KGB BarLit Journal

Christa Faust’s Money Shot Cashes In

2009-04-30T21:40:08Z

Hard Case Crime recently turned 50. The independent publishing house dedicated to all things pulp has published over 50 titles since it opened for business in 2005. And what a business for lovers of crime fiction: HCC not only reissues out of print classics by ‘usual suspects’ Donald E. Westlake and Lawrence Block, but also new works by Jason Starr, Richard Aleas, and Max Allan Collins. Whatever book you choose, the HCC catalogue guarantees a entertaining cocktail of sex and violence, booze and gunplay.

Perhaps this last is why most mistakenly believe that American crime fiction is ‘a guy thing.’ Most readers are more familiar with Sam Spade than Kate Shugak, Matthew Scudder than VI Warchowski. And in looking at HCC’s catalogue, one can see why myth lives on: all of the titles are written by men.

Well, almost. That is, until Money Shot (Hard Case Crime, 6.99) came along, and got nominated for the Edgar Allen Poe Award for Best Paperback Novel of the Year. ‘I still can’t believe that my book will be on the same shelf with so many of my old-school hardboiled heroes,’ says Faust.

Writing within any genre is double-edged: how do you stay within the conventions of the form, and yet break the rules enough to distinguish your own voice? And are there different ambitions or obstacles for women writers of crime fiction?

With Money Shot, Faust admits that she wants to ‘ make male readers think about things like female sexuality, complex body issues, fear of aging. And I want female readers to face the hard, cold reality of violence against women, as well as see just how tough a woman can be.’ But she also notes that ‘I’m a pulp writer at heart. I just want to tell a good story.’

Angel Dare—the former porn star who narrates Money Shot—evokes Uma Thurman’s The Bride from Kill Bill: strong, sexy, and smart (it’s no coincidence that Tarantino is quoted on the jacket). Angel plays with the archetype of ‘the whore with a golden heart,’ becoming more Kali war-goddess than the concubine of Shiva. Betrayed and forced to restore justice, Angel rips through these pages with wit, sass, and strength.

Intriguingly, the portrayal of the adult entertainment industry in Faust’s book is more matter-of-fact, less lurid than what you would expect from a pulp crime novel. Faust—who has worked on and off screen in the fetish & BDSM segment of porn—wanted to show the industry ‘for what it actually is: an eclectic mix of all kinds of people, good and bad and everywhere in between, all just trying to make a living.’

Faust balances her creative writing with other ‘glamorous’ tasks like going to the gym, walking the dogs, blogging, catching up on email, and doing the laundry. ‘Unfortunately that doesn’t always work out, and I often find myself pulling 7-day weeks.’ Yet the origins of her books tend to come from a single scene, situation, or predicament.

With Money Shot, it began with ‘Angel tied up and left for dead in the trunk. The fun of writing is taking a starting point like this and trying to piece together how she got there, what she’s going to do about it.’

The book ends rather open-endedly. Can readers hope for a sequel featuring Angel Dare sometime in the future? What is Christa Faust working on now?

‘If I told you,’ she replies with a smile, ‘I’d have to kill you.’

Christa Faust is the author of numerous crime and horror novels including Hoodtown, Triads, and Control Freak, as well as the Scribe Award-winning novelization of the movie ‘Snakes on a Plane.’ She has also worked as a filmmaker, a model, and a Times Square peep show girl.

[CRIME CORNER] Doing It Right: Interview with Gregg Hurwitz

2009-04-16T15:06:16Z

Los Angeles. The city of (fallen) angels has lured many crime fiction writers over the years, its truths often stranger than fiction. From Hollywood to Echo Park, L.A. is a siren song of corruption, racial tension, drugs, and silicone implants. Perfect grist for a writer’s mill. Its urban sprawl screams for stories to chronicle its bittersweet existence, yet few succeed in the task. Those that have, are famous beyond L.A’s zip code—writers like Chandler, Ellroy, and Connelly.

Let’s add one more to the list: Gregg Hurwitz.

This June, American readers of can read his latest thriller Trust No One (352 pages, St. Martin’s Press, $24.95), which the Europeans devoured last year under the title We Know. But regardless of which time-zone you live (or read) in, set aside a couple of days without interruption. Once you begin a Hurwitz novel, all other daily activities tend to be put on hold.

The novel’s opening literally explodes, with a SWAT team breaking into Nick Horrigan’s home in southern California. A Black Hawk helicopter whisks him off to negotiate with a terrorist. Set in post-9/11 America where the boundary between ally and enemy tends to blur or be fluid, Horrigan discovers that he must reckon with his past if he is to survive.

As in his other novels—most notably his tertralogy featuring US Marshal Tim Rackley—Hurwitz depicts his characters through action. Suspenseful in the extreme, his stories also wrestle with larger themes such as justice and vigilantism, vengeance and culpability.

Despite the grandeur of his themes, however, this writer’s feet are firmly placed on the ground. Whether he is writing novels, screenplays, or Wolverine comics, Hurwitz describes writing as fundamentally ‘blue collar’, and ‘like carpentry.’

‘I like loud keyboards,’ Hurwitz confesses, ‘so it sounds like I am working. Like I’m hammering, nailing, pasting. That’s the closest element—like I’m constructing a building.’

Such a straightforward sentiment may cause his former professors at Harvard and Cambridge University to blink, where he received his Masters in Shakespearean Tragedy. Upon closer examination, however, perhaps linking his books to plays like Hamlet or MacBeth is very apt indeed. Many of Hurwitz’ novels read like revenge tragedies, blending visceral action with dramatic themes. And like any good playwright, Hurwitz writes with swift economy and entertainment.

‘In L.A., everyone wants to be a writer, but no one wants to write,’ Hurwitz says with a smile. ‘Everyone likes the dust-jacket and the book signing tour, but it’s the most unglamorous job in the world. You wake up, you go down the hall, you sit down for 10 hours, you write.’

When pressed, Hurwitz admits that while writing involves discipline and consistency, it must also ‘be elevated to something else.’

‘When you’re inspired, you don’t need any help,’ Hurwitz explains. ‘A professional needs discipline, structure. Bringing up the bottom of your game. Escalating that, so that every time you sit down, you are conditioned to produce.’

Trust No One is the latest accomplishment from a professional passionate in his craft. Hurwitz does it right, writing from the gut with muscularity and smarts. For Hurwitz, ‘writing is a sport,’ and this latest will leave you breathless.

-------
Gregg Hurwitz is the author of The Crime Writer, Minutes to Burn, Do No Harm, The Tower, and the series featuring Tim Rackley: The Kill Clause, The Program, Troubleshooter, and Last Shot. Mr. Hurwitz lives with his family in Los Angeles.

The Scraping Sound of Auto Parts

2009-04-14T18:29:06Z

Your little sister is late. Outside the terminal, a slight drizzle slants in the orange streetlights. Everyone else on your flight has long since been picked up or connected to another destination. You hear her car before you see it, a scraping sound of auto parts traveling across potholes. As soon as she pulls up, your nephew climbs through the passenger window and jumps on you, tries to pick you up around your knees. Your sister rushes towards you. “Hiiieeee,” she hugs your arm then yells at your nephew to get your bag. He’s pierced his left ear, a tiny silver hoop hanging off it, just like yours.

You get in on the driver’s side because the other door is broken. Your nephew slides past you into the back. He bounces up and down, then thrusts a tape into the stereo and turns it up loud. “This is my new favorite band,” he says. Your sister adjusts the volume and asks if you’re up for Thai food.

It takes a few minutes for her to get the engine to turn over. “How was the trip?” she asks.

“It sucked. Baby next to me got sick all over its mother. And I mean all

over. Even on her face.”

“Ohhhh nasty,” your nephew leans over the gearshift, his head wedged between you and your sister.

“You’re one to talk. You did that to me once,” your sister pushes him backwards.

“No way.”

“You did, your first Christmas when we were going to Grandma and Grandpa’s. Just as we got on the plane. I had to wear your dad’s coat the whole way because my shirt was a total mess.”

“Gross. Sorry.”

“Just don’t let it happen again. Baby puke is one thing, 12-year-old puke is another,” she pulls up in front of the Thai restaurant.

While she runs inside to get the food, your nephew turns up the music again and drums the back of your seat.

“You’re losing your hair,” your nephew drums the top of your head.

You are always amazed at how clean your sister’s house is. She must have gotten a gene or something that you didn’t in order to be able to work full-time, look after your nephew and keep the house looking like this. You like coming here for Thanksgiving, a comfortable, effortless holiday, only one meal, no presents to buy, your favorite relatives. And there are never any family negotiations because your parents have already driven to Florida for the winter and your older sister, Nancy, and her family go to the in-laws every year. Everything is all set. Christmas is a whole other story.

Your sister has candles and a tablecloth for every meal, even takeout. The foil containers of food leave oily yellow stains on the batik cloth.

You listen to the rest of your nephew’s new favorite band while you eat. He’s starting his own band, he tells you in between gulping down an entire portion of chicken curry.

Their New-Agey neighbor, Charlotte, stops over to borrow some eggs for an apple pie she is baking. Even though she’s old enough to be your mother, she has a crush on you, your sister told you a few years ago. She manages to come up with a lot of excuses to drop by whenever you are visiting. “Hey you,” she gives you a long hug, an overpowering scent of patchouli wafting off her soft, billowing body. Then she helps herself to a glass of wine and sits down at the table. Your sister stands behind her mouthing “I’m sorry.”

You are only too happy when your nephew asks if you want to come up to his room and listen to some music. He plays you a song he wrote on his guitar while you sit cross-legged on the bed. The walls are covered with posters of bands and skateboarders replacing the ones of the Mariners and the Sonics that were up last time you visited. You take out your new iPod that you bought in anticipation of being hired by the producer. Even if you don’t get the job, at the very least he’ll give you an occasional rewrite, you justified to yourself in the Apple store. “Awesome,” your nephew says as you show him how it works.

“Coast is clear,” your sister knocks at the door. “I’m just going to take a bath.”

“Wanna watch TV?” your nephew asks.

You sit together on the living room couch while he flips through channels, finally settling on MTV 2. Above the television, there is a picture of you and him at an amusement park when he was about five. You are stoned in the picture, after sharing a joint with your sister before you left your apartment, blowing the smoke into a towel so he wouldn’t notice. It was hot and you carried him around

on your shoulders for most of the day. Your nephew visits you by himself now, but you still go to amusement parks every time. It is like being on vacation when he comes, doing all the things you wish you did more often. Eating breakfast at various diners every morning, taking him to the beach, on hikes. He is like a novelty item and you bring him along to everything you’d do anyway, like parties, or out to dinner with your friends.

After he goes to bed, you stay up late with your sister, drinking red wine in her kitchen, discussing your older sister Nancy. If you get Nancy’s husband when you call, it will be a long time before he lets you talk to her, giving you the update on the Italian villa style home they are building. Last year they bought a plot of land and knocked down the century-old farmhouse and barn on it in order to create this marble monstrosity. “It has a 20-seat screening room and an indoor gym,” your sister imitates his hollow voice while she opens another bottle of wine. Nancy doesn’t do anything except spend her days chauffeuring their twin girls to horseback riding lessons, the tennis club, in between her personal trainer workouts. And they give the girls ridiculous gifts, like matching fur coats for their eighth birthday. It is somehow satisfying saying these things about Nancy, makes you both feel a little superior at two in the morning.

When you first wake up, you don’t know where you are, a familiar feeling. It is late and even your nephew has already eaten breakfast. He is perched on the kitchen counter drumming with wooden spoons and your sister has her feet up, reading the paper.

“I thought we were going to Ollie’s,” he grabs your shoulders as you walk past, shaking you slightly.

“We are,” your sister yawns. ““Hey did I tell you that we’re not doing the turkey thing this year?” she says to you. “I’m trying to be a vegetarian again and I couldn’t deal with cooking a bird. The whole thing is so gross anyway.”

“Whatever,” you’d been thinking about stuffing all week.

“Are you pissed?”

“I don’t care.”

“Jeez, I didn’t know it was that important to you.”

“What part of ‘I don’t care’ do you not get?”

“Ok, ok, ok. Have some coffee,” she goes back to the paper. “Before I invite Charlotte over.”

They always take you to Ollie’s when you are here. It is similar to a restaurant you went to when you were a kid for special occasions which seemed unbelievably fancy at the time, but was basically a Denny’s. The place is busy for Thanksgiving. “Maybe everyone is considering vegetarianism and not up for dealing with cooking a bird,” you say as you order the special, a turkey dinner sandwich with all the trimmings.

Your sister threatens Charlotte on you again. “She just got licensed to be a massage therapist,” she moves her eyebrows up and down at you. “I’m surprised she didn’t ask to practice on you.”

After the late afternoon lunch, your nephew wants to see this new skateboarding documentary. One of your friends worked on it, you start to tell him, but stop yourself. Your sister is always accusing you of name-dropping, especially in front of your nephew. You go with him to get popcorn while she guards the seats. She told you that he has a new girlfriend and asked if you could find out more. While you wait in line, you sucker punch him in the stomach, twist his arm around.

“Stop,” he smiles, lips retreating over braces. He hip-checks you and you bump into the family waiting in front.

The mother scowls. “Sorry,” you say, your nephew laughing.

“So how’s the girl action this year?”

“What do you mean?” he turns red and looks around to see if anyone has heard.

“You know.”

“I’ll tell you later, all right,” he whispers.

The three of you eat an entire vat of popcorn, your hands coated with butter and salt when the movie is finished.

“Are your friends still coming over?” your sister asks him on the way home.

“Yeah,” he leans over the gearshift again and looks at you. “Tonight is gonna be my band’s first rehearsal. Maybe you could help us think of a name.”

“How about ‘The Fuckheads,’” you say, shoving him backwards, softly punching his open palms.

“Don’t,” he laughs.

“We’re going to have a fucking accident if you don’t knock it off,” your sister slaps your ribcage.

You take a nap when you get back to their house, waking just as your nephew’s friends arrive. “That’s my uncle,” he says, pointing to you on the fold-out couch. You wait for him to ask you up to his room, but he doesn’t. His friends follow behind, looking you over as they walk past. Some have brought guitars and you can hear them alternate between trying to play their own music and listening to albums.

Your sister opens more wine. “Did you get anything about his girlfriend.”

“Hey, I’m not your spy.”

“He wouldn’t tell you, would he.”

You shake your head.

Your nephew comes down and asks if he can show his friends your iPod. Then your parents call and you all take turns talking to them. You stay up late again, this time discussing them. It is not as much fun as talking about Nancy. Your sister is always angry with them for this reason or that, trying to get you on her side. There are usually long periods of time when they aren’t even speaking to one another. You switch to beer halfway through the evening. Your nephew’s friends leave, but he doesn’t come downstairs to say goodnight.

In the morning you watch more MTV 2 sprawled out on the couch, your nephew curled up in the armchair. He doesn’t provide his usual music video banter, endless facts about the band, the director of the video, record label this, record label that. Instead, he just sits there quietly. Your sister’s ex is coming to get him in a little while. You ask him if he’s going to visit over his February vacation like he did last year. “I guess,” he shrugs. “Unless I go to my Dad’s.”

You have a shower and go get changed in his room. His backpack is on the bed, stuffed with clothes and magazines. You look closer. Your iPod is in there too. Maybe he forgot that he had it in his bag, you think, taking it out and putting it in your pocket. The doorbell rings. You pull on your shirt and hurry out of the room, drape the towel on a hook in the bathroom.

Your sister’s ex is at the kitchen table. He takes up the whole room. You were wrestling with him once years ago when they were still together, and he got you in a choke hold, wouldn’t let go until your sister picked up a baseball bat. They got married when your sister was five months pregnant, then divorced right after your nephew’s first birthday.

“Look at you,” he offers a firm right hand.

“Yeah, how you been?” you nod slightly. Your nephew concentrates on his toast, your sister has her back to everyone, the water running over dishes in the sink.

“Well we better get going,” he spreads his wide hands through your nephew’s hair. “Got tickets to the game,” he says loudly, so your sister will hear.

She turns around. “Cool,” she sounds distracted, as if she’s busy thinking about something else. “Go get your bag, honey.”

“Don’t call me that. You know I hate it.”

“Don’t talk to your mother like that,” he slaps your nephew on the back of his head just a little too hard. You and your sister exchange a look.

“Since when do you care,” your nephew goes out of the room. Your sister glares at her ex then goes back to the dishes. He doesn’t say anything, just picks up the paper.

You start to follow your nephew and explain out in the hallway, away from his parents, that you took back the iPod but there’s no hard feelings. Instead you stop and just watch him leave the room. When he comes back down, his face is wrinkled up like he’s trying to read subtitles in a language he doesn’t understand. “Bye,” he mumbles, not looking at you, focusing on something far away.

“Maybe I’ll see you in February, man.” You do this handshake that the two of you made up when he was little, where you interlock elbows and make a warbling noise. He goes along with it reluctantly. Then you grab him and pull him towards you, his face cradled in your armpit.

Everyone goes out to the front of the house. Your nephew isn’t wearing his earring anymore, you notice as you walk behind him. He throws his bag in the back of his father’s car and glances at you briefly before getting in. Then they drive away.

Your sister picks up some trash on the small patch of lawn in front of the house. “Assholes,” she crouches down over the squashed beer cans and McDonalds’ wrappers that someone must have thrown out of their car window as they drove past. She looks especially small and young in her sweat pants and oversized T-shirt, balancing the garbage in her hands. She throws it out, then stands there for a moment, staring at the spot where the car was.

When you were growing up, she was always bringing home stray cats and dogs, injured birds, friends who were thrown out of their homes, anything she could take care of. She starts to go inside then stops, unsure what to do with herself for the next 24 hours she has until her son comes back. She looks at you, hoping you might have some ideas, then away, knowing you won’t, before heading into the house.

You look out over the other houses on her road which swerves around and connects to a commercial street dotted with record exchange stores, a food warehouse, second hand furniture outlets. Your bare feet stick to the cold cement steps. The sun slips out from underneath metallic November clouds as you sit down and toe at the wet grass sticking up through the cracks in the pathway.

Whaling Song

2009-03-23T02:58:52Z

“Are you Middle-Eastern?”

She leaned forward with her knees pressed together.

“I’m Italian and Polish.”

It was a common misconception. He had dark eyes, dark hair, and over the tanned skin of his face a five o’clock shadow which, left to its own devices, transformed itself into a dark and exceptionally full beard.

His name was equally deceiving.

“Is it Torin?” She looked down at her clipboard.

“Torun. Torun Opat.”

A college professor was the only person to have ever pronounced his name correctly in its entirety on the first try. He had recognized ‘Torun’ as the beautiful Polish city on the banks of the Vistula River and ‘Opat’ as the surname of a very famous Polish mathematician – a Catholic who had helped to rescue his own Jewish ancestors during the Holocaust. A man who had, by some miracle, survived the slaughter of the Polish intelligentsia and died of lung cancer many years later after the creation and documentation of an unprecedented number of critical theorems. There was no reason for Torun to think that they would be related. He was generally terrible at math, but when his professor suggested the possibility of their relation, he was curious, and so he spent two years learning everything he could about this hero-genius, tracking down relatives, people who knew nieces and cousins of Opat’s colleagues until, ultimately, he confirmed that they were family. He kept a picture of his great-uncle in his wallet because there in the picture was anatomical proof that they were connected. If one looked closely, it was apparent that their noses were both the slightest bit crooked, and on each of their faces the crook started in the exact same place, just less than a centimeter from the bridge.

He told her all of this so that she wouldn’t look so disappointed, but all she said in return was “You look Middle-Eastern.”

“My father’s family was from Milan, and my mother’s family was from Torun in Poland. That’s how I got my name. My mother and father are…” He cleared his throat. “American. Were American.”

She looked up with a hopeful expression that asked “Expatriates?”

“My parents are gone now actually.”

When she leaned back and slid her bottom so that it was now firmly and entirely on the cushion of the couch, he knew he had made a mistake. She had been considering if he could be the show’s villain or, alternatively, the misunderstood foreigner who ultimately unites the cast after exposing their ignorance. Every reality show had one of each. But now he had ruined it by not being from the Middle East, and worse yet, by becoming the sad orphan. They had probably cast one of those weeks ago. It might have been alright if he was an orphan from the Middle East, but he was the son of an American writer and a very American movie star.

“My mother died last week.”

He was aware that they loved these sad disasters, that at least half of the cast would have lost a parent or a best friend, but he hadn’t said it for this reason. He had only said it because it was still so fresh that it had settled like a fog on his brain and clouded every minute of the day and night so that all he could do was think of her. To the rest of the world she was the actress who kissed Daniel Casey on the bridge in the film-turned-legend The Right Idea, but to him she was simply his mother. A certainty. It wasn’t until later in life that he was able to see her as anything other than this, that he started to consider that she may have been other things to other people, to question if her acting had ever seeped into their own lives, if he was ever fooled and, of course, he was. When it was close to the end and he did begin to know her in all of her capacities, he became angry with her for having the nerve to break character in what was her most important role, and he wished for the time before she spoke to him as a confidante, when she still spoke to him as a child, hiding things and making adjustments – a time when the preferred order of nature was still in intact and life was, for the most part, predictable and pleasurable.

“Do you think that she ever used her acting with you? Ever fooled you?” She asked it with a half-smile and her head cocked to one side. Torun found this kind of psychic aptitude in casting directors irritating.

“I don’t know.”

His mother had fooled him all the time.

“And your father?”

“He died a few years ago. Pancreatic cancer.”

His parents were buried together in a cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut three and a quarter miles from the house that his mother was born in. Even on the sunniest days most of the ground was shaded, and there were a good deal of flowers growing and ferns in the shady, damp corners of the grounds close to the woods that remained. One of his mother’s most prized possessions was a book of the works of Pierre-Joseph Redouté, and it was with this in mind that he had first set out with a pot of miniature roses under each arm which had subsequently spread like vines and now hung like curtains around her headstone. One of Torun’s earliest memories was of sitting in the grass at his mother’s feet as she dug holes for new rose bushes. Thorn. That’s your name. And this is a thorn too. They sound the same. But they’re spelled differently. She traced the letters in the dirt. T-o-r-u-n. T-h-o-r-n. He had swiped a small hand at the words, smearing the letters together.

The grounds were like one of her movie sets. There was a stunning display of landscaping, flowers and shrubs not typically found in combination in the every day world, framed by the dramatic urban gothic architecture of the city. The streets that formed its perimeter were each named for a different species of tree found along its walkways. At the corner of Birch and Ash, a heavy Egyptian arch served as a doorway onto the grounds, and at the very top was reassurance from Corinthians. And the dead shall be raised. Unlike the other local cemeteries which held the remains of those who had been born and died in the same city, the inhabitants of the Grove Street Cemetery were an incredible cast of international players including soldiers, slaves, university presidents, inventors, mothers, father, and children alike. His own mother happened to be surrounded mostly by young soldiers, except that on her left was laid his father, a stranger who never belonged to him, a writer who the rest of the world claimed as theirs. Although he was twenty years her senior – a scandal in their time – here they failed to qualify among the countless odd-couples who were lodged together for all eternity.

“Was he sick for long?”

“No. It was fast actually.”

“Ah. And did you have a chance to say goodbye?”

“Not really.”

“No?”

“I didn’t know him very well.”

“And why is that?”

“He worked a lot.”

“Mm. I’ve read many of his books.”

Torun chose not to reply.

“Do you think that he loved you?”

This was a critical question. She was probing for any sign of an inability to love or be loved, any strange or dramatic reaction to its mention, any exhibition of longing or lack which might translate to entertainment when a camera was employed.

“Yes.”

He was aware that his father had fooled him too, but that was none of her business.

“So would you say that you grew up without a father figure?”

“I had other people to look up to who were more…” He paused. “Present.”

He had developed a relationship with one of his university

professors, a kind of father and son connection, but he too had died and Torun was ashamed to admit that his professor’s death had left him feeling more lost and disoriented, more like an orphan than the death of either of his parents.

“And was this the same professor who suggested that you might be related to the mathematician?” He wondered why she had chosen this word instead of ‘hero’ or ‘genius’.

“Yes.”

“What were you studying with him?”

“Philosophy.”

