Collom / McAdams, Sherry
Sisters / Andrea Scrima
Can you imagine if you were someone else? I used to think about that a lot, that it could be just as natural to be gazing down at a completely different big toe—I mean, the toe I'd be seeing would seem normal to me, because that toe and not this one, the one I'm looking at right now, would have been the only big toe I'd have ever known as my own. As though it weren't too much more than an accident that I turned out to be me and you turned out to be you.
Mama always said that's not philosophical thinking, philosophical thinking is something else entirely. And I always said, Mama you're wrong, it's just that I don't like abstractions, I need the example, even if the example still doesn't get across what I'm trying to say because it's more about what I feel when I look at the toe and think it could just as well be a different one, one that would seem just as normal to me. My own toe would be the weird one then, the way it stretches out and then curves up a little bit, but no one seems to know what I mean. It's the thing I feel when I say "toe," it hides behind the words somewhere and I can't really pin it down. I always wished for someone in my life to understand, someone I could say "toe" to and they'd understand exactly what I meant, they'd nod and say, "strange, isn't it?"
It's funny she told me in the end. Mama, I said, why didn't you tell me before, and she said Phoebe Marie, I wasn't sure if you should know or not, but now that my days are numbered I think differently, and I don't want to take this to the grave with me. And ever since then I've been wondering what it would have been like if I'd have known all along.
But here I am with my toe and the other toe and all I can say is that it often feels like I could just as easily be someone else. I open my mouth to say something and what do you know but that my voice sounds strange, as though it were coming from somewhere outside of me. There's this disjointedness that I've never been able to describe, the voice is out there, outside my head somewhere, but what worries me most is this feeling that everything is random, that it could just as easily not exist at all. I hurry down the street to catch a bus just like anyone else, but it's not like I have a sense of certainty that this is all exactly what it is, this and nothing else—this street, this blinker signaling a right turn, that driver motioning me across the street with a wave of the hand that's starting to get impatient, because I'm stalling, I'm holding him up, and then I hobble across as best as I can with my bum leg, and here I am in the midst of things, going about my business without the slightest doubt that this is this and that's that, or so it seems.
I always told Mama I felt there was something wrong with me; there are people with phantom limbs that ache and ache even though they're not even there, but with me it's my whole self that aches, Phoebe and Marie, both of us feel like we're not there, but that can't be, of course. One of us must be here, because there's always so much to be done, there's the shopping and the laundry and then there're the stairs that have to be swept and the hallway rugs to shake out and somebody is always passing by whom I have to say Good Morning or Good Afternoon to as the case may be. I usually take the opportunity to rest my hands on my broom and to straighten up a bit, and that's when I feel the ache, standing there in the stairwell with the light shining dimly in and exchanging a few words with whomever happens to walk by. I see the kindness in their faces, the sympathy in the way they carefully skirt around the piles of dust—they're glad I'm here, keeping the building clean and chatting pleasantly, it makes them feel better, but it leaves me feeling so lonely that I'd like to blurt something out, but what could I possibly say? I'm here and I'm not here, I don't know where I am? I'm sweeping, in a moment I'll be mopping, but I can't say for sure if any of this is real: it's not a phantom limb, but a phantom self I'm talking about here, can you help me?
But this must be real, because if I disappeared they'd notice it. At first they'd notice the hallway getting dirty, and then the ones I do laundry for would wonder where all their socks went, but it wouldn't dawn on them just yet, because I'm the one who brings their laundry to them, what's the point of getting someone else to do it, I always say, if you have to bother about picking it up yourself? But then they'd eventually realize something was wrong and they'd notify my employer, and he'd call the police, I guess. Oh, they'd notice all right, maybe not at first, but soon enough, and so how can you say you don't exist when a couple of dozen tenants can identify you, would have things to say about you, Mr Macintyre would know all about the vacation I took to the Poconos once; I described it to him in great detail.
Jeez, Mama, you could have told me. I stood there next to the hospital bed and looked out the window at a concrete foundation being laid for a building about to go up on the other side of the street until I suddenly realized that I'd walked along that long construction fence plastered with notices just a few minutes ago, without the slightest thought as to what might lie behind it, and here I am on the fourth floor now looking down at the entire scene, the Caterpillar parked at the far end of the muddy field and the deep curves of tracks going this way and that, and then I look at the faces of people hurrying past, their steps pounding across the wooden planks as they squeeze by one another without the slightest curiosity about what might lie just beyond that fence, without the slightest inkling that a whole huge space is right there on the other side, spreading out to the farthest end of the city block, but isn't that how we live our lives, anyway? Not the slightest inkling of what might be right there, at arm's reach. If she'd told me maybe I could have found some help somewhere, there's someone out there to help you with everything these days, isn't there, but now it's probably too late, I'm not young anymore and it's hard to teach an old dog, as they say, but there's a point to that. I always needed a sister, needed someone to understand me, and it's true, you know—she guesses my every thought, and I hers, and we get on each other's nerves sometimes because we're so much alike, and so what drives me crazy about her is pretty much what drives me crazy about me, but for the most part we're glad to have each other, it's not like with other sisters who can't tolerate one another at all, because you see that kind of thing happening a lot, take the Sutton sisters on the third floor, unmarried, you'd think they'd stick together but no, they can hardly stand being in the same room, fighting like teenagers, and about what, nonsense for the most part.
Take Edna, if there's one thing I'll never understand it's this urge to broadcast to the general public, God knows what she'd do if she lost her voice, what she'd do if she couldn't gossip. You think something out loud around her and the whole building knows before you do yourself. I asked her once what brought her to these parts, living with Martha like that if they didn't get along, and her eyes got as small as pins and she cocked her head to one side and peered at me with such mistrust that I never asked again. But I was only wondering, really, it was a notion I had all of a sudden, what it must be like to have a sister—not a long-lost twin to suddenly arrive in your life like a true-blue miracle, but one you'd rather be rid of altogether—I just didn't get it, I'd have thought you'd be grateful for any company life provided you with, all the better if it's next of kin.
Now that I know, what am I supposed to do? Go back to work tomorrow, tomorrow's Thursday and Thursday's the day I do my weekend shopping, I never shop on Friday, the supermarkets are too crowded on Fridays, either you forget what you wanted to buy altogether or it's not there because someone else has grabbed it right from under your nose. I saw Martha Sutton stuff a piece of cheese right up her coat sleeve once, I could hardly believe my eyes, what would she do if she got caught, they'd make her go to the back of the store with them, make her sit down in their grimy office with piles of cash register receipts stuck on top of those pointy pronged things, and then they'd check her bags and her coat pockets and wait for the police to come, and maybe they'd even get one of their female employees to frisk her, who knows, maybe she'd have a leg of mutton stuffed down her drawers as well, anything is possible. For my part I'd be mortified, but maybe she thinks she's charmed, that no one would call the police on an old lady, and maybe she's right, who knows, but that's still no excuse to shoplift like that. I wonder how they divide the work, those two, always bickering, always complaining, any opportunity that comes along, one about the other and vice-versa, but they seem used to it, used to the bickering hell they've made for each other, yet I can't help but wonder why their ways didn't part long ago, what was it that stuck them together like that, a big blob of invisible glue it must have been, some folks you just can't understand no matter how hard you try. Now, if they were twins, see, things would be different—twins are made from the same ball of wax and so naturally they'd want to spend a lot of time in each other's company, that's a completely different story of course.
