INTERVIEW: Scott Cheshire, author of High as the Horses’ Bridles

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Highas

Those who know Scott Cheshire know the sort of decency he exudes, a kind inseparable from that of a searcher who has seen the precipice and taken true gauge of its depths. High as the Horses’ Bridles is a torrential debut novel. It’s bold. It’s substantive. It’s formally inventive. From within the whirly circles of the NYC literary scene, it can sometimes appear that writers shun serious treatment of the day’s banner subjects, those scrolled across the country at large, even one as wide and clear and pervasive as evangelical Christianity. Are we daunted? Over the span of centuries, stories have a way, it seems, of slipping into religious texts and leaving their individual authors behind. This past Father’s Day (apropos, it turns out, for High as the Horses’ Bridles), I had the distinct pleasure of chatting by email with Scott. We talked the Book of Revelation, humor, rewriting, and what science and faith might have to say to each other. — J.T. Price

J. T. Price: In the mode of Galifianakis, I’ll start by asking, Why horses? Why a novel about horses?

Scott Cheshire: I have never heard of this Galifianakis. I assume he’s a lesser Greek poet, or something…

JTP: Yeah, renown for a collaborative epic poem called The Hangover…

SC: It’s actually a very good question. I never set out to write a book with “horses” in the title, and while I did write a book in which there are horses, it’s certainly not about horses. It’s about a troubled family, and it’s about religious legacy, a struggle with faith, and the difficult reuniting of a father and son — all of that, and yet the kernel of all that drama is an apocalyptic vision the son, Josiah, has, as a boy. The vision of a horse. Something I’ve not yet really considered, I guess, is why the vision of a horse?

JTP: If you don’t mind… I’ve actually got a page marked, from the later stages of the book. (Breaking the Galifianakis mold…) This is the estranged wife of the protagonist asking the same question: “But why horses? Why not as high as tank treads, if this is supposed to impress me? Or high as a Chevrolet’s side mirrors, and for two thousand years the faithful are wondering, What’s a side mirror? What’s a Chevy?”

SC: I like to think it’s a funny book, and maybe those lines give a sense of that, so thanks for bringing them up. I guess the answer to all this is partly the wonderfully anachronistic image of a warhorse. I mean, if there is a Second Coming it somehow makes sense that it would happen via horse, a great white horse. And yet horses also suggests a woefully ill-prepared return to battle. At least, if you read the image literally, which most believers do. That’s the fascinating and self-defeating essence of prophecy: it’s of its time, so it dates.

As far as giving the book its title, there were a few contenders.

Flannery O’Connor says: “The only way to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then try to discover what you have done.”

I would dare go a bit further, and say it’s not only how I learned to write, but it’s how I will always write. I write, and only discover what’s there afterward. In this case, I discovered horses, among other things. They figured in the book in a sort of mysterious way, even for me. Plus it’s a damn good phrase, and I can say that because it isn’t mine. It comes from Revelation.

JTP: Now, as psychoanalyst or self-realization guru: how greatly did the Book of Revelation shape your own childhood, your expectations of the adult world? How fluent are you with it now? And did you find yourself returning to those pages while writing High As The Horses’ Bridles? How did those successive returns feel?

SC: Revelation looms large for me, always has since childhood. We read and studied it weekly at church, probably more than any other book. And for that I guess it gave me a rather apocalyptic perspective on the world. More than most, I guess, but not nearly as much as some.

Harold Bloom has a good book about American Christianities (of which there are many) called The American Religion, and in it he calls Revelation “the preferred text,” for some sects. He also calls it a “nightmare of a book.” He’s right on both counts, but I also think he sells the book way short. Nightmares come in all forms, and Revelation is one to which we all collectively and perennially return. And I do mean all of us. There’s something disturbingly attractive about the violently apocalyptic endgame scenario.

JTP: Sort of the Reservoir Dogs, video game final level, ‘guess I’ll end the novel in a melee like Bonfire of the Vanities’ phenomenon? The Book of Revelation being a foundational text in that regard…

SC: Absolutely. There is something gloriously and strangely legitimizing about it. Before I started the book, I hadn’t looked at Revelation for years, decades, even. But at some point I realized it was in some ways the book from which this novel comes. And so I had to return to it, reconsider it, and re-familiarize myself with its pages. I found the best way to do that was to immerse myself in the history of the book, remove it from its contemporary cultural trappings — which incidentally have almost nothing at all to do with the genesis of the work.

JTP: You’re reminding me of an excellent essay of yours on the subject…

SC: Well, thanks for saying that. Writing that essay was difficult, mostly because it was the first time I tried to honestly ask myself the question: why am I writing this novel? I had deliberately buried myself in the work of a few modern scholars, studies of American religious history, eschatology, and the ancient apocalyptic form. My shelves are stuffed with them. Writing the essay felt like the first time I’d come up for air. At some point I realized, wait a second, Revelation is basically just a dream. It’s a dream of vengeance and reward, at its core. And I get that. I think we all do.

JTP: Apocalypse fiction is hot (or is it cold?). Some of the contemporary treatments are fantastical or readymade allegories, while others provide much more disturbingly plausible scenarios. In contrast, your novel feels like a kind of patient zero study, one that parses underlying sources of doomsday visions, in both their individual and collective form. The wild world-historical impossibility of the question aside, what is it about visions of apocalypse that won’t leave us — I mean, the human species — alone? Dogs, for example, probably don’t have the same preoccupation. Although I guess I can’t be sure.

SC: This is the big question, isn’t it? Why? I think the answer is pretty simple: it makes sense. That is to say, it makes time itself make sense. It gives existence narrative form. Closure. It’s no accident the Bible ends with Revelation. Any first year MFA student would say, I think, End it here.

JTP: Or there’d be a comment, ‘Um, the tone shifted here a bit and made me feel kicked out of the story…’

SC: Yes! Or something like — I get that He’s out to end the world, and all, but I don’t know what He really wants, you know?

