The letters are the same as all the ones that have come before, and as usual, I’m taking it from all sides. Sometimes I’m surprised I’m not getting rejections from small children, scribbled in crayon on oversized paper, that say, “I have yet to decide on a career path or even which binkie I want right now, but should I choose to become a literary agent in the future, I would just like to let you know that your project does not fit my needs at this time… Poopy.”

I’ll admit up front, much of my failure with this book is probably my own fault. With this project, I’ve taken an approach to querying the same way a duck hunter does—a scattergun, aimed in a general direction, trigger pulled, with the hope a big juicy duck will just fall out of the sky.

Also, I may be on the receiving end of some karma for having, let’s say, “unapologetically tweaked” my original letter and proposal. Let’s take a look at some of the few minor—let’s say—discrepancies between “truth” and “not as much truth.”

Things I Embellished, Obfuscated, or Flat-Out Lied About in My Letter and Proposal

The Letter:

“In addition, I publish my own column at www.stephenmarkley.com, which caters to a network of readers who have been following me since my days as a campus firebrand at a college newspaper.”
“In other words, the entire book is about my endeavor to publish the book. Subsequently, this letter itself is part of the book, as is your response whether you send me a contract (‘Cool!’ I will write in the book) or a form rejection letter (‘Not cool,’ I will write).”

“Of course, I understand what a ridiculous, self-serving concept this is. However, it’s obviously not just a book about publishing a book. It’s a scathing look at a young writer in pursuit of his dream—the travails of taking that road less traveled, the pitfalls and angst of beginning a life from scratch, of dropping into Chicago with no money, no job, and no prospects. It’s about politics and religion and friendship and an unexpected pregnancy and unrequited love.”

“The more well-known authors I’ve secured for interviews include NBA winner Richard Powers, science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson, bestselling mystery writer Phillip Margolin, pop culture critic Chuck Klosterman, and first-time novelist Heather Skyler.”

“In addition to the opening chapter, I’ve included a proposal and an initial chapter outline. However, I encourage you to take a look at my website or even meet with me in person to get an idea of how serious I am about this project. Look at my work with an eye toward opportunity, possibility, or both.

Sincerely,
Stephen Markley”

The Proposal:

“There are always large audiences for a strong, humorous voice—one which a reader will follow anywhere, no matter the topic.”

“I’m fortunate to have demonstrated such a voice with a core following of readers. My column in the Chicago Tribune’s RedEye has quickly become one of its most popular and the columns that run on my website continue to attract a faithful readership of thousands.”

“Furthermore, aside from some fairly big names I’ve already secured commitments for interviews, this book has opportunities for cross-promotion.”

“Last but not least, I urge you give me and my project serious consideration for this reason alone: I’m ready to explode. With two books under my belt that no one wants to touch because I don’t have a strong enough list of credits to my young name, I’m in a position to come out of nowhere. I’m young, charming, good-looking (enough), and primed to tear a white-hot streak across the face of the country.”

“None of this will convince you, however. Read the sample chapter, peruse my website, and if you have questions or would like to get a better feel for the direction of the book, feel free to contact me by phone or email.”

Following the revisiting of the query and proposal, I actually go back and read the sample chapters I’ve sent to fifty different agents. You have to understand that I’ve been at this for months. Having forgotten what these chapters said almost entirely, I wanted to know what an agent would see with a pair of fresh eyes. To my disbelief and appalling dismay, I realize within the first half-page that I had chosen to open my book with the story of my college roommate, Scott, explaining his shitting/shaving contraption.

No, I thought. Why would I do that? I don’t even admit to people that I know Scott. Scott is an idiot. Why would I choose to start a book with him saying one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard? What have I done?

As if I’m not distraught enough, it has dawned on me that this book may have set me on a path to stark-raving madness. After all, the only way this goddamn book will ever end is if it gets published. That’s the only logical ending. Nothing else works. Therefore, what if it never does get published? What if I’m just collecting anecdotes and unconnected, irreverent thoughts for the next fifty years—my entire life revolving around the absurd narrative of a book that has no narrative other than itself? The problem is that when I began this project, I had more or less envisioned myself publishing it after about a year. Why, you ask, after I have discussed previously just how hard and unlikely it would be that I’d ever actually publish anything, would I still secretly harbor this sentiment?

I begin to have visions of myself, thirty-five years old and living in Naperville, Illinois, with three kids and a fat wife, still writing and editing for a car blog because I have a mortgage, a car payment, and three college tuitions coming up quick. Old friends will come to visit and they’ll ask, “Hey, how’s the book going? The one about publishing the book?” And I’ll forlornly think of the 2,346th page I’ve just written that morning. Likely by this time I’ll be down to cataloguing interesting things I’ve picked out of my teeth after meals for material.

An Excerpt from Future Stephen Markley’s 2,300-plus-page Epic Publish This Book Circa 2023

It was just after lunch and Ted from marketing had given me the second half of his hoagie, claiming he couldn’t eat both halves because that much meat would wreak havoc on his colon. I chomped away at it delightedly, only to realize that it was heavy on the salami. This being the stringy, gristly salami where the threads of meat tend to implant themselves between your molars and canines, exerting some fairly unpleasant pressure on your gums.

