bertin’s conception of love by making a distinction between his love for her and what she can offer him. While she acknowledges that he loves her capacity to satisfy the “wants of [his] heart” without causing him any pain, he has nevertheless failed to lover her:
In me you love so many things—my beauty, which is fading, my devotion…the opinion the world has of me, the opinion I have of you in my heart—but that’s not me, that’s nothing of myself. Can’t you understand that?
As the aging lovers endure their own, private torments and attempt to reconcile themselves to the disparate effects of time and the growing sense of irrelevance it produces, the countess—having given herself completely—finally acknowledges the source of their grief in conceding, “It’s the fault of our hearts that have not grown old.”
This third translation by the NYRB imprint of a longer Maupassant work is as relevant as it is overdue. Maupassant’s inquiry into time and the nature of love will no doubt resonate with a great many, as his influence persists.
Derek M. Brown holds a B.A. in English & Comparative Literature from Columbia University and lives in New York City.
WAYWARD HEROES by Halldór Laxness translated by Philip Roughton Archipelago Books, 466 pages
reviewed by Tyson Duffy
The Slighted, the Neglected, the Sufferers of Injustice, and Sheep
Certain great writers fade from the American memory like condensation from a windowpane. The Icelandic novelist Halldor Laxness—he was once all the rage here—is one. He was considered something of an upstart, a genius, a social novelist, a fellow traveler of Upton Sinclair and Bertolt Brecht, and he often journeyed between Europe and America. A Marxist-Stalinist who was very critical of America, he was once important enough to attract the personal ire of J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, who worked hard to impoverish Laxness by attempting to confiscate profits from his U.S. book sales, which were considerable.
Laxness’ major novel, Independent People—a long, dense, and brilliantly strange book that one admiring critic playfully summed up as being a book about “Sheep”—was an enormous hit in America even by today’s standards. In the 1950s, he finally disavowed Stalinism after the pogroms in Europe and later he dabbled in Taoism and Catholicism. Another well-known novel is The Atom Station, in which he satirizes the U.S. and NATO for occupying Iceland and seeking to build a military base in Keflavik. Probably around this time (the late 1940s), politicized American readers began to turn away from the deeply reflective Nordic bard who wrote about sheep; but then, in the wake of considerable controversy, he won the Nobel Prize in 1955. He was immortalized. In his Nobel speech, he spoke gently of the influence of his grandmother and
the moral principles she instilled in me: never to harm a living creature; throughout my life, to place the poor, the humble, the meek of this world above all others; never to forget those who were slighted or neglected or who had suffered injustice, because it was they who, above all, deserved our love and respect, in Iceland or anywhere in the world.
I recount this background here because I’ve found that in light of Laxness’ political history, critics tend to brandish political interpretations of his novels as though there were no other way to approach him. Surely, politics can be as much a part of literature as it is of life. And The Atom Station was certainly an overt commentary on American postwar power projection. But Wayward Heroes, the book at hand, is not a geopolitical novel about the Cold War balance of power. I would add, somewhat timidly, that the tome could not properly be called a novel, either.
I loved it by the end—absolutely became addicted to it—but, just so you have fair warning, here’s how it begins, as if, indeed, fog returning to the window glass:
Two are the heroes from Vestfirðir that have gained the greatest renown: Þorgeir Hávarsson and Þormóður Bessason, sworn brothers, of whom, as we might expect, much is told in Ísafjarðardjúp, where they grew up, as well as in the Jökulfirðir and Hornstrandir.
The book goes on like that for 466 pages. Unpronouncible place-names, references to ancient myths unknown to anyone innocent of the PoeticEdda, and tough, straightforward, comma-spliced, driving sentences march you through the icy pastures of Scandinavia, up to Innuit country, then on to medieval England and Europe, and back around again. Laxness is an acquired taste, you could say—one that a writer no less important and highly esteemed than Jane Smiley took on with relish—but once you have the flavor rolling around in your mouth, and you come to understand its sweetness, you crave it. By the end, the nearly five hundred pages were, for me, not enough.
Halldór Laxness
The book cannot be properly thought of as a novel because it’s clear that Laxness intended it to be a retelling of one of the Icelandic myths, The Saga of the Sworn Brothers (the Fóstbrœðra saga). As the old story goes, two preteen warriors, one who as Cormac McCarthy would say has “already a taste for mindless violence” and the other a “skald” with a taste for heroic poems (called “lays”), unite in their desire for booty and triumph and take off to see the world. They are quickly split apart in a humorous situation soaked in pathos (empathetic poet Þormóður saves proud bloodthirsty Þorgeir’s life, and he is none too pleased about it), and the book goes on to recount their separate adventures.
As is tradition in the telling of a saga, the narrative often splits off to follow, say, Olaf the Stout of Vestfold for many chapters, or King Æthelred the Unready, and there is much reference to how the often magical-realist events are, of course, entirely historically accurate—don’t doubt it!—since they are taken from very, very old books (“Most sources say …” “Gotland books tell of how …” “Learned men have often noted …”). Laxness does this kind of thing with a smirk, following closely the traditional saga format while casting the patina of gentle, almost invisible satire of an educated Modern over his utilitarian sentences.
There is much that is humorous here but, like all real humor, the laughs stand foursquare on a foundation of heart-wrenching pathos. Another critic informs us that the original Icelandic title of Wayward Heroes can be translated into English more literally as, simply, “Heroica.” This title is more apt. The book, as Laxness has conceived of it, is not really about the titular heroes, but rather a commentary on so-called heroism itself; the true focus of the book is someone else altogether—that someone whom Laxness’ grandmother felt needed to be placed above all others: the peasant. The commoners. The sufferers of injustice. The sheep.
Those subjected to the jackboot of heroism are everywhere struggling against the incursions of these so-called heroes, rebelling, spitting back, loving each other, taking in the sick, and appreciating poetry. Take just one speech as evidence, given by Kolbakur, the Irish slave attached to one of the love interests of Þormóður, who, when asked by the girl why he does not cry since he is a slave, replies:
“I do not cry because heroes and skalds burned down my house; because they slew my father in this field and thrust a spear through my grandfather, just a frail old man. My grandmother was on her knees praising her beloved friend, the blessed Columbkille, when a man bashed in her skull with a blow from an ax. That is why I do not cry. Then they took my infant brother, unwound his waddling clothes, and tossed him naked between them on their spear points. My mother and my young sister, they dragged wailing to their ship. And that is why, young woman, I do not cry.”
The suffering of ordinary people represents the emotional heart of the book. All throughout it, as our heroes and their kings (whether Christian, pagan, or otherwise) wreak often funny but always bloody havoc across northern Europe, the common people emerge as not just victims but the only truly moral force in the ancient world. Toward the end, Laxness ties this tendency of the ethical rabble to the origins of Iceland as a nation:
The ragamuffin says: “It cannot be denied that when Harald Tanglehair set Norway aflame, we betook ourselves west and made ourselves Icelanders. This we did because we had no desire to associate with men who allow themselves to do battle and murder for money. We took no possessions from Norway apart from the lore of the skalds, warriors, ideals, and tales of ancient kings.”
This is, more or less, historically accurate. When Norway was at the top of the heap all those centuries ago, they waged bloody war on any innocent land lying around. The original Icelanders, the story goes, fled to a difficult, undesirable landscape of ice and rock in order to live in peace. There, while tending sheep and living under the midnight sun, they composed a range of myths and folklore in the form of poetic sagas that has become central to global literary history. So much for you warriors and your heroics. We, the People, have our skalds and our lays.
Is that a political statement? Partly. But is it geopolitical, having to do with Cold War antipathies and Marxism? No. The book’s central concern is the basically moral heart of community life, the essentially destructive force that is humanity, and the ways in which history retards our language, our connection with beauty. Religion, war, tradition, these are all ruthlessly poked fun at here. What survives, Laxness seems to say, should be poetry, art, love, brotherhood. But in the end, not even these find a place, since they have been perverted by power and bloodlust and greed. In the poignant final lines of the book, when King Olaf asks the poor poet to recite to him that great poetic song of warrior-heroes, the defeated and bedraggled skald, wandering off, replies only: “I can no longer recall that lay.”
Tyson Duffy is a writer, editor, teacher, and translator. He’s a former Fulbright Fellow and a current fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center Writers’ Institute. His most recent fiction appears in the Carolina Quarterly Review. He lives with his wife in New York City.
In most ways I am a good mother, wife, and friend, but I realize that I am a bit critical and nitpicky. Even when I make an effort not to, I find myself suggesting that my (adult) daughter’s hair needs combing, or that my husband should stop starting every sentence with “So,” or that my weight-loss buddy should do more lifting and less swimming if she wants to see results. I really am working on keeping my mouth shut. But I fail often. How can I stop myself from giving so much advice?
—Critical in Carolina
Dear C in C,
Funny question to ask an advice columnist! And, indeed, I may be the wrong person to ask because I have been told that I share your problem. But, then again, I may be just the right person if you want the empathy that comes from having walked down that same carping, officious, insufficiently-filtered road.