The ancients used to write these stories and deliver them aloud during wartime, including Revelation. It was therapeutic.

And who doesn’t like a little drama? A little blood? Apocalypse is the über-action scene. And I for one love those movies, even the bad ones. They get my cash every time.

In my book, apocalypse works just this way for Josiah’s father, who desperately wants it all to make sense, especially after losing his wife. And when she passes, that apocalyptic longing is entirely domesticated. He tries to bring it on himself, within his very own home. It should also be said that, in the classic sense, the End is essentially just the Beginning. Even Revelation ends on a note of hope. The Future will be Better. Next time! And this can be comforting when you lose a loved one. As far as Josie, well, I think he’s trying to dismantle the apocalyptic mindset. And it’s hard. As far as dogs: my pug, Olive, I pray fears nothing at all.

JTP: Josiah Laudermilk, aka Josie, your protagonist: where did you find him? A Queens-raised childhood biblical prodigy turned successful young California beach-town entrepreneur. When we make his grown acquaintance, he is flagging on multiple fronts: romantic, familial, and, prior success aside, professional…

SC: Well, it might seem exotic to some that I was a kid preacher, but in that community everyone was expected at some point to preach and deliver sermons, especially the boys. So it seemed natural to me to use that history, and it weirdly made sense for the reader. I wanted the opening scene to feel grand and new, and less and less alien for the reader. A young boy on the occasion of his first large-scale sermon would experience the scene in just that way, hence young Josiah.

JTP: It’s interesting, that scene, I felt almost like we were inside the mind of the adult Josiah as he attempts to reconstruct this incredibly powerful experience from his childhood in minute detail. The sense of time passing slows down…

SC: Oh man, I love you saying that, because that is exactly how I imagined it. In fact, as far as I’m concerned that whole first section is a first-person narrative. “First-person removed,” we’ll call it. I think I just invented a newish perspective. That whole section is a movement from third to first, from “them” to “me.” It embraces the other. He’s claiming his personal history.

On the other hand, making the leap to adult Josiah was difficult, for lots of reasons. One being: how do you make something not happening (the end of the world) dramatically interesting? And can it sustain a whole book? And so I started thinking about the thousands of people whom every time are disappointed by yet another failed religious End Times prophecy — which happened recently, in 2011, with Harold Camping and his followers. That whole non-shebang definitely played a part in why I wrote the essay you brought up earlier. Of course, for lots of believers it’s simply a matter of reworking the numbers, and deciding on a “more precise” date. But for others it means the end to their faith, and what a terrible and conflicted sense of disappointment that must be. To me, that was an interesting problem. How do you un-know what you thought you knew? Josie (no longer Josiah) attempts to un-know, and he grapples with and reads the physical world as he becomes newly accustomed to it. He made me see the daily world around me in brand new ways. It was a thrilling perspective to write from, and not entirely unfamiliar.

JTP: The story unlocks in the manner of a nesting doll: one enormously pivotal scene opening to reveal successive stages in the lives of Josie and his family and friends. Over the novel’s course, time seems somehow to both advance and retreat while the narrative layering deepens. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the structure?

SC: The structure of the book was absolutely its most difficult aspect. I wanted to figure out a way of denying the book a linear narrative because I felt that otherwise it would be too sympathetic to the apocalyptic model of time. Beginning. Middle. End.

The middle section, called “The Ends,” at some point started taking on a circular shape, constantly doubling back on itself, which if I’m honest is closer to how I experience the world, anyway.

The past and the immediate past are always alive in the present, and I’m ever trying to reconcile the two. Josie experiences the world in just that way, constantly circumnavigating what it means to be alive at any given moment. It also became a way of creating dramatic tension, casting Josie in the “now,” with few cues to the reader of how he got there. The last thing I wrote was the closing section of the book and yet it might be called the beginning proper of the novel. We go back in time and place. Which ultimately felt right, making the whole book something of a circle.

JTP: For all the gloom and foreboding suggested by your big subject, there is no shortage of humor or emotionally articulate exchanges to accompany the darker atmospherics. Even the most desolate of occurrences (and, yea, desolation there is) seems informed by almost its opposite. Does this sort of sensibility approach a world-view?

SC: It is, for me anyway, and for the longest time the book did not reflect that. It was much darker, or at least as dark with very little comic relief. And then at some point I gave the manuscript to my friend Alex Gilvarry, who is not only a fantastic novelist, but also one of the funniest writers and people I know. He read it and said, “You know in real life you make me laugh, you’re funny. But this is not funny. At all. You should make it more like you.” That changed the book tremendously, and I might even say changed me as a writer. I let Josie be both morbid and funny. A good mix, I think. I mean life is funny — and sometimes it’s ugly, sad, tragic, and painful, but also funny. Maybe it’s my way of dealing with the world. William James says a fundamental difference between the religious and the non-religious is their respective relationship to the universe. The religious agree with it. The non-religious agree to it.

JTP: At one with the flow versus making an idiosyncratic path despite it? Or is that too simplistic?

SC: Not at all. The lazier critical take on the apocalyptic perspective is “they’re just doing what they’re told.” But it’s a perspective on the world that takes a lot of deliberate mental work. As far as I’m concerned, I’m of the latter persuasion. I agree to it all, yes, but reluctantly, and not without laughing.

JTP: I’ve read a fair amount of fiction and watched with dispassion as the epiphany, James Joyce-model, goes in and out of style. If I may say so, you have achieved some higher-level proficiency with the dramatic epiphany. Josie, it seems like, is capable of experiencing epiphanies within epiphanies. What I mean to say is you dramatize the need to believe with remarkable acuity. How about that?