After finishing the sandwich, I realized my teeth were now packed with left-over salami gristle. I went looking for a toothpick, but the restaurant didn’t have any. Sweet Jesus, I wondered. How the hell do you not have a toothpick? Then Linda called to say I needed to pick up Elmer’s Glue on my way home for Tiff’s school art project. I asked her why she needed me to pick up the goddamn glue, weren’t there stores all over Naperville with glue? And she said, “My ass might be enormous, but you are the biggest gaping asshole I’ve ever met.” And having had that delightful conversation with the wife, I procured from the coffee room a plastic fork. After freeing it from the plastic, I began needling a single tine into the gaps between my teeth in attempt to get at the salami. One particular bubble of refuse popped out with a satisfying trail of muscle rending out of my gums. I stared at it for a moment, dangling from the single fork tine, a glistening gobule of processed meat that vaguely resembled a single dead spermatozoa. Smiling, I popped it into my mouth and swallowed it down. Then I opened my mail and got more rejection notices for this book…Whoopdi-goddamn-doo isn’t this a great original meta-concept? Blahblahblahblahscatalogicaljokehere.

If this theory plays out then this book could just end up a catalogue of my entire life—the raving commentary of a verbose lunatic. Perhaps one day, my grandchild will unearth it from the attic and show it to his friend in the ebook uploading business, and this young man will leap to publish it as the tragic, bitter study of the twenty-first-century writer at the death of print media.

It would only be read by cretinous twenty-second- century scholars uploading it to their iRead or Kindle9 or whatever moronic contraption people in the future will use because they’re too lazy to separate paper pages with thumb and forefinger.

What a fate.

* * *

Publish This Book is available in bookstores everywhere.

–Stephen Markley is a Chicago-based freelance writer. His work appears regularly in the Chicago Tribune, RedEye, KickingTires.net, and his blog Off the Markley. His work has also appeared in the Chicago Reader, Weber: A Journal of the Contemporary West, and 10,000 Tons of Black Ink. Publish This Book is his first book. You can find him on all the time-sucking social networking sites.

Stephen will be reading at Houndstooth Pub at 520 8th Ave, Tonight,  Aug. 31, from 6-9.

Pierre Bonard's Breakfast Room

Alas the glory of the prince! How the time has gone,
vanished under night’s helm, as if it never were!

From “The Wanderer,” 6th century English poem

He heard the clack of his dog’s old nails on the floor. Hadji sat at his feet, looking up, hungry like all the aged. His dog that had run in the breathless snow, strong legged, young, his ears back, his keen glances, his pure smell. A life that passed in an instant.

From Light Years (1975)

Some things that are plentiful in James Salter’s writing: wartime heroism, the valorization of the dead, striking or farfetched similes, fine things and physical beauty, descriptions of food and drink, sexual opportunism, an almost mystical attitude towards the acquisition of fame and money, accidents, lost youth, sadness at the passage of time.

Some things that are noticeable by their absence: sexual restraint and fidelity, long passages of background or expository prose, politics, humility, Middle America, justice, a sense of damnation or sin as opposed to a sense of time wasted.

In 1992, when he was in his sixties, Salter published an essay in Esquire celebrating the pairing of beautiful younger women with older, powerful men.  He made approving references to Abelard and Heloise, to Picasso’s romantic life, to the habits of the Continental nobility, even to sex tourism: “happiness is often at its most intense when it is based on inequality, and one of the imperishable visions if it is of life among a burnished, graceful people not as advanced as we” (by ‘burnished,’ Salter of course means dark-skinned).

Salter is everywhere referred to as a ‘writer’s writer,’ or a ‘stylist.’

Le style c’est l’homme, Buffon wrote in the 18th century. Style is the man. Yet to call a writer a stylist in our day means to concentrate on the surface beauty of his prose and to ignore the man behind the style.

A stylist is often a euphemist of genius, a writer who gives elegant or poetic expression to man’s basest motives or actions. Like Hemingway, Salter is a writer driven not by religion or even ethics as much as by a code, or manners. The code Salter articulates–the code behind the style–is a pagan or aristocratic one, though Salter himself is no blue-blood (actual aristocrats are too complacent, incurious and suspicious of mere verbal glibness to ever expand upon the meaning of their beliefs). Like ‘grace under pressure,’ it is as much about looking good as doing the right thing.

Light Years, like Anna Karenina, is a marriage novel, though without a Kitty and a Levin; it is written from the perspective not of Tolstoy but of Vronsky, from the perspective of a man who values surfaces above all things, whose unhappiness is bone-deep, yet who is closed to alternatives.. The world of Viri and Nedra is the world of upper-middle class New York and Long Island from the late Fifties to the early Seventies. Viri is an architect; Nedra doesn’t work; they give dinner parties, have affairs; shop; divorce; they and their friends grow older and frailer; Nedra dies of cancer.

Nedra, like Rochester or Gatsby, is at the beginning of the novel a mysterious character whose mystery is described largely by her effect on other people. The source of the mystery, the reader realizes with a sinking heart, is something as ordinary as glamour––a numinous-seeming confidence that comes from the envied combination of beauty, money, leisure, and good taste.

Salter is a writer who has cut a figure in the world, been in the thick of battle, spent time in Hollywood, loved many women.  The terse Hemingway style is an obvious model for him–the Hemingway of The Sun Also Rises in Salter’s early war novels, the Hemingway of sitting around in cafes and noticing the light on leaves in Salter’s later novels; but his prose has a compressed lushness all its own.

