SMUTMOBILE Banned Books Party

1. The band. 2. Mike Edison on stage, reading Roald Dahl’s version of “The Three Little Pigs” (from Revolting Rhymes), which was a challenged book.


It’s Banned Books Week (Sept. 27-Oct. 4), so Housing Works Bookstore & Café hosted a party last night to celebrate. The party was Mike Edison’s personal baby, but Edison is no n00b when it comes to potentially (or blatantly) offensive writing: he has written and worked for the controversial likes of High Times, Hustler, and Screw, and has also written twenty-eight pornographic novels.

The evening started off with Edison reading Roald Dahl’s version of “The Three Little Pigs”, which was backed by a jazz-type two-piece of drums and keyboards. Next, Edison gave us a brief history of banned books, during which we learned the difference between banned and challenged books (banned books are backed by law, which is rare in the good ole U.S. of A. today), and the various reasons books were banned/challenged. For example, The Color Purple was described as “smut,” and, hilariously, people had a bone to pick with Brave New World because it made “promiscuous sex look like fun” (God forbid!).

1. Christine Martin & Fiona Buckland. Fiona had this to say about censorship: “Wherever there is a struggle—that’s where the heat is.” (When I googled FB I came up with this) 2. The Joe DiMaggio of the First Amendment: Herald Price Fahringer

Next up was Herald Price Fahringer, a lawyer who has famously and prolifically defended free speech in the courts. His best anecdote was about taking the entire court room to a pornographic movie on the Bowery as a part of the trial proceedings.

Richard Nash, formerly of Soft Skull Press, was the third act. He introduced himself as the “pedestrian” part of the night because he wasn’t an amendment all-star and wouldn’t be backed by jazz—but I found his talk to be anything but. Censorship by our government has become outsourced, he explained. The first amendment has become “too effective,” and a “hybrid of legal, economic and commercial” censorship has emerged. When small presses (or otherwise) attempt to publish controversial content, larger corporations can sue for libel or slap on a cease and desist order; the smaller press often doesn’t have sufficient legal defense funds. No money equals censorship by default. Fortunately, Nash happened to marry a copyright and trademark lawyer, but as he mentioned, this is not a sustainable strategy for small presses in general.

1. Lori Greenberg, Richard Nash, and Fiction Daily’s David Backer. Lori wore a bracelet that featured the likenesses of banned book covers for the event. 2. The aftermath of Mike Edison.


Next, he explained “walled gardens” — the mega-internet institutions such as Facebook and the Apple App Store — discussed in the current issue of Wired in a provocatively-titled article “The Web is Dead.” Nash cautioned that content viewed through Facebook and Apps is subject to censorship. While not advocating a boycott, Nash advises that we consume our internet through various channels with “vigilance and awareness.”

Perhaps the most succinct warning that Nash had for the evening was this: We, our world and our country, are in a tremendous transitional period. In transitional periods, things get messy. When things get messy, the rich entities offer order. Preserve the mess, he said, because it’s the key to what or who we are in years to come.

–Julia Jackson is working on her MFA in fiction at Brooklyn College, and is a regular contributor for Electric Dish.

Anna Prushinskaya was an accomplice for this event.

Robert Hass, Hunter College, Wednesday Night

1. Tweeds and flannels await the start of the reading. 2. Chris and Phyllis, two students from Hunter’s MFA program who had recently discovered Hass’s work.

Robert Hass, who kicked off Hunter College’s reading series yesterday, has struggled throughout his career to look at the world’s unrelenting ugliness without being struck dumb. Over the last four decades he’s written six books of poetry, translated as many, and been the poet laureate of the US. Most of his work is, unsurprisingly, a somber mix of meditation and frustrated hope.

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Music Ho!

Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline (1934), by the forgotten British composer, conductor and critic Constant Lambert, superficially resembles a kind of polemic familiar to twentieth-century readers: the Modern Art Jeremiad.  The Modern Art Jeremiad, whose prototype is probably Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1895), means to expose the sterility, rootlessness, pseudo-egalitarianism, elitism, and lack of craftsmanship in modern painting or sculpture or architecture or dance or literature –and to tie these flaws to deeper flaws in modern life.

