Reality From The Eyes of the Uncanny: Gutshot by Amelia Gray

Posted on by 007595

A swan’s foot, like a duck’s, is a webbed claw. In traversing swan shit and mud, these claws naturally gunk up and reek. Nobody in the history of the world, save another swan, has licked a swan’s foot while that foot was still attached to the swan.

So begins “The Swan as a Metaphor for Love,” which in little more than a page, encapsulates the pitch-black humor, vivid grossness, and scathing critique of human emotions that is characteristic of Amelia Gray’s Gutshot. In Gray’s hands, a swan­ — commonly the epitome of avian grace, reverence and respect, emblematic of romance through its use in corny ‘love boat’ rides — stinks of “bacterial purge,” and will “bite you and tear your flesh.” The swan “will attack you… if you are trying to have a conversation with their mate,” conjuring the vision of a jealous lover, so insecure in their relationship that they imagine everyone a threat. Famously known for their tradition of mating for life:

someone found a swan once that was twenty-four years old and probably it was mating for life, which everyone made a big deal out of even though the swan was not even old enough to rent a car. The swan wasn’t yet acquainted with life enough to silently hyperventilate in its bed.

For Gray, the sentimental symbolism of the swan is naïve, overcome by the reality of love, as “anyone who claims the swan is a majestic and noble creature has never seen a swan up close.” Her juxtaposition of the superficially clean, composed swan, and its underbelly of filth and shit, is representative of Gray’s view of the human condition as a whole. In her work, nothing is quite what it seems.

Gray published her first novel, THREATS, in 2012, and with Gutshot returns to short fiction, adding to her collections AM/PM (2009) and Museum of the Weird (2010). Like Museum of the Weird, Gutshot is comprised of a series of unsettling short stories, which on the surface appear unrelated, have faint threads that link them: violence, sickness, madness and desire. Both collections elicit a sense of foreboding, characteristically emblematic of Gray’s writing, as epitomized in her novel, THREATS, a book both extremely unsettling and deeply moving.

The novel’s account of both manifest and metaphysical mysteries deftly communicates what is just as often inexpressible — grief, mourning and depression — by undermining reality with her protagonist David’s unreliable, borderline insane, narration. In Gutshot, Gray continues to use mentally unstable and unpredictable characters, and thus is able to create worlds with uncanny realities, at once strange and familiar, and always unexpected.

Perhaps the most unsettling attribute of Gray’s writing is her deadpan presentation of what are quite often unspeakable acts, and while this unsettling detachment gnaws away as we read, we are unwilling to remove ourselves from our discomfort before reaching the disturbing climax. In “The Moment of Conception,” a couple attempt a sort of procreation ritual that involves “some sacrifice,” to say the least. When promoted by his partner to consent, rather than fear the man feels “dominated by the thought that it was difficult to find a person with whom I shared so many of my hobbies.” After dismembering his penis and sewing it inside her “bloody sex,” the two lie entwined, feeling:

There were things that we would do for each other, sacrifices we would make, and the proof of that fact was in front of us plain as an hour in the day. It was a beautiful morning or afternoon.

By offering the horrific and disturbing without judgment, Gray intensifies their effect on us. We become more disturbed by violence and psychosis when these thoughts and actions are offered to us neutrally, as if they were normal.

Gray’s writing frequently leaves us mystified, unable to comprehend the scenes laid out before us with near-sociopathic detachment. In “House Heart,” one of the most twisted stories in Gutshot, a couple kidnap and imprison a young prostitute who “smelled like a bowl of sugar that had been sprayed with a disinfectant.” They bribe her to live within the arterial ventilation system of their house like a human hamster, engaging in a game they call ‘House Heart.’ Aroused by her fear and the thought of her captivity, they make love as she crawls above them, pressed onto her stomach, dehumanized. Either completely unaware of, or resistant to, the idea that their behaviour is abhorrent, the couple believe “each of us had our individual function and hers was to embody the house, which had begun to smell like a hot scalp.” At no point does Gray indicate if she supports or condemns their beliefs and behaviors, and this absence of moral compass permeates her work, causing the reader to question their own morality when faced with such ambiguity.

Her neutral tone, enhanced by the use of third person narration, encourages us to embrace her writing’s dark secretions without conscience, simultaneously engaging in gleeful enjoyment of the repugnance provoked, feeling repulsed by the sickness of her creations. One of this collection’s standout stories, “Fifty Ways to Eat Your Lover,” plays with these conflicting reactions of delight and disgust, and is guaranteed to make those of any gender wince. This list of ways to graphically maim and torture your male lover is fantastically funny and absolutely vile in equal measure. Charting a relationship from start to finish, Gray subverts romantic tropes, suggesting, “When he tells you he loves you, paper-cut his fingertips and suck their blood. When he asks you to marry him, panfry his foreskin.” The story exemplifies the underlying feminism, even misandry, prevalent in Gray’s writing, which is refreshingly brazen and unapologetic.

Adding another layer to the delicate disturbance is the unnerving sense of familiarity contained within many of Gutshot’s stories. Gray’s characters act on feelings that most people only daydream or fantasise about. There is a sense that they signify repressed desires to commit inappropriate, taboo, even immoral actions. Thus, the true horror of her work is founded in its realism: while some stories are fantastical, others are undeniably plausible. “Away From” is on the extreme end of this, with its themes of kidnapping, rape and murder, all discussed in Gray’s typically detached tone; the victim thinks to herself “Well now you are in a predicament,” and later “the thing about fighting is you can’t fight forever”. In “Curses,” twins inflict awful illnesses upon their mother, for no apparent reason other than sick gratification, and with no penance. It would be amiss to assume no child has ever wished for the ability to do the same, but disturbing to consider all the same.

Despite this, Gray’s writing is, at times, extremely funny. Many scenes elicit bursts of unabashed laughter amidst the gore and strangeness. In “Thank You,” two women exchange ‘thank you’ notes of increasingly elaborate forms:

a postal tube arrived and the woman opened it to release eight disorientated white mice. They tumbled out in a line and scrambled for safety. She gave them water and sliced up an apple but was confused by their presence until later that evening when, save for one, they seized and made tiny bowel movements which produced the alphabet beads T H A N K O and U. The last one was uncomfortably constipated in a life-threatening way until she took him to the vet and had the Y extracted at the expense of forty-five dollars.

There is the sense that, for Gray, the gross and the amusing go hand-in-hand. In an interview with The New Yorker, she commented, “Life is a natural mix of horror and humor.” While this is hard to disagree with, in Gutshot she takes this idea to the extreme. Comic scenes do not come as relief for the reader, but rather heighten our experience of the bizarre and unsettling. By making us laugh, she offers a brief thrill of pleasure, before plunging us back into the horror. It can, at times, be alienating, and certainly one needs a strong stomach to read. Gutshot seems most suited to those with an appreciation of dark comedy. Gray’s warped imagination and love of the absurd has created a haunted house of human perversion, brimming with black humor.

[Editor’s note: read “These Are the Fables” from Gutshot in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading.]

Gutshot: Stories

by Amelia Gray

Powells.com

A Special Form of Crazy, a conversation with Jeremy M. Davies, author of Fancy

Posted on by 007595

by Eric Lundgren

At a 2011 reading in St. Louis, hosted by the university we both attended (though not concurrently), I heard Jeremy M. Davies read from his work in progress. The passage he read was about a character who painstakingly hung mirrors along the street where he walked to work so that he would never lose sight of the reflection of his house. The character’s name was Rumrill and I haven’t yet fully managed to get his voice out of my head. That might be why my head hasn’t been feeling quite right for the past three and a half years.

The voice — by turns corrosively witty, obsessive, anxious, and hallucinatory — is the driving force behind Davies’s newly published novel, Fancy. It follows 2009’s Rose Alley, which documented the making of a failed film about the Earl of Rochester during the May 1968 uprising in Paris. Whereas Rose Alley was a verbally promiscuous, prismatic sex comedy, Fancy turns its gaze inward. It begins with Rumrill delivering instructions to the supposed caretakers of his twenty cats in the foyer of his home. Then he begins to recount how he, too, was once a caretaker for a man named Brocklebank, who owned thirty cats. And no cats of any kind seem to be around … Rumrill’s monologue builds into a deeply strange ontological investigation, as well as a hypnotic and compulsively readable account of one man’s baroque attempts to process and cope with the world inside and outside his house. It is an invention of great wit, imagination, and feeling — what they used to call, a few centuries ago, “fancy.”

Fancy “could become a cult classic,” according to a starred Publishers Weekly review, and the Times Literary Supplement called it “a witty and ingenious polyphonic invention.” Joining Rose Alley (Counterpath, 2009) and Fancy (Ellipsis, 2015), Jeremy M. Davies’s debut collection of short fiction, The Knack of Doing, will be published by David R. Godine/Black Sparrow later this year. He is Senior Editor at Dalkey Archive Press. I was very glad to have the opportunity to interview him by e-mail.

Eric Lundgren: While the novel takes the form of cat-sitting instructions, Rumrill, the novel’s narrator and I guess we could say protagonist, turns this form to his own private and delightful ends. I kept thinking of J. L. Austin’s notion of “performative language,” the way certain kinds of language alter reality or create reality anew. Early on Rumrill refers to his instructions as “arias.” To what extent did you have the sense of performance while you were writing this? It’s a one-man show in many ways.

Jeremy M. Davies: It would be a difficult performance to pull off, live. Performative but not necessarily performable.

Do you know Wallace Shawn’s monologue The Fever, which is meant to be put on in a private rather than a public space? I’ve never seen it played — there’s an excellent audio version available, but that’s not the same thing as having someone standing in your own living room, “acting” as you try to avoid eye contact. But my notion of what it might be like to have that text delivered to you in this fashion, without your knowing what you’ve gotten yourself into — and without a way out, since you’re already at home — was in my peripheral vision as I was knocking Fancy into shape. A monologue beginning pretty harmlessly, comically, gradually getting sinister, cutting off lines of (rhetorical) escape, and recasting familiar things as threatening. So, perhaps “undermining” reality than creating it anew.

Which, at just about the other end of the engagé scale from Shawn, is kind of an old trope in “weird tales,” isn’t it? The words you shouldn‘t hear, the knowledge that you’re not meant to have, uncovered in a “house on the borderland,” leaving you mad … Though here this world-destroying kernel is concealed in a bunch of supposed cat-sitting instructions. To each his own?

EL: Which raises the issue of Fancy’s fantastical edge. You do a lot of what the SF crowd calls world-building, here.

