So Long, Farewell, I Can't Spell German So Never Mind the Rest

Greetings, mes petits. I've written here before about how I've been a devout reader since I was about two days old. But it wasn't plays or oral histories or absurdist haiku that got me started down the path of the bibliophile; no, it was fiction, truths not facts, creative lying with a real ending at the end, made-up stuff. Since then I've branched out; now I listen to country *and* western. But the core of my love of reading will always reside in a fictional place.

Perhaps that's why I picked a short story to highlight in my final post. Yes, yes, get out the hankies, oh the humanity, but I must, my dears, I must leave you. I've been offered a highly lucrative--well, let's just say lucrative--well, okay, *technically* it's lucrative since there's monetary compensation involved, but let's not quantify it, shall we, how crass--position writing book reviews for a startup site. I know what you're thinking: "What an idiot, leaving a non-paying job for a low-paying one!" Good point. But that mortgage isn't going to pay itself, so until my wealthy patron comes along :: taps foot, checks watch :: I've got to trade some labor for some cash. It's the American way, hippie.

Plus, you can still come and visit me sometime at my personal blog, Nine Long Nights. Tell me I sent you!

Enough about me; what do *you* think about eSCENE, Web del Sol's compendium of excellent literature from all across the Series of Tubes? Pretty frakking awesome, that's right, I knew that's what you'd say. For instance, I just ran across a really great story at eSCENE #37: "Representing Doris" by Peter Walpole, from Virginia Quarterly Review.

This story reminded me of a weird combination of Flannery O'Connor (unsparing examination of psychology and foibles), Mary Gaitskill (absolutely pitch-perfect depictions of the subtlest nuances of action and expression), and Richard Bausch (the peccadiloes and idiocies of educated upper-middle-class people whose lives are starting to unravel).

I really can do no better than to give you a longish excerpt from the first part of the story, where it is explained how an old lady, a neighbor of the middle-aged protagonist, slowly went a little crazy:

Doris had been a shy, lovely bride. Over the years, however, she had become increasingly withdrawn, to the point where Paul, who was utterly devoted to her, finally no longer needed to apologize when Doris did not attend a potluck supper, or a cookout, or the yearly Walk for a Cure with all the other ladies of the hill. People came to understand that Doris would not be coming. Since Paul’s death, she had essentially become a recluse. Sometimes, in the dead of winter, she might go a week or more without leaving her house. Occasionally illness confined her to bed. So, not every day, but most days, she would venture into the world only to collect the mail and to water her driveway.

Yes, she's watering the asphalt driveway, not the plants or the grass near it. The protagonist feels protective of the doddering old woman. The protagonist's wife merely clucks her tongue until the town enters a drought, when she wants to call the cops and report the old lady for violating water-use restrictions. Great setup for a great story. This is that rarest of literary stories: excellent writing, profoundly observed characters, *and* an actual plot. Is that too much to ask? Most of the time, yes. But not here.

As the drought drags on, hilarity does not ensue, except it does, because Walpole has such a great sense of humor. As proof, here's another longish excerpt, describing what happens when the neighbors gather around to see the police car that's been called to Doris's house:

Bob and Nancy were out for their morning walk with Tucker, their big goofy Labrador, who immediately stuck his nose in Mallory’s crotch.

“Okay,” Mallory said, and danced a bit sideways and bounced into Claire, or Carla—Caroline?—the nurse or lab technician or something who was renting the Hoagland’s garage apartment. She was in a remarkably small jogging outfit. “Sorry,” he said, and she laughed.

“He likes you,” she said, grinning as Tucker snuffled greedily. “A lot.”

Hans and Venetia, who had been heading to church, were sitting in their car with the window rolled down.

“Is she all right?” Hans asked, and Venetia echoed: “Is Doris all right?”

“Restrictions,” Mallory mumbled.

“Tucker, that’s enough!” Bob said and gave Tucker’s leash a good pull.