Torun had been hired to work as an assistant for the professor, organizing his research, typing, gathering books and articles, but when the professor was invited to speak at a conference in Prague, he invited Torun along and soon they were traveling together. Torun had stood by when he received a standing ovation in Venice for his speech on the modernization of positive existentialism. He had also stood at his side when a crippled old man limped up to the professor to spit in his face at the suggestion that the world’s most well-known philosopher might have had no choice but to work with the Nazis. Later the professor defended the man, explaining to Torun that the man had done it “not because I was wrong, necessarily. Just to show that he cared.” In a few years time, he explained, the center of the world had shifted and the collective global memory was filled with new horrors while the old horrors were put on a shelf. “Remember, these are not new wars being waged,” he reminded. The old horrors, he explained, had no expiration date and they shouldn’t be treated as such. He had found the old man’s gesture reassuring.

When they were in Germany the next winter, Torun began noticing signs that his professor’s mind was faltering. Evidence of a brain tumor that would be diagnosed three months later. Torun began spending more and more time with the professor, first at his office and then at his apartment. Working, talking, cooking. Then cleaning, making his bed, feeding him.

“That must have been difficult.”

Torun had been surprised at how natural it felt, how easy it was at first. Easy, perhaps, because it felt as if there really was no choice involved at all. How many times had they debated together the ins and outs of free will? Of ethics? And now it was clear. Without the illusion of options, ethics was simple. It was a military principle.

One does not abandon a dying man.

In the last days before the professor was checked in to the hospital where he would spend the rest of his days, he had convinced himself that they were aboard a whaling ship. Torun had been with the professor through countless delusions, but this one was made more uncomfortable by the fact that it was so dated. It was like being in a badly-acted period movie, and it was embarrassing how his professor adopted a fake accent. Worse yet, it became a musical when his professor began belting out whaling songs. He shouted at Torun and made him stretch his hands in an imaginary accordion.

“It should start with a bang! Now play!” He stamped his foot. In just one week, Torun had been his mother and his son, and now he was playing an imaginary accordion, a mate on his whaling ship. It made him nauseous.

“Like this?” Torun asked with his arms outstretched.

It was the same sign that people use to surrender.

Arms up.

Like they are playing an accordion.

“Why a whaling ship, do you think?”

“I’m not sure. I think he was reading Melville. Or maybe he just saw something in a newspaper.” There were stacks of newspapers in every room. No one seemed to know why they were there.

“And what does a whaling song sound like? I don’t think I’ve ever heard one.”

He was expected to perform on the spot.

“OHHHHHHH! ONE-two-three-four ONE-two-three-four…,” he complied. “And then it keeps going on like that.”

Before his professor had turned into a madman, Torun had only heard a whaling song once before at the local aquarium during a field trip in grade school. A dirty, unshaved man who smelled like fish stamping to a squeezebox.

“And they sing about hunting?”

The professor only sang about hunting whales occasionally. Most of his songs were about other things – a woman named Anya, philosophy, conjugations in Latin.

amō, amāre, amāvī, amātum

dēleō, dēlēre, dēlēvī, dēlētus

cupiō, cupere, cupīvī, cupītum

morior, morī,, mortuus sum

Sometimes the songs were made up entirely of nonsense words as if he was singing in tongues.

“Mostly. But not just about hunting whales. They sing about their lives, their struggles.”

“Like hip-hop.”

He couldn’t tell if she was joking or not.

After the funeral he had bought some cds. He kept them hidden under his mattress. Most were sung with no instrumentation backing them, just a raw voice and an occasional foot stamping wood. A few had strings or a single drum. None were accompanied by an accordion. The lyrics were stories about the hunt, about the departure and the voyage, but hardly ever about catching what they wanted most. The most unbearable was a song about a homesick whale-hunter who had left his love and lost his mind. The professor’s own constant departure from reality had eventually started to wear Torun down. He would have liked to be wherever his professor was without pretending, so that he could say it was the slamming of water on wood that made the acid rise up his throat. But it was another violent confrontation of man and nature that was making his stomach turn.

“Shhh! Wait! Do you see it? Do you see it?!” His eyes were on something beyond Torun.

“It’s sinking.” Torun said it quietly at first.

“No, no. It’s not sinking. We’re fine.” He said it as if he was sure.

“IT’S SINKING!” Torun had screamed so loud that the glasses on the table rattled. He was immediately sorry for being so dramatic. From the beginning he’d been disgusted with how cinematic it had all been – how Brahms’s Symphony Number 2 had played in the background as his professor confessed his illness in a monologue, how the crescendos coincided with his short outbursts of anger, how the last notes were drawn out as he told Torun that he loved him like a son. Better than his own son. Torun didn’t know that he had a son. The notes faded into silence as soon as he had said the words.

The day before was like a silent film. Torun thought that he would have welcomed it after the previous days, but he failed miserably. He opened his mouth to speak when there should have been quiet. His gestures were all nerves. Biting his nails, picking at the corner of his shirt where the seam had begun to pull apart. His family, who had been called in were all exaggerated facial expressions, overwrought gestures, and rolling eyes. Wringing their hands. All lips and hands and eyelids.

She tried to change the subject.

“What would you say is your biggest regret?”

It seemed ridiculous to acknowledge that eating a hot dog

at an inopportune moment could be someone’s biggest regret, but admitting this would give her what she wanted: the feeling that she knew him, that he was willing to give himself away, and confirmation that he could be both sympathized with and despised. In short, he would be entertaining.

He had driven four hours in the rain and spent the next twelve at the hospital watching his professor die. The entire time his professor looked him right in the eyes. And held his hand. Jesus, he shouldn’t have told her that. Ok, but it was too late now, he said it. When the professor’s breathing slowed and his eyes closed, Torun walked down the hall to the waiting room for people who are there to watch someone they love die and he ate a hot dog. A stranger had given it to him. “You need to eat.” A foot-long. There was nothing else to do. The bread stuck to the roof of his mouth. He didn’t have anything to drink. When he almost choked a round Mexican woman jumped out of her chair with children still hanging from her limbs. She clapped her hands and shouted at him “Necesita ayuda?”

Sí. Necesito ayuda.

Ayúdame.

My professor thinks he is on a whaling ship.

He is dying and I am eating a hot dog.

The ship is sinking.

He shook his head and waved her away. Eating it really disgusted him, made him feel the separation between life and death. Miles and miles of black ocean. A gaping chasm between him and the people he’d lost. Living people eat food. Dying people stare you in the eyes gasping for air. Where was his son?

Eating a hot dog at a moment like this made it extremely difficult to entertain the notion of heaven.

Beat: A Morality Tale

2009-03-22T22:28:57Z

The ritual is the best part, the pouring of white powder from the brightly colored construction paper envelope onto the glass table, the chopping of it with an American Express card, the rolling of everyone’s twenty dollar bills, the rush of fragmentary joy at the bachelor party after the stuff’s been inhaled.

But around ten in the evening, they run out. The original idea had been to leave the apartment at about this time for one of the city’s hipper more intimidating night clubs, but Alan Stern and his friends are no longer so interested. No club could be guaranteed to admit this small universe of guys, and they wanted more drugs. Alan knows how to get it for them.

“Smoke, smoke,” says the girl walking briskly past him in a neighborhood farther east about twenty minutes later.

“Coke?” Alan tentatively asks.

He follows her down Tenth Street towards Avenue A, knowing they should converse like they know each other so their purpose won’t be obvious. That shouldn’t be hard as he has plenty of students in his high school English classes in the Bronx just like her: slinky, dark-faced Latinas, traces of black girl sass mixed in with their immigrant politesse.

“Bad weather,” she says, keeping up her side of the bargain.

“Terrible,” agrees Alan, just now beginning to come down and wondering how long it will be until he has the bounty to bring back to his friends.

A quick glimpse of the intense, almost scholarly expression, as she scans the streets for law enforcement, shows how pretty she is, lithe, graceful.

After they cross Avenue B, she points to a dismal looking bodega on the corner, the kind of place where merchandise is exchanged for cash through a grimy Plexiglas grate. Alan slips her two twenties, but she doesn’t look satisfied. Once he’s given her a third, she takes off in the direction of the store.

“Don’t stay in one place,” she tells him.
Alan hesitates, confused.
“I won’t beat you, guy.”
“Beat you,” means take your money and run.

Earlier that same Friday, a hung-over Alan had gone over grammar with his class.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, guys,” was how he’d prefaced it, “it’s not like you really write like this.”

The passage he’d photocopied for them, indeed a sort of parody of their writing, was full of sentence structure errors for them to correct. It also had a vague moral lesson.

Juan is walking down Tremont Avenue, Juan thinks he’s all that. He runs into Lourdes and Shaniqua and he tries to kick it to them. They think he’s kind of a loser, they walk away. They don’t like guys who think they’re all that they think guys like that are basically assholes…

With the exception of the tall black kid sleeping in back, the students dutifully tried to correct the run-on sentences without commenting on the content. They removed the comma in between “Tremont Avenue,” and “Juan” because it didn’t look right and placed a period in between “Lourdes” and “and” because it did.

Alan generally stayed patient with his students (“that’s close, but…” was his typical response), but that morning—his head aching, his stomach gurgling—he found their incompetence hard to take. His voice quavering with frustration, he began to make the corrections himself.

“Naw, Mr. Stern,” said Oscar Garcia, the handsome black Dominican kid who Alan was always touting as his smartest student. Oscar slumped at his desk, his narrow torso disappearing inside his Tommy Hilfgers. He looked crushed by the desultory ending of English class.

“You want to do it, Oscar?” asked Alan.
“You put a semi-colon after Tremont Avenue.” Etc.

After class, Oscar wanted to know when he was getting back the paper that he had turned in early about a week before. He peered eagerly over Alan’s shoulder as he went through the motions of looking for it in his folder, trying to contain his anxiety.

“I’m sure it’s good,” said Alan, tentatively placing his hand on his student’s shoulder and keeping it there for a moment when he didn’t seem to mind, “I’ll get it back to you later.”

The discourse back at the bachelor’s party consists of the following topics.

1. How fucked up it is that Ian is abandoning them to tie the knot.
2. How fucked up they’re getting.
3. How fucked up it was of them to forget to hire a stripper.

That final topic is laced with something like irony. While not exactly “pansy ass feminist guys,” as Ian, himself, put it, they’d all attended colleges in which “girl as fuck object rhetoric,” to once again use Ian’s phrasing, was a little discouraged.

“The whole thing feels like a sick joke,” repeats Will for the umpteenth time that evening, “except it’s really happening.” Ian’s only twenty four, but he’s somehow given in to his girlfriend’s pressure.

Will’s outburst calls for more cocaine, but there’s nothing left in the construction paper envelope that Alan had recently purchased from the sexy Dominican girl.

“You know it’s kind of late,” says a more rational member of the party, “and we’re already pretty toasted.”

A pause for decision. A nod to more reasonable behavior or a dive into further excess? Alan’s not willing for the evening to end. He recalls the sensation of trying to sleep when your body bursts with artificial energy, your head and stomach ache from drink. He slips his shoes on and heads out the door.

Alan jogs at first, the first block disappearing in an energetic daze, but soon his heart palpitates worryingly. Even athletes, he’s heard, can die from exercising on coke, so he walks instead.

But the next long, slow block discourages him. He’ll feel down and depressed by the time he’s gotten there, and the folks at the party will have lost interest if not outright gone home.

So he hales a passing cab.
“Where to?” asks the driver.

Which presents a problem as he heads more to a general region, a series of East Village streets known in that era for the vending of narcotics, than a particular address, but the cabbie doesn’t seem suspicious when he just names an intersection.

When he first gets out of the cab, he sees only bunch of kids standing in front of what must be some sort of club.

“Smoke, smoke,” says a passing black kid, interrupting Alan’s reverie.
“Coke?’ goes Alan’s inevitable refrain.

The black kid signals for him to follow, and soon they’re heading east, the same direction in which the Dominican girl had led them earlier in the night.

“Hot out tonight,” is all Alan can come up with for conversation.
“Fuck yeah,” says the kid.

Alan hands him the requisite twenties and prepares for the wait. The kid disappears down the block, presumably up one of the buildings in which they’re selling tonight or into another bodega/cocaine dealership.

Sitting down on the stoop, he tries to get his heart from beating so anxiously and his mind from creeping into weird and dangerous places. He settles on the oddly comforting trip he’d taken with his parents out west, the one time they’d camped. You’d have expected disaster from the situation, a marriage that had just about had it, suburbanites in the great outdoors, but his dad, who’d been an eagle scout, made camp with admirable efficiency, a fire lasting well into the evening. They stayed up passed midnight looking up at the stars, and…

“Mr. Stern! Yo, Mr. Stern!”

His heart skips several frightened beats before racing even faster to make up for the lost oxygen.

It’s his star pupil, Oscar Garcia.

“Hey man!” Alan says, overeagerly attempting normalcy.
Oscar Garcia doesn’t seem to notice how messed up he is.
“Really nailed it, didn’t I, Mr. Stern?”
“What?”
“That sentence,” he says, his mind still back in class, “that run-on sentence.”
“Fuck, yeah,” stammers Alan, “fucking knocked that sentence.”

Oscar looks confused, a bit taken back by his teacher’s sudden enthusiasm. Maybe he fears he’s being made fun of.

“Fucking run-on sentence king,” Alan goes on.

It’s just at this point that Oscar (Alan guesses) begins to wonder what his teacher is doing on this street corner at this hour, why his talk is so fast and slurred, his face is so red.

“You going in there?” asks Oscar, pointing to the heavy metal/goth bar they happened to be standing in front of.

Alan stutters incoherently, not sure what to say. It might look better if he were, but Oscar would soon figure out that he wasn’t decked out properly. Alan prays to himself that the black kid won’t actually show up with his cocaine. His thoughts clump together hysterically. If Oscar figures out what he’s doing on the street corner and tells the school, they’ll fire him, and he won’t be able to pay his rent. His father will be pretty disappointed if he has to lend him more money.

Alan feels a light tap on the back of his shoulder; the black kid has emerged out of nowhere. He nods at Oscar like he knows him, deposits another construction paper envelope into Alan’s hand and darts away down the street.

“You’re scoring, man?” mumbles Oscar, surprised and disappointed.
“Yeah, I guess,” says Alan, covering his mouth with his grubby smelling hand, “you won’t…” But he can’t get out the embarrassing words, “tell the principal.” Suddenly hit by a mid-drinking hangover, crashing too, he sees his life like those quirkily scandalous items on the news, the teacher caught buying drugs by his student.

But Oscar’s attention has strayed to the package that Alan clutches in his other hand.

“Let me look at that,” he says, peering at the red construction paper.
“That’s shit,” he tells his teacher after he’s gotten a better look, “you got beat, Professor Stern.”
“Beat?” asks Alan, forgetting for the moment what the expression means.

With no concern about the passersby, Oscar takes the package from Alan’s hand and opens it, allowing the contents to slip out onto his hand. The white color is the only thing about the viscous paste that at all resembles cocaine.

“That’s okay,” says Alan, genuinely beyond caring, “no big deal.”
“No big deal?!” says the exasperated Oscar Garcia, “you got beat!”
“How much you pay for that?”
“Forty.”
“Just give me twenty,” says Oscar with a sigh. He may not approve of what his teacher’s doing, but he doesn’t like to see him ripped off.

It occurs to Alan that if Oscar Garcia were to turn him in at this point, he would have to face the consequences of dealing himself. In fact, having Oscar buy him cocaine gives Alan some job security. Besides, Alan turns out not to be so fucked up and exhausted as not to want to prolong his evening with more drugs.

He pulls a twenty out of his pocket, and Oscar takes off with it down the street. It’s the best price Alan will ever get unless Oscar beats him, of course. You’d have to assume that the run-on king would be made of higher moral fiber.

Which turns out to be true. A few short minutes later, he reappears, bearing a yellow construction paper envelope, which, as he tells Alan, has “extra” in it.

Forgetting for the moment the complications of having your student as your dealer but remembering his drug etiquette, Alan asks Oscar if he wants to come back to the party and do a line or two with his friends.

“Naw,” replies Oscar without irony, “I don’t do drugs.”
“Okay, well thanks, see you next week,” says Alan, beginning to head down the street to look for a taxi back to the party.
“But, you know, I can come back with you for a while,” says Oscar, his voice faltering for a moment, lonely, a little bit dejected, “meet your friends.”

The obvious words, “not such a good idea,” are just too far down Alan’s throat.

For the first part of the taxi ride, they don’t have a lot to say to each other but about half way there, Alan finds his voice. He has some questions for Oscar. What was he doing downtown? If he was dealing, shouldn’t he be dealing up in The Bronx? Alan wouldn’t be buying on the street if he knew he might run into a student.

“I’m downtown a lot,” says Oscar, “my cousins live around here.”

These Dominicans have so many cousins, thinks Alan, remembering his own two cousins in Ohio with their suburban homes and already-started families.

“How did you get to be a teacher?” asks Oscar when they’re stuck at a traffic light a few blocks away from the party.

Alan takes a while to answer. Oscar can’t really be that interested. Oscar can’t really understand.

A callow kid comes to New York after college and takes a series of lame-ass jobs: from advertising assistant for a detergent company to temp receptionist to his disastrous attempt at waiting tables. At first Alan skips the part about being blown off by his girlfriend (who’d stayed in the Midwest) but when he alludes to it (even though it’s not strictly in answer to Oscar’s question) his voice cracks with embarrassing emotion. He sounds even worse when he claims that being hired as a last minute replacement at the high school has been the closest he’s been to finding something he’s good at. The kids screw around on him, sure, but he’s treated at least marginally like an authority.

“A good teacher,” says Oscar Garcia, sounding suspiciously sincere, “a really nice teacher.”

Oscar is perceptive enough to figure out that Alan’s friends are freaked out by his presence at the bachelor’s party, particularly after Alan’s introduced him as his student. After wishing everyone an awkward goodbye and shaking their hand for the second time in ten minutes, he leaves to take the subway back up to the Bronx.

The sensible members of the party go home pretty soon after Oscar, leaving Ian, the bachelor, William, whose apartment it is, and Alan to delve into the remaining cocaine.

Their more and more fragmented talk makes less and less sense as morning approaches. The red-faced trio replays the evening’s conversation, punctuating their words with unconvincingly wise-guyish obscenities.

“Fucking shame, Ian man, fucking shame.”
“What the fuck.”
“Fucking shame, you’re fucking getting hitched.”
“Fucking stripper, man, shit.”

The yellow construction paper envelope provided by Oscar Garcia gives out around four in the morning, and Ian staggers back to Brooklyn. Not bothering to ask if he can stay the night, Alan just leans back on the couch, stares up at the paint-chipped, moldy ceiling and begins the long vigil for sleep, his mind thankfully empty of thought, his body too numb to feel the aftershocks of all it’s been through.

When he gets up to pee several hours later, it’s full-blown morning outside. He replaces his mouth’s foul taste with a fingertip full of William’s toothpaste, but he can’t get back to sleep. Oscar Garcia is on his mind. Alan isn’t gay or anything, but Oscar is the only person he can think of who seems reliably into him. Since their painful divorce a bunch of years ago now, his parents have been too self-involved to think much about him, the girlfriend found someone else immediately, of course, and the kind of guy friends you get fucked up with are generally only good for that. Oscar looks at him with appreciative dark eyes like he’s actually a useful person. But what has he done for Oscar? Not bothered to grade his papers and encouraged his dealing.

Several hours later, Alan steps out into the glare of an early spring afternoon. He doesn’t stop at the subway station as he can’t stand the thought of waiting on the steaming platform or sitting in the unforgiving fluoresce of a train.

His legs ache at first as he walks uptown, so that he has to stop in the middle of the block a couple times like an old man. But once he manages to build up a little speed, the air lightens around him, the frying food (from diners, brunch places, Chinese take-out joints) doesn’t make him wretch quite as much.

But at about the halfway point of his walk, while passing the desolate office buildings of weekend midtown, a devastating question occurs to him. What will he do once he’s back at home? His two apartment mates are gone for the weekend and each activity he imagines (sleeping, cereal-eating, television-watching) feels more empty than the last.

It’s while watching teenage boys skateboard on the sports channel in his disheveled living room, his eyes glazed over with the thought of his own lost youth, that he has the good fortune to notice the folder of unmarked essays that’s been expanding ever since he grew bored with slapping grades on papers early in the semester.

Several of them are written by none other than Oscar Garcia, and the least he can do for the guy is get his work back to him. Alan’s got no choice in the matter. Someone outside of himself—several people if he counts his other students—expect it from him.

Oscar’s first essay tenderly (a bit sentimentally) describes the time he’d gone back to the D.R. when he was thirteen to see his aunts, uncles and cousins. It far exceeds Alan’s length requirement and follows his suggestions about using lots of adjectives a bit too literally. Oscar walks passed the “trashy, smelly, dirty, ugly beach,” to swim in the “warm, clean, fresh, beautiful, salty sea water.” A nighttime power outage makes the finca (some kind of farm house, Alan guesses) feel “cramped, filthy, odorous, but warm hearted.” Oscar’s relatives are also “warm hearted,” as well as “kind, handsome, caring and loving,” the polar opposite of Alan’s relatives in their neo-colonial housing developments who were, as Oscar might have put it, “mean, stingy, cold and ignorant.”

After he’s gotten through about a third of the papers, grading at least one by each student, it’s almost ten, and he’s hungry enough to order in some Kung Pao and drink a beer.

He senses something dangerously close to optimism the following morning when he remembers that he can finally return some of the essays to his class

The A he gives Oscar Garcia at the end of the semester (as well as the glowing recommendation a few months later) helps him get into college. And despite what they say about good deeds not going unpunished, Oscar’s articulate if overly adjectival enthusiasm on the student evaluation form tips the delicate scales in his teacher’s favor when the principal was leaning towards letting Alan Stern go after one semester at the high school. It’s something of a turning point.

The Tragedy of Gary Moretti

2009-03-22T22:10:48Z

Ed. Note: This time three years ago, it was impossible to escape the ghost of Gary Moretti. The nation was entranced by the ubiquitous Tozzi photograph, the hour-long specials on NBC and CBS, and the running debates on newspaper op-ed pages and cable news programs. This 23-year-old kid momentarily seized the popular discourse in America and abroad, not so much for anything that he did, but for what circumstance did to him. In absentia, Gary became a voiceless icon, a negative space upon which we projected our own ideals and our own fears.

Scarcely two weeks had passed since the incident in Genoa when I felt the first throbbing of what would become a three-year long obsession. A local newscast aired an interview with Gary’s mother and flashed photographs of Gary on the screen. One picture in particular made me pause. Gary was gently tilting a birthday cake toward the camera. “Happy 23rd Gary!” was lettered in red frosting. A cardboard crown sat atop his head and his smiled a jokingly huge and toothy smile. The normalcy shocked me. He didn’t look at all the hardened revolutionary that I had imagined. Could Gary be both the jolly birthday boy and the radical street fighter? I wanted to find the line that connected these two poles. I wanted to understand how the average and the iconic could exist within one person.

I never thought I’d be on the story for three years.

Rather than add to the din of voices trying to make sense of Gary Moretti, I decided that the most honest portrait of Gary would come through oral history. Having never known Gary, what would my own opinion, my own analysis be worth? The totality of my research is accumulated in A Radical Nobody: The Life and Death of Gary Moretti, a book to be released next week by HarperCollins, but the Atlanta Alternative Press has given me the opportunity to offer you an abridged version on these pages. Interview transcripts are edited for length, and the descriptions are taken directly from my notebooks. The annotation is light and only used to identify people or events with which you may be unfamiliar. Due to the restrictions inherent in a biweekly magazine, I’ve condensed my research down to the barest essentials that would still do justice to the story. For a more thorough picture of Gary, please check out my book.

      Elliott de Rossi
      Atlanta Alternative Weekly
      July 15, 2004

Felix and Diane Moretti
Parents

Felix: mid-50s. Very thin and mustached. Haggard is too strong a word, but not far from accurate. Professor of sociology at Georgia State University, noted Marxist theorist.

Diane: mid-50s, as well. Handsome blonde (dyed? dyed.). Civil rights lawyer.

Felix & Diane separated last year. Seem ill-at-ease. Felix gives her nervous glances.

D: I guess we can start from the beginning. Gary as a child?

F: He was a very bright young man. Very smart.

D: Compassionate, if I had one word.

F: Very smart. Top marks since kindergarten.

