“What I am particularly interested in exploring is the border zone between consciousness and unconsciousness, between then and now, between self and other and self as other.  The border is not a fixed site but a movable one where exchanges occur, where encounters happen (between people, between imagination and language), where some material doesn’t get through and what does get through flows out in the odd dream logic of condensation and ongoing deferral.”      –Thomas Heise, The Missouri Review (Vol. 34:111).

Gabrielle Giffords, the Congresswoman from Arizona, is thankfully recovering from the point-blank gun-shot wound that she sustained to her head.  Forensic analysis showed how the bullet entered her skull and exited after passing through the area of the brain associated with speech, and if it hadn’t passed through, the energy from the trauma would have been too much.  The victim would not have survived.

As of last week, of course, we see that Giffords has done considerably more than survive and suffer the comatose or vegetative conditions associated with the aftermath of such horrific events.   She has cast votes in Congress.   She has done interviews.   And most recently she has resigned from her post in the House of Representative and will now be devoting herself full-time to recovery, which may involve a trip to the African continent with her astronaut husband, Mark Kelly.   It may also involve a sojourn to the “border zone” that Heise describes above.

I find myself irresistibly drawn to this story for a variety of reasons:  the relationship between Giffords and her spouse is simply beautiful to behold and I can only imagine the way their private conversations also manifest all that’s good about marriage and the way it’s supposed to work.   I also might point out how Giffords actually stood for very controversial things, gun control among them, and that in Arizona, where the wild, wild west is a point of nostalgic pride, that’s a courageous stand to take.   But most of all, what strikes me about this amazing person’s progress involves the tears associated with her overwhelming drive to communicate, and to communicate in ways that may prove instructive for those interested in semiotics and how language becomes tethered to the rawest right-hemisphere processing of the brain.

Giffords weeps and weeps most often as she attempts to retrieve words and form sentences, things that are now much more difficult than they used to be.  Regarding the violent act which precipitated her injuries as well as the death of others — including a federal judge who appeared with her in the Safeway parking lot … including a nine-year-old girl who idolized her — she is now painfully aware.   That is, she grasps the tragic loss of life, and that she miraculously survived.   She comprehends the psycho-path’s premeditated act, perhaps his warped world-view.  But the visual imagery associated with the actual firing of the weapon is blissfully blacked out… cryptically erased… redacted by the powers of the soul (or the hard-wiring of the brain, which may be inextricably intertwined)…

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This is what our move will look like, except our building is taller, pinker, and 1960s-er

There’s nothing like signing a binding contract in a language you don’t know. We got a “translation” of our lease in English, but it isn’t really a translation of the document we signed. It’s what is called a “Convenient Translation,” though we don’t know yet for whom it is designed to be most convenient.

The objective of this document is to let foreigners know the basics of what might be found in the German lease being signed, but of course we don’t know what is actually lurking between “Schlüsselversicherung angeraten” and “Grundstückflächen abgestellt.”

What we do know is that the Convenient Translation requires us to air out the rooms of our new apartment every day “by opening them completely (for at least ten minutes, three times a day)” all while maintaining the temperature in the apartment at 17° Celsius. Read more »

Hey – it’s been awhile. My MFA-related job as a line cook has taken over my life, my dreams (literal and figurative), and my time to read and write as much as I want and need to. I did just read (before I received a text, asking if I wanted to come in to work early to help subdue today’s behemoth prep list) a great essay, Darwin and the Art of the Three Star Review over at Vouched. I personally tend to read more music reviews than book reviews – often times more than I actually listen to the music, but anybody with a fetish for reading book reviews, often times more often than the book under review, ought to check this essay out. Perhaps I’m a little biased, as it’s written by my friend Kyle Winkler and published on my other friend Christopher Newgent’s website, but it’s a great look at the phenomenon of judgement over a lifestyle that goes unrewarded more often than not. That’s all. I miss you guys. Time to go make gumbo, mainline corn pasta salad into the Appalachian veins of morbidly-obese yuppies, and slice off an opposable thumb.

Someone wise & judgmental once said to me, "imagine if you were in their shoes."

If I open a new tab with my internet, I’m shown a display of my most-visited websites. Handy. Convenient. And potentially embarrassing. A friend recently used my computer and when my most-visited results popped up he turned to me and asked “seriously?”

Two of them were celebrity gossip sites.

It was like he’d opened my nightstand goodie drawer,  I suddenly felt ashamed. I wanted to deny everything like the time I took a huge shit in the single-stall bathroom at work and opened the door to a waiting coworker Hey, Gary, it was like that when I got here. Read more »

Because seven is a cooler number than eight.

Some people would have you believe there are no new stories to tell. Christopher Booker would have you believe there are only seven plots in all of existence (though he does allow for subplots under his comedy and tragedy headings, because (I can only assume) most people with a brain could tell you that “tragedy” is not, in and of itself, a plot). I admit I’ve never read his book, and I know better than to let TV Tropes suck me in while I’m trying to get anything done, so I’ll take a stab at those seven plots and say they’re something like this: Lord of the Rings, Oedipus (marrying your mom—is that comedy or tragedy?), Cinderella, Twilight (though I’ve never read it), Star Wars, Inception, and To the Lighthouse, though I still can’t tell you what happened in Inception, and something tells me Booker hasn’t read much Woolf if he thinks her plots would fall under a heading such as “The Monster.”