Mama. Maybe you never should have told me, but then it would have been like it'd never happened, and maybe it explains some things to a certain extent, although I wish there was a book you could buy that was written exactly for this particular predicament, or someone you could talk to about it all, I wish there was a place you could go with exactly this problem and then they'd point to the sign hanging up above their desk and smile; they'd be able to help you. It's like I'd finally gotten things into some kind of order in my life, what with the job and the building and all, I don't mind the work, really, it helps me plan the day, and so there I was with everything all set up and then Mama goes and dies but first she tells me this. And so all of this order is peeling away like paint on a rusty railing, and I sit and stare at nothing and my mind wanders off like a hungry dog and I start imagining what everything would have been like if… It's like this huge absence has entered my life now, a big blank space that takes up all the room around here with its silence and its blackness, and so I spend my time trying to fill it in, and every day I invent another tiny bit, but the absence is so vast and empty that the parts I invent don't amount to all that much more than itty bitty iotas, little pinpricks of light in a nighttime sky, and it will take me to the end of my days to amass a couple of clusters as best as I can but I'll never be able to make the sky bright with life, and all of it will be my own invention.
It's getting harder and harder to concentrate now, and I'm starting to make mistakes, I gave Mr Macintyre's laundry to Mr Schiff by mistake, Mr Schiff laughed it off, but Mr Macintyre didn't find it funny one bit, I guess he's sensitive about his girth, because he really does have an unusual figure, so wide in the middle, and such short legs, and for a week I was wondering if he'd stop having me do his laundry altogether, because it's not like I have a whole lot of extra money right now, what with Mama's hospital bills the insurance didn't cover and all, but he calmed down after a few days and then everything seemed okay. Mr Schiff held up a pair of pants in the hallway and laughed his head off, it looks like someone was hit by a ton of bricks, he wheezed, look at these legs, squashed right down like silly putty, and whose laundry did you say this was? Now let me guess. And it was all I could do to get the bundle back from him, and I guess it wasn't really necessary, either, I don't know why folks have to go poking fun at people all the time, but if there's one thing I've learned it's that you're never going to change them.
And so I have to watch out now, and I've taken to writing little notes to myself, don't forget to sweep on Monday, don't forget to lock the broom closet, I nearly forgot again last week and if I do and the supplies get stolen then I'll have to make up for it out of my own pocket. So I try to limit myself, I pick times to mop when I know I'll be left alone for the most part, and then in the afternoon I make it down to the park and sit on one of the benches outside, that gives me time to think although there are so many muggings these days that I wouldn't risk venturing too far inside, I'm not a spring chicken anymore and what with my leg acting up again and all. So I walk down the street arm-in-arm with this big blank thing now, and I think of how much time a life actually is, all these minutes and seconds and what would it be like if you could turn it all back again somehow, take away those seconds one by one, undo all the layers until there you were, just about to be born and without the slightest notion of everything that lay ahead—that's the nature of the absence that I'll never entirely comprehend, that's it exactly.
I remember when Mama asked me who I was talking to one day, I can still recall the look on her face when she said it, Who are you talking to?—thoroughly spooked, and I didn't really know what to say, and so I said myself, I guess, but she looked at me for a long time and from then on I tried not to do it when she was around, but sometimes I slipped and then I'd look at her and laugh a kind of guilty laugh and she'd say, Well I suppose that's why I gave you two names, Phoebe Marie, because there seems to be two of you in there. And so we pretended it was a kind of joke, and I believed it, I really did, but I guess somewhere deep inside I knew that it wasn't really a joke, knew from the way she'd look at me sometimes that she was spooked by it, there's no other word for it I guess, and so while she'd sometimes ask me who it was she was talking to that day, Phoebe or Marie, I always said both, Mama, you know that, and I tried to act nonchalant-like, but she sensed something, I know she did.
It's a real gift in life to have someone just like you to confide in, but that Edna Sutton walked in on us one day just as we were in the middle of a disagreement, I didn't notice at first but then I turned and saw her all of a sudden, and Edna seemed a little shocked, which is hard to accomplish in a person as contrary as she. So I had to be more careful after that, and even if it stopped her in her tracks for once, even if it actually shut her up, she must have gotten over it soon enough and advertised it everywhere she could, I'm sure of that, and although no one in the building seems to pay her any mind, you never know nowadays when people are going to say you're crazy and have you locked up, so I tried to watch out as best as I could.
It's not like we never fought though, and sometimes I got the blame for things I didn't do, and I'd be the one left standing there and it'd be up to me to invent an excuse, but for the most part we got along just fine. But there were days when we just didn't see eye to eye and then I had to think that if she weren't my sister I might not want to have anything to do with her at all anymore, that's how bad things got sometimes, imagine that, a sister getting on your nerves like that and you have to keep quiet about it, none of this complaining like Martha and Edna all the time, and so naturally she got away with a lot of things she'd never have gotten away with if I'd have been able to tattle on her, if I'd have been able to tell Mama.
But now Mama went and took her away from me, took her away just like that and left me with a big fat blank, like she'd stuck a pin in some tremendous balloon and it burst, but only so far, disappearing not into nothing but leaving a kind of negative space behind, and all tattered-looking, like molten metal that's fallen into cold water, spread for a split second like a fast and crazy explosion, and then frozen solid in a quick hiss. And so where I had a sister I have nobody now, and if Mama hadn't told me I'd have never known, because it was just a little bit of a thing that died that day, lost to this world before she even had a chance to see the light of day, and now there isn't enough life left to fill it all in, I'll never get her fleshed out enough, and she never even had a name, and she'll never do, this twin, and so it's just Phoebe Marie now, and it'll never be Phoebe and Marie again, and what would that have felt like to have a sister, I wonder, someone just like you.
Adventure Capital #1 / Shathley Q
"Welcome to Yesteryear, Actus Primus"
March 12, 2009 feels real and solid and sober in my hand like a gun in those first microseconds of recoil. Not the day itself, but "March 12, 2009" the episode of the The Daily Show, with Jon Stewart. Otherwise forgettable, the day eventually winds into Stewart's 'showdown' with Mad Money host Jim Cramer. And in a flawlessly poignant moment, Stewart gets to the heart at the heart of the financial crisis in a human and meaningful way that no amount of scholarly diligence on the part of Andrew Ross Sorkin (whose beautiful work Too Big To Fail remains as a singular compass-star for understanding the mechanics of the Crisis) could ever produce. Some ten minutes into the conversation, Stewart says directly to Cramer,
"Now why when you talk about the regulators, why not the financial news network? That is the whole point of this? CNBC could be an incredibly powerful tool of illumination for people that believe that there are two markets: One that has been sold to us as long term--"Put your money in 401k's. Put your money in pensions and just leave it there. Don’t worry about it. It’s all doing fine". Then, there’s this other market, this real market that is occurring in the back room, where giant piles of money are going in and out and people are trading them. And it’s transactional and it’s fast, but it’s dangerous, it’s ethically dubious and it hurts that long-term market. So what it feels like to us--and I’m talking purely as a layman--it feels like we are capitalizing your adventure by our pension and our hard earned money. And that it is a game that you know. That you know is going on. But that you go on television as a financial network and pretend it isn’t happening."