Salter’s prose invites us, through a kind of intensified seeing, to make a grail of laughter of an empty ashcan, in Hart Crane’s words. This promise to transform the workaday world into a kind of magic play land is the promise of the great stylists—Nabokov, Proust, Nicholson Baker.

It is also the promise of advertising. Salter, aristocratic hedonist that he is, celebrates a life devoted to the pursuit of pleasure: dinner parties, tailored clothes, lazy alcohol-drenched summers at the beach, gallery-hopping, adultery. But Light Years is no brightly colored advertisement for joie de vivre, no Renoir painting or New Yorker cover: the truth-teller within the novelist, the truth teller that squats within any worthwhile artist, can’t help but describe the heavy pagan sadness that dogs the pursuit of pleasure’s every step; yet the stylist within the artist can’t help glamorizing not just the pleasure but the sadness.

The result is, surprisingly, not an incoherent work of fiction but a tensely satisfying one, one of those rare novels that, in a process like seduction, moves the reader almost against his will.

Why is this book, which elevates the meretricious, the snobbish, the narrowly bourgeois, so moving?

In the pagan consciousness, one of the feelings that approximate religious awe is a sense of the majesty of time’s passing. In Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of Britain, a work in which the pagan overlaps the Christian worldview, a speaker compares our life on earth to the flight of a sparrow through a banquet hall. In Light Years, time is, to use a Salteresque simile, like the ancient stone floor beneath a throw rug.

(What is the true nature of time? Nabokov compared our trying to figure it out—us, sentient creatures living in time—to a harried driver keeping an eye on the road and one hand on the steering wheel, while with the other hand fumbling through the contents of the glove compartment.)

Time, we see, has a dual nature: it is both motion and accumulation; current and sediment. Salter records the movement of the light throughout the day; the changing of the light through the seasons. He records the passage of the years and their cumulative effect, which is to induce a kind of vertigo in man, a wonderment:

There is the dock, unused now, with its flaking paint and rotten boards, its underpilings drenched in green.

[…]

It happens in an instant. It is all one long day, one endless afternoon, friends leave, we stand on the shore.

The heavy sense of the dual nature of time in Light Years makes time itself the agent of drama and gives this mostly eventless and drama-free novel its narrative pull.  Salter describes a minor character, a failed painter, as seen through the eyes of his daughter:

He had spent a lot of time with her when she was a child. She remembered some of it. She had lived in waves of color he had chosen, irradiated by them as by the sun. She had seen his torn sketchbooks on the floor with footprints across their pages, she had found him sprawled drunk in her room, his face on the thick spruce boards. She could never betray him: it was unthinkable, He asked nothing of her. All these years he had been beaten, as if in a street fight, before her eyes.

* * *

John Broening’s Column Note.

—John Broening is a chef and writer based in Denver, Colorado. His work has appeared in the Baltimore Sun, the Baltimore City Paper, Gastronomica, Edible Front Range, and the Denver Post, for whom he writes a weekly column about food.

This video is by the amazing Martha Colburn, who also contributed to our Single Sentence Animation Series.

A reading to celebrate the release of Here Comes Another Lesson will happen on September 16 at 7:00 p.m. at Bookculture.

The novel as. I’ve met people who say, “I haven’t read fiction in years,” or “I’ve never finished a novel.” In fact, lately, I’ve met more people that prefer nonfiction. There have been essays written on the phenomenon of the dying short story, and on the predictions that the novel is the next to go. There have been novels written as conversations, or as commercials for themselves. There are novels written as blogs, as interactive diaries, by corporations. We’re supposed to still like MTV. Our society is segregated into classics enthusiasts and nons. I don’t give a damn about any of it because I know that one thing will never change: people mostly think about themselves.

Everyone’s a photographer, and everyone is a writer (or blogger, which is like journalism, so everyone’s a journalist). People are famous because they are in internet porn, or something similar. Even cartoons are in porn. Like Ariel and her dad, King Triton, and Simpsons characters. You know how Cartoon Network had to by the rights to the Hannah Barbara characters? I doubt these porno-animators are buying anything. The internet makes it so you can steal until you get caught, but even then, are you caught – the porn’s past existence cannot be erased when it’s caught.

Everyone is a celeb because celebrity has been shortened to celeb in order to accommodate us. We are in online forums and collectives and clubs and discussions, and our pictures are tagged. People think about us enough to “tag” us and create testimonies. But look at the people with hardly any comments; they must be sad that they are not famous, like the rest of the world. Online personal shopping, exclusive deals, free shipping, and total privacy and anonymity. We can become two different people so easily now: the famous one and the secret one.

My dream, as a female writer, is to look and act like a female writer. I want the surface of my life and my internet-surface to affect my writing and my drive, not the other way around. This way, I can’t lose. I will be famous because I’ll forget what fame means.

I just re-watched The Last Days of Disco (Whit Stillman, 1998), which is about a bunch of people who work in a publishing house but want to be writers.  I wouldn’t say it’s a great movie, but it has great dialogue. I watched it alone, and by the end I was sort of hugging myself whenever Chloë Sevigny said anything. I like her for the reasons everyone else does: Kids, Gummo, Boys Don’t Cry, Julien Donkey Boy, and what some interviewer in some men’s magazine said about her: that watching her act is like walking in on someone in the bathroom, which is uncomfortable but intriguing, since she doesn’t seem to mind.