JMD: You know, parenthetically, I have trouble with that term. I understand how it can serve as useful shorthand, but something about its recent ubiquity rubs me the wrong way. As though every work of fiction doesn’t already “build a world” with its own and necessarily fantastical/fictive rules, no matter whether they happen to be dressed up like everyday things rather than folkloric or science-fictional ones … Am I being oversensitive? (I’m really asking.)

EL: “Building,” I suppose, in the sense of establishing what is and isn’t possible in a fictional world line by line. As opposed to deferring to a kind of consensus reality. This is important in Fancy, the idea of language as a system for processing the world and the eroding effects of secondhand language and cliché.

Part of the fun of any novel worth its wood-pulp is, for me, the delight I take in suspending my assumptions as it teaches me how it means to be read…

JMD: I’d say that “consensus reality” doesn’t just apply to brand names and smartphones and city landmarks and all the other impedimenta we use to signal that a book takes place in what’s meant to be the real world: it also applies to genre. That is, we have a consensus as to what makes a fantasy novel, we have a consensus as to what makes a coming-of-age story. So “They had their usual seats at Wrigley Field” and “They had their usual seats by the warp-drive monitoring station” each provides an equal (if different) number of reference points. Whereas the real trick is in setting out the rules for how the world of the book works, as you say — which is as much a linguistic process as it is a juggling of generic expectations. Part of the fun of any novel worth its wood-pulp is, for me, the delight I take in suspending my assumptions as it teaches me how it means to be read — as it makes its various concessions to and perpetrates its various violations upon the history of the form.

But yes, Fancy’s world is one that takes very seriously the prospect of language eroding thought, and thought eroding reality. Mainly what it wants to teach you is suspicion.

EL: And Fancy’s is a very sparsely furnished world. Outside of Rumrill’s house, and his precursor Brocklebank’s house, we have a train station, a bridge, a library … am I forgetting anything?

JMD: The railway graveyard … ?

EL: I loved the railway graveyard. And there’s the high-rise tenement in which the prospective cat-sitters live, and which blocked Rumrill’s view of the town, and which seems to represent a sort of obscure doom that has fallen over the area. But I guess what I’m saying is that you tend to avoid the dense substantiating stuff we’d find in a more conventionally realistic fiction.

JMD: See, to me, that doesn’t sound sparse at all! A train station, a bridge, a library — that’s a hell of a lot more generous than some stories. This starkness is probably more attributable to the fact that Rumrill’s town lacks the usual signifiers placing it in a recognizable somewhere, so the information he does volunteer floats in the middle of a lot of supposition, rather than being suspended in a known quantity like “Paris” or “Sheboygan.” Its landmarks come to feel a bit talismanic.

Unless you’re Michel Butor, though, or someone with a similar project — that is, if you have a program of density, as in his wonderful Passing Time — you’re probably doing something wrong if your substantiating “stuff” feels dense, as such…

EL: Fancy’s landscape isn’t deliberately starved or denuded of facts, but every fact is harassed. There’s a pervasive sense of doubt in the novel, applying to even its most central propositions: the existence of Rumrill’s cats, and the Mr. and Mrs. Pickles he’s supposedly instructing, to begin with. Rumrill’s phenomenological doubts are a key theme — kind of a wobbly fulcrum for the whole book — and this extends to the narrative world. So it’s world-building and world-undermining at once.

JMD: What we do learn is always subject to second-guessing, yes. Rumrill isn’t even sure what the weather is like outside (or, anyway, he refuses to make a clear statement without gainsaying it in the next line). On the subject of science fiction, now that you’ve let that imp out of the bottle, I’ll mention that another work often on my mind when writing Fancy was a Michael Moorcock story, I think called “The Dream of Earl Aubec.” It’s a creation myth of sorts, and — bearing in mind I haven’t read it in more than twenty years and am inevitably going to be remembering it wrong — is about a prehistorical hero-type being talked by a goddess into venturing out beyond the known world. The man is hesitant because he knows there’s nothing out there — the world drops off and turns into chaos where the map ends. But the goddess prevails upon him, and when he sets his no-doubt jewel-encrusted boot over the border, he doesn’t fall off the edge: the map is instantly filled in, and not with new countries, but countries that were always there. So Rumrill’s town is perhaps the remnant of a country where the bloom’s come off of that act of creating what was already there; or where the foundation of this creation has been — here’s that word again — undermined. Things are turning back into mush. Save, that is, for a library, a bridge, etc.; save for what our very unheroic and jewelry-free hero is present, in person, to witness and thereby keep stable.

But then it’s an open question even to himself whether Rumrill is fighting a holding action against the mush or is actually its agent.

EL: It’s not a place that would appear on any map, but I do think of Rumrill’s home as being in a Midwestern town, although I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because we both live here, a few hours apart, although I rarely see you.

JMD: That’s funny, I see you all the time.

I think of it as Midwestern too. It’s a scrambled, impossible, certainly post-”obscure doom” Midwest, but I won’t pretend that the resemblance is coincidental. I’ve lived here a decade now and I still feel as though it might as well be Mars. (Or, more to the point, as though I might as well be from Mars.)

EL: It may also be the horizontal quality of much of the architecture, or the sense of ruination (the sewers aren’t functioning well and rats are showing up in bank lobbies, and the library mainly stocks survival manuals).

JMD: Aha! See? It is conventionally realistic fiction. This stuff is practically documentary!

EL: I also have the sense that recluses, I mean hard-core recluses, prefer the Midwest.

JMD: I could hypothesize, irresponsibly, that this is because there are less people crowded together here than on the coasts and borders? And yet enough people everywhere for it to feel inhabited, even teeming, despite an accompanying sense of emptiness due to the absence of topography. It incites loneliness but offers no solitude, and is almost anti-picturesque over long stretches: it’s a place where things are both rigorously human sized (with nothing much taller than a person, and for miles in every direction) and yet often inappropriate for human habitation (because fouled and then abandoned by industry, for example; or simply because it’s not much more than a filled-in swamp). You’re made to feel like the center of the universe while also feeling enormously exposed and vulnerable. Which induces a special form of crazy. Especially if you’re a transplant from places with greater population density, more amenities, more community, more tallness. I can imagine a Brocklebank landing here from Vienna and looking out over the corn-and-soy fields, yelling: wake up and make some sense, damn it!

EL: There’s a beautiful description in here of how cats might read rearranged furniture as a science-fictional geography. Part of Brocklebank’s treatise on cat-fancying, which Rumrill quotes from time to time in his monologue, ends up in a pulpy science-fiction journal along the lines of Weird Tales. I’ve been told you’re a big Doctor Who fan and I wonder how you see this line of influence playing out here and perhaps in future works.

JMD: Whoa, whoa, whoa — you’ve been told? Who have you been talking to?

All the time my family thought they were sending me to yeshiva to get God, I was actually studying Doctor Who.

All right, it’s a fair cop. Doctor Who was a foundational text for me, growing up — I’m talking about the ’80s now. All the time my family thought they were sending me to yeshiva to get God, I was actually studying Doctor Who. I imagine there are probably still copies of holy books at my grade school that have little blue ball-point TARDISes scratched into the flyleaves. But look, I consumed nothing but science fiction till after eighth grade. Any novel without some fantastical element in it bored me stupid. Then I read Joyce and Bernhard and Borges and realized that there were sneakier, more challenging, and funnier ways to avoid tedium than having explicit recourse to fantasy. Or, to put it another way, that style could be more fun than spaceships. (Not that you can’t also have both.)

So, yes, Fancy has a pulpy/Lovecraftian air to it, at times, along with the qualities of alienness and phenomenological slipperiness we’ve already spoken about. And Rose Alley has a super villain and lots of other jiggery-pokery that you’d have to call “unrealistic.” But those are more jokes than subjects.

As to future work, who can say. There’s a novel to be written about the odd relationship kids brought up in religious atmospheres can develop with what I’ll call “competing mythologies.” After all, it can’t be news to anyone that Western religion is where we get the notion of there being canon and noncanon (that is, apocrypha/fan fiction) — such a vexed issue with convoluted, long-running properties like Who or the Abrahamic religions: these impossible things happened, but absolutely not those …

EL: There’s a sense in which Brocklebank’s system of cat-fancying does come to feel religious. In any case, it’s a total system for understanding the world. Rumrill seems to be living out the consequences of this system, this faith as it were, although he’s a less than perfect exegete.

JMD: Judaism as a pedagogical and scholarly discipline is extraordinarily concerned with exegesis, with mapping every scintilla of the universe with rules derived from rules derived from texts derived from conversations derived from rumors derived from annotations derived from interpretations derived from texts derived from marginal comments. There’s a Talmudic echo in Brocklebank’s cat-fancying system and Rumrill’s study/sabotage of it. But, then, the revelation that the only place B. could get excerpts of his tractatus published during his lifetime was in a Weird Tales analogue is a good indication that his ideas were pretty cracked even before Rumrill got his hands on them.

There’s a Barry N. Malzberg story in which aliens torture a science-fiction hobbyist to get their grubby little protuberances upon an issue of a pulp magazine he has in his collection, all because one of its long-dead contributors published there a secret of unimaginable importance in the guise of a short story. I’m not sure I read that until after I finished Fancy, but it goes to show … something. Not least that there are preoccupations (like science fiction) that have a way of evolving into bizarre and potentially unsavory theologies (not to mention bizarre and potentially unsavory theologies that have a way of evolving into science fiction).

EL: Brocklebank’s commandments are definitely bizarre. And there’s just a great deadpan sense of humor in the way they’re presented. Rereading the book, I’m both impressed by the control of the voice and retroactively concerned for your sanity. I can’t really imagine what long-term immersion in this project would be like. Rose Alley was an elaborately structured novel with several Oulipian constraints in place. I’m curious what your own writing systems were here and how they helped you to control the material in Fancy.

JMD: There’s the Rumrillish sentence and then the Brocklebankian sentence. Those structures were the container for all the book’s material, one size fits all, and were adhered to with occasionally discomfiting rigidity; it was a sort of autosuggestion: the trance state that minimal music can induce. (What was it Bob Ashley said? “Short ideas repeated massage the brain”?) So while I’d hesitate to call Fancy Oulipian, the syntactical rules for these sentences, their shape and rhythm, were indeed determined in advance, and these determined in turn the shape of the book and also much of its content (this notion of being infected by other peoples’ manners of speech, and having your mind remade as a consequence, is itself a consequence of my imposing upon myself these manners of speech). Having said all that, though, it probably goes without saying that I’m not so interested in rules and constraints for their own sake; at the end of the day, I want to have produced something good, to have added something of value to the tradition. (Which is my way of saying I cheat like a bastard as needed.)