Let me tell you a story. I used to have an ungainly wolfish dog, whom I’ll call Peaches (although God knows why I am changing her name). Peaches had many issues, one of which was what her trainer, who had a flair for euphemism, called an underdeveloped bite-inhibition reflex. The dog did get better, but she backslid sometimes; and I remember how, on one such occasion, she lunged at my chin. I could see her look of total dismay as, mid-lunge, she remembered all the reasons she really did not want to bite me any more. My laugh as I saw that unmistakable “Oh, shit, now I’ve done it!” expression in her demented blue eyes is probably what saved us both: I doubled over and her jaw clamped shut as the bottom of her snout landed lightly on the top of my head. Peaches slunk off into the back yard and never bit me, or at least hardly ever broke the skin, again.
I have thought of that poor dog and her “Oh, shit!” face more than once while standing by helplessly, listening to myself blurt out some ill-advised suggestion or opinion. (One of my favorites: “But isn’t that more a name for a house pet than a kid?”) And, like her, I have gotten better, but I backslide. Please take the following not as some lofty expert’s gospel but as tentative, but experienced-based, suggestions from a fellow sufferer, as if I were standing before you at your local chapter of Advice-givers Anonymous.
I find that the best way to strengthen the advice-inhibition reflex is through advance planning and dry runs. What are your areas of danger? Perhaps your daughter is coming home for a visit. Visualize her with the most unkempt hair imaginable. Then put clashing orange and fuchsia streaks in it. Then practice not mentioning it. Run through scenarios where you talk to her about any number of matters unrelated to hair, or indeed to appearance. Practice how to respond if she has a fit of daughterly insecurity or wickedness and actually asks for your opinion on her hair, or her clothes, or her piercings, or her tattoos, or whatever else might get to you. Think of how happy you will be to see her. Think of the things you most love about her.
Do the same when you are about to see problematic friends or colleagues, or when you have reason to suspect that your husband is about to launch into a speech full of serial “So”s. Visualize your silence. Visualize appreciating, or at least paying attention to, the content of what your husband is saying. As for your friends, think about recent events in their lives and imagine scenarios where, when you get together, you lead with some thoughtful questions about these events and stay far away from any comments on those unfortunate dad jeans Robert is wearing or those pesky typos in that poem Lydia finally got published.
Tell yourself that almost everybody likes to be listened to, and that almost nobody likes unsolicited advice. You probably know this quite well already, or you would not have written. But keep reminding yourself. And remind yourself further that talking about a problem is not the same thing as soliciting advice. Hell, half the people I know don’t really want advice even when they come out and ask for it. I just hope that the people who write me are in a separate category.
Another tactic I have found useful, although not quite as effective as visualizing specific scenarios, is more general exercises and pep talks. Say: “I will be careful! I will hold my tongue!” And find some inhibiting behavior you think will work for you. Counting to ten—or to five, given our sped-up world—can be useful. But it really does take practice. If people could always remember to stop and count to ten before blurting out unwanted advice and opinions, they could probably always remember not to blurt them out in the first place. You have to make a habit of tricks like counting to ten, or looking at the floor, or pinching yourself. (You also have to know when to break the habit: there are business situations where rapid-fire exchanges, or just getting a word in edgewise, are more important than caution.)
Bear in mind that, where advice and opinions are concerned, it rarely matters how witty and pithy they are, or even whether the advice is sound or the opinions correct. The real issue is most often interpersonal. Are we showing respect? Are we treating people as equals? Are we observing the proper boundaries? Are we helping people maintain their sense of self-worth, including any harmless illusions they may have? Or are we sacrificing any of these in order to establish our own importance or display our own cleverness and expertise?
This is also important: never forget that there are countless implicit, even involuntary ways to convey one’s opinion. Families and close friends can be geniuses at discerning feelings you think, or would like to think, you have managed not to express. You therefore have to be very careful what you say when certain thoughts are uppermost in your mind. If you are thinking about the ineffectiveness of your weight-loss buddy’s swimming routine, this is a good time to say nothing about swimming, or weights, or anything remotely related to either. If your friend knows you well, even a remark like “I think I will only swim ten laps today!” or “I’m so pleased with my progress on the rotary torso machine!” will very likely sound to her like what you are thinking. She will hear what you probably mean—“Stop swimming so much and get into the weight room if you want to get rid of those bingo arms”— and she may be more annoyed than if you had just come out and said it.
You even have to be careful about totally nonverbal cues. If you really want to cut back on the unsolicited advice and opinions, work on your poker face. Just last week I got in big trouble with my family because of what they call The Look, which I apparently deployed after hearing something that bothered me for about three seconds, and then not even very much. I am currently doing some soul-searching about whether there are times when I actually know I am engaging in The Look and am being passive–aggressive or something, or whether I honesty never have any idea what’s going on with my facial expressions.
As for The Silence, don’t even get me started.
I suppose that the only safe way to avoid conveying unwanted opinions is to arrive at a state between neutral and enchanted about every aspect of everyone you know. In the meantime, though, you and I will have to work on our visualizations and do our advice-inhibiting calisthenics.
Peaches died young, of natural causes. Even though it was probably for the best, I still miss her. She really tried, which is all anybody can do.
Dear June,
This weird little thing happened to me the other night. I was on my third date with “Steven,” whom I met on line but who turns out to know a couple of people I went to college with. Our first date was just Starbucks. The next time we walked and talked for a couple hours. The third and most recent time we went out for dinner and a movie. We were getting along very well and I invited him up for coffee. Anyway, we talked and laughed, I showed him some old pictures, and we made out a little.
I got up to go to the bathroom and he went into the kitchen, I assumed for a coffee refill. But on my way back I saw him looking into my spice cabinet. Then he took out my bottle of rosemary and put it in his pocket.
I backed away, really glad that there was music playing to cover my retreat. There was plenty of time to fake a second entrance after Steven had closed the cabinet and returned to the couch. After a few minutes more I told him I was tired and wanted to call it a night. He looked disappointed but was very kind and pleasant, saying what a great time he’d had, kissing me goodbye, and telling me he would keep in touch.
After he left I checked, and the bottle was gone. Isn’t that strange? It was just a regular bottle of the Acme house brand, maybe an ounce.
He left me a voicemail yesterday asking when we should get together again.
How weird is that? And what should I do? I was starting to like Steven, but this seems kind of creepy.
—Weirded Out in West Orange
Dear Wo,
It seems kind of creepy to me, too. And definitely weird. If he had just taken a pocket pack of Kleenex, or maybe a candy bar, you could reasonably decide that he is a bit thoughtless and rude, but not (depending on the nature and extent of the candy bar in question) necessarily undatable. If he had lifted a pair of gold earrings, you would conclude that he was a thief, stop seeing him, and possibly inform the police. But pocketing one of your spices? This, too, probably makes him undatable, since it points to some kind of abnormality—a compulsion, maybe, or a fetish, or a basic lack of understanding or respect for other people.
You are still at the very start of the dating process. I would advise you to get out now. Best, I think, would be to call things off over the phone. A phone call is kinder (and less permanent!) than a text or email; but safer and easier to terminate, and less of a big deal, than an in-person meeting. If the thought of a live conversation is too unpleasant, go ahead and text. And if, for some reason, you want to talk to him in person, be sure to do so in a neutral public place.
Do you feel the need to ask him about the rosemary? I was going to advise you to avoid an unnecessary argument by just letting Steven’s petty theft go, and making the same “you’re wonderful, but this just isn’t working” speech you would have made if he had never pocketed the rosemary. But then a few things occurred to me. One: Although you don’t have a clear duty to do so, it would be kind to let this guy know that what he did is troubling, not to mention really off-putting, and that he should get help. Two: If you are like me, you will spend more time than it’s worth wondering about it if you never ask for an explanation. Three: It is conceivable, although highly unlikely , that he may actually have an explanation. The only acceptable one I can think of is that there was some misunderstanding. Maybe you will you ask him why he took your rosemary and he will say, in total and credible surprise, that when he heard you coming into the room the first time he called out to you to ask if he could borrow some for a pork roast and was sure you heard him and said yes, but that must have just been the Nina Simone he heard—the music was loud and his back was turned. I just might believe that. But I doubt that he will say any such thing. It is much more likely that he will deny that he took the rosemary (dump him!). Or he may say that he was going to ask if he could borrow it and simply forgot to tell you and is SOOOOOO embarrassed (I do not believe that: unless you know more than I do, dump him!). Or he may confess that he has some sort of problem like kleptomania, or the need to take some small trophy object from a romantic prospect, and is making significant progress in therapy (listen sympathetically, but dump him nevertheless).
Take my sage advice and be very careful.
Cleaver’s in-house advice columnist opines on matters punctuational, interpersonal, and philosophical, spinning wit and literary wisdom in response to your ethical quandaries. Write to her at [email protected]. Find more columns by June in her attic.
