Poetry Phobe

POP QUIZ: If you asked Ira, when he was 22, which would he prefer to read--

a) a Shakespearean sonnet
b) War and Peace and Crime and Punishment at the same time while singing Belinda Carlisle tunes
c) a Wordsworth poem about clouds

--the answer: B.

For the longest time, if I saw words that were arranged in weird shapes or if sentences failed to go all the way to the right side of the page, I ran screaming. I didn’t have to read it to know it was a dreaded poem. I couldn’t even say the word. The mere mention of a poem made me want to plunge sharp objects into my brain, made me want walk on crushed glass.

Am I being melodramatic? Probably.

I was never the type of teenager who scrawled deep thoughts into a notebook or wrote angsty poems about how girls didn’t like me or how life sucked or how I would never be prom king because the system was rigged. (IT TOTALLY WAS!) I never understood poems, no matter how long we covered them in class, no matter how many English papers I had to write about them. There was a mental barrier between my brain and the poem.

In high school, I used to date a girl who would read me her poems. Every time she started, I pretended to look into the sky, put my hand to my chin and nodded thoughtfully. Really, my mind went flat line and I was thinking about dinner or how the Bulls would fare without the great Michael Jordan. She read her poems in the way that after every line there was a question mark. I’m falling into a deep, deep hole of despair? When she asked me for my opinion, I appeared as if she had recited the most profound piece of art in the world, and told her it was like watching a painting come to life. She caught on to my bullshit and we quickly disintegrated as a couple.

I’m not going to blame bad English teachers for my misgivings. They’ve been blamed enough. In fact, I’ve been quite fortunate to have wonderful English teachers. (Here’s a shout out to Ms. Savaggio, Mr. Scarpelli, Mr. Monnier, and Mr. Winch) The best of the best. Teachers who were passionate about poetry.

There was, for a while, a disconnect in language for me. English was already a secondary language, and often times when younger, I would have to go through a series of obstacles to understand what I was reading. The eye would recognize the English word, would then have to process the word to a Thai equivalent, and finally the brain would come up with meaning. This made me into an extremely slow reader, and even now, an extremely slow writer. Poems, it seemed, operated with a different set of rules. Some poets, like the great W.S. Merwin, use no punctuation, so my brain doesn’t know how to make sense of sentence syntax. And then there was the dreaded line break which disrupted my brain momentum. And don’t forget grand metaphors that took me to the edge of understanding and often times misunderstanding.
Ironically, I fell in love with a poet. When we first dated, she asked what poets I liked to read. I felt that this question would determine our future together. If I admitted I hated poetry, if I admitted I wasn’t smart enough to understand it, this long-haired poet of Illinois, this green-eyed smarty pants, would leave me.

I thought quickly. “I love that Arlington poem. ‘Richard Cory.’”

Truth: I thought it was OK, but I didn’t know what else to say. The bullet in the brain part was cool.

She shuddered and said, “Don’t you think that poem’s a little overdone?”

“Totally,” I said. “You’re right.”

“What else?” she asked.

“You know Keats, Wordsworth. Ginsberg is pretty deep, too.”

“Anyone not dead?”

My brain went blank. I’ve never read any living poet. I didn’t realize there were living poets out there in the world. I assumed they all died after The Beats. I imagined some strange poet plague that wiped out every rhyme, every enjambment, every trochee; everything Lewis Turco wrote in his Book of Forms.

I shook my head. I felt ashamed. I really, really liked this smarty pants poet.

The next day, I went poetry hunting. I took out three books: Picnic, Lightning by Billy Collins; Rose by Li-Young Lee; Burnt Offerings by Timothy Liu.

I read them. I understood them. I felt like I was in a public service commercial where some celebrity extolled the virtues of poetry. I imagined that celebrity was Tom Hanks—I was obsessed with Forest Gump—and Tom was telling me how poetry opened the mind to other planes of the imagination. At the end of my imagined commercial there were rainbows going in every direction. Tom was right. I wanted more. I wanted Billy Collins’ meandering musings, Li-Young Lee’s quietly sustained power from stanza to stanza. The very first line of Timothy Liu’s poem, “Echoes,” captured how I felt. The world exists again. It did. Reading these three poets made me want to read more poetry. I went on a poetry rampage. I read a book a day, sometimes two, going through shelves and shelves of verse at the library. Tony Hoagland. Dean Young. Sharon Olds. Mary Oliver. Marie Howe. Lola Haskins. Charles Harper Webb.

A stranger thing happened: I revisited those poems I hated. Something had magically shifted. The language and rhythm of the contemporary poets I read made me understand the poets of long ago. Give me T.S. Eliot. Give me e.e. cummings. Give me Byron and Yeats. Give me all of those poets I struggled with. A door had been opened, angels were singing, and indeed the world exists again.

Am I being melodramatic? Absolutely. When it comes to understanding, you can’t be dramatic enough.

(As a side note: I married the smarty pants poet. She didn’t think I was too stupid.)

____________________


The Clever Title would love to hear about your favorite poets and poems. If they are online, link us to them.

Spin Cycle

There isn’t a cover on Kim Addonizio’s Tell Me anymore, and the first couple and last few pages are missing. This doesn’t bother me; all her poems are still present, and I actually like that the remaining pages feel more than a thousand years old, like I am in possession of a sacred Sanskrit text. Despite the recurring word "God," Tell Me is everything unholy with its raucous addictions to alcohol and sex, its cold ice way of showing exactly how critical the “I” can be. Perhaps this is why I like her book? Perhaps Kim Addonizio needed to take an accidental spin in my washing machine so I could feel just how fresh and tattered the speaker of her poems is?

I am either singing or thinking or whistling when I am alone, so it should come to no surprise that Tell Me’s first section is titled The Singing, and like the second poem I come across sharing that same name, I am at times caught staring at the tree limb Addonizio sings at:

There’s a bird crying outside, or maybe calling, anyway it goes on

and on

Without stopping, so I begin to think it’s my bird, my insistent

I, I, I that today is so trapped by some nameless but still relentless

longing

And this is why I knew, even before the book met the detergent, before the acknowledgment page disintegrated, that I would feel a rapprochement with Tell Me.

I, I, I, isn’t it

the sweetest

sound, the beautiful, arrogant ego refusing to disappear?

Now doesn’t it seem relevant for me to talk about myself in relation to Addonizio’s poetry? Tell you that I see myself in her poems, not in the movement and story, but in the text of her poems: where Speaker filets World to examine Heart, and finds all the tiny sections that have begun to decay?

But the I, I, I is why I shouldn’t talk about myself in this piece, because when is enough, enough? It seems to me that Tell Me begs that question.

But Tell Me isn’t a book of poetry relying on questions to encourage the reader to think; Tell Me is instead a showing of the beautiful and the dark and the selfish we hold within us. Addonizio is a house that contemplates the people living in it, willing to make declarations, willing to jump from the type rope into the witness stand and undergo a type of intrapersonal cross-examination that most of us are scared to undergo because we bury our demons in a wooden box without words for a reason.

Come to Tell Me and find the irony of my washing machine.

Come to Tell Me and find the image of an ex-lover naked and drunk and tangled with God’s arms in the narratives of these poems.

Come to Tell Me and experience what it is to want a bath with all your clothes on.

________

Ladies and gentlemen...Brandon Pettit. (By the way, it was my book that took a tumble in his washing machine. I'm just happy he got an essay out of it.)

"Messpot"

In a poetry class, a few friends of mine held a vote over which words in common use sound the most ridiculous. A tie erupted between the words “masturbate” and “poot.” For me, the word “masturbate” sort of ruined the idea that the experience could ever be taken seriously, as a participant or an observer. I, personally, have not discovered the root of my own disassociation from the word. Someone in my class suggested that the strange combinations of vowels suggest a slapping or jiggling motion, which produces an absurd feeling when speaking it. It was also decided that the problem with the word “poot” is the way that the lips fold inward for the “p” sound and thrust outward in an exaggerated pucker for the “ooo” noise.

Many of my poetry classmates felt that the connections between the absurdity of the words’ sounds and their meanings being associated with the bottom half of human anatomy were completely coincidental. A sociology major suggested that we only thought the words were funny because of social stimulus—specifically, the word “poot” is more associated with cartoons and small children, and the word “masturbate” is still recovering from the sort of alienating taboos and urban legends which, nearly a half century ago, led the general public to agree that it caused blindness.

My theory about the current attitude towards these words and the sounds which create that attitude is slightly more paranoid: I am convinced that some number of arbitrary figures—labeled unceremoniously as They—organized the etymology and phonology of “masturbate” and almost every other conceivable word, both slang and technical, which connects with the anatomy of the human reproductive and digestive systems to produce a feeling of discomfort, awkwardness, and for some unfortunate people, embarrassment. Psychologically, this word association has to create some apprehension when it comes to the physical embodiment of these words. This, I believe, is why over half the people I meet are either terrified of their bodies or obsessed with them. This is also an example of my 1984ish belief that words can do a lot, especially when we aren’t paying attention to them.

With that said, I realize that I am at least slightly full of shit in regards to the content of this particular theory, which is probably why I abandoned my very short stint as an anthropology major years ago.