This is what I want my writing personality to be like. Sevigny is not very good at playing very many emotions, or any, really, which makes Alice a perfect role for her. She’s sort of annoyed every once in a while, but mostly unperturbed, and just into dancing and publishing (like me). Her office outfits are better than her disco ones, and Kate Beckinsale is the other way around, so you know that Chloë will end up okay. (Did I ruin it? So you know: It’s about a group of friends who aren’t very friendly to each other and like to discuss high art and literature by comparing it to low art and literature.)

In my real and internet life (which should soon merge into one), I have to come up with perfect lines, like the one about vodka tonics being the drink of choice for college graduates, which is tragically boring. Maybe there’s a few too many anyways, as in, “Anyway, I don’t think I can live with you anymore.”  None of the lines are very realistic: it’s like a play, but instead of the stage being the limit, it’s that the acting is bad.

So, I’m admitting that I’m dangerously insecure because I’m trying to be a writer, and that’s okay, because I’ve figured out part of it. Here is what I need to do: Always act badly. Say ‘anyway’ before saying something else. And make sure my office outfits are better than my disco ones.

-Natasha Stagg is a writing teacher and student in Tucson, Arizona.

The first combatant to read was Melissa Petro, author of Sex Work Matters: Power and Intimacy in the Sex Industry, who wooed the audience with a story of youthful experimentation and portentous deflowering. Benjamin Hale, author of the forthcoming The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, countered with a tale of primal urges between a primate and biologist.

The next bout pitted Rachel Shukert, author of Everything Is Going to Be Great: An Underfunded and Overexposed European Grand Tour, against Dasha Kelly, author of Hershey Eats Peanuts. Rachel, the first to strike, regaled the crowd with a tale of a lost crown and sexual assault at the hands of Italian dental hygienists.  Dasha stood her ground, countering with a combo of poems, recited from memory: one about the quest and conquering of orgasm, the other about our collective place in history.

The competition was fierce, but a sophisticated panel of judges arose to the occasion.  The trio consisted of: Bruce Benderson, author of The Romanian: Story of an Obsession, who judged literary merit and smoked a smokeless, electronic cigarette; songstylist Michael Hearst, of the band One Ring Zero, who critiqued performance and admitted that he felt like Howie Mandel on America’s Got Talent; and Elna Baker, on sabbatical from the Church of Latter Day Saints and author of The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance, who weighed in on the “intangibles” and enlightened the audience on the realities of “moose kisses.”

Melissa and Rachel were the evening’s finalists, the title ultimately conferred upon Rachel following a round of audience members pelting the pair with balls of duct tape symbolizing cholera (apparently there’s history there: August was once cholera season in New York, and consequently became the month that the publishing industry chose to vacate the city).

What did Rachel think of her victory? “I’m thrilled to have vanquished my enemies,” she said. “Although I contracted cholera and will soon die in a pool of my own bloody stool, at this moment, victory is sweet.”

–Benjamin Samuel is an Editorial Assistant for Electric Literature. He graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, will begin an MFA at Brooklyn College this fall, and was voted by his high school as Most Likely to be Seen at the Diner.

When putting together my novella,  Troglodyte Rose, I used a number of different techniques. Originally the project was going to be an ‘illustronovella’, which is a fusion of sequential art (as in comics) and straightforward prose. This reinvigorated the writing process: flitting between prose and script. It certainly made writing easier and more enjoyable, because those scenes that would be written as a script didn’t require the vigorous technical detail that goes into a traditional novel. I also found the prose sections came out in almost poetic slivers. As Douglas Thompson later said of the book:

I have long harboured the hope that film might have changed writing in much the same way as photography changed painting, and that we are therefore in a bold new era where novels don’t rely on the sequential any longer, but are a series of paragraphs each as good as a poem.

Of course, I have to confess to also being a poet, so perhaps this is natural. But during the writing of this book I did reach an economy of language not present in my earlier attempts of fiction. And the paragraph really is the basic unit of meaning in my writing now. Take for example:

We are inside Hell. How can I describe it any other way? I can feel the fires of the glassworks. I can smell the sulphurous breath of our chthonic gods. I live in squalid darkness and breathe filthy air. My name is Rose and I’ve never seen the sky.

I also managed to alternate slower, more introspective prose sections with fast-paced, rampaging script for art sequences. Unfortunately due to the artists’ commitment to  providing a serial for Tor.com, the overall project had to evolve.

In the end I opted to adapt the Japanese  light novel as a basis for the book. Those scripted sections I’d written, which were all about action and dialogue by necessity, were converted to prose that captured the same pace and energy sequential art would have. Consider:

PAGE 1.
Underground. Outside a pharmaceutical store called Sindar’s Pharmacy.
Light comes from mirrors fixed to the vaulted cave walls and spindly,
Victorian-looking lampposts. We’re in the market district, surrounded by closed
shops, boarded up or with windows smashed. Graffiti covers the walls.
Only a couple of shops are in business, their neon signs half broken
so only some of the letters light. Two figures in the foreground,
perhaps silhouettes or perhaps only half in frame. This frame takes up
the width of the page, but perhaps only a third of its height.