SC: I like it! And I assume you know that super essay by Charles Baxter, “Against Epiphanies,” in which he says if life were truly like most American “literary” fiction then it must be the case that people all over the country are struck with epiphanies all day long and everywhere.

JTP: Yes, great observation from a great essay.

SC: This is palpably not the case.

How many epiphanies have I had in my life thus far? Any? Maybe one.

And even that one came on more like slow-heating water just about to boil a frog. All of a sudden, it hit me — so I jumped before the situation killed me. The formal literary epiphany, The Wonder Years-like sudden realization occurring on a regular basis does not resemble any conscious reality I know of. And yet there is something to the consciousness of a person who tries to be alive to every moment as he can. This inevitably fails, sure, but it’s still a viable, if unsustainable, tack. This is Josie’s mission, and it’s a classically apocalyptic one, which, lest we forget, comes from the Greek for revelation, “a removing of the veil.” Which sounds a hell of a lot like epiphany. The difference being Josie’s attempt is deliberate. The classic and not always believable literary epiphany is accidental. It suddenly just happens. It’s pretty passive. Josie, on the other hand, is actively looking for ways to make the physical world around him deliver a new experience, to learn from it. This is how he hopes to redeem himself, I think, in the eyes of his business partner, his ex-wife, and his father.

JTP: A semi-obscure writer once wrote, “A novel might be the brilliant lived sermon that found no root in organized religion as currently composited.” Is there anything to this theory, do you think?

SC: I believe the writer is Price — J. Now him, I’ve heard of. And I’ve actually read the article, more than once. Why? Because a question I’ve been taken with for many years is at the heart of that lovely phrase. You often hear people, usually non-religious people, say things like ‘Love is my religion,’ or ‘Music is my religion,’ even ‘Food is my religion.’ And of course I’ve heard writers say ‘Writing is my religion.’

JTP: ‘Baseball is my religion.’ ‘Used bookstores are my religion.’ ‘The internet is my religion.’

SC: And more to the point: why does this get my goat? I think it’s because it seems too easy a way out of having to debate a subject or answer a question directly. It’s a way to avoid thinking about what you actually think.

JTP: You mean in the sense that by switching out the context, whatever is under discussion suddenly melts into air?

SC: Exactly. But I’m also inclined to agree. If, as James says, the religious agree with the universe, well, there is little better way to agree with a universe, or a even a world, than to write a novel. Hell, you’re creating the thing. That is a godly move. Not to mention all the ritual that generally goes with writing. Most of the writers I know are ritualistic, which is not to necessarily say disciplined. I have rules by which I write (when I write, when I don’t), rules for what I do before and after I write. I have totems. These are all religiously inflected inclinations. Perhaps the least religious aspect of writing is the solitude. There is no community, at least not involved in the act of writing anyway. In this way the public reading, especially something like the marathon readings mentioned in that piece, do resemble a religious service. It’s communal. Then again, James famously defines religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences, of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they consider the divine.” Solitude! And if that doesn’t sound like a writer I don’t know what does. You see my problem here.

JTP: There’s definitely a tension. Published in 1941, Virginia Woolf’s final novel Between the Acts explores the overlap between faith, technological progress, and the performing arts in a small town theatrical production, a play meant to reprise the entirety of Britain’s history in the shadow of WWII. As the show on the village green approaches the modern moment, an audience member observes, “It’s odd that science, so they tell me, is making things (so to speak) more spiritual…” This observation also appears key to the thematics of High as the Horses’ Bridles… I should note too, that Woolf complicates things, true to form, by having another attendee remark, “If one spirit animates the whole, what about the aeroplanes?” (Aeroplanes. Why did people ever stop calling them that — and in what spirit?)

SC: I hear you. It’s a very pretty word. And I have not read the book, but I will, so I can sound smarter the next time I’m asked this question. I will say this, though, about the notion and the apparent dichotomy between science and spirit: it’s all about wanting to know, wanting to transcend the known limits of humanity, as such, and really know, you know? I remember reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer and thinking, ‘all of this comes from Revelation.’ Even his physical description of cyberspace I’m convinced was artfully stolen from the Bible. As technophilic as that book is, and yes it’s sort of the extreme example, it uses the very skin it claims to slough off and tells pretty much a story of religious spiritual ascent. Very strange. As far as literal science, well, it’s certainly taken on some new dimensions that present a more supernatural picture, no? Other dimensions. Other universes. Other types of time. Frankly, I think it’s a terrific time to be alive, and the things we learn every day, even a mere glimpse at deep-space photography, or a short article on quantum physics for a layman like me, outstrips and outdoes the very dated notion of God so many cling to. That old God is actually not enough to contain what we know about the universe. Maybe it’s high time we redefine God, or better yet leave the idea indefinable, which seems better suited to the idea of God to begin with.

JTP: Today is Sunday and also Father’s Day, which seems somehow apropos in light of your novel’s principal themes. The fraying and mending of a father-son bond, specifically in regard to religious identification, comprises the crux of the story. Where does June 15th, 2014 find Scott Cheshire?

SC: This is a deeply personal question and I welcome it. Here is where I am: I’m in my living room, answering these lovely and thoughtful questions, happy to have a reader take my work seriously. After all, that’s why it’s there. It’s my opening gambit in what I hope proves to be a good and long conversation. My wife is out for a run. The pug is asleep by the air conditioner. Snoring. And I spoke with my father just a few hours ago. He is reading my book right now and is reading, he tells me, every page twice. Once so he can hear my voice, and, once again, so he can follow the story. I think that’s beautiful, and I thanked him for it.

For a long time I was afraid to send the book to my dad, or my mom for that matter. There was the typical fear of the first novelist.

Will they understand this is not about them? That it comes from me, yes, but it’s not me? But I was mostly afraid because of the subject matter. My parents are deeply and proudly religious, as they should be. And so I feared a book that examined one facet of the American religious life would offend. It did not. It does not. I asked my father if he remembered the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel. I said writing this book was my wrestling with angels, if that makes any sense. He said of course it did. And then he said I’d made them proud.