“Busted on a watering rap,” the girl beside Mallory said, as he brushed the front of his trousers.

The humor and awkwardness and sharp insights continue to a payoff that truly feels like one. So, for the last time, it is my honor and pleasure to say to you: Click the clicky bit. Read the ready bit. Enjoy.

eSCENE: Where Literature and Neuroscience Intersect, Sort Of

If you're reading this, you probably know that Web del Sol is vast. The upside of that vastness is the sheer quantity of literary goodness to be found within its electronic confines. The potential downside is that you can get lost (hello? *ello* can anybody hear me? *ear me*) in that vastness. BUT another upside is the sheer variety of the content. It doesn't matter what mood you're in--dour, poignant, noirish romantic with a dash of the surreal--it's all there. So today I give you links to three different pieces, all culled from the eSCENE page on Web del Sol, that will stimulate three distinct regions of the brain (and these are real regions because I once took an anatomy class, how dare you doubt my word).

1. THE POETIC REGION: "Desert," by Annie Boutelle (from AGNI). This fine, brief poem imagines Mary Magdalene becoming a desert hermit like John the Baptist. Her sexuality is married to the stark asceticism of the desert by means of the sensuality that all humans share:

Wind is her lover, the slim moon
her torch, scorpions her servants
with their wily calm, their armor—
she longs for such armor.

2. THE PROSE POEM REGION: "What We Tell Girl to Do with Us Brothers If We Ever Stop Making Mud," by Peter Markus (from Double Room). This piece exemplifies what I love about prose poems: some sense of narrative is combined with a poet's sensitivity to the music of language, all in a form where the unit of meaning is the good old sentence--capital letter, subject, predicate, ending punctuation, you know the drill:

Bury us brothers here. Cover us up with the mud of this river. Let this muddy river run up and over us brothers, let it run its muddy waters up into the insides of our mouths. Let the fish of the river, let the mud too, nibble and gnaw us brothers down to bone.

3. THE SHORT-SHORT NONFICTION REGION: "Snakes," by Ron Arias (from Brevity). I believe I've already talked about how much I love Brevity, partly because the journal's foundational concept is so cool: nonfiction of 750 words or less. Just about any piece from Brevity is a good read, but here's a snippet of Ron Arias's account of the time he interviewed the president of Nicaragua, while jogging:

Suddenly Ortega jogs into view. He's accompanied by seven big men in running sweats, all carrying Kalishnikovs. Next to these guys, the comandante, who's wearing a shirt and shorts, looks small. He hurriedly shakes my hand, barely slowing his stride. "Let's go," he tells me in Spanish. As we trot up an inclined fairway, behind the Jeep with Harry in the back, I ask him how often he jogs. I'm holding up the tape recorder so that it's only a few feet from his face.

Now, remember, your brain does have other regions--the absurdist theater region, for instance, or the Victorian ghost story region. To ensure a well-rounded brain, be sure to take regular doses of eSCENE.

Perihelion Goes to Oz

As I wrote in my previous post here, I'm really getting into the October / Halloween / autumnal-reminders-of-mortality mood, so when I started cruising around Web del Sol to find some good writing to send your way, I was looking for something supernatural. Poetry about ghosts or heaven or at least a good nightmare or two.

I saw that Perihelion's latest issue focuses on Australian poetry, so I figured, hey, rich tradition of aboriginal myth there; maybe someone has decided to write poetry about the dreamtime. I clicked the links and scanned through the lines: nope, no dreamtime; no, nothing too mythic in that one either; nope, still in consensus reality; enjambments aplenty, but nary a god or demon in sight.

And then I came across a non-supernatural poem that made me slow down and read it carefully, and then re-read it; it was the first of a four-poem cycle, so then I read the next one; and by the end of the fourth poem, I knew what I was going to write this post about. The poems, by Australian poet Marcella Polain, are titled "Bird, lemons," "Bird, magic," "Bird, turning," and "Bird, fish." What grabbed me right off the bat was the power of the writing in the first stanza of the first poem:

The house next door will not stop weeping.
Fat lemons rot on the tree. Cats stalk and leap in the grass.
You would fall down laughing at their spring up the wall, their inane eyes,
their mouths full of legs like grey furry fangs.

