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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No one likes to be misunderstood.

At least I’m assuming, and shamelessly projecting upon others the alienation that I myself do not savor…

The fact is — as I write whatever I write — I do not really know what I’m intending to mean, and therefore appreciate another soul making the effort to comprehend that proposition or observation or truth claim around which my words take tentative and perhaps over-confident stabs in the dark.

This, I’m afraid, is the best any reader or any literary critic can offer by way of definitive credentials.   “Ours is in the trying,” muses T.S. Eliot (italics mine).  We put our stuff out there and hope for a dialogue partner, and at our best, do not react with a hyper-critical defense which degenerates into the slinging of mud or jello…  Or even the defense which ostensibly folds its arms and snickers in condescension.

Daisy Fried, in her New York Times articles and in her Poetry Foundation commentaries, has exercised her readership’s cerebral capacities for over a decade now.  I love that about the poetic graduate of Swarthmore College — that she pushes and prods and gets our synapse connections firing on all cylinders.   And I want her to know that I used to ride my bike through that upscale campus and pick up, as through osmosis, the academy’s deepest thoughts.   I did this, however, not for the sole purpose of one day asserting that  William Carlos Williams is the Dante of the American twentieth century (a comment that makes me want to dig further into the Inferno and perhaps learn the epic in the original Italian).  But I thought those thoughts, which were clearly above my blue-collar rank, because it seemed to me then, and seems to me now, that no one owns this dialectic terrain… that intellectual property is nothing more than a cold, stony seat in the amphitheater where scholars and non-scholars may cool their heels, listen and perhaps chime into the conversation.

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard and/or read about Marie Calloway. But if by some miracle, you’ve been enjoying your life and ignoring sordid internet shitstorms, I’ll be your tour guide today. Put on your raingear and some goggles. Note: This whole thing began more than a month ago, which in internet time is approximately 1.7 million years. Even though I avoided reading it/writing about it for weeks, I’m doing so now mostly because I was bewildered by some of the comments made in a recent interview with the writer in question. But we’ll get to that.

(I feel sort of like Inigo when he’s trying to explain to Wesley what’s going on after they wake him up from being almost-dead. “Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.”)

So there’s this young female writer who had posted a couple of pieces on Thought Catalog about losing her virginity and spending a day as an escort in London.* She had her own blog under the pseudonym Marie Calloway, which she has since taken down, but many of her posts were about sexual encounters with men she contacted through the internet, and a few times she posted naked pictures of herself. She read and admired some writing by an older man in New York, who is apparently in or on the fringes of one of the cool kids’ clubs of writers in the city. (As a non-resident of New York, an unpublished writer and a decidedly uncool kid, let’s just say I’d never heard of the guy in question.) She made contact with him, and suggested they meet up and have sex while she was in the city. They met and did have sex, despite his admission that he had a girlfriend but that he was “bored,” and the fact that she was traveling with another man who’d paid for her trip and who she was also sleeping with. (She says the other man, Patrick, was supportive of her plan to sleep with the writer, and that he was happy with how he was portrayed in the account/story.) She took some photos on her phone, and wrote a detailed account of the whole liaison for her blog, using the real names of everyone in question, publishing the photos she took (including one of her face with the writer’s semen supposedly all over it), and essentially giving a play-by-play of all their conversations. Oh, and also play-by-plays of all the fucking.

So people started to notice it, and her blog exploded with hits, and then (this is where I get fuzzy) for some reason she took the post down. Not sure what that was prompted by. But then, a couple of days later, lo and behold: nearly the exact same account, in its entirety, was published on Muumu House as fiction, with one main change: the male writer in question’s name was changed to Adrien Brody, at the suggestion of Tao Lin. Ms. Calloway had communicated with him previously and sent him her writing, so she sent him her 15,000 word piece and he agreed to publish it, advising that she change the man’s name to that of a celebrity.*

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Nicole Louise Reid’s collection of stories So There! tremble and quake with the electric hormonal urges and desires of teenage girls just realizing their sexuality. Whether it’s a young woman with a cicada living in her armpit, or a girl touching the cold metal of a handgun resting in a boy’s pocket, Reid’s characters are enchanting and devastating. The characters in her stories are longing for something larger than themselves, whether it’s a moment suspended in the air, a touch that changes a life forever, or an escape from the dread that lives in the caverns of your gut. They send you to a dark place that’s still living within you, a place that’s been buried under age and maturity, a place that leaves you wanting.