It doesn’t matter why or how it happens: words and sounds soothe us, frighten us, wrap us up, and change us.

*

My mother recently started calling me a “messpot” when I don’t wipe the counter completely after cooking or when I leave my clean clothes in a pile in the laundry basket for too long, by her terms. Before she died, her mother used the same word for the same type of reasons. I’m still trying to thoroughly understand what a messpot is. When I was a kid, the word made me think of a dirty child with a saucepan on their head. Now, I’ve concluded that it must literally mean a toilet.

Discovering that both my mother and grandmother found and find some sort of familiar comfort in calling me a toilet when I leave a few spots of stickiness on the kitchen counter shouldn’t produce cuddly nostalgia, but it does.

Along the same vein, my friends had a baby two years ago, whom they named Further. After he was born, they called him “Furby” for short, which reminded me severely of those terribly annoying faux-fur covered toy-things that speak gibberish and make mechanical noises when they open their beaks and plastic eyes. I rejected the name for months, but eventually caught on. I’ve noticed since that most of my friends and family members cute-ify the names of pets and small children with shorter versions that usually end in “y” or “i-e.”

Why does this “y” sounding tendency apply to small, tender things? I cannot imagine how alienated I would feel if my peers or family began to call me “Ash-y.” Perhaps I would feel that I had lost control of my own life, like my brain had begun to disintegrate, like I had unknowingly regressed into childhood, infancy. Or I would consider that everyone of the name offenders had completely lost their minds.

*

Sounds do things to people. Tones and attitudes: the voice probably has more power than the word itself, but one could not exist without the other.

In Wordstruck, Robert MacNeil’s movement through life, as he writes it, was propelled first by the sounds of words, poetry, and then through literature and the story.

When I was young and alone, playing in my parents’ backyard, I picked random weeds and flowers from the edge of the fence bordering the yard. I mixed them in a bowl with stones that had chipped off the concrete steps leading into the house, some mud and water, and a handful of seed pods that had fallen from the neighbor’s tree. I labeled some of the weeds “pickle plants” because of their sour flavor, and, in turn, called the soup, “pickle-plant soup.” Generations before and in a completely different world than my home, Florida, Robert MacNeil hacked away at the trunk of a tree in his yard in Canada.

He writes, “In the garden of the small apartment house we lived in was a very big tree. One day, filled with visions of hollow trees that people could enter, even live in, I attacked the trunk of this tree. The power of imagination or wishful thinking was so strong that it by-passed any sense of physical reality. I actually believed I could cut rooms inside the tree; or, if I made a little effort, a staircase would magically appear…

…I must have been thinking of Owl’s tree with its curved steps in the Hundred Acre Wood or the hollow-tree entrances to the home of the Lost Boys in Peter Pan…”

My obsession with books began as an independent venture: my parents had very little to do with it, other than completely supporting it. Before I began to landmark my advancement by page numbers, and during the times of Pickle Plant Soup, my parents encouraged the bizarre undertakings of my own imaginative labeling of my environment. Unlike MacNeil, my mother didn’t read poems or sing songs to me at night, and the relevance of sound unveiled itself slowly, following the importance of the story and its relation to the stories that I had already experienced in my own life. For MacNeil, the sound preceded the story. The noise of words, the comfort in that noise, invoked his imagination and carried him through his life.

Through his childhood, MacNeil connects the economic Depression with Winnie-the-Pooh and David Copperfield. He characterizes his father’s connections with his own heritage with a description of the comfort he found in Irish-sounding words and phrases. In his description of his college years, MacNeil writes, “I didn’t find God but I found William Shakespeare, a piece of God’s work so extraordinary that he comes close to divinity himself.

How weary stale, flat and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world.

… There, exquisitely put, was the enervating mood, the despair so painful-delicious to seventeen-year-olds that often visited my late adolescence. Never before had there been such instant connection between something I felt and a set of words to describe it…”

With every stage and moment in his life, MacNeil produces an association with literature, poetry, prose of some kind, or a word, the noise it makes, and the meaning the sound inflicts on him.

*

At first, I found this memoir a slow read, constantly infringed on by interjections of passages from the Classics. About half way through, I put the book down, and I walked away. Because a friend had recommended it, weeks later, I gave it a second chance. Who knows what happened during those weeks. Maybe that was the necessary gestation period for the first half of the memoir. Upon my second address, I realized that although MacNeil was directly connecting his experiences with his environment to his experiences with literature and noise, the experiences he explained were nothing like the literature itself.

In other words, the influence was indirect. The literature did not position his life, but manifested in a string of syllables within his life.

I understand now that although my life and my connection with literature moved in obscurely different patterns than MacNeil’s, myself and everyone else are just as affected by words and sounds as he was.

While MacNeil connects Shakespeare to adolescent angst, I connect my parents constant fights to my eight year old sudden and severe belief that I could fly. I heard the sound of my parents’ dissatisfaction and need for release, and I manifested that into the physical. MacNeil experienced the physical, and once he read Shakespeare’s words aloud, his understanding of himself became acute.

*

I don’t know why each word affects me the way that it does.

I don’t know what other elements associated with the word change the word itself.

Whatever the cause, my obsession with the direct influences of words on society and society on words has been refreshed through my read of Robert MacNeil’s own insistence on both of these principles.

_________

Asha Baisden is the scribe of this beautiful essay.

Sailing for Dummies

When I was younger, my father, one crisp fall morning, left for work as a tire salesman with no apparent hobbies, and then, that same day, returned from work completely obsessed with the sport of sailing. He told me he’d come into contact with a man who was going to sell him his 27-foot Hunter at an “unreal, just absolutely unreal” price. My father went on and on all night about his plans for the boat, and his plans for us: he and I were going to spend our summers fixing up the boat (it needed hours and hours and hours of work), and when the boat was finished, we were going to sail ourselves on a week long-expedition, clear down the Eastern coast until we hit the Bahamas. When we got really good, and I’d proved myself as a decent Skipper for the boat, we’d make plans to upgrade our vessel. And then, someday, we’d sail the world together. For a Connecticut girl who’d never traveled outside of the Tri-state Region by car, much less by the swan sail of a boat, the prospect of this adventure was beyond my wildest dreams, beyond any excitement my five-year-old mind could begin to fathom. My mother just nodded with a crooked smile while Dad and I talked out our intricate plans: paint and sail colors, the name of our boat, the places we’d go on her.

A few weeks later, after departing a giant coughing school bus, I noticed what looked like the bottom half of a boat propped against the side of our tiny brownstone home. I could see just how beat-up she was from down the street – chipped paint, a crooked mast, a rusted rudder – but I couldn’t help it, my dreams of a real voyage, open water, and unlimited time with my often-absent father got me going, and I started running from my pack of kindergarten friends toward my house until I could touch the thing that was to carry me, transport us so many miles away.

Before school each day for months, I’d kiss her fiberglass body, right on the side of the keel. I’d tell her how many days were left until summer before we could begin to work on her, until we could shine her up and make her new. Inside each night, we continued our plans, my father searching and notating items in thick Boat U.S. catalogs until the wee hours of the night, as I sat scribbling images of the ocean and the Bahamas in my little grey notepad and reading slowly from a “Sailing for Dummies” book, tracing my finger over each image, notating the differences between stern, starboard, bow.

Finally, when the last bit of bitter winter had seeped from the air, my father and I began our work. While he toyed with wires and ropes, the hatch and the jib sheet, I scrubbed and scratched at grime and rust until the hot orange sun set each night. Even after the sun had disappeared, I’d work until Mom dragged me in the house by my shirt for dinner.

We’d worked for weeks before Dad decided on her name. I secretly wanted to name it Erin, but my father’s mind was set. Althea. It was the name of his favorite Grateful Dead song, and he told me, smiling wide, that it meant “healer.” The boat had bigger plans for him, he said, than we had for her. He also said that when the boat was finally finished, he’d let me paint her name in big blue letters across the transom. I spent weeks of art time at school designing how I’d get it just right, each bubbly letter spilling in to the next in ruler-measured, five-year-old precision.

But before we got Althea to that sparkling finish, that crowning moment, something happened. Something changed. My mother and father started their violent warfare again, and suddenly, Dad wasn’t home for us to work together – and whenever he was there, he was just on his way out, just had to pick up something for work, just scooting past the laser glare of my mother. And then, it seemed, he began ducking by my own waiting, anxious stare. I still kissed Althea’s keel each morning, and I assured her we’d be back to it soon. But many months later, as I sat in a lawyer’s office watching my parents debate over who got what, I heard my father say in exasperation that yes, he’d be selling “that Goddamn boat.”

Weeks later, along with my father and his belongings, she was gone, like she’d never been there at all. Nothing was left of Althea but some white paint splatters pasted to the grass and few heaping piles of ashy cinderblocks.