D: But sweet. So sweet. I remember a conference with his teacher during—I guess it was the third grade?

F: Fourth, I think

D: Fourth, whatever. Gary’s teacher had me and Felix in for a conference. He wasn’t eating his lunches. We would send him off in the mornings with a brown bag, but he was arriving at school with nothing. She asked him, “Gary, where’s your lunch?” and he wouldn’t say. She thought we weren’t paying attention. Negligent or something. We got home and said, “Gary, where are your lunches?” He said nothing at first but eventually—

F: “I give them to the man with the cup.”

D: “I give them to the man with the cup.” He’d been going hungry so he could give food to a homeless man he would pass on the way to school.

Rebecca Clerk
Middle School Teacher

Yes, Gary was quite bright. He was shy. I remember that he loved books, science fiction and fantasy especially. The Little Prince, he read. He always had pencils with animal-shaped erasers. I thought that he was too old for that, and seemed too smart, but he liked them. And he was the kind who wanted to please. His temper could be short, though. Once, some boys teased him about one thing or another—maybe the animal erasers, or maybe because he was pigeon-toed, or maybe just nothing specific—and Gary whacked one boy in the face with a book. Gave the boy a bloody nose. Once he’d realized what he did, he cried a lot, more than the boy he’d hurt. The blood scared him, and he seemed scared of his father, too. Not that Mr. Moretti would hit him or anything like that. Gary just didn’t want to disappoint him.

Felix and Diane Moretti

D: High school? I think he got along okay. I mean it’s not a great time for anyone.

F: We sent him to Woodward Academy.

D: It’s not a boarding school, just—

F: Private.

D: North Atlanta High wouldn’t have been good for, well—

F: A nerdy white boy. [laughs]

D: This is about the age where Gary started getting into politics. We both encouraged it, although his persuasion was closer to Felix’s than mine.

F: Marxist. Well, actually an integration of old school Marxism-Leninism with a nod to Maoist praxis.

D: Gary had read the Manifesto by fifteen or so. Quoted it when I made him do chores. Equated doing the dishes with wage slavery.

Jacob Weinstein
Friend and roommate at Emory University

Currently works at a hedge fund in Connecticut.

He arrived a sort of quiet kid who was into science fiction. He liked the Star Wars movies, I remember. Whenever we ran out of beer, he would do this big Chewbacca roar that he thought was really funny …

It was after the Seattle ’99 protests¹ that Gary really got into this anarchism stuff. He watched the news coverage and seemed excited, panting almost. He seemed really turned on by the adventure of it, the audacity of fighting for the Revolution with a capital R. He’d been pretty fluent in Marxism when he got here, thanks to his dad. So it wasn’t that big of a jump up to the next level of radicalism.

For Gary, I think a lot of it was aesthetic. To look edgy, you know? He told me about how he wasn’t very popular in high school. He was a virgin, he said, when he got to Emory. But at college, a lot of people took to him. Radical chic, is the phrase I’m looking for, I think. He was quick on his feet and so he usually seemed like he knew what he was talking about, and had a pretty good grasp of basic politics. But when I pushed him—I studied economics, Gary studied philosophy—when I pushed him to explain his anarchism in economic terms, he would get defensive and slippery. He’d snap at me for “giving more of a shit about numbers than real change.”

But he started going to protests after Seattle. Not that there are a ton in Atlanta. I went with him sometimes. I’m a Democrat, you know. I hate Bush and all. But for Gary, this was all as social as it was political. He liked talking with the people there, the other protestors. The old burnouts with dreadlocks and the punk kids. And he liked the credibility of having gone to protests. Used it to seduce girls, usually two kinds of girls: the radical, activisty girls, obviously, but also wealthy, tame girls who were looking for a bit of rebellion. He called these girls his “bourgeois babies.” He found Donna during junior year, though, and that pretty well stopped his womanizing.

I think I’m making him sound like an asshole. He really wasn’t. Just insecure. He was a really funny guy, like funny ha-ha. Fast banter and one-liners. And he had these habits that were so soft. He was very cuddly, even to his guy friends. If I was stressing over a problem set or something, he would sit down beside me and put his head on my shoulder. Then he’d sigh, very dramatically, and say something like “life is pain” or “time to off yourself, son.” And he’d giggle. His giggle was very sharp, like a machine gun.

^{1 On November 30, 1999, anarchists and anti-globalization activists converged on Seattle, Washington to protest the World Trade Organization’s Ministerial Conference. Riots ensued. Protestors destroyed property and fought with police, leading to over 600 arrests. News outlets worldwide covered what has since been nicknamed the Battle of Seattle. It is hailed as one of the watershed moments of contemporary anarchism.}

Gary’s room
Home of Diane Moretti
Brookwood Hills neighborhood
Atlanta, Georgia

Gary lived here until age eighteen, and during visits and summers in the years thereafter. Ms. Moretti says she’s left it “untouched” for the past three years. I believe her. A gray Emory University sweatshirt is draped over the armrest of a wooden desk chair and a half-empty bottle of Sangiovese sits on the nightstand. Room is average-sized,
approximately 10x15 feet. Walls painted red ochre. Diane: “It was a compromise. Gary wanted bright red paint.” A.S. Roma soccer poster on the wall over bed. Unpainted wooden bookshelf crammed with books.

A partial list:

Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick
A Scanner Darkly by Phillip K. Dick
Neuromancer by William Gibson
The Collected Writings of Ericco Malatesta
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Das Kapital by Karl Marx
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
The entire Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

The science fiction books appear well-read. Spines cracked, pages dog-eared. Das Kapital seems completely untouched. Favorite phrases (mostly slogans) in the Malatesta,² however, are underlined. These include: “We anarchists do not want to emancipate the people; we want the people to emancipate themselves” and “Violence is the whole essence of authoritarianism, just as the repudiation of violence is the whole essence of anarchism.”

^{2 Ericco Malatesta (1853-1932). Italian anarchist writer and activist.}

Donna Broz
Girlfriend

When he was in his element, Gary was very charming. I first met him at an Amnesty International meeting during our junior year. He didn’t run the organization, but it was clear that he ran the room. He’d throw in jokes. He’d flirt with everyone, doling out pet names. The girls would get “hun” or “ma’am” or “lady,” and with the guys he’d get a bit more risqué: “sweet tits” or “love monkey.” There was a cocky air about him, but he was charming. He could pull it off.

Get him away from that milieu, though, and he clammed up. He’d never be impolite, just shy. And he was so fragile. He’d hate for me to be telling you this—he liked to be seen as the invincible—but he was one of the most fragile people I knew. Prone to crying. Only when we were in private, though. I’m sure Jacob saw him cry a couple of times. Have you talked to Jacob? Yes, okay. But other than Jacob, I think I was the only one he trusted enough to cry around. Movies would do it. We saw Billy Elliot, that one about the working class ballet dancer, and he cried his eyes out in the movie theater. At Gladiator, too. When Russell Crowe died at the end, rejoining his family in the afterlife.

The first time we… I don’t know how much information is too much, but the first time we had sex, he cried afterward. It was very, I don’t know. It was strange, but sweet at the same time. He liked to sleep with his head on my chest, and when we spooned he liked to be the little spoon. Very feminine in some ways, and I think that’s part of what drew me to him. How brash and macho he could be in some ways, like arguments about politics, and how very—not dainty—sensitive, I guess, he could be when we were alone.

We were dating right up until he left for Italy.

Felix and Diane Moretti

F: The trip to Italy was a graduation present. A chance for him to travel. See Rome, Florence—

D: Genoa.

F: Genoa.

D: I had no idea about the G8 summit.³ No clue. But Felix, of course—

F: Gary wanted to be part of the protests, you know, the demonstrations. We didn’t tell his mother about this because we were afraid she’d worry.

D: How stupid of me.

F: Diane, how could I have told you?

D: I’m so glad that I had you around to protect me. Thank you, Felix.

^{3 Each year, the heads of state of eight of the world’s most productive economies meet to discuss issues of global importance. The 2001 G8 summit, held July 20-22 in Genoa, Italy, was to be the scene of massive anti-globalization protests, attracting activists from around the world.}

Gary Moretti
Voicemail Message

Left in the account of Donna Broz, July 20, 2001.

Hey lady, it’s Gary. Big convergence today. A group is breaking off from the main march and
it oughtta be an adventure. The protests here are way bigger than anything
in Atlanta. Anyway, love you lots. And I’ll call you back if I need
you to wire me bail money. Just kidding. Love you.

Sean Kirkpatrick
English Anarchist

Yep, that’s me. I’m the bloke in the picture with Gary, the picture that gets all the play.
I didn’t know him at all, though. Just saw what happened happen. We
were scuffling with the Carabinieri⁴—they’re the nastiest
Italian coppers, paramilitaries. They’d fired some tear gas into the
crowd. They provoked us, no matter what they say. Tear gassed us because
about a couple hundred of us had broken off from the main march.

That’s when hell broke loose. Kids started throwing the tear gas canisters back at the fucks.
I even climbed up the wall of a bank to nick the Italian flag—it ain’t
my flag, but all flags are the same, ain’t they? But we were pushing
them back, the riot police, I mean. What you hear about the riot mentality
is real. Once people get in that atmosphere, they get empowered. Do
things they wouldn’t normally. The energy of the crowd works through them.

And then a kid with a red bandana around his face—this is Gary—rips up a piece of cobblestone
and starts heading toward a Carabinieri jeep, one with an open back.
I wasn’t five meters away, and I was cheering, all excited since he
looked like he was going to throw it at a copper inside.

Then, I hear the copper shout something in Italian—I don’t speak Italian—and it looked
to me like Gary hesitated. He looked surprised at himself, like “What
in the bloody hell am I doing?” I thought he was going to put the
rock down. Then, the gun shot off. Really loud-like. BANG! And Gary
falls down while the jeep drives away. I went over to check on the kid.
His head was bloodied up. His blood was puddling up the ground. Big
fucking hole in his forehead. The only time I ever, you know, seen anything like this.

His pulse was fluttering, and I remember screaming for an ambulance, but I knew it didn’t matter.

They started this, though. Make sure people know that. And Gary was a hair’s breadth from dropping the rock. No need to shoot him. None.

^{4 Italian military police. They police both civilian and military populations.}

Francesco Tozzi
Photojournalist, Reuters

I took the picture. I did not see the shot fired, but I heard it. The first I saw, Moretti was
on the ground. I started clicking with my camera. There are several
pictures in the series, but it was the one with the Kirkpatrick staring
into his eyes and screaming that got famous. I hear it is on posters,
but I do not know why you would want that on your wall.

Felix and Diane Moretti

D: Felix took the phone call.

F: I talked to a doctor. One from the hospital. They knew then that …

D: After Felix told me, I just sat paralyzed on the sofa. And… oh, Gary—

[Diane begins to choke up, puts a hand over her eyes. Felix reaches to touch the back of her
neck, but changes his mind, places hand back in his lap.]

F: I was at a loss for what to do. I knew there was always risk, that class war sometimes results—

D: Oh, shut up, Felix! Class war?!

F: I didn’t kill Gary, Diane.

D: You filled his head with that shit. Marx. Class war. You—

F: He was our—

D: He never—Gary would have never [unintelligible, coughing] just a boy.

Donna Broz

I apologize, Mr. de Rossi, but I’d really prefer not to talk about this. It was hard. It still
is. Seeing that picture of him everywhere. Some people acting like he’s
a villain and others like he’s a martyr. That fucking rock. Why did
he have to? I don’t have anything else to say. I’m sorry.

Email from Ernesto Luzatto

Mr. Luzatto is the attorney of Salvatore D’Amico, the then-20 year old Carabinieri officer who
allegedly shot Gary Moretti.

From: xxxxxxxx@romalegge.it
To: elliott.derossi@atlantaaltweekly.com
Subj: Re: Salvatore D’Amico
Date: Tues, 6 Jan 2004, 04:26:37

Mr. De Rossi--

My client has no comment, other than to point to the fact that all charges against him have been dropped. He wishes to reiterate his contention that it was not he who fired the shot that killed Gary Moretti. Ballistic evidence shows that the bullet that killed Moretti was not of the same calibre as ammunition used by the Carabinieri. Mr. D’Amico has spent the past three years attempting to move beyond this tragedy and would appreciate a respect for his privacy.

E.L.

Giuseppe Fabrizio
Carabinieri Officer
Driver of the Jeep
Translated from Italian.

D’Amico shot him. You must understand the circumstances. We were under attack. Our jeep was
surrounded by protestors. They had already shattered our rear windshield
with boards. They were lighting things on fire. We were under siege.
If the boy had a rock, D’Amico had to shoot. I know he says that it
was not his gun, and I think that he believes it. To kill someone must
cause severe psychological damage. Please just leave him alone. I assure
you it was self-defense.

Tony Blair
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

This is effectively a sort of anarchist traveling circus that goes from summit to summit, moving
from each summit with the sole purpose of causing as much mayhem as
possible. In fact, their actions have nothing to do with anything other
than a desire to cause violence that threatens the lives and the livelihoods
of innocent people, and I would like to send the clearest possible signal
that such protests must not and will not disrupt the proper workings
of democratic organizations.⁵

^{5 “Blair: anarchists will not stop us,” BBC.co.uk}

Eli Day
Senior White House Official
Speaking on Behalf of George W. Bush

The president regrets the violence, believes the violence is regrettable, the tragic death and
the injuries to the protesters and to the police officers is highly regrettable.⁶

^{6 “G8 summit death shocks leaders,” CNN.com}

“Gary Moretti (One of Us!)”
Tbe Molotov CockTails, Bristol, UK

The Molotov CockTails have remained a mainstay of the UK punk scene for the past fifteen years. “Gary Moretti (One of Us!)” appeared on their 2003 album Candlelight Riot released by Stooge Kat Records. Candlelight Riot debuted at #97 on the Billboard 200, a major achievement for the usually inaccessible hardcore punk genre. The music video for “Gary Moretti (One of Us!)” includes footage of the G8 protests and ends with a screenshot of the Tozzi photograph.

Marching in black
Poised to react
Gary, our brother, chose to fight back
Blood runs red
Soaking in the streets
Try to stand up
Got shot down by the pigs!

[Chorus:]
Gary Moretti
(One of us! One of us!)
Gary Moretti
(One of us! One of us!)

Young like ’ye
Dead at twenty-three
Slain like a dog by Carabinieri!
Didn’t die in vain
Be fucked if we let it!
Feds’ fuckin’ blood
Time that we shed it!

[Chorus]

Every time you stand up
(Gary lives on!)
In every riot that erupts
(Gary lives on!)
In every window that you
smash (Gary lives on!)
Every time you fight back
(Gary lives on!)

[Chorus 2x]

Gary’s Headstone
Greenwood Cemetery
Atlanta, Georgia

Simple granite headstone. Trinkets littered about, including a rain-dampened copy of the Tozzi photograph,
a folded black and red anarchist flag, a l6 oz. can of Coors, myriad flowers. Inscription:

Gary David Moretti

April 7, 1978 – July 20, 2001
Lived Without Regret,
Died Without Reason

Easyreeder

2009-01-15T20:57:40Z

WEEK 1

UNRELIABLE NARRATOR

Do you want a reliable narrator? An unreliable narrator? If there is any first-person element to your narration, there’s one answer: all people lie to themselves, all people are unreliable. The question is of degree. While extremely unreliable narrators are fascinating to writers, they pose serious difficulties. The lens of the narrator can so diffuse the reality that the reader is lost—has no idea what’s going on. A cause for concern, but not outright panic: cueing the reader to shifts in perception is an intricate business, and it’s rarely right in the first draft. Just some backbreaking labor ahead.

When the project is funny—satire, farce, etc—it’s easier to point up a narrator’s self-delusions, and/or outright lies. A ridiculous misconception, a change of pace, a furrowed brow, a toothy grin, a silly adverb: you may not need much.

BEING ANNOYING

Something annoying happens to someone; that someone is a writer. The event took no more than two minutes, but the writer carries it home, works on it for three weeks, and “fixes” it. The event is now interesting (or so we hope), and not annoying. It’s one of the primary impulses to write: to fix the annoying. So, if there’s something in your own writing that annoys you … fix it. You may not be able to control all that happens in life, but you can control it on the page. The page is one of the few places you can be free of annoyances; so take care to be free of them. If there’s annoying stuff in there, no one’s to blame but you.

And if you leave it in there? When you give it to your agent or editor, they will invariably point to that thing that bugs you and say, “See, that’s amazing, that’s what I’m talking about.” And you will force a smile and nod your head, knowing in your heart it’s not amazing, it’s a little turd, and now you’re stuck with it forever.*

*Ok, if it’s a book, hopefully not forever; you can find a moment when nobody’s watching and make the excision. But if it’s a piece for a magazine or journal; yep, you’re stuck with it til the end of time. Somewhere in the archives, an annoyance glimmers.

HOW DO I GET MY MANUSCRIPT TO AN EDITOR/AGENT?

In a nutshell. Don’t do what you’re supposed to do. Query letters, manuscript requests, etc… That stuff almost never chances out of the slush pile, and even when it does, the process takes forever. You’re talking at least four months per step, per agent. That means: four months for the query to get read and the manuscript requested, four months for the manuscript to get read. That’s if everything goes right. If you eschew multiple submissions, as some agents request, you will while away your life, waiting.

WEEK 2

A CAUTION ON NAMES

Well, you can always change the name later. Or … wait. There’s a magic to the right name; it comes less from your head than you hands. The name sticks, the readers accepts it. For no apparent reason, readers can instantly pick out a name that’s “wrong,” and very often, that name was a brainstorm of revision.

A second risk: this one more concrete. Changing a name from one syllable to two, or vice versa, will mess up the feet in every sentence where that name appears. The rhythm of the whole piece will be compromised. As a writer, you may not know why everything suddenly sounds wrong, but you’ll know you have to work on it. If you’re going to change a name, try to stay with the same number of syllables: you might also be able to get away with exchanging a one syllable name for a three syllable name (or vice versa) or a two syllable name for a four syllable name (or vice versa). And, try to keep the primary consonant the same. A name with a substantially new sound will also unravel your sentences.

DIALECT

Writing dialect is fun. It’s amazingly satisfying to research a period, a population, and get the spoken language exactly right. Phonetic spelling, apostrophes, hyphenations: it’s a dream.

Now, the nightmare: you’ve written a whole book, thick with dialect, and your agent says, “get rid of the dialect.” Dialect is reviled by agents and editors—all the ones I’ve spoken to about the subject. Probably for good reason, they believe that dialect is hard to read, and greatly limits the salability of a title. The first exceptions that I hear mentioned: A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, Ridley Scott by Russell Hoban, and The Color Purple by Alice Walker. The Burgess and Scott are creative, no doubt, but science fiction (or speculative or set in the future or whatever you want to say), which has a little more wiggle room, just a little more, on the dialect question. And the Walker: if you look closely, it isn’t written in dialect. Walker indicates dialect without syllable-by-syllable detail; and always, she uses rhythm and what Robert Frost called “sentence sounds” to bring authenticity to her language. (Sentence sounds, in short, are the common rhythms or frameworks that underlie most spoken phrases.) It is a terrible, terrible lesson: to know you’ve duplicated something so rare and beautiful, only to have some cookbook peddler tell you no way. But beware, they are out there, in wait. And don’t even think about citing works published early in the Twentieth Century; your agent/editor will stop returning your calls.

BESIDES SENDING QUERY LETTERS, WHAT CAN I DO?

You can get some traction. You may already do some of this, I don’t know, but:

•Write some reviews

•Do some interviews

•Have a literary blog, which covers new books (right now, this can still work very well, very quickly)

•Get your feet wet in the publishing business

•Launch a reading series

•Launch a literary website or a literary journal (a lot of work, but probably the closest thing to a surefire approach)

You can also get an MFA, if you don’t already have one, or just plug in with a workshop taught by a well-published, respected writer (a generous instructor who’s not so well-published can also be good, but you have to exercise more caution). The summer seminars and writers retreats are also great places to make contacts. People build whole careers out of Yaddo, Breadloaf, MacDowell, etc..

WEEK 3

WRITE WITH YOUR HANDS

There are times when your hands take over (a good moment to know how to type) and you’re full throttle ahead without knowing where you’re going. Not the foggiest. You’re instinct tells you to go, and it feels good, and you go. Perfect.

But there are also times you don’t have that unconscious momentum, and you need to somehow summon it. Sit there, and work. Prod at the material until you find an entry. (Well, I guess if you insist we could say it’s something akin to “automatic writing,” but that implies a lack of coherence that can be as limiting as the structure itself.) Tap away at your keyboard and be willing to toss every word of it, but also be willing to take unexpected directions—to transcribe semi-conscious or unconscious thinking. That idea that just eludes you in your prose may be well articulated in a coil of your cerebellum that shirks at the constraints of awareness.

A few spots to seek solutions with your hands: sticking points in revision, things you don’t want to do, names and titles. Often, when you feel reluctance at an element of revision or drafting—even if you feel like you know what you have to do—your reticence is significant of an inarticulate dissatisfaction, and/or a creative unconscious at work. In those situations, trust your unconscious more than your logical mind. You may understand your instincts better at a later date. And if you really don’t want to do something, there’s a good chance a reader won’t want to read it. Names, titles: let go, and pay attention. Listen to the barely discernable whispering in the back of your skull. As much as writing is a process of logic, it is a process beyond logic, of real magic—or if you object to the word magic, of something beyond understanding. To find that title, that name, that solution that’s beyond contrivance, beyond meddling, beyond any rhetoric or expectation or explanation, you need to yield to the unfathomable. But, don’t stop working on it in the interim. Just in case.

IF YOU’RE BORED

If you’re bored, everyone’s bored. If you don’t want to write it, if you don’t find it interesting, how interested do you think your reader will be? If you feel like you have to suffer, go right ahead: suffer poverty, suffer indignity, suffer heartbreak, suffer loss—but don’t suffer boredom. You can be offensive, you can be difficult, you can be goofy, you can be schmaltzy, but if you are boring, you have committed the gravest sin, and you will be banished. Your precious book, your precious manuscript—foregone for a rerun, or a leisurely walk to the fridge and a lowfat yogurt.

If your project is making your eyes glassy, put it down for a while. Maybe you’re finished! Or, maybe you’re not, and you’re due for an unexpected revision—could be great, could be some hard hours ahead. Either way, as you work and rework your manuscript into monotony, you’re just making problems for yourself. And a problem, on a novel, on a book-length project—that’s two months, six months, three years of work.

I GOT A REJECTION LETTER, AND I WANT TO STICK MY HEAD IN THE OVEN

Publishing is a social strategy game. Don’t think of it as having anything to do with your writing; rejection isn’t a judgment on you. For the most part, your work isn’t even getting looked at. And even when it is, an agent is asking him/herself one thing: do I have an editor, or two, to show this to? If they don’t, which they probably won’t, they pass on your masterpiece. (Remember, agents make their money selling non-fiction: mostly cookbooks and self-help books and assorted garbage.) An editor is looking for something they can sell to their colleagues at an editorial meeting, as well as something they can sell in the specific marketplace they have access to; also, most editors only get to buy a few literary projects a year, so if your timing is wrong, you’re out.*

*As a young writer, the best advice I ever got from an editor was: “toughen up.”

WEEK 4

HOW MANY DRAFTS YOU GET

I hate this, but in my experience, an author only gets a limited number of drafts before they poop out on a project. You can always do a “tweak,” which I would define as a quick rework of a draft. Novelists and film writers and television writers and non-fiction writers, usually, will say the same thing: 4-5 drafts. The first draft to get it down. The second to organize the narrative/chapters/scenes (or, if you’re a more experienced writer, you’ll get the structure right in the first draft). The next draft to work on the paragraphs. The next to fine-tune the sentences. The last as a granular polish: repeated words, glitches, etc..

If you’re past five drafts? Try to wrap it up. Make a plan, execute it, and pull your pages together before you are defeated by ennui.

NUMBERS: DO I SPELL THEM, OR WRITE THEM AS DIGITS?

Copyeditors always say that their way is the right way. Over the years, I have interacted with many, many copyeditors, and while every one of them is sure there is only one correct method, and they are in possession of it, no two of them agree on what the correct method is. Take numbers, for example. While there is consensus on a number as the first word of a sentence (always spelled out), on the major points, opinions differ:

•Numbers under ten (and including ten) are spelled out, all other numbers written in digits

•Numbers under one hundred (not including one hundred) are spelled out, all other numbers written in digits

•Numbers with more than two words in them are written in digits (for example, “one hundred and one” is 101); all other numbers are spelled out.