So many people I know get depressed in the winter. Some of them take medicine, and some use special lamps to mimic sunlight. Although I do not especially like being cold, or walking home in the dark, winter has never really bothered me. But for the last few years I have been feeling sad and restless and wondering what it all means and so on as soon as winter ends and spring comes around. I get all full of longing and I keep asking myself why, with the world so beautiful—I have a fellowship at a place where the birds twitter and the fruit trees blossom and the air is fragrant, the whole bit—I feel so antsy and blue. What do you think? Is it really true what they say about April being the cruelest month?
—Wondering near Williamsburg
Dear Wondering,
By “they” I assume you mean T.S. Eliot who, in 1922, began ‘The Waste Land” like this:
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
It would be very cool if you also meant to refer to Edna St. Vincent Millay who, a year earlier, began her poem “Spring”:
To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
(I sometimes wonder whether ol’ T.S. didn’t see her poem and just decide to run with it, while agreeing with the New Critics that ol’ Edna was not even worth including in their anthologies and lists. But perhaps the election has made me bitter. Besides, even if his opening salvo may not be all that original, his line breaks are the best in the business. Now back to your question.)
Both poets were writing just after a terrible war, and both have a bone to pick with April because the sense of hope and renewal it gives is inadequate and misleading in a world laid waste or, speaking more broadly, a world where loss and death are inevitable. As Millay says, spring with its beauty is not (or is no longer) enough. As Elliot adds, it can just tantalize and taunt and expose us, whereas winter, as he later says, “kept us warm.”
Yes, April can be the cruelest month to some people. Not all people, certainly: not busy gardeners, baseball fanatics, people with S.A.D., homeless vets, active kids, unreflective people, or families with terrible heating bills. But the early spring can be a terrible time for some people who are older, or nostalgic, or bereaved, or lonely.
And it has been my experience that the springtime can also be hard on the poets, dreamers, and academics among us. Maybe there is some correlation between choosing academic, literary, or speculative pursuits and a tendency towards springtime melancholy. I have no idea why this would be, except perhaps that the world’s annual renewal may seem more empty and ironic to people who make a habit of thinking about matters existential, especially about how nature as a whole may remake itself every year but all individual living things age and die. (If so, I wonder which comes first, the existential quandaries or the life choice?)
I have also found, although my evidence here is highly anecdotal, that people who think and operate more in terms of the academic than the natural calendar may have more emotional dissonance in springtime. For many students, academics, and parents (and some people, like me, for whom old associations die hard) the world begins at the end of summer, with new projects and schools and courses and bills and backpacks and sublets—and an invigorating autumn tang in the air. This is when we start anew and, reassuringly, until we pass middle age the world in autumn actually seems a bit older, a bit farther along, than we are. But in spring, when the lovers are trysting and the sheep are cavorting and the lark’s on the thorn, and fragile flowers are reaching and passing their single perfect moment, we are trying to wrap things up at school, or getting ready for an onslaught of young people in our houses, and feeling stressed and tired, and envying all those lissome kids applying to be lifeguards or staying out at clubs until three. Our year is old, and the young world seems to be passing us by. Just a thought.
But let’s return to the practical side of things. For starters, how sad are you? And how old are you? If you are youngish (as your having a fellowship implies) and not so much deeply unhappy as full of inexpressible longing, you may just have what used to be called spring fever. You say you are restless. If that means you are feeling a rush of energy you don’t know what to do with, especially if you think about love or sex a lot, maybe you are simply the educated human version of a healthy young animal in the springtime! In that case, you should consider getting outside and moving a lot, always a good idea anyway. And, if your fellowship duties allow, follow your restless heart and devote some time to your love and sex life, whatever that may be.
On the other hand, if you feel a deep sadness, and if your restlessness feels more like anxiety than any kind of romantic or sexual longing—and especially if you feel old, jaded, or tired—my totally unprofessional diagnosis would be not so much spring fever as plain old depression: a kind of seasonal affective disorder, as I see it, just not caused by the usual season.
Whatever your age and circumstances, if you feel sad for weeks at a time you should try getting some help. Call your doctor, a therapist, or a counselor at your institution. You should also seek help and advice if you do not enjoy your life the way you usually do, or cannot do your work, or feel lonely.
Although I would never advise against reading poetry, and especially not during National Poetry Month, I do caution you not to read too much of the lugubrious kind until at least July, when you will probably be too busy cursing the heat to worry about mixing memory and desire.
Dear June,
I visit my grandmother in her nursing home every week or so. I don’t mind doing it: it gives my mom a break, and I love Nana and owe her a great deal. Besides, she is fun. She is getting frail and does not go out much, but we love to watch old movies together, and sometimes she and my musician boyfriend sing standards and doo-wop songs together at the home’s piano.
The problem is her horrible roommate, Mrs. Addisone. Mrs. Addisone, as she will remind you within the first five minutes of any conversation, will be 97 years old this coming June. Aside from a few minor short-term memory issues she seems to be sharp as a tack. Especially her tongue. I was going to say that she has no filter, but the more time I spend with her, the more I think that the mean, hurtful things she says are quite deliberate and that she actually puts quite a lot of work into them. Last week she told me that she was sorry my mom was too lazy to come visit and had to send me, because Nana was always disappointed when I took her daughter’s place. This didn’t really bother me, because I know my Nana likes to see me. But another time Mrs. Addisone asked me whether I ever resented my sisters because they are so much smarter than I am. This hit home: I am adopted, and my younger sisters (both biological) got into much better colleges than I did. I love them both, and nobody in my family has ever done anything to make me feel less capable or less valued than my sisters. But you know how it is.
There are plenty more examples I can give you, but one of her more recent digs pretty much sums things up. Enrique, my boyfriend, came into the home with me a couple Saturdays ago. He had just dug up some Nelson Riddle arrangements for piano and had transposed some of them down so Nana could do them justice with what’s left of her voice, and we were happily chatting about it as we came into Nana’s room. I guess I had my guard down, because when Mrs. Addisone smiled at us and asked us to come over and stand where she could see us I assumed she had some benign or at least neutral purpose. Instead she just smiled at us—she always smiles when she delivers one of her zingers—and said: “Look at you two! Why did one of you get all the weight?”
Enrique—who, as I am sure you have guessed, is as slender as I am zaftig—just rolled his eyes and, as we were wheeling Nana out to the room where the piano is, gave my butt a sweet little pat, as if to say that he knew exactly why I got all that weight. Even so, I felt about twenty pounds heavier and a lot less desirable for days afterwards.
So mostly I just try to slink past Mrs. Addisone’s bed and draw the divider curtain when I come into Nana’s room. But what I would like to do is confront Mrs. Addisone, or at least talk back to her when she says one of the rotten things she says. My mom insists that I should just overlook it—that anybody that old should get a pass and be able to say what they want. What do you think?
—Needled near Newark
Dear NnN,
I disagree with your mom that old age alone should give Mrs. Addisone a bye. If she had a cognitive or emotional impairment that made it impossible for her to control her impulses or her venom, I would feel differently. But it sounds as if she is basically just a spiteful old lady. I realize that being isolated, dependent, and very old is no picnic. In such cases it is great to be compassionate. But it is not necessary to be a doormat. As you describe her conduct, it sounds as if she knows what she is doing, and there is no good reason why she should have a license to be mean-spirited and nasty to other people based solely on her advanced age.
The best thing to do would be to ignore the old bat’s comments: laugh them off, and then erase them from your memory and your psyche. But it appears that you can’t manage to do that—which is totally understandable, since she seems to have a real gift for ferreting out people’s insecurities and finding ways to play on them.
Since you can’t simply ignore and forget Mrs. A’s jabs, getting her to shut up, or at least tone it down, would be a good idea. I agree, therefore, that you should confront her. The real question is whether doing so will help. If, for example, the next time she lets loose you reply by saying something like “Why do you say such mean and spiteful things?” she may just shrug her shoulders and change not a whit. She may even be delighted that she has so obviously gotten your goat, and this might actually spur her to more frequent and even nastier snipes.
Still, it might work—she might be one of those bullies who caves in at the first sign of resistance—and I think it is worth a try.
Or she might respond by going all innocent, or all cute-old-lady. If so, at least she will have been warned that you know what she is up to. And she may be just a little bit afraid to continue sniping at you once she realizes that you are going to call her on it when she does.
I suppose she might also become sincerely upset—perhaps nobody has seriously objected to her conduct for years—and cry, and press the buzzer for the nurse. If she does, that’s fine.
Your letter left me with a question: does Mrs. Addisone seem to focus on you, or is she equally mean to other people? I am thinking in particular of your grandmother. Have you ever seen Mrs. A. go after her? Have you ever talked to Nana about it? Mrs. A. may not have the inclination or the nerve to attack Nana, or Nana may not care if she does. But if there is a problem, consider talking to your mother and grandmother about changing rooms or taking some other action. Nana needs to be happy and relaxed, or her vocal styling may suffer.