Looking at the paint splatters and cinderblocks each day after school brought about the same feelings I experienced while reading Jeannette Walls’ memoir The Glass Castle. The prose of her book is spare in detail, but rife with emotion, as you grow to understand Jeannette’s brilliant tale of buoyancy growing up and eventually escaping a life of poverty and strife. Along with her three siblings, Jeannette endured a father who, when sober, taught them how to embrace life, but when drunk, became dishonest and reckless; and a free-spirited mother who preached resilience, but often despised the task of raising her own family. The Walls parents do exhibit that they love their children – but it is a peculiar, selfish love, a love that leaves the children knowing they are cared for in a sense, but that they will never have parents they can truly depend on. In a series of short chapters, you feel the let-down as the Walls family moves from home to home, each worse than the last, often lacking basic comforts like food on the table, heat in the winter. Through the pain of each shattering memory, though, the Walls children learn to care for themselves and for each other. They fed and protected one another for years until, finally, they were able to escape the cycle of poverty, and even more importantly, the cycle of constant disappointment from their parents. Through it all, though, Walls prevails, and ultimately finds peace in aftermath of her parents’ carelessness over the years. The Glass Castle, a representation of hope and of future promises for Walls, remains standing, despite the pains of her past.

A few years ago, after I’d graduated from college, I rented a small sailboat with my boyfriend and sailed for a day along jetties of the boastful Jacksonville, Florida coastline. I hadn’t been on a sailboat in over 14 years, but my boyfriend had taken an interest to sailing and was determined to learn, so I tried my best to suck it up, and we went. As we finally got the boat settled and then coasted seamlessly along the sparse shore, the sails of the tiny boat puffed full with the ocean’s cool breath, I closed my eyes for a moment and tried to imagine we were approaching Bahamian shores, that I could hear the bong of steel drums dancing through the air, that I could feel the sticky, encompassing heat I’d once imagined as a five-year-old. I tried to imagine the voyage that had never been. The dreams I’d had for my own family that did not and would not ever manifest. But the sting of the Northeastern winds on my face, and the sound of my boyfriend cursing at a runaway rope, however, brought me back to my own aftermath. My own, still-standing glass castle. I opened my eyes, and saw my boyfriend cluelessly fumbling with the main sheet, a look of humored frustration plastered across his face. Right then, for that moment, I decided there was no place in the world I’d of rather been.

____
This essay was written by the ultra-talented Erin Trauth. She has the magical gift of doing one hundred things at once. She accomplishes this with her teleporter. Don't look but she's behind you right now.

Who Let the Dogs Out!

When my wife isn’t home, when she’s teaching all those classes, I read to our dogs. I don’t know why I don’t tell her this. I don’t know why I keep it a secret. (It ain’t a secret anymore!) I know, however, that some books need an audience, deserve an audience, even if that audience is of the canine variety.

Just recently, I discovered R.E.A.D. (Reading Education Assistance Dogs). The mission of R.E.A.D. is to improve children’s literacy by having kids read out loud to certified therapy dogs. Studies have shown that reading out loud helps with reading comprehension. More importantly, for children with confidence issues, reading to a dog is less intimidating than reading out loud in class. This from therapyanimals.org: “Research with therapy animals indicates that children with low self-esteem are often more willing to interact with an animal than another person. Further, during such interaction they are inclined to forget about their limitations“ (http://www.therapyanimals.org/read/about.html).

This is where our tax money should go. Rescue the dogs in all the pounds. Train them. Load our schools with dogs. We will read to a pack of Pomeranians Charlotte’s Web, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, A Wrinkle in Time, and Catcher in the Rye. Our canine companions will be attentive while we recite the poems of Dickinson or Frost, howl in admiration at Ginsberg’s “Howl,” click their claws for more Sylvia Plath. It doesn’t need to be just our elementary schools and middle schools and high schools. Let the dogs into higher education. Let them sit beside us in literary theory. Let them tongue wag at Lacan or Foucault. Let them sit in on our creative writing workshops. Let them growl at a bad metaphor, a weak sentence, a bad title. What’s the harm in opening up our literature to golden retrievers? Why can’t we have another bestsellers list, one in which involves poodles and Dalmatians and St. Bernards? Wouldn’t we all be in brighter moods with a dose of literary dog love? Wouldn’t we all be a little bit smarter, our canine friends knowing more than how to sit or stay or play dead, but now how to deconstruct sentences, find the deeper meaning of Ulysses?

Today, I’ve decided to read something my dogs and I can both learn from, How to Speak Dog, by Stanley Coren. In chapter nine, “Ear Talk,” I read about various ear positions and what they mean. My dogs—Ginger, Charlie, and Savvy—are gathered in my office, lying in various positions, in various spots. When I start reading, immediately Charlie leaves the room. He’s not the intellectual, more of the ball-loving jock. But the other two are attentive.

In between paragraphs, I look at them. “Is this true?” I ask. “That when you have your ears back, you’re being submissive?”

Savvy wags her tail. Ginger looks up at me, her ears back. Charlie peeks around the corner of my room and goes back out.

I read some more. Coren writes about how humans never use our ears to communicate, but we decorate them with studs and earrings and multiple piercings.

“How would I look with an earring?” I say.

Savvy wags. Ginger tilts her head.

“Do you think Mommy would like it?”

Savvy wags. Ginger puts her head down.

“I’m thinking you’re right, Ginger.”

When I end the chapter, Charlie barks from the other room. It’s 5:30. Time for dinner. Nothing, not even the best of books, can deter a dog from dinner.

Alone in Brotherhood

And Loneliness, this is what I am talking about: a feeling so alone and disjointed in the world. A force unlike any other. A stray bullet caught in the lightless night’s fractured resolve.

I was boy who believed himself to be broken, and as such, I traveled with the ‘wrong crowd.’ Looked for quick fixes. Not like a hammer and some glue. We didn’t care about putting ourselves back together. We cared about pounding liquor and beer. We cared about slapping substances to the sides of our lungs. We cared about experiencing an escape by the process of dissolve.

[DISCLAIMER]: I have no research or theoretical basis to back this forthcoming phrase, nor have I borrowed it from someone, as it is what I feel grinding between the teeth in my bones at night:

Men will love their buddies from youth, no matter what tragedies in life occur, as they will forever be brothers.

Of Brothers: I could never bring myself to join a Fraternity during my undergrad years. I stayed in contact with the friends my family would say were ‘going nowhere,’ during my college years. We relived that part of our minor fractured selves together, again, but since then—I have pulled away from them, said goodbye to many of them, some with words, some without, some in death, but I know I will never be able to let go of them—these friends—the ones who walked into the darkest depths of night with me.

It is this idea of Brotherhood, this idea of loneliness and fractured identity, this feeling of loss and of being lost that I believe Brad Land is writing through in his memoir Goat. The memoir itself is fragmented, disjointed, told with the language of a poet on the run. Land’s lines are short, jagged, full of image, similes; empirical. The form and function of Land’s memoir is a representation of himself, or the ‘self‘ as portrayed in his memoir.

In Goat, Land is like most boys trying to find their way in a masculine world, attempting to learn the ropes--but like I am learning, have been learning--Land begins seeing he will never fully subscribe to the American ideals of masculinity shared by the masses of boys and men around him.

For an aspiring poet, Land’s use of rhythm, language, and tension is to be admired and studied. In reading Goat, he and I begin to form a budding relationship like two friends embarking on their first road-trip together. Land is a friend I don’t quite know, a friend with such demons that I may never truly know him; yet-- I can’t help but feel like Land and I have both fallen off the same apple tree.

Goat.

Brad Land is a friend. A friend confused with his place in the world. A friend that I wish will succeed in his own head although I may forever worry. He’s the friend I watch get beaten brutally, enough to the point where I wish to hunt down his attackers and reciprocate their bloody bludgeonings. Land is a friend I reach out and hug as he cries because we both believe in emotion and honesty. And by the end of the first section of the book, Land is a Brother I reluctantly, but dutifully agree to sprint with as he struggles to explore the orange melancholy road of identity and brotherhood he finds at Clemson University. I do all this with Brad Land because of his craft, because of the immediacy he comes by to tell his story, because Brad Land and I are one in the same; we are Brothers finding our place in life. And if I can watch my brother make sense of his life, then I know there’s a chance I can make sense of mine.

______

Brandon Pettit is the author of this lyrical review. Among his many talents, he is one hell of a whistler. For real!

It Begins with Boys

We were next to the garden shed, in the grass, hiding in the shade from an oven-hot sun. We kissed upside down, my nose touching his chin. I felt him smile, and he said he always wanted to kiss a girl underwater. I brushed a beetle off his chest. His head was on my lap, my hands were in his hair, and we were in love.

Josh was my first knee-buckling, stomach-tumbling, don’t-need-any-other-food-except-your-love type of boy. He was my New York summer vacation fling at age sixteen, the main topic on every page of my journal, the first thing I thought of when I woke up, and the last person I saw before boiling down to sleep. For two weeks he was my soul mate, my future husband, my “one and only”, and then I scratched off home, three hundred miles west of him. We were over.