The writer of the Jeremiad is almost always an outsider and often an amateur or non-practitioner; his tone is caustic and usually reactionary; the writer maintains a bitterly satirical approach, world-weary yet not morally compromised–the knowing adult in the guise of the not-yet illusioned child, fearlessly exposing the Emperor’s New Clothes.

Often another artist, usually unfashionable or little-known and by general standards faintly risible, is held up as a healthy alternative to the decadence of other modern artists.

Examples of the Modern Art Jeremiad  might include Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House, Philip Larkin’ s All What Jazz, Bryan Griffin’s Panic Among the Philistines, B.R. Myers’s A Reader’s Manifesto.

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Irish Time: Diary of a Young Writer at the Frank O’Connor Short Story Festival

Sign at the Cork airport advertising the festival.

For five days in September I had the pleasure of, for the first time in my life, experiencing VIP treatment — in Ireland.

Recently I found out that a short story of mine had won the Sean O’Faolain Award, and I was invited to read at the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Festival in Cork, Ireland. The invitation stated: “If you come to accept your award we will lavish you…” You get the picture. Who doesn’t want to be lavished?

Organized by director of the Munster Lit center Patrick Cotter, The Frank O’Connor festival meets once a year to celebrate one of Ireland’s most beloved storytellers. The festival gives out two awards: the O’Faolain award for a single story (the little brother), and the O’Connor award for a collection of stories (the big brother — 35,000 euros).

For a young writer this is a treat of numerous courses. Obviously, it is a pleasure to receive an award, to have my writing recognized and heard; my choice to write was reinforced, and for the first time, by people other than friends, classmates, and mother.

But, the most rewarding part was the experience of the festival itself (really) — the people I met and the intimate treatment the short story receives in Ireland. I was awed. I was excited about writing. Each night I wanted to return to my room, get behind the computer, block the internet and leave the TV remote untouched — if you know me, this alone is a monster feat.

Those short listed for the O’Connor award: Laura Van Den Berg, Robin Black, Belle Boggs, David Constantine, and Ron Rash, who was ultimately the winner. T.C Boyle was short listed, but could not make it due to a last moment accident. Other writers were there to read, or to simply enjoy the festivities (Tess Gallagher, Ben Greenman, Tania Hershman, Karen Russell, David Vann, Nik de Vries, and more).

I could sit and just listen to Tess Gallagher talk for days; the woman is like some sort of living mood-stone, and in her presence you are forced to feel grounded and steady. I wanted her to adopt me.

The writers I met were not just successful in publication or financially. These were writers who were committed to and passionate about the craft. Each had a story of struggle, especially poignant in a time when the short form is undervalued.
Their success was in the daily confrontation with the page. The continual willingness to sit down and capture a moment of life, and a life in a moment, in a way that surprises the writer as well as the reader.

Each writer had a story of life’s compromise, and a private moment choosing to write. I know we are often told that writing is not a choice but a habit or addiction. Nevertheless, I have the impression that each writer, in the most private moment, ultimately does face a choice: to follow craft or, instead, to follow common sense.

Listening to the readings and being in conversation with these writers, I could not help but to consider other possibilities:
There is a Raymond Carver working for a law firm in Detroit; a Faulkner as a shrimp man in the Carolinas; there is a Dostoevsky running his own kitchen and staff at a hotel in South Beach; and a Virginia Woolf ordering her own preparatory school in New Castle. There is a Frank O’Connor tending bar in Cork City, telling stories of his childhood to the inebriated tourist.
There are other routes for everyone. How much of our culture and language we would lose if they chose those routes, if they escaped the daily struggle with the page.

A paper mache dog, reading O’Connor — A Frank O’Connor totem.