CAP: THE WARRENS. A NATION UNDERGROUND.
CAP: THE ROCKY RIBCAGE OF THE PLANET ASP.

This became:

Underground. Outside Sindar’s Pharmacy. Light pours from the spindly iron lampposts and dies again mere feet away. We’re in the market district, surrounded by closed shops—buildings boarded up or with windows smashed. Graffiti covers the walls. Only a couple of places are still in business, their neon signs half broken so only some of the letters light up in half-understood promises. Our shadows are silhouetted against the door like crooked fangs, hungry for what’s inside.

As you can see, the latter is more fleshed out, but borrows directly from the script to maintain the visual aspect and keep things flowing quick and ready.

Next in the development of the novella was the website. We took the artwork, gave it to my best friend and Creative Director of  Dog Horn Publishing (Michael Dark), and he created an interactive Flash-based website. This is basically a teaser which readers can explore, providing snippets and info about the book, but only enough to tantalise.

Troglodyte Rose comprises three levels: the prose, the art and the website. Together these build a multimedia text which, I hope, lends itself to a digital age with fragmented audiences, shorter attention spans and a need for stimulus. As a result, the limited edition pretty much sold out on the launch day (there are a handful of copies I kept aside just for online sales, but that’s it). It then got nominated for two Lambda Awards and made it to the finals in the Transgender category for its intersex/hermaphrodite character, Flid. Now it has been reworked, again, as a novel, which should make the Trog Rose text accessible to another (perhaps more mainstream) kind of reader.

These kinds of interstices have been explored in other areas of my work, too. Take for example my recent post as writer in residence at the local  I Love West Leeds Arts Festival. Visitors to Armley Mills, where the festival was centred, were sent SMS poetry I’d written in response to my research into West Leeds and the Mills. People could keep these texts or forward them onto friends, and many of them perhaps wouldn’t have read the poetry otherwise.

Poetry and short stories are now being presented as podcasts by websites such as Poetry Jukebox and  PoetCasting.co.uk. There are engaging events like  Literary Death Match and  Polari, and we’re witnessing the rise of the ebook. I think it’s only a matter of time before we’re having cybersex with Mr D’Arcy and exploring the worlds of H. G. Wells in virtual reality.

–Adam Lowe is a writer, journalist and publisher from Leeds, UK. He has been nominated for four Lambda Awards and three British Fantasy Awards. Kurt Huggins & Zelda Devon’s illustration for his story ‘Singer’ was awarded the Silver Editorial Award at the Sepctrum Fantastic Art Awards in 2008.

Troglodyte Rose was published in 2009 by Cadaverine Publications. Illustrations by Kurt Huggina & Zelda Devon. The novel-length version of the book is currently in the contract negotiation stage of publication and a release date will be announced in future.

Sappho of Lesbos began eating her own hair at age four.

Trichotillomania is defined as the irresistible urge to remove hair from one’s body. Some yank, some pull, some simply cry until it freezes off.

Dr. Doryphoros prescribed 60mg of Prozac per day to remedy the patchy bald spots. “Jesus Christ, Sap,” her mother said. “Would you look at what’s left of your hair? Do you want people to think you’re some kind of dyke?”

Federico García Lorca was in kindergarden when he began writing his first poemas about little turtles with souls. At parent-teacher conferences: “Señora Lorca, we’re a little concerned. Does he ever write about people with souls?”

Aurelia Plath worked two jobs to support Sylvia and her brother Warren.

By the time she was fourteen—living on her own—she discovered that hair al dente went well with marinara sauce and a side of raw chickpeas.

Mrs. Brecht craved swiss cheese for the duration of her pregnancy. When he finally popped, she observed a silent birth, gummed ice chips, and told the nurse to get her a fucking wheel of brie already.

Alexander Pushkin had an overwhelming fear that one day he would be shot in a duel by a blonde man taller than he.

Though Aeschylus was the first poet with a documented case of erectile dysfunction, he was said to be prone to random outbursts of trochaic orgasmic screams. Ai ai ai ai ai.

Because duels were forbidden in 19th century Russia, they were usually held at dawn.

“But Mama, people don’t have souls. And who will love the little turtles?”

This fear didn’t stop him from loving.

“You bought brie? I asked for a fucking cube of havarti. Is that so fucking hard to understand? Where’s my baby?”

In 1562, Bruegel completed his Triumph of Death, depicting fires, shipwreckings, armies of stoic skeletons, horses and dogs attacking and eating women and babies. Despite all this, in the right-hand corner, a woman is joyfully playing a lyre.

Susan Sontag never forgot about Irene.

In 1936, at Franco’s request, García Lorca was shot seven times in the face in a butterfly pasture somewhere in Andalucia. His body was never found.

Never, never, never.

At the 1888 Barcelona World’s Fair, Pau Audouard refused to photograph the façade of La Sagrada Familia, claiming it was too gaudy for his taste.

In most cultures, hair is often associated with beauty and vitality.

Warren Plath, a forgotten name.

Eugene Onegin is a novel-in-verse containging 389 stanzas of iambic tetrameter with a rhyme scheme of AbAbCCddEffEgg.