Seven years later, I’m a grown woman and a permanent resident of Central New York. I have a job and pay for my own car insurance, prescription co-pays, and groceries. Soon, I’ll be moving out of my parent’s home to stumble south in search of a master’s degree in Creative Writing. I’m an adult. I’m mature. I’m also sitting on the front porch, legs folded kindergarten style under an open journal, waiting for Josh to drive by in his forest green Mustang so I can wave to him. He doesn’t live at home anymore, but he works with his father and acknowledges me when he zooms by, all sleek and sexy and tattooed behind his Aviator sunglasses. I smile back, careful not to seem too enthusiastic, and raise a limp hand in the air as I avert my eyes to the blank page I’m working tediously not to fill. Meanwhile, my stomach does a cartwheel, and, secretly, I hope Josh’s does one too.

As a serious writer, I shouldn’t be covering this topic. According to almost every one of my creative writing professors, this is high school drama. This is blah. This is boring, and the most important part of the piece is my unyielding obsession, not the lingering, hopeless love between a boy and a desperate girl. Essays about relationships hardly ever work as successful and riveting pieces. Give it up, my professors would say. It’s not worth it. Tell that to Jo Ann Beard, author of a book dedicated partially to the butterfly effects of hormonal bonding, The Boys of My Youth.

Beard, a skillful artist with a remarkable ability to present both monumental and mundane moments with an emotionally distanced hand, is Queen in the world of broken relationships. She’s experienced them all. Hal, the stuffed doll with a plastic head who’s eventually clunked into an ice cream shop garbage can. The handsome, much older and popular jock who she knows will never become more than the distant, aesthetically pleasing object of a hot afternoon observed from a best friend’s bedroom window. The dope-smoking, butt-poking creep. The intelligent, witty, understanding, and married physicist. Finally, but definitely not last, the cheating husband who decides he’s not in love with his wife anymore. One after the other, each boy, in some way, scrambles the strings of her already tangled heart. I understand how she feels, and I don’t think it’s boring or blah.

I admit, however, that beneath, or – perhaps more accurately stated – above, Beard’s sour love stories exists a level of emotion that transcends the trivial subject of failed romantic relationships. It’s one that’s easily forgotten when ensnared by heart-shaped trappings, and it’s the one I neglected to remember the summer a beautiful boy curled into my lap. But it always, when we least expect it, reminds us it’s there. What Beard reaches for and successfully grasps is the inevitable approach of a greater loss, an abandonment that arises not by choice, but by the natural recycling properties of the universe.

Amidst the boys, Beard watches death tiptoe on its ever-moving feet. More than once, she teeters close to life’s final drop off, and, as a result, searches for something as motionless as plasma to hold onto when everyone else spins by like loose space rock.

Like Beard, I’ve had boys grow and drop off my mind like dead leaves. They’ve made me cry and wish I were driving south towards Alabama with broken windows rolled down and music blaring from the radio. I, too, have witnessed my dogs grow old too fast. Sitting beside them on the floor with their chew toys, I touched their arthritic knees and cleaned up the urine they could no longer hold. Unlike Beard, losing a human loved one, fortunately, has not become one of my experiences, but I know one day it will.

Jo Ann Beard’s book is entitled The Boys of My Youth, but in the end, it’s not about the boys. It’s about what happens in between and after the boys are gone. They may be the first fleeting shard of heat that ignites a greater fire, but they are not the entire story. They are not the only objects of love. Awareness, artistic talent, and self-contemplation rise from the red ashes of Beard’s broken hearted memories. This eloquently written book reminds readers that life rolls temporarily forward even when others stop. There are greater losses in this world than failed sexual attractions. Like my story, Beard’s begins with boys but ends with something greater.

I sit on the porch. Josh drives by and doesn’t wave, I’m flogged momentarily with defeat, but I soon realize the house behind me is filled with pets and people that won’t be with me forever. The Boys of My Youth sits on a wooden rail by my chair, basking in the cool, bluish shadows of my home. The book review is half-finished on my lap. Inside, Jo Ann Beard is doing a silent screaming routine with her best friend, one who’s stayed with her since childhood. She’s found her plasma: the indelible bond gluing each being to one another, securing a universal love that even death cannot destroy. I’m no longer thinking of boys.

_____

Emily Engelhard wrote this wonderful essay and she is exceptionally talented at juggling chainsaws while eating ripe tomatoes.

Hiding

I was trying to sneak a picture of Katie reading, but this is what I ended up with. You must read this book. It's quite excellent.

What Are You Reading, Kyle Minor?

Kyle writes: "I'm reading the Library of America's Philip Roth: Novels and Other Narratives 1986-1991. The book collects two novels -- The Counterlife and Deception -- and two nonfictionish books -- The Facts and Patrimony. Roth's earliest work in books like Goodbye, Columbus and Letting Go showcase a gifted apprentice writer grappling with his masters, as far as I can tell mostly Henry James. His first big commercial success is Portnoy's Complaint, in which he abandons clockwork prose for rip-roaring dramatic monologue. To my taste, the books that immediately follow Portnoy -- Our Gang, The Breast, and The Great American Novel -- show a writer with sufficient power to do whatever he wants in the act of squandering his time and talent on farcical stuff that doesn't add up to much. But then something happens. Roth pens Zuckerman Unbound, a trilogy and epilogue of metafictional novels featuring Roth doppelganger Nathan Zuckerman. Roth is still not afraid to transgress, but now it's to more serious ends, and the work still holds up today. Novels and Other Narratives 1986-1991 represents the period immediately following Zuckerman Unbound. Here we see the beginning of Roth's transformation from literary provocateur to literary master in The Counterlife, and from aging adolescent to grownup in the nonfiction narratives, particularly in Patrimony, which is a forthright wrestling with his father's death. These books prefigure Roth's greatest achievement, the run of Sabbath's Theater, American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain, the first two of which might likely be the most accomplished works of fiction of the century's last twenty-five years. Reading them together and in order for the first time, in addition to being a deeply pleasurable experience, has been an education in how a good writer teaches himself, mid-career and book-by-book, to become a great writer."

_________

Kyle Minor is the author of In the Devil’s Territory, a collection of short fiction, and co-editor of The Other Chekhov. His recent work appears in The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, and Plots with Guns, and in anthologies such as Best American Mystery Stories 2008 , guest edited by George Pelecanos (Houghton Mifflin, 2008), Surreal South(Press 53, 2007), edited by Pinckney Benedict and Laura Benedict, and Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers (Random House, 2006).

The Lazy Summer Monster Wakes

Every summer, the Clever Title goes into hibernation. It sleeps and reads and eats and reads and partakes in rounds of frisbee golf and reads and travels to foreign lands to visit relatives and reads and sleeps some more and reads some more.

During this hibernation, the Clever Title dreams of books. Lots and lots of books. It dreams of the places these books will carry it--to what worlds, to what imaginations. It loves these dreams so much it does not want to wake up, but wake it must. It has an obligation, a mission, a promise.

And so it lumbers out of its cyber-cave. It says, "This coming year expect more essays-reviews, more essays, more poems, more photos of people reading."

Be on the look out. Be ready.

Tom Perrotta

In 2004, I moved to New York City and would live there for a year. Some of my work days stretched to fourteen hours, so I didn’t have much time to write. But I did go to New York is Book Country, the City’s celebration of the printed word. And who would be appearing on the NYU campus? Tom Perrotta. I was there with my brand-new copy of Little Children, ready to tell him how much I loved his work. After an NYU-sponsored panel discussion of Election (Jim Taylor, the film’s co-writer, is an alum), Perrotta was signing books at a folding table outside the building.

Here’s the thing: even though I’m comfortable speaking in public and I’ve done tons of onstage comedy, I lose the ability to speak coherently around celebrities I respect. (I’m pretty sure Tony-winning actor Brian F. O’Byrne thinks I’m a blubbering moron.) I mumbled something about being a longtime fan of his work and mentioned that I was a writer too. Perrotta took his time, serving up that parental-type advice that somehow sounds more credible when delivered by a bestselling author.

Perrotta told me to keep at it, that success doesn’t come immediately—after all, Bad Haircut wasn’t published until he was 33. He even folded advice around a secret (now public knowledge). Tom Perrotta ghostwrote a Fear Street novel that I probably read when I was younger. While there are worse ways to make a living, Perrotta was telling me that you have to take advantage of any opportunity you can. I took that advice to heart. I published music criticism, wrote for a local newspaper, and even contributed material to a New York City guidebook. (Imagine my surprise when 1.5 sentences of my work were reprinted in The New Yorker!)

Working as a copywriter in Syracuse, those groves of academe beckoned once more, and I applied to MFA programs. Happily, Ohio State wanted me, and I eagerly anticipated my time as a Buckeye. One day at my office job, I got an e-mail from a future classmate at OSU. He explained that there would be panel discussions with visiting authors, and he wanted to pair a third-year student with a first-year student to lead the discussion and asked if I might want to join in on the fun. There was this novelist visiting in Winter Quarter, and he wondered if I had any interest in sitting in a small group with and asking questions of this Tom Perrotta guy. I responded at the speed of light.