This is why it is so vital to have this festival in Ireland. Over and over, I met writers from Cork. These were not writers from a place, the way we think of writers as, for example, from Brooklyn. I’m a writer from Brooklyn but I’m not really from Brooklyn, few writers are. The Cork writers and poets were born in Cork. For them, the choice to write is a pattern of territorial identity. Confronted with this, I wanted to know, why? Why is this place so attached to the story?

Almost everyone reads in Cork. It is in the demeanor and faces of the locals; that wrinkled and bloodshot look that comes from years of reading or late stage boozing — maybe a combination. And conversation starts up everywhere.

Frank O’Connor, Sean O’Feolain, David Marcus were all Cork writers, but first, they were citizens of Cork — a fully involved and integrated part of the community. Unlike so many other cultures, the Irish story originates from its people and is a source of pride for them. It tells a personal history, not from above but from the fabric itself. The story is their language.

For a young writer this was an introduction worthy of a hyperbole — as our best memories often have to be. Away from the at times stuffy, at times hyper competitive world of New York City, an opportunity to be around people with passion and care for the story itself — an opportunity to celebrate.

–Nikita Nelin is the winner of the Sean O’Faolain award for his story “Eddie” which will appear in Southword Journal.

NEW STORIES FROM THE SOUTH at Housing Works

1. Proud parents: Wells Tower & Amy Hempel. 2. The scene: Housing Works Bookstore & Cafe, fighting AIDS one book at a time.


In case you’re like me, maybe you have been inside Housing Works Bookstore & Café and looked around and thought it was a pretty cool place, but perhaps you were unaware of how cool Housing Works actually is. Besides having a nice atmosphere, good selection, and tasty little café, the shop is dedicated to helping out homeless New Yorkers who are living with HIV and AIDS. And when I say dedicated, I mean dedicated: the entire stock is donations and the staff is all volunteer. So, as events coordinator Rachel Fershleiser said, you can come here and drink six or seven beers all in good conscience, knowing that you have done a good deed and are fighting AIDS.

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Jean-Christophe Valtat’s AURORAMA Launch at Clover Club

1. Samuel Sobek, toy-maker and steampunk fashionista; member of the Steampunk Meetup Group. I especially liked his flip-up shades. 2. Nathan Ihara, a publicist with Melville House, in a dapper hat.


Last night Melville House took over the backroom of Clover Club to celebrate the launch of Aurorarama, Paris-based Jean-Christophe Valtat’s latest novel. Set in an alternate-universe arctic circle—in steampunk 1908, within the fictive polar city of New Venice—Aurorarama blends sci-fi, romance, and frigid skylines with repressive regimes and intrigue.

1. Dennis Johnson, publisher and editor-in-chief of Melville House, looking publisherly. 2. Nathaniel Keats, graphic designer and owner of a very fine tie; member of the Steampunk Meetup Group. Obviously, I envied his vest.

Melville House coordinated the launch with New York’s Steampunk Meetup Group, organized by Katherine Moseley and Brandon Herman. So, there were more than enough well-dressed ladies and gentlemen to crowd the room, wearing everything from dresses they’d made themselves to vintage threads they’d scavenged; unfortunately, this made yourstruly feel not a little bit underdressed.

Meetup-member Samuel Sobek, finely dressed in flip-up specs and—I believe that fancy tie’s called—an ascot, explained that he did not take off his hat despite of last night’s unseasonable warmth because, in the nineteenth century, to be without a hat was like walking around with your fly open. (This made me reflexively check to see if I were zipped.) Nathaniel Keats, another member of the steampunk meetup, looked sharp in his pinstripes and tie. Both are excited to read the book, which will be discussed next month in the group’s book club.

1. Katherine Moseley and Brandon Herman, organizers of the Steampunk Meetup. 2. Jean-Christophe Valtat, author of Aurorarama, who was kind enough to let me blind him with my camera and humble me with how and how fast he wrote the book—in English, a second language, and within four months. Writing in English, he said, made it quicker and easier for him to complete the novel; he didn’t obsess over his place within the tradition, and the story came as if in a trance.