•A dizzying variety of treatments for dates, times, fractions and numerical series.

Numbers, of course, are only one of the many niggling decisions you will have to make in your writing life. And while the decision is minor, it can be a chore to go through a manuscript and change all the numbers from one way to another, or change the way you deal with ellipsis, or whatever. I would strongly advise you to go to half a dozen writing handbooks—The Chicago Manual of Style, Strunk and White, The MLA, Fowlers (Fowlers is the ultimate trump card, though you will be called an Anglophile)—assess your options, decide what you are going to do, and stick with it. Get it right in the first draft, and don’t worry about it (and the myriad other niggling problems) ever again.

HOW DO I FIND AN AGENT?

Extremely important, and difficult to metabolize: they’re looking for you, and you’re looking for them—ideally, the contact is a human one.

When agents or editors want work, they don’t care where it comes from. When they’re not looking for new manuscripts, the doors are pretty much closed. So find them when they’re looking. They’re out there and—this is the part that’s difficult to digest—they’ve put out feelers to everyone they know. So you have to talk to everyone you know, everyone, everyone, to find the overlaps: the six degrees. They’re there, I promise you. There are millions of agents: I sometimes think more than writers. And, when they need new material, they don’t care if it comes from their cousin or their maid; they will read it (or at least the first few pages of it).*

If an agent’s green, he/she might take on a project just because he/she’s “over the moon about it.” But that may not be good news: whether or not your young agent knows what they’re doing (for that matter: whether or not your experienced agent cares what they’re doing), if your manuscript makes the rounds and gets rejected everywhere … well, ask not for whom the bell tolls.

*There’s a well-known story about Jack Kerouac, begging a friend of his to deliver a manuscript to an editor. The friend agreed, and with the manuscript under his arm, paid a visit to the editor’s office. The friend said, “I have a fantastic manuscript etc., etc..” And the editor said, “Great. Who’s the writer?” The friend said, “Jack Kerouac,” and the editor pointed his finger to the corner of his desk, where there were already four copies of the same manuscript.

WEEK 5

WORD COUNTS

Try to think in word counts, not pages. You tell someone your manuscript is 800 pages long, but what you don’t tell them is that it’s formatted with 150 words on a page, or 450 words on a page. On an average manuscript page, there are 250 to 300 words. The common rule of thumb is that a manuscript gets ¼ shorter as a book. But that rule of thumb is extremely rough. If you can think in word counts, know how many words your project is, you’ll be in way better shape. A couple of examples …

Book reviews:

•150 words: a very short review or blurb

•250-300 words: a short review

•600-800 words: an average review

•1200-1600 words: a feature review

•1600-3000 words: a major review, probably in a major venue

Fiction:

•500 words or under: a “slice of life” story, or a “prose poem,” or a “short short story,” or “micro fiction,” etc., a good size for journals

•1200 words or under: also called a “short short story,” a very good size for journals

•7500 words or under: a “short story,” at 7500 words, you’re getting a little long for many journals

•Under 40,000 words: a novella (this is the only hard number here, I have not heard any other cutoff for a novella)

•Around 75,000 words: usually, now, literary fiction

•Over 100,000 words: usually, now, genre fiction

Obviously, there are shorter genre books and longer literary books, but it’s interesting to note that the norm at the beginning of the twentieth century was the opposite of what it is today. The longer works (over 100,000 words), with “sprawl,” were literary works, and the shorter works (around 75,000) were more of the dimestore variety.

A note on novellas: everyone loves them, except publishers, who have a hard time selling them for enough money to justify their production costs. Yes, it’s true, and don’t point to your copy of Daisy Miller and say “what about that?” That was published a long time ago. There are contemporary exceptions, lots of them, but an editor is going to be that much more skittish about acquiring a 35,000 word project. It doesn’t mean you need to fatten it up, just be aware; could be someone will be asking you, “Can you make this longer?” On the flip side, if you’re running 150,000 words, you might find some truculence on the part of the publishers. Who wants to read 150,000 words that came out of your bean? If you’re walking in off the street, that’s a pretty tough question to answer.

Whatever you’re working on—whether it’s a Young Adult novel or a cookbook—find out the word counts for your market, and keep them in mind. The sooner you start thinking in word counts (“This is going to run 80,000 words”) the easier it will get to hit the mark. After a while, it’ll be second nature.

THE SLUSH PILE

The slush pile is doom. I would rather cold call than be in the slush pile. Don’t be in the slush pile. The readers are interns—either college students or MFA students. If you’re lucky, an assistant agent is digging through to see if there’s something they can cut their teeth on. Possible, but pretty unlikely, and probably not the best of circumstances anyway.

HOW MUCH IS PUBLISHING ABOUT THE BOTTOM LINE?

I occasionally hear writers, etc., bemoan the state of contemporary fiction in this way: all publishers care about is making money.

Well, yes. It’s a business and they’re trying to make money. At least they’re not filling the world with AK47s.

WEEK 6

A GOOD TITLE

A good title can give you:

•The central theme or conceit of a project

•The whole story/novel/whatever

•A direction for revision

•The tone/attitude

A good title will give the reader:

•The basic idea of the thing

•The time and place (especially for historical settings)

•Something scintillating (and easy to remember)

•The tone/attitude

A good way to test a title. Spring it on a friend. Don’t listen to whether or not they like it; listen to whether or not they repeat it. If they repeat the title ten times—even if they’re saying they hate it—that’s an excellent sign.

A few hours or days later, ask them what the title was. If they remember, that’s good, if they don’t, that’s bad.

If you don’t have exactly the title you want, lay siege to your working title; slave over those few words for however long it takes—days, weeks. Think of this as an act of poetry. True: most good titles just arrive, out of your typing fingers or from a voice whispering in your head.* But you might not receive that blessing, so you better get to work.

And, pay attention to the first title, the “working title.” You may be sick of it, your agent may be sick of it, but it’s fresh to the rest of the world.

*The title for my second novel, “Snowball’s Chance,” occurred to me while I was walking down Lafayette Street on 9/10/01. I said to my wife, “Snowball’s Chance, that’s a great title.” She wasn’t so sure. But I knew there was something to it. The next day: 9/11. The day after that, I realized what the title meant; it meant that Snowball, from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, returned to bring capitalism to the farm. Knowing that, I had the whole novella in my head; it was an all-day, all-night, three-week sprint to get it on paper.

GETTING AN AGENT THROUGH PUBLISHING IN LITERARY JOURNALS

It could happen, I suppose. One occasionally hears of such things. A writer gets some publications; an agent sees something he/she likes; the agent takes on a novel; the gazillion dollar deal. Pretty much, it’s the story Stephen King tells. I don’t know Stephen King, or his agent or editor; who knows, maybe that really is how it all went down.

I do know one writer who had it happen that way. An amazingly gifted writer actually; if the story were to happen to anyone, it would be him/her. The short version of the story is this: the young writer studied writing in college, and then went on to get a very respectable MFA in creative writing; then he/she struggled in New York City for a while; then he/she published a story in a reputable literary venue; a young agent approached him/her; the agent took the book out; an editor bought it.

Here’s the rest of the story; the young writer went to a reputable college; her family had some pull, not a lot, but probably enough to help in getting into that good college and graduate school; after college, the young writer fell upon some money, and worked for a literary superstar; his/her classmate from that MFA program happened to be an editor at a reputable literary journal that published our young writer; the agent who approached our young writer happened to have an interest in the literary superstar that our young writer was working for; the young writer became the host of a reputable literary reading series; on the night of his/her own reading at his/her own reading series, he/she met the future editor of the major publishing house who would one day buy the book.*

And, the caveat, he/she is an amazing writer (as I said at the top) and probably deserves way more recognition that he/she has had so far. And as far as networking, he/she is half-hearted, and not all that ambitious, and much more concerned with finishing good projects.

*The literary world takes apprenticeship seriously, and I know three or four published writers who have a story very similar to this one.

WEEK 7

FALSE STARTS

You begin a project, it seems to be going ok. You abandon it. You feel guilty. You repeat the process, oh, a few thousand times.

False starts are ok. Sometimes it takes a few pages, or even a few hundred pages (sigh) to know a project isn’t for you—even if it does seem to be going well.

And … there is always the possibility you will come back to a project, and you’ll finish in a tempest of inspiration. It may well be that you put the project down because you are ill-equipped for the task. You may or may not know that the next chapter is utterly beyond you—but when you come back to the project, three years later, with the skill you need, you’ll appreciate that you just left the project there, waiting to be finished. It’s a gift to the future. If you force yourself to work on a project that you don’t have the experience to execute, your future holds a nightmare in store for you. Reams of pages, for example, of writing that’s no good, of writing that bars you from clarity of purpose, from the redemption of your aborted beginning.

And, who knows, when you put something down, it may be that next thing you touch—the old project you opened just to look at, the blank page you decided to fiddle around with—that will alight, and catch fire.

DANGERS OF BUDDY BOOKS

In a first person buddy book, the first problem is: who is the protagonist? It is often a difficult distinction: protagonist versus narrator. In this situation the question is even more complicated. Where is the focus? On the internal change of the buddy writing the book? Is the focus more on the other friend? Is it about both of them? Both getting over something? Both being horrible? Could be, but this leads into the next problem:

Are the two characters too similar? A sure way to baffle readers and muffle the impact of your dramatic scenes: buddies that are hardly distinguishable in the eyes of the reader. If you find yourself, as an author, inserting paragraphs that parce their distinctions, so that we know what those distinctions are, you’re probably in trouble. The distinctions should be clear to us. If both of the characters are reprehensible, we should be able to sort out their separate flaws, which leads to the next danger.

If the narrator, as one of the buddies, has a moral streak, you can run into a couple of sub problems. First, your reader may be annoyed by the narrator, who doesn’t do exciting things put before him. As reader, we resent missed adventures. That’s why we’re reading, of course. The right decision may be morally superior, and yet ill-justification for writing a book. Sub problem two: your buddy has a moral streak, and does reprehensible things anyway. That kind of hypocrisy can be hard for a reader to reconcile.

Is all this insurmountable? No. There are plenty of examples of books that overcome these problems. Unfortunately, they are major problems, core problems, and you’d be wise to wait on revisions until you resolve them.

Another solution: you can make the two characters very similar. Notably so.

Self-publishing

All the time—every time I go out—somebody either tells me how great self-publishing is (how it’s the future), or about how they are planning to self-publish.

If you don’t mind selling fifty copies, self-publishing is fine. Or, if you have a really specific subculture that you can access, and that will find your book invaluable—or at least think that it’s invaluable for long enough to swipe the card—self-publishing is fine. So, for poets: good. For artists: maybe. For niche markets: ok. For break out literary novels: not likely. I know a lot of people don’t want to hear that, but, alas, it is the fact. As the books editor for the Brooklyn Rail, I’ve seen thousands of brand new books come in over the transom—from big houses, to small, to self-published. In the time I’ve been at the helm, we have not reviewed one self-published book. (We did once have a writer write about self-publication, but that writer had previously published with legitimate houses, and the book was really more performance than anything else.) Very few publications will review, or even consider reviewing self-published works. And then, distribution. Without proper distribution, you just can’t move units. Self-publishing enterprises will make all kinds of promises about distribution. Good luck.

You’re better off starting a press of your own. Many people do just that: start a collective, publish four books a year, etc.. That, for some reason I can’t articulate, is ok, or pretty much ok, and does not carry the stigma of self-publication.

WEEK 8

THE TEN TO ONE RATIO

Occasionally, there are numbers that creep up in writing, numbers that everyone cites—from literary authors to poets to genre authors. If you repeat the following ratio, most authors will squint their eyes and nod their heads woefully: for every page you keep, you will throw ten pages away. That may mean that you rewrite and rewrite the same page over and over again, or it may mean you write a number of projects that don’t amount to much, and then you write a terrific, nearly polished project in a single sitting. You must scale mountains of stuff you’ve thrown away to find that summit. Moving on from those not-so-good pages is hard work; revising them is even harder. Take comfort; you’re not alone.

Time Shifts to Modulate Narrative “Arc”

Ok, without getting into a whole horrendous discussion of “arc” and whether it’s good or bad, and whether or not it’s a western construct (which it is, and a religious one: sin suffering redemption), I’d like to put forth something which came up in workshop recently. It is possible to modulate a traditional/normative “arc” through time shifts, as opposed to dramatic elements. Not flashbacks, exactly. But a series of moments organized in a non-linear fashion that serve to give the story a structure and progression.

It’s an appealing option, especially if you’re weary of formulaic plot templates. It also can satisfy the demands of those templates, which is why you see this structure more and more in even Hollywoodish ventures.

Agents are not the enemy

I had a rather upsetting email exchange this week with an author who describes himself as “frustrated.” He wrote about his difficulty obtaining an agent: “So weird in this business that there are some great things out there, but nobody willing to make any effort to get them out.” He was/is under the impression, like many writers, that agents are somehow between him and the publishers and market—that all it will take is one person to really believe in him. He wrote: “are there any who aren’t ruining the industry?”

Agents do not hold the keys to the gate to happiness. They take you on if they think they can sell your book; they don’t know for sure, they think they can. If they think they can’t, they don’t take you on. Do they get jaded? Yes, like everyone in everything else. Are they genuine people, with passions of their own—areas of interest in which they’re willing to take a chance? Yes. But that’s not entirely to your advantage; you really don’t want someone taking a chance with your book. An honest rejection may well be better than an acceptance that turns your book into a longshot.

There are readers, there are publishers, there are writers, there are technologies; there are all kinds of things that contribute to the book market. It’s always appealing to find a scapegoat, but the argument that it’s the fault of agents of editors or whoever; it’s essentially going to estrange you from anyone with even the most tenuous of grips on reality.

Melville House Interview

2008-09-16T22:47:40Z

When I spoke with Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians of Melville House Publishing at their Hoboken office on the “Left Bank” as they fondly called it, in 2007, they had just won the Mariam Bass Award for creativity in independent publishing. They had also just published Tao Lin’s double feature, a book of short stories and a novel, Eeeee Eee Eeee and Bed. And their headquarters was still located in a labyrinthine warehouse which also housed practice space for the band Yo La Tengo. Last winter, Melville House moved operations across the river to Dumbo, Brooklyn, where they are in good company, only blocks from previous Mariam Bass winners Akashic Press and in the building that houses Verso Press. The new office now features a bookstore, gallery, and performance space, where they recently held a party to celebrate Lin’s new book of poetry, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy.

Johnson and Merians spoke with me at length about the challenges of independent publishing, their fondness for French literature, and how they hope to revive an older, more sustainable model of publishing where authors perceive publishers as collaborators rather than enemies. Johnson and Merians are unlikely publishers--he is a literary journalist and she an artist and poet; neither had anticipated entering the book business before founding Melville House. Fueled by a passion for literature and steered by their keen taste, their recent successes reflect their vision and hard work and illustrate how backing books you believe in is still relevant and, to quote Merians, “a lot more fun.”

KGB: You said that when you published What We Do Now, a collection of essays by literary voices and cultural figures on ways to respond to Bush’s 2004 reelection, it made you realize that there is a place and a need for independent publishing. I’m wondering if that’s one of the reasons why you founded Melville House, which grew out of your blog, Moby Lives. Is publishing something that you had wanted to become involved in from the beginning?

DLJ: It was all her idea.

VM: Hardly. We had never anticipated being publishers, it was the furthest thing from my mind. Well, not the furthest, but a very far thing from my mind. We were definitely driven by the sense of disconnect the media had to what we felt was going on [after the 2004 presidential election], and we wanted to be able to get other voices out there that were not being heard.

DLJ: It did grow out of Moby Lives. Reportedly the first book blog: it wasn’t really a blog it was more like a news digest. It was kind of a live performance—a typing performance I did every morning. On Monday, September 10, 2001, Yahoo! had announced that Moby Lives was the site of the week. All of a sudden, I was famous. So on September 11, I was typing with the biggest audience I had in my life.
We went through that horrific morning as witnesses, running down to the water, et cetera. The communication towers went down with the World Trade so we couldn’t get any radio. And then we started getting a television feed from CBS over the radio, because they had a tower on the Empire State Building. It was all very frustrating.
When we went online and I had all of these emails waiting—people were writing to Moby. Some of them were witnesses—there’s a poet I knew, George Murray, a great poet, who worked in 7 World Trade, the building next door. He wrote a letter about his escape, and I put it up on Moby. A plane tire had blocked them in the building and they had to knock that out to get out and there were bodies falling. It was just a horrific story. Playwright Mike Daisy wrote to me about his experience trying to get over the Brooklyn bridge with all these dazed people. Novelist Linda Yablonsky wrote about staggering around Greenwich Village in the aftermath. The poet Eliot Katz sent me a great poem about watching it happen from Queens. And I started putting all this stuff up. This went on for days and weeks—and meanwhile the media was covering the President coming down and saying, “We’re going to kick some ass.”
And we were just feeling that the stuff that was being published in the newspaper was not what we were feeling was going on here. People weren’t walking around New York saying, “We’ve got to go kill somebody. We’ve got to go attack somebody.” They were walking around saying, “What the hell just happened and why did it happen?” And so at some point, Valerie was looking at what I was posting on Moby and she said, “That’s a book. We ought to just make a book and tell people.”
We had no intention of starting a publishing company, we just wanted to make a book. And we didn’t know what we’d do—we thought we’d go down to KGB Bar, maybe, and pass it out. David Lehman and Star Black, who ran the first reading series at the KGB Bar, were good friends of ours, so we thought, “We don’t know, we’ll do something with them, we’ll figure it out. We’ll put it in the back of the car and go.” Because that was our experience. We both went to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and our experience wasn’t anything more than that—people made chapbooks, people made little books.

VM: It was an art project kind of idea.

KGB: I read that in the beginning you planned on doing six books a year, and it seems that number has already expanded. Have you expanded because you are approached with more ideas, or is it because you have the capability to do more?

VM: As we were going along, we were learning more and more about the book publishing business, and how you can do it and make it work. Our capabilities were growing and our interests kept expanding. We felt like we had this amazing staff—they’re all completely brilliant and we’re very thankful to have them. We feel like we can really do some exciting stuff here and really contribute to the culture in a concrete way. And one of the things we’ve been very interested in, throughout the short history of the company, is publishing European and foreign work.

DLJ: As foreign as possible.

VM: As foreign as possible. I mean, America is just so terribly insular, and aside from our love of world literature, we feel that it’s so refreshing to be exposed to the literature of other cultures and countries. So that has us very energized right now. We keep broadening our horizons and seeing more things that interest us. We have grown as a company. It used to be just Dennis and I on the kitchen table there, slaving away. We’ve certainly grown, and we want to try to fulfill our potential, as it were.

DLJ: The company is also being shaped by the staff that Valerie mentioned. I know it’s a cliché to say that it’s a team, but it really is. Nobody here has a very clearly-defined job. Everybody does a little of this and a little of that. It’s like a rock band and we’re all playing the song together.
We did this book about the impeachment of the president, and that turned into a colossal team effort. We are always jamming on how to promote a book and how to get a book out there because we know there’s an appetite. For that book, I came up with the idea, and then Kelly thought of who could write it, and Becky had an idea about promoting it, and on it went. We wound up doing all these crazy projects with it. Valerie thought of making a documentary film. And then Kelly said, “Let’s do a house party web site.”
From there it just kind of exploded. I think that’s why we just won this award—it’s probably that book. The American Association of Publishers just voted us the indie publisher of the year. It’s called the Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing. And I think it was because of stuff like that—coming up with wild ideas. But we couldn’t have done that by ourselves. The staff here, we really fire each other up, and it’s pretty cool.

KGB: That is really cool. Do you plan on keeping the staff small so you can continue working in the same way?

DLJ: There’s a certain size, I think, you need to be. One reason we do the number of books we do is to support a staff of a certain size. For a couple of years, Melville House was Valerie and Dennis doing everything: acquiring titles, editing titles, proofing titles—everything except laying them out. And at the end of two years, we were pretty whipped. I mean, not in good health, and really, pretty tired. So there’s a certain number of people you need to have the kind of company we want to have—you need a production person, a publicity person, a rights person. But we tried to find people who could also be editors and feel that if they had an idea, we could make it happen. So, there’s one or two more areas that we need to cover but economics are going to force us to keep it small. And our tastes are going to force us to keep it small, because we do want it to be like an art project and not like a business project.

VM: I want to be interested in the books we publish—always. I don’t want to just be churning them out. To me there’s no sense in doing that at all.

KGB: It seems that your interests and passions are reflected in what you choose to publish. One thing I’ve noticed is your affinity for world literature, especially French literature. Is there anything more behind that?

VM: Just really our love of French literature. It occurred to us on our honeymoon in Paris that there wasn’t much French literature, or even just French pop fiction, making its way over to the United States. Dennis likes to say that the last thing people know about is Camus.

DLJ: That and the heavy-duty critical stuff from college. But as far as general interests, France was famous in the ‘50s and ‘60s for producing all this intelligent fiction that was not to the level of Derrida obscurity, but was readable by just the average lover of literature. And that seemed to kind of stop. The only thing that’s happened since then is Houellebecq.

VM: [laughs] That’s the most recent phenomenon. And so we thought it was definitely something we wanted to explore. They have their equivalent of the National Book Awards—the Goncourt—and we were just shocked that those books didn’t automatically get published in the United States. So, we started poking around and thought, “Well, there’s some great stuff here, we really want to explore this.” And we’ve found some good writers and are finding more, not only in French literature but also in German. We’ve got some very cool German books coming out.

DLJ: German, Italian, Hungarian…

VM: We have an Israeli novel that’s due in the fall. We’re enjoying the whole international part immensely. There’s really a great, great pleasure in this.

DLJ: It’s in terms of both fiction and nonfiction. The reporting in this millennium, the superior news reporting, is coming out of Europe—with notable exceptions. The book we just published is a good example: It took an Italian reporter to uncover the lies that the Bush administration was using to start the war. That was the Watergate story of this decade. One of the very first books we did, Who Killed Daniel Pearl? was written by a Frenchman. And that book reported on the nuclear arms trade going on between our ally Pakistan and Iran and North Korea. We put that book out a year before those stories appeared on the front page of the New York Times and The Washington Post. The kind of reporting coming out of Europe was way ahead, and much more honest and out there than American reporting of the time.
And with fiction, too. I just think it’s a very dull moment in American fiction, and there is much more exciting stuff going on in Europe—particularly in Germany and Italy, but to some extent in France as well. Here in America, we’re having fraudulent stuff like Jonathan Safran Foer and Jonathan Franzen— just ridiculous, shallow stuff. We were much more intrigued by what was going on in Europe, and very proud of some of the fiction we’ve discovered, such as Benoît Duteurte’s book called, The Little Girl and The Cigarette. It’s great novel and is doing really well here. And a writer named Kevin Vennemann from Germany who we’re going to be breaking out this winter.
We also have some American discoveries we like. Our lead fiction writer is Stephen Dixon, who is still, I think, the country’s leading avant-gardist, and Tao Lin. We are really thrilled about him. This is one of the most exciting books we’ve ever published. We’re looking to find some new sensibilities in fiction writing and in current events writing, and for the most part, Europe has been leading the way for the past several years.

KGB: Do you think that American fiction is dull, in large part, because of what the large publishing houses choose to publish? Or does the problem have more to do with the writers in general?

DLJ: Certainly, those are major factors. I think another factor is just our education and mainstream media. They have just pounded us down into dumbitude. The mainstream book industry has been taken over by the same mentality that runs Hollywood, and they like young and they like pretty and not too difficult. It seems really perverse in such a treacherous time—we’ve got an unelected government and we’re in a murderous, ridiculous war—that kind of literature just seems silly to me. I’m much more interested in people who are honestly connecting with the world and writing about it, instead of trying to write entertaining stuff or stuff that’s so self-involved. I don’t understand the purpose of it. The kind of memoir-orientation that’s driving fiction today is not my cup of tea.

KGB: How did you find Tao Lin?

