According to eye witnesses, when I was born, my father was in two different places.
He was at the American Legion drinking when he got the call that I was on the way. By the time he arrived at the hospital, Mom had already squeezed me out. The whole ordeal was all over, and my dad missed it. BUT he says he caught a glimpse of my “monkey face” (his words) being rolled down the hallway in a cradle, as he had come racing in once he had realized his failure. Here was this adorable new baby all swaddled and wide awake, blinking up at him matter-of-factly and curious. He might’ve giggled (because Mom says he had surely been out drinking himself silly). Then he strolled his long legs into the hospital room to take the tongue-lashing my Mom was certainly entitled to give him. But, really, she was most likely already sleeping. Nonetheless, Dad insists that, in that moment, my monkey face touched him in a special way, and he will never forget it.
He was also actually IN the room AS I was being born, right there standing a few feet away from Mom’s distressed vagina but close enough to see all the blood when all Hell broke loose. And he wasn’t drunk, but he had probably smoked lots of cigarettes – right there in the hospital lounge because it was 1974 – and he (just as he had ended more than one long night at the bar) had to vomit up everything right there, right then. Mom says (with a little disdain) that a nurse left her side and rushed to assist him, and he sat and barfed his dinner
into the trash can while I was thrust into existence, all soppy in goo and mucus, my blue chord hanging to a gob of placenta. Then someone surely stuck a syringe up my nose – because that’s what happens when the world first sees you – and Dad eventually pulled himself together. And because Mom laughs a little now when she tells me her side of the story, like she’s getting one over on him by telling her truth, I imagine her laughing at Dad’s green face in between her contractions. Laugh, push! Laugh, push! And when I imagine Mom laughing and pushing, I imagine some bald doctor, sitting between my mother’s spread-eagle legs, as he’s throwing Dad a raised eyebrow over a pair of itty bitty doctorly glasses. My dad = tough, ole’ beer-drinkin’ veteran or skinny, puking wimp? Why am I even asking? Being both is acceptable and quite easy. Read more »
remember when i was bangin’ on the printers row thing? at least partially because they wanted me to be a member of their community—which really meant they wanted my money? here’s the part where someone else offers another thing eerily similar to that, but i get kinda excited instead of annoyed. it’s called the chicagoan, and it’s primarily a new bi-annual publication that’s basically like a book-length lit mag. the publisher even says it’s got 26 pieces, so you can read one a week until the next issue comes out. i bought the first issue this week (newstand price $20), and it’s freakin’ beautiful.
the editor is the same guy behind the utterly-brilliant-but-now-defunct stop smiling, which featured long-form interviews & essays which its contemporary magazines seemed to shy away from. the chicagoan tries to reinvigorate pieces like that, while also taking a bit of inspiration from the original 1920s magazine called the chicagoan. the first iteration was chicago’s attempt to create it’s own new yorker, and while it succeeded in publishing amazing illustrations (most notably on its covers), the consensus was that the content didn’t really compare favorably. nevertheless, a 2008 anthology of that old magazine had captured the city’s attention recently, including that of the new chicagoan‘s editor, j.c. gabel, who took a long time bring this new thing to life.
EWU grad Jessica Lakritz published in Slate. There are nineteen others, but clearly, this is the best one. And that black dog in picture #2 looks awfully familiar.
Dan Kois adds his perspective to the Whorfian Fact. His piece is very good, and if you read it, and you should, you’ll see why I can’t discuss it much without ruining it. But at one point, he compares John D’Agata’s fudging/making up/ changing facts in his essay to Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, “a hybrid of memoir and fiction that was a touchstone for a generation of writers looking for new ways to tell stories.” I suppose it is fair to call TTTC a hybrid of memoir and fiction, the key difference is that O’Brien clearly states that the book is a work of fiction. Of course, within the book, he creates the appearance of non-fiction, and you feel like you are reading memoir. There is a character named “Tim O’Brien,” who has had a very similar life to the author, Tim O’Brien. And well before Dave Eggers got the idea for starting the creative part of a book before page one, O’Brien dedicated his book to the men of Alpha company–all of whom are fictional characters.
I guess my point is, if you want to fudge the facts of a real-life story to make it better, to make it art, then call it fiction. Naive? Maybe. Read more »
So many people I love are really far away. One of them: S. Last time I saw her she said she lives in many worlds at once. I’d known her for years by then and only saw her drawings that day for the first time. Intricate, singular drawings. The kind that necessitate layers of worlds, levels of worlds, parallel worlds running together and then falling apart.
I’ve been dropping in and out of one certain world since I was eighteen and started reading Antonin Artaud and Guy Debord and everything that spun out from the ideas of the Situationists. The way they used words caused a kind of glittering in my head, seemed to to match up exactly with an unspoken perspective I thought existed only for me. Seemed really really close and really really dead. Something else I had missed.
This is all why I’m wishing I were in London this week, to catch Robert Montgomery’s show “it turned out this way cos you dreamed it this way” at KK Outlet.