Valtat is already planning the followup to Aurorarama, which will draw on the history of the Grand Guignol theater—think nineteenth century drama enacting the equivalent of slasher flicks, complete with audience splattering special effects—and feature La Salpêtrière, the infamous French hospital where madwomen were treated for uppitiness and hysteria.

–Jake Davis salts most things, and is a Dish contributor.

David Bezmozgis & Rahul Bhattacharya at the Russian Samovar

1. Foster Mickley & Samantha. Foster is currently working on his MFA in fiction at Columbia, and is a student of Bezmozgis. 2. Jiayang Fan, Kate Bittman, & Alexis Okeowo, all of The New Yorker. Jiayang especially enjoyed listening to Bezmosgis, since she worked as a fact-checker on his book.
Last night kicked off this fall’s FSG Reading series. The event was held in the upstairs room at the Russian Samovar, which was a very nice space for a reading–softly lit, modestly elegant, and spacious while still being intimate. But by seven o’clock the room was packed, with all the chairs taken and people spilling into the aisles and staircase. Chantal Clarke introduced Rahul Bhattacharya, whose first novel, The Sly Company of People Who Care, will be published by FSG this May. She described his writing as rich, powerful, and having an anthropological quality. Bhattacharya said he wasn’t able to tell if his voice was too loud or too soft, because his ears were plugged up and he “couldn’t yet afford American health care.” If there’s justice in this world, let’s hope that he will be able to soon, especially with a novel debut as striking as this, if the excerpt we heard is any indication.
1. Writer Rahul Bhattacharya, looking like models camping… pretty intense.
David Bezmozgis was up next, and was introduced by Mark Krotov. Bezmozgis pointed out a Soviet theme by saying that he did his first reading of “Natasha” at the KGB Bar, which was “creepy”, and that he much prefers the Russian Samovar. He read a chapter from his upcoming novel The Free World, which will be published by FSG in April. I particularly enjoyed the section where one of the main characters, Alec, rewards himself by going to an Italian pornographic movie theater, from which he “grasp[s] the full extent of Soviet deprivation.”
Afterward, the crowd mingled while sampling the Samovar’s menu of seventeen different flavored vodkas, snagging review copies of Bezmozgis’ novel in between.
* * *
–Julia Jackson is working on her MFA in fiction at Brooklyn College, and is a regular contributor for Electric Dish.

PLEASE TAKE ME OFF THE GUEST LIST

1. Diva & Dena, who are friends of Lipez. 2. Joey & Reena, who were killing time before the reading by paging through Time Out New York and BlackBook.


What do you get when you combine one dedicated designer + one member of a famous rock band-slash-photographer + one musician-slash-DJ-slash-bartender-slash-writer-slash-party boy?

At least four book deals, the most recent (Please Take Me Off the Guest List) of which was celebrated last night with a reading and Q&A at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square.

The young, alt, and wearing-pretty-much-only-black crowd was told much different things than say, the crowd of the Franzen reading, which was located at the same spot a few weeks back. Things like, “This is going to be recorded, and everyone knows the camera adds – oh hell, let’s be honest – twenty pounds, so the louder you applaud, the thinner you will look.” The event also started a few minutes late to accommodate the still-arriving crowd, despite the fact that the Facebook invite warned “that this is not a show or Northhampton anarchist potluck or your ‘fun’ uncle’s funeral-IT STARTS AT SEVEN SHARP.”

The designer (Stacy Wakefield), photographer (Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs), and writer (Zachary Lipez) fielded questions by journalist Katherine Lanpher. The interviewees discussed their aesthetics, which are quite different, yet complement each other. For instance, Wakefield believes that good design should be “invisible,” since obvious design tends to date things too quickly. Zinner wants his photography to be unsentimental, and Lipez hopes his writing is “funny but not precious” – which, for him, is easier to achieve with prose than poetry. The interviewees also described the desire to publish a book, explaining the satisfaction of producing something beautiful that one could hold and carry. Maybe the small price and size of Please Take Me Off the Guest List were intentional—Zinner, Wakefield, and Lipez wanted to make something accessible, something that could be given as a gift or read on the subway.