There was a new Tom Perrotta novel coming out. I read The Abstinence Teacher in one sitting, excited that I’d be able to actually ask the author the nerdy questions only a fiction geek could love. Why are the leads of Abstinence so far apart in the first 150 pages of the book? Why does he frequently choose to introduce his male leads through the perspectives of women?
In late January, Laurel Gilbert, that third year, sat across from me with a notepad, and we worked out our battle plan. It’s difficult enough to impress teachers you see every day, but we took great pains to construct the kind of probing questions that Perrotta hadn’t heard before. I had read all of Perrotta’s stuff, so I could ask about the evolution of his work. Laurel loves music and children, so she was qualified to ask about those things. We typed up our thoughts and were ready.

It was finally February 6, 2008. I was at the discussion room much earlier than I had to be, so I was there when Perrotta strolled down the hall with Lee K. Abbott, one of the excellent teachers in the program. Laurel and I said hello, and Lee looked at the assembled students with his usual good cheer and asked, “Any way we can make some coffee happen for Tom?”

Laurel and I looked to our classmates and at each other dumbly. The English Department made its magical pots of fresh-brewed communal coffee with purified water drawn from gold-plated faucets in the kitchen beside the hovercraft hangar. In other words, the nearest coffee was several buildings down. “Yeah,” I said. “We can do that.”
I walked down the hall until I was out of sight, then I started running in my good suit. (Okay, my only suit.) I took the stairs because the elevator would take too long. I went across the street and past the music building and over the crosswalk to the Wexner Center. I dashed down the stairs and pulled the plastic out of my wallet. I filled the paper cup with dark roast instead of light because, after all, he went to Yale and probably liked a more complicated blend. Then I jogged back to 311 Denney and put the cup in front of him on the wooden table. “Thanks,” he said.

“Not a problem,” I replied, struggling to breathe evenly and stop sweating.

During that panel, I found out that Little Children was supposed to be a much lighter work, in the Wishbones mold. The book turned darker when Ronald James McGorvey, the town’s child molester, showed up. A sweet novel became one about sexual transgression. I learned that he doesn’t speed through the chapters in a first draft, but writes each one at a time, not going on until he’s happy. The panel was over too soon. Laurel and I offered to walk Perrotta to the auditorium where he would be giving a reading. For five awesome minutes, Laurel and I walked a best-selling author across the Oval and the three of us took our place in a timeless exchange: teachers help students who become teachers in turn.

This quarter, I got to fulfill another Perrotta-related ambition. I assigned my class to read Joe College, hoping some of my students would relate. We discussed the characters and structure and plot and worked out the different ways the work could be read. I helped them understand the book and they helped me. Perhaps someday, that circle will be completed and some poor class of college students somewhere will read my book.

_______

The talented Kenneth Nichols wrote this essay. We at The Clever Title like him a lot!

Old Time Religion

I hadn’t thought much about the sexism evident in Christian religion. I never gave much thought about its values being situated in a patriarchal society wherein the omnipotent, omniscience, omnipresent God is man; Jesus – who saved the world of all of its sin – is man; Adam, who was deceived by Eve, (who all by herself tainted the world with sin), was the first man; the Bible’s great prophets and teachers – Moses, Solomon, Paul, Isaiah – were men, and man is used for every mention of humankind. In addition, I neither paid much attention to the male pastor, the male bishop, the male monk, nor did I think twice about how organized religion was structured to empower men, while omitting and (sub)consciously oppressing women. Instead, when I thought about Christianity, I thought about race.

Growing up in Antioch Missionary Baptist Church, Jesus was white. He had blue eyes and long blonde hair; all of his angels were fat miniature white boys with eyes as blue, and hair – although curly – as blonde as His. Jesus was white, and because He came from God, God was white too, (and so was the Holy Spirit), and thus these great white hopes were used as vehicles to subjugate black people. As long as black people revered white as clean, pure, holy, and powerful, they would learn to celebrate white men, while subduing themselves. It was as if Willie Lynch had a hand in organizing religion just as he orchestrated a way to pit black slaves against one another so that blacks would participate in self segregation sans the overseer. Hence, when I thought about my Christian religion, the religion upon which America stands, I didn’t think about gender; I thought about 300 years of slavery, 40 acres and a mule, and Jim Crow laws, and woe be unto me, for my black skin made me a member of the most oppressed cultural group in America. But then here comes Sue Monk Kidd who shows me that Christianity influences more than race matters, and introduces me to religion’s impact on gender and sexuality.

In The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, a spiritual memoir, Sue Monk Kidd retells the awakening in her life that leads her from existing like a sleepwalker in a patriarchal Christian tradition, wherein man stood at the helm of her being, to finding home (and refuge) in the Sacred Feminine, in which woman is acknowledged, celebrated, and incorporated as the vanguard of her reality. Her awakening is reminiscent of one raging against a machine, kicking it and punching it until it breaks, and later realizing that the machine can’t stay broken, but must be repaired, realized, and reformed in a manner that makes its utilization healthy and valuable for all people.

During her spiritual journey, Kidd takes readers to the grocery store, introduces them to the Many Breasted Woman, and encourages them to stand as tall as the caryatids. She claims women have lost their feminine divine within patriarchy, and must venture out—awaken themselves—in a quest for the female soul in order to be whole.

Indeed, to find something else wrong with organized religion doesn’t contribute to increasing my own Christian faith. However, what Sue Monk Kidd’s memoir does for readers (like me who feels like I am a member of the most oppressed cultural group in the world, and in turn end up being an oppressor), is reveal our common threads, our insecurities, our divinities, our humanity. Therefore, if reading, criticizing, and conversing about Christianity leads to the debunking of traditions that have oppressed any person, then ride on Christian soldiers.

Kendra N. Bryant is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric & Composition at the University of South Florida, Tampa. She is interested in Spiritual Memoirs, Harlem Renaissance, Radical Pedagogies, Hip-Hop, and Poetry. She can be reached at knbryant@mail.usf.edu.

A Preemptive Eulogy for My Father

I often fantasize about incinerating my father in a funeral pyre. The kindling of bank statements and tax returns from the better part of a century will catch first, spreading the flames to the burial shroud of toilet paper rolls he horded from motels and motor-courts across the country. On a southwest Texas hill, overlooking the rocky rag-weed country and spindly deer-pruned oaks, my father’s smoke will rise, mixing with the fumes from discount sirloins charring on the grill and gasoline flavored Travis Club Cigars burning like incense.

This obsession with my father’s death started when my mother taught me how to blend cement like cake mix. While we poured the blend into fencepost holes for my father’s new garden, she let slip how old he was turning on his upcoming birthday. I was dumbfounded. I couldn’t even count that high.

As the son of a cemetery groundskeeper, my father had often lectured me on the high cost of death. To ease his worries about the price of his own funeral, I crafted him a headstone with my new masonry skills. I poured cement in a coffee tin around the base of a stirring-stick with R.I.P inked on the handle. Normally I tried to sell such creations to my parents to offset my father’s quarter-a-week allowance, but as it was his birthday, I wrapped the memorial up as a gift.

“It’s your own fault,” my mother told my father when he reacted with horror to the coffee can monument. “It’s just Shawn’s way of dealing with your fussing about your high blood pressure and how you could die at any moment.”

My father and I cope with our propensity for worry by envisioning the worst outcomes in every situation. This gives structure and stability to the unknown, providing a working template for coping with the disastrous future. And so, each time my cell phone lights up with my parents’ number, I expect to hear my mother’s lighthearted voice asking how I’m doing, telling me that she is okay and that my father just died.

“How?” I’ll ask, though this will be as much a formality as her asking about my day. He’ll die just as his brother died and just as he predicted--the same way I’ll likely die. His heart will finally give out beneath the strain of hypertension. He’ll crumple over while sitting in his failed garden with an air rifle, potting squirrels that raid his diseased pecan tree, and trying not to think about the struggling stock market.

* * *

At their core, most memoirs provide an understanding of life through the lens of death. In, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, Peter Godwin attempts to understand himself, and his native country Zimbabwe, through his father’s death. The book reads like an annotated eulogy, cataloging and qualifying his father’s works in terms of his fated demise.

Zimbabwe teeters on the edge of revolution. Vagrant guerillas claiming to be war vets invade white owned farms, beat the owners, and force the displaced people to pay ransoms to flee with their personal possessions. Reading about these graphic acts, we initially question why anyone would remain in such a hostile environment. However, Godwin shows us how the situation worsens gradually, making it increasingly difficult for native whites to know when to draw the line. Through Godwin’s recreation of his father’s life, we understand how Godwin senior cannot leave his home no matter how worthless his Zimbabwe savings become, how many of his neighbors are killed or raped, or how many times his house is broken into and cars stolen. Godwin senior cannot abandon his home. As we discover alongside the author, he already did this once when fleeing Nazi controlled Poland as a child, leaving his family to meet their deaths in a concentration camp. Although threatening, this African landscape is his home. Through this terrain he has come to understand himself and his world. Fleeing would be its own kind of death.

My father has also abandoned his past once before. For ten years he was married to a woman who I only know in terms of the property she took in the divorce. Undoubtedly, a detailed account of their life, of joint tax returns and car payments, once existed. But, in all my restless scavenging during the waiting of youth, I never found so much as this woman’s name scribbled on a receipt.