I’ve heard a lot of writers say that when they’re working on a novel, their characters are always with them. Their characters ride around on their shoulders, whispering in their ears until their stories are down on paper. It’s a good reason, they say, to make sure you’re writing characters you won’t mind living with for a few years. Even when you’re not expressly working on the book, they’ll be at the corners of your mind. I’ve often doubted this would be the case with me, I suppose because I imagined this kind of absorption as a constant longing for the pen or the keyboard, an unending flow of ideas. I’d written a “novel” before–a disastrously autobiographical string of words written by the enforcement of quotas and deadlines that is now in a box under my bed where the cat has most likely puked on it–and I never felt that way. I had to force myself to write more words, not because the story needed them, but because I was determined to write a book-length work. My characters were my family members, thinly disguised, and the only one who seemed to follow me around was, predictably, based on me.
Now that I’m a more experienced writer and committed to a novel that is 100% fictional, I understand what those writers mean. Read more »
Der Klügere gibt nach. (The cleverer give in.)
–A German Saying
A retired German man was walking in a German city not long ago. He saw a group of people trying to cross the street at a dangerous intersection. The cars wouldn’t stop so some women created a human chain as a barrier to help the others cross. An Audi drove up to the woman-made-chain and pushed their bodies out of the way with his car. The women were shocked; their hands dropped, chain broke, and they didn’t know what to say.
The retired man went over to the Audi and told the driver to stop pushing people around with his car. The man in the Audi opened his car door, got out, and yelled at this thin man who must be in his late sixties. The thin older man pushed the driver back into his Audi and shut the car door. The driver opened the door, got back out of the car, and towered over the old-ish man, yelling some more before driving away. Read more »
About a week ago, I spent a Saturday evening drinking scotch, telling stories and having some laughs with a small group of people who all happen to be smarter than I am. Our hosts had some music on in the background, and I recognized a particular piece. In my typical self-deprecating manner, I pointed out how I loved the piece (Ravel’s String Quartet in F major), but my primary association with it was that it signified the title sequence of The Royal Tenenbaums. So as opposed to, you know, being a genuinely cultured person and knowing specific compositions by name, I only recognized the piece because of a movie. I didn’t have to make that connection out loud for everyone– as I said, they’re smart people– so our host, being a good natured person, smiled at my idiocy and proceeded to tell us a bit about Ravel’s history, alluding to some criticism he’d received as a composer and telling us that he’d died a virgin. Which was cool– I love that she knows stuff like that.
When I think about the evening, I think about it in two ways. First, as I said, it was lovely, and I went home glad I’d chosen to go. It was warm and cozy, the conversation was good, I laughed a lot, and I got to know one of the people a little better. But now that I’m writing about it, it’s changed. That’s what happens, right? We make decisions about how to convey scenes. As I’m thinking about the night through the filter of the music conversation, I can point to the various moments that exemplify my opening comment about the others being more intelligent than me. Two people were bantering in Russian, someone alluded to their time teaching at an Ivy League school, someone quoted an obscure passage from a Vonnegut novel I’ve never read, so on and so forth. Now, that doesn’t mean there weren’t penis jokes– even classy people like those– but as I drove home, the moment of noticing the music, and particularly noticing why I noticed the music, caused my mind to travel down a little rabbit hole and land in a room where all I could think about was why I like the art and pop culture that I do.
It’s 1986. Mickey Shaw is a thirty-five-year-old female New York cop who mostly works behind a desk, answering phones and filling out paperwork, processing masses of drug dealers, prostitutes, and domestic disturbers passing through. Being a woman, she is often asked to make coffee. She usually ignores the request. She is a compulsive knuckle cracker, and every morning before work she hits the gym; her favorite workout is boxing. She is a bit of a worry wart, always thinking, never shrugging anything off unless you count her husband, Stanley, who is a paper pusher but still earns more money than she does. She and Stanley have been married for fourteen years, and he isn’t as fun as he used to be, worn down by his job, plus he spends so much time alone in his office that he’s become increasingly clingy. He calls her several times a day, both at work and at her friend Olive’s apartment, where she spends one evening a week playing Trivial Pursuit with her high school friends. She quit drinking a few years ago and so is usually the only one of them fully sober, and often finds her friends heartless in their criticisms, but that’s just the way they are, and she accepts it. After all, she’s known them longer than she’s known her husband. She’s not one to throw friendships away. She walks with her hips wide, toes pointed slightly outward, shoulders square. She carries her gun in her purse at all times, though she’s never fired it outside a shooting range. As a kid she was addicted to Gunsmoke. She moves quickly, with purpose, but doesn’t always look where she’s going. Her effort/shape (a description of how she moves through space) is sinking, widening, out, bound, quick, strong, and indirect. She leads from her hips and her toes. Read more »
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art, books, culture, music, reading, Uncategorized, workshopping, writers, writing 