Cleaver’s in-house advice columnist opines on matters punctuational, interpersonal, and philosophical, spinning wit and literary wisdom in response to your ethical quandaries. Write to her at [email protected]. Find more columns by June in her attic.
When she arrived, the sun turned black
lead-rugged upon my ragged eyes
that marked the breast-pump’s watchful click.
But as she lay upon my chest
each night, the transcendental glow
the phosphor clock, the bobbing head
bred warmth beneath the surface rust.
America, let me tell you this
your hope that languished in the reeds
can still be salvaged, let her rest,
wide-cheeked upon your weary breast. And when she does
sprout legs, your conscience,
steady in
the slurry of this brash lagoon
heave her upwards, like a dove
to soar across the saline moon.
Jo-Ella Sarich has practiced as a lawyer for a number of years, recently returning to poetry after a long hiatus. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Verse News, Quarterly Review, The Galway Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, takahē magazine and the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2017.
I am a senior in high school and have been dating the same boy, Allston (fake name! duh!) for over three years. We first told each other we loved each other when we were just starting tenth grade and we promised to be faithful to each other. We started having sex when we were fifteen. There were even some pregnancy scares before I started being more careful. We have been through a lot together.
The problem is that I just got into my dream school, with great financial aid. Allston was accepted at some good colleges, but none of them are within 500 miles of my dream school. The other problem is that I am not even sure I want to stay with Allston. I still love him, I guess, but there are lots of days when I would just as soon not see him. I get bored and then I feel guilty.
What should I do? The world seems like such a mean dishonest place. Most men treat women like pieces of meat. And here I am with a kind, smart, respectful boy I know I can trust, and part of me just wants to leave him and break all my promises and go off to Massachusetts. There are two schools we both got into that would give me a decent education. But part of me thinks that even if I went to the same school as Allston I might want to date somebody else. I already sometimes do want to, actually. But isn’t life supposed to involve making sacrifices for a larger good?
—Indecisive in Indianapolis
Dear Indy,
You should go to your dream school.
I would advise this even if you had not mentioned any reservations about your feelings for Allston. It sounds as if you two have had a loving and meaningful relationship, but you are still very young. In our society, at least, you are barely into your adolescence, with many years ahead for learning and exploration. There is every reason not to limit your educational or personal choices at this point. This is important for all young people, but especially for young women who, all too often, have been culturally conditioned to choose romance, safety, and the wishes of others over challenge and opportunity. The chance to go to the college of your dreams may be one of the greatest opportunities life offers you. Take it.
Besides, you do have some serious reservations about Allston. You “guess” you love him, but you admit that you get bored sometimes, think about dating other people, and welcome time alone more than you used to. These are all good reasons for considering a breakup even without the college-choice issue. Putting a few hundred miles between you may be just what you both need so that you can move on.
It would be shortsighted tin the extreme to opt for a school you find merely “decent” in hopes of preserving a relationship you are already starting to find unsatisfactory. You would very likely end up being not just unhappy with Allston but also disappointed by Decent U and understandably resentful at having sacrificed your dream.
You mention two overarching reasons for staying with Allston. One is that he is a good, respectful, intelligent man in a world where men like that are hard to come by. This may be true, and you should certainly be careful where you give your heart, to say nothing of how closely you watch your drink glasses at bars and parties, in the years ahead. Even so, most of us have managed to go out there and find a pool of good guys from which to choose and be chosen at various points in our lives. Besides, if you are already limiting your educational choices, and trying to talk yourself into staying in a relationship that no longer seems to fulfill you, because of some fear that you will never find a good man again, the jerks have already won. I would also just throw out there that you probably had excellent reasons for shooting for your dream school—perhaps you were dreaming that going there would satisfy your intellectual curiosity, prepare you for your chosen career or guide you in choosing one, introduce you to all kinds of new people, and help you become independent and self-confident. These are the goals you should keep in mind when making your college choice—and, as a collateral benefit, they will make you a stronger, savvier, more independent woman who will know how to recognize the good men and fend off the bad ones.
But what about duty, the second reason you gave for staying with Allston and giving up Dream U? Yes, there certainly are promises we should keep and relationships we should preserve even when times are hard or, often worse, boring. And there are certainly duties that should win out over our strong preferences, even college or career preferences. I understand your concern about being faithful to Allston, and you sound like a lovely young woman for caring about his feelings, honoring your long (for high school) relationship, and wanting to keep your word.
I do not think, though—and I doubt that anybody else, with the possible exception of Allston and perhaps a few of your more overwrought friends, would think—that your promises and duties to Allston are anywhere near this level. You were, and are, simply too young and inexperienced to be bound either by the vows you made or the time you’ve spent dating.
If it had so happened that you still found Allston endlessly fascinating and fulfilling, things might be different. But you do not, and that is fine. In fact, it may be better. This is your time to experiment and grow. If you look around you, you will see how few people end up building a life with their first love. Most people will tell you that they are very glad they moved on and eventually settled on someone better suited to them (or on a happy single life), and equally glad that they had some variety and fun along the way.
While we are still on the topic of duty, you should think about what you do owe Allston: honesty. Your boredom and restlessness do not sound like temporary blips on your romantic radar while you are stressed about deciding which college to choose. They sound like the way a person feels when she is falling out of love. You will not be doing Allston any favors if you stay with him, and even follow him to college, out of a sense of “sacrificing for some greater good.” No healthy eighteen-year-old man wants to be an object of duty whose girlfriend sees not just giving up on her first-choice college, but also dating him exclusively, as sacrifices. He will pick up on this, if he hasn’t started to already.
Talk to Allston. Tell him you plan to go to Dream U, and that you think your choice makes this a good time to talk about your relationship. The two of you may want to hold on to some part of it for now—go to Prom together, maybe, or date exclusively until you both leave for college, then see how it goes after that. Or one or both of you may prefer a clean break. Whatever happens, I suspect that you will not be together this time next year (except as loving exes, if you are lucky).
Who knows what the future, even the distant future, may bring? You may transfer to Decent U two years from now after falling back in love, although I very much doubt it. Or you may get back together with Allston after trading photos of the grandkids at the Nobel awards in 2057. Or not. In the meantime, I hope you have a fantastic, guilt-free college experience, with plenty of loving but even more learning. Go Dream U!
Dear June,
I am a faculty member at a small liberal arts college in the Northeast. I have a student I’ll call Joe, who has taken several classes with me, and has asked me for letters of recommendation many times. Each time I have written him a positive letter. He is not one of the best students I’ve ever had, but he is a good writer and has other strengths that I have emphasized in the letters.
But last week he did something that took me by surprise. My class had an assignment that involved teaching a short lesson on a topic they are researching for their final project to students who live in a nearby underserved public school. This assignment was clearly on the syllabus from day 1, although it is not weighted heavily towards the final grade. Almost everyone in the class was excited about the project and put a lot of effort into it. But Joe did almost no preparation. When he showed me what he was planning to present, I realized he needed help and asked a more advanced student to assist him. He did not accept the help but instead told her that he resented the assignment, which he thought of as “working for free.” The more advanced student ended up taking over and doing almost the entire presentation herself. At the end of the presentation, I asked Joe in private why he had not done more of the teaching. He basically repeated what he had told my advanced student, saying that he had come to college to learn, not to be an unpaid instructor for someone else’s students.
Today he emailed to ask me for another letter of recommendation, this time for a civic-minded internship that involves working in the city. He did not address the incident in class, but simply said, “Since you’ve written for me before, I think you would be able to write me a good recommendation.”
I have not yet responded. I thought about declining and explaining why. But if I do that he will surely give me negative course evaluations. I am untenured, and course evaluations are weighted heavily at my college.
What should I do?
—Undecided in an Undisclosed Location
Dear U in a U,
I am appalled by your student’s behavior. You had made this requirement clear on the syllabus: his unilateral decision to virtually ignore it, for his own openly selfish reason, shows a total disregard for your authority and pedagogical methods. (Perhaps it has never occurred to the little snot that teaching, even teaching “underserved” kids, can be a learning experience, even for overserved kids.)
His conduct—or, at least, his assuming that he could get away with it—is also unfair to his fellow students, who did pitch in for that “unpaid work,” and especially to the advanced student who did his assignment for him.
Worst of all is his ungenerous, disrespectful attitude toward the students he was supposed to teach. He seems to have a healthy ego, so I assume he believed that a carefully-prepared lesson from him would have been of some value to them. But apparently he cared more about his own precious time than their well-being.