1. Artist Catherine Sieck, whose favorite part of the show was Lipez’s spastic lip-pursing, which seemed to be brought on by the audience’s failure to laugh at his more subtle jokes. 2. Musician/Performer Anna Copa Cabanna, musician Daniel Sheerin, & Catoonist/Blogger/DJ Nate Turbow. Daniel used to live with Lipez. When asked what his worst habit was as a roommate, Daniel & Anna just laughed.


Lipez read three essays, which were accompanied by music played by Wakefield and Zinner. The first essay, “You Can Always do Better,” made me incredibly depressed and sometimes nauseated (which, I admit, may have been the result of outside factors, such as that I was incredibly sleep-deprived).  In Lipez’s ponderings about women’s shitty taste in men, he suggested that one might be better off dating Stalin rather than a musician, and (despite being ancient–he’s thirty-five) reveled in/fetishized being wet-the-bed drunk, staying up ‘til dawn on coke, and sleeping with decade-younger self-proclaimed “sluts.” But don’t bother criticizing Lipez for any of this, because he’s already beaten you to the punch: He’s quick to admit everything from being a “loser” to being emotionally immature to having questionable literary talent/authority.

We also learned when it is appropriate to drink while on antibiotics: If you’re on a seven-day regimen, it’s okay to drink on day four. If you’re on a nine-day regimen, it’s really just bad form to drink before day five. The final essay, “My Letter of Resignation,” (to The Strand, love Zach), featured Wakefield playing a typewriter as a musical instrument, and moments of this verged on beautiful.

–Julia Jackson is working on her MFA in fiction at Brooklyn College, and is a regular contributor for Electric Dish.

FRANCO: LINCOLN CENTER

1. Screen shot, James Franco as Allen Ginsberg. 2. Franco-philes Harris Solomon, Halimah Marcus, Mathias Black – all Brooklyn College MFA fiction students.

James Franco looks beat. (In case you’ve been comatose, proof here, and here, right there, there too, and, oh, here.) But the man’s still going.

Monday night at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater, his tour-de-force of a creative life landed him at a Brooklyn College-sponsored screening of the indie Allen Ginsberg bio-pic, Howl, two days before its official New York City Film Festival premiere. The place was packed with students, donors, faculty, Granta subscribers and other poetry nerds. Ginsberg stories were traded around like meatballs. And though 17 minutes late – “Sorry, I had class,” he quietly said, as he hopped on stage for a post-film Q&A – Franco fielded queries about everything from his feelings towards the poem, preparations for the film’s extensive monologues, the actor’s own endeavors into the writing life, and which of his multiple grad-school stopovers took the MFA prize. (Disclaimer: Franco graduated from Brooklyn’s MFA program last May.)

Wearing white sneakers and a faded red coat, Franco ran his hand through his wavy hair, shifted his seat, gulped a water, and confessed awe-slash-intimidation in the role. “[The directors] and I spent a year building Allen’s behaviors before filming,” he said during the forty minutes of crowd questions. “I’ve read Ginsberg, well, for quite a while.”

1. Cocktail partiers, who clinked wine glasses and ate spinach dip. 2. Over a hundred film goers waited in line before Howl doors opened.


Ginsberg is no stranger to Brooklyn College. While the Beat-legend cemented his name with the highly contentious poem, published in 1956 by San Francisco lit lion, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg ended his career on Bedford Ave, as a heralded member of the poetry faculty at BC. “Poems should be pouring out of them,” Ginsberg is to have said of students. (There may or may have not been a Howl-worthy anecdote recalled by a BC professor about Ginsberg blowing a guy who blew a guy who knew a guy somehow connected to Walt Whitman. We’re just saying.)

Post-flick, while attendees debated the film’s trippy use of jazz-fueled animation, what seemed consensus among the MFAers was the star actor’s strong delivery of the famous Six Gallery, spoken-word version of “Howl.” Franco’s Ginsberg lit up when the poet hit the stage. Unsurprising, as both actor and directors admitted the text to be the film’s true main character.