Goethe cried a lot, but lied about it.

As they say, don’t fill your well after the calf falls in.

The only stanza that does not follow the Pushkin Sonnet depicts Lensky’s death by duel. There is no word that rhymes with the Russian equivalent of despair.

On February 12, 1963, Mrs. Plath told reporters that she regretted giving her daughter an Easy Bake Oven for Christmas however many years ago. Like all mothers, she tried to find a reason. She tried to blame herself.

Human hair contains keratin, which smells of sulphur when burnt.

After divorcing and remarrying, Carson and Reeves McCullers were vacationing in Paris when he overdosed on sleeping pills. He left no note.

By the time she was 27, Sappho was nearly bald.

While walking on the streets of St. Petersburg, Pushkin saw Tatyana Petrovna and was so moved by the experience, he stepped into a telephone booth and penned a seven line poem called I Only Loved You For Your Hair.

He tried to convince her to join him. She did not.

Alexander Pushkin was shot by Georges-Charles de Heechkeren d’Anthés in 1837. He was tall and blonde. The dispute was over a woman.

When there was no more hair, she began to gnaw at her fingers. Until there was nothing left but enjambed nubs.

The only remaining fragments of her last poem read:

]
] lyre lyre lyre
]
] i might go
]
]
]
]
] celery
]

—END—

–Joseph Cassara is a writing student at Columbia University. His short stories, humor and nonfiction have been featured in Eclectica Magazine, Quarto, The Eye, and The Faster Times. He lives in New York City.

Sean Patrick Hill

From Eye, Ghost:

Eye wake up in a construct. Eye lay on my
bed and sweat. Eye replay final moments. Eye try to
picture her face. Eye program a future version of myself
to remember it, slick with seawater, ringed with wet hair.
Eye go to a little shop where they sell machines
that keep you up. Eye lay the crumpled body next
to a convenience store.

Mirov recursively gathers the key figural elements of Ghost Machine into “Eye, Ghost,” the long significant section at the center of the book, substituting the speaking subject’s prior I, with the psychically-charged eye. I plan to be another language in the body of deer in “Sleepless Night Ghost” permutates to Eye plan to be another shadow in the body of deer in “Eye, Ghost.” In such recursions and refigurations, GM’s symbolic objects take on the status of motif. Grave and persistent motifs, to borrow language from Valéry, which affect the ear, the open path set deeply and directly into the reader’s cognitive copse. In so doing, Mirov lays and overlays feedback loops of sound and syntactic shape on the reader’s short term memory.

Mirov’s genius lies in his ability to centripetally reel those loops towards the book’s gravitational core. This reeling-in has an obverse aspect: it amplifies the skips and twitches of the poems’ associative nimbleness and stop/start iterations and erasures, essentially heightening the centrifugal dynamics of the text while deeply compressing its figures. The result is overwhelming, a gut-wrenching torsion, a whirl of implosion and disbursement something like the psycho-emotional blastvaccum of love’s abrupt termination. As such the emotional terrain of GM is figured into the motif-rhythms of the poems themselves. The shape of the blastvaccum in its inertia of absence manifested in the medium of memory is taken up in the recursive form of GM, and it is in this figuration that Ghost Machine is noteworthy literature.

Mirov’s speaking subject is never seen. We perceive the character, the subject of so many of GM’s predications, by its reflection in the poems’ mise-en-scène. This array consists of the bars, public transportation, streets and bedrooms of the poems, and these settings’ correlating locational props, all which reflect the presence of the speaking subject in the text, but do not explicitly show him. Instead GM’s character emerges in a sort of gestalt from the collage; those other characters the speaking subject encounters are reflective detritus as much as are the coffee, drunk food, clothes, furniture and the rest of the array of twenty-something object-markers that populate, nearly wash out, the poems.

From “Wave Machine”:

… J calls me a shitface with tears in his eyes. We meet
at 8 and grab a bite to eat. Someone says my name is Booth. She
Gives me my third drink for free. Z laughs whenever a kid starts
a fight. There isn’t enough sex to go around.

That is, with the exception of her. The compliment of GM’s speaking subject, her, is in memory a subject previous to the speaking subject of the text, a prior agent which predicates the speaker in having caused the determining factors which constitute speaker, which bring the speaker into existence. In Eye, Ghost, by a similar degree as to which her lies prior to the speaker, the figure of the eye, the perceiving organ of the ego, projects the poem away from the speaker. In this the speaker exists in the space between the absent her and the present eye in the pronoun of pure consciousness, I (more Valéry), which has by displacement become absent itself.

…Eye remember
being in the ocean with her. Eye probably won’t see her
for years. Eye put on a clean t-shirt.

GM is the powerful poetic trace of its speaker’s slow, painful reorientation towards recovery in the vacant, psychic wake of failed love. But the speaking subject does not recover, and so Mirov avoids the  most abhorrent pitfall available to him considering the essentially not-quite-adult preoccupations and material of the world of the poems. In fact the speaker does not even enter the state of recovery; GM closes with the ghost of recovery looming in the figure of “Ghost Couple”:

I’m granted a dream of an unglowing girl.

Recovery projected through the dream-ether onto the object of desire. An adjective, an authorial gesture, unglowing, traces the attempt to demote recovery, the speaker’s object of desire embodied in the absent her, from its ideal status. But the adjective is an inadequate lever for the mass of the dream, the gesture fails, and nothing in the dream is shifted to the plain of the real.