Course-evaluations and their repercussions aside, I believe that you should teach this kid a lesson, in both the kind and the not-so-kind senses of the term. Unless there has been some gross misunderstanding, Joe has plenty to learn about humility, community, and respect for others. No decent liberal arts college should let him graduate from it without at least trying to get through to him before unleashing him on the world. So yes, you should try to explain to him why his conduct was unacceptable and why he might, therefore, want to seek a recommendation elsewhere. It’s conceivable that he might have some explanation for his behavior that would make it more understandable, although I am hard pressed to come up with one. (Covering for scars and performance anxiety because of childhood bullying? Covering for being unprepared because of some recent family tragedy? Bizarre expression of solidarity with striking TAs?) Nor would I lay a heavy bet on his having some basic change of heart as a result of your explanations, or your declining to recommend him. But perhaps you could nudge his heart a little in the right direction, or at least let him know that—in some circles, anyway—entitled, selfish defiance can actually have consequences.
If I were you—and, again, course-evaluation and tenure issues aside—and if it is not already too late, I would also make sure that his grade reflects his handling of the teaching requirement, and explain why. I would certainly give him a very low grade for that one assignment; and if your school rules permit it I would lower his grade further for the separate offense of explicitly refusing to do assigned work on the syllabus, to the detriment of the class as a whole and the community. This seems to me a separate category from simply doing poor work, less serious but similar in some ways to plagiarism: if somebody brazenly and knowingly plagiarizes an assignment that only counts for 10% of the grade, this usually doesn’t—and certainly shouldn’t—mean that the grade simply gets lowered by 10%.
But you are worried about those course evaluations. Not having to survive in the meat-grinder of Academe myself, I do not want to pass judgment. I will say, though, that this strikes me as a very clear case, one where you should take a stand if you are ever going to: Joe flouted your authority, ignored the requirements of the syllabus, and behaved selfishly and without any sense of civic responsibility. Yet you have not even asked me about his grade, but only whether you should actually recommend him—not one of your best students in any case—for a “civic-minded” internship in the city when has already shown indifference, at best, to the type of community I assume he is being asked to serve.
I have to ask you: if course evaluations are so important to your institution, does anybody there ever give mediocre grades, or refuse to write a recommendation? Don’t the senior faculty and administration have any sense of how disgruntled students tend to react? And don’t they know how to discount outlier evaluations? Is there nobody you can talk to about the situation, for protection if not real guidance? But perhaps I am missing the point here by naively assuming that anyone in your department will care whether your course evaluations are fair and accurate, as opposed to whether they are likely to draw more applications and donations to your institution.
If you decide that it is just not worth the risk of antagonizing Joe by assessing him honestly and telling him why, this certainly does not speak well for your college. Again, I reserve judgment on how it reflects on you. Depending on circumstances I don’t know anything about, you may quite reasonably feel that you will be not only safer, but also more able to do good, by avoiding a confrontation here. I realize that I am dodging the specific question you asked me; but I hesitate to take a hard stance if there is a real risk that listening to me might jeopardize your job. I suspect that, in your place, I would decline Joe’s request and talk to him about it; but, then again, I am a tenured agony aunt and can say whatever I want with few if any repercussions.
If you do go ahead and write the recommendation, you will have to consider what to put in it. I wonder to what extent your agreeing to write a recommendation implies that you will write a glowing recommendation. I have found that, except in cases where recommendations from a particular person are mandatory (school guidance counselors, thesis advisors, direct supervisors), it is misleading to agree to serve as a reference or write a letter of recommendation for someone you do not, in fact, plan to recommend. But what about damning with faint praise? Given everything you have told me, I do not see any ethical problem with writing a recommendation that, while honest about Joe’s strengths, is less enthusiastic than your previous ones. In fact, I kind of hope you do. The city where he’s applying deserves no less. Besides, taking time out of your busy schedule, just so you can bend over backwards trying to make this kid look good, sounds like unpaid work to me.
Cleaver’s in-house advice columnist opines on matters punctuational, interpersonal, and philosophical, spinning wit and literary wisdom in response to your ethical quandaries. Write to her at [email protected]. Find more columns by June in her attic.
The year is 2017, and it is still young. Yet already it has managed to make me very concerned about how it will turn out as it grows older.
At present, I’m staying with my aunt Rebecca in her house in San Francisco, California, under the wing of her charity. The back of the drought has been broken by a glut of rain. Every night Rebecca watches the news. She watches the news of her own will and choosing, and I am simply there for it, experiencing its noise and light because I am in the same room while it plays. Rebecca is an American, by her own identification, and lives in America. I am simply here in it, situated physically in this spot on the earth, borrowing space in other people’s lives.
The news is a series of shocks interspersed with trivialities.
A forecaster states, “Strange and exuberant bouts of unnatural weather lash the nation.”
And I think: this is what it will be like now, a series of binges and purges.
A newscaster reads, “Xenophobia and lies in the early days of the Trump administration.”
And I think: this is what it will be like now, a series of descending rungs into dystopia.
Then they discuss a new smartphone that is spontaneously combusting.
When I want to escape the noise and light, I go to the front parlor and sit by the window, looking out onto the street. School children weighted with backpacks go by. I watch them, and I write.
I imagine that this document will be found later by generations who are digging through the wreckage trying to figure out what happened. They will be humans, but different from me: mutated by waste and radioactivity; something strange and new. Thinking of this brings me hope and comfort. Humanity should be doing something new. But, all they will learn from my writing is that I was small, powerless, and lost.
I don’t know how to feel afraid for myself. The fear that I manage to feel is disembodied, like pain in an anesthetized body part. I’ve never had any hard evidence that I’m a real person, a person who exists outside of rooms where televisions play, a person who can be affected by the things out there. But, I do feel afraid for other people. I feel afraid for the people out there; the people on the TV screen during Rebecca’s news hour.
In the last segment, images played of the protests at San Francisco International Airport. There were frightened people speaking into the cameras, lamenting the sudden barrier that has dropped between them and their loved ones overseas. I stood paralyzed, first because of the sight of them, and then because of an overwhelming sense of despair at the complete absence of will in my body to move, to act, even now.
I wish people would stop saying “I can’t believe this is happening here, in the US, in 2017.” As if this is not the same place, the same country in which they live and have lived, that has contained this reality since its birth. As if this period in U.S. history arrived sans a series of traceable steps. Then I question, am I one of those shocked people who believed that modern America was a land of moral superiority, where society is a forever-ascending staircase of progress towards… what? Liberty? Did I believe that the future was a better place and we were living the future today? Did I think that love and enlightenment could be a feature of the new global monoculture?
I move into the kitchen and begin following the images on the TV screen in glances. Rebecca and I buzz around each other, making our dinners. Here I am then, watching the news, living in America, existing as an American. The news becomes a part of my nightly routine, just like Rebecca.
Maybe this is the time she and I will look back on as when everything changed, but right now everything remains the same. Right now, we are just living our lives, watching other lives in glances, hearing things from far away but feeling them only peripherally. We are not the dry aquifers or the farmers. We will not be deported. We make our dinners and then we eat them. Still I do not believe anything will really happen, because I can’t imagine the change. Even when the change is occurring still I cannot imagine it.
If I could offer the mutated humans of the future one thought, it would be that we are gone because we let circumstances advance until they were upon us, until they were irreversible; because we did not want to step away from our ordinary lives long enough even to preserve them, to abandon our projects and our routines, even when we saw a looming threat to them in the distance. We did not want to experience change, and so inevitably change came to us.
There is one good piece of news, though: I’m not pregnant. So, I made an appointment at Planned Parenthood to get an IUD implanted while that is still an option. I have to enjoy as much fear-free sex as I can before my ovaries become property of the state.
Arden Sawyer is a genderless artist from Philly who utilizes the pronouns of they or them. They are an art student working on their BFA at Rhode Island School of design. They are currently taking time off of school to travel and pursue their writing.
I am in a writers’ workshop—some fiction, mostly poets—with a total membership of twelve, nine or ten of whom usually show up for our biweekly meetings. We have been meeting, with just a few changes in membership as people come to town, or leave town, or lose interest, for almost ten years now.
One of our members, a founding member actually, has been creating problems for us because she almost always monopolizes the conversation. Ivy, as I will call her, is a wonderful poet and a good critic, but she loves to be the one who speaks first and she is forever interrupting people.
Until recently nobody ever did much about it except roll their eyes and occasionally makes some mild remark like “if I can get a word in edgewise, Ivy.” But, when Ivy didn’t show up for a meeting this past January (come to think of it, she almost never misses a meeting), one person ventured to say that it was kind of restful not having her around setting the terms of the discussion for everybody else. Then the floodgates opened and we were all trashing her and saying that something needed to be done.
The result was a letter, which we wrote right then, and eight of the nine of us who were there signed—everybody except a narrative poet named James, who is probably Ivy’s best friend in the group and also definitely the second most aggressive and talkative. He said that he pretty much agreed with us but did not like the idea of ganging up on her.
The letter was pretty gentle, I thought. It just said that we had all been talking at the meeting and agreed that, although we really appreciated her writing and her critiques, we were writing to ask her if she could let other people start the critiques, stop interrupting people, and try not to monopolize the conversation. We closed by saying that this had been a hard letter to write, but that we did it out of our concern for the health of the group.