DLJ: He found me. He was a fan of Moby Lives, and we started corresponding. He’s really quite unique. The first time I read [his work], I thought, I’ve genuinely never read anything like this. And he’s very young. And he’s incredibly conscious of what he’s doing. He has an awareness and a concern for craft that strangely enough, in the age of the MFA program, is really rare. He’s really got a shockingly intense understanding of where he’s writing from.
I think that in a lot of the writing that’s being fostered by the big houses, people are forced to pose. I think there’s an understanding amongst contemporary writers that we’re in treacherous times and this is what they should be writing about, but they don’t know how. For one thing, they’re ill-read, so they don’t really have any field of reference. They haven’t read For Whom the Bell Tolls or The Sun Also Rises, shockingly. They should have, but a lot of them haven’t. They haven’t read Orwell, or even Dostoevsky and stuff like that where they’re really connected to the moment and writing from the moment. But they know it exists and they’re trying to kind of do it. And so what happens is you have writers like Nicole Krauss who, in her last book, felt she had to make reference to Isaac Babel, and her reference actually is mistaken so that she has him alive at a time when he was most likely dead—which she would have known if she had so much as read the introduction to a collection of Babel’s writing. But she felt pressure to be a hot, young intellectual instead of really writing from her experience in society. And I don’t mean to single her out because this is a time of mistaken assumptions. Why does Jonathan Safran Foer feel he has to write about 9/11 in a way that has a happy ending? That’s insane. That’s writing to a goal, as opposed to writing to expose the moment.

VM: There really is all that pressure to be avant-garde among kids in writers’ workshops because that’s how they understand writing: that they’re making something new. But this genuinely is new, or unknown, and I don’t think it comes from an outside pressure to feel like you’re making something up. It’s a whole cloth.

KGB: How do you find most of your books?

DLJ: We’re constantly looking. We keep our ears open.

VM: And we genuinely read the slush pile, and we’ve published out of the slush pile. We take it very seriously.

DLJ: The next piece of fiction we’re publishing came from the slush pile.

VM: I also think word has gotten out to foreign publishers that we’re publishing—we’re getting a lot of foreign projects pitched to us.

DLJ: We do get a lot of French stuff. I mean, we’ve published the editor of their leading newspaper, Jean Mari Colombani from Le Monde. We’ve published Derrida, we’ve published Debray, we’ve published Benoît Duteurte. So we get a lot of attention in France. We are the king and queen of France.

VM: Paris is no longer a vacation. Paris is now work.

DLJ: It’s true. We stay at these little hole-in-the-wall hotels when we go to Paris, and we still come down to the desk and someone’s dropped off a manuscript. It’s amazing.

KGB: Do you see yourself as artists first and publishers second? How would you define yourself?

DLJ: We’re publishers—we’re just a different kind of publisher. Actually, I think we’re more of a traditional kind of publisher. Most people in the book industry are great people—lovers of literature, intelligent, kindhearted people—but the business really changed twenty or thirty years ago. Maybe the turning point was when RCA bought Random House. When the bottom line is what counts, when you have to report to your shareholders every quarter, when you have to show an increased profit every quarter—this is not a good way for art to meet commerce. That’s when art starts taking a second seat. When those big companies started out—when Bennett Cerf started Random House, the guys named Simon and Schuster started Simon & Schuster—they had totally different priorities. Yes, they wanted to make a profit, but they didn’t come at it with this kind of weirdo American capitalism that’s so dominant now.

VM: They knew they had to make interesting books—that was their largest priority. First you had to make an interesting book to attract a buyer. It wasn’t like the dictates of the market, or of your shareholders, were first and foremost. It’s not that kind of industry. It can have a small profit every year, and that’s fine—that’s how it survived for years and years. But now there’s another capitalist model that’s been imposed upon it, and it’s not surviving the model—they’re killing the thing itself. They’re killing bigger publishing.

DLJ: If you look back at the memoirs of Bennett Cerf, he discusses a different model. And his
model was this: If I publish William Faulkner, I’m not going to make a lot of money. William Faulkner’s an avant-garde writer. Some people would define his writing as difficult to read, but important to read and rewarding to read. I’m going to publish him, but I’m going to lose money on him so I will also publish a joke book that I can sell 100,000 of, and this will support my ability to publish serious literature and serious political writing, and poetry, and things like that.
That model has been thrown out. This is not a theory, this is not my analysis—this was their stated model. You had to do a mix to support the literary stuff. Now that model has been replaced. Stated as dictum by people like Alberto Vitale, the money man at Random House during the ‘80s and ‘90s, the new model is that every single book has to make profit. Every one. If you’re publishing William Faulkner and he’s losing money, you stop publishing William Faulkner.
We certainly do follow a completely different model than the conglomerates. We’re really kind of old-fashioned. People think we’re radical or underground, but in a way we’re just doing what publishers did for hundreds of years, for the entire history of publishing. Samuel Johnson, when he published the dictionary, lived around the corner from his printer/publisher. They worked together very closely—they were friends, they were pals, they were business partners. That model has been extant. So that’s what we’re going back to.

KGB: You’ve previously stated that publishing is a labor of love. I was wondering, since you are married, how that makes the publishing house stronger. And would producing a book in three weeks be possible if you weren’t married?

DLJ: I don’t think we could have done it—I couldn’t have done this without Valerie. It is a joint art project to me.

VM: I don’t imagine it would be something I would have wanted to do without Dennis because it’s been so consuming. There’s no way to have something this consuming in your life and not share it with your partner and still have a partner. There would just be no room in your life for something else.

DLJ: You know, when Valerie sits up in bed in the middle of the night, I know why. And I understand why. She doesn’t even have to say anything. If I wasn’t co-publishing with her, she could never explain this to me—the thousand and one things involved with making a book. It’s incomprehensible. Most writers don’t have a clue about what’s going on in publishing, not politically and not in a daily reality. They have no idea the work that a publisher does for them, that an indie publisher does for them. When you get down to it, the publisher is at the bottom of the food chain. The retailer gets the biggest cut of a book, the next biggest cut goes to the distributor, the next biggest cut goes to the writer, and what’s left goes to the publisher. And it’s something like, a retailer usually gets 50% of a cover price, the distributor gets half of what’s left of that, and all the remaining money then goes to the publisher to pay the writers, to pay the printers, the publicity, the promotion, the shipping—you name it. At the end of the day, the publisher gets the lowest cut.
At the same time, the only person with an actual financial stake is the publisher. Valerie and I put the money out for these books—we’re the only ones who actually stand to lose cash. If the retailer doesn’t sell our book, they can return it for a full refund. Forever. Ten years from now, Barnes and Noble can send this book back and we have to give them the money back for it. If the distributor doesn’t distribute our book, we still have to pay them for storing our book and handling the book. If the book doesn’t sell but we ship 100 copies, we have to pay the writer. We hold a reserve against returns, but we have to pay them something: those are called sales. Just shipping a book to a bookstore is considered sales, and we have to pay out. Not to say that the writer hasn’t made an investment, but they haven’t put any cash in it. And if the book bombs, they aren’t going to lose cash as a result. But we are. That’s a significant thing. Everything we own is in this company, so if it doesn’t work, we are quite literally destitute. So we are literally putting our money where our mouth is, and so everything we do we have to really believe in, we have to get behind.

KGB: Do you deal with agents at all?

DLJ: No, not very regularly. Occasionally, but the pie just isn’t big enough.

VM: We’ve had agents mess up deals that both we and the author wanted to happen. We try to work with them sparingly. Although there are some agents out there who seem to understand the pressures. And I imagine you would need an agent. But at the same time, those writers who are not, should we say, fodder for the big houses are still operating on the model that they need an agent, which is really not the case.

DLJ: It’s no criticism of them, though. They are what they are.They have businesses and they need to make money, and they need to survive. But there are two publishing models, and in this model, the agent is another person with needs that don’t benefit their client. And they can’t admit that. If you need an agent to deal with Melville House, then Valerie and I are not doing our job.
We have had many instances of writers, even well-known writers, bringing us a book project that no other publisher would do because it’s small or different or weird or out of their norm. And we’re happy to do it and excited to do it, and an agent will step in and say, “If you can’t give us an advance, you’re not getting that book.” And we won’t get that book and so that book is never ever made.

VM: They’ve actually just finished off books in their entirety. Not like it will be sold to somebody else, but it just won’t exist.

DLJ: This is what happened to Stephen Dixon. He fired his agent to come to us. That’s the state of the art at the moment. Agents are the most fascinating turf in publishing right now. They really are defining the differences between independent publishing and conglomerate publishing in a more definitive way than the Hudson River is. It’s really the battle ground, and how that all shakes down in the future
Another aspect is thinking about writers: most writers hate their publisher and love their agent. The day may come when they regret that. If a big publisher drops them and they have to go to an indie, it takes some understanding and a leap to be prepared and to navigate that journey.
There’s an innate distrust of publishers, and that’s because for the last twenty years the big houses have behaved despicably. There was an instance in 1995, or some time in the first half of the nineties, when HarperCollins—in one fell swoop—dropped 100 writers. One hundred so-called mid-list writers. It was big news at the time because there were some very big names on that list. And they were just dropped because their books weren’t selling so well—it’s not that they weren’t making a profit, but that they weren’t making enough of a profit. Shit like that should make you distrust the big publishers. There should have been a revolt. People in those publishing houses should have revolted the way André Schiffrin revolted when stuff like that started going on within the Random House empire. But his reaction was a rare one. So I understand the distrust. But if you think about independent publishing as a kind of mom-and-pop business, and start seeing yourself as a partner in that, it’s a much more traditional model for publishing and it’s not too hard to comprehend.

VM: And it’s a lot more fun.

DLJ: It’s a lot more fun to be more involved with your book. Once I asked Stephen Dixon how this is working out for him, how he thought about working with Melville House. He said he loved it because it was the first time in his career that he’s been able to get the publisher on the phone.

*****

KGB: Is there anything else that I’ve missed?

DLJ: You should tell people to send money.

KGB: How do you prefer that?

DLJ: Small bills.

VM: To buy Melville House books.

DLJ: If they can’t send money, buy Melville House books, at an indie bookstore, or at a KGB Bar event.

DLJ: By the way, I love Morgan Entrekin. And his hair. I am jealous of his hair.

A B Plan

2008-09-16T21:56:31Z

Samantha Hunt

Sometimes I give speeches at elementary schools. I wait backstage in the wings where they hang the discarded costumes of the four food groups, costumes that are now unused, in light of the Surgeon General’s newly revised food pyramid. From here I overhear the students asking questions like, “Who is this guy?” or “What were they doing on the moon?” or “Where’s the first guy? They should have gotten the first guy."During the assemblies I tell the children, “On the way to the moon we had to drink through straws. Can anyone tell me why astronauts drink through straws?” I get many answers to that question but never the right one.

On the schools’ miniature stages I am gargantuan. I have a hole in my space suit. It is tired. The material has aged. It is not the real one, not the one I wore to the moon. Can anyone tell me what would happen to an astronaut on the surface of the moon if he had a hole in his space suit? That’s right.
He’d be sucked out through the hole like a piece of spaghetti. Like a straw.

During the assemblies I always ask one child, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” because I used to be guaranteed the answer, “I want to be an astronaut!” but not anymore. Now the children say, “I want to be an anchorperson,” or, “Mister, I’d like to be in pictures, or “Make me a star!” and they don’t mean a galactic sphere of gases burning hot on nitrogen or oxygen or helium.

Biographers always note that I was “one of the first two men to walk on the moon.” Which is true but not as true as what the school children say, “You mean he was the second man.” Biographers sometimes include the fact that my mother’s maiden name was Moon. That’s even truer and Neil Armstrong can’t say that. “The National Space Society board of directors will come to order,” a young stenographer announces. She calls roll. Hugh Downs. Arthur C. Clark via video conference call from Sri Lanka. Michael Collins, he’s the man who stayed on board. Senator John Glenn. Tom Hanks. Jim Lavelle, who Tom Hanks played in a movie. And the young woman. John Denver used to be one of us.
Bob Hope used to be here too. We keep their pictures on the wall.

“Come to order,” she says again and sits in front of her steno machine.

Tom Hanks speaks first and the young woman begins to record. He says, “Well I don’t know about the rest of you but,” and then he doesn’t finish. He’d like an astronaut to start the conversation but we rarely do and the room is soon quiet. Hugh Downs tries to begin again with, “Brethren,” and then, “What a beautiful day.” In the silence that follows this opening I hear a hum in the room’s filtration system, a buzz and a tap, tap, tapping of someone’s nervous leg beneath the conference table."All right, outer space, guys,” Tom Hanks says and he starts, “Venus is out. Am I right? Too hot, right? Right. Pretty sure I’m right on that one,” he says. “So, Senator, Doctors, fellas what about Mars? Huh? Mars. It sounds great!” he says. “Plus the darn thing is bright red. What do you think? Huh? What do you think?” Tom Hanks is asking me.”
I think this room is a bit chilly,” I say and most of the board members think I am making a joke.
“Well, sure Mars is going to be chilly, as the doctor so aptly put it but we’re Americans,” Tom says and claps his hands together twice. “Now,” as a general leading troops into battle, “who’s with me?”
In truth, I myself am building a little spaceship and the truest thing about it is that it is little. There is a place for me and there is a place for my wife. It is a tiny travel pod that we’re hoping will feel a bit roomier once we’re ready to go, once we are done growing up, once we’re beginning to do the opposite, once osteoporosis sets in and we start to shrink.

You see my wife and I are waiting until we are older to travel in our small craft off into outer space because this trip will be a one way trip, if you understand what I mean. It will be the journey of a lifetime. We will go as far as we can, past the end of this galaxy, past the ends of hundreds of galaxies, on and on through time and space. We will not return. We don’t want to. We will die in outer space and even then, once we are dead, our spaceship will cruise through the universe past asteroids and meteors, past black holes and star clusters. No, we don’t want to return, plus, the United States and Russia have an agreement in place that says any craft that has traveled to Mars or beyond is not allowed to ever return to Earth. They are afraid of diseases, Martian diseases, infecting our planet. That’s fine. We don’t want to come back anyway.

I have loved outer space ever since I was very young. One night I saw a strange and beautiful thing. It was my mother spinning in circles alone, outside with her head raised up to the stars. I sneaked up on her. I touched her leg as she spun. It felt like a horse’s hot neck, like she’d been spinning for hours. She jumped some when I touched her. My mother scared easily. “Oh, there, best boy. I didn’t know you were here.” She stopped spinning and stumbled some from the centrifugal force or maybe just because she was dizzy. “Have you ever seen anything as beautiful as this?” she asked. But I don’t believe she could have seen anything. Her vision was still spinning and her head kept trying to catch and hold one light to steady herself. She looked up and finally focused on the Moon. Her maiden name was Moon. “Have you, best boy?”

“No," I said but I didn’t just mean the stars. I also meant her and her legs like horses.

The moon is small. The moon is ours. I wonder why we are going to Mars. Mars. Mars. I wonder why no one, not even me and my tiny craft, is making plans to live on the moon.

Hugh Downs never says much. Except sometimes he used to make jokes about Bob Hope’s last name. He doesn’t do that anymore. Which reminds me. Moments before we landed on the moon I had a thought that I’ve never told anybody. It was, “Neil Armstrong, despite his last name, is not as strong as I am. What if I pushed him out of my way and I got there first?” I thought.
It was a plan B. But I like Neil and so I took the thought back.
When we did arrive on the moon I wondered if my mother might be there. But Neil got out first. He left his first corrugated footprint. He started all that first jibber-jabbering back to Houston so that the Moon was not as quiet a place as I had imagined it might be. My mother scared easily. She wasn’t there when we got to the moon or else Armstrong, with all his Houston talk scared her off before I made it out of the ship. There we were on the Moon. It seems almost unimaginable now, as simple and perfect as a childhood. And as impossible to return to. “Best boy,” my mother used to call me with her hair hanging on her shoulders and so now I wait in the movies for the credits to roll. I look for the names of National Space Society members. I look for the best boy in the credits.

Tom stops mid-sentence and says my name. “What do you think? Huh? Mars right?"For a moment I think, “Too bad his movie about Apollo 13 didn’t end differently.” But then I take the thought back. I like Tom. I like Mars too.

I excuse myself and the young woman at the steno machine records my exit. I take one step and then one giant step for mankind and then I take another and another and another all the way to the men’s room. I lower the toilet seat inside the second stall, lock the door and sit down to rest my head against the steel and it feels like home, or at least it feels like the space pod home my wife and I are building.

In the stall I close my eyes and imagine how our journey into outer space will begin. The craft will probably rock and shimmy during lift off. My wife might grab onto my arm or if we are strapped in, chances are we will be strapped in, she’ll simply glance over in my general direction. I will mouth the words, “Goodbye Earth,” and she’ll nod her head and repeat these same words. Perhaps she’ll start to cry inside her lady helmet. “Goodbye Earth,” she’ll say. But sorrow, we’ll soon find, will be difficult to maintain on our journey through outer space. “How can you be down where there is no gravity?” I’ll ask, ribbing her. And soon we will have passed out of the Earth’s atmosphere, out where it no longer has an attractive pull on our ship and we’ll see how smooth sailing can be as the Milky Way, Andronmeda and Cassiopeia become brief, bright spots outside our window, specks easily mistaken for a grease smudge or bit of dust on the quadruple-reinforced glass.

Eventually the door to the men’s room swings open and I breathe softly and draw my knees up to my chest so that I will be undetected in my stall.

I can see two pairs of feet saddle up to the wall of urinals. There is quiet until one of the men begins to urinate. Tom Hanks speaks, “Come on Hugh, of course it will be me. What do you think? That they’ll send Arthur C. Clark into outer space?” Hugh Downs says nothing and there’s a moment of no talking. Tom Hanks lets out a laugh, “I’m sorry,” he says. “I was just picturing old Art’s puppy-eyed face waving from the window of the shuttle. Ha!” he says.
“I mean really. Who would they send? Glenn already got to go. Michael Collins? He stayed on board, for Christ’s sake. No one’s even heard of him or they think he’s the Irish guy in that movie. Denver and Hope — they’re dead and Buzz, well,” he laughs. “Ha, Buzz.”

Then there is silence. Hugh Downs still says nothing. The two men finish and Tom begins to tell a joke as he’s opening the door to leave.

“What’d one astronaut say to the other astronaut?”

It takes Hugh a moment. “I don’t know what did one astronaut say to the other astronaut?” The door closes and once again it is quiet.

How would they know? They did not grow up to be astronauts.

The florescent light above me is set to detect motion. It trips off, no motion, no buzz, just darkness. I shut my eyes tightly. I look up and squeeze them closed. I see stars. Movie stars in outer space. That is what’s next. I keep my head on the cool wall. Tom is right. That is what’s next. No more astronauts, no more teachers but movie stars in space. And I can imagine the speech Tom will give on his return to Earth — of course Russia and the United States will let Tom Hanks return to Earth — something like, “And I thought winning a couple of Oscars was great. Gosh.”

I roll my head on the cool wall. I’m tired. I have to do something. I have to stop Tom from making outer space into a movie. I’m afraid Hollywood might convince the world that outer space is as real as The Right Stuff or Star Trek. Only as real as An Officer and a Gentleman or one of these video games the kids play nowadays. A thing that’s like real but not real. Like this: Once I knew a man with a wife until he saw Sophia Loren in a movie and after that he didn’t want anything else. His life was ruined. I think of the wife. I think of the moon. I think of my mother and the best boy holding the boom.

The movies make what is not the movies look bad. I know it because everyday I find things that are not the movies discarded, forgotten, left in dirty alleyways.

In my stall I shift, lowering my legs back down to the ground. I like going to the movies. I like the dark. I have nothing against Tom Hanks and the movies. I shift again and my movement triggers the motion detector. The dome light switches back on. It is like the moon in the movies. That’s the problem. It is not very bright. I don’t want Tom Hanks to go to outer space. I don’t even want him to run for President. I want him to be a movie star.

I step out of the stall. I am going to do something. I look in the mirror. Yes, I am going to do something. I am getting older but I am going to do something.

What am I going to do? I get many answers to that question but never the right one.

“If this were a film,” I think, “I’d go strong arm all the movie stars. Collins, Glenn, Lavelle and me. Pow. Pow. PowPowPow. The astronauts would win. If this were a movie the final shot of the film would be my tiny craft re-envisioned as a gorgeous, sleek monstrosity. It would be blasting off to the moon or perhaps even Mars, piloted by me as interpreted by Clint Eastwood or else, maybe if this were a movie then just outside this bathroom door a black hole would be throbbing, anxious to suck me through a wormhole to the year 1969 where I would be played by Ben Affleck where Neil Armstrong (Matt Damon) and I would bounce across the surface of the moon.

I put my hand flat on the door like praying, only one side of the praying. I want to believe that all those endings are possible without special effects.
I went to the moon and now anything can happen. Why doesn’t anyone remember that? I glance back into the stall. It is teeming with a universe of invisible microbes. Teeming! Anything, galaxies and galaxies of anything are possible without special effects.For example, I could take Tom Hanks out. He is tall and young but I am an astronaut. I’ll be the first one there. She will be waiting for me.

I keep my hand against the door. I can see the black hole. It is just on the other side of this doorway. There it is — deep space right on the other side of this door. And so I stay this way, with my hand pressed to the door, as if I alone am holding aloft the possibility that children will become spacemen and spacewomen rather than playing them on the television. I stay this way. I press my hand even harder, praying, in case what’s beyond this door is just a hallway lit by florescent bulbs, some of which need replacing.

Samantha Hunt is the author of two books, The Seas, and The Invention of Everything Else, a novel about the life of Nikola Tesla that will be published February 2008 by Houghton Mifflin. Her stories have appeared in the New Yorker, McSweeney’s, Cabinet, Seed Magazine, Jubilat, Hobart, and on the radio program This American Life.

Despite Herself

2008-09-16T17:30:55Z

^{Image used with permission from Mentality Design}
[Excerpt]

Even though he is across the room and reading I know he is watching me. My boyfriend likes to keep tabs on where I am so he can determine where we are. My boyfriend seems to think he has a sixth sense with me and annoyingly, I agree. But then again, that extra bit of wisdom comes from the thirty years he lived before I was born. I love that life advantage he has over me. I hate that life advantage he has over me. I rest my head back on my chair. I’m not in the mood tonight but usually I like to test his sixth sense abilities. I’ll play The Ministry of Misinformation game. I’ll tell him that I am somewhere that I am not--that’s when he’ll begin his interrogation. I’ll answer his questions, but not really. I’ll tell him he’ll have better luck if he uses a thermometer. He’ll laugh. By the end of the night I’ll have spun so many tales, woven so many lies, that really, I could have been a spider in another life. Still, he’s crazy about me. Gil and I are plugged together in such a way that moment by moment, beat by beat, I can feel him inside of me, on to me, beside me, between me, and on top of me-without him even having to look at me. Our love current is positively powerful that way; there’s no denying that. I love that about us. I hate that about us.

I hate it when he complains I leave piles around the apartment. He drops Index cards on them with a note telling me he is going to burn them.

My piles.

My stuff.

But then yesterday he said, Between you and the mountain, there’s nothing you can’t do. How could I not love someone who says something like that? But maybe he says it to them all. And then he stroked me and said I was his pinto pony-beautiful white flame. Oh, Baby, Baby and then stroked me some more. Kissed my neck. Showed me how. He did show me how. Love. Make love. Not fuck. There is a difference and it is not just with the vowels and the syllables. Who knew! He did. He let me know. Let me? Oh, and last week he shaved my legs in the bathtub. I stared at the interesting patterns and colors the water damage from the loft above made on the ceiling. I placed my hands on the chilly fat rim of the bathrub. Uck. Even his bathtub is old.

In his sprawling Tribeca loft, my legs are dangling over the arms of a rocking chair that is placed diagonally across from him. This is where I am. I can’t really pretend that I am somewhere else, not concretely that is. I exhale and he reacts like a sleeping dog that hears a noise that only another dog could hear and up goes his eyebrows. His radar is on but for the moment, at least, we are doing just fine, no games. I take a deep breath and sigh. My script is in my lap and I’m eating gummi-worms. I am in the process of nailing down my character’s motivation for my audition tomorrow for the role of Catherine in A View From the Bridge by Arthur Miller. I’ve promised myself that by the end of the evening and with Gil’s years of experience not just as a professional but as an adult, I will have it all figured out. Fulfilling that promise is what will make this night different from all other nights. His knowledge of these things is invaluable and essential. It’s also one of his most attractive qualities. It is a turn-on. Watching him think is a turn-on. I am watching him now as he is lying in our bed and reading Schopenhauer. I can almost hear his brain chomp, chomp, chomping away on the ideas and images that the words in his book are conjuring up. He becomes monstrously attractive. I toss a red gummi-worm across the room. It splats against the wall by his head, then drops behind the mahogany headboard. He fires a gaze at me. Oops! I shrug my shoulders, and then turn the page. I never was very good at being direct.