“Glimpses of Underthings” is about a teenage girl, Agnes, who tells boys that her name means “an angel of God.” She studies her father’s hands and infidelities and steals his girlfriend’s underwear. She twirls around a world where boys aren’t men, so she calls them by their full names. Agnes flirts with secrets and wears them where the eye can’t see.

“If You Must Know,” the first story in the collection, begins with this line: “These are the early cicadas, four years ahead of schedule, chirping, shrilling, blistering through their skins.” There are so many lines I want to pull out from the page and feed to you because they’re so rich with word candy.

While some could consider So There! to be “Chick Lit,” stories for and about women, the dark truths within this book transcend age and gender. They drip with sex and yearning.  Reid’s prose has an ethereal quality, capturing the magical idealism of adolescence while quietly breaking your heart with the harsh realities that hurl a budding youth back down to earth. They remind you how painful it is to grow up, how disappointment can leave a scar.

Nicole Louise Reid is a graduate of the MFA creative writing program at George Mason University. She teaches at the University of Southern Indiana and serves as the director of the RopeWalk Reading Series. She is also the editor of RopeWalk Press and is the fiction editor of the Southern Indiana Review.

So There! is available from Stephen F. Austin State University Press and her website nicolelouisereid.com.

“This is your brain…” Imagine a freshly hatched egg rolling on the kitchen counter.  To the left is a skillet set on a stovetop and there’s butter already simmering on its stick-resistant and concave surface.   Some legendary actor then cracks the egg shell with one hand, allowing the yoke and stuff to spill into the hot skillet.   The egg fries quickly — sunny-side-up — and the voice-over of the commercial continues, “And this is your brain on drugs…  Any questions?”

I’ve seen variations on this themes on everything from astrological horoscopes to bumper-stickers to political buttons (see end of post) to a manual on Zen Buddhism (This is your brain on Buddha!)

And yes, as prevention programs go, this one beats Nancy Reagan’s “Just So No!” hands-down.

Metaphors, 1.

Moralizing Slogan, 0.

And yet, before we, in the creative arts, run up the score, I’d like to consider a book on the brain that has been acclaimed by neurologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, neuro-imaging researchers and even by such egg-heads as the editor of Poetry Magazine, Christian Wiman.   The book is published by Yale University Press and is written by Johns Hopkins mega-star in the above fields, Iain McGilchrist.  It’s entitled, “The Master and His Emissary,” which is odd, considering it has nothing to do with the despicable institution of slavery, nor with any messengers who might have made special deliveries.  Nothing literal like that at all.

On the contrary, the subtitle saves the day (not to mention the marketing department’s ass):   “The Divided Brain and the Making of the Modern World.”  And it is here — in that criss-crossing, apple-saucing of the two hemisphere’s of your primary internal organ, your grey matter, that the rubber meets the road… that the kettle becomes black… that the chicken (coming first) traverses the road, lays the egg (coming second), which gets fried in the skillet, next to the kettle on the adjacent back-burner…   The point is, once the author clears his throat, everyone who has ever set a coffee mug down upon a literary journal of any reputation should stand and salute.  Or bow and genuflect.   McGilchrist is brilliant, as the mere progression of chapters in the table of contents can testify:

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How are we on time?   You know, chronological, nanosecond by nanosecond, always, always, running, time…  Before you answer, please note the following:   it’s been about 48 years since the death of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (and that’s roughly my own age… he added, self-consciously).   And more to the point –

Stephen King has written a new novel (released on Nov. 8, 2011), depicting events leading up to and beyond “11/22/63″…  In fact, this is the title of the 849 page tome of fiction, in which the protagonist, Jake Epping, travels back in time to 11:58 a.m., September 9, 1958, and accepts the mission of preventing the assassination.  The 35-year-old school teacher therefore has a good five years to move to Texas, get close to Lee Harvey Oswald and otherwise unravel layer upon layer of  elusive history.

What he discovers, of course, is that history’s not like a tangled string of Christmas lights.  It doesn’t even resemble an onion.

History, it seems, has been wrapped and rewrapped, inserted and re-inserted, into and out of the autonomous individual’s psyche — an individual who is embedded in peculiar communities from which we, upon “pain” of non-existence, may never detach ourselves.   There is no such thing as objective history.  Here’s the quote from the main character, favored by a New York Times Critic:

“For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don’t we all secretly know this? It’s a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. . . . A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.”