What is Machine? It is authorial resistance to collapse made manifest in poetic form. It is the material surface of Mirov’s poems brought about in the unfolding of time amid the collapse-zone of a failed relationship. It is the speaker’s gestural traces drawn into sentences, sentences constituent of predication, subject through the verb to the object, sentences which function as charged syntactic units patterned into Ghost Machine’s emergent form. What is Ghost? It is that which has brought the speaker into existence, but also that which the speaker cannot apprehend.

“Ghost Transmitter”:

The knowledge of my receivers grows dim.
I can only misquote what the voice tries to say.
I will probably never see it in the mirror.

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Previously: Juxtaposition, the Modern Sublime, Poetry Responding to The Deepwater Horizon Disaster.

-Curtis Jensen works and studies in Brooklyn, but he’d rather be here. He maintains a blog.

Editor’s Note: This is the next installment of The Novellaist. See the column note here.

Patriotism
By Mishima Yukio
Translated by Geoffrey W. Sargent
New Directions Pearls, 2010

Mishima Yukio is not simply an incandescently poetic, unswervingly empathetic prose stylist and a professional weirdo—he famously committed seppuku in 1970 after his personal Rightist army failed to take over the Japanese military and arm it with nuclear weapons—he is also a logician not to be fucked with.

From Kinjiro (Forbidden Colours) onward, Mishima lays out stories that, however wild, are nothing if not logical.  He is the E. A. Poe of the secret-to-itself modern human heart.  When the sailor’s lover’s son kills the sailor in the very-short-novel The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, for example, our anticipation, our terror, is all the stronger for our knowing it all along—that the boy will not, cannot be turned from his course, because if he is truly a post-War nihilist with no faith in adults, he cannot make exceptions, even for the charming, down-to-earth father-figure of a sailor.

Kinjiro is even more tightly and quietly logical.  An ahead-of-its-time-then, still-ahead-of-its-time-today novel, Kinjiro details a handsome young husband’s secret gay romances, which are somehow both maudlin and ordinary—both “epically epic,” to borrow a Scott Pilgrim-ism, and all-too-familiar—what could be the individuated products of any modern human’s struggles with the same societal and biological pressures (make money; make babies).

Patriotism is more dour, a logical meditation on its title, a true novella.  The meditation is on a theme so alien to me—love of the Emperor, lust for an “honorable death”—that I expected it to read slowly.  But it is a one-train-ride read.  The whole plot is captured in précis on the back cover and the first two pages of the book; we can readily predict what will happen, thanks to our collective understanding of Japanese culture, the sister of American culture (make the robots bigger, add more flashing lights…).

But the logic of Patriotism is not without struggle and swelling, near-breaking, almost-giving-up.  The novella would not be the focused movement-towards-death—the must-see ballet of death itself, death present, becoming-death—without some flinching, however slight, on the part of the young soldier, Takeyama Shinji, and his months-married beautiful wife Reiko, with whom he finds himself in his last moments increasingly, perhaps understandably, in love.

Their gift will be the gift of death, to their Emperor and to each other, and finally to a world beyond their limited understanding. This type of death is not meant, I think, to move us to tears (or to perverse laughter), but to capture our gaze for a few dozen pages, and then leave us as it found us, alive and unsure.

Takeyama and Reiko feel the need to remove themselves from the embarrassment of a mutiny on the part of Takeyama’s fellows—a mutiny they did not ask him to participate in because of his recent marriage—a mutiny that so eerily echoes the writer’s later failed coup that I can’t help but wonder if Patriotism is not, in the end, addressed at anyone but Mishima himself.  This meditation on future-action, is not animated by its alien focus and unhappy theme, but by its very human center—Mishima’s feelings, unspoken, performed as puppet-act—which produce flawless, unhurried, unclever sentences.

Ben Franklin said, “So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.”  Mishima is very reasonable.  Lucky for his readers, he is also an enduring and, for better of for worse, honest artist.

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-Wythe Marschall can be found here. Previously on The Novellaist: The Murderess by Alexadros Papadiamantis.

Violence is the muse of the American imagination.

More than any other human impulse, more than wonder at the beauty of nature, love of God, fellow-feeling, nationalism, or romantic love, violence has inspired Americans to create new artistic genres, modes, styles: the Western. The Mobster Epic. Outlaw Country. Slam Dancing. Superhero Comics. Pulp Fiction. Gangsta Rap.

Look at our movies. It’s impossible to talk about American movies without examining the central role of violence in their development. The first feature-length movie produced in this country was a shoot-em-up Western called The Great Train Robbery. What’s characteristic about this movie is not its violent subject, but its most famous shot. It’s described by the Edison Film Company, which released the film in 1903, as “A life size picture of Barnes, leader of the outlaw band, taking aim and firing point blank at each individual in the audience. The resulting excitement is great. This section of the scene can be used either to begin the subject or to end it, as the operator may choose.”

Already, at the birth of the movies, cinematic violence was something detachable, free-floating, an end in itself. Scorsese pays tribute to this famous shot at the end of The Departed when Mark Walberg’s cop character fires at the camera. Coppola unconsciously echoed it in the theatrical print of Apocalypse Now, which begins and ends with the napalming of the Vietnamese jungle, an eerily beautiful conflagration only tenuously related to the narrative.