As an accountant, my father takes faith in the certainly of numbers, calculating his mortality in bank notes and interest rates. On several occasions I have accompanied him on his weekly pilgrimages to his safety deposit box. I’ve tried to steal glances at its contents in search of scraps of his secret past: old love letters, a perfumed handkerchief, creased photos, or the note his first wife slipped him like a dinner napkin, announcing their divorce. Other than envelopes full of low risk bonds, the only sentimental object in the box is his old wedding ring. But I’m sure he only keeps the ring because its worth would be lost in resell. It is nothing like the simple gold band he wears. It’s an expensive, fashion conscious ring—the ring of a forgotten man.

I can’t imagine how difficult it was for this keeper of records to incinerate ten years of his life, partly because I know how ruthlessly he clings to his current life. He will never move out of our family home no matter how many times his car is broken into or women are raped at the corner laundry mat. He will never give up his obsessive habits of scribbling computations in the edges of the Wall Street Journal or monitor his stocks online like vital signs no matter how negatively these affect his hypertension. This house, his obsessive habits and routines are all that remains of his laborious life, and he will only part with them in death.

Just as my father knows how he will die, I can predict what his will, will contain. In numerical script, he’ll explain the most cost-effective way to conduct his funereal. The cemetery plots he has horded his entire life will be left to his children, to leave to our children. An outsider may read this departing list as cold, but my family will know what hides behind the numbered instructions.

And so, like Godwin, I’ll watch my father burn. I’ll stand on a vista overlooking the layers of hill country turning a grayer shade of green each level back. In the crackling fire, I’ll hear my father murmuring about how much money he is saving us. And when the BBQ coals turn gray and the Travis Club cigars he left are stubbed out, I’ll scoop his ashes into a coffee tin and transport them home, to the one place he truly found security: his safe deposit box.

_____________________

Shawn Alff is the section editor of the Tampa Bay edition of Creative Loafing’s Sex and Love site (http://tampa.creativeloafing.com/gyrobase/sexandlove). He is currently hard at work on his own epic eulogy.

Subject: Go, Huraki!

Dear Mr. Murakami,

As I type this message, you are undoubtedly fast asleep—on the other side of the planet, in Japan. And at this point, roughly one year after the publication of your memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, I cannot imagine how many pages of fiction you wrote, how many miles you ran, before going to bed today. According to your book, in 2005, you’d run 186 miles in July, 217 in August, 186 in September.

I find this dedication amazing. I also find it amazing that you’ve got a profile on Facebook.

The purpose of this message is to explain to you as clearly as possible why you should confirm my friendship “request.” Like you, I operate best after a short midday nap. Like you, I lack a competitive drive. Like you, I am a runner. (Or rather, to be less presumptuous, I’ll say I run.) And like you, I am a writer. (Again, to be less presumptuous, I write.) Also, if you’ve gotten a chance to look at my profile, you’ll notice that I, too, share an interest in classical and rock music, that I adore Raymond Carver, and that The Great Gatsby is one of my favorite books.

Now, click on “Photos.” In spite of our obvious physical differences, we share a certain—let’s see, how can I put this–“essence.” You’ll notice that in many of my pictures, I try to cultivate a sullen, contemplative expression comparable to yours on the dust jacket of your memoir. Also, you’ll notice that in my many of my pictures, I’m alone. So like you, I am a loner, a craver of solitude. (That’s what I think the pictures imply, at any

My point is: these similarities in taste and temperament should not be tossed aside lightly. You and I could get along famously, Mr. Murakami. We could be great friends, I feel.

Like you, I once lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Your description of running along the Charles brings back so many fine memories: “People enjoy being around the river. Some take leisurely walks, walk their dogs, or bicycle or jog, while others enjoy rollerblading. (How such a dangerous pastime can be enjoyable, I frankly can’t fathom.)” Mr. Murakami, I can’t fathom it, either! Whenever I walked the paths along the Charles—I didn’t run when I lived in Cambridge—the most irritating thing was having to jump out of the way of reckless, inconsiderate rollerbladers. When you go on to say that “seeing a lot of water like that every day is probably an important thing for human beings,” I couldn’t agree more. Without exception, I’ve always lived close to rivers: I was raised in a town that sat on a river (the Kanawha), went to a college that sat on the confluence of two rivers (the Ohio and Muskingum), spent my early twenties near a pseudo-river (the Olentangy), and now live near the Hillsborough River, in Tampa.

But for a few months, I lived in Cambridge and saw the Charles every day. This was the spring of 2004. For the sheer fun of it, I took the T from Cambridge to downtown Boston, circled the Commons on foot, then returned to Cambridge. I remember the thrill I would get when crossing the Charles, how beautiful the sun looked, a ball of fire reflected in fragments in the water.

As I said, at the time, I did not run regularly. This is because I was smoking so heavily, close to two packs a day. For this reason, I can appreciate that at one point in your early adult life, you smoked sixty cigarettes a day. You state in your memoir that once you decided to dedicate yourself to running, you gave up smoking completely: “It wasn’t easy to quit, but I couldn’t very well keep on smoking and continue running. This natural desire to run even more became a powerful motivation for me to not go back to smoking, and a great help in overcoming the withdrawal symptoms.” This is encouraging. Perhaps, if you and I ever sit down for coffee or a beer—I love Sam Adams, too, by the way—you could elaborate on this and give me some pointers for quitting for good.

Anyway, I admire your dedication, to running and to giving up cigarettes. When I was in Cambridge, there was one spring day when the entire city shut down: it was the Boston Marathon. I spent the day watching the runners from a sidewalk in Brookline—the 23rd mile marker, I believe. We cheered for everybody who ran past: “Go, Andy!” “Go, Sammy!” “Go, Bobby!” The expressions on the runners’ faces were exactly as you describe them in your book, “like they’re thinking about something as they run.” When you describe running the Jingu Gaien course in Tokyo and hearing a woman call out to you in support, I wish it had been me. “Go, Haruki!” I would have shouted, and given you a thumbs-up.

Another reason I want you to confirm my friendship is that I truly take your thoughts on creativity to heart. When you say that the advantages of running are that “you don’t need anybody else to do it” and that you need “no special equipment” and “no special place to do it,” I can’t help but think you’re also talking about writing. Most writers require nothing more than paper, pen and space. You say that a writer “has a quiet, inner motivation, and doesn’t seek validation in the outwardly visible.” I have similar thoughts on writing, even though I can’t articulate what my “inner motivation” is. Of running and writing, you state that focus and endurance are just as important as natural talent. Because I sometimes suffer bouts of fatigue, I find it reassuring when you state that focus and endurance can be sharpened over time. You say that writers, like runners, “have to train themselves to improve their focus, to increase their endurance.”

Well, with warmer weather around the corner, having completed your book, I’m hoping to run and write better, with greater focus and endurance. If you confirm me as your “friend,” I will share with you how these hopes pan out.

Cheers,
Bryan Rice

Bryan Rice lives in Tampa, where he is pursuing an MFA at the Univ. of South Florida.  During his free time, he drives up and down random avenues and counts adult bookstores and strip clubs, of which there is an endless abundance.

Reading Railroad by Katrina Koski

I am the opposite of a claustrophobe. I love wedging myself into tight spaces. I revel in that “hugged” feeling and the knowledge that if the world were to come to any sort of crashing halt I would bounce safely off of the barriers of people, darkness or walls that I had lodged myself between instead of careening aimlessly into the air and landing in a crumpled mass of broken bones.

Books are a sort of barricade to the outside world. When I crawl into that crevice between the pages and lock myself in with characters, plot, and thematic fulfillment I am sitting inside of a tiny box. It lets me set aside the financial realism of the nonliterary world and focus on somebody else’s problems. I get to watch other people handle sticky situations and file it away like advice from a friend.

I live just off of the Q line in Brooklyn and while its primary purpose is transportation, I often take advantage of the giant metal box and bring my latest distraction along for the ride so I can nestle cozily into a world run by someone else.

I like the lack of silence the train provides. The seductively mechanical tone of the woman announcing stops on a newer train is more enjoyable than the garbled accents of real live conductors on the older trains, but the seats on an old car are comfortable and provide nooks where the new ones only have benches lining the walls. The lighting on an old car is a dingy yellow and the seats are red and orange as opposed to the crisp tungsten blue benches and clean chrome handrails on new ones. It’s digital versus vintage. Still, both trains rock me sweetly into the pages, while the car fills and empties with each stop.

When a train pulls up to the platform and the windows are filled with tired sardines wearing suits and sneakers my first instinct is to curse the rush of commuters. This is what most New Yorkers do and no matter how tightly we pack ourselves into a car there will always be more along the way. I’ve perfected my sea-legs and spent many a ride with my feet planted firmly and precisely against the floor. One hand helps to redecorate the chrome bars with flesh-colored upholstery while the other hand finds enough space between bodies to keep my book within reading distance.

Unless I’m being poked in the back with an oversized purse or inhaling the fumes of a heady personal fragrance, I don’t mind the packed train ride. My book is like the tiny center of those Russian wooden nesting dolls that you pull apart from the middle. Layer upon layer of protection – the story within the pages, within the cover, within the walls of my mind, within the wall of commuters, within the walls of the train. We nestle into the moving metal box and are carried off into our own thoughts and distractions.