"It feels like, we are capitalizing your adventure". It's a shining, perfect, Don Quixote moment whoever you are, whenever you are. A moment swathed in the everyday heraldry demanded by an ordinary world. Cutting to the heart of the thing, it speaks to the human element in financial crisis; that you did this to us, the you did this, that there's both agency (direct or arising from subtle interactions) and activity, and that collectively we've been on the receiving end of a strange conspiracy of both.
But the moment is shining, perfect, not in a sense of its identifying and simultaneously confronting directly the egregious horror perpetrated against us all. The moment is shining, perfect, because it installs in us almost unquestioningly the belief that, although this hasn't yet come to pass, the someday, somehow, the Crisis too might be prevailed over. Not that this monstrous, gutturally-evoked situation is at an end, not that its end is even in sight, but the idea that this condition is merely that, and that it can have an end, and that we might be able to reach that end.
"It feels like we are capitalizing your adventure"… After having come through slaughter, finally we can conceive of a victory over the agents that have caused our financial oppression. In the human glut of a single moment, nothing becomes clearer than 50 Cent's popular motto, "Get rich, or die trying". The obverse of now seems clearly to be, "Punish those who have prevented you from getting rich". Both ring true in the mind like a war slogan now, just as March 12, 2009 feels good and real and solid, like a gun in my hand, at the moment of recoil. Victory, I feel as you do too, can finally be in our grasp.
"It feels like we are capitalizing your adventure"… But by what infernal machineries did I come to have this gun in my hand in the first place? What occasioned my backslide into grandiose metaphors of violence? Why is Jim Cramer being made to kneel in what is more and more beginning to feel like a cathedral that has simply erupted around us all, a cathedral to the life we had begun to imagine for ourselves during the frenetic burst of wealth that seemed to culminate in 2007? And most of all, why, in the turn of a single phrase, "we are capitalizing your adventure", am I being deindividuated from you? It feels like I've done enough in my life, or at least attempted enough, to discern myself from you, and you in yours from me. Why now, on the Eve of Austerity, does it feel like there's a Greater Us being nationalized and pressed into service like an oil company on the morning of The Revolution?
Look hard enough at not the politics of Jon Stewart's statement, but the semantics of the thing and it becomes easy enough to understand how we can be swept up in the wonderhell that will break first as the Arab Spring, then as London 2011, then as Occupy. And next? Who's to say it won't government-engineered youth-led protest in China, in the Szechuan most likely, that goes horribly awry and begins to take on a life of its own? "It feels like we're capitalizing your adventure", and its only a matter of time before I too want to be anonymized within the crowd.
Stewart's comedic genius lies in the fact that he can leverage a single phrase into opening audiences to the idea that we are all already trapped in cascading metafictions of prenostalgia. That we can imagine ourselves having some manner of grand-scale, socially-networked revenge against the condition that stole away our pre-imagined economic stability, only to come up against the imponderable of the legal structure of civil society. There's a certain kind of prenostalgia to our dreams of breaking free from the system and Occupying, or shaping the world through hacktivism, taking down giant corporations like Sony by staging cyber-sit-ins while actual hackers break the seals and get away with the data. Just as there is a certain kind of prenostalgia to earlier having been able to imagine ourselves into the role of financial comfort, the stock market doing what it must, the boom continuing unflinchingly as it did since '93.
A handful of days before the new year of 2010, a very different kind of skirmish with prenostalgia plays out in the pages of MAD #502, "The 20 Dumbest of 2009", and plays out again in MAD #513, two years later's "20 Dumbest". Two entries, both written and drawn by Herman Mejia. These artistic statements speak to governmental activity (or inaction) spinning out from the financial crisis. The first in 2009, Mejia's "Keeping Bad Companies" that punches in at #2 on the list, is communicated beautifully in the visual. Hank Paulson, President Obama, Big Ben Bernanke and Larry Summer hoist an American flag in a tableau vivant of the flag raising at Iwo Jima.
But of course, in true MAD tradition, the flag being raised isn't anywhere near the shores of the Pacific isle. Instead, piles and piles of of crisp $100 bills, batched together in stacks of a thousand, make the craggy ground upon which the flag is hoisted. Even the flag itself is laced with parody. The familiar Field of Stars has been instead supplanted by corporate logos of the companies "saved" during The Bailout.
Two years later and it's not The Bailout, but The Downgrade being commented on. "The Walking Debt" is this time at #1 on the Dumbest list. Mejia uses the unprecedented success of a transmedia phenomenon, Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead and its eponymous AMC TV show analog, as a staging area for unlocking the true meaning of The Downgrade. The message? The Downgrade of the US Dollar by Standard & Poor is really a result of institutional gridlock in Washington. And gridlock is its own kind of zombie apocalypse.
Beautiful, savage statements both. But also a kind of reorientation in respect to prenostalgia. In the space of just 10 months we seemed to have moved from the kind of prenostalgia we engaged with on The Daily Show, to a "stronger, loving" kind of prenostalgia, to simultaneously quote and butcher John Cale. Earlier in 2009, The Daily Show seemed to offer us a unique formulation; that somehow, someway the prenostalgia of our happiness at the prospect of economic security was justifiable. Not the prospect of economic security itself, but our collective prenostalgia at the prospect. That we somehow deserved to be warmed by the loving glow of this memory that had not yet occurred.
The show's suggestion of the idea of culpability on the other side of the table reads like the pulp fictions of yore: imagine Wall Street as a kind of ghost town, ramshackle and long-abandoned, just now bought out by some savvy investor, and a Banner spanned at the reopening that reads "Welcome to Yesteryear". You'd bump into maybe Charlie Sheen or Julian Sands or Larry Hagman riding in the Batmobile. And at any moment Lone Ranger or the Phantom or the Spider might leap from the shadows, and save you. The show's position seems to at least diminish the idea of a networked complexity of interests and opts for good guy/bad guy in the more traditional, pulp fiction sense of things.
Somewhere, somehow, someone is to blame. And if we can't get at the good prenostalgia, it certainly seems plausible that we can get at the other kind, the kind that begins to feel like recoil in your hand. Already it feels like directly interdicting these thugs and villains and swindlers, might again produce, in us even now, that feeling of warmth and security of a memory that hasn't yet occurred.
Mejia and MAD offer a radically different redeployment of prenostalgia. Rather than being warmed by the glow of a memory that we haven't yet had a chance to enact, Mejia's prenostalgia forces us into the critical distance. What makes the parody of Iwo Jima so telling to our received understanding of The Bailout? Or to hone it even more, by what mechanism did we come to hope for The Bailout to be resolved in as morally unambiguous terms as raising the Flag on Iwo Jima? And by the same token, what about the gridlock and the consequent Downgrade makes us believe that Washington has been overrun by the zombie apocalypse?