In grad school, we sometimes talked about someone (and, forgive me, I forget who, because I was almost completely uninterested in simplifying plot this far) who had said there were two: someone comes to town, someone leaves town (or, perhaps I’m mis-remembering because I just looked at Cory Doctorow’s page on Wikipedia; have you tried the random article feature? It’s as much of a time sink as TV Tropes). Read more »

Fact: 71 days until the Get Lit! Festival begins.
Fact: A person who may or may not have a serious medical condition still showed up the other day, worked hard and stayed the whole shift without a whiff of self-pity or complaint.
Truth: I want to be more like that.

Fact: There are ___ days until your thesis is due.
Truth: Don’t count. Don’t even think about counting. Make sure everyone understands that if they continually announce the countdown until their/your defense date, you’ll punch them in the throat.

Fact: When you’re planning fifty events, every person thinks their event is at the top of your priority list.
Truth: Most of them aren’t. Sorry.

Fact: Everyone around you will assume that their level of stress about thesis is greater than yours.
Truth: Everyone will be stressed, to some degree. It’s not a competition. Be kind to each other.

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Fine, this is what it looks like.

It took me forever to get this review written.  I bought Blue Nights, Joan Didion’s latest work, in November, soon after it came out.  It’s a small book and I figured I could read it in a day and get to work. I started it pretty quickly and read 40 pages.  And then it sat on the night stand by my reading chair in my bedroom.  I took the cover off, and the back photo haunted me every time I saw it—Didion’s daughter, young, sitting on a chair, elbows on knees with towhead in hands, too serious. And I couldn’t read it.  I knew it was about mortality, and as Didion says “When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.” I knew her daughter, so ill in the first memoir, was going to die, had died, and so I spent a lot of time not reading it.  And when I went back to Blue Nights in January, I opened my reading journal to see what I’d written, to remind me.

“There’s a sense of clinging about this…it’s humbling and haunting and it makes me want to stop reading it and go read a book or play a game with my kids.”

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Early in the new Murakami novel, a young writer named Tengo edits/rewrites a novella, originally written by a teenage girl, to win a debut literary prize.  As the novel progresses, the world he lives in changes to resemble the world Tengo embellished/ created in his work.  Notably, he describes two moons in the novella, and lo and behold, eventually he notices there are two moons in his world, and the second moon looks exactly how he described it.

On occasion, I’m struck by the similarity of something in the real world to something in a story I wrote.  Am I special person, like Tengo?  (I’m aware Tengo is a fictional character) Or did my sub-conscious give me the idea, which I used in the story, and then noticed in the real world?  I lean toward the latter.

I tried NaNoWriMo this year.  I failed.  I wrote about 1,500 words my first day, but decided they were so bad, and I mean really bad, that I couldn’t bear the thought of pounding out 48,500 more terrible words.  (NaNoWriMo seems to work for some people and that’s great)  I share this because in those first few pages, my main character hits a little girl with his car on his way to work.  It’s not his fault.  The girl darted out in front of him, but he feels guilty, and wonders if he could have prevented it had he been paying more attention.   Read more »

1. The essayist will take pride in neuroses. He will go on an on about the joy of scratching his ear with a pencil or brag about how long he hasn’t driven a car.

2. Everyday outings, such as going to the grocery store, will become overwhelming adventures. Huge adventures, like swimming with whale sharks off the coast of the Yucatan, will sound like everyday activities.

3. You will never know where she is. She will insist on trying a diverse range of activities, from accordion lessons to firing a machine gun, claiming it is research for a “Never Have I Ever” column.

4. You will realize that your world is more bizarre than a postmodern short story. You will start anecdotes with, “You can’t make this stuff up!”

5. You will not know whom you’re with at any moment: the character, the narrator, the persona, or the person. You will begin to wonder if you are a character or a person and sometimes narrate the recent past as if a memory from childhood. He will hear you and violate your POV.
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My fellow poet and girl crush, Danielle Shutt,  had a poem called “Narcotic Winter” in the September 2011 issue of Pank. It was accompanied by an interview conducted by J. Bradley. I’d heard the poem before during our monthly graduate reading, Voice Over, and I was excited to see what Danielle had to say about it.  I wasn’t disappointed.  As usual, Danielle was eloquent and witty, insightful and self-deprecating when speaking about her impulses as a writer. And it made me wonder how I would’ve answered questions about my own poetry.

For the next few months, I hounded my fellow poets. At parties, I got drunk and asked each one to “Describe to me your writing aesthetic.” I wanted to know what contemporary writers they would compare their work to. I wanted to know about their opinions on rhetorical questions in poems and how they viewed titles that had no seeming relation to their poems. I wanted to know about dashes. I wanted all these answers because I couldn’t answer them for myself. Read more »