It’s a good day.

Map of the City Where Every Novel Takes Place

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A few days ago we posted this imaginary map of a city where every movie takes place, and luckily there is a literary version too! This map doesn’t include every novel, obviously, but it does include literary locations from “over 600 books from the history of English Literature (and a few favourites from further afield).”

In this bookish city, Animal Farm is a farm off of Wuthering Heights road. The park system includes Lunar Park, Jurassic Park, Mansfield Park, and The Asphalt Jungle. You can go hiking At the Mountains of Madness and Cold Mountain, or take a dip in Dead Lagoon.

Designed by Dorothy, you can purchase the map as a 60cm x 80cm print. There is also a film version you can see here.

bookish map
literary city
book map

MEDIA FRANKENSTEIN: Surveillance

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Lost Highway poster

THE HEAD: Lost Highway dir. David Lynch (1997)

There’s a scene in David Lynch’s 1997 neo-noir head-trip Lost Highway thathas Fred (Bill Pullman) taking down shots at a bar in the midst of a party when a short man with black hair and insanely staring eyes, his face painted with Kabuki makeup (played by real-life acquitted murderer Robert Blake and credited as “Mystery Man”) approaches him through the crowd. The sound cuts outs but for their voices.

Blake: We’ve met before, haven’t we?

Pullman: I don’t think so. Where was it you think we met?

Blake: At your house, don’t you remember?

Pullman: No, no I don’t. You’re sure?

Blake: Of course. As a matter of fact, I’m there right now.

To prove it Blake proceeds to take out his cellphone, encouraging Pullman to call him. When Pullman does, Blake’s voice picks up on the other end before emitting a surround-sound cackle that comes from both the Blake at the party and the Blake at Pullman’s house, jolting the audience from its trance of unease into terror. That the best scene in Lost Highway is also one that speaks forcefully to its major theme of surveillance is convenient for my purposes here. Lost Highway is an underrated movie by Lynch, I’ve come to think, yet just like all of Lynch’s movies it traffics in identity switches, inexplicably malevolent supernatural figures, female sexuality with teeth and the transcendental meditation-inflected pacing which is the director’s trademark. The film takes its anchor in two intersecting yet also directly abutting storylines; one of them involves the tortured marriage between Fred, a jazz saxophonist (played by Pullman) and his cuckolding wife, Renee (Patricia Arquette), while the other follows the embroilments among a car mechanic (Balthazar Getty), a rage-aholic mobster (Robbert Loggia) and the mobster’s moll (also played by Patricia Arquette) who may or may not be Renee’s infernal double. The story begins with Fred and Renee living in their modern and dimly lit LA home, where they start to receive a series of sinister videotapes that show, by way of fuzzy tracking shots, the front of their house, their living room, their sleeping bodies. The aura of someone scrutinizing Fred and Renee’s every waking breath Lynch underscores with his wandering and casually invasive camerawork, often with a blood-red curtain lurking just beyond the shot. Angelo Baldamenti, Lynch’s soundtrack man, lays down a haunting, electronic overlay, alongside guest appearances from Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson and David Bowie. The tone of the film is a testament to Lynch’s playful and ever-evolving relationship to genre, specifically his love of pulp; you’d be hard-pressed to find a pulpier figure than Robert Blake’s incessantly questioning angel of destruction or a pulpier circumstance than the decaying marriage of a nightclub saxophonist to a smoky-voiced femme fatale.

Lynch’s genre bending and meta-textuality underscores the thematic concern of surveillance.

The film’s as aware of itself as a film as its characters are of the forces that watch them. A sort of schizophrenia begins the show amid the reels as the movie’s conventions part ways with themselves. As matters between Fred and Renee arrive at their culmination, there is a shift in the film that starkly divides the first movement from the second — the saxophonist, Fred (Pullman) turns into a completely different person, the mechanic (Balthazar Getty) — and gleefully logic begins to unravel as Lost Highway takes off in a second direction with lingering echoes that presage the first: Patricia Arquette, now a blonde gangster moll; the imp in Kabuki face paint from the party. As you are watching David Lynch, there are no answers by the end. The mechanic turns back into the saxophonist and as the film concludes vice-versa. But no matter how much their identities shift the two men stay, at root, the same. They are passive and prideful and, as the film builds, capable of committing or being complicit in nauseous-making acts of violence. Surveillance comes to mean far more than a man at a party or strange VHS’ but in itself an act of violence that tears one asunder from one’s truest self.

Last Days Brian Evenson

THE TORSO: Last Days by Brian Evenson (2009)

A similar upheaval of personhood takes place in Brian Evenson’s 2nd novel Last Days (also a neo-noir with pulpy splashes of Gothic horror)in which a mutilated P.I., Kline, reminiscent of Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op from his gangland novel Red Harvest (1929), finds himself a subject of surveillance among the ranks of a cult that functions on the principle that limbless-ness equals godliness. As early as page 1, Last Days reckons with the alienating wages of surveillance: “It was only later that [Kline] realized the reason they had called him, but by then it was too late for the information to do him any good. At the time, all the two men had told him on the telephone was that they’d seen his picture in the paper, read about his infiltration and so-called heroism and how, even when faced with the man with the cleaver — or the “gentleman with the cleaver” as they chose to call him — he hadn’t flinched, hadn’t given a thing away.” That “reason,” forebodingly alluded to by Evenson in the novel’s opening sentence, becomes somewhat of an existential red herring over the course of Last Days as

Evenson embarks his anti-hero through a rat’s maze of double-crossings, metaphysical trapdoors and many, many murders.