EL: I was thinking particularly of the passages from different composers and musicians that are appropriated for Brocklebank’s opus — this was pointed out in an astute review by Paul Griffiths in the TLS. Those liftings definitely bring different air, verbal draughts, into the book.

JMD: Rumrill, greedy amoeba that he is, absorbed almost all of Brocklebank’s role, leaving the old man with only the words of others. The idea behind cento’ing my betters was, as you say, to put something into the book that originated outside its airless pocket-universe. (But the sheer, perverse fun of repurposing serious music writing to be about something as seemingly insignificant as managing your house pets can’t be left out of the equation.)

Part of the challenge and the pleasure of Fancy was seeing how all sorts of different statements could become Rumrillish or Brocklebankian if subjected to the same pressures. I even experimented with hiding bits of other novels in Fancy, “translated” and denuded into plodding, methodical Rumrill-speak; for example, the first line of Gravity’s Rainbow. (None of these survived into the finished book, thank goodness, though it was pretty funny at the time …) Try it at home!

EL: One rule of Fiction Writing 101 that you break quite pleasurably in Fancy is the prohibition on dream sequences. There’s one in which Rumrill dreams he’s dressed as the Queen of England, and another where he dreams an opera in detail. There’s also that M.C. Escher mirror-corridor sequence on the train.

JMD: What prohibition? Oh dear; I don’t think I got that memo. Do they call it Moresby’s Law, or something? (“‘No!’ cried Kit with force. ‘Dreams are so dull! Please!’”)

EL: Yeah, it was the very first class. They handed out AWP badges. You came in late, and naked … you don’t remember?

JMD: I’ve never had that dream . . . I did actually have the train dream, though, more or less as described in Fancy. Maybe I shouldn’t be admitting that. And I have dreamed entire nonexistent movies or plays (or: on waking I had the impression of having done so), and I did have a nightmare when very young about there being an afterlife that was essentially identical to this life, just grayer. Terrifying.

If you’re alone too often, it’s can be difficult to tell the difference between a memory and a dream.

If you’re alone too often, it’s can be difficult to tell the difference between a memory and a dream. Not that you have trouble distinguishing reality from fantasy or any such dime store nonsense, but in a very ordinary and unavoidable sense, in the absence of stimuli, external proofs, it can be easy to mistake a conversation you might really have had for one you’ve only dreamed about having. Texturally, that kind of confusion typifies Rumrill’s world (or Rumrill himself). He isn’t sure, frequently, whether an event happened before or after another. That non-logic is native to dreaming. Dreams were also, in terms of their practical use, one of a few ways the book has to escape the foyer and point Rumrill at subjects that wouldn’t otherwise come up.

Brocklebank dreams too. He speaks initially of his system having come to him in a dream, to “an incredibly detailed degree.” This sentence originates in some liner notes by the composer Mauricio Kagel, but I was probably thinking too of Jacques Roubaud’s epic autobiographical novel The Great Fire of London, which was inspired (if that’s the word) by a dream the author had during a period of loneliness and despondency. Or, to be more accurate, what Roubaud dreamed about was a project he was never able to complete; The Great Fire of London isn’t the edifice he hoped to build but a record of his defeat. Brocklebank would sympathize.

As to the mirrors … this is one of those subjects it’s virtually impossible to address without sounding like an ass. Mirrors, marionnettes, mannequins, and masks are hotspots for twaddle. Really, the “mirror corridor” section of Fancy began as 100% schtick: it grew from my taking a preposterous postulate seriously (like so much of the book). But you’re right it rhymes with the train dream, and with much else in Rumrill’s world, which (not to put too fine a point on it) is in toto a brand of Midwestern, phenomenological nightmare — unalloyed solipsism being another preposterous postulate Fancy chooses to take in deadly earnest. Rumrill can only see Rumrills, endlessly, and endlessly isolated.

It comes down, I think, to my own real terror and fascination with sameness, repetition. With the autophagy one is driven into when too long alone, or too much aware. With the strictly nursery-school but nonetheless rather upsetting notion that there’s no real way to get out of your head without losing it.

EL: As a public librarian myself, I naturally enjoyed your portrayal of Rumrill’s erotic activities in the stacks with his former supervisor, back before he became a cat-fancier and amanuensis to Brocklebank. He in fact meets Brocklebank through his work at the library, suggesting (plausibly I think) that public library work may be an entry point into deep eddies of idiosyncrasy and corrosive solitude. But Rumrill looks back on his time in the stacks with a genuine, if befuddled, tenderness, it seems.

JMD: I suppose Rumrill’s tenderness is inherited from me. I would have liked to be a librarian. I did work for a time at my college library; I loved losing myself in the semi-abandoned Dewey Decimal stacks (everything past a certain date was cataloged Library of Congress style, but no one ever bothered to convert the older books). I’d disappear a lot when I was meant to be shelf-reading or putting back returned titles. I probably did bring a couple of friends down there with me. It was one of the most private places on campus, despite being open to the public. You’d run into students on even the most forsaken spot of waste ground in the dead of February, but, strange to say, the depths of the library went unmolested. (And books, of course, make excellent sound baffles.)

It’s easy for city-dwellers to take libraries for granted — I mean for their services, not for their potential as trysting places. (Or, anyway, both.) Out on the plains, they’re absolutely necessary. It’s a sort of miracle that, even in the most destitute and far-flung Midwestern towns I’ve passed through, being choked to death by car culture and misdirected capital, there’s usually still a little public library holding on for dear life. I feel certain the rest of their funding will be cut in a year or two, and then — well, on comes the “obscure doom.”

EL: Yeah, we’re still holding out. That may be why I find Rumrill sympathetic despite his repellant qualities. He’s a holdout. And not to sentimentalize your work, I hope, but I find Fancy quite moving as a document of the immense imaginative work Rumrill has undergone to cope with loneliness and to make life in what he repeatedly calls “the big world out there” tolerable for himself.

People keep apologizing to me for finding the book funny or sad.

JMD: Then I’ve done something right. People keep apologizing to me for finding the book funny or sad. I assure you all sentiment and comedy were very much intended! Rumrill and Brocklebank are both tragic figures, to my mind. That their tragedy is of no consequence, in itself, only makes them more so; as does the comedy of their (perhaps successful!) attempts to force the rest of reality into their mold.

EL: Finally, I have to ask about your own cats. How many of them are there, if any? What are their names? Have their food and water bowls been filled recently? In general, how are they doing?

JMD: I didn’t have any while writing Fancy — there goes the roman à clef! But my wife brought one with her when she moved in, so I do have one now — his name is Osip. He’s fine, fed, watered; healthy. Extremely free with complaints, by no means a silent cog in any abstruse ontological machinery (that I know of). He’s in a permanent snit because we also came to adopt a three-legged Indian street dog named Zuleika, who would really rather that the cat get no attention whatever. She’s now eaten three copies of Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematographer, so I know she’s got taste. I’ll give the menagerie your regards.

How Bigots Invaded the Hugo Awards

Posted on by 007595

If you’ve heard the rumblings about the Hugo nominations, perhaps you just shrugged your shoulders and said “what’s a Hugo again?” Even if you know that the Hugo Award is one of the two most coveted science fiction and fantasy literary prizes (the other being the Nebula), you still might assume the controversy is a nerdy Alien Vs. Predator situation in which picking a side feels like rooting for an arbitrary monster. But that’s not the case here. What has happened is simple: an angry mob has exploited a loophole in how nominations occur in order to crash a party that they seemingly detest anyway. The gaming of the Hugo Awards Ballot wasn’t executed for frivolous reasons: it was organized by racist, homophobic people who want science fiction to be going backwards instead of looking toward the future.

Was the airlock left open for certain creatures to enter the starship of the Hugo Awards? Yes. On both the Hugo website and the site for the current World Con (SasquanCon) you’ll notice that to become a voting member requires about $40 dollars. Even the Hugo Awards site itself says specifically “voting is easy.” If you have the 40 bucks and you don’t care about not attending the ceremony itself, you can vote. In the past, this hasn’t really resulted in what most would consider overt gaming-of-the-system, but the ability is clearly there.

So, what happened this year? Here it is briefly: a campaign started by largely politically conservative science fiction and fantasy enthusiasts got together and decided they’d had enough of alleged liberal bias in the Hugo Awards. This movement is known as “Sad Puppies,” and sometimes as “Rabid Puppies” in an attempt to mock people (liberals? I guess?) who are (one has to assume) affected by the woes of small animals. If you’ve ever listened to Rush Limbaugh, you can imagine how clever these folks think these code-words/monikers are.

The Sad Puppies campaign began two years ago, organized by two writers named Larry Corriea and Brad R. Torgersen in an effort to de-throne what they perceive as a “social justice warrior” strangle-hold on the science fiction and fantasy publishing awards. Torgersen, for example, lambasted the Hugos as turning into “an affirmative action award” that was given out “because a writer or artist is (insert underrepresented minority or victim group here) or because a given work features (insert underrepresented minority or victim group here) characters.” In previous years, their attempt to get “their” authors on the ballot has been less than successful. However, his year’s efforts were overwhelming successful, in part because an even more reactionary splinter ballot put forward by Vox Day. In the Best Novel Category 3 of the 5 nominees were on their ballots, while in the Best Novella, Best Novellete, and Best Short Story Categories 100% of the nominees were Sad Puppies or Rabid Puppies. Overall, 61 of the nominees were from one of the two Puppies slates and a mere 24 nominees were on neither.

Now, in fairness, the “liberal elite” that the Sad/Rabid Puppies claim to be fighting against, such as John Scalzi, have encouraged members to vote for titles or to vote to increase diversity in nominations before. From a third-grade notion of “fairness” it could be easy to argue these conservative folks have done the same thing, simply flipped the tables on the liberal masters of science fiction and fantasy. However, the supposed liberal faction has never put forward a single slate that won anything like 61 nominations.

While Larry Corriea and Brad R. Torgersen have gotten a lot of the credit in the press, the real power behind this year’s Hugo nominations is someone else: Theodore Beale. Beale goes by the pseudonym of Vox Day, and is conveniently the lead editor of Castalia House — a new press that landed 9 nominations plus two more for Vox Day as editor. Castalia House publishes a writer named John C. Wright, who, if you didn’t know any better, you might think has suddenly become the greatest science fiction writer in the world, literally overnight. Wright, famous for his homophobic rants, garnered an amazing six Hugo nominations thanks to the Sad and Rabid Puppies ballot stuffing scheme of the Hugos.