Mejia's masterful statements not only deconstruct the power of the cultural moments themselves (truly, who hasn't longed for The Bailout to be resolved on Flag raising terms, or who hasn't conceived of DC as the Zombie Apocalypse?), but deconstruct the cultural moments themselves, and our power or apparent powerlessness in relation to them. And in so doing, deconstructs our own propensity for prenostalgia. By what mechanism did we come to yearn for a morally unambiguous resolution to The Bailout that would simply have Iwo Jima'ed things for us. By what mechanism have we already begun to subject Washington and the business of politics to an ongoing horror story?
It's not at all hard to make the jump from Mejia's use of prenostalgia to Reinhart & Rogoff's This Time is Different, perhaps the most accessible academic work on the recent financial crisis. The book details a historical context of some eight centuries of "financial folly". And Reinhart and Rogoff too offer a riff on the theme of pre/nostalgia. How is it we lose the lesson each time, This Time seems to push us towards asking. In other words, by what psychic mechanism can we time and again assume the current financial crisis as new territory, territory which has somehow invalidated what we know, or at least what we should already know?
The art of This Time lies in its secreting of this question of the human psyche at work in the broader world, within the deeper recesses of economic study. Reinhart and Rogoff don't blatantly pose the question of the human capacity to assume that a given financial crisis is somehow unique. That is to say, the book isn't an exercise in behavioral economics. Instead what they offer is a way for readers to embroil themselves in the question to find their own there by way of classical economics. Sooner or later you get to a point where you begin to ask, if the data is so clearly, so overwhelmingly pitched towards financial crises having almost exclusively one pattern, how is it we manage to delude ourselves into believing that this time is different?
[continued next week…]
Salvatore and The Second-Person Narrative / Shannon Peebles
Joseph Salvatore playfully experiments with various perspectives in his anthology, To Assume a Pleasing Shape, including the hard to achieve and often avoided second-person point of view showcased in both "Late Thaw" and "Subjunctive Mood." In the aforementioned literary works, by using the pronoun "you," he addresses the reader directly, which allows the reader to engage with the text on a deeper level. It produces an experience very different from other pieces that contain first and third person point of views. It eliminates the emotional distance between the reader and the main character, allowing the reader to experience the narrator's perspective while simultaneously forcing us to explore our own emotions. We, as readers are no longer on the outside looking in; we are fully immersed in the character's world, the setting, both past and present tense. In essence, on some level, we are the characters, which is what makes them so sympathetic.
The second-person is a narrative mode in which the narrator tells the story, usually of the main character, through the addressee's (usually the reader) point of view by using the pronoun "you." It's rare in all genres of literature, in fiction and nonfiction alike. It is mostly employed in instructional pieces, such as self-help books or manuals. One might even be familiar with its use in role-playing games or choose your adventure books. It is also sometimes used in poems and songs, and often used in advertising.
The second-person narrative often evokes one of three moods used in English. First, the indicative mood is used when one makes a factual statement or poses a question; second, the imperative mood, meaning the author uses it to express a direct request or command; finally, the subjunctive mood, which is rarely used in writing, but when it is, it is used to show a wish, doubt, or anything else contrary to fact by using verbs without endings. I hope your synapses are firing at the connections here! Salvatore takes on two rarities in literary technique regarding his use of second-person point of view and subjunctive mood in his piece titled, "The Subjunctive Mood."
Why are both of these techniques considered the proverbial white-unicorns of literature? First, in regards to the second-person narrative, authors rarely speak to the reader. It's a risky choice, but usually it's made with a specific objective in mind. It makes the story more personal and intimate. The second-person narrative is avoided because it usually limits the audience through direct feelings or through the use of assigned traits attributed to said character, involving gender, age, social, and societal contexts. For example, though we can empathize with the main character in the "Late Thaw," we're not all middle-aged widowers. It's for this reason it's often avoided in literature since by using second-person it has a tendency to seem forced and even foreign, with the reader thinking "I'm not a man/woman" or "I wouldn't do that" or "I don't feel that," so instead of strengthening the bond between the character and the reader, it creates conflict and prohibits full-immersion in the story.
In "Late Thaw," Salvatore successfully avoids this by walking the fine line of ambiguity to avoid defining the reader's emotions themselves, and he makes it relatable by tackling a subject known and understood by all, death and loss. In "Late Thaw," Salvatore's genius is that he doesn't define the main character's emotions. He never directly states whether the main character is sad, angry or depressed. He alludes to these feelings by presenting the reader with background and intimate details, allowing the reader to replace the main character's emotions with his or her own. It's up to the reader to come to his or her own emotional understanding of the character's situation. To really understand how the second-person narrative is effective in "Late Thaw" let's go on a shortened version of Salvatore's presented emotional journey. In the following quotes notice the absence of directly penned emotion; these lines are designed not to define, but to build an emotional response in the reader:
"Who thinks of these things as you eat a peanut butter sandwich and your wife is lacing up her Nikes in the kitchen."
"[Y]ou're eating a sandwich made from the bread you were supposed to use for the stuffing for a turkey that will sit in your freezer frozen for seven months until now because it was she who had touched it last, she would had brought it home a week before her run and cleared out the freezer shelf and pushed the frozen bird in, and who thinks these things."
"[W]ho thinks these things that this man would use nylon rope that could so easily be traced back to Home Depot in New Jersey."
"[W]ho thinks these things that her legs you had helped stretch just hours before would be cold to the touch and so would her feet."
"And who things these things that those small scars that you had touched and traced and kissed might have gleamed for just a moment in the beam of a searching flashlight? …Who thinks such things? And for how much longer?"
Many times, throughout the story each important section that requires visualization which inevitably leads to reader-defined emotions, contains the line, "Who thinks these things?" That begs the question, what are these things that we think of. Yes, these things are the memories the main character keeps going over in his mind, but these things are also the things that "you," the reader, thinks of, and in an indirect way, these things are your emotions.
Salvatore's brilliance lies in mastering the power of inference, by never outright defining the readers' emotions, making his pieces subject to subjectivity. That is why so many readers emotionally respond to this piece. In a way we, as readers, are allowed to create the grieving widowers emotions in our own private way, within the realms of our own contexts. On some level we are the main character, thus, it makes the main character in the story sympathetic to the maximum degree possible: as sympathetic as we, ourselves would be.
The genius of this piece can be summed up in the pluralistic meaning of its title, "Late Thaw." The title not only refers to the literal late thawing of the frozen bread, the last thing the wife touched, but it is also the symbolic representation referring to the thawing of the main character's emotions seven months after the tragedy occurred; and in a more abstract way, the late thaw is also the slow reveal of the late climax, which allows us as readers to discover, in conjunction with the narrator, our own emotions.