At the outset, Kline is called upon in his infinite bad-assery to investigate the murder of the cult’s founder Aline — after losing his arm in a scuffle right before the book picks up, Kline self-cauterizes the wound on a hot-plate. And while the real reason that he was recruited continually escapes his grasp, Kline’s M.O. diverts from the mystery at hand to wanting no more than to be left alone. Herein lies Evenson’s mordantly funny nod to Red Harvest — the Continental Op, too, wants only to be left in peace — his Lynchian existentialism and his tongue-in-cheek approach to the theme of surveillance in the novel. While the justifiably paranoid “they” who are tracking Kline’s every movement in Last Days — and who find their rhyme in Blake’s Mystery Man from Lost Highway — are possessed of a set of lofty, hierarchal ideals deriving, in part, from the Bible (“And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell”) Kline fights toward a goal no loftier than the basic human need for restful solitude. As this prospect is withheld from him with escalating sadism, a split occurs in both the character and the plot of the novel similar to that which takes place in Lost Highway between the saxophonist and the auto-mechanic, between causality and chaos. Kline, no more passive than Pullman or Getty in the hostile world of Lynch’s film, is driven to commit an operatic act of violence of which, when Last Days begins, the reader may not have imagined him capable. “If I use only one clip,” Kline ponders in the pages leading up to the novel’s grisly climax, “…maybe I can still come out of this human.” But Kline speaks truer than he knows. What’s at stake in the novel, finally, is neither Kline’s desire to be left in peace nor the riddle of what happened to Aline but Kline’s personhood, as it’s been all along. Kline’s loss of self-sovereignty to the surveillance and manipulation of the cult drives drives him to reclaim it by unspeakable means. At the end of the novel he’s more than he was: an instrument of “holy wrath.”

Return of the Mac

THE LEGS: Prodigy’s Return of the Mac (2007)

Prodigy (formerly of Mobb Deep) composes an elegy to surveillance and paranoia in the rapper’s 2nd solo albumReturn of the Mac. Loosely grouped in with the brief horror-core craze of the early 90’s alongside Gravediggaz and Flatlinerz, Prodigy pick-axes into incisive psychological ground on this East-Coast-pride themed record where the beats are damn dirty, the lyrics relentless. On one of the album’s singles, “Mac 10 Handle,” Prodigy raps: “I sit alone in my dirty ass room starin’ at candles/ High on drugs — all alone wit my hand on the Mac 10 Handle/ Schemin’ on you niggas…

By myself in my four-corner room watchin’ Hard Boiled, I feel like I’m crazy… They got eyes in the sky, we under surveillance… Gotta watch what I say, they tappin’ my cell phone

/ They wanna sneak and peek inside my home/ I’m paranoid and it’s not the weed/ In my rearview mirror, each car they follow me…” As though the reference to John Woo’s Chinese shoot-em-up Hard Boiled (1992) weren’t testament enough, Prodigy and so much of horror-core hip-hop wallows unabashedly in pulp noir and various other forms of genre experimentation. One need look no further than the schlock-celebratory video for “Mac 10 Handle,” in which a shirtless and prodigiously tattooed Prodigy, well, sits “all alone in [his] four-corner room” surrounded by occult candles and the grim debris of prolonged intoxication, washing his corn-rowed head in his hands in between bouts of loading his clip and stabbing the cushions of a couch that gushes real blood. The video even contains a cameo appearance from cinematic boogeyman Michael Myers alongside images of a snake burrowing through the ocular cavities of a human skull and a Halloween-mask Satan enticing Prodigy to “put some work in.” And this he proceeds to do, cruising his car around Queens while scanning the street for real or imagined enemies, his face in a rictus of kinetic alertness that recalls Kline’s take-no-prisoners massacre at the end of Last Days or Pullman/Getty’s bloody dash for redemption in Lost Highway. And yet the paranoia and surveillance that pervades the song — and the record as a whole — has roots in the real world as well, specifically the East Coast-West Coast criminal one-upmanship of the mid-to-late 90’s which tragically took the lives of both Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, and Prodigy’s own rocky Queens upbringing. By juxtaposing the effects of real with imagined violence on Return of the Mac Prodigy seems to be suggesting a split in his own fictionalized consciousness similar to that which Pullman/Getty and Kline experience in Lost Highway and Last Days. He’s aggressive one moment and tender the next; he’s cocksure, forceful, scared as hell. Over the course of the album, surveillance and paranoia have the sum effect of worrying away the rapper’s personhood, reducing him to something blank to which his most immediate circumstances affix themselves — in “Mac 10 Handle,” an unsavory diet of spliffs, murder films and jugs of Henny. As Prodigy raps on the album’s other single, “Return of the Mac, aka New York Shit,” “Heard ya workin’ with the D’s, you a New York snitch/ I’m tryn’a make a hundred mil’, that’s New York rich/ Back an’ forth to Philly with these New York bricks… I got eleven Mac 11’s, thirty-eight .38’s/ Nine 9’s, ten Mac-10’s, this shit don’t end…” The compulsively violent and utterly isolated ceaselessness of Prodigy’s condition on many of the songs on Return of the Mac is the scariest thing about it. In many ways, Prodigy seems to be attempting to extract the gangster lifestyle from its diamond-encrusted cultural context; it’s as much as process of de-glamorization as it is one of de-familiarization — “Too much of that gangsta music,” raps Prodigy in “Mac 10 Handle, “nah this reality rap/ I really go through with it…”

And so while the characters from <em>Lost Highway </em>and <em>Last Days</em> come under surveillance by unknowable forces, the forces compromising Prodigy are utterly banal — his rivals, his lust for cash-money, himself.

The prison of the self at last — say, a “four-corner room” where we all sit “starin’ at candles, high on drugs” — amounts to surveillance at its furthest (or shortest, as it were) conceivable tether. The one pair of eyes you can never escape is looking at this screen right now.