Since the release of The Great Train Robbery, American directors have done violence better than any other directors. Ford, the master of death on horseback.  Peckinpah, with his slow-motion lethal ballets. Penn, whose Bonnie and Clyde ushered in a new era of heightened movie violence. Scorsese. Tarantino, who in Kill Bill uses arterial spray the way Jackson Pollock used paint.

Film critics, like Pauline Kael, who employ phrases like ‘violent lyricism’ to describe what these directors do, are on the money. Like a lyric poem, violence in movies stops narrative time. The notorious scene in Scorsese’ Raging Bull, in which Jake La Motta destroys the face of a boxer fancied by Motta’s wife, is so gruesome that it annihilates everything that comes before and after. And like most violent scenes in Scorsese (think of the death of Joe Pesci’s character in Casino, for which Scorsese has gone to the trouble of getting the sound of aluminum baseball bats on bone just right), it’s executed with such loving care–slowed down, enhanced by the use of extreme close up–that we can only conclude that the director considers violence a subject of inexhaustible beauty and fascination, as the Hakuru poets viewed the cherry blossom.

There are many critics, especially European ones like Umberto Eco, who believe that genre fiction is our most significant contribution to world literature: the crime thriller, the mystery novel, the police procedural, the serial killer novel: each of these has violence at its core.

Periodically, a writer of genius will reinvent one of these genres, or slice and dice a few of them. James Ellroy took Mickey Spillane’s hard-boiled prose, mid-century scandal rag boilerplate, hipster jive, and a deeply cinematic compression, and turned this hybrid style upon the secret history of the American Century. In American Tabloid, he describes the botched Bay of Pigs invasion from the viewpoint of a participant in a low-flying plane:

They saw a supply ship snagged on a reef. They saw dead men flopping out of a hole in the hull. They saw sharks bobbing at body parts twenty yards offshore.
They saw beached landing craft. They saw live men crawling over dead men. They saw a hundred-yard stretch of bodies in bright-red shallow water.
The invaders kept coming, Flamethrowers nailed them the second they hit the wave break. They got flash-fried and boiled alive.

There is a whole school of writers who have thought of themselves as pugilists.  Hemingway, who, with Poe, must be at the center of any discussion of violence in American literature, celebrated in Spain’s bullfighting the expression of a deeply American belief, the belief in the redemptive power of ritualized violence. He famously remarked, “I’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody’s going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I’m crazy or I keep getting better.” Norman Mailer with his cocktail party dustups, friendship with Ali, and advocacy of the therapeutic power of violence. Pete Dexter, who writes about death in the ring and poses for his book jacket photo with his broken nose, a speed bag hanging in the background.

James Wright, probably our best postwar poet, saw our belief in redemptive violence with far more ambivalence; in his heartbreaking ‘Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio’ he described the tragic way this belief is acted out on our high school football fields:

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.

And there are less obvious examples from other arts. Jackson Pollock, whom Life magazine called ‘Jack the Dripper,’ and who enacted on canvas the violent rituals of his life. Miles Davis, who aspired to ‘play like [Sugar Ray] Robinson boxed.”  And Davis could play like a boxer: percussively, alternating long periods of stalking silence with short explosive riffs, setting up a counter rhythm to frustrate his opponent’s expectations (more than any artist, Miles saw the audience as the antagonist). Large swaths of hip hop mash up a series of American archetypes: Gunslinger, mobster, juvenile delinquent, urban revolutionary–the gangsta rapper is a little bit of all of these.

Where does this obsession with violence in country originate? In his All God’s Children, Fox Butterfield, like most historians of violence, mentions the persistence of the frontier mentality in our national consciousness. But others trace our fascination back to our Puritan roots. In an interview, Rikki Ducornet, whose novel, The Fanmaker’s Inquisition, is a fantasia on the Marquis de Sade, was asked why our culture, with its obsession with  ritualized torture, sexual violence, and brilliant serial killers like Hannibal Lecter, was so Sadean, she replied: “The obsession with the body, which is really a hatred of the body, is a legacy of our Puritan ancestors…the belief in man’s innate badness is always a problem in Christian cultures.”

Rap Brown, who as Jamil Al-Amin, was sentenced several years ago to life in prison for the murder of one deputy and the attempted murder of another, is best remembered as a political figure. As an agitprop sloganeer, he popularized the catchphrase ‘Burn, baby, burn” that punctuated the inner-city riots of the 60s, and coined the phrase that began this essay.  It is often misquoted as “Violence is American as apple pie.” This misses the uncomfortably sexual connotation of his phrase. ‘Cherry pie’ was, and is, a sexualized term, especially for a young, available woman. So, Brown’s insinuation that violence is as American as cherry pie has a double meaning, one that hints at a disturbing impulse that is at the heart of this country’s history.

As James Ellroy, writes in the preface to American Tabloid: “America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets.”

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John Broening’s Column Note.

—John Broening is a chef and writer based in Denver, Colorado. His work has appeared in the Baltimore Sun, the Baltimore City Paper, Gastronomica, Edible Front Range, and the Denver Post, for whom he writes a weekly column about food.