Poetic, eh?   Or maybe a hybrid of Soren Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death and Rogers & Hammerstein’s The Music Man (King’s novel even goes the extra mile and includes a librarian-love-interest)…

At any rate, I’m thinking you can either read this epic, suspense-filled revision of history — something I plan to do over the holiday season.  Or, you and I may delve into the John Hodgen poem, “Teachers,” from his collection, Heaven & Earth Holding Company.

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See? Pretty book.

Our local library recently had a book sale, and I went on the last day, when you could get a bag full for $3.  So my family and I went down and brought our own big bag and we loaded up with 25 books.  The first one I read was Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard.  It’s a short thing, just 75 pages, and I was interested because I found it in the fiction section of the book sale, and I’d not read anything but nonfiction by Dillard, but it turns out this book’s nonfiction.  It’s a lovely little first edition with the pages that are uneven at the edges, and they are thick.  I love it.  My kids already wrote in it, but that’s really neither here nor there.   I love how on Dillard’s website she explains what genre her books are (this one’s a nonfiction narrative).   It’s great because we’re always having to label our writing, and she’s sort of funny and matter-of-fact about it.   I first read Annie Dillard a few years ago, when I was on my first memoir kick.  I read An American Childhood, or at least I read part of it.  I didn’t make it through.  This was before I’d studied writing at all, but even then I knew her sentences were gorgeous, bubbling over with beauty even, but for whatever reason the book didn’t hold my interest.  In graduate school I read an essay called “Total Eclipse,” which then led me to read a beautiful and lyrical book Dillard wrote in 1999, called For the Time Being.  It was a masterful threading of a few different narratives, historical, philosophical, scientific, and ecological, and after reading it, it immediately went on my thesis list, so that I could study it more.

Part of what makes reading Annie Dillard so interesting is that she goes on all these adventures, and we get to go with her. It’s through her own curiousity and endeavoring to put pieces together that we get to see any of this. Read more »

look at their faces. the whole damn story's written right there on the freaking cover.

quick: name for me the hero of tikki tikki tembo.  you can’t, can you?  because it’s sort of a trick question.  in more ways than one.  at the center of this conundrum is the matter of how we define “hero”—and also the true heart of this story, which has nothing to do with arlene mosel’s purported purpose for telling us this tale in the first place.  what, you thought this was an ancient folktale passed down through generations about why the chinese don’t give their first-born sons crazy-long names anymore?  because that’s what the book jacket told you?  don’t be ridiculous.

this book is much closer to being yet another example of americans importing, appropriating, and abusing a product of the humble chinese people for their own profiteering ends.  yeah, in case you missed that part, the “author” of this book is some old white lady, who made up an absurd name for her character that sounds nothing like any kind of chinese word, let alone a name—oh, and she sold a million copies of her book.  and a special bonus, we get a depiction of the chinese as monsters who would let a child die rather than forsake the honor due to one’s elders.  which totally falls in line with my understanding of the chinese (i.e., they are dragon-worshipping weirdos).  but back on point…

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If This World Falls Apart, Lou Lipsitz

For all the banter and bluster of the avant-garde crowd, plain speaking can be a virtue for a poet. The literary merits of the language of everyday life—let’s call it dinner table diction—haven’t been exhausted and won’t be anytime soon. Winner of the 2010 Lynx House Prize, Lou Liptsitz’s If This World Falls Apart is a fine reminder of this.

The poems are sometimes striking in their simplicity—some seem to start out almost as simple accounts of events—but they quickly become much more, as Lipsitz’ work often does what good work should—it conveys experience, puts you there, with each piece revealing something close to truth. And Lipsitz does so while dabbling in some pretty serious—and personal—subject matter: lost love, regret, family scandals, and he somehow avoids lapsing into the great sin of solipsism. That’s a difficult dance, and something to be commended. Read more »

This week I read a craft book by an author I enjoy, one who writes both fiction and nonfiction, Anne Lamott.  The book’s called Bird by Bird, and though it mentions mostly fiction techniques, it’s remarkably relevant for nonfiction as well.  I’ve talked some about creating a character of yourself, which is what we do in nonfiction. In fact, when I write, I’m supposed to be creating a whole cast of characters—all of them me.  But the different characters I play are important, because just like you have to get to know a fictional character to figure out what they would do next, or how they would order their eggs cooked at a restaurant, I have to step into the character of that moment, the character I’m using to portray this one aspect.  Read more »