We never heard back, and Ivy did not show up at our next two meetings, which ended up being kind of lackluster and subdued. Finally we deputized James to call her and see how she was doing. He reported back last week that she has decided to quit the group, and that she cried and seemed utterly devastated.
What should we do?
—Second Thoughts in South Toms River
Dear SecTho,
Man, you poets are a harsh crowd.
I am not sure what you should do. That depends on what you want. Do you want Ivy to rejoin the group? Do you want to make her feel a little better? Do you want to feel better about yourselves, with some help from me?
If what you’re after is some reassurance from me that this letter had to be written, so that you can all feel less morally queasy, I am not the right agony aunt for you. On the whole, I am with James on this one. There are so many better ways of telling a prolix poet that she has overstepped the bounds of workshop decorum than sending a formal joint message—and letters do tend to seem formal these days—explaining how all of you had gotten together and discussed her behind her back, leading you to decide with near-unanimity that she was such a nuisance she needed to be sent a cease-and-desist notice. My own cheeks burn at the very thought of receiving such a letter from a group I co-founded, and felt safe in, and thought I had been more-or-less benevolently presiding over for ten years. Are you all so passive-aggressive that none of you could just have said “let’s have a rule: no interruptions” or “how about everybody gets to speak for five minutes” or “let’s have a rotating facilitator” or “let’s take turns starting the critique. Amy?” You could even have invested in an egg-timer or one of those pseudo-Native sticks I have heard tell of, that powerful men pass around at campfires, remaining silently inebriated until it is passed to them. In sum, you could have started out with some general rules and, if that didn’t work, one or more of you could have at least tried talking to her.
Too late now, of course. But do you, or does the group, want to try to undo some of the harm the letter seems to have caused? This may not be easy. For one thing, she may not want to face any of you. If she does, though, one of you, or perhaps one of you plus James, could take her out for lunch or coffee. But then what would you say if you did? Telling her that the group feels simply awful about how upset you made her might just make matters worse: she would then have to think not only of being resented, but also of being pitied, behind her back, not to mention having been reported on by James.
If you want to make amends, I would tell her that you are sorry, that you realize now that a group letter was the wrong way to go, and—much more important to her bruised ego and sense of trust—that you have all been missing her insightful, lively criticism and her fine poetry, and that you realize now that the whole group, not just Ivy, needs to develop habits and set rules so that everyone contributes and nobody either hangs back or takes over. You might even commiserate, saying how hard it can be for the quickest, most insightful, and most creative people to keep silent and let other workshoppers muddle wrongheadedly or tritely along.
I have been writing without differentiating between the singular and plural “you.” And it is true that messages from the group are probably what Ivy needs and wants most right now, since it was the group as a whole who wrote the upsetting letter. I nevertheless think that, when you sense that the time is right, you should try to speak to Ivy as yourself, not part of the group. If the conversation goes well and you both feel like being explicit, you and Ivy will be able to express what you, as individuals and not part of the workshop mob, think about each other and about what’s best for the group. But if all you end up talking about is Rilke or language poetry or James’s new girlfriend, you will at least have started the process of smoothing things over.
Of course, if you and the group do a good job cheering and mollifying Ivy, she will very likely agree to rejoin the group. Is that what you and the workshop want? (Ever-quixotic, I would give it a try, but not before investing in an egg-timer, a feathered stick, and some rules.) If the workshop does not want her to return, you all may prefer to wait a while longer before any of you gets together with her. In this case, a letter—from you, personally—to the effect that you’re sorry she outgrew the group, and just became too sophisticated a poet and critic for the rest of you, would be sweet.
Dear June,
My parents, who retired a few years ago and are living on a very modest pension and Social Security, have a little dog they adore. It turns out that he needs life-saving surgery they cannot possibly afford. My husband and I, on the other hand, can easily afford it. He is a fancy accountant, and I am a not-so-fancy lawyer who nevertheless brings in about four times what my folks do these days.
My parents are very proud. So I called the vet and asked her if I could pay for most of the surgery—it is about $6000—and have her tell my parents that she’d found a way to do a simpler procedure for, say, $500. The vet thought that this was a great idea. But my husband (let’s call him Chip, with Spanish pronunciation) says that he wants no part of this, that $6000 is a ridiculous amount to pay for a dog and that, in any case, it is disrespectful to my parents to fool them in this way. What should I do? By the way, I would not have any real problem paying the vet off at, say $500/month without anyone’s knowing, including my husband. Hell, I could skim that off ATM withdrawals and cash-backs from Whole Foods if I made some minor adjustments in areas like salmon and artisanal cosmetics. My husband has so little interest in the dog that I doubt he will ask any questions if little Fala fails to die. And the vet is more than happy to collude with me in a system of monthly cash-only payments
I am tempted to lie to both my husband and my folks. Would that be wrong of me?
—Soft in Sellersville
Dear SiS,
I don’t suppose that your $5500 (more or less) would otherwise go to an even worthier cause, like sick children? If not—and it sounds as if the only people who would lose out here are purveyors of fish and outer beauty—I am totally fine with your arrangement. Morally, that is. I see no problem at all in doing an end run around Chip. I rarely advocate misleading one’s spouse but, where the spouse in question is trying to equate kindness and generosity with disrespect so he can save a tiny fraction of his family income, it seems to me that a little factual adjustment is permissible, and may actually be morally obligatory.
My real problem is the complexity of the scheme. I advise you to tell no one about it, not even your sister or your best friend. Never bring the dog up with Chip, and have an offhand, lighthearted answer ready if he somehow does start to wonder why Fala is still around, and asks questions. It would be a shame if your parents found out about your scheme and felt embarrassed, or if Chip found out and helped them feel that way, to say nothing of how mad he might get at you. Of course, even then your parents would probably be happier than if they had lost their dog, and you would still be entitled to a warm inner glow for having saved a living creature (several, if you count the salmon).
This is not something you asked me about, so I’ll keep it short: are you and Chip otherwise okay? Does he have lots and lots of sterling qualities that outweigh the way he responded to your parents’ sick dog? Do the two of you respect each other? Have you felt the need to resort to subterfuge on other occasions?
Good luck to you, and I hope the simpler procedure, wink wink, is a total success
Cleaver’s in-house advice columnist opines on matters punctuational, interpersonal, and philosophical, spinning wit and literary wisdom in response to your ethical quandaries. Write to her at [email protected]. Find more columns by June in her attic.
I’m a prairie mongrel, not a signal
I’m a tethered satellite, never floating away
I’m Florida, I’m underperforming
I’m drinking refined,
not eating my white valley
I’m neck and neck
I’m not anymore
I’m a cliché, not a rishi
I’m the boy crying, I forgive him
I’m a raving bitch
not the interpreter screaming, I love you
I’m the peril, not the alertness
I’m trading post spawn, not the morning
flicker sparking at the forest’s edge
I’m an overland cannibal
not the mansion on the hill
I’m in agreement with this whiskey
I’m not arguing
I’m reaching through the screen to grab
a stone sphere and roll it in my hands
finding lips, a face
I’m the one who saw the eye
peeking through the curtains
not the antenna on the mountain
I’m the medium
I’m the next caller
not the rusted drum that won’t hold
I’m the next wet planet
not space junk, never floating away
I’m sentient, not repentant
I’m Galileo, a good name for a car…
I’m the butcher, not the breaker
flipping, I’m not badly hurt
I’m the hand reaching into the boat
sucking water, not the sands of Athens
I’m a margin, not a marble head
I’m climbing the panhandle
I’m 12:31 not 2:39
I’m a house of pancakes,
not a locked door
I’m the rose garden,
not the face in our hands
Jenny (Seymore) Montgomery has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Barrow Street, Tar River, CALYX, Unsplendid, the New York Times, Gathering of the Tribes, and the Cairo Times. Her poetry installations have been shown at galleries in Montana and Washington. She was educated at the Evergreen State College and Columbia University. She resides in Missoula, where she owns a distillery with her husband, Ryan.
HOW WE SPEAK TO ONE ANOTHER: AN ESSAY DAILY READER edited by Ander Monson & Craig Reinbold Coffee House Press, 309 pages
reviewed by David Grandouiller
The oldest post on the Essay Daily blog is from Monday, January 18th, 2010, by Ander Monson, who taught at the University of Arizona and teaches there now. It’s a list of essays included in the Indiana Review 31.2:
Claire Dunnington, “Green Eggs and Therapy”
Joan Cusack Handler, “Beanstalk”
Jen Percy, “The Usual Spots”
Tom Fleischmann, “On Alticorns”
The next day—Tuesday—there are six posts, all by Monson, and some of them are lists. One of them is titled, “A word about the space,” which he defines as “a collaborative space to talk about some of the better (by which I mean more interesting) essays to appear in the literary journals that publish the majority of what we like to refer to as creative nonfiction, or literary nonfiction.”