And, as to the question of why all those schools, James, why the grad degree roulette – He’s at Yale now - and which, of all the New York City MFA programs, truly beat the others? After running his hand through his hair, sighing, drinking water, he spoke. “Brooklyn writers, on the whole,” he said, “I’d say, let’s just say, they seemed to be stronger.” And the crowd approved. What didn’t he say? There’s a competing Lincoln Center Howl event at the end of the week – for Columbia.

–Taylor Bruce is an MFA student at Brooklyn College and comes from Alabama.

Only One Rule That I Know Of, Babies

“The Song of the Cerulean Warbler”: Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

“Where did the self-pity come from? The inordinate volume of it? By almost any standard, she led a luxurious life. She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable. The autobiographer is almost forced to the conclusion that she pitied herself for being so free.” – an excerpt from the autobiography of Patty Berglund, Mistakes Were Made

“She was seventy-five and she was going to make some changes in her life” runs the closing sentence of Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 breakthrough novel The Corrections. The spirit of that frangible wish for radical reinvention in any sense possible—of self, of a relationship, of the environment—holds at center his latest endeavor Freedom. A monument to a contemporary America tangled up and blue at home and abroad, Freedom teems with cultural wherewithal and satiric edge, narrative drawn in thick strokes on a broad canvas. The novel has got scope: parents and children, left and right, New York City and West Virginia, conservation and mountain top removal, Protestant work ethic and masturbation, Bob Dylan and Paul Wolfowitz, rescued songbirds and captured housecats.

A married couple washed up on the shores of middle age, Patty and Walter Berglund harbor deep uncertainties as to whether they are happy with what they have found. She is from Westchester, NY, relocated to the Midwest; he, a Minnesota native. Having been the first white couple to reclaim a Victorian on Barrier Street, the St. Paulites are thrown back on themselves when their two grown children set off to make their own way in the world. And what do Patty and Walter find? That they must also make their own way in the world: Patty absorbed by an autobiographical writing project premised on her helpless attachment to her son Joey and her nagging attraction to Walter’s best friend, a musician named Richard Katz; Walter, a risky environmental gambit funded by a Texas billionaire whereby miles on miles of untouched land in West Virginia will be stripped of mountaintops and coal and then set aside as a natural preserve for migrating cerulean warblers.

It is only around the rock ‘n roller Richard that Patty feels she can be “her unpretended true self.” And as Walter says to his assistant on the cerulean warbler initiative, a beautiful young woman of Indian descent: “I’m sorry… I’m still trying to figure out how to live.” How likely, then, that things will turn out okay?

Can there ever even be an okay in a world where, as Walter puts it to Richard, curiously echoing the late, great David Foster Wallace:

… there’s never any center, there’s no communal agreement, there’s just a trillion little bits of distracting noise. We can never sit down and have any kind of sustained conversation, it’s all just cheap trash and shitty development. All the real things, the authentic things, the honest things are dying off. Intellectually and culturally, we just bounce around like random billiard balls, reacting to the latest random stimuli.

As with The Corrections, Franzen again affirms what the novel is capable of affirming. No, really: it’s not just his media narrative. Like the underwater city of luminous beings in the finale of James Cameron’s The Abyss, only without the tens of millions of dollars in special effects and flagrant deus ex machina—special effects as deus ex machina—Freedom lifts survivors from the last ten years’ corporately published fiction to the surface. Joshua Henkin’s Matrimony, Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision, Jonathan Lethem’s New Yorker story “Lucky Alan”: they’re all there, with however many others, boundaries blown outward. In even-handed, unshowy prose, Franzen channels his inner C. Wright Mills, the personal and political collapsing in to one another, along with the mulm of polite opinion, niceness and its perils, denial and its undying champions dreaming of a world transfigured.

At last, Richard knocks on the bedroom door of the woman who married his best friend: “He listened carefully, enveloped in tinnitus. ‘Patty?’ he said again.”