Beale himself is a self-described “fundamentalist” who’s gotten into numerous tussles with writers like John Scalzi, and actually managed to get himself kicked out of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America for calling the great black writer N.K. Jemisin a “half-savage” among other offenses. As you can guess, and as Jemisin has pointed out, Beale is unapologetically racist.

Now, as someone who has attended a number of SFWA events and occasionally feels like an outsider for my own odd reasons, I will say you have to be some kind of monster to get yourself kicked out of this organization of largely sweet, supportive, and yes, politically diverse group of people. Vox Day/Theodore Beale thinks women can’t go to college or rather, can’t deal with science when they do. He thinks people like Darwin are awful. He once intentionally misinterpreted a satirical letter John Scalzi wrote decrying rape culture and attempted to paint John Scalzi as a rapist.

So, because Larry Corriea and Brad R. Torgersen believed their politics were being excluded from the Hugos they created their latest “ballot” of their “Sad Puppies.” With the help — sought after or not — of Vox Day, they essentially got enough votes to get all of their nominees nominated for awards in numerous categories. I’m not saying Corriea and Torgesen or even Wright are reactionary hate-speech folks like Beale, but his influence helped them win.

So, the Sad/Rabid Puppies have indicated how purely democratic the Hugo Awards actually are, but they also revealed their smallness. Weirdly, these people claim to be championing books and other writing which are more “popular” than the liberal books they excluded. But this “suppressed popularity” just isn’t real. As Jason Sanford points out, novels like The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu and Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer sold better than most of the novels on the Sad/Rabid Puppies slate.

Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with Scalzi’s tactics and there’s nothing wrong with the tactics of the Sad/Rabid Puppies. Like Scalzi, they’re “just” exploiting a system that’s easy to exploit to get writing on a ballot that they think is worthwhile. But this is not the loyal opposition. These are people using somewhat legitimate tactics to perpetrate a racist and intolerant point of view. Or at the very least, using a racist and intolerant publisher (Beale) to wield power to get their moment in the sun. Just because you play by the “rules” doesn’t mean you’re being remotely fair or kind.

So what next? There are a lot of cries now to open up the voting procedures even more, while other people I’ve talked to feel like making into more of a closed club house is actually the only solution. In any case, while the Hugos assumed everybody would play fair, and perhaps had too loose of a policy, we cannot put the blame on the burgled for leaving their door unlocked.

But that’s not the real issue. The real issue is that there are groups of people motivated in opposition to progress. Last year’s Hugo Nominations were among some the most diverse ever. This year, in the categories untouched by the Sad Puppies, like Graphic Novel, we see the excellent G.Willow Wilson being nominated for her Ms. Marvel “No Normal” series; a storyline about a Muslim teenage superhero, which is certainly something that Beale/Vox Day would likely be opposed to. The Sad Puppies also were only able to influence the best novel category to a point; acclaimed books like Anne Leckie’s Ancillary Sword still made it on. But how are these people supposed to feel about this? Would you even want to show up to the awards?

There’s an old Ali G. sketch in which “Ali G.” interviews Noam Chomsky and ignorantly asks him what would happen if he “invented his own language.” After muttering hilarious nonsense words at Chomsky, the noted linguist says to Ali G. that “no one will pay attention to you if you behave this way.” Which is what the response should be to the Sad Puppies. If people choose to vote in the Hugos this year in the categories they approve of or just simply cast “no award” for all the categories isn’t really that much of an issue, to me. Because what this group of spiteful people have done is demonstrated that we should do nothing except not pay attention to them. At all. If they believe the Hugos or any other organization is trying to exclude them they are, or at least should be, correct. Because these are the people who — by their own admission — are asking science fiction to look backward and not forward.

The Sad and Rabid Puppies might think they have “won,” but their coup isn’t all that relevant. This rude ballot stuff from bigots isn’t a revolution, but instead the last cries of political dinosaurs flopping over. The Nebulas and other awards will solider on with more progressive science fiction and fantasy, and the Hugos may yet survive this. The future is still coming, no matter how loud these angry (or sad) dinosaurs cry.

Update 4/11:

*Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies are different slates. The article talks about both at the same time because there are clear connections. However, it should be re-emphasized the movements are separate.

*It has been pointed out to me that it has been well documented that the Rabid Puppies reached out to GamerGate specifically for advice and assistance. GamerGate supporters have been known to threaten women with rape and death. (Though some members claim those threats are satire.) Presumably, not all Rabid Puppies are like GamerGate supporters and not all Sad Puppies support either. Still, a clear connection between GamerGate and the Rabid Puppies exists.

*Vox Day/Theodore Beale was kicked out of SFWA for specifically calling N.K. Jemisin a “half savage” on the SWFA Twitter feed.

*This article did not intend to suggest everyone who supports the Sad Puppies or Rabid Puppies are bigoted individuals. Instead, that connections to bigoted practices and ideals seem to exist.

*The article did not intended to suggest that the author believes John Scalzi’s suggested Hugo nominations in past years were actually equivalent with the Sad and Rabid Puppies slates. Simply that it could be argued that the methodology was similar. It is my opinion, however, that Scalzi’s suggested nominations were not born out of political/ideological desires, while both the Sad and Rabid Puppies are specifically and overtly political.

Tin Cans

Posted on by 007595

by Ekaterina Sedia, recommended by Jeff VanderMeer for Weird Fiction Review

I am an old man — too old to really care. My wife died on the day the Moscow Olympics opened, and my dick had not done anything interesting since the too-optimistic Chechen independence. I shock people when I tell them how young I was when the battleship Aurora gave its fateful blast announcing the Revolution. And yet, life feels so short, and this is why I’m telling you this story.

My grand-nephew Danila — smug and slippery, like all young people nowadays, convinced they know the score even though they don’t know shit, and I always get an urge to take off my belt and wail some humility on their asses — called and asked if I needed a job. Tunisian Embassy, he said, easy enough. Night watchman duty only, since for business hours they had their own guards, tall and square-chested, shining and black like well-polished boots, their teeth like piano keys. You get to guard at night, old man, old husk, when no one would see you.

Now, I needed a job; of course I did, who didn’t? After the horrible and hungry 1990, even years later, I was just one blind drunken stagger of the inflation away from picking empty bottles in the streets or playing my accordion by the subway station. So of course I said yes, even though Danila’s combination of ignorance and smarm irritated me deeply, just like many things did — and it wasn’t my age, it was these stupid times.

The embassy was located in Malaya Nikitskaya, in a large mansion surrounded by a park with nice shady trees and flowerbeds, all tucked away behind a thirty-foot brick fence. I saw it often enough. The fence, I mean. I had never been inside before the day of my interview. All I knew about Tunisia was that they used to be Carthage at some point, very long ago, and that they used to have Hannibal and his elephants — I thought of elephants in the zoo when I paused by the flowerbeds to straighten my jacket and adjust the bar ribbons on my lapel. There used to be a time when war was good and sensible, or at the very least there were elephants involved.

There were no lines snaking around the building, like you would see at the American Embassy — not surprising really, because no one wanted to immigrate to Tunisia and everyone was gagging for Brooklyn. I’ve been, I traveled — and I don’t know why anyone would voluntarily live in Brighton Beach, that sad and gray throwback to the provincial towns of the USSR in the seventies, fringed by the dirty hem of a particularly desperate ocean. The irony is of course that every time you’re running from something, it follows you around, like a tin can tied to dog’s shaggy tail. Those Brooklyn inhabitants, they brought everything they hated with them.

That was the only reason I stayed here, in this cursed country, in this cursed house, and now stood at the threshold, staring at the blue uniforms and shining buttons of two strapping Tunisians — guards or attachés, I wasn’t sure — and I wasn’t running anywhere, not to Brooklyn, nor to distant and bright Tunisia with its ochre sands and suffocating nights. Instead, I said, “I heard you’re hiring night watchmen.”

They showed me in and let me fill out the application. There were no pens, and I filled it out with the stubby pencil I usually carried with me, wetting its blunt soapy tip on my tongue every few letters — this way, my words came out bright and convincing. As much as it chafed me, I put Danila’s name as a reference.

They called me the next day to offer me the job, and told me to come by after hours two days later.

It was May then. May with its late sunsets and long inky shadows, pooling darkness underneath the blooming lilac bushes, and the clanging of trams reaching into the courtyard of the house in Malaya Nikitskaya from the cruel and dirty world beyond its walls. I entered in a shuffling slow walk — not the walk of old age, but of experience.

And yet, soon enough there I was. As soon as the wrought iron gates slammed shut behind my back, I felt cut off from everything, as if I had really escaped into glorious Carthage squeezed into a five-story mansion and the small garden surrounding it. A tall diplomat and his wife, her head wrapped in a colorful scarf, strolled arm in arm, as out of place in Moscow as I would be in Tunisia. They did not notice me, of course — after you reach a certain age, people’s eyes slide right off of you, afraid that the sight of you will corrupt and age their vision, and who wants that?

So I started at the embassy–guarding empty corridors, strolling with my flashlight along the short but convoluted paths in the garden, ascending and descending stairs in no particular order. Sometimes I saw one diplomat or another walking down the hall to the bathroom, their eyes half-closed and filled with sleep. They moved right past me, and I knew better than to say anything — because who wants to be acknowledged while hurrying to the john in the middle of the night. So I pretended that I was invisible, until the day I saw the naked girl.

Of course I knew whose house it was — whose house it used to be. I remembered Lavrentiy Beria’s arrest, back in the fifties, his fat sausage fingers on the buttonless fly, holding up his pants. Khrushchev was so afraid of him, he instructed Marshal Zhukov and his men who made the arrest to cut off the buttons so that his terrible hands would be occupied. It should’ve been comical, but it was terrible instead, those small ridiculous motions of the man whose name no one said aloud, for fear of summoning him. Worse than Stalin, they said, and after Stalin was dead they dared to arrest Beria, his right hand, citing some ridiculous excuses like British espionage and imaginary plots. The man who murdered Russians, Georgians, Polacks with equal and indiscriminating efficiency when he was the head of NKVD, before it softened up into the KGB. And there he was then, being led out of the Presidium session, unclean and repulsive like a carrion fly.

He was shot soon after, they said, but it was still murder; at least, I thought so, seeking to if not justify, then comprehend, thinking around and around and hastening my step involuntarily.