“If you’d like to talk,” writes Monson, “about an issue, a journal, or an essay (or a trend in essaying) that you’re hot and bothered by, this would be a good space for that.” Essay Daily’s first anthology, How We Speak to One Another, is proof, seven years later, that plenty of essayists are hot and bothered and willing to talk about it. The names that appear in this collection are a testament to how successful Monson’s project has been: Robin Hemley and John D’Agata, Phillip Lopate and Brian Doyle and Rigoberto González, among many other notables.
How We Speak to One Another, which came out this month, is a book of essays on essays, on the Essay—that sprawling mountain of a form, reaching its roots into every fallow field. The reader sinks in to find Ander Monson digging his way: “I’d thought of my own essaying as mine work, a kind of solo exploration down here in the dark. But then one time I was chipping at a hunk of rock, watching my tool spark, and suddenly it broke through a wall and ran into another tunnel.” The tunnel is John D’Agata’s. This kind of encounter, told in one of Monson’s quirky conceits, is representative of the rest of the anthology. These essays are excavations in what the Catholic monk and writer Thomas Merton called (in his last address, just two hours before his death) the “interdependence of all living [and dying] beings.”
These essays offer conversation that skips the bullshit. “What ails you?” Asks Julie Lauterbach-Colby, author of In the Same Bite: Essays on Food and Death (Lulu.com, 2011). “How do you suffer in this life? If you are able to get to the heart of the matter, will you know why you are in pain?” When Emily Deprang talks back to silky-tongued Joan Didion (“Oh Joan”), she gives readers permission to question their idols: “Didion wrote that barricades are never personal, but as middle-class white women, it’s more accurate to say few barricades’ successes or failures touch us personally.” And speaking of back-talking, here’s what the twenty-seven-year-old Lucas Mann has to say to Phillip Lopate (who also appears in the collection): “I think we secretly love an essayist who writes young.”
Even simply from an organizational standpoint, the collection is remarkably well-curated as a conversation. González, who writes, “When they visited the after, they did so as strangers to the streets they no longer recognized and to the people who no longer remember them,” follows Fleischmann, who writes, “We have not yet let the past we didn’t have go.” Pairings (or groupings) like this one occur in the collection repeatedly as the essays, and essayists, speak to one another.
For example, D’Agata is (once again) teaching his critics how to read his work. Using Ansel Adams as allegory, he quotes: “‘Photography is really perception…As with all art, the objective of photography is not the duplication of visual reality, but an investigation of the outer world and its influence on the inner world….All my photographs are photographs of myself’.” What Columbia University’s Meehan Crist writes in the following page, even though she’s talking about Oliver Sacks, reads like a translation of D’Agata’s Adams: “He has still seen what he has seen…Rules are only useful if everyone is playing the same game.”
As the conversation here is both broad and deep, there’s something for everyone: muscle cars and fencing, science-fiction and sex and sighing, some prose and some poetry and some playwrighting and some graphic narrative about feeling young and insufficient, about feeling old and insufficient, and of course there are lists upon lists. But maybe that’s missing the point, because what this collection says is that all of it belongs to everyone: “A thing never happens once. A thing happens all the time, is still happening right this instant—to us or to other people,” writes the medical essayist Katherine Standefer. The more of others’ stories I know, the more I begin to realize that all reality coalesces.
This collection confirms what Ander Monson suggests in the introduction: each essay is one in a network of intersecting tunnels, forming a landscape of ideas and experiences about what it means to be human. These essays offer, in the words of novelist V.V. Ganeshananthan, “the sensation of reading about myself.”
David Grandouiller is an undergraduate student at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio, where he majors in English and minors in Creative Writing, among other things. He’s really excited about community in the arts and the incarnate power of words. He likes his eggs over easy and his pizza cold, and he doesn’t dress up if he can help it. His work appears or is forthcoming in Dark Matter Journal, Duende Literary Journal, First Class Literary Magazine, and The Cedarville Review.
When I wrap around your bodies, I wrap around your limestone boulders, your
mossy riverbanks, and your trees …..……sheered limbs that leave daggers
The rivers evaporate, fill the sky with water, then fall again to soak the soil. Trees grow,
pines cedars, sturdy. A system designed to give what is needed; a system that burns
when poisoned.
When I survey your naked skins, I catalog the colors of your shedding maples, every
boisterous feathered-soloist, every ………howl erupted towards the blood-soaked moon
There’s a seismic difference between the footprint of a squirrel and the tread of
size tens—
200,000 pounds.
When I inhale your perfumes, I inhale twice. Your air, invading at night, retreating
with the sun; I sip your ………cindered blessings
The orange (sky) faded in ’41; it’s been black
since ’42.
Blaize Dicus is a graduate student at the University of Central Oklahoma. When he was eight, his family moved to Beijing, China. He lived there for five years: going to school, making friends, learning the language. This early journey sparked his existing interest to study people and culture. His goal as a writer is to translate the unheard to the unwilling.
Jail Break Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.
— Marcel Proust
Al walks under an onyx set of moons whose one good eye blinks like the cherry top called to that last day in his old life. Yesterday, the warden warned the leaky faucet would not be tolerated, and so it became the last domino to topple—and how true they all fell. Al draws on his jeans under a mirror ofclouds. It was time to set his watch, the cheap Timex from Aunt Alice, set it to a more auspicious hour—perhaps Twelfth Night off Dame Street in a drawing room where they were dancing in quadrilles and pansy skirts. Or to an hour of privacy where the fairy tale poet still searches vodka in the closed garage that tilts to Africa. Himself, he will make do and go his own way, hoarding every second like chocolate and fresh air. The ghosts of a million regrets follow him through the prairie’s parking lot. He will find a hole in a wall and erect a door, a few windows open to the birds. Relieved of all the undeserved responsibilities he’s carried, he’ll sing each word of his silence with patience. He’s clever enough to be wary of freedom and trusts only the grunge music of adolescent basements where sex blossoms and a single toad watches from the ledge. Every lie he ever told draws close to be excised lovingly with memory and ink. He is counting the scars, and dividing with forbearance the good luck from the bad. Figures he’s due.
◊
She Didn’t Think of Herself as Religious
One evening she observed Truth standing off in a corner by the tall Chinese urn upon which was worked a pattern of leaping salmon, watched him stand there smug and translucent, mostly unnoticed. The kitten circled and circled that urn, mesmerized by the predictable, yet elusive fish. An “unexpected quandary” her father is saying, and she has no idea to whom he is speaking, nor what he might mean. Her father is corpulent like Edward the Seventh, though without the mistresses, and to blame beer, burgers, and fries seems unfair unless America counts for more than she heretofore believed. But it is true. America is so busy being imperial—very much like the good king in his later days—that it doesn’t take time to consider this evening’s metaphors loosed by a boy on his bike whose name was Andrew and who’d stopped earlier to ask about a kitten. This was a definition of “quandary,” as well as “unexpected.” To have anchoring words redefined by someone who was not even part of the family—how does this happen? And yet this boy clearly knew this feline creature, seemed to care, was disappointed when we were too busy to conduct a proper search. He was so intent, a real soldier of devotion, and now what if he’s gone missing, too? It’s a rough neighborhood between here and there, and if he gets lost, what chance is there of any one innocent ever finding their way home? Someone tell me, tell us, tell someone.
You were just over there a moment ago, so silent and aloof. Behind the “quandary,” wasn’t it? And what is that? Is it a “quandary” of salmon, or will you call them a school? We need teaching. Remember that urn? A question and a number. Fifty-four comes to mind, and the other is beggared so she must leave them to it, shift the urn, face it away from the clouds where the others will soon be eating from her hand. It is she, isn’t it, who holds the metaphor, trumps every time? The kitten is mewing at the door, the urn leaning towards ambivalence, truth putting on its sunglasses, ready to slip away, slippery as a fish in the silken waters of China. Herself, she has a ticket for Roanoke, a kitty box under her arms, and the boy’s hand in hers. Salvation has less to do with truth than belief. Watch those salmon lift their wings, see the poor, first in line, at the only door that matters, and not “unexpected.”
Marc Harshman’s second full-length collection, Believe What You Can, is out from West Virginia University. Periodical publications include The Georgia Review, Emerson Review, Salamander, and Poetry Salzburg Review. His poems have been anthologized by Kent State University, the University of Iowa, University of Georgia, and University of Arizona. His thirteen children’s books include The Storm, a Smithsonian Notable Book. He was an invited reader at the 2016 Greenwich Book Festival in London. His monthly show for West Virginia Public Radio, The Poetry Break, began airing in January, 2016. He is the poet laureate of West Virginia.
Hear Marc’s piece and more virtual poetry from Cleaver on our SoundCloud podcast On The Edge.