There's lots to love about the language here. Adjectives are used sparingly but well: "fat lemons," "inane eyes," and a genuinely fresh image, "grey furry fangs." The verbs are great, of course: "weeping," "rot," "stalk," "leap." But what I love most about this stanza, and most of the rest of this cycle, is how the tone shifts and shifts and shifts again. The residential comfort and mundanity of "the house next door" is immediately undercut by its "weeping." The image "fat lemons" suggests natural fecundity, but those lemons are rotting, untended. The cats seem to rescue the scene with their unforced play, but they are made into figures of fun with "inane eyes," and their casual cruelty is highlighted even as it is lampooned. Such complexity packed into such a small space--and all in uncomplicated syntax and un-flashy diction. That's good poetry.

The writing in the rest of the cycle is equally good. The eponymous Bird is a person that the narrator addresses by name in the first two poems and by implication in the last two. The poems are about the narrator's loss of Bird; we're never told exactly how this loss occurs, but death is suggested:

The crowded afternoon bus stop. A lull in traffic. Buses and cars bank up,
idling at the lights up the road, and two boys step out.
Their blue school shorts, their white shirts and faces, their shouts:
Who wants to play the death game, the magic game?

The next poem describes the narrator accompanying Bird's mother into a nightclub to look for her: "The doorman stamps a small grim reaper on the whites of our wrists. ... Sunday, in the shower, I stare at my wrist, at / the small smudge of death, weary on his staff, in the / same bruise-purple as the last dress your mother bought you."

The final poem is a cascade of beautiful, chilling images that evoke an icy feeling of loss. It's not often that I want to buy a book of someone's poetry after reading four of their poems, but that's the case here. So go visit Perihelion and get you some Marcella Polain and see what else might strike your fancy.

The Pleasant Gloominess of Autumn

Howdy, y'all. Sorry for no post last week; I was on vacation, hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I bring back no thrilling tales of snakebite or hand-to-bear combat, although I did get us lost at one point, which almost led to a thrilling tale because it made my wife want to throw a rock at my head. (She quelled the urge, and as of this writing I remain concussion-free.)

We hiked in some deep woods, and all around us were the signs of impending autumn: brown, brittle grass and green leaves mottled with splotches of yellow and red. Since then, temperatures have cooled, and now it's October, and for me the whole month of October is colored by the fact that it's the month in which Halloween occurs. As far as I'm concerned you might as well call it Halloweenber. So I've got fall and Halloween on the brain, which really means I've got a case of the macabres. I want to read Poe and listen to goth bands and watch horror movies. And I find myself thinking about death at odd moments.

So of course I warmed right up to "On the Electrodynamics of Dying Bodies" by Kimberly Ruth, a poem in the latest issue of Web del Sol's Del Sol Review. The poem is structured in four sections (two blank verse and two prose) that vary in tone, mood, rhythm, and content, creating an overall effect like a four-faceted jewel that provides four different refractions of the same object: people dying.

It's not a grim poem, or at least it didn't strike me that way. It's not a nihilist insistence on the ugliness or inescapability of death. But it is a somber poem that directs our attention to events and ideas and feelings that we usually look away from:

It is titled War Execution. His face is contorted with one eye shut and the other only half- so, like a broken window stuck ajar, yet he stands straight, shoulders down, hands behind his back. If they are tied, I do not know. He is young, in his twenties, maybe, and a gun is pressed against his head. FLASH. Capture iniquity. FLASH. Expose truth. FLASH.

The poem shows a welcome restraint here. It could have depicted the actual war execution, but instead it shows us a photograph of the event, reminding us that we are spectators to the atrocities and heartbreaks that death so often involves. In this and other ways, the poem subtly asks its readers: What do you think about this execution, this death, this grief, you who are part of this death-ridden world?