Alternative Cuts:

Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers (1967); Blood Simple dir. Joel & Ethan Coen (1984); The Wilding by Benjamin Percy (2011)

Jealousy by Allain Robbe-Grillet (1957); Caché dir. Michael Heneke (2005); Marcel Duchamp’s Étante Donnés (1946–1966)

The Untouchable by John Banville (1998); Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy dir. Tomas Alfredson (2011); The Pogues’ If I Should Fall From the Grace of God (1988)

The Lives of Others dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (2006); Pulp’s This is Hardcore (1998); Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912)

Previous MEDIA FRANKENSTEINS:

#1: Manmade Apocalypse

#2: Ghostbusters

In Two Weeks: College

London Benches as Classic Books

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If you are in London this summer, be sure to check out Books About Town’s 50 literary benches spread throughout the city. The benches are sponsored by the National Literacy Trust to “remind Londoners on the streets of the joy of reading books.” Everyone from Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde to Ian Fleming and Cressida Cowell are represented. View more of them here.

SEATTLE DISPATCH: Ten Spots to Satisfy Your Various Inner Book Nerds

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We may be home to Amazon, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it. If you want to get your literature from places that don’t also sell fertilizer and hemorrhoid cream, here’s where to find expertly curated selections, book lovers galore and great places to read.

eliot, seattle,

photo by Joe Mabel

Elliot Bay Book Company

For the one who wants it all in you

EBBC has everything: great selections, an online store (which includes e-books), helpful staff, all-star readings, a cafe that’s way more delicious than Starbucks, and a beautiful, light-filled storefront that makes it easy and enjoyable to hang out for hours.

Seattle’s Central Public Library

For the starving artist in you

The Central Library is all kinds of free, and it happens to be an architectural marvel as well. Check out the video installations, explore the book spiral and do some reading, sketching or writing at the community desks upstairs.

Wessel & Lieberman Booksellers

For the fancy pants in you

Located in the newly reinvigorated Pioneer Square neighborhood, Wessel & Lieberman has an impressive rare book collection ($4,750 for a multi-volume collection of Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts, anyone?). Find the perfect addition for your museum-quality shelves, or imagine what your library would look like if you became the next J.K. Rowling.

Seattle Mystery Bookshop

For the little old lady in you

I love a good mystery as much as my grandma, and I’m sure she’d also be charmed by this little basement bookshop. Specializing in everything from cozy to true crime genres, this shop is obviously a labor of love (case in point: the Our Story section on their website) — stop by on your way between downtown and Pioneer Square.

Left Bank Books

For the practical radical in you

Take a break from the Pike Place Market crowd by ducking into this collectively owned book oasis, located near the famous Public Market sign. A fixture of Seattle’s radical community since 1973, Left Bank carries a selection of over 10,000 titles, organized into sections ranging from anarchism to parenting (because raising little anti-authoritarian kids is hard work).

fantagraphics, cartoonists

photo by brewbooks

Fantagraphics Bookstore and Gallery

For the acned fanboy in you

The storefront of indie comix press Fantagraphics is located in Georgetown, a happening industrial area just south of downtown. Aside from being a mecca for comic book fans, the store shares space with Georgetown Records, making it a destination for vinyl junkies too. Plus, it’s a great excuse to check out the neighborhood. Grab a book and head to a nearby coffee shop, brewery or bar.

Open Books: A Poem Emporium

For the poetry junkie in you

Nestled into a house-shaped storefront in the quiet Wallingford neighborhood, this all-poem bookstore is a poetry lover’s dream. Go and gorge yourself immediately, or ask one of the lovely owners (poets, of course) for some ideas on where to start.

Third Place Books, Ravenna

For the alcoholic bookworm in you

This is a great general bookstore, but even better is its cozy, wood-paneled bar, Third Place Pub. Grab a book upstairs and head down to the basement to read it with a beer (or five).

Magus Books

For the perpetual undergrad in you

This tidy used bookstore in the University District has a sweet selection of high-quality secondhand books, as well as expensive out-of-print and rare titles. Rest assured, you’ll be able to afford something.

book larder store

Book Larder

For the unapologetic foodie in you

With its delicious selection of cookbooks, carefully curated by actual chefs, this cute little bookstore is sure to make you hungry — especially if you stumble in during one of their on-site cooking classes.

CELEBRITY BOOK REVIEW: Hillary Rodham Clinton on “The Possibilities” by Kaui Hart Hemming

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Editor’s note: Any resemblances to actual celebrities — alive or dead — are miraculously coincidental. Celebrity voices channeled by Courtney Maum.

Hemmings

The Possibilities, Kaui Hart Hemming’s follow-up to her award winning, The Descendants, is a novel that deals in large part with the ramifications of having a child as a single woman in the world we know today. In the still frothing wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Hobby Lobby case, the decision to have — or not to have — a child is a hard choice that is becoming even harder when a body like the Supreme Court decides that it’s no longer ours to make.

Sarah St. John is a single mother working as an infomercialist for the Breckenridge resort in Colorado when her only son, the 22-year-old Cully, dies in an avalanche. The rest of the novel is an unsentimental depiction of Sarah’s mourning period, a circuitous journey that peaks with discoveries (a mysterious three grand in cash in her son’s winter coat), halts with sorrow (Sarah can’t help from making dour comments when she returns to live TV), and upgrades with hope in the personage of Kit, a young woman who might, or might not have been her son’s secret girlfriend.

Already prone to cynicism, grief has numbed Sarah to a point where it’s difficult for her to feel compassion for other people, including her best friend Suzanne who is being divorced by a man she still loves. She’s having a hard time mustering up the patience and humor that enabled her to work and live in a resort town before Cully’s death. When the story opens, Sarah is relying on displacement and compartmentalization to see her through. “I pretend that I’m not from here,” is the first sentence in the book.