The high-pitched animal cries of your boy come hurtling to you drunk at the breakfast table from the backyard, and until you finally hear “Dad! Dad! Dad!” it’s only by that terminal “Dad!” when anything registers—those cries and yelps and weight of the sliding glass door as you wrench it open into the sharp February bluster that spreads against your arms and face, snow falling in the crushed heels of the shoes slid on like slippers before crossing your uneven deck. There he is, your boy, standing on a cheap, green, plastic, piece-of-shit chair holding his puppy’s leash untethered in a red glove. Profiled against the warped wooden fence that spreads like bad teeth at places along its base, he is small, and he’s half-leaning into the neighbor’s yard over the top, his jeans dark from playing in the yard. On toe-point, he’s reaching over, looking at a situation you only later—by how cold the world feels on your knees, how it falls out beneath you—will begin to figure; he’s pointing into that other yard, his arms marshmallow thick in his blue winter coat saying again without looking back, “Dad! Dad! Dad!” because he knows you are there, trusts for some reason that you will always be, and you make an effort to talk except what comes out isn’t helpful or coherent because, face it, you’re ripped and don’t know what to say anyway, but you know what to do, goddamnit, which is scale that six-foot wooden fence now, Dad, right now.
The deep snow pushes up the bottom of your grey sweatpants on the other side of the fence and you’re focused on its cold grip around your ankles—not a single thought flying to those shadows on the x-ray your doctor handed you or the dot dot dots of the Sign Here’s on the papers your almost-ex brought with her last night. No, you’re thinking: the neighbor’s yard is just as sad as mine. Ditto his two-bedroom apartment. Then you see the blood in the snow. Lord, there’s plenty. But, for a moment, you allow yourself some hope. All this couldn’t be from your boy’s dog. Because it was so small. And barely old enough to be spayed let alone grown enough to have so much to lose. It was like the night before, when your wife dropped your boy off with his sleeping bag, when she was surprised to see a puppy, how she hurled arm-crossed accusations like, That’s a sad bid for affection, and, Shouldn’t he be bigger by now? like it’s your damn fault your boy’s nine and hasn’t sprouted into an awkward birthright of long limbs and voice shifts. Like it has nothing to do with the woman he’ll end up living twelve out of every fourteen calendar days with until he’s eighteen, or you’re dead.
“There,” your boy calls, “the bush!” which you should’ve figured, because of the blood, and because your neighbor’s fifty-pound fawn-colored mutt’s barking at the large, ugly-brown bush beside a warped deck just as shitty as yours, the dog’s entire backside wagging, and, between deep woofs, puppy-high wines; those cries that threaten to swing the world beneath you open, whoosh, like a trapdoor. An old dog, you’ve seen the neighbor kids, six and seven years old, hold onto its leash when a squirrel cuts across the yard, that dog lunging, rearing up on its legs against its collar. It looks back at you, making that happy dog face, almost smiling, jowls smeared lipstick red, and it paws at the cherry-dark snow.
“Dad!” you hear as if from on high, as if to warn you, but you never listen, do you? Until it’s too late not to. So you start talking low and calm with your hands out in front, moving toward the dog. Then you’re cursing, a growl and an uncommon anger rising into your throat. And you’re pointing. At your chest. Then grabbing the dog’s collar in a fist. And kicking wildly again and again and it’s pulling and twisting and yelping and you’re holding it off the ground by the collar and it’s making this crushed-throat hoarse-noised gasp and you hear:
DaddyDaddyDaddy!
But that isn’t your boy calling, no. It’s those neighbor kids on their deck yelling back into their house through the open dog-nose-smeared sliding glass door, a door you might have had. And you let go. Exhale. Feel a little bad, but also alive, even when you hard-cough in the cold air and spit what comes up.
Their dog hurries, with a limp, toward the kids, tail tucked, favoring one leg, choking, wheezing. When your tall, rail-thin neighbor finally comes out he says, What’s all this? as if he means anything by that in his Old Navy sweater, his flannel pajama pants and fur-lined Crocs, and his two kids are trying to explain. One’s trying to talk but out of breath while the other one cries; heart-wrenching stuff, should be, but their dog’s fine—he’ll live—and your neighbor says, Just what the hell is going on?
Grow up, you want to say when you kick the red snow. You wave open-palmed at all of it like the last act in a magic show before the curtain drops. Ta-da, you gesture, get fucked. You pound on that shadow in your lung and you kick the snow again. This time, your crushed-heeled shoe goes reeling onto the deck, and he cocks his blonde blockhead at it.
“Dad,” your boy says, and you ignore the sounds from the deck, and you ignore your bare foot in the snow to get down on your knees by that bush to find what you came for, saying stuff you never even said to your boy—not when he fell off his bike and skinned his arm up to the elbow, when she said right in front of him, Full custody if I can—those It’s okay’s and It’ll be fine’s. You get ahold of the puppy’s collar and, slowly, try to rescue it, to do the thing right. But, as you pull, it leaves a pink paintbrush-streak in the snow. There are flecks of mulch and dirt stuck to the red, slick parts that steam in the cold. You can see tiny bones and, for some reason, for a million reasons, you look over your shoulder and—whoosh—there he is, your boy, gape-mouthed, watching.
Last night, before he got into his sleeping bag because you only have the one small bed now, he watched the puppy sleeping, watched it kick and twitch and breathe, and he asked if dogs dream which you didn’t know how to answer. You wanted to say Yes and wanted it to be true.
Down in the bloody snow you pull off your shirt, a shiver riding your ribs, and scoop up your boy’s puppy and wrap him inside.
From his deck, your neighbor says something about the police and you’re saying a choice thing or two about him and his mutt even though you get it—what he must say and do, as Dad. But, no, you won’t shut up and you won’t hold on just a minute, and already you’re at the fence handing the swaddled pup to your boy. You climb the fence, which seems taller this time, the dry wood scraping like teeth across your chest and gut.
Inside, he asks, holding that small dog in his arms, “Is everything going to be okay, Dad?” and, for the life of you, you don’t know what the hell to say because you know how this ends. Choking from the cold, sobering air, you lead him by the scruff of the neck through the apartment with a limp from your one numb foot to grab your keys, and the coat with the cigarettes, and you are all three in the car going ten over the speed limit, fifteen. And your boy, he’s older, getting older by the mile, and before long he’s too old to hug and tall enough for his mother and his voice is breaking while you—you’re a shadow sliding down a road snaked with snow still trying to say It’ll be okay like you mean it.
Brandon Timm is a recent fiction graduate of Southern Illinois University’s MFA program. He currently resides in his home state of Ohio, where he holds a position at a logistics company. His work has been published in ZONE 3 and online at The Carolina Quarterly. He owes much to those family members, friends, and teachers who have supported him, and this is a small, printed thank you to all those who have rooted for him.
along the pathway through live oak
and cedar trees…..ant trails lead
to dead cicadas and worms
I look for lichen-covered twigs
and a piece of prickly pear
to dry and paint on canvas
*
Dear God
are you a woman
hard to picture after all the years
of otherwise…..but if it’s true
I’ll buy it
*
Dear Victims of Orlando
this mountain is for you…..my darlings
golden tops and red rock to ease your way
up from Orlando to the next station
use crevices to climb where fragments hide
*
today the gastro doc removed a five-peso coin
from Hannah’s stomach…..I cry for the child
who has anxiety…..I cry because I am a grandmother
and grandmothers cry frequently…..whether tears come or not
*
Dear God (Woman) I wake realizing the dark side
of mother lives in me and it’s been there more of late
*
someone saw another coral snake nearby
a rattler once crossed the neighbor’s walkway
fire ants bite my leg…..the car’s gas tank is empty
(Mike asks if I know what causes that)
in the morning we find tiny remains of
some animal on the back door mat
Len carries the mess to the trash can….cleans
with Clorox…..washes the mat with rain
snout-nosed butterflies linger on their way south
the woman asks…..what are those bugs
will they harm anything…..God (also Woman)
must be saying….just watch their drab beauty
◊
Hannah Finds a Lime in Our Yard
where no lime trees grow…..we toss
it between her fit-running form and
our out-of-date shapes…..we take
Mexican Sage plants out
purple blooms..wrangly
stems hide…..last year’s
leaves…..take them out
put in flagstones line
with variegated liriope for
Hannah to play pirates…..jump
from stone to stone…..hide treasure
amid drought-resistant plants
home to lizards…..scolding wrens
hummingbirds and large pots
for dropping …..leaves
stones….pieces of grass
to make her caldron brew
under the Chinese Pistache
turning golden….leaves
covering grass…..God (as Woman)
I may falter…..after seventy years
of bargaining with you…..to live
a little longer…..to see Mike
get permanent teeth ……………………….to
look out the window at the stones
leading to Star Jasmine
where the dog barks ……………………….on the other side
Marcia Roberts, originally from South Dakota, has lived many places, including Madrid, Spain; Washington, D.C.; and San Francisco. She now resides in San Antonio, TX, with her husband Len about five houses away from her granddaughter Hannah. Marcia holds a master’s degree in English and Spanish, and she studied Poetics at New College of California. Her chapbooks include Open Eye (Skanky Possum Press), Autumn’s Slant and In the Bird’s Breath (Effing Press), and What She Knows (BlazeVox Books).
Hear Marcia’s poem and more virtual poetry from Cleaver on our SoundCloud podcast On The Edge.