Sometimes I tie literature to events in my own life, but it’s usually easier to let go and forget that I see these connections. In reading A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Eggers doesn’t just tell me about his mother’s death or the toll it took on him. He boards me onto his train of thought, where we make tracks along a stream of consciousness with views more colorful and depressing than anything I’ve seen in Brooklyn. He blurs the line between literature and reality and instead of slipping in to his living room and dying mother, I look to the passengers that surround me, pondering their turmoil. I read the lines on their faces, the languages their bodies speak. I take them all in like a first line, setting the stage with props like groceries, babies, and cell phones. Their frocked outer layer reveals tone and voice, but it’s up to me to write them a story. I never know how close I get to the truth.

I live in the boonies of Brooklyn, so seats start to open up when there are five or six stops left until my own. Passengers I hadn’t noticed before pardon their way past me, calling me back to what is tangible. Each passenger is another page of the book; the emptying seats make room for struggles I am not prepared for. The train gets colder, is less comforting than the cushion of human contact, but it is the anticipation of my nearing stop that distracts me from the world of ink and paper. In part, my mind is still wedged between the pages like the thumb that holds my place, but the rest of me falls back into the rhythm I was running from. Breathing becomes a little easier and my feet get to relax, but my mind becomes vulnerable in that emptiness. Real life is an issue once again and the thirst for a new distraction itches at the nape of my neck.

People Like Me

Random facts are awesome. Let me clarify this statement. I am not talking about random facts like Sasquatch is a girl, or the earth is flat, or that the personal success of most professional athletes and popular singers would never have happened except by the direct intervention of Jesus Christ and the Great Lord Almighty. Those are a given. No, I am talking about the random facts about the people you might call family or friend, or lover. Or the random facts you learn from a newfound acquaintance and because of these random facts, you are intrigued to want to know them a little better. I am talking about the random facts that make people individuals—the little tidbits of insight that allow you to make a connection with them and allow you to see the humanity hidden inside the persona.

For example, here are a few random facts about me.

Random Fact #1. When I was kid, I loved sugary breakfast cereal and would beg my mom to buy each colorful sweetness solely based on the cartoon commercials I’d see every Saturday morning when I ironically sat in front of the TV with a big bowl of sugary breakfast cereal. I don’t know why, but there was something about the cuckoo bird and the silly rabbit that made the cereal taste better.

Random Fact #2. When I was a kid, I was a Star Wars geek. Here’s proof. My friends and I used to run around the neighborhood with sword-length tree branches and make the light saber swooshing noises as we fought. We’d play Rock, Paper, Scissors just to see who got to be Luke, and who got to be Darth, with the loser being Han (which in retrospect wasn’t all that bad). As I said, I was a Star Wars geek…until I saw the final film of the trilogy, Return of the Jedi. I mean, come on. The almighty Empire brought to its knees by Ewoks? Darth Vader turns against the dark side? Really? Okay, I was a kid, but I wasn’t stupid. Even back then I knew that ultimate power corrupted without redemption and huggable teddy bears were (simply put) huggable teddy bears.

Random Fact #3: For as long as I can remember, music was (and still is) an important part of my life. Once, when I was a twelve or thirteen, I was left home alone. I boosted a little weed from my mom’s stash and played her old records for hours. Bands like Elton John, Styx, and Billy Joel. I sat by the stereo, big-ass headphones on my ears, blasting away while stuffing sugary breakfast cereal in my mouth and reading the lyrics to “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” “The Grand Illusion,” and “Goodnight Saigon.” A few weeks later, I danced my first slow dance to Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.”

As I grew through my teens and into my twenties, my favorite bands became my favorite bands because they had not yet “sold out.” Think Aerosmith when they were still on drugs. Think Metallica before “Enter Sandman.” Think R.E.M. before “The One I Love,” before “Stand,” before “Shiny Happy People.” Back in those days, I thought Guns N’ Roses rocked and then Axel Rose fired everyone in the band. I thought Def Leppard was great before their drummer was reduced to one arm, then they were only good. I thought Motley Crue was cool when they were ripping off Ratt and Kiss but not when they were ripping off Guns N’ Roses.

So what do all these random facts mean? For the most part, nothing. They don’t define me as a person. Not really. But in a strange way they provide a third dimension. When you read them, I become more than some little-known writer clicking keys. I become a person who is inviting you, the audience, into my world just a little.

This same type of invitation is what unfolds in Chuck Klosterman book Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs. By way of his reminiscent pop-culture, Chuck invites the reader into his world of random facts and ties them into a worldview that, while a bit jaded, is (at least in this reader’s opinion) spot on. For example, whether or not you agree with Chuck’s declaration that “The Empire Strikes Back remains a legitimately great picture,” you can enjoy his argument that the film spawned the philosophies of Generation X by way of Luke Skywalker as the original Gen Xer. I know, this sounds outrageous. But it makes sense. From Billy Joel and Guns N’ Roses, from computer life simulation games such as The Sims to the victimization of cartoon breakfast cereal spokesmen, from The Real World to Saved by the Bell, Klosterman assigns provocative views on the themes of consumerism and America’s infatuation with fame by dissecting pop culture with comic banter and repartee.

But more than that, as I read this book, I began to connect with the author. By way of his random facts and slices of pop culture, Klosterman extracted from me memories long gone from my day-to-day life. The book evoked a sense of comradery between me the reader and Chuck the writer. We had something in common, and because I could relate, his worldview made perfect sense. So much so, that I wondered how I missed it all these years.

There is a pretty good chance that those born in the late eighties or nineties may never have heard of When Harry Met Sally, let alone know who Sam Malone or Dianne Chambers are. Chances are, because Hollywood remade The Shining in the late 90’s and it pretty much tanked, or because schools no longer require the reading of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and hence don’t pair up the movie with the book like they do with Romeo and Juliet, well, to this generation, Jack Nicolson has only been the guy who counted cracks in the sidewalk or was a sidekick to Adam Sandler or worse yet, he’s just that old guy from The Bucket List.

This book was written for me and for people like me. For us, who love not only sugary breakfast cereal but the cartoon spokesmen who made them taste better. For us, who know there is something philosophical in Empire, and understand that those philosophies were sold out by huggable teddy bears. For us, who hated the label of “Gen Xer” but still “bought shit marketed to Gen Xers.” This book was written for us, who still own a Human League cassette.
_________

Jim Miller is the fiction editor of Saw Palm and the associate editor of The Mailer Review. He has a story that appears in Florida English, and he received a purple heart for injuries incurred during a paint ball war.

Awake Experience

I have trails of dreams and nightmares almost every night. A friend of mine once said that my dreams were “stress tremors.” She told me that stress is like an earthquake for me. Stressful events are so exact and massive that my brain can’t process them at once. Dreams are the effects that come afterward. The tremors. Aftershocks.

When I was in second grade, several of our domestic tabbies and some of the neighborhood feral cats were found dead around the neighborhood. Newspaper reports called it a “gang initiation.” That explanation seems silly to me now. Regardless, they had been cut with knives.

My family collected pregnant strays and usually had trouble homing the entire litter, which left us with seven cats, at the time of their disappearance. All of them disappeared over a two week period. Before they were found lying scattered across grassy lawns a few blocks away, I spent my time after school kicking sticks along the sidewalk with my little brother, calling their names one by one, until the day I understood what had happened.

The day I found out, I sat in the backseat. Dad drove a wide, stocky car. The car’s name was Bear. I remember him turning the wheel for minutes upon minutes to pull into the driveway. I don’t remember where we were coming home from. Tommy—a slinky, white cat— about a year old— lay sideways in the middle of the driveway. He breathed heavy and slow. I remember the wheeze of his breath and the chill of the purple-gray sky, the brown blood, a circle around fresh, red blood, a long his stomach. Dad curled Tommy into his arms, rested him against the passenger seat of the car. Our mother led us into the house.

Later that day, I found out all of the other cats had been found dead. I don’t remember feeling sad or scared about their end. I remember the trauma of the realization that I had been calling their names for days when my parents knew they were dead. I thought of my mother’s sympathetic eyes. I felt disconcerted, ashamed.

I still have dreams about laughing people holding the dead cats, gutted, the way pigs and cattle are, hung from meat hooks in butchery warehouse coolers.

Maybe this was my first violent dream, or maybe it is the first dream I can relate to an awake experience, so I remember it.

I dreamt after my father’s death that the death was all a sham, that he had been hiding from us all along. I react differently to this information each time I dream it. Sometimes I sob and thrash around whatever space I’m dreaming about. Sometimes I sit quietly and have a conversation with him. Once I found him living in an underwater community in Alaska. We hunted polar bears together.

When my dog was sick last year, I had a dream that fronds of black viruses sprouted from his fur, and I methodically cleaned them off with a make-up removing pad. When I was sick this winter, I dreamt that reality was made of a quilt with red string, that all of humanity sits around sewing it, talking to each other, like grandmothers at a knitting circle. I remembered after I woke up that someone had told me recently, “Women heal from talking.”