So if you're in a seasonal mood like mine--or if you just want to read a good poem--go to Del Sol Review and read the whole poem. Otherwise, you should check out the rest of the issue, which is not as dark, I promise. Although there is that story about the zombie . . .

Getting Inspired at 3 in the Morning

Mark Twain said, "Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great." I would like to propose a more particularly literary corollary to this excellent proverb: The best writing makes you want to participate in it by creating something yourself. For the writers among you, don't you love that feeling when you read a story or book or poem, and you put it down and all you want to do is write something yourself? For Whom the Bell Tolls affected me that way so powerfully that it induced me to re-emerge from a years-long writing hiatus and once again take up the pen.

I was recently perusing Web del Sol's own 3:AM Magazine when I felt once again the thrill of inspiration that comes from reading a good piece of writing. The flash fiction piece "I Am Running Out of Ways to Make You Love Me," by Elizabeth Ellen, made me want to sit right down and pop out my own flash fiction. (I didn't do it, for various reasons, all of them hopefully good ones, but that's another blog post.)

Specifically, the story made me think, "Why isn't more of my writing sexy?" Ellen's piece is sexy, although not pruriently so; it's just about the complicated interweavings of sex, love, and loneliness in a relationship (and potentially outside of it). I immediately fell in love with the story's first-person narrative voice:

I’d never taken nude photos of myself before. I wrote this on the palm of my hand so I’d remember to tell you: I’ve never taken nude photos of myself before. I wanted to make sure you appreciated the gesture. I was trying to make you love me anyway I could. I had a feeling I wasn’t doing so well anymore. I thought about how effortless it had been in the beginning:
1. eat a bag of peanut M&M’s
2. brush hair

Compelling, emotional, nonchalant, and realistic, all at the same time, all without veering into mawkishness, cynicism, obscurantism, or any of the other pitfalls awaiting those who write flash fiction, or who write about relationships, or who write about sex. So do yourself a favor and read some good fiction that will make you want to write, or paint, or sing, or maybe take naked pictures of yourself.

The Old Left Makes New Compromises

Winston Churchill was a brilliant, articulate, eloquent politician. He also had some deplorable political views, especially with regard to race, as a recent biography has pointed out. But the man could turn a mean phrase, and he left us with some great quotations, even when they express views that are, shall we say, regrettable.

For example, here's my favorite Churchill quotation: "If you're not on the left in your twenties, there's something wrong with your heart. If you're not on the right in your fifties, there's something wrong with your head." This quotation is not my favorite because I agree with it (because, for the record, I don't); it's my favorite because it so neatly sums up a trend that's prevalent in many cultures: the seemingly inevitable rightward shift. Communists become democratic socialists, anarchists become Labourites, and Trotskyists become full-on neoconservatives.

The latter group has it the easiest; they can simply say they've seen the light and have dropped a fundamentally flawed set of principles for a completely different and fundamentally sound set. But those who shift right within the left can much more easily be painted as people who compromise for the sake of expedience. You still think capitalism is wrong, or at least not inherently right; but you no longer proclaim your intent to do anything about it. You take the cushy job; you wear the nicer clothes; you compromise.

Author Tessa Hadley writes convincingly, even poignantly, about these issues in "The Enemy," a story (which actually appears to be a novel extract) in The Barcelona Review. I found Hadley's story by going through eScene, Webdelsol.com's excellent archive of links to poetry, fiction, essays, and other literary content located off-site. There's enough great writing here to keep you reading for many a moon.

"The Enemy" is about a woman in her fifties who is visited by her former brother-in-law, who was once a charismatic revolutionary in the 1960s. The tale is suffused by the melancholy mood of a middle-aged woman whose life has never come close to meeting the impossibly high ideals she once used to possess; yet she accepts her life, and herself, with a certain grace. Or is it simply the comfort felt by the bourgeoisie? This is the question constellated by the former revolutionary, who has also changed--at least enough to know something about wine, which he once would have derided as a hopelessly bourgeois (and thus counterrevolutionary) affectation.