Sometimes the attachés, while rushing for the bathrooms, left their doors ajar, illuminated by the brass sconces on the walls, their semicircles of light snatching the buttery gloss of mahogany furniture and the slightly indecent spillage of stiff linen, the burden of excess. But mostly I walked the hallways, thinking of everything that happened in this house, so I wasn’t all that surprised or shocked when I first saw the naked girl.

She must’ve been barely thirteen — her breasts uncomfortable little hillocks, her hips narrow and long. She ran down the hall, and I guessed that she did not belong — she did not seem Tunisian, or alive, for that matter. She just ran, her mouth a black distorted silent hole in her face, her eyes bruised. Her hair, shoulder-length, wheat-colored, streamed behind her, and I remember the hollow on the side of her smooth lean hip, the way it reflected light from my flashlight, the working of ropy muscles under her smooth skin. Oh, she really ran, her heels digging into the hardwood floors as if they were soft dirt, her fists pumping.

I followed her with the beam of my flashlight. I stopped dead in my tracks, did not dare to think about it yet, just watched and felt my breathing grow lighter. She reached the end of the hallway and I expected her to disappear or take off up or down the stairs, or turn around; instead, she stopped just before the stairwell, and started striking the air in front of her with both fists, as if there was a door.

She turned once, her face half-melting in the deluge of ghost tears, her fists still pummeling against the invisible door, but without conviction, her heart ready to give out. Then an invisible but rough hand jerked her away from the door — I could not see who was doing it, but I saw her feet leave the ground, and then she was dragged along the hardwood floors through the nearest closed door.

I stood in the hallway for a while, letting it all sink in. Of course I knew who she was — not her name or anything, but what happened to her. I stared at the locked door; I knew that behind it the consul and his wife slept in a four-poster bed. And yet, in the very same bed, there was that ghost girl, hairs on her thin arms standing on end and her mouth still torn by a scream, invisible hands pressing her face into a pillow, her legs jerking and kicking at the invisible assailant… I was almost relieved that I could not see him, even though the moment I turned and started down the hallway again, his bespectacled face slowly materialized, like a photo being developed, on the inside of my eyelids, and I could not shake the sense of his presence until the sun rose.

I soon found a routine with my new job: all night I walked through the stairwells and the corridors, sometimes dodging the ghosts of girls — there were so many, so many, all of them between twelve and eighteen, all of them terrible in their nudity — and living diplomats who stayed at the Embassy stumbling past the soft shine of their gold-plated fixtures on their way to the bathrooms. In the mornings, I went to a small coffee house to have a cup of very hot and sweet and black coffee with a thick layer of sludge in the bottom. I drank it in deliberate sips and thought of the heavy doors with iron bolts and the basement with too many chambers and lopsided cement walls no one dared to disturb because of what they were afraid to find buried under and inside of them. And then I hurried home, in case my son decided to call from his time zone eight hours behind, before he went to bed.

You know that you’re old when your children are old, when they have heart trouble and sciatica, when their hearing is going too so that both of you yell into the shell of the phone receiver. But most often, he doesn’t call — and I do not blame him, I wouldn’t call me either. He hadn’t forgiven and he never fully will, except maybe on his deathbed — and it saddens me to think that he might be arriving there before me, like it saddens me that my grandchildren cannot read Cyrillic.

I come home and wait for the phone to speak to me in its low sentimental treble, and then I go to bed. I close my eyes and I watch the images from the previous night. I watch seven girls, none of whom can be older than fourteen, all on their hands and knees in a circle, their heads pressed together, their naked bottoms raised high, I watch them flinch away from the invisible presence that circles and circles them, endlessly. I think that I can feel the gust of Beria’s stroll on my face, but that too passes.

I only turn away when one of them jerks as her leg rises high in the air — and from the depressions on the ghostly flesh I know that there’s a hand seizing her by the ankle. He drags her away from the circle as she tries to kick with her free foot, grabbing at the long nap of the rug, as her elbows and breasts leave troughs in it, as her fingers tangle in the Persian luxury and then let go with the breaking of already short nails. I turn away because I know what happens next, and even though I cannot see him, I cannot watch.

Morning comes eventually, and always at the time when I lose hope that the sun will ever rise again. I swear to myself that I will not come back here, Never again, I whisper — the same oath I gave to myself back before the war, and just like back then I know that I will break it over and over, every night.

On my way out of the light blue embassy house, I occasionally run into the cook, a Pakistani who has been working there for a few years. We sometimes stop for a smoke and he tells me about a bag of bones he found in the wall behind the stove some years back. He offers to show it to me but I refuse politely, scared of the stupid urban legend about a man who buys a hotdog and inside finds his wife’s finger bone with her wedding ring still on. The ghosts are bad enough.

During this time, my son only called once. He complained at length, speaking hastily, as if trying to prevent me from talking back. I waited. I did not really expect him to talk about things we did not talk about — why he left or why he never told his wife where I was working. In turn, I made sympathetic noises and never mentioned how angry I was that his emigration back in the ’70s fucked me over. What was the point? I did not blame him for his mother’s death, and he didn’t blame me for anything. He just complained that his grandkids don’t understand Russian. I don’t even remember what they, or their parents, my own grandchildren, look like.

When he was done talking, I went to bed and even slept until the voices of children outside woke me in the early afternoon. They always carried so far in this weather, those first warm days of not-quite summer, and I lay awake on my back listening to the high-pitched squealing outside, too warm in my long underwear. And if your life is like mine — if it’s as long as mine, that is — then you find yourself thinking about a lot of shit. You start remembering the terrible sludge of life at the bottom of your memory, and if you stir it by too much thinking, too much listening to the shouts and bicycle bells outside, then woe is you, and the ghosts of teenage girls will keep you up all night and all day.

The cars the NKVD drove were called black ravens, named for both color and the ominous nature of their arrival in one’s neighborhood. Narodniy Komissariat Vnutrennih Del — it’s a habit, to sound out the entire name in my head. Abbreviations just don’t terrify me. The modern yellow canaries of the police seemed harmless in comparison, quaint even. But those black ravens… I remembered the sinister yellow beams of the headlights like I remembered the squeaking of leather against leather, uniform against the seats, like I remembered the roundness of the hard wheel under my gloved hands.

Being a chauffeur was never a prestigious job, but driving him — driving Beria — filled one with quiet dread. I remember the blue dusk and the snowdrifts of late February, the bright pinpricks of the streetlamps as they lit up ahead of my car, one by one, as if running from us — from him, I think. I have never done anything wrong, but my neck prickles with freshly cut hairs, and my head sweats under my leather cap. I can feel his gaze on me, like a touch of greasy fingers. Funny, that: one can live ninety years, such a long life, and still shiver in the warm May afternoon just thinking about that one February night.

It started to snow soon after the streetlights all flickered on, lining along the facades of the houses — all old mansions, being in the center of the city and all, painted pale blues and yellows and greens. The flight of the lights reminded me of a poem I read some years ago; only I could not remember it but tried nonetheless–anything to avoid the sensation of the sticky unclean stare on the back of my head, at the base of my skull, and I felt cold, as if a gun barrel rested there.

“Slow down,” he tells me in a soft voice. There’s no one but him in the car, and I am grateful for small mercies, I am grateful that except for directions he does not talk to me.

I slow down. The wind is kicking up the snow and it writhes, serpentine, close to the ground, barely reaching up high enough to get snagged in the lights of the car beams.

“Turn off the lights.”

I do, and then I see her — bundled up in an old, moth-eaten fur coat, her head swaddled in a thick kerchief. I recognize her — Ninochka, a neighbor who is rumored to be a bit addled in the head, but she always says hello to me and she is always friendly. The coat and kerchief disfigure and bloat her as she trundles through the snow, her walk waddling in her thick felt boots that look like they used to belong to her grandfather. I hope that this misshapen, ugly disguise would be enough to save her.

I pick up the speed slightly, to save her, to drive past her and perhaps find another girl walking home from work late, find another one — someone I do not know, and it is unfair that I am so willing to trade one for another but here we are — just God please, let us pass her. In my head, I make deals with God, promises I would never be able to keep. I do not know why it’s so important, but it feels that if I could just save her, just this one, then things would be all right again, the world would be revealed as a little bit just and at least somewhat sensible. Just this one, please God.

“Slow down,” he says again, and I feel the leather on the back of my seat shift as he grips the top of it. “Stop right there.” He points just ahead, at the pool of darkness between two cones of light, where the snow changes color from white to blue. The wind is swirling around his shoes as he steps out, and the girl, Ninochka, looks up for the first time. She does not recognize him — not at first, not later when she is sobbing quietly in the back seat of the car, her arms twisted behind her so that she cannot even wipe her face and her tears drip off the reddened tip off her nose, like a melting icicle. I still cannot remember the poem — something about the running streetlights, and I concentrate on the elusive rhythm and stare straight ahead, until I stop by the wrought iron gates of his house and let him and Ninochka out. I am not allowed beyond that point, being just a chauffeur and not an NKVD man. I am grateful.

So I thought that my presence in the sky-blue house was not coincidental, and the fact that I kept seeing the dead naked girls everywhere I looked meant something. I tried to not look into their faces, not when they were clumped, heads together, in a circle. I did not need to see their faces to know that Ninochka was somewhere among them, a transparent long-limbed apparition being hauled off into some secret dungeon to undergo things best not thought about — and I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head, just not to think about that, not to think.

My son was a dissident, and to him there was no poison more bitter than the knowledge that his father used to work for NKVD, used to turn people in, used to sit on people’s tribunals that condemned enemies of the state. His shame for my sins forced his pointless flight into the place that offered none of the freedoms it had previously promised, the illusory comforts of the familiar language and the same conversations, of the slowly corrupting English words and the joys of capitalism as small and trivial as the cockroaches in a Brighton Beach kitchen. He still does not see the irony in that.

But he does manage to feel superior to me; he feels like he is better because he’s not the one with naked dead girls chasing him through dreams and working hours, crowding in his head during the precious few minutes of leisure. The bar ribbons of all my medals and orders are of no consequence, as if there had been no war after the slow stealthy drives through the streets. Seasons changed but not the girls, forever trapped in the precarious land between adolescence and maturity, and if there were no victories and marching through mud all the way to Germany and back, as if there was nothing else after these girls. Time stopped in 1938, I suspect, and now it just keeps replaying in the house in Malaya Nikitskaya. And I cannot look away and I cannot quit the job in the embassy — not until I either figure out why this is happening or decide that I do not care enough to find out.