The subjunctive mood, literature's other white unicorn, is used to express something contrary to fact, a wish, or when posing a hypothetical question. A good indicator of the subjunctive is the use of the following words: if, whether, wish in conjunction with a noun or pronoun (example: I wish), could, would, should, might and may. If the author invokes the subjunctive mood in his or her work, the author relinquishes a bit of control over the story and it can be seen as a bit vague. This could be why it is avoided since some authors like to be in control of their character's past, present, and future. In Salvatore's case, within his story, appropriately titled "The Subjunctive Mood," he uses the subjunctive mood, the hypothetical in conjunction with the second-person narrative, when addressing "you," as the reader. It's as if the narrator were talking to "you," as a close friend or confidant, telling "you" of a situation between himself and his love interest and he requests "you" to hypothetically (subjunctive mood) put yourself in his shoes by asking, "[w]hat would you do? If you were me?" The piece even begins by defining the subjunctive mood, "(I) [a] condition contrary to fact; (2) an expression of a wish (3) a command or request: e.g.," The e.g., which means for example, is used to segue into the story. Just in case it's not literal enough for you, he titles the piece, "The Subjunctive Mood." He all but slaps you in the face with it to make sure you understand the mood of the piece.
In "Subjunctive Mood" the second-person narrative is successful for a slightly different reason compared to "Late Thaw," and it's because he invokes the hypothetical-subjunctive mood. In the "Subjunctive Mood," Salvatore plays with the second-person narrative switching from you, to we/us, and back to you. His final switch is the most interesting because "you" could be "you" the reader, you the main character, or you as if he's addressing the woman, his object of desire in his thoughts. I say in his thoughts because right before the switch from "we" to "you, the last line reads, "[t]he exchange is followed by more silence," it seems as if nothing else is spoken. That said, even when playing with the narrative, Salvatore makes sure he maintains some separation between the reader and character. Simultaneously "you" is still "you," the reader, but "you" is also indirectly him, the character, which allows this character to get his own feelings across without making "you" own said feelings. By allowing these separate identities, by not forcing you or dictating to you how you feel, it allows them to naturally become entwined. You are never pushed into his beliefs in the "Subjunctive Mood" you don't have to agree with his assertions or his choices, or like how he carries himself. This is shown when the narrator poses to you, the reader, a series of questions and asks your opinion at the end of the story:
"Q: What would you do if you were me? Plead your case, say it was entirely your own original joke, argue that you must be tapped into some cosmic-comic funniness that all Iowan poets and prehistoric men understand? Or say, "Ok, yes, I did hear the joke elsewhere. Who hasn't? How could you have not? Perhaps, it was at camp, or on some TV show, I can't recall. But, I'm sorry. I wanted to tell you sooner, but you seemed so amused; everything was perfect; and weren't we happy? Didn't you like me just a little bit more? Find my lazy eye just a little less disconcerting? Feel comfortable having merry new sex because I too am funny and attractive? Like you. And don't you like me more than the me whom I don't let you see? Can't I be forgiven for trying to stave off the inevitable? What would you do? If you were me?"
By asking you what you would do, Salvatore allows you to disagree. You are free to both view and approach this conflict differently. By posing a hypothetical, Salvatore overtly allows readers their own opinions, and even if these opinions deviate from the character's, the readers are not forced to feel separated from the story. By evoking the subjunctive mood, Salvatore eliminates the alienating internal self-conflict that the second-person narrative often creates within the reader.
This last paragraph is also Salvatore's postmodern coup de grace, if you will. We are made to imagine ourselves, in a post-modern ironic twist as the main character, who in turn is imagining himself as the joking-telling and joke-failing Fred Flintstone. The irony is in the implication that we learn how to be human through Fred, a fictitious character, a prehistoric parody of life itself! In this piece, the use of the subjunctive mood makes an unverified, undefined future possible, meaning we can imagine a future different from the present. Unlike its modern predecessors, it's a story without an ending. Salvatore does not disclose what happens. He refuses to wrap it up and hand it over to us with a neat little bow. Instead he has the main character pose a series of questions to us, as readers, with possible conflicting resolutions, which leaves it open to interpretation and ultimately allows us, as readers, to create our own imagined ending, a post-modern ending where the subjunctive mood and second-person meet, an ending that openly invites opinion, provokes discussion and begs "you" for further exploration—"What would you do? If you were me?"
In the end, the second-person narrative in a way forces readers to internalize what they read in a first person perspective, which causes them to identity with the character on a very intimate level. It is seen as a bit presumptuous because it often dictates how the reader is supposed to feel. The writer is the proverbial puppet-master, but instead of making his or her characters dance, by using the second person narrative it's the readers that are caught in the author's strings. This is why it can feel forced, uncomfortable, and almost foreign. These are the reasons second person is usually avoided in formal and academic writing because these rope-tightening dictations can have a noose-like effect. Within a short-story medium, using the hypothetical, and by steering clear of defining the readers' emotions, Joseph Salvatore successfully avoids the stagnation of form, alienation of the reader, and the limitation of emotions the second-person narrative often creates. Instead of becoming an unwilling marionette, Salvatore uses his craft to subtly whittle the reader into more of a free-thinking, free-feeling Pinocchio. He allows us, within the context of each story, some control over the character's emotional and hypothetical destinies making Salvatore simultaneously the God-like creator, Geppetto and the Blue Fairy of liberation. In essence, it's Salvatore's successful use of the second-person and the subjunctive that makes these characters "real" boys and girls, for they are the reflection of the readers themselves.
Bonding Poets / James Sherry
Jackson Pollock: “I am nature.”
Hans Hoffman: “Ah, but if you work by heart, you will repeat yourself.”
Noted biologist Richard Lewontin writes in the NYRB, May 27, 2010, “Nothing creates more misunderstanding of the results of scientific research than scientists’ use of metaphors.” He writes this sentence in an attack on the misuse of the “metaphor” of natural selection, a Darwinian umbrella concept that he describes as containing four mechanical principles of survival and reproduction “stripped of its metaphorical elements”: heredity, variation, differential reproduction, and mutation. While his querulous response to the term natural selection has some value in pressuring scientists to be rigorous, it seems impossible to condemn all metaphor or even that specific metaphor because it can be misused.
The skeletal form of evolution itself is metaphorical as variation is a metaphor for countless disparities that operate differently, some more directly and some inconsequentially. Heredity does not mean offspring must resemble their parents, but that they tend to look more like parents. Plenty of people are dead ringers for each other coming out of unrelated parents. And the vague generalization of differential reproduction does little to show us the variety of relationships between organisms and their surroundings.
Not only does Lewontin attack metaphor, he also characterizes natural historical stories as an invalid method of understanding principles of survival and reproduction, citing several examples of how the narrative about an organism fails to include certain important contradictory elements that reduce the accuracy of the “causal story of natural selection”. So if we can’t have metaphor (and I assume any other figure of speech) and we can’t have stories, what are we left with?