If I get the part I won’t get paid but who cares. It’s a good production with good actors and it’d be fun. So far I’ve worked mostly in TV commercials. I am lucky to work so much. I work hard though, I really do. Last year I auditioned and got an ongoing part in an NBC soap opera “Another World.” I played the part of Josie, a gum snapping teenage prostitute--I had a pimp named Silk, fancy clothes, long nails, shiny shoes and in the story line I had been to juvenile detention and was on my way to the slammer if I didn’t straighten up and fly right. Oh, it was a lot of fun! It beat playing the girl next door, or the girlfriend of the boy next door, all of which is why the experience of working on a legit play like this one would be good for me, good for my career. I open the script. I close the script. Gil and I are feeling so deliciously mellow--even right now--that I would almost prefer not to work on the script. This is very weird. Gil narrows his niggly eyes and scans my emotional state. I open my script and get back to work.

Gil did help me get this audition. He’s worked as a director in the theatre world for many, many, many years. He’s a big shot here, LA, and in Chicago. Gil knows a lot of people who know a lot people. He’s also one of the best teachers of life I could ever hope to have. He talks to me, he listens to me, and he has this incalculable method of drawing me out of myself. I’m sometimes astonished at some of the things I’ve said and done with him. I guess it is all part of getting in touch with my feelings, which, since I am an actress, is a good thing. Anyway, he wouldn’t have recommend me if he didn’t think I was good, which I am, so there’s nothing to worry about. If I do get the part it will be the first time I will be working on a project that he won’t, in some way or other have a say over, or attachment to; I’m looking forward to that, and of course he knows it. Actually, interestingly enough, he seems to be the one who has been worrying. I bite the head off of the gummi-snake, lean back on my chair, look up at the ceiling fan, and rock myself back and forth.

A half-full bottle of red wine, a bowl of grapes, a burning jasmine-scented candle, and remnants from our leisurely dinner are placed like a Cézanne still life on the rustic table that separates us. It is late, about one or so. Miles is playing in the background and I am naked but warm in his green flannel shirt that fits me like a dress. The wall to my left is ceiling high with books. The wall to my right is adorned with posters and framed tapestries. Trinkets from his travels are everywhere. The screen that divides the kitchen from the living area is covered in a chestnut colored embroidered silk. The cold November wind outside is rattling the flimsy windows of his old loft; it is fighting to get to where it is warm and cozy. It wants what I want. Who doesn’t?

I wrap my arms around my knees. Soon, very soon, I will cozy up next to him in bed. I hum “Girl From Impanema” and think about how nice it is to be surrounded by such sophistication. I am only twenty-three years old yet I feel insanely mature. I must be mature if I am living with a man so much older than me. It can’t help but rub off--I wonder if by the time I’m thirty I’ll have accumulated as many nice things as he has. But that’s light years away, right now it’s super fascinating to be surrounded by things from a man who has lived in the whole wide world. Oh, to be in love.

My attention is now undivided, as I stare at his bare feet. They stick out from the blanket at the bottom of the bed. I watch him use his cracked, calcified and yellowed, big toenail to scratch his calf. He skillfully avoids the small globules of clotted blood that are sutured gaily around his ankles, like purple barnacles. These particular veins of his are not as intriguing as his other veins. And yet I study them all, I like to touch them, kiss them, lick them and put my ear to them. I close my eyes and feign a yawn. What is sex going to be like tonight? I wonder. There he is. He is fifty-three, six feet three, and two hundred twenty pounds. He is lying on the bed, and wearing a die-hard serious look on his face. In comparison to me, he’s a giant, but I’m not afraid of giants. I’m tough. And besides, he’s crazy about me. I close one eye and gently hurl another gummi-snake across the room, a long green one. It lands on his belly. Getting closer, I blush. He smiles, and drapes the worm into his mouth. The light from the halogen lamp reflects his balding bulbous head and makes it shine in spots-squiggly blue tendrils run up the side of his right temple. With my eyes, I trace the bulging veins on his forearm, and images of last night rush into my head. I cross my legs and squeeze them tight. I must concentrate on my work.

Instead I look at the phone and I am grateful that it is too late for any outsiders to call in for Gil and take him away from me. Gil doesn’t let me answer the phone yet, and I don’t really know anyone, not well enough anyway, to call, so I don’t. Gil says that if I never spoke to anyone ever again, well that would be fine with him. That makes me feel exclusive, like I’m a player in some secret game of his, which is cool because I love games. Not everyone in the world is special enough to be in on a secret. This is my home now. I cherish moments like these. In silence, everything is safe. Everything makes sense and feels blissfully uncomplicated when he and I are quiet. Words can really trip us up.

I am not a big talker like other actresses. I know that, but that’s ok when I am with Gil, because it means that I am a good listener. My last boyfriend Richard helped me to understand this. He said that coming from a large family like mine with seven brothers and two sisters he could understand why I didn’t talk much but that in time I would get better. When I was a dancing ballet professionally nobody cared if I spoke or not; all my teachers and choreographers cared about were my lines, speed and weight so it is not like I had all that much practice. But now, I have help from all over: my acting teacher for one, Oh she is very grand. She stood up from her chair one day in class as though she were Cleopatra and Mussolini combined, she raised her arms, and said, “Daahling, you must fill the air with your words.” And she was right. Madame Adler was always right. Talking can be fun now, especially if I’m using the words of Tennessee Williams, Chekhov and O’Neil. Oh yes, I feel very adult as I sit here studying my character’s motivations, while at the same time, my boyfriend is surreptitiously studying mine. It just proves the point that you don’t need words to make a scene alive.

Gil places his book on his belly and stares at me. I feel his gaze on me and I like that he has caught me in a responsible moment. I consider using my studious pose for an upcoming scene. I furrow my brow for greater effect. He takes his glasses off and crosses his arms on his chest. He is looking at me, no, he is gazing at me ... no, not quite that. He is staring at me, certainly, but ... he is doing more than that, most definitely ... yes, I am being analyzed. It’s just like what my father does, as though I were a specimen in one of his whack-ass science experiments.

“I can see what you’re going to look like when you’re an old woman,” Gil says as he uncrosses his legs, and props himself up, high against the pillows.

“What?” I say.

“Your face; under that light. I know what your grandmother looked like.”

“What are you talking about? I’ve never even seen my grandmother. She died before I was born.”

“Your bone structure ...” he persists calmly.

“Really, what will I look like?” I ask.

“Older,” he says.

“Humph,” I say. I roll my eyes and think about the shrunken face that in time will be mine. “What do I look like now?” I ask.

He strokes his chin. “You look like you need me to be inside of you. You look like you want me to take you on the rocking chair. You need me.”

He is right, that is what I want. Is that what I need though? Well, yeah, maybe, I guess he is right about that too. He has no bones about cutting to the chase. I respect someone who can say the obvious. But who is in charge here? I cross my legs. I take a worm out of the bag, and bite off its head. As I chew, inspiration strikes.

“Sometimes I feel I can hear the way you listen.” I say smugly.

“Oh really, and how is that?” he replies with a delighted interest in his eyes. An interest I decide needs milking by performing. I sway my head and hands like a metronome as I speak. “Relevant, relevant, irrelevant, relevant, irrelevant. Like that.” I bite the tail of the worm into three sections, and wait for his response. A serious two seconds goes by. Come on, Mister.

“I listen for what’s important,” he says.

“According to who?” I ask.

“To whom,” he corrects. “You’d be a better actress if you were a better listener and certainly a less unnerving girlfriend if you didn’t wire your brain with all that sugar. How many gummi-worms have you eaten tonight?”

I sweep my head dramatically to the right, giving him my profile. I pause. The gummi-worm topic bores me and the actress topic annoys me. Let the games begin!

“I’m going to say something right now, and when I’m done, I want you to tell me what the important words are. Okaaaay? One, two, three ....”

“I shouldn’t have let you leave the table without finishing your dinner ....”

“No sex tonight,” comes coolly out of my mouth. A serious, almost dangerous silence grips the space between us. Our eyes lock together and I feel close to him. I feel powerful and alive. If we were on a stage right now the audience would be at the edge of their chairs waiting for the next line, the next bit of business. I rub my eyes nonchalantly before I continue. “Ok, so when you listened to what I said just then, what did you hear? And which of those two words was relevant: sex, or no?”

He opens his book and turns the page. I wait. He’s buying time by dismissing me, a classic Gilbert move. The phone on his desk to the right of me rings loudly. I jump. A ringing phone in a large loft at night is startling. I decide, before thinking about the consequences, that I am going to answer it. I stand up. We stare at each other with animal stupidity. I inch forward and with needle precision he says,

“Don’t.”

I hesitate. I relax my stance but cross my arms over my chest. “Why don’t you let me ever answer the phone. It’s after midnight.” I say as the phone rings again. I stare at it, hoping my gaze will burn through the force field between me-and-it. I shift my weight and examine my fingernails, which quite frankly could use a polish.

“I think it’s weird, I protest! I live here. I told Richard about you not letting me use the phone and he thinks ....”

“When did you see Richard?” Gil asks jealously. “You would have been a Park Avenue Bimbo married to a Wall Street Zombie if it weren’t for me. I saved your life.”

I missed Richard more than ever. So what if we fucked instead of made love. He was my best friend. I want to scream this but something in Gil’s look scares me. I back down,

“He called me when you weren’t here. Just one time, I answered the phone once when you weren’t home. I did it just once--promise, “ I say meekly.

The phone rings a fourth time and in a last ditch effort to hold onto my dignity, I take a step towards the phone but stop short before picking it up and then turn my back to it, as if I could care less, but awkwardly.

“Who’s calling so late?” I ask. “And why don’t YOU pick it up?” Trying to deflect his attention and induce some normalcy into our elliptical argument. I stare at the phone as it rings a fifth and last time. A deafening silence ensues. I slump in my chair and wrap my arms around my legs, defeated, in this round. I want to tell him that I hate him and that I wish him dead. Instead I say,

“Why don’t you get a regular phone? Nobody has a rotary phone anymore. It’s too loud. It’s not modern.”

His face drops. What just happened. I did it again. Don’t panic. I need to think. I’ve hurt him, I hate myself. Okay let me start over. I love myself (I am testing this out). I did hurt him, I think, or maybe it’s a ploy to make me feel sorry for him; with him I can never tell. He told me it is crime. Hurting people is a crime. He said he is going to reform my criminal mind and diletantte ways. I thought it sounded cool, at least. And then he says he wants to share his life with me. As if there is an urgency to decide. He does share. He shares what he has. That is true. Whatever he has he shares. Except for his peanut butter--that he won’t share. He’s got this thing with the peanut butter. I hate his dumb organic peanut butter anyways. He’s such a baby. He is so full of them. Words. And yet, he looks like a hurt nine-year old boy whose mother just scolded him for being in the way. Oh I just hate it when he gives me that look, it is so confusing. I wish I was like my friend Ruth, she is the captain of her ship.

The rain has lightened up, or stopped. A group of pigeons huddle and are coo-cooing on the ledge outside the window. I catch a glance of myself in the mirror. I have the same petrified look in my face that the little red wolves had when they heard a click from my brothers BB gun. They stood wide-eyed and stiff, as if someone had pressed the pause button, disrupting their nightly pursuit of terrorizing the pheasants, peacocks, chickens and roosters in the nice pens that my father built in our back yard.

My mind is going a million miles an hour thinking of a way to escape but I can barely nod my head “uh huh” because every sight, sound and gesture is so magnified it hurts to move. I do what I always do in situations like this, I start counting. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 ... tandu, plie, tandu, plie ....

I look at Gil’s large nose, his thin lips and the reddish sagging delicate flesh of his cheeks and neck. He could have been a hen in another life. He reminds me of Eddie in A View from the Bridge. Maybe I can use the moment for my audition tomorrow.

Notes from the Undercard

2008-09-16T03:03:40Z

by John Reed

These are the notes that I took in preparation for, and during, the Brooklyn Book Festival's National Book Critics Circle Panel, which took place in the lecture hall of the Brooklyn Historical Society on September 16. The panel was part of the NBCC's week long symposium, "The Age of Infinite Margins: Book Critics Face the 21st Century." The topic up for discussion at the Brooklyn Book Festival panel: "Why Book Reviews Matter: how we decide what to read (next)."[1]
The panelists:
· Jane Ciabattari, NBCC vice president and short story writer (moderator)
· Kathryn Harrison, novelist, critic, memoirist, essayist, NBCC member
· Colin Harrison, novelist and executive editor, Scribner
· John Reed, novelist, book editor, Brooklyn Rail[2]
· Harvey Shapiro, poet and former editor, New York Times Book Review
Question:
As a reader of literature, who do you trust to give you suggestions on what to read? (Word of mouth? A book group? NPR? The New York Times? Other book review? Brooklyn Rail? Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Library Journal or other advance industry book review? Oprah? Literary blogs? (If so, which ones?)[3]
It really depends on who’s recommending what. There’s no single source I go to for my reading material. If the right person recommends the right thing, I might look at it; but I’m more likely to look at it if I also see a print review, or also run across the book online, or at the bookstore, or something. The term one heard in advertising, maybe the year before last, was Ecosystem. The sale of books, being suitable behind the music industry, is now beginning to take on that model; no single venue makes up a successful strategy, rather, it is an overall profile and accessibility that moves “units.”
The blog entries that I read are on the websites of journalists or writers who archive their published materials. Everything is published, pretty much. Other than that, I’ll read a friend’s blog, if it’s a lark. As for the book networking sites, I relate best to goodreads. Bookcrossing and bookmooch and a few other sites don’t have any market for new books, and Shelfari, while I like it, doesn’t list many, many literary books—it has a stunning absence of poetry titles.
As Jane touched upon in her comments, the poetry titles have a terrible time getting review space, bookstore space, and increasingly, library orders. The disappearance of small press publications from library shelves, in favor of electronic databases, is a grim reality to poets.
The poets, out of need, out of personality, maybe, tend to be early adopters of technologies as they apply to literature; goodreads looks to the poetry community to fine effect.[4]
Question:
Where do you buy your books?
I probably buy the majority of my books online. But I also peruse bookstores, graphic novel stores, drama bookshops, airport bookstores, etc. For very specific subjects, I’m almost certain to buy online; the Shakespeare section, for example, has this season’s books, but not necessarily the best books on the subject. And many literary titles just aren’t at bookstores. Also, if the tipping point on buying a book is something I run across online—website, blog, networking site—I’m much more likely to pop over to alibris or powells.com and buy it.
Public domain books I download. It’s a crime to buy them.[5]
Question:
As a writer (novelist, poet, memoirist), who do you trust to give you suggestions on what to read? (see above)
Same as above. Echoing Kathryn: I like to listen to my students.
Question:
As a writer, which sources of review attention do you hope will cover your books?
Print? The New York Times: big readership venues. I wouldn’t mind the front page of myspace. The advance reviews in Publisher’s Weekly, Booklist, Library Journal, etc., are extremely important. My thoughts here are almost identical to the answer Harvey Shapiro gave on the subject.[6]
Question:
As an editor (Colin), how do you get the word out about books you are publishing?
This leads to current shifts/trends …
The internet is increasingly important, but the internet itself is a vast sea of garbage. The influence of the internet is in the process of orienting to smaller networks. The networking sites are the obvious next place to provide readers with perceived accessibility to authors, and to provide authors targeted markets.
Question:
(John), how do you hear about books for the Brooklyn Rail?
The way I like to choose books: through a publisher’s catalogue. I can pick books that fit in with the Rail’s mission, and assign them, and get the reviews printed on-time or even early. (The best thing the Rail can do for a literary title is to get it early press.) I also hear about books through advance press, reviewer pitches—usually, I’ll check out the book on the publisher’s website—and through publicists, and occasionally a book agent or editor who has a book they care about.
Question:
As a book editor (John), how do you decide which books to give book review space to?
Literary underdogs. Books we can do something for, that are worth doing something for. What we like to do: early press, which can help to pitch the book to bigger publications and can also help along the distribution process. Sometimes a publicist will ask me to wait on a review—to put it out at the pub date—because they think reviews/interviews sell books. I try to accommodate them, but I think they’re crazy. First of all: I don’t know what I’ll have that month, and the piece might get bumped. Second: by the time the book is out, it’s over.[7]
Question:
As a book critic (Kathryn), how do you find the books you review? Assigned by book editor? Read about (where?) and asked to review?
The question leads into assumption that a reviewer or editor should know everything …
That I like catalogs, means I have to know the presses. Of course, nobody knows everything anymore—there are many, many small presses printing quality books, and even the large presses have nooks and crannies, and good books that aren’t readily apparent. So I do my best to constantly update myself: to pay attention.[8]
Question:
What’s the difference between a literary book and a “non-literary book”?
In a literary book, structure follows content; in a genre book, content follows structure. Of course, there are many exceptions.
Question:
As former editor of the New York Times Book Review (Harvey), how have you seen the book culture shift in terms of letting readers and those who care about book culture know about books they should read? How effective do you think the online sources of reviews are? (i.e., online versions of newspaper book review sections, literary blogs, online versions of magazine, literary magazines online, other?). Which do you read yourself?
The question leads into the difficulty of genre fiction competing with “quality fiction” …
I don’t think genre fiction competes with “quality fiction.” Any new books are good. I think the major competition for literary books is the backlist: primarily, the backlist of “classics,” many of which are just not better (in my opinion, often, just not as good) as contemporary books. If anyone doesn’t believe me, go peruse the review books in the basement of the Strand.
It’s easier to go to the classics—for everyone, academics, critics, etc—but it’s no wonder that young people look at those books and say literature isn’t for them. I don’t blame them, looking at those books: they’re right. The readership of literature would grow exponentially if the books we offered in school weren’t utterly divorced from contemporary concerns, contemporary life, and contemporary authors.
Question:
What’s the function of book reviews? At best?
At best, book reviews can help level the field, take some of the corporatism out of book publishing, and give attention where attention is due.
At worst?
At worst, book reviews function as the establishment. Calcified, antagonistic, and obsequious.
Question:
Do book reviews sell books?
In some publications they do, the Rail, for example, has a targeted readership, and it’s my impression that readers do respond to the reviews. More important to the book, though, is that the Rail readership is made up of many people who sell books: i.e., bigger press venues, reading venues, book publicists. Everyone who lives in Brooklyn.
Early reviews are especially important for library sales. Also, as Jane pointed out, most libraries require two reviews for a librarian to order a book.
Question:
Optimally, what can a review do for a book?
Book reviews may not seem to do much, but without them, your book is dead. Publishing a book is a chain of events, and any break in that chain can undo the success of your title. Without reviews: booksellers won’t know about your books to stock them, and book readers won’t know about your books to read them.

Can sell books.
Can sell books to people who sell books.
Can help get more press.
Can mitigate an unfair review.
Can help sell hardback to paperback.
Can frame the discussion of a writer (make/support a career).
Can change the trajectory of a discussion on a writer (change a career).
Probably keeps a few heads out of ovens.
The last thing: reviews might not make a big impact review by review, but overall, a publication can help to shift the emphasis on what gets covered, what gets read.

The review, said Harvey Shapiro, is “the talk in the room.” Less a judgment than a conversation.
Question:
What about reviews on blogs or bookseller networking sites? Do they put an end to print reviews? Do you trust those reviews?
To me, the multi-platform aspect of the networking sites allows for so much that I can’t help but see the venue as the future of bookselling, and television, and magazines and advertising. Right now, the technology is rudimentary, but the more one interacts with it, the more apparent the potential becomes. If one thinks about early magazines, and their ability to put fiction, journals and news into one package, the networking site is less objectionable. (Writers, by the way, take to these sites like ducks to water.)
Do I trust online reviewers? Usually, no. Top reviewers on Amazon review hand soaps and batteries, and books—so that’s not where I would go for my expert. To look back into history again: in the early years of the printing press, there was an erosion of “the expert,” because the word gained authority through the process of printing. But then, after a glut of pap, the expert returned; they were needed. My feeling is that networking sites, and bookseller sites, for content, will eventually turn to sources that their users can trust. I’m aware of business models that are already moving in that direction.
Jane opens up the discussion to comments on specific literary blogs; Jane reads Bookslut.com, theoldhag.com, maudnewton.com, and The Elegant Variation (marksarvas.blogs.com), as she knows the sensibility of the founders. Audience members cite Booklust (nancypearl.com) and the Wall Street Journal. Writer’s portals—various combinations of publishers, booksellers, lit blogs, journals, magazines, interviews—are also gaining users/readers. A few examples (like the lit blogs, there are many; their exclusion here is no slight): Powells.com (Review-a-Day), Hecale.com, Noveltown.net, KGBbar.com, livewriters.com, readerville.com.[9]
Question:
Bad reviews? Do you write them? Do you run them?
We’ve run a few grumpy reviews. But when you’re talking about a book of poetry or a literary novel from a micro-press—it’s pretty hard to motivate to print a snide review. Any first-time author with a small print run; maybe a big press, maybe a small press—regardless, what’s the point? As for running negative reviews of “big” books; I can see doing it, in another venue, but it’s really not the mission of the Rail.[10]

[1] Ok, the above: dry as dust. But, heady stuff, esteemed company: a daunting bit of prose. And I was afraid of coming off like a fool, which is why I took notes in the first place, and why, probably I was invited to participate: comic relief.[2] Novelist sounds wrong. How about: pote? Or, I don't know, the London Telegraph once called me a smart-aleck.
[3] One set of people I don't ever believe: those who tell me I have to read something. People who say something is so good that you must read it—they usually only read one or two books a year, and like to think they're reading the right ones.
[4] I am frequently "friended" by poets. And, regardless of how good a poet is, there's nothing more heartening to know: there's yet another sweet-tempered poet out there. You want to do something good with your day? Go find an unknown poet on goodreads, friend them, and write a glowing review of their chapbook.
[5] Please, please, please don't buy public domain books. And, God forbid, don't tell your editor, or perspective editor, or agent, or perspective agent, that you're the next Dostoevsky. If you're the world's answer to Dostoevsky, you better go find a time machine, or build one, and get into it.
[6] Every author I know (who hasn't been on Oprah) reports with great misery that, inevitably, when they're books come out, dozens of people tell them they should get on Oprah. Yes, Oprah is a good idea.
[7] A terrible, terrible confession on this. A publicist asked me to push an interview to sync up with the pub date, and I did, and, alas, we had a new designer that month, and we misspelled the cat's name.
[8] I still miss major things, all the time. In our culture, even "big books" and "renowned authors" are virtual anonymities.
[9] If I didn't include your blog here, it wasn't an oversight, it was that your blog, among several other top blogs, was so obvious that I figured everyone already knew about it.
[10] To close up the event, we got the compulsory angry guy. I got to field his question, which wasn't really much of a question. He wanted someone to confess that reviews had come to an end, because now the people could write reviews online, at networking sites, at booksellers, etc.. Look at my name: Vive La People! Go write me a review on amazon and I'll dance an Irish jig on your front lawn, or in your hallway. I'm pretty good with the drinking songs after I've knocked back a few. Like most authors. But, sadly, I won't be entrusting my distribution to the angry guy, who may not have inroads to the NY Times, Publisher's Weekly, the buyer at Barnes & Nobles, or Oprah.

Tell the Story of Your Father’s Life

2008-09-16T00:51:09Z

Tell the story of your father’s life,
and your father’s father’s life,
and find your own, or find
something altogether new,
an antipodes of the expected.
Expect to find, what? A history
of habitude? A cacophony of drunks?
Shocking, to learn of hidden happinesses
swallowed by the undulating
recitation of history.
“He lost everything gambling,
and, rueful of the homeward way,
clocked himself with a 410 Winchester.”
It’s easy to tell, draws the most sighs.
But what about the lolling times,
when nothing bad, and nothing
particularly good, happened?
Decades, eras, even, gone by with
no tangible sorrow or conquest.
How can that define a human life?
Where’s the cost? And where the awe-
filled ears to listen and repeat
and nurture the story of love gone
dour or heartache bound up in
wine and exotic kisses?
History was not always heavy,
but we seek to make it so,
most fervently in our own lives.
A day drawn to a close without incident,
and what, have we lived?
If a tree falls, but not on us,
have we lived?