I remember the last week I worked in the Tunisian Embassy. The dead girls infected everything, and even the diplomats and the security saw them out of the corners of their eyes — I saw them tossing up their heads on the way to the bathroom, their eyes wide and awake like those of spooked horses. The girls — long-limbed, bruised-pale — ran down every hallway, their faces looming up from every stairwell, every corner, every glass of sweet dark tea the Pakistani cook brewed for me in the mornings.
The diplomats whispered in their strange tongue, the tongue, I imagined, that remained unchanged since Hannibal and his elephants. I guessed that the girls were getting to them too, and for a brief while I was relating to these foreign dignitaries. Then they decided to deal with the problem, something I had not really considered, content in my unrelenting terror. They decided to take apart the fake partitions in the basement.

I was told to not come to work for a few days, and that damn near killed me. I could not sleep at night, thinking of the pale wraiths streaming in the dark paneled hallways of the sky-blue house. But the heart, the heart of it were all these dead girls, and I worried about them — I feared that they would exorcise them, would chase them away, leaving me no reason to ever go back, no reason to wake up every day, shave, leave the house. I could not know whether the semblance of life granted to them was torturous, and yet I hoped that they would survive.

They did not. When I came back, I found the basement devoid of its fake cement partitions, and the bricks in the basement walls were held together with fresh mortar. The corridors and the rooms were empty too — I often turned, having imagined a flick of movement on the periphery of my vision. I looked into the empty rooms, hoping to catch a glimpse of long legs shredding the air into long, sickle-shaped slivers.

I found them after morning came and the cook offered me the usual glass of tea, dark and sweet and fragrant.

“They found all these bones,” he told me, his voice regretful. “Even more than my bag, the one I told you about before.”

“Where did they take them?”

He shrugged and shook his head, opening his arms palms-out in a pantomime of sincere puzzlement. I already knew that they were not in the house, because of course I already looked everywhere I could look without disturbing any of the diplomats’ sleep.

Before I left for the day, I looked in the yard. It was so quiet there, so separate from the world outside. So peaceful. I found the skulls lined under the trees behind the building, where the graveled path traveled between the house and the wall.

I looked at the row of skulls, all of them with one hole through the base, and I regretted that I had never seen Ninochka’s face among the silent wraiths. I did not know which one of these skulls was hers; all of them looked at me with black holes of their sockets, and I thought I heard the faint rattling of the bullets inside them, the cluttering that grew louder like that of the tin cans dragging behind a running dog.

I turned away and walked toward the gates, trying to keep my steps slow and calm, trying to ignore the rattling of the skulls that had been dragging behind me for the last sixty years.

This AWP Play Electric Literature AWP Bingo

Posted on by 007595

Are you packing your chapbooks, moleskines, and elbow-patched sweaters in preparation for AWP Minneapolis? When you get there, be sure to visit us at booth 1838. You can get 10% off anything from our literary aces playing cards to our The Book Is Dead, Long Live the Book! tote bag if you win a round of AWP bingo. (We’ll have copies at the booth as well.)

AWP bingo

Designed by Nadxieli Nieto

The Very Act of Cruelty, an interview with Cynan Jones, author of The Dig

Posted on by 007595

Welsh author Cynan Jones’s short novel The Dig is released in the U.S. by Coffee House Press on April 14th this year.

The novel is about a bruising encounter between a badger-baiter and a grieving farmer in rural Wales. In contrast to the long and expansive novels which fill so much bookshelf space, The Dig’s taut span of just 156 pages takes you into the emotional heartland of the place where Cynan Jones grew up and lives now. His work is imbued with the spirit of that land and speaks powerfully of lives trapped there.

The Dig was a winner of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize 2014 in the UK. In an end-of-year round-up of books published in 2014, Paul Baggaley, Publisher of Picador, wished that he (rather than Granta) had been the one to publish in the UK what he called “a shocking, brutal yet poetic novel.”

I talked to Cynan about the country he comes from, the difference between novellas and short novels, writing sheds and not being a natural festival-goer.

Cath Barton: The Dig is set in Ceredigion in West Wales, where you grew up and still live. The story — and indeed much of your previously published fiction — carries a strong sense of place, but is about the landscape of the heart as much as it is about a particular geographical area. Are the two bound together as part of your Welsh identity?

Cynan Jones: Wales, to me, is the physical place I am connected with. Ideas of nationhood, cultural history and so on are more conceptual and secondary. My ‘Welsh identity’ is referred to mainly to point out I’m not English. Overseas, and even within the UK, that’s a necessary requirement given that people don’t understand British doesn’t always equal English. The question of identity is often raised as if there’s something elusive behind it, but there isn’t. Being Welsh is a fact, as is being 40 years old.

It sounds like I’m digressing from your question but I’m being very specific. The land itself and my sense of connection to it is what holds me here, not any idea of Welshness or ideal of Celtic belonging. In as much as home is where the heart is, then yes, my identity is utterly bound to this geographical area.

CB: All of us as writers are influenced by those we have read, but we all also hope to be identified for who we are and our own voice, rather than “in the tradition of x, y and z.” Or is it more complicated than that?

CJ: People categorise, make links, connections. We’re pattern-making animals, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing on some levels. Personally I try to live under a rock when it comes to writing and just do my own thing. But I am driven to writing certain things over others. Generally I write about men getting through things, often physically. And that aligns me with other writers who write about similar dilemmas, most of those writers American. People tend to slot me alongside Hemingway, Steinbeck, McCarthy rather than Auster, Roth, McEwan — writers whose characters are more often academics, dentists, psychologists, lawyers. But I have a long way to go before I’m anywhere near worthy of being on lists like that.

One of the best things about being ‘compared’ or aligned with other writers is being compared or aligned with one you’ve never read. That way I came to McCarthy, Carver, Flannery O’Connor, and as I’m writing this — after Geoff Bendeck’s review here — William Gay.

CB: I’d like to pick up on your comment that you “write about men getting through things, often physically” and link back to my first question, how you write about the landscape of the heart. Yes, you do write about men doing physically demanding things, but you also reveal their emotions, emotions which they themselves may not easily reveal to others. I love this line from The Dig:

The cat came up and sat with him, and for a while they sat like that, in the comfortable sound of the rain, and the closeness of the cat was almost too much.

You show here something profound about your character Daniel’s feelings for his dead wife. But you also show men’s emotions in more physically brutal scenes. To me there’s a tenderness in there which some might say is at odds with the subject matter. Or is it?

CJ: I think there is a tendency to break emotions up into artificial objects so we can handle them more easily. But emotions are multi-faceted. I don’t know many people who experience emotion in a non-complicated manner. In a situation of pressure, or greater jeopardy or responsibility — anything heightened — emotions fracture into increasingly complex things. The very act of cruelty can bring a person not used to tenderness face to face with it. An act of necessary brutality can demand a person finds the cruelty to see it through. These feelings are not simple.

CB: Your work is often called poetic and it does seem to me that you choose and weigh each word, as a poet does. You’ve drawn a distinction between the novella, a short form of fiction which you describe as being carried by energy, and the short novel, such as The Dig which relies on weight and is, as it were, a longer work condensed. It’s a form you’ve used before, starting with your first novel The Long Dry (2006). Did you consciously choose it, or has it chosen you?

CJ: The story is god. Ultimately it chooses the form that best suits it. First comes the compunction to commit to a story; then the clarity to listen to it. For example, I’ve been working on a short novel for the last two years. It wasn’t right. In early February I recognised why. It’s a long short story, not a short novel.

The Dig similarly. I was under pressure to write a longer book. I addressed that pressure by writing a book comprised of two parts. The first set in the 1940s, telling the story of an Italian interned and sent to work on a west Wales farm. The second a contemporary tale picking up the consequences of a relationship that developed in the first story. When I read it through, my agent also, we recognised that the story of the two characters — The Dig — was the real story. I cut the book from 90,000 words to 28,000 or so. You have to be prepared to do that.

A strong story should be a stubborn, belligerent thing.

A strong story should be a stubborn, belligerent thing. And like stubborn, belligerent people, their demands aren’t always the easier ones to accept. A short novel works by implication. The eye has to stay on the action, and the rest of the world has to exist behind that action. It thrills me to work in that form. Rule setting is one of the most important aspects of writing, and limits free you up to make the correct creative decisions. So, I choose in general to write short novels, but am also drawn to stories that are best told through that form. Chicken and egg.

CB: You’ve described writing as “a spell cast.” Who casts the spell and as the writer can or should you attempt to break it?

CJ: First the story itself has to cast the spell on you as the writer. It’s better to write under that spell. Then you have a duty to shake off the enchantment and put the result to the test. Every single aspect should be tested, free of the spell. The only time you get to feel the way a reader might is that first moment when you write the thing down. You have to trust that first emotional reaction you had, but also scrutinise.

CB: Actually, I think your writing casts a spell over the reader. There is something very powerful about a book which almost forces you to read it in one sitting. To me this is because of the power of the emotion carried by your writing. In The Dig, Daniel, the farmer, says:

It is the ability of a person to bring a reaction in us that gives us a relationship with them…

He is talking about his wife, but it also says something to me about how you, as the writer, draw in your readers and form relationships with us. Some might say you want to shock in The Dig. You certainly don’t flinch from showing the reality of badger-baiting, though it is not crudely brutal and there is poignancy in large measure in your work too. Do you consciously want to provoke a reaction?

CJ: I am always clear about the reaction I want the story to provoke when the reader closes the book, but I try as closely as possible to carry that reaction out of the characters or action into the reader. Readers are generally compassionate, creative people in their own right so I don’t see a need to ‘tell them how to feel.’ I try to write a thing down as strongly and clearly as possible, trusting that the reader will have their own judgements and emotions.

The Long Dry, despite what happens, needed to leave the reader with hope, a sense of continuation. The Dig would have lied to have any of that. It’s not the story. It had to finish, and it had to finish suddenly, like a blow. That was my conclusion after trying thirteen or so different endings. Things in life either happen more suddenly or more slowly than we expect them to.

CB: Your compatriot Dylan Thomas famously had a writing shed, a place where he could hide away to write. What does your writing space look like? Are there particular things you have to have there by your side when you’re writing?

They are sacrosanct places. No one else goes in them.

CJ: I have a shed. I came home to write from Glasgow where I’d been working for five years as a copywriter. I promised myself I’d come home when I was twenty-eight and give myself two years to write a book. I lived in a shed in my Mum’s garden, which I still work in. I also built a writing room into our house. They are sacrosanct places. No one else goes in them. There’s nothing particular I have to have (other than pens, blank paper and a window) but I am incredibly protective of my writing space.