Sadly “mechanical consequences” that Lewontin wants to be the primary, if not sole, methods of description in natural science are insufficient for the purposes of society’s goals for science and even for the accuracy of the results. Too often restricting the modes of discourse to mechanical consequences result in excluding important features of reality that emerge from the complexity of those well-defined mechanisms. Paul Feyerabend has pointed out in Against Method (1976) that Galileo could not have prevailed against the orthodoxy of the church with only scientific method as his tool. He points to rhetorical, stylistic, and other persuasive activities such as writing in Italian instead of Latin as key contributors to the church’s ultimate vindication of the scientist and the science. Feyerabend concludes that “theoretical anarchism is… more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives” (p10). Here we have the exclusionary principle on the other hand. Each structure has its value, but excluding one in favor of the other merely precipitates argument.
Underlying Lewontin’s argument is a plea for purity. If only we say just the right things in the right way, people will believe in us and we can continue with our work. We have heard this plea for purity of language and intention before. Language writing fought this running battle for years with the academic literary establishment until it carved out its niche (another metaphor) in the poetry world. Language writing rebalances lexical meaning and grammatical/formal meaning, meaning built into structures of writing like sentences and sonnets that go unquestioned for years until someone willingly breaks with tradition. Poets start writing in ungrammatical sentences. “Shakedown baby, I don’t like you so cosily—Payback is a devil dog.” Or later “God is science—First, they have to get more Nazi-like Modern English in their gender qualifies first indoor life;…” (Bruce Andrews, Give ‘em Enough Rope)
This impurity, read lack of consistency, was exacerbated by the pastiche strategies of many of the language writers like Steve McCaffery, Charles Bernstein, Ray DiPalma, Ron Silliman, as well as Andrews. Their landmark collaboration Legend put forms of writing on the chopping block, fragmenting in a Dada-like manner. The catchphrases of pop culture were juxtaposed and in some cases the words themselves were chopped up into letters and syllables as in P Inman’s Red Shift, “print dockery. / drew , mang. / figment keeps to hum // off flections / . climb in / draw nints” (12,13).
Making this point is not new to poetry criticism. Aligned with an environmental model of culture Feyerabend points out how this same approach in science also leads to new ideas. Science like poetry develops unevenly and as a result non-rational approaches must be brought to bear in order to change orthodoxy. “The consistency condition which demands that new hypotheses agree with accepted theories is unreasonable because it preserves the older theory…” Or Feyerabend’s citation from Einstein. “The external conditions…which are set for [the scientist] by the facts of experience do not permit him to let himself be too much restricted, in the construction of his conceptual world, by the adherence to an epistemological system. He, therefore, must appear to the systematic epistemologist as a type of unscrupulous opportunist” (Feyerabend, 18)
The underlying legalistic or maybe one should say ideological terms of both orthodox scientific and literary arguments lie in a concept of efficiency that not reflected in natural systems like animals or languages. Rather a principle of inefficiency more accurately, although perhaps less emotionally satisfying, maps most complex, real-life processes than any single theory or point of view. And neither is the principle of diversity universal as Vaclav Smil has pointed out in The Earth’s Biosphere… Diversity is more effective in sustaining an environment in only about 30% of cases, better but far from universal. (p227)
If we release all these restrictive approaches from their disciplinary confines, we are left to model nature and humanity together along the lines of Lewontin’s mechanical principles with the added understanding that each frame as modeled alone isn’t going address all conditions or situations. To effectively achieve our real life biological and cultural aims of sustainability we constantly need to add mechanical principle to mechanical principle until their very complexity produces properties that are not present in any of the individual mechanical principles.
Science cannot progress past its orthodoxy without input from metaphor. The metaphors and narratives of culture need the mechanical principles of interaction from grammar, syntax, and format to accompany purely observational methods. These statements imply that metaphor not only reflects the mind’s ability to bridge logic with images, but also that the world has transformational or emergent characteristics. New things and processes arise from complex combinations of existing things and processes.
The complexity of these interactions of organisms and poems leads me to begin to look at the relationships between them more completely rather than simply view relationships as a characteristic of organisms. The relationships between organisms are the peer of the organisms themselves. Strangely, however, no thorough study of relationships exists that I know of that compares to the detailed disciplines about organisms and poems. Each discipline has its own set of relationships. Physics has four forces connecting matter. Anthropology identifies various group relationships. Poetry uses grammars, syntax and figures of speech. But poetry has forces and anthropology has syntax and physics has group dynamics that are both similar and different from the way they are used natively.
Since relationships are things, too, they like organisms have characteristics. For example, relationships can be strong like the relationship between noun and verb, neutron and proton, mother and child or weak like the relationship between sentences, atoms and clans. Relationships can be holistic like gravity and periods or transmit only specific components of the organisms like blood vessels and poetic line. Relationships can be uni-directional like time or bi-directional like roads. They can support relatively consistent flows like copper wire and iambs or change the volume and speed of their flows like locks in canals and punctuation.
The point of connection between the relationship and the organism varies in character. The point of connection can be a property of the organism such as the mouth in a kiss or part of the independent connector like a chain. In some cases the connectors themselves are organisms and in other cases there is a third organism that acts as a connector between organisms as in primitive termites that use specific gut bacteria to help digest wood. There are other cases where connection is made so thoroughly that one organism becomes part of another as in exosymbiosis where mitochondria and chloroplasts, starting as separate bacteria, became part of the very cells of animals and plants.
While this is a far from thorough list of connectivity options, I hope it shows the complexity and importance of having a theory and a science of connectors as we have a culture of connections in poetry or anthropology. And finally the emergent properties of all these connections some of which are merely concepts, some of which are forces and some of which are organisms themselves implies that we have spent much time on the organisms and insufficient energy understanding the connections between them.
Now let us review the poetry and biology in terms of organisms and connectors where some organisms are themselves connectors. Both organisms and connectors have component models, that is, they are built up from other things. Questions of ontology can be dismissed as irrelevant except where knowing where a thing came from helps to understand its function.
There are conditions when vocabulary does not extend beyond a specific discipline, and situations where translating a term is not only useful, but points to the larger planetary environment. For example similarities of form take place at different scales. The curve defined by certain flows along nanowires is virtually identical in two dimensions and in one dimension. (Nature, P740, Ap 9, 2009) So similarities not only jump disciplinary boundaries, but even dimensional boundaries.
Cultural changes occur in patterns that are isomorphic to changes taking place in natural selection: heredity, variation, and environmental differences. The idea that purity of language implies purity of meaning has to be approached more carefully than the orthodoxy of science and poetry admit. There are many misuses of terms like natural selection or quantum or poetic, but to exclude all trans-disciplinary uses locks us into our current patterns of behavior and language and makes it doubly hard to accept change when change varies. Theoretical anarchy is a far more fertile process than demanding that each theory be consistent with existing theories. Such demands repress advancement in science and poetry.