Courage Is Love: War by Sebastian Junger


“The glory heaped upon heroes in almost all societies might explain why young men are so eager to send themselves to war—or, if sent, to fight bravely. That would only work in a species that is capable of language, however… once our ancestors escaped the eternal present by learning to speak, they could repeat stories that would make individuals accountable for their actions—or rewarded for them.” – Sebastian Junger

American combat operations in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan, “the Afghanistan of Afghanistan,” as Sebastian Junger puts it, “too remote to conquer, too poor to intimidate, too autonomous to buy off,” began and ended with a Medal of Honor. The first went posthumously to Lt. Michael P. Murphy, a Navy SEAL who placed himself in the line of fire to radio in reinforcements for his badly outnumbered team. Those four were among the first Americans to enter the valley, on a mission to eliminate a Taliban leader. They found themselves surrounded by a force of over one hundred after allowing shepherds who had stumbled on their position to walk away; the team had put to vote whether or not to kill them and decided against it. The second was awarded just about a week ago to Sergeant Salvatore A. Giunta of Battle Company, 503rd Infantry Regiment. He is the only living recipient of the medal since the Vietnam War.

Battle Company’s service in Korengal (“about half the size of Staten Island”) is the subject of Sebastian Junger’s intimate nonfiction document War, and the accompanying film, Restrepo, which he shot and directed with photographer Tim Hetherington. Author of commercial smash The Perfect Storm, Junger was embedded with Battle Company for five months over the course of a year, June 2007 to June 2008 (American forces withdrew from the valley in April of 2010). During that time he got to know a few of the soldiers well, in particular a commando named Brendan O’Byrne. Junger’s life depended on those bonds: he accompanied Second Platoon on numerous patrols and even a few missions behind enemy lines. The experience of coming under fire he examines in great detail, describing the body’s reaction to stress as measured by heart-rate:

Complex motor skills start to diminish at 145 beats per minute, which wouldn’t matter much in a swordfight but could definitely ruin your aim with a rifle. At 170 beats per minute you start to experience tunnel vision, loss of depth perception, and restricted hearing. And at 180 beats per minute you enter a netherworld where rational thought decays…

Battle Company, Junger notes, was taking “the most contact of the battalion, and the battalion… the most contact—by far—of any in the U.S. military.”

Most of the author’s time was spent on the mountain outpost named for Second Platoon’s guitar-playing medic Juan Restrepo who died in the first few months of deployment. The improvised base overlooks the valley below, “a miraculous kind of antiparadise… heat and dust and tarantulas and flies and no women and no running water and no cooked food and nothing to do but kill and wait.” As Jonathan Franzen writes of the fictional Midwesterner Walter Berglund’s family history: “The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.”

It is that dream of limitless freedom and the potential for its souring that Junger watches hang in balance in the minds of the men-boys around him, their humor, horseplay, boredom and belief. After not being washed for thirty-eight days uniforms “are so impregnated with salt that they can stand up by themselves.” During one of many slow moments in the cold winter months, O’Byrne states what could be the opening line of a short story: “I used to live a thousand feet above sea level, and we’d find seashells in the rocks along the side of the road.” No one has any kind of response for that, the way a mind can occupy two places at once just as geological traces of another lifetime mark a familiar landscape.

“The moral basis of the war doesn’t seem to interest soldiers much,” Junger writes, “and its long-term success or failure has a relevance of almost zero.” What drives them, instead: “These hillsides of loose shale and holly trees are where the men feel not most alive—that you can get skydiving—but the most utilized. The most necessary. The most clear and certain and purposeful. If young men could get that feeling at home, no one would ever want to go to war again, but they can’t.”

Thom Shanker of The New York Times detailed the awarding of the most recent Medal of Honor as follows:

“President Obama said ‘thank you’ for what I did,” Sergeant Giunta said in an interview from his current post in Vicenza, Italy, after getting a call from the president. “My heart was pounding out of my chest, so much that my ears almost stopped hearing. I had my wife by my side. She was holding my hand. When she heard me say, ‘Mr. President,’ she gave me a squeeze.”

–Jeff Price is a Brooklyn-based editor and writer.