***
In Praise of One Night Stands

The small of your back is new to my hands
The words that you say are new, and not new
Not the same dew on an April morning,
but of the same lover’s hue,
of that same longing, that endless longing.
I fall for you every night.
For a different you, but you, nonetheless,
and for a night, I, too, am new,
a cloud break in the covered spaces,
a robe opening to fresh surprises,
a dilapidation with a fresh beam.
Truth spills over like little autopsies,
fingers spread like miracles
across all of my new parts,
and for an hour I am not broken.

^{Image used with permission from Mentality Design}

Jelly

2008-09-14T22:23:07Z

Vernon Wilson

“What the fuck was I saying? Nothing about what you were saying right?” My hand fell on Tasha’s arm. We were on Canal Street going towards Broadway. We’d been waiting for the light when Natasha, in this sly way she does—with a fluttering of the eyes—she said, “When we went out this morning you were about to tell me a story.” “No,” she smiled, all white-eyed. “Not that.” She wasn’t beautiful, Tasha, but she could be pretty in an imperfect way. First off, her cheeks were pretty high. They weren’t of bone but of a lighter substance, of flesh and faint perfume. She had soft, big brown eyes as deep as a little girl’s and thick lips that curved to a sexy peak in the middle, two tender flares at the top. She’d shot me this lingering look—the love eyes—and her grin all of a sudden was even gentler and fragile almost, when this squat woman crossed in front of us shouting at her kid in Spanish. She ran right into Tasha. But she didn’t look up startled, begging pardon, or say “Excuse me,” or wave and duck her head, nothing. Only the kid seemed stunned a little.“People are fucking idiots, I swear.”“Don’t say that, Sean.” She sighed. “Anyway, you said something about your cousin getting out of jail.”
“That’s right. I remember,” I said, as though apologizing. I felt all worked up without knowing why. “I’m trying to think.”
A few brassy-ass police officers dangled from the windows of their patrols eating franks, drinking, stalking the corners like the fucking kings and queens of Mesopotamia. The funny part is I didn’t despise them, didn’t have a problem beyond their arrogance. You’ve got to be at ease with random madness and with death to be a cop. Too at ease for me, I’m sorry. Frankly I was surprised I’d said anything memorable and that Tasha admitted remembering it. Lately between us we had been unusually subdued. Distant, pretty much. I’d sensed her slipping away. This wasn’t the first time.
“Why they call him Jelly?” she said, giving me a restless look.
“Because how he got locked up…” A little man zipped between the tangled Sunday traffic on a black motor scooter. Tasha, striding ahead, looked back to see where I was, smirking for no reason really. There were sirens despairing somewhere in the distance and, just underneath them, like another life inside the sound, music beating from the long river of cars. My stomach turned and clawed itself in hunger. “Because,” I said, “when we were kids he used to love to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. He’d eat that bullshit all day if he could. My aunt would beat him, though. That was her answer for everything, the belt. After while she got my mother punishing me too.”
“For what?”
“I don’t fucking know…’cause Jelly’d get sick. I was the oldest so I had to pay for it, I guess. Plus,” I remembered, “Jelly was very dark. Still is.”
“Mean he look African?”
“We just thought he looked like a jar of jelly. Like grape jelly.”
Natasha laughed. “Jelly got a little ring to it, too.”
The giant ad overhead was of a ripped, unshaven guy with his crotch up in the camera, frowning and glaring intensely at the sneaky flash of the coming sunset. Armani bullshit. I nudged Natasha and hugged and kissed her with tongue. I was so damn happy that she was up, in a cheerful mood and exuberant. We could have pretended we’d lost nothing, that nothing had happened, but that wasn’t quite possible. I was thinking that Jelly had something to do with it.
“So, so what happened to him?”
We’d been sailing along from the Little Italy side toward Broadway and the highway, but now people were stooping to check out the DVDs strewn across the sidewalk. Africans, large-toothed men, in ropes of layered gold and fake mink jackets hawked CDs with the usual bootlegged blockbusters. Books, titty mags and tattered shoes for sale too, if you wanted. We were caught in this boiling knot of bodies.
A one-eyed Chinese vendor pushed handbags—Gucci and Louis, Rocawear, Prada and Coach—pens by Waterman and Mont Blanc, aquatic kids’ toys, a whole panoply of perfumes. The guy looked desperate, claustrophobic even, behind his display. The patch cupped on the absence of his eye. A pinprick of food or fresh blood on his lip. Tapping his foot. A Diet Pepsi bottle and plastic shades on the folding table behind him.
“See, my mother did well enough for me to go to private school. But Jelly and them were poor. I used to get sick from what they ate on a regular basis. True story. You know: beef that’s almost green and canned corn and peas and shit, not much else. Serious. The times when they had something was because Jelly’s father had some money. He’d come over sometimes, Montgomery. He had a big mustache, used to push this old Benz. One of those they don’t even make any more.”
“A baller before his time,” Natasha said, grinning tightly at the dirty architecture around us. I felt like we were in a jar, some weird display of a stranger’s devising. It was terrible if you thought about it, Canal Street. Plenty of first-storey windows, beautifully designed originally, shattered in neglect. That, or too shitty for the sun or any phantom of sunlight to pass through.
“He was, sort of,” I said. “He wasn’t rich by a long shot but Gloria wanted him to be. She wished he fucking was. Even I could see that. All day she’d wait on him doing nothing, so he could chauffeur them downtown once in a blue moon, like dignitaries. Go to Red Lobster, Olive Garden. That’s where Jelly got his big ideas, from her, always wanting all this money. Always talking about it. Jewelry and all that. All day she sit with those rollers in her hair, I remember with her bra busting open and a cigarette smoking in her fingers.”
“Smoking itself,” Natasha went, throwing her head back. Her eyes got big. “She smoked Virginia Slims I bet.”
“She just watched soaps. All day. Guiding Light, General Hospital, all that crap.”
“Young and the Restless, Santa Barbara.”
She came off breathless.
“Like she was wooing herself in a way. Summertime, I saw it all. Everything. Her walking around that little-ass crib like a goddess undressed. Like she was the black goddess of summer. Think I’m playing! She should have a star on the fucking Hollywood Walk of Fame. I’m telling you.”
Tasha, she shook her face into her green, knotted scarf.
“The True Hollywood Story!” she said with noisy laughter.
“I swear. Plus Montgomery’d always come pulling me aside and try to be poetic and wise. Like he was my father and shit. ‘Mucho trabajo, poco dinero, O’sean. Lot of work, little money.’ I always remember him saying that. We all got the short stick, might as well make the best of it. Fuck it. By we he meant us, but I always thought it was more general. A general rule of thumb.” Natasha stared at me sort of glowingly, thinking and wondering. Her face watchful and lovely. “That’s our whole relationship, just that one saying,” I said. “Then years later I find out the nigga had another family the whole time, wife and kids in Long Island. Matter fact, he was married already when my aunt met him.”
“Where’d they meet at?”
“Atlantic City, gambling,” I smiled.
Natasha squealed laughter, her fingers jumping hard and slacking, bouncy eyes brightening with a special intensity of encouragement. My heart was beating in a heavy rhythm.
“Jelly falls in with this bunch of thugs, niggas from the hood with nothing to do. You know these niggas. It’s nothing at first, but soon they’re robbing bodegas for little candy, cigarettes and soda. Little bullshit. One cat had a thing for porno. Niggas start lifting TVs, camcorders, DVDs whatever. Long as they made some money it didn’t matter. Niggas had names like Peru, Heroin and Taj Mahal—like, that’s what they actually called themselves. I mean, my mom named me O’sean, but that’s different.”
“Right.”
Her teeth gleamed like a keyboard under the hot glass of the sun. I winked at her wild eyes.
I said, “I got a grandfather somewhere that’s part Irish. The thing was niggas started fighting themselves, amongst the group of them. Egos. It wasn’t but a few weeks ago somebody told me—this dude Pat that still lives in the hood—he told me two of these niggas got murked in they car one night. They old running buddy Cochise set it up apparently. A old deal gone wrong.”
Natasha rolled her eyes to the pale spits of daylight between rooftops.
“It’s another kind of life. It’s no rules, no morals. No nothing. Crazy thing is, it’s funny, I used to idolize Jelly, and I was the older one. He was the suave one, good with the girls, all that stuff that matters.” “I still can’t tell what the fuck happened. It’s like he never had any other choice. Someplace to go.”
“No he didn’t want to,” Natasha said, pointing a finger at me. “He didn’t want to have nowhere to go. You ask me, that’s what it was. I sorta feel bad for him, but.”
The crowd got murkier. High, wild voices raced up ahead. My heart beat crazily. Whatever the reason I feared the worst. There wasn’t much in our control. I hated that feeling and despised myself for being afraid, desperate, for even eyeing the prospect of fear. I cursed myself, spine-chilled, and a steely shiver of remorse cut through me. Just past Lafayette I caught the fierce yellow blood-rimmed eyes of one of the vendors (her limp hands drooping with veins) and wondered what darkness it must be to live and goddamn die on Canal Street. Maybe there’s much more to it.
“You might be right, though. He never had all the chances you’ve had.”
It wasn’t a swipe. She seemed so serene. I felt vaguely comforted but baffled by the sudden fullness of her calm, freaked in heart and head like you feel staring at your own stupid smile in old pictures.

“Sad part is, Jelly got caught stealing stereos and shit from this spot up on Fordham Road. By then he’s got his girl six months pregnant. I can never remember her damn name. Richelle, Raquel. Something like that. Richelle Brown. And Jelly got sent up north. Rikers. The sad thing is he was changing. He even started reading, stuff like Stephen King.”
She’s astonished. “She had the baby?” It’s like the unavoidable had somehow crept next to her, discreetly dressed, in bed.
“He got sentenced six to eight years. Pleaded that shit down from like fifteen since he was unarmed. He’s just in the car, the getaway guy. The fucking driver. You believe that shit?”
Natasha clenched her eyes and nearly mouthed my words as I was saying them, like some first-time actor in the spotlight. “You just waste something so precious because…because you, you just don’t have the drive. Something. The willpower. Don’t you think that’s so selfish? I know he’s your family and everything, but Jesus.”
We‘d fought tooth and nail about this baby she wanted. I figured I was too young for a kid and thought we were clearly and obviously both children still. Natasha wholeheartedly agreed. She’d started grinning and nodding, so deep was her agreement. Her argument, however, and her sort of furious need, was all about that state of innocence. “I’m too selfish,” she cried to me then, full of fear and loathing. “I don’t want to be alone!” “You won’t,” I said. My heart in mad pieces, thundering. “I don’t want to just wander through life for nothing, O’sean. I love you and—” “And that ain’t enough?”
A bitter sadness hung over my shoulders. Reluctantly, slowly, I brought the palm of her hand to my lips. I thanked God in Heaven (like my mother says) to have made my mistakes and not Jelly’s.
I followed Natasha inside one of the bigger storefronts.
“So my aunt Gloria, who to this day will defend Jelly as the victim—”
“Of course,” Natasha said over her shoulder, without looking at me.
“—she’s raising the kid with this girl, Richelle or whatever. The mom and the baby mama.”
Natasha asked the baby’s name. I made up something, smirking to myself.
“Oh so it’s a boy!” she laughed. She had three purses she’d tried on in hand.
As we were leaving a couple in short black fur coats—they looked like fucking gorilla suits, I’m sorry—talked about a carjacking with the lust of fight analysts after a particularly nasty knockout. The dude’s friend used to whip a gold Lexus coupe on 24s, a sick ride, and some nigga one night in Brooklyn threatened to jack him if he saw him again. This happened on Flatbush Ave., the guy not knowing where he was. The story stopped right there. Natasha shot me a smirky grin.
“That’s Jelly,” she said as we stepped outside. The sun danced on her skin in strange colors.
“Well.”
“So that’s it? They back together? Just like that? All happy ever after?”
“Jelly got out early. Came back home,” I said. “Same old crew all over again. Some of the guys were back on streets already. New ones too. There’s always new ones. But Jelly, he wants to walk the straight and narrow, right? He’s reading The Art of War and Henry Miller. Tropic of Cancer. His cellmate turned him onto this stuff, some guy used to teach high school. He read all these books on acupuncture. Hells yes—acupuncture.” Natasha was beaming. “Eastern Asian medicine.”
“Just ‘cause you went to college, smart ass.”
We both laughed.
“But the whole acupuncture thing—Jelly said himself—he liked it because of the needles.” Tasha threw me a funny, screwfaced look. “Seriously. Said the needles gave him control for once. The first time. Like he could finally pinpoint some—”
“Literally,” she went, looking past me.
“He finally could pinpoint his problems. Little personal things. He called it black damage. Like black ice. The damage you can’t see.” Natasha frowned heavily like she had something rotten in her mouth, as you see intellectuals and sometimes children do. My chest hammered around my heart. I couldn’t hear a damn thing, as if the street had dropped away. “He never knew how to get to it before. Course he hadn’t done shit, mind you, but just thinking about it it’s like he’s putting chaos back in the right order. All the broken pieces back in place. You can numb the body and bring it back to life. You don’t remember,” I said, grinning almost, “I brought up doing it myself, when we went at it about the baby?”
“So she waited for him?” Natasha said sharply, as if out of breath. A bright diamond braid of water ran down the gutter at our feet. She had to lift her voice over the unanimous chorus of horns. Two fatasses shouted and spat at each other from their cars. “She stuck around, this Richelle chick?”
“In a sense, yeah. It turned out she was loyal til the end, then she disappeared. Bitch just left all of a sudden one day. Went to stay with some family she had out in Brooklyn, in Bed-Stuy. Jelly was heartbroken more than anything. He wanted her back, and the baby too of course. Especially his son.” “Of course,” Natasha repeated, picking through old boxes of “Drakkar Noir” and “Eternity” at one of the kiosks. “He was a fucking mess. What he didn’t know but quickly found out was she’d been seeing this old ex of hers. Truth is, she tells Jelly, the honest truth is she never stopped loving the guy. She’s like, it’s not over between them.”
Natasha searched in my eyes.
“Here he’s still thinking he loved her, but he knew it wasn’t true.”
“Sounds like his father cheating, but reverse,” she said with ridiculous satisfaction.
We came to a crawl in front of a big decrepit lot on Mercer, maybe Wooster, I don’t know. Black men with blue milk crates and cardboard boxes were inside playing cards.
“Here he go! Here he go now!” one of them stammered, running in place. He stood grinningly off to one side, holding an unlit but clearly smoked cigar in one ashy hand. His partner slapped down the cards, meanwhile. I looked at them and laughed. There was raw freedom in his voice, a boyish exuberance for the crowd. But I was too embarrassed to go up to them. I thought about it though. But what the fuck, besides skin, did we have in fucking common?
Blood rushed to my head, crowded my pulse. I turned to Natasha, stiff as hell.
“She’s crying telling him she doesn’t love him. Like it hurts her too.”
“Maybe it does…”
“Bullshit!” I said. “Jelly ransacks the place looking for his son. Hasn’t seen him in months. Richelle hesitates out of sympathy, sort of, but she calls the cops anyway. Jelly makes a threat but he bounces. Bitch puts a order of protection out against him. He breaks it. He’s like she called him telling him to call her from a payphone down the block. Said her ex’s been beating on her and threatened their son. ”
Natasha slid her head toward my armpit, nestling there like we were in bed about to fall asleep.
“Same story all over again. He got caught out there. This was the second strike. But he just got home yesterday. So now there’s this little party.”
“A homecoming, like.” She watched the guy with the cards amp the crowd. Her fingers went slack when he got really hyped.
“What’s he gonna do?”
“Anybody know where the ace of spades?” the hustler hollered, glancing up to cajole everybody curdling around him. Bunch of dead faces. He flipped the cards like a goddamn maniac, had the polished glare of a shaman, and I still went numb.
“Watch the spade, watch the ace of spades! Where it go? Is it gone?”
“No fucking clue,” I said to myself. Natasha had a weird, distracted look.
“Where the ace? Ace of spades, the one and only, ain’t no phoney. Seek and ye shall find, the game is in your mind. Look again…”
“Right there!” somebody said shrilly, a woman in a big droopy cotton hat almost like a bonnet. Like Driving Miss Daisy. She tapped the cracked sidewalk with a wooden cane. “Just right there, that one!” she cried in a stern, seasick sort of voice.
It was a yellow Jordan t-shirt and jeans that Jelly’d had on when I last saw him. He was down. Didn’t want to hear or really talk about much. Even the intimate blessings of acupuncture. There’s a photo from that night too. Ragged clouds catching fire and the sun’s savage eye being sucked from the room over his shoulder.
“He reminds me of somebody I know,” Natasha murmured sullenly, jerking her chin at the cardsharp. Him and his fat cigar-chewing friend, the friend especially—he still hadn’t lit the fucking thing, just chomped the end until the tobacco swelled out like a black eye—gave me a thrill of horror and sadness, sort of a shameful dread—they were funny but slightly dangerous, childish and grotesque. They knew it, the spooky bastards. Pissed me off. Coming from where I came from it’s probably who they were that bothered me. I’m being real. They were just like niggers—but niggers loving being niggers, hollowed men, and nothing more.
Natasha said, “But I can’t think who it could be though.”
Whatever I whispered was a lie. Everything got mysterious. Even the uncut curve of Natasha’s nails, the spiced odor of her hair. I couldn’t think of anything. What good would goddamn thinking do me? I know that the white sky moving over the street seemed inexplicably near and whole. A big lake of alien light.
“What’s he gonna do?” She’d asked before and I hadn’t answered.
“Maybe…I don’t know, my aunt says he want to join the Marines. Change his life up. But we both know that won’t work. Can’t just switch it up all of a sudden.” I sighed and my throat tightened like a fist. Leaked oil gave the street a dark sparkle.
“If he goes back it’s like it’s three strikes. That’s it. Game over.”
The big motherfucker with the cigar flashed his fried-on grin and people from all over—Brazilian, Italian, Japanese—laid their money down for the pleasure of being duped. It was the same bullshit game the players played where they were from and yet they offered themselves up in charmed astonishment. Somebody even clapped.
“They hoping they could cure him, so to speak,” I said, remembering the wishlist my aunt had rattled off for the party: a computer, a plasma TV, DVD player.
“You think it’ll work?” Natasha asked, smiling. She laughed, “And don’t lie, ‘cause you know I could read your mind!”
A man in a windbreaker was selling DVDs. Not one but two canes leaned at crazy angles on the brick wall behind him.
“Two for eight, one for five,” the guy said languidly. He sold his shit out of the gigantic garbage bag behind him. The beard devouring his face and throat was all flames, unbrushed and ugly but alive. He didn’t have any legs. His eyes were red and watery as ice on a hotplate.
Natasha looked at him, then at me, pumping my fingers. I suddenly felt crushed by a nauseous sensation. I had to look down. That feeling spread out and I was left with something else neither better nor worse.
“You’re scared he’s gonna do something aren’t you?” She was all agitated too.
“I can’t exactly say that,” I said with a forced grin.
The guy, rubbing his bloody eyes, handed me a DVD.

Gongguan Digressions // 公館漫遊

2008-09-14T19:18:41Z

In his 7^th floor apartment on Roosevelt Road, Wan Hao-hsien (溫浩賢) anguishes over what his new kitchen god shrine design should look like.

If life imitated television dramas and commercials, Taipei would be run entirely by eager young college graduates with androgynous haircuts. But in reality, the city has endless ways of humiliating the young. Take Hao-hsien, for example – fresh out of National Taiwan University with an honors degree in graphic design, and all he can land is a pity commission from the neighborhood bubble tea café.

Forget about the city being your oyster. You – proud graduates of the class of 2008 – you are the city’s oyster.

“Still can’t find a job?” the mama-san at the café asks him one afternoon.

“No, I’m still waiting to hear back from Saatchi & Saatchi.”

“啥乞?” she says. “Weird name. Never heard of it.”

“It’s a famous ad firm based in London. I have friends working there, some insider connections.”

Wan is always bragging about his college friends working in fancy foreign companies, his friends dating Brazilian supermodels, his friends DJing at Luxy and Barcode. At a college as selective as National Taiwan University, your friends are all quite necessarily future winners.

“That’s a pity, talented guy like you going without a job,” mama-san leans over his table, sighing as if pronouncing God dead. “President Chen’s screwing up the economy. Society is in a huge mess. The world is going to pieces.”

“President Chen has no shame,” Wan nods. He doesn’t know exactly why he has no shame, but anyone with any fashion sense said so. It’s the way the president sweats at the podium, his perspiration apologizing for his timid words in advance. The same unseemly sweating cost Al Gore the election. Nixon sweated enough to feed the Tigris and Euphrates. Shame and sweating — highly correlated.

“In that case, if you don’t mind…” she dry coughs a little. “We would love to borrow your talents. See, our kitchen god just isn’t holding up anymore.”

Wan stands up and studies the mini-shrine — nailed to wall at slightly above eye level in the café’s main lounge, a red-skinned and bearded figurine sitting in the center, two peach-shaped miniature lamps flanking the figure and a rusty copper gourd serving as an ashy pincushion for incense sticks. He can’t see anything wrong with it.

“Looks like a fine kitchen god to me,” he compliments. “Good composition.”

“Well,” the matron stashes away a private grin for herself. “The shrine just doesn’t quite fit the rest of our décor, though. We’re different than the other bubble tea shops. See, we’re trying to attract a sophisticated crowd.”

Resplendent in a lime green and neon orange motif, the bubble tea café is called:

SPUTNIK SWEETHEART

For reservations, call: 0943-2626

Couples dressed as Toru and Naoko on

Murakami Thursdays get a house-special

Norwegian Forest Cake for free!

Mama-san — like other café owners in the Gongguan District — is an unapologetic fan of Haruki Murakami.

A pack of suited men and women walk in, security key cards dangling around their necks. Mama-san glares at them, then shoots a wan smile in their general direction. They are not her target clientele. But nonetheless, the suits pick the table under the altar.

“Can’t believe we had to walk all the way here for lunch,” a woman with cropped hair and a black skirt says.

“Now, we’re the odd ones here. Who else other than students and pretentious bums hang around Gongguan?” a man says. “We should’ve had lunch break much earlier.”

“I always warned you guys that the eateries around the office would be packed by one. Now we have to come to this place and splurge $200NT on a bento box,” another man says, vindicating himself. He is secretly happy about the situation.

The cropped-hair girl raises her hand. “老闆娘, 老闆娘—”

Wan and mama-san are too busy discussing ideas for a new kitchen god. The peach-shaped lamps would have to conform to an iMac color palette or it’d have to go, Wan decides. Mama-san disagrees. The rusty color of the incense gourd is her main grievance.

“Hey, 老闆娘! We’re ready to order—”

The cropped-hair girl stands up to secure the matron’s attention. For a Taiwanese woman in her mid twenties, the girl’s height measures at a freakishly tall 177 centimeters. Her height is a favorite subject of water cooler gossip among her coworkers, many of whom suspect that her towering stature plays a role in her continual failures in romance. The kitchen god shrine at the Sputnik Sweetheart stands at a freakishly low 170 centimeters above the closest dining table. Kitchen god meets the top of the girl’s head at a painful six kilometers per hour.

“Fuck!” she yelps. “Ouch… FUCK.”

“Whoa, watch your mouth,” her coworker laughs. “You okay there? Tourette syndrome working up a little?”

“夭壽喔,” she glares at him and pinches his right ear, “I’m—fine—thank—you—and—you—?”

“Ow ahh-Okay, okay stop it what are you doing?” the man begs. The table erupts in sitcom laughter.

We might as well give her a name now. She is Gloria Ying, a secretary at AceTech Software, an educational language-learning computer game development company. She is always the first to arrive at the office every morning, though she never does any productive work until well after lunch. Before lunch, Gloria prepares coffee, sorts mail, plays online chess with her former college roommate and rearranges her iPod playlists. After lunch, Gloria returns to her cubicle and updates her MSN Messenger screen name:

*GloriYa* - attacked by teahouse kitchen god… 痛啊啊啊~ T-T

has just signed on to

Windows Live Messenger!