Several years ago, over a summer when I frequented the beach, I fell asleep under the sun and had recurring dreams about plants growing teeth and hair, fruit which, upon opening, had tiny beating organs living where the seeds should have been.

I am constantly wondering at the power of writers. For any artist, dozens of potentials troll the beams of our creative processes. Most of these “powers” rely on the specific audience, their expectations, their drive to investigate. Entertainment seems like the root of the effect of most writing. And through entertainment, the powers exist. The power to discuss. The power to examine. The power to call to attention, to shock, to disarm. The power to haunt.

I found Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen in the most boring place ever: on a shelf at a Christian thrift store. It stood there between scattered, beat up Bibles, Children’s books, a book about truck maintenance, and several other random selections. I looked down at the cover: a drawing of a woman stepping through a collection of leafless trees, pointing a flashlight at the ground, at the end of a piece of string or rope that trails off the page. She wears a bright blue cardigan tucked into her knee length skirt. I am reminded of television secretaries and Nancy Drew. Her appearance seems dated, but I cannot imagine which decade she belongs in. She seems to belong in every decade.

This cover allows a book of engagement in the bizarre to rest, quiet and unacknowledged on a thrift store shelf, waiting to infiltrate the life of an Unsuspected: someone who will collect the book based on the cover, will send it to their granddaughter in high school or a good friend who is “into reading” because a comment from Jonathan Lethem, written on the top of the front cover, reads, “Kelly Link is the exact best and strangest and funniest short story writer on earth…”

The cover is camouflage.

I feel guilty, now. I should have put it back, gone home, bought it from a independent bookstore or somewhere where the sale would show up in a database, would maybe do a dime of work to help her career. I should have let someone else find and appreciate the smooth oddity of this work. Someone, not a creative writing student, should have found this by accident, should have read about a dead man writing letters to his wife which he places in a mail box standing in the middle of the beach water. The water is described as “furry.” Some other reader should have ear-folded that page and considered the feeling of a wave against them versus the feeling of their cat rubbing past their ankles.

This comparison, this feeling is the effect of every story. A piece of hair lingering between a girl’s lips is described as a tail. Puzzle pieces are described as “nuggets of sky colored glass.” Jewels on the hem of a gown scratching the floor are described as having the sound of mice.

The stories are, most of them, fantastical, magical, and full of ghosts, but they speak of our own stark reality through their strange plotlines, character descriptions, metaphors.

Dreams lag in the backs of our minds for days, years. Sometimes, we forget them. Sometimes, they rest, ghostlike, not full memories, but shadows of memories. Stranger Things Happen reminds me of my own dreams. It reminds me of the grey, formless knowledge of fear, horror, surprise, and chaos, ducking, shrouded by the landscape of my mind, hidden from me during the hours I am awake. It is the knowledge that appears in new form only after I recede into sleep— once in the guise of a man in a bear costume, guarding our house from the neighborhood cats, once in the mold of the cats themselves, sitting in a line at the bottom of my closet, their tails twitching behind them, speaking to me in deep, low whispers, saying, “Leave the door open when you’re finished.” They told me, “If we can’t leave the closet, we’d at least like to see the room where we live.”

Asha Horikawa wrote this lyric review. She currently is in San Diego. She writes me often to tell me how good the food is there.

They Will Never Leave

To read is to surround yourself with characters, real or imagined, and to immerse yourself in their world. You know what they’re thinking. You feel what they are feeling. Their sole existence is to tell you their story and you can follow along and pause and replay it as often as you like and they can’t stop you. They can’t turn you away. They cannot reject you.

These characters will not get annoyed for considering them your fallback plan on a Friday night. They will not betray you. They will be your on-again, off-again. They will not mind.

They are not the jealous type.

They will not accuse you of cheating. They will not make you feel guilty for building personal relationships with newer, unfamiliar characters. They will not fault you for seeking comfort in other pages. They are content to just be there, waiting.

And you will need them. You will try to set them aside. You will have to. Sleep, work, love, and life will barge in on your personal time with these characters. You will think of them often at first, wishing you had the time…

You won’t tell your real-life lover about them. Or maybe you will. Maybe your lover is into that sort of thing.

But maybe you just want to keep this one secret. You want your characters to remain yours anyway. You like to pretend they exist only for you.

Eventually, they will fade. You will think of them occasionally. You will be reminded of events that transpired and it will take you a bit to realize it didn’t actually happen to you. It happened for you.
No matter, they won’t mind playing the part of the dirty mistress.

You consider starting something up with them again, maybe from the middle. You miss them.

They will not mind if you visit them only to escape your divorce. They will not mind distracting you from the death of a loved one. They will not mind being replaced with a less dog-eared copy when your toddler tears the familiar one in half.

You will feel better in no time.

You will realize that they will always, always be around when you need them. They exist only for you.
_____________________

Katrina Koski, currently sick with flu-like symptoms, wrote this little essay about characters that stick with us. If you haven't already, go check out her project at http://project365.shutterfly.com/.

On the Beaten Path

I was walking down a cramped alleyway off of Khao San Road when I saw some stereotypes walking my way.

Didn’t these tourists know how stupid they looked? Just because every other backpacker – birdshit traveler as some Thais called them – looked like a filthy mess didn’t mean that they had to. The couple in question each had dreadlocks and identical sleeveless shirts. Their fingers were locked, and in each of their free hands were identical Lonely Planet guidebooks.

It was almost cute, but all of these white people looked the same in Bangkok. Even outside of the city, they were identical whether they were on the beaches, in the mountains or in Burger King.

I thought I was different. I was practically Thai, albeit a bit tall, blonde and bearded.

The main thing all these visitors to the kingdom had in common were their Lonely Planet guidebooks. Or a Frommer’s. Or a Rough Guide. I owned two, but I would never read them in public since it was an invitation to be hassled by the locals. Pick any location in the book, and you’ll find tourists. If a location in the book is described as tranquil and quiet, even more tourists will show up to this supposed unspoiled place.

Some people hate the guidebooks for ruining out of the way places. Some love them for making the great places available without spending hours trying to comprehend indecipherable writing in a foul-smelling bus station. I’m in the middle where I use them but see the harm they cause by attracting people like me. They’re a necessary evil. Perhaps necessary evil is too harsh. Pleasant annoyance maybe? Vital frustration? Necessary disappointment?

There we go.

I’d be fucked without a guide book, and so would most people. Not everyone has the time and patience to blindly search for the next great place. We want our vacation and we want it now. Being the only whitey in a crowded place can be intimidating to most. I got used to it, but sometimes I just wanted people to stop staring at me while I shopped at the market after class. I was only buying eggs. I wasn’t going to haggle for the live snakes.

The pros and cons of the guidebook mentality are examined in Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? by Thomas Kohnstamm. This underpaid, overworked Lonely Planet guide writer occasionally hates what he’s doing to South America. His job is mainly to update the previous edition, and places that were once described as low-key had become overrun with tourists. When he stumbles on an undisturbed oasis, he’s technically supposed to write about it. If he does, tourists will flock to the place, the industry will blossom, and the tranquility will disappear. Cue the pollution, gaudy hotels and the hookers. If he doesn’t write about a destination, a rival will find it and the same thing will happen anyways.

That Catch-22 is at the heart of Thomas’ decisions as he goes to resort towns that have fallen victim to European travel package tourists. What was once idyllic in the outdated edition has become relatively unpleasant. The travel writers are more than conveyors of information. One favorable write-up from Lonely Planet is all it takes to make it the hottest place to go to. People bitch to Thomas that he’s ruined all the best spots by writing on them. Others ask them how they could get a job working for The Bible, as they call it. He just wants to remain anonymous, fix the outdated information in the book and find the next place for a good drink. I could relate.

All of the guidebooks I read raved about Chiang Mai. What sold me is that this northern city in Thailand was high in the hills and substantially cooler than the steaming wok that is Bangkok. Ancient temples are scattered throughout the country’s second largest city. Charming, some books said. Can’t be missed, said the others. The beauty of the city became victim to the hype.

What the guidebooks didn’t really mention about Chiang Mai were the prostitutes. They were everywhere. They sat on the bars stools and wore high heels and short skirts. The high-end places boasted ladies classy dresses waiting by the entrance. As pleasant as their calls from the bar are when looking for snacks at a 7-11, they quickly grew tiresome. Girls were everywhere. Burnt out expats were enjoying the nightlife. Backpackers swarmed every location and Thais were a minority in the old section of town.

I was disappointed. My buddy and I grabbed some Beer Changs and went to the night bazaar. It was all the same trinkety crap that can be bought just about anywhere. We got drunk. We haggled for knockoff clothing and brass knuckles. We drank some more. I fell on the ground. He was puking everywhere. We were both laughing: silly white men in a strange – but not too strange – place.

We were wearing down the beaten path even more. The title of the book asks if travel writers go to Hell, but I think the tourists might. At least we’re adequately guided the entire time.

Anthony Karge wrote this essay. He is a worldly traveler and reporter for The Westport News. He also is an Associate Editor of Thunderbolt, an online video game publication (http://www.thunderboltgames.com/).

To Updike

http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2009/01/28/john_updike_dies_was_legend_of_literature_from_steamy_to_sublime/