But don't let all this political talk put you off. "The Enemy" uses political convictions as the staging ground for an inquiry into psychology, aging, personal change, the texture of a life in its fifth or sixth decade--in short, all the stuff of literature. It's a subtle, wonderful story.

Masks, Mirrors, and Poetry from In Posse Review

You may not know this, but your humble editor is also a writer. Your humble editor writes poetry. This is not to say that your humble editor gets any of his poetry published. Some of your humble editor's poetry got rejected just yesterday, in fact, and by a very fine journal, too.
But I keep drinking from the well of poetry, because the water tastes so damn fine. And here's a fresh draught for you: The all-poetry "Mask & Mirror" issue of Web del Sol's In Posse Review has just hit the cyber-stands. The poems in this issue range in style and content from the mundane to the fantastic to the imagistic, written by veteran poets with decades of experience and by new authors receiving their first publication.
Shawn Pittard's "Fall Stream" starts with an image both concrete and fanciful, and continues in the same vein:

There’s a door in the bottom of the freestone stream
at the bend below the railroad grade.
On my birthday, I dared to open it, figuring
I’d lost most of what I had to lose by fifty.
Under the door, the water was drinkable,
like it was when I was a boy scout.
Crayfish still crawled everywhere.
A speckled trout swam by
with my lost hook in its mouth.
My front tooth sparkled in the gravel bed
near the piece of my right knee the orthopedist removed.

The simple, declarative sentences are complicated by deliberate line breaks and strong verbs. The combination of clear description and fantastic imagery makes us feel as if we're reading a fairy tale in the form of a particuarly well-written poem.
In "Tomasii and the Wise Serpent, Ourdyss," Jeff Miles recounts the experience of falling asleep while a grandfather tells a bedtime story about seven men who get chased into a cave:

In my dream, the seven found footholds
cut into the hidden cave’s near-vertical shaft.
Tomasii led them downward. The darkness
was complete. Then came the serpent’s voice:
I am Ourdyss. Who disturbs my sleep? Sleep,
said my grandfather’s voice. The seven men
groped along the cold black road, arms
stretched out before them. Ourdyss, said the voice
out of the darkness. My grandfather
said nothing, dead these forty years. He visits
my dreams, drinks from a red goblet, never speaks,
though sometimes I ask him questions. I know
he would not tell me what happens next. As always,
he would start over again from the beginning.

I love the palpable sense of adventure in this poem, but that youthful fun plays out in counterpoint against a sad adult wisdom that knows about loss and death. As I read this poem, I found myself as interested in the plight of Tomasii and his followers as in the relationship between the narrator and the grandfather; and by the end, the two threads are woven inextricably together. Poems like this make life itself seem like an adventure, a real one, whose final chapter is still unwritten.
After examining two poems with a strong narrative thread, I now want to look at a poem made of enigmatic images and metaphors. The title of Luisa Igloria's poem is also its first line:

At night, the sky's a parasol studded with points--
Its steel ribs retract, taking the woman's earrings,
her filigreed comb, the agate necklace
which she hung from a cloud's lowest branches.

Her arms grow heavy, so heavy, oh.

This is not a poem about life, or Life, or Death, or aging or sex or any of the other things poems are so often "about." Instead it uses arresting images to convey a feeling and a mood and a savor. But these are not static, unchanging moods; those steel ribs do retract, taking the stars away in the form of earrings and comb and necklace; yet the conflation of stars with jewelry does not leave the sky behind, as our attention is then directed to "a cloud's lowest branches." So the images move us from one side of a metaphor to the other and back again, and we still feel that we've never left the world drawn for us in that first line. This is a fine, fine poem.
There's a lot more where that came from, so click on over to In Posse Review, put on your mask, look in the mirror, and enjoy.