But the cracks are showing. Sarah’s becoming insensitive, even mean. Standing outside the parking lot of the Village Hotel where her son used to be a valet, (or rather, used to hate being a valet), she reflects, “Growing up I’d feel the same thing, an embarrassment to work in front of friends and peers. The worst job I had was fitting ski boots for girls who came here on spring break from places like Florida and Texas. They were always saying, “It hurts,” and I would say that it’s supposed to, making the boots tighter.”

The entire first chapter is laced with the bitter disappointment that so many of us feel now. The cauterizing sensation that this isn’t what we signed up for, isn’t how we want to live. The dumb rage that Sarah feels as she goes through the administrations of her daily life echo the throbbing ache in my head as I start yet another day, trying to find the energy to stay angry and engaged.

“I know a sense of consequence is essential to any job, but the conviction in the weight of my work, the search for import — it’s downright elusive,” writes Hemmings in chapter one. “Yesterday a man named Gary Duran beat his pregnant wife in their home in Dillon. She and her unborn child took the flight for Life helicopter to Denver. Everyone’s waiting to see if she and her baby make it, but we don’t report on things like that. Maybe if we did, I’d be okay. Maybe if we reported on the lack of low-income housing for people who work here but are forced to live elsewhere then maybe I could muster some motivation, or if we focused on tragedies that made me more aware of the world beyond this. But instead we talk about lift tickets, then share tips from Keepin’ It Real Estate and Savvy Skiing with Steve-O.”

I identify with the disgust here, the fatigue, the sense that Americans are keeping America down. The hypocrisy of it, the need to always be wearing this happy, winky face —

I’m sick of it, I’m done. You want to talk about my scrunchies? My pantsuits? About the length of my hair?

How ‘bout we talk about what it was like to be on the West Bank having pomegranate tea with Benjamin Netanyahu, strategizing how to bring about an end to the Gaza Conflict, and I’m testing solutions, and Mahmoud and Mohamed start laughing, and I’m like, what? And Mahmoud Abbas holds up a cellphone image of Honey Boo Boo in a tiara and says: “Hillary? Why are you even here?”

Let’s keep talking about disappointment. And disgust. Let’s tweet and subtweet and “like” and make donations, and let’s have nothing change. Let’s talk about what it’s like to have built my entire career around equal rights for women and to have universal health coverage fail again and again; talk about how I was hit with diarrhea when the news of the Sandy Hook broke out, how I sat in a stall with my guts clenched with horror for the mothers — for those mothers, for all mothers, for mothers just like me — but also with a current of excitement running through me because I knew that finally — finally! — things would really change, and how nothing has changed. Nothing has changed. Not a goddamn thing.

We aren’t moving forwards as a country now; we are spiraling backwards.

And after all of my hard work, my sacrifices, the things that my political efforts have done to my face — after all of this, to end up at a place where a right-wing hawker of sequin tongue depressors gets to make decisions about my daughter’s womb? It enrages me to the point of combustion. To the point of giving up.

Sarah St. John ends up coming to a détente with her friends, her life, her home, but The Possibilities is a work of fiction, while us readers are stuck in a place that is becoming more and more loaded to call home. The other day, a journalist friend of mine working on a project in Antarctica sent me a snapchat of a polar bear running in the wild. It made me think of a line in The Possibilities that I’d just read. I was in a G6 on the way to the Costco Headquarters in Issaquah to sign stock of my new book, but where I really wanted to be was back in New York looking at baby strollers with Chelsea. I don’t know. I was too tired and too jaded and too sad to type it out in reply to my friend’s video, but this is what it read: “Grainy ashes. We live. We disappear. Sometimes I feel so sorry for all of us.”

Imaginary Map of the City Where Every Movie Takes Place

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This map imagines a city where every movie takes place. Lost Highway is an actual highway, Airport is an airport and Reservoir Dogs is, well, a reservoir. You can purchase it as a poster from Dorothy. There is also a literary version you can see here.

Click here to view it in full size and explore! The detail is pretty astounding, with over 900 films represented.

movie map

Three Sisters

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Let us take a look at this place. Marshlands. All the way to the horizon. The land drained, but nevertheless sinking. Sinking into nothing, nothing but itself. Frogs volleying noise in the grass, unseen. The hazy movement of mosquitoes low to the ground. On a lush blade of green a sleek cricket, blacker than night and — look closely — its antennae twitching. Just think: there must be more of those creatures, thousands, perhaps millions, clinging to the swamp grass as far as your eye can see.

Running through it all is the highway: black tarmac dumped on a man-made ridge. Power poles no longer vertical. Wires sagging. And a tarmac bridge, built without so much as a timber railing. Can you see the creek underneath? A seam of brown water between banks of mud. The mud pockmarked with crab holes and mangrove-ridden.

There is firmer land somewhere. Land where cattle stamp the soil with cloven hooves. Where horse hair is torn against barbed fences. Where colossal windmills slice the air. But that is not here.

Now, the terror of a road train — listen! Tearing at the asphalt, shaking its steel hinges, like a caged animal, angry only at itself. See how it passes in a tumult of wind. Even the murky water of the creek shudders. Then the swamp grass settles. The frogs resume their hollow sound-making. The cricket has gone.

Look around in the stillness abandoned by the truck’s passing. There is a cluster of weatherboard houses. Crouched past the bridge, in the clearing by the muddy creek. See the white one-room bungalow? With the peeling paint and the skeletons of fish hanging from the porch like a witchdoctor’s bunting? That is a museum.

On the walls inside you will find a collection of colorless photographs. Aerial surveys. A fishing boat in a vein of water, closed in by mangroves. A group of mustachioed men, holding onto the rails of a wooden jetty. Eyeing the camera as if it was an enemy. There is a creature from prehistory, all tendrils and feathery gills, hauled up on a chain next to them. And look: another picture. On the muddy bank, a sorry group of men, almost naked, forlorn as the forgotten.