A new chat window pops up on her computer screen.

[Jen-E] says: heyy

[Jen-E] says: lol wtf attacked by teahouse?

[Jen-E] says: what happened??

*GloriYa* says: just a dumb accident at a café haha

*GloriYa* says: got made fun of for it… =_=

[Jen-E] says: hahaha

*GloriYa* says: yeah I know… shut up

*GloriYa* says: anyway, concert still on tonight?

[Jen-E] says: of course.

[Jen-E] says: at The Wall?

[Jen-E] says: when is it again? are we doing dinner first?

*GloriYa* says: mmm… Thai diner near NTU sounds good?

*GloriYa* says: the concert isn’t until 9pm

*GloriYa* says: let’s meet at Exit 2 of Gongguan Station @ 7pm?

[Jen-E] says: sounds good…

[Jen-E] says: hey, you mind if Eric comes too??

*GloriYa* says: …Eric what?

[Jen-E] says: Eric Barton. Tall 老外 we met at Club Wax on ladies night?

[Jen-E] says: afterschool English tutor at Hess, Florida State grad?

*GloriYa* says: the guy who swore he could sing every Jay Chou song ever?

[Jen-E] says: haha yeah. We went to karaoke last week. His Chinese was pretty impressive for a white guy. It was pretty cute

*GloriYa* says: um… creepy??

*GloriYa* says: but I dunno, I only bought 2 tickets. It’s Tizzy Bac’s first performance after their new album so tickets are probably sold out by now…

The bottom of the chat window informs Gloria that [Jen-E] is writing a message… [Jen-E] stops typing, deletes her message, chooses her words for a long time.
[Jen-E] is writing a message…

[Jen-E] says: he says he doesn’t mind lining up early and trying to see if they still have more tix.

[Jen-E] says: only if you’re okay with it, of course.

[Jen-E] says: He’s friends with the ticketing lady there.

*GloriYa* is typing a message…

*GloriYa* says: you invited him already?

[Jen-E] says: mmm…well he said he’ll find seats and sneak in some booze for us.

[Jen-E] says: you know how much The Wall charges for a drink haha.

Gloria has been planning this night for too long to allow for third wheels. It was supposed to be their night together, theirs alone. She imagined the audience dispersing after the concert, her hand grazing Jen-E’s, the dim light of the venue and the warmth of the alcohol steeling her nerves for her confession— she will need to be numbed and alone with Jen-E for this.

[Jen-E] says: aiyo, anyway, he’s not that terrible lah.

[Jen-E] says: And besides, I think there might be something going on between us…

*GloriYa* says: exactly what I don’t want to hear.

*GloriYa* is writing a message…

Last message received from [GloriYa]: 2:58PM 12/9/07…

*GloriYa* is writing a message…

*GloriYa* says: but suit yourself. I need to go, boss is calling.

*GloriYa* says: talk to you later

[Jen-E] says: you sure it’s okay if eric comes?

---*GloriYa* is offline. Messages you sent will be delivered when they sign in.---

[Jen-E] says: Gloria?

On the other end of the miles of fiber optic internet cables separating them, Jen-E sat cross-legged in the Shida University library, guessing the words cut off and lost in the digital void. She is a librarian, though not in the sense of English tea time and cat-pampering spinsters. Mostly she specializes in consulting cultural theory grad students in their research and decorating the themed monthly bulletin boards at the library’s entrance.

“Jenny.”

Jen-E recognizes the flat voice as her supervisor’s. A learned defensiveness about her digital privacy jolts through her, the basal ganglia of her brain firing synaptic responses reminding her that ALT+TAB meant minimize chat window.

“Yes?”

“Hope I didn’t interrupt any of your hard work.”

“Oh no, not at all. What is it?” She replies, her taut grin hiding daggers. If I have to deal with his passive-aggressiveness one more time— Jen-E thinks tragically to herself.

“So, about this month’s bulletin. Thought of a theme yet?”

“I think it’ll be about 韓良露 and her South Village project,” Jen-E answers. “Seems the talk of the town right now, the star local writer. Plus, she doesn’t live too far from here. I’ve seen her slinking around the campus. You heard though? She wants to officially rename Gongguan Market Circle as ‘South Village’—”

On the laptop computer behind her, a chorus of digital dissent churns across countless blogs and online PTT and BBS forums:

韓良露 wants to turn Gongguan into the Lower East Side.

韓良露 wants to sell Gongguan to La Rive Gauche.

韓良露 wants to elect herself deputy Gertrude fucking Stein of Taipei.

韓良露韓良露韓良露韓良露, who will be her Picasso and Hemingway?

“I think she’d make a timely theme,” Jen-E says.

Jen-E’s bulletin board suggestion hangs in mid-air between them. Her supervisor blinks slowly, offers a perfunctory smile and walks away without saying a word, which means that he’s chewing on the thought for further consideration. She understands that complimenting younger employees was never a favored practice among the graying 五年級生 generation.

A new instant messaging chat window sprouts on her computer screen as the supervisor vanishes behind concrete corridors.

JT 角頭 says: hey bitch

[Jen-E] says: -_-|||

[Jen-E] says: WTF do you want JT

JT 角頭 says: saw the boss giving you a hard time

[Jen-E] says: yeah he gave me that dead fish smile again

JT 角頭 says: I’m so bored. Falling asleep.

JT 角頭 says: let’s go out for a 7-11 break??

Jen-E stands up and stares over to JT’s desk, which she can see on the floor below. JT winks at her. She nods.

“I meant bitch in an affectionate way,” JT says as he approaches her desk.

“You’re weird.”

“Let’s get some coffee?”

“Yeah, some Mr. Brown won’t be amiss. Get me out of here.”

In front of the main gateway of the Shida campus, a flock of students stood in a stiff circle, all blue wigs and cardboard samurai swords and gothic Lolita frills. They call themselves cosplayers, an embattled fandom of people who dress as their favorite Japanese cartoon characters. A scrawny boy arrives in a shock of aluminum gray hair and white kimono, a lacquered medicine box slung over his shoulders. He orbits tentatively around the group before gathering his courage.

“Excuse me, is this… are you guys…” he cannot bring himself to say it. “Are you all members of the Moé World Forum?”

A girl dressed up as Chun-Li from Street Fighter rolls her eyes. No one responds.

“Is this the monthly otaku meet?”

“What’s your screen name?” a flat voice demands.

“銀古24,” he says. Ginko24. Normally, the scrawny boy is an undergraduate chemistry major. In a white kimono, though, he is the itinerant spirit-world traveler, a world savior, liberating medieval Japanese villages with sass and pizzazz.

“You’re at the right place,” a pirate says, extending a sweaty hand. “I’m Luffy-X.”

Ginko24 accepts the proffered hand suspiciously. He remembers that in a heated cyber-debate about the superiority of shonen comics to shojou, he had called Luffy-X a “total noob” and “irascible homo.” Given Luffy’s clout among the veterans of the forum, Ginko’s online popularity quickly plummeted to a new low.

“You know, Ginko’s not supposed to wear a kimono,” Luffy says. “That’s what makes him special. He wears western clothes.”

“Is Shin-sama here yet?” Ginko changes the subject, disentangling his hands.

“No, we’re waiting for him to get out of class. Then we’re going to Shimending.”

Jen-E and JT squeeze past the cosplayers as they exit the campus gates, cigarettes dangling from their fingers. JT eyes the cosplayers, elbows Jen-E to secure her attention, takes a long drag and blows a mouthful of smoke into Ginko’s face.

“Jay,” Jen-E says. “What are you—”

“Look at these otakus, Jenny,” JT chortles.

Ginko is not sure how to react. The group stares at JT through neon bangs and mascara eyelashes. Luffy-X relishes an exquisite mental picture of Ginko’s face getting punched in, teeth flying everywhere, Ginko sobbing, Ginko pissing his pants, Ginko begging for forgiveness as Luffy’s magnanimous figure steps in to his rescue.

“Jay, don’t be an asshole.”

“They were standing in our way. They’re the assholes.” he says. “Hey kids, can’t you be weird somewhere else?”

“Jay,” Jen-E says.

A delivery boy loads a newspaper stand with fresh issues of Pots Alternative Weekly as he witnesses the standoff. His hands are stained menstrual-red from the smearing of tabloid ink (this week’s Pots cover story: “Sawat di Pi mai! Celebrating the New Year with Illegal Thai Laborers.” The cover art features a blood-soaked Thai flag). Dangling from the delivery boy’s neck is a flimsy laminated press pass:

YEN Chang (Pots Weekly editorial intern)

The 5PM bell sounds across the Shida University campus. JT and the cosplayers’ spat elevates to an uncomfortable 70 decibels as college students pour out of classrooms and cascade around them. In his head, Yen decides on an article pitch: Fear & Loathing in Taipei’s Cosplaying Subculture. He digs through his messenger bag for his digital camera. The word ‘cosplay’ conjures up a chain of associations in Yen’s head: cosine—Harajuku—Gwen Stefanie—Orientalism—tarmac—breast implants—shame.

His cell phone rumbles in the pocket of his jeans. Caller ID: 吳慕清 // Editor Wu.

“Yen, how’s the paper route going? Are you done filling up all the Shida University newsstands?”

“Yeah. And I also have a question...”

“Fire away.”

“So all these anime geeks are having a mini-convention in front of the university gate right now, right? And I was thinking— have we written about the Otaku subculture?”

“Only a billion times, Yen, and decades ago at that. Otaku fashion’s a consumer fad, flavor of the week. Leave that bourgeois fluff topic to The Eslite Reader,” Wu says. “So anyway, all done with the paper route?”

“Aw c’mon,” Yen sighs. “Yeah took care of the newsstands, already told you.”

“Well I have great news then. A real hands-on assignment. Yen, The Wall just booked Broken Social Scene for a concert in Taipei. I want to set up an interview with Kevin Drew, so I need you to head over to The Wall right now and talk to the manager about scheduling a time. Can you do that?”

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah, holy shit, right? Can I trust you to do this?”

“What’s the manager’s name?”

“Oris. Or Mr. Buo, if you want to be all suit-and-tie about it, but he doesn’t really give a fuck. Tell him you’re吳慕清’s assistant.”

At the underground cavern of The Wall, Oris sits behind a reef of PA system control panels. The buzz of tattoo pens and muffled thumps from drum rehearsal rooms can be heard from the outer hallways. Oris’ throne is elevated above the scratchy hardwood dance floor, an isolated perch seemingly detached from the music club. The three members of Tizzy Bac practice a synth-heavy piano rock number on stage. They don’t pay Yen any mind.

Oris takes a sip of the house special cocktail — appropriately named Oris真雞歪, or “Oris, Douchebag Extraordinaire.” Shot of absinthe, club soda, triple sec and grenadine. It is designed to embolden gushing college fans to annoy their favorite bands.

“So 慕清 wants to interview Broken Social Scene?”

“Yeah, and he was wondering if he can interview them here.”

Oris takes a drag on his cigarette.

“Not a problem at all. Tell him VIP lounge as usual. But tell him, only on one condition…”

“What condition?”

“Well,” Oris licks his upper lip. “It’s a little complicated, see. 慕清 already owes me a few favors. How bout we talk about this over a few drinks?”

………………………………………..

It’s minutes before Tizzy Bac’s first set and Yen wakes up in a urine-saturated toilet stall. An incessant knock on the door wakes him up.

“Anyone in there? Can you hurry up? I kinda need to go real bad—“the accent sounds garbled, roundish, foreign.

Yen’s surroundings come into focus. Before he can reorient himself in the conscious world, his attention is arrested by the scrawled handwriting on the bathroom wall.

操妳祖宗十八代 — fuck your ancestors eighteen generations up.

[It’s unclear to Yen what anyone could do to deserve such an ancestral event.]

溫浩賢，假文藝青年 — Wan Hao-hsien is an insufferable hipster.

段考失敗　殺了我吧　囧rz||| — Failed my general exams. Kill me now.

1F73號一直報警的雞歪阿婆我咧幹你娘咧!

[Knock knock— this time in English now: “Dude, hurry up!”]

Yen feels for his sharpie in his front pocket, pulls it out and scrawls “Oris aint got shit on me” on the door. He is proud of sneaking in this jab at Oris in his home turf. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, the sourness of vomit tickling his nasal cavity. Yen leaves the stall. A tall foreigner — Eric Barton — stares down at him.

“Next time go jack off somewhere else,” Eric Barton says. “不夭在車所大手槍好不毫??”

“媽的洋鬼子”

“Piss off, kid.”

Yen climbs the stairs to the entrance of The Wall, walking past an interminable line of concert-goers that wind beyond his vision down the back alley. As always in the endless interiority of the city, night comes suddenly. He brushes shoulders with Wan Hao-hsien, who paces around aimlessly at the door of The Wall, a bottle of Taiwan Beer in hand. Hao-hsien does not know what to do with the night, so as usual he strolls down Roosevelt Road in search of large gatherings, traffic accidents, student protests, break dancers.

“先生, are you looking for a ticket?” a woman’s smoky voice calls for Wan Hao-hsien. “Do you want to buy one off of me?”

Hao-hsien shrugs. “I have no one to watch the concert with though.”

“Either way. I was gonna go with a friend, but she went in with someone else,” the tall woman says. Against the aggressively hip crowd of Gongguan bohemians, her suit seems starkly formal. Hao-hsien would guess that she’s an accountant or secretary.

“You can still go anyway,” he says.

“No, I really don’t want to. Not in the mood anymore. You a fan of Tizzy Bac?”

“Well, I like their breakthrough album, but their latest is complete baroque-pop twee,” Hao-hsien says. In truth, he’s never heard the new album, but he’s read the Pots Weekly album review.

“They’re only performing the first album and 都是我害的 tonight,” she lies.

“Much better then,” he says stupidly, just to keep up the judicious charade. “That sounds solid. Alright.”

Out of embarrassment, Hao-hsien trades a $400 NT bill for her ticket and descends into the warm dark womb of The Wall. At the bar, Hao-hsien trades the ticket stub for a Miller. Tizzy Bac does not perform “Sideshow Bob,” the only song of theirs that he recognizes. The night passes unremarked, and soon Wan is home again. When he doesn’t know what to do, he buries himself in the small details of life — reorganizing his drawers, researching his stamp collection, obsessing over a small graphic design project. He walks through the city at night like a ghost, talking to no one. This is how his parents have taught him to live.

In his 7th floor apartment on Roosevelt Road, Wan Hao-hsien (溫浩賢) anguishes over what his new kitchen god shrine design should look like.

Establishing Shot: An Interview with Steve Erickson

2008-09-11T20:26:55Z

Steve Erickson’s many novels read as if written for the readership of other worlds—worlds not different from ours so much as parallel, the real turned upside-down, inside-out, and yet centered, inevitably, around Los Angeles. With Zeroville, Erickson gives us his tightest establishing shot yet.

---------------------------------------------------------

Steve Erickson’s many novels (Days Between Stations, Rubicon Beach, Tours of the Black Clock, Arc d’X, Amnesiascope, The Sea Came in at Midnight, Our Ecstatic Days) read as if written for the readership of other worlds— worlds not different from ours so much as parallel, the real turned upside-down, inside-out, and yet centered, inevitably, around Los Angeles; an alternate cityscape, purged of cloying commerciality, populated by dreamers, and informed not by mundane and compromised reality, but by a rarefied innocence that, transposed through metaphor to describe our own condition, offers our reading and dreaming lives, here and now, a modicum of hope, and even—redemption. The perceptual skew of his new book, Zeroville, turns Hollywood into Babylon, or an Eden redux. Here, Erickson gives us his tightest establishing shot yet: an image of film as the Scripture of a secular age. Its hero, Vikar Jerome, is a film editor who, in the rise and fall of his career, uncovers the secret history of our time—call it a celluloid Apocrypha—through a madcap, and maddening, resplicing of film frames. What results—what is framed—is nothing less than a new Creation Myth. What is created is nothing less than us.
Erickson, movie critic for Los Angeles Magazine, and editor of Black Clock, published by CalArts, where he teaches, responded to questions about his Zeroville via email.

KGB: First off, is this book any sort of roman a clef? Factual characters are fictionalized everywhere: Charles Manson, Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro; Vikar, your film editor hero, has Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor tattooed on his skull. Your character Viking Man is, fairly obviously, John Milius, most famous for having written the script for Apocalypse Now, and, also, as being lampooned by John Goodman for his character in the Coen Brothers’ Big Lebowski. With all this background, is Vikar himself based on anyone real?
Erickson: No roman a clef, other than that the story is set in the context of those real events, as you indicated, with references to those real people. When a novelist creates a character there may be a model, but if the book comes to life at all, the character becomes his or her own person. You’re right that Viking Man clearly is inspired by Milius, but I don’t know Milius and have never met him—so it’s more precise to say that Viking Man is my version of a Milius, trying to stay clear of the Lebowski portrait, at least in my own head, while acknowledging at the same time that I drew on select facts of Milius’ life that are identifiable to anyone who knows anything about movies. Vikar is more a full creation, with a little bit from this source and a little bit from that. It was when he came together for me as a character that the book came together too.
KGB: A follow up. Vikar is Vikar Jerome—does his name have anything to do with St. Jerome, himself a Vicar of sorts, the 5th-century translator of the Bible to Greek? Are you trying to say that film editing, Vikar’s eventual profession, is, itself, a form of translation?
Erickson: Well, my calculation wasn’t that erudite or smart. But I was aware that the name “Jerome” conveyed a kind of churchly quality, if you will, and I certainly did see Vikar’s natural creative role as a mediator rather than as, if you will, an originator—more the prism than the light, through whom we see fifteen years of cultural upheaval in movies and music, in the L.A. of the seventies and early eighties. We never really understand Vikar, of course, whether he’s a savant or just sort of socially retarded, but Viking Man’s characterization of him as not a cineaste but “cineautistic” captures him better than anything.
KGB: Vikar begins as an excommunicated theology student, and ends as a famous film editor (winning the only editing prize ever given at Cannes) who unwittingly uncovers a secret history of the world, dispersed in the frames of various films. Is film, to you, a holy medium—“holy” as in the archaic sense of “magical”? Do you think art is a replacement, or usurpation of sorts, of scripture, or of the authority of religion?
Erickson: I think of art and scripture as coming from the same place, which is an effort to interpret what is beyond interpretation. For true film obsessives—which is to say more obsessive than I—there almost is no higher truth than film. When Godard concluded one of his films with the words, “End of cinema,” by which he meant not just the end of his particular movie or his particular work but the end of an art form, it was intended to have the same impact as those who declare the “end of history” or that God is dead. I love movies and always have, but I’m not someone who’s truly consumed the way that Vikar is or some of the filmmakers who came out of the seventies—Scorsese, Schrader, Spielberg, De Palma, Bogdanovich. There are too many other things I care about. There have been large periods of my life when I was just as consumed by music or fiction or politics. But all of those things aspire to the transcendent.
KGB: All of your books tend to propose stories that teeter between metaphor and realism, or, better, actuality—Vikar’s discovery of this secret history is a perfect example of this technique. Do you believe in an objective reality outside of your books? Or—is “everything possible”?
Erickson: I don¹t know. This is one of those questions where even our definitions of “objective” are up for grabs—which may answer your question right there. I accept “objective reality” but I leave open the possibility that there’s something bigger.
KGB: “Zeroville”—read: Hollywood—is shown here in its dissolution. The studio system is bankrupt. Angry young filmmakers appear, and begin doing things their own way. Charles Manson & family kill people. Drugs are everywhere. The music changes, cranks louder. How did you yourself experience this shift in the early 1970s? And does the counterculture of those years and the years just prior have any relevance to today’s mass culture?
Erickson: I was a teenager in the sixties and in my twenties in the seventies, so I came of age during that time and it had enormous impact on me. Even then the moment was special, crystalline—there was a sense of possibility, and I keep feeling the current era trying to find its way back to that same sense, though that might be noxious boomerism talking. At the same time there also was a way in which, living in L.A., I was at odds with the more immediate culture, and while generally Vikar isn’t very autobiographical, some of his experiences brush up against mine. Living in Echo Park in the early seventies, I was the only person I knew in L.A. who owned a Roxy Music record. I was the only person I knew who owned a Stooges record or a New York Dolls record or a Mott the Hoople record or an Eno record. I didn’t listen much to the Eagles or Carole King or James Taylor. So I felt at one with the culture and at odds with it.
KGB: Film editing is the subject of remarkable little essays scattered throughout the book. Have you picked up anything from film editing applicable to your own work? The form of Zeroville—small chapters, arranged symmetrically, climaxing at middle only to rewind numerically back to zero—seems as if influenced by the form, or only the appearance of the form, of a screenplay. How influential have cinematic techniques been on your writing?
Erickson: Well, I was a film student at UCLA before resigning myself to the fact that whatever talent I had —and certainly my temperament—was better suited to writing novels. That said, the movies had an enormous impact on me and on my fiction. There was a conscious decision to tell Zeroville’s story according to the narrative laws of a movie, in action and dialogue and movie references, in a linear structure that didn’t feel compelled to motivate everything, short scenes cutting to other scenes, and the Godardian numbers. I read a book called The Conversations, a series of interviews between Michael Ondaatje and film editor Walter Murch, which was a revelation—after the third reading I had to make myself stop, because I worried it would influence me too much. Murch is an amazingly smart guy, something verging on a renaissance man—I thought I knew something about movies and editing, and reading the book, I was daunted by how much I didn’t know, and still don’t. But the striking thing was how often the editing decisions Murch makes resemble some of the decisions a novelist makes. Minute decisions that come down to a few frames or a few words, that no viewer or reader can possibly register except subliminally—but all those subliminal decisions have a cumulative impact.
KGB: Montgomery Clift, besides being the subject of Vikar’s tattoo, makes a cameo appearance. You seem to have chosen him due to his outsider status (homosexuality, drug abuse), his brooding aspect, and his survival of that terrible auto accident. Who is the literary equivalent of Montgomery Clift?
Erickson: Wow, great question. You’ve got me. I have no idea. Somehow I don’t think it’s Philip Roth. I chose Clift f or all the reasons you mention, and also because I really did begin with that image tattooed on Vikar’s head—the close-up of Clift and Elizabeth Taylor on the terrace in A Place in the Sun—because it’s such an emblematic image of the movies in all their dreaminess, and it’s hard to think of two better looking people so perfectly matched in their beauty, two people who had more cinematic chemistry, a chemistry that clearly was bigger than sex. After that moment, I’m not sure the movies were ever again as persuasively romantic.
KGB: Hoping not to give too much away for free—but Vikar’s discovery of the scattered film frames is wonderfully frightening. His discovery seems to flirt with the idea that we haven’t created film, film’s created us. Is film the ultimate medium? Or is it, itself, replaceable with future technologies? How do you deal with film-as-ultimate-medium, or with a technological replacement to film (the Internet, the interactive), as a novelist, as a writer—as someone working in one of the oldest mediums, in the medium least conducive to such change in format or technology?
Erickson: I was seventeen or something when I saw a Claude Lelouch movie called Live for Life and had an epiphany exactly along the lines you’ve mentioned: “Movies are the Ultimate Art Form!” It shows how you can be influenced by something as bad or cheesy as a Claude Lelouch movie, something that, even as you’re seeing it, you know isn’t very good, and paradoxically the ve
ry thing about it that is cheesy or not very good is the thing that’s revelatory—in this case, the overwrought use of cinematography, music,editing. This is why I don’t get too hung up on “good taste”—you learn a lot from the things that constitute “bad taste,” which of course raises the question of just how bad the bad is, or just how good the good is. At the time, it seemed clear that art couldn’t go farther than movies, probably because we had no notion of virtual art or cyberculture, at least I didn’t. That was when I became a film student, watching movies all day and supplementing it with classes in literature and political philosophy. But in the end, like most creative people I didn’t choose my medium, it chose me, and I make the best of it. It doesn’t matter if fiction is a dying art—and it may be—it’s what I’m cut out to do, for better or worse, either well or not, which is for others to decide, obviously. Obsolescence may be my destiny. But it doesn’t matter.

Joshua Cohen was born in New Jersey, in 1980. He is the author of four books, and a literary critic for The Forward. His new novel, A Heaven of Others, was just published by Starcherone Books. Cohen lives in Brooklyn, NY.