CB: As you garner writing success, people increasingly want to interview you, invite you to literary festivals and otherwise take up time when you might prefer to be writing. I’m wondering whether this distraction has any compensations, perhaps some you hadn’t expected?

CJ: I’m as protective of my writing time as I am of writing space, but yes, the requirements to be available grow. However, there’s a danger at a certain point of success — when you can exist more or less through writing — that you disappear up an ivory tower. Then you start to wonder why the things you’re writing aren’t communicating with people as well as they should. And that’s generally because you’re not communicating with anyone you don’t choose to. So the compensation is that it forces you out of the indulgent space you’ve waited years to arrive in, but which isn’t healthy for good writing. I also think that a strong story needs time to happen, so the excuses to not be writing it down are important, provided the time comes when you do.

CB: So I’m wondering, have you been asked any questions at say, a literary festival, that have made you sit up and review any fondly held views?

CJ: No. What does happen, though, is that talking about writing a book after you’ve written it makes you realise you did know what you were doing at the time. So much of writing, during the act itself, is instinctive. All the practice, the pre-thinking, everything that has gone in fades behind the attempt to tell the story.

CB: I’m curious to know what it’s like to combine writing and farming. Clearly your knowledge of the land and of animal practice means that your writing is very true, but on a day-to-day basis do you find the two activities complementary?

CJ: I don’t work on a farm on a day-to-day basis but I’ve grown up around them and supported friends, neighbours and family at certain times. Lambing, for example, haymaking. Times like that you need all hands on deck. I do try to balance time at the desk however with time on my feet, doing practical, tangible things. That’s very important to clear writing.

CB: And finally, what’s your fantasy career — astronaut, deep sea diver, arctic explorer? Or is it writer or nothing for you?

CJ: I don’t really think in terms of careers, of jobs. I see things as ambitions. The job is to fulfil the ambition. Writing is the main thing I want to do, and the thing that is the backdrop to everything else.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Graduation Speech: What the “Ghost Dance” of the Native Americans and the French…

Posted on by 007595
Kurt Vonnegut

[Editor’s note: the following is excerpted from If This Isn’t Nice, What Is? Advice to the Young, a collection of Kurt Vonnegut speeches from Seven Stories Press. This particular speech was given at The University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois on February 17, 1994]

What the “Ghost Dance” of the Native Americans and the French Painters Who Led the Cubist Movement Have in Common

In which Vonnegut tells how his own fiction writing was inspired by the professor who was “low man on the totem pole” in the University of Chicago Anthropology Department.

A young woman told me a couple of years ago that she had applied for admission here. The man who interviewed her asked her why she had found the place attractive. She said it was because Philip Roth and I had both gone here, along with many other considerations, of course. He replied that Philip and I were precisely the sorts of persons who never should have gone here. What could he have meant by that? If he is in this audience, I would appreciate meeting and talking to him afterward.

I came here in 1946, immediately following my participation in a war. It was the Second World War, a name and event worthy of H. G. Wells. That war ended with our dropping atomic bombs on the civilians, and their pets and house plants, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, quite a surprise to one and all. That such bombs were possible was first demonstrated in the abandoned football stadium of this very university, where the importance of contact sports had been discounted. The university president at that time, Robert Maynard Hutchins, was famous for saying that, whenever he felt in need of exercise, he lay down until the feeling passed. He finally wound up in a California think tank.

So far as I know, the only Second World War weapon worth a nickel to come out of Harvard, which thinks it’s such hot stuff, was Napalm or jellied gasoline.

I came here from Indianapolis. In those days, that was like a provincial Frenchman’s coming to Paris, or an Austrian bumpkin’s coming to Vienna, or, as in the case of Adolf Hitler, to Munich, Germany.

In those days, thanks again to Robert Maynard Hutchins, the undergraduate course consisted of only two years devoted to a study of the so-called Great Books. Philip Roth is a product of that short course. We would not meet until many years afterward. The graduate school was everything past what would have been the sophomore year at other American institutions. Like many returning veterans with more than two years’ worth of credits from someplace else, I was admitted to this unconventional graduate school, with three or four years to go before qualifying for an MA.

The credits I brought with me were near-flunks in chemistry, physics, math, and biology. I had actually twice flunked a course whose purpose is to exclude people like me from careers as scientists, which is thermodynamics.

Despite my inability to o’er-leap the intellectual barrier of thermodynamics, or pile of shit, if you like, I still wanted to be respected as a person who thought scientifically, who loved the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It was obvious that only a pseudoscience was a possibility for me. Ideally, I thought, it should be a pseudoscience socially superior to astrology, meteorology, hairdressing, economics, or embalming.

The two most prominent such, then as now, were psychoanalysis and cultural anthropology. Both were based, then as now, on what had regularly sent innocent persons to the electric chair or the hot squat, which is human testimony, which is blah-blah-blah. I chose cultural anthropology. The result now stands before you.

Much has been written about the effects on institutions of higher learning of the sudden influx of veterans after my war. One thing it did was bamboozle many teachers whose authority and glamour was based on their having seen a lot more of life and the world than their students had. In seminars I would occasionally try to talk about something I had observed about human beings while a soldier, as a prisoner of war, as a family man. I had a wife and kid then. This turned out to be very bad manners, like coming to a crap game with loaded dice. No fair.

Also: we were so innocent.

In retrospect, my trying to become a member of the anthropology department was like visiting a kibbutz, a kibbutz as described by Bruno Bettelheim in The Children of the Dream. We returning veterans were mildly interesting strangers to be treated politely, with our understanding and theirs that we would soon go away again. And we did.

At about that time there appeared in the New Yorker a series of stories by Ludwig Bemelmans about a busboy who assisted a waiter in a grand hotel in Paris. The waiter was named Mespoulets, “my little chickens.” Mespoulets’s specialty was serving persons the management didn’t want to come back again.

Every academic department has a sort of Mespoulets, I think. We certainly had one in the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa when I taught there. The Mespoulets in the anthropology department in my time I will call Dr. Z, who is no longer among the living.

Dr. Z was lacking in the charm and stage presence fundamental to the reputation of a great cultural anthropologist. He was also having trouble getting published. So he was made thesis advisor for those of us the department’s stars did not care to work with. He also gave a course in the summertime, when the rest of the department was on vacation or on a dig or whatever. The course could be about anything, since its real purpose was to entitle returning veterans to continue to receive living allowances from a grateful government. In order to make ends meet, I was working as a police reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau, practicing what might nowadays be called “urban anthropology.”

Becoming one of Dr. Z’s little chickens was one of the most fortunate things that ever happened to me, second only, perhaps, to my having been in Dresden when it was firebombed. He died a long time ago now, but many of his ideas live on with me. He died several years after I left. He was a suicide. He had great big ideas about science, about art, about religion, about evolution, and on and on, which he expressed in his cockamamie summer course. Many of these, and surely the grandeur of his dealing with the biggest issues imaginable, are elements in my works of fiction.

I don’t know if he left a suicide note. My guess is that he found it impossible to put his great big ideas on paper.

He had so many great big ideas that he gave me one for my thesis. I was a candidate for a master’s degree, mind you, for the rank of Corporal in Academia. He said my dissertation should deal with the sort of leadership required if a radical change in a culture was to be effected. Why mess around?

So I did it. He told me to compare the leadership which inspired a peaceful Indian tribe to fight the United States Army, the so-called “Ghost Dance,” with the leadership of the Cubists, who found brand-new things to do with surfaces and paint. He didn’t say so, but he had already done this. And, thus directed, I reached a conclusion he must have reached.

But my thesis was rejected by the department, as both grandiose and non-anthropological. And I was out of time and money, and I accepted a job in what was then arguably the most prosperous and compassionate socialist state in history, the General Electric Company in Schenectady, New York.

For whatever it may be worth, and it may be worth no more than “a pitcher of warm spit,” as we used to say in the Army: The leadership of both the Ghost Dance and the Cubist movement had these elements in common:

1) A charismatic, gifted leader who described cultural changes which should be made;

2) Two or more respected citizens who testified that this leader was not a lunatic, but was well worth listening to;

3) A glib, personable explainer, who told the general public what the leader was up to, why he was so wonderful, and so on, day after day.

Turns out that such a table of organization worked pretty well for Adolf Hitler, too, and maybe for Robert Maynard Hutchins, when he turned this place inside out and upside down sixty years ago.

I was in Chicago a couple of years back on business, and visited my old department. Professor Sol Tax was the only teacher from my time still on the job. I asked after some of my old classmates, kibbutzniks whose theses had been acceptable. One, he said, was practicing urban anthropology in Boston, and I allowed as how I had worked for a couple of years in an ad agency there.

I told him what I’ve told you, how much I owed Dr. Z. I didn’t comment on Z’s having been low man on the department’s totem pole, the Mespoulets. I would be very happy, incidentally, if that word, “Mespoulets,” became a part of academic conversations, identifying that faculty member stuck with being mentor to all the nobodies going nowhere. In ad agencies it is common to start out in the mail room. On faculties it is common to start out as a Mespoulets.

Use a new word three times in conversation, I read in Reader’s Digest when I was a juvenile delinquent, and it becomes a permanent part of your vocabulary. Dr. Z was a Mespoulets, and died without having risen above that rank. Sol Tax may have been a Mespoulets at one time, but he certainly wasn’t one when I got here. I find it hard to believe that the head of the department, Dr. Robert Redfield, who made his reputation, and the department’s reputation, too, with an extended essay called “The Folk Society,” had ever been a Mespoulets. There: that’s three times, I think.

Dr. Tax, recalling the department’s dead and gone Mespoulets of long ago, said that Dr. Z had written well about the controversial Native American religion, the Peyote Cult.

So far as Dr. Tax was aware, Dr. Z hadn’t done much writing since then. Only those of us who took Z’s freestyle summer course were aware of the scale of the ambitions of our mentor. Each seminar, we came to realize, was an airing and testing of ideas in a chapter of a book about the human condition he was writing or planned to write. I didn’t share that information with Dr. Tax, but I did ask him if he had the address of my dead mentor’s longtime widow. He did.

She had long since remarried. I wrote to her, wanting to tell her how stimulating I had found her first husband, and how useful his wide-ranging speculations had been to me in my career in fiction. I must have reminded her of utterly ghastly unhappiness which she had hoped to put behind her. We had never met, and never will meet, for there was no reply.

If there had been one, I would have asked her if he got any of his big ideas on paper, and where, if anywhere, some pages were. Ah me.