Five Lyric Essays / Legacy Russell
MONTAGUES AND CAPULETS
She dreamt of vacuuming and she spoke the words out loud saying, “I am exhausted from cleaning the carpet.” And, “I think the house is crumbling; there is always dust on the floor.” But the people laughed and so she laughed because, let’s be honest, it was a ludicrous idea. The Dream was taken in for observation, strapped to a table to be dissected and so cavities were sucked dry swept and cleaned left glowing like embers in the salty sky of a Galveston mid-March. She was left with the feeling that something had gone missing. Though the people had laughed at first she realized later that the vacuum had been stolen and when she went hunting for it around the neighborhood she found that husbands were acting awfully suspicious and that wives looked freeze-dried and unusually dust-free. But she laughed and went home to sit out on the grass because, she assumed, it must have all been just an unlucky coincidence.
it was at some point that she did not want to love her any longer and maybe it would be safer to forget their love affair altogether perhaps the scars from this fall would help to pad the next one and she delighted in the idea of being thrown into fire again daffodils baptized in butter
we went to agent provocateur and talked politics over panties watched all the sluts slaves and housewives leaf their way through appled lace on the shelves priced at several hundred dollars we could only dream that one day we could be wife enough to have strange men in black over-coats alongside us at check-out counters selecting their next fantasy an impulse buy! just another pack of juicy fruit
he was covered in hair and that made him a real man that is what convinced her to be a woman again and he drove her home and she let him rub lips behind earlobes a bite and a tickle sent shivers but she did not smile a woman does not smile she pouts so she pouted and gave sad eyes and he thought she was crying and so he sang to her the songs that boys sing and looking up she did not want him anymore covered in hair he was back in the pan. that night she found a flood of curls detached clumps and pieces floating on her pillowcase filling her mouth and eyes with stabbing pillars of salt—
AND SHE’LL HAVE A MANHATTAN ON THE ROCKS
he told me to wear the one with lace and dressed me up until i no longer recognized myself for him, i was all garter belts and lip-gloss never slacks or chap-stick on top of amplifiers i leaned back and let him seize me he drained me pulling red ribbons from between my legs and tied them up about the room like streamers lit candles like birthdays he celebrated me by making me undone he unwound me in strings black strings pouring from cassette tapes mix tapes with songs like Castles Made of Sand and Rebel, Rebel, Rebel and i was muted by the volume of it all the ribbon hung from asbestos-covered ceiling pipes like satin strips of weeping willow i could not see through satin and so i closed my eyes and hung onto the pieces with my fists sediment bubbling up behind my lips like Champagne Supernova waiting for the shudder and jerk of a final finish and removal of a foreign object from the hidden rooms within
tell me again about those secret summers you know the ones where we watched the little boys through the trees we were little too then don’t you remember and it was hot and we sweat profusely beneath our one-piece suits that hung from breast-less figures like loose skin there was no hair under our arms then or between our legs we looked like little russian dolls and perhaps we were we certainly had a few other little girls if not a full-grown woman or two piled up inside becoming smaller with the reduction of each wooden layer tell me again about the way the light fell through the armed branches dappling bodies with scars of sun that shifted and shook with the air and separated us from one another tell me would we have watched these boys had they been men or would we have turned away in shame for fear that our fathers might emerge from beneath the glassy surfaces of the stream and freeze us in our sin
you asked me if i remembered what it felt like when i realized first that i needed you those memories are blurry fixed in rooms with dimmed lights your eyes piercing through the shadows your fingers working topographically across the hills and valleys of my body you disrobed me do you remember what that felt like when you first set eyes on me did you see me really then or were you just pretending sometimes i forget what your voice sounded like when you avoided slicing me to pieces and instead placed me in the recesses of your abdomen you stroked the hair on my head i let it fall against you curly and unkempt and was no longer ashamed you asked me if i remembered what it felt like yes yes i do for the first time in seventeen years i exhaled and it was alright you said you said it was alright
The joke is that she woke up first. Her breath smelled like last night’s pale ale, the firefly moon a sticky shade of blue-green. Outside the street was stiffened with dirty snow, mountains of black illuminated with lunacy. The arm across her back had the dead weight of a fridge. In the bathroom the toilet seat gave her a shiver. She was naked and the house was too hot anyway—
FOR YOU, A MIX-TAPE ON YOUR BIRTHDAY
last night we were sitting somewhere in Maine the air smelled like fish and seaweed it was misty the air was wet and the surface we were balancing on was wooden it had splinters and was rough beneath my fingers you were sitting in front of me or beside me i don’t recall i can’t remember but i could only hear your voice and your voice implied your presence your voice it made the outline of a shadow and i stared through it and saw grass blades kissed with decay and your shadow took my hand and we went running i couldn’t breathe my outline was heaving trying to keep up and when we stopped the oxygen was salty it burnt the inside of my nose there were black rocks there were BLACK ROCKS and rising tides and it was windy and my hair was damp against my neck and from the darkness your hand emerged offering me a cigarette in the wind there were whispers voices asking me if i would like a cup of something hot or bubbles in the bath that foamed and hissed over salty stones below
we went to the walker arts center it was a party it was a gala we had been invited eight o’clock no more like nine and it was pitch black outside not a star in sight we stood on the balcony and tried to imagine giant cherries floating on spoons tried to believe in modern art but we sucked down soupy triangles of cocktails rainbow’d in pastel pinks and greens i let a man who was not you put his hand around my waist i tried to fit into him pushed down my shoulders and slouched he was not much taller than i but i tried to be smaller i wanted to be a PORN STAR i wanted double-d tits and stilettos made of glass that never break and come with ease i wanted pillow talk and bedroom eyes right then and there if it was dim enough for him to touch me would it be dim enough for him to try to take me home tonight and unfold me putting arms and legs away in drawers for safe-keeping could he keep me detach my lips from my face like a toy put them on his night table would he want to or in the morning would he ignore my pleading from within wooden drawers lined with the silky triangles of neckties that rub and burn like ropes cutting corpse with corporation
he says he meets men for coffee at starbucks in Edina that wear football uniforms but dislike physical activity when it involves a gym he says all i wanted was to be fucked that’s what i want he says my milkshake brings all the boys to the yard and he lets them parade him home little CALIGULA and into bed he lets them strap him down like a mental patient lets them punish him for liking boys for wanting men he never thought his mother was beautiful he spat on her he hated her he watched his father shower once when he was small he thought he looked like marble drenched in moisture and post-cleansing perspiration he wants to be arrested asks to be cavity-checked to be pinched black and blue don’t worry dizzy girl he says to me don’t worry i know when to stop i know the secret password that will make them know i want to breathe again this love is safe i know it this love is real i promise
Sightings / Jon Curley
My grandmother taught me to read in a cemetery in southeastern Massachusetts. She would read the headstones and I would be asked to repeat what she had read. Finally I began to lisp the contents of text, of names, of birth and death dates. So engraved obituaries were my birthright of literacy. This grandmother was Irish and Welsh and related to the Welsh poet Thomas Thomas, no relation to Dylan, and heavily anthologized in Welsh poetry volumes but never translated into English. From gravestones I went on to children’s books, everything written by Anonymous, but soon enough discovered Poe. Into the cemetery again. That wasn’t all she wrote, as it’s said, but the writing was on the walls. I began reading every story that contained descriptions of ravens, pits, pendulums, and casks of amontillado thereafter. Then began the sightings:
I was a scrawny, 92 lb. bodyguard for Clive Barker in a DC bookstore, a week after he had been attacked by a zealous fan with a straight razor. A few years later, Irish writers started making their mark and taking their tolls. Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney “forced” me to drink whiskey while chauffeuring him to a reading. Medbh McGuckian flirted with me when her husband was asleep on her shoulder. “What I could do with you,” she whispered. Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and I taught a class together and were depressed together for a full four months. Ciaran Carson visited the class and, later, after downing a few glasses of poteen, the illegal, death-dealing whiskey, said over and over again, “This city of New York, New York City, it is fucking strange, man, this city.” Michael Longley told me that I had the “keen eyes of the dead” and was amazed I had recognized him in mid-town Manhattan, a self-described “fat poet from Belfast, like Walt Whitman in appearance anyway.” Tom Paulin arrived at the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin for our interview so drunk that he demanded I carry him up to his bed instead. I pitched a script to Neil Jordan and am still waiting to hear back, ten years later. I used to see Martin McDonagh walking in downtown NYC with various Asian women. Paul Muldoon asked me if I thought I looked Curley. When I approached Tom Murphy in The Floating Tide pub across from the Abbey Theatre, he backed away. “I thought you were from Florida or Utah. Definitely a Yank, though.” When Emer Martin showed up at a reading I threw in Soho in a cowboy hat and a blue sequined dress, I finally realized that the Irish are capable of style. At seventy five, John Montague walked down Thompson Street arm in arm with a woman no older than twenty five. In Paris, Beckett had told Montague that there was no such thing as love, that “there was just fucking.” Samuel Beckett died on December 22, 1989, the same day I began reading him.
On to the non-Irish. Over coffee, Richard Hell told me that I could be at the vanguard of a punk rock renaissance. Alas. I saw John Updike walking in Brooklyn Heights and fled like a rabbit. I’m not a fan. And then there was poor John Ashbery, walking without an umbrella during a downpour on 6th and 55th. Malcolm Gladwell’s hair was at a tipping point at a Xmas party several years ago. When I saw Chris Leo at the Astor Place Barnes and Noble, I saw art and fiction aligned like urinals against the wall. Re-read the opening of White Pigeons and you’ll know what I mean. Seeing Billy Collins and C.K. Williams at a Starbucks wasn’t surprising, as their work is both franchise-friendly and disappointing. Gypsy James O’Toole recited a poem for my birthday and then gave me a gypsy tattoo. When I met Samuel Menashe (1925-2011) the first time, he told me I was a drunk. I am. Michael Heller, whose party it was, said I wasn’t. And he is also correct. Eileen Myles and I almost shared a drink in New Orleans with her attractive girlfriend. At a West Village loft, Jonathan Lethem glared at me because I had stolen his girlfriend. I wish I hadn’t. On the phone from Florida, William Gaddis told me he couldn’t talk with me anymore because what they did to Clinton because of the “goddamn Lewinsky fiasco.” I arrived in Barcelona the very day the great Roberto Bolano died of liver cancer there. Sam Shepherd asked me where the restroom was once, and Michael Harper told me that anyone who didn’t understand jazz, didn’t understand writing. How true. I met Michael Patrick MacDonald at a reading in NoLita—he read with a self-promoting bitch/bastard named Nuala O’Faolain (R.I.P.). Just before he died, Armand Schwerner gave a memorable reading. I cried. At the same reading, Mark Rudman tried to convince me that my Iranian girlfriend’s name was Scottish. It’s not, it’s Iranian. Reportedly, Gunter Grass liked a story I published about Artaud in a German lit journal. I insulted Michael Connelly when I told him I liked his book, Bringing Out the Dead, but that the screenplay was rot. “Really?” he said. “I wrote it.” I used to drink Talisker with George Plimpton, for whom I worked. We’d shoot pool and he’d have to go on and on about that mediocrity, Truman Capote. R.S. Thomas, the Welsh poet, had Parkinson’s so dire that the podium from which he spoke shook like an engine. Amiri Baraka told me to keep the struggle going and his wife, Amina Baraka, told him to cool it. When I saw Robert Creeley on the street he looked thirty years younger than he was. Creeley introduced Bill Matthews at a reading and Bill died two weeks later. Sharon Olds was as spurious as Erica Jong and her friend, Galway Kinnell, had gin blossoms by the bushels. Keith Waldrop wrote experimental verse and taught my class on 18th century English poetry while his wife, Rosemarie Waldrop, quietly conducted translations on 71 Elm Street . I caught Ed Sanders wandering around the east side of Providence with his piano tie. Legs McNeil told me to “fuck off,” and George Bernard Shaw’s biographer, Michael Holyrod, mentioned that since I was a socialist, vegetarian, and have red facial and pubic hair, I should grow a beard to look more like Shaw. A beard where? I used to live with Matt Bernstein Sycamore and edited his stories after he’d come home from servicing Edmund White. Gg Re a.k.a. Grey Space is is a queer street poet in Texas and I think about him all the time. Edwidge Danticat and I used to exchange smiles and nothing else. Stanley Kunitz never answered my query about the Sacco and Vanzetti trial that he covered when he was a teenager. I was too intimidated to knock on John Hawkes’s door and he died before I had the courage to do so. A groveling letter was sent to Thom Gunn and I have no idea what spurred me to write literary fan mail. Never again. I used to write only one Christmas card a year, sending it to 44 Joy Street, Boston, MA, where the hermit poet John Wieners lived. He died in 2004. Donald Hall never invited me to his farm in New Hampshire but sent me funny postcards that were typed. I used to chat with Jacques Derrida during his office hours because no one would show up, too intimidated by the pipe-smoking deconstructionist. Jacques failed to hold the door for me the week his book, The Politics of Friendship was published. Martha Nussbaum, who wrote The Fragility of Goodness, once laughed hysterically when my backpack burst open, dispersing its contents on a busy street. Harold Bloom never looked me in the eye when I talked to him or tried to talk to him. Ian McEwan was astonished when I recognized him near the Knitting Factory. His teenage son seemed impressed. Fly used to roller blade through Battery Park and shoot me nasty looks, while Sonny Barger of the Hells Angels looked like a homunculus at a reading in Utica. I once collaborated on a script with Simon Kinberg. The script and our friendship were aborted and he went on to write the Brangelina screenplay, Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Jim Carroll seemed to be reading a Dickens novel on the subway a decade ago and Susan Sontag whispered across me that she didn’t know the work of the author she was supposed to introduce. The writer was the Australian poet Les Murray, who sent me an angry letter after a poem of his I published omitted one word: “the.” Tom Savage tried to pick me up in Tompkins Square Park when I was reading a Coleridge biography. Rick Moody waved to me in the downstairs lobby of the Angelika even though we don’t know each other. When I tried to get in touch with Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton, his girlfriend said he was not dressed and couldn’t come to the phone. The only financial contribution I’ve made to another writer was to Kathy Acker, to defray expenses for her funeral arrangements after she died of breast cancer. And when I shook hands with Arthur Miller and a mutual friend introduced us, he started laughing hard. “Curley,” he chortled. “What kind of name is that?” The man whose hand caressed Marilyn Monroe began to cry tears of laughter.