Long term, I am as indebted to the head of the department in my day, Dr. Robert Redfield, as I am to its Mespoulets. Dostoyevsky suggested that one sacred memory from childhood was perhaps the best education. I say to you that one plausible, romantic theory about humanity is perhaps the best prize you can take away from a university. And Dr. Redfield’s theory of the Folk Society was that for me. It has been the starting point for my politics, such as they are.

My politics in a nutshell: let’s stop giving corporations and newfangled contraptions what they need, and get back to giving human beings what we need.

Long before I got here, all theories of cultural evolution had been proposed and discarded, for want of evidence to support them. Cultures were not describable, predictable rungs on a ladder societies were bound to climb, from polytheism to monotheism, for example, and so on.

But Dr. Redfield said, in effect, and I condense and paraphrase or worse: “Wait a minute. I think I can describe in some detail one stage many, many societies have reached or left behind, neither higher or lower than any other.” It might be worth thinking about because it was or had been so common. Dr. Redfield’s course in the Folk Society, which he gave every year, was enormously popular, drawing auditors from all over the university. Is his theory much discussed here or anywhere nowadays?

A Folk Society, he said, was a relatively small number of persons bonded by kinship and a common history of some duration, with a territory uncontested or easily defended, and sufficiently isolated so as to be little influenced by the cultures of other societies.

There can’t be many such societies nowadays. There were still quite a few when I first came here. I recall the testimony of some people who had lived in one to the effect that the isolation, the like-mindedness, the routines and so on were suffocating.

I can believe it. I myself never visited one, unless you want to count the anthropology department itself.

But I had certainly read about a lot of them in the library here. It seemed to me that they, because of their simplicity and isolation, might be regarded as petri dishes in which human beings might demonstrate certain apparently basic human needs other than food, shelter, clothing, and sex. For want of a better word, I will call such needs spiritual, by which I mean only that they are invisible, un-smellable, inaudible, intangible, and inedible.

Was it possible, I wondered, that certain features common to all of them not only revealed spiritual needs of all human beings, including those of us in this auditorium? Might not those features also show us methods for satisfying those needs, theatrical performances, if you will, which human beings, by their nature, can ill-afford to do without?

I think of the British Navy, whose sailors, although filling the world’s oceans, felt lousy all the time, until they started sucking limes. A vitamin deficiency, of course! And here we are in the post-industrial, post–Cold War whatchamacallit, feeling lousy all the time. We get all the minerals and vitamins we need. Is it conceivable that we are suffering from a cultural deficiency which we can remedy? Friends and neighbors, I say YES to that:

Let’s give everybody a totem at birth. What proof do I have that even highly educated people need nonsensical, arbitrary symbols which will relate them to other people and the Earth and the Universe? I am a Scorpio. Would those of you who are also Scorpios please hold up your hands? Lookee there! Dostoyevsky was one of us!

Yes, and let’s find a way to get ourselves and others extended families again. A husband and a wife and some kids aren’t a family, any more than a Diet Pepsi and three Oreos is a breakfast. Twenty, thirty, forty people — that’s a family. Marriages are all busting up. Why? Mates are saying to each other, because they’re human, “You’re not enough people for me.”

Yes, and let’s make sure every American gets a puberty ceremony, an impressive welcome to the rights and duties of grown-ups. As matters now stand, only practicing Jews get those. The only way the rest of us can feel like grown-ups is to get pregnant or get somebody else pregnant or commit a felony or go to war and then come back again.

I only want to say in closing that it’s nice to be home again.

***

photo by Edith Vonnegut

photo by Edith Vonnegut

KURT VONNEGUT (1922–2007) was among the few grandmasters of twentieth-century American letters, one without whom the very term American literature would mean much less than it does now. Vonnegut’s other books from Seven Stories Press include God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, the national hardcover and paperback bestseller A Man Without a Country, and, with Lee Stringer, Like Shaking Hands with God.

Game of Totes: Canvas Is Coming (round one)

Posted on by 007595

The wait is over and the most historic battle in literary tote history begins. 33 totes are fighting for the canvas throne, and you, the reader, get to draw first blood. List up to five of your favorites in the comments section, where all true battles take place. You can click on the images for a larger slideshow. Order is randomly generated to ensure tote equality. Voting will be counted until midnight, Friday.

The winners will make round two, judged by our panel of experts including Dana Schwartz (Guy in Your MFA & Dystopian YA), Kenny Coble (Bookseller, Elliott Bay Books), Max Neely-Cohen (Author, Echo of the Boom), Kevin Nguyen (Editorial Director at Oyster), Bethanne Patrick (Writer and blogger), Nadxieli Nieto (Writer and designer), Jillian Steinhauer (Senior editor at Hyperallergic), Alexander Chee (Author, The Queen of the Night), and Maris Kreizman (Slaughterhouse 90210). Finally, on 4/20, we will judge the last remaining totes to crown a champion at Housing Works. Cosmopolitan’s book-editor-at-large Camille Perri, Saeed Jones (poet, Prelude to Bruise, BuzzFeed Literary Editor), Bev Rivero (Publicist at The New Press), and Dan Wilbur (Writer and comedian).

But who gets to face the judges? That’s up for you to decide. Pick up to five favorites in the comments below.

Electric literature tote

ETA: If you’d like to purchase our “Love Live the Book!” tote bag — which we are not entering into the contest out of fairness — click here.

Let the games begin!

BOMB Magazine

BOMB Magazine

Out of Print Clothing

Out of Print Clothing

Penguin Teen

Penguin Teen

Knopf

Knopf

Litograph

Litograph

Ryan Bradley

Ryan Bradley

Jai Lai

Jai Lai

Riverhead Books

Riverhead Books

Oyster Review

Oyster Review

Tin House

Tin House

The Lit Hub

The Lit Hub

The Paris Review

The Paris Review

Graywolf Press

Graywolf Press

Blunderbuss

Blunderbuss

Underwater New York

Underwater New York

Gigantic

Gigantic

National Book Foundation

National Book Foundation

Biblioasis

Biblioasis

The Strand

The Strand

Poetry Magazine

Poetry Magazine

Pop Chart

Pop Chart

The New Inquiry

The New Inquiry

Nouvella

Nouvella

N+1

N+1

O, Miami

O, Miami

April

April

Booksmith

Booksmith

OR Books

OR Books

Parnassus Books

Parnassus Books

Koyama Press

Koyama Press

Crown

Crown

Poets & Writers

Poets & Writers

Melville House

Melville House

FICTION: “Our Christophers” by Sharma Shields

Posted on by 007595

I had always hated my friend Rhonda (she was needlessly beautiful and generous and successful and kind), but I’d never hated her so much as when she told me that her bright, athletic, handsome, well-adjusted son would attend community college here in Spokane rather than matriculate at Harvard, where he had applied and — of course — had been accepted.

“He wants to save the money,” she said. “He wants to stay near us for a bit and then attend a state university. He’s not sure what he wants to focus on and believes he can figure it out in a more modest setting. ‘Harvard will still be there in a couple of years,’ he says. My Christopher. I know it sounds silly to say this, but I’ve never been prouder of him.”

“Pragmatic,” I muttered. “Good head on his shoulders.”

We were sharing a beer at my kitchen table. It was always a mistake to invite Rhonda over. I could hear my son in the basement, also named Christopher, moaning and banging around as he humped our dog.

My Christopher was the same age as Rhonda’s Christopher. My Christopher didn’t do much, grade-wise or sport-wise or anything else-wise, but what he did do, play video games and hump our dog, he did passionately, and for hours. I hated the video games, but the dog thing was beyond me. It really grossed me out.

I’d caught him in the act only the week before. I was depositing fresh laundry around the house. “Laundry deposits!” I called them. I thought I was pretty funny back then.

I opened the door to Christopher’s room. It didn’t have a lock. The dog was just standing on all fours, looking sort of bored, and Christopher — my Christopher — was kneeling behind the dog, humping away at her. I was dumbstruck. All I could think of to say was, “Use protection,” and then I just went about like normal, putting the folded laundry into his drawers, trying not to breath in the scent of his sex.

Wasn’t it right, to advise him? Because don’t dogs carry diseases, just like humans do? It seemed like sensible advice at the time, but Christopher — my Christopher — just blinked at me and continued humping the dog. He asked me to close the door when I left.

That’s how our conversations went those days.

Rhonda took up our beer and sipped it. She took too big of a sip. I would be left with nothing but backwash. Goddamn you, Rhonda.

She asked me then, generously, affectionately, “Is your Christopher still thinking of becoming a veterinarian?”

This was wildly funny to me. “A veterinarian!” I hooted. “Yes! Yes! What an idea!”

Beneath us, in the basement, my Christopher began to yodel his climax.

“What’s Christopher doing down there?” Rhonda asked, pushing the glass of backwash toward me.

I peered into the glass. There were the flakes of Rhonda’s last meal floating around in it: Tofutti or vegan hot dogs or something healthy like that. Rhonda ate like a champ.

“He’s fucking our dog,” I told her. “He fucks the dog all the time. I don’t know.” I shrugged, as if to say, parenting is such a shitstorm! Parenting is a trainwreck! “One of those things,” I said. “What can you do?”

Rhonda leaned toward me, dropping her warm palms over my hands. She gushed, sincerely, “Oh, sweetie. Just so long as he’s happy. That’s all we want, right? For our Christophers to be happy?”

“I guess,” I said, although what I really wanted was for my Christopher to stop fucking the dog, and for her Christopher to get hit by a bus.

From downstairs came a loud and satisfied YES!

“See?” Rhonda said. “Hallelujah.”

I nodded. I drank her backwash.

Rhonda was a fucking saint.

God, I hated her guts.

Sunday Sundries: Literary Links from Around the Web (April 5th)

Posted on by 007595

Looking for some Sunday reading? Here are some literary links from around the web that you might have missed:

Why are crime books leftwing and thrillers rightwing?

Game of Thrones wasn’t the first gritty fantasy world: here are ten authors who wrote gritty, realistic fantasy before Martin

Speaking of George R.R. Martin, he’s now determined to finish book 6 before season 6 of the show

An important essay on racism in publishing from Saeed Jones

And speaking of Saeed Jones, we interviewed him about his new role as BuzzFeed Literary Editor

The Millions writes about the benefits of writing dialogue without quotes

Tor.com rounds up the best geeky April Fools pranks

On the difficulties of teaching Thomas Pynchon

What’s the secret of the Jane Austen industry?

Are we going to have an Amazon vs. Hachette redux? Harper Collins might battle the online giant

The Guardian helps you find time to read