So much for the museum. Do you see, on the other side of the highway, the white clapboard building? It is the roadhouse. The only one for miles around. There is the concrete driveway with oil stains, and the fuel pump, shaped like a teapot, in front. And out to the side, almost lost to the mangroves crawling up from the creek bed, the remnants of a playground. A swing, its tyre seat hanging low to the ground, where the mangroves, worming unseen, have pushed their stems through the mud.

Do you see the derelict cottage out back? Three sisters live there. Two of them run the roadhouse. Svetlana, the middle sister, waits tables and does the cooking. Oksana, the youngest, works the register and helps with the dishes. The sisters are pale-haired and towering. They wear white blouses, and black pants usually a little too short against their ankles. They keep themselves busy. When the place is empty of custom, Svetlana and Oksana clean the fans and filters above the vats of oil in the kitchen. Scrape the ice from the freezer room walls. Do the book-keeping on one of the diner tables.

Svetlana and Oksana are in the roadhouse now. Cleaning out the cupboards in the kitchen. Spraying for cockroaches. Setting fresh mousetraps. Putting the crockery back. Do you see them in there, under the fluorescent lights, on their knees on the worn linoleum?

And what about the third sister? Tatiana. The eldest. She keeps to the cottage for the most part, though some say they have seen her sitting by the mud and mangroves on the tyre swing in the bruised light of evening, when the crickets begin their chirruping. First one and then suddenly more, you know how it goes, until the air is thick with their din.

A veil, they say, always covers Tatiana’s face. Have you heard the rumours? Some say that she is the beautiful one. Her beauty deadly as a siren’s. Others that her skin is pocked like the creek mud. That the smell of the creek banks, when the moon sucks the tide away, comes from her mouth. That she summons the clouds of mosquitoes, which swarm up from the marsh when the earth darkens.

It is early afternoon, even though the moon, like a stone, is still visible in the blue sky. The roadhouse looks quiet, but do you see the sign hanging on the inside of the glass door? The place is open for business.
Enter another road train, rattling against its chains, crossing the tarmac bridge. This one slowing into the roadhouse driveway. It stops — do you hear with what relief? — by the diesel pump.

Out steps a man with long, uncombed dark hair. Grossly overweight. He strolls the stained concrete with a cigarette in his hand. Surveys the cages stacked on the trailers. Teeming with ugly feathers. Throaty noise. There is the reek of manure, overcoming the tidal odor of the swamp and the stink of fuel.

The truck driver squashes the cigarette underfoot on the concrete, slaps a mosquito that has landed on his hairy hand, and heads inside. There is the surprising sound of the bell as he pushes open the glass door. Like something remembered from childhood.

And there is Oksana, standing erect and solemn behind the counter with its cash register. You can take a look at her now. Taller than the truck driver. Pale-haired. Her color too wan and her skin too thick for men to believe she is beautiful.

The truck driver winks at Oksana as he passes by, brushing aside the plastic strips hanging in the doorway to the dining room. The ceiling rafters are swathed with a creeper, its foliage thinning, its trunk muscular. There are long windows, framed by curtains of moth-eaten red velveteen. And against the walls are half a dozen tables, draped with faded red gingham tablecloths.

The truck driver seats himself at a table by one of the windows, facing the swinging door to the kitchen. There is a fish tank on a stand against the wall there. A goldfish floats on its side in the cloudy water. Can you see it? Playing silently for time, then struggling? The truck driver cannot. Svetlana has already appeared through the swinging door. She stands in front of him, pen and notepad ready.

The truck driver looks up at her pale face. Eyelashes next to invisible. She is almost identical to her younger sister, though she might be taller. Do you agree that there is something clumsier about her?

The fat man’s face grows a smile. Svetlana returns the gaze, if not the smile. Seconds pass. The sisters are not known for their conversation. Their skills, people say, are still only rudimentary. The truck driver breaks the silence.

“You don’t remember me, do you, love?” He pauses. “Although I’m fatter. Why not say it? Nothing wrong with talking straight.” He looks at his stomach, covered by a flannel shirt, and pats the fabric there.

The odor of the truck driver’s body is mixing with the air. The reek of sweat. Old alcohol. Seeping from his organs, his skin, as if he was pickling himself. Can you smell it? It is hard to tell if Svetlana does. Standing there in her black pants and white blouse, frilled around the collar. Her hair sprayed into a bun.

The truck driver folds his hands over his swollen belly. Looks up at Svetlana again.

“My dad was always one for straight talking. There was this time when I was a boy. A helicopter crashed on the old farm. Squashed down onto the ground and burst into flames.” The truck driver presses his hands into the yielding flesh of his stomach and then lifts them. Spreads his fingers in the air. Returns his hands to his belly. Looks at them there. “Afterwards there were these black bodies, out in the paddock, in the long grass. Not that the cows cared.”

Svetlana waits with her notepad and biro. There is a clock ticking. The white one on the wall above the door into the kitchen. The minute hand shudders every time the clock registers the passing of a second.

The fat man looks up at Svetlana again, slowly grinning. “Well, just before the helicopter came down, as we were watching its death spin from the back porch, Mum turned to Dad and said, ‘Do something!’ Dad said” — and here the truck driver puts on a mock-Italian accent and rhythmically waves his right hand — “‘Whadda you want me to do? Catch it?’”

The truck driver stops, his hand still in the air, smiling up at the tall, thick-skinned woman in front of him. Svetlana looks at him through her pale eyelashes, her pen and notepad poised at chest level. The fat man lowers his hand, smears his sleeve across his mouth. Wiping away the grin. Then he rests his heavy hands on the red-and-white tablecloth, fingers splayed. Begins to inspect them. The nails — perhaps you noticed earlier? — are long and dirty.

“Look, get me a steak, will you? You know how I like it.”

Svetlana brings the notepad and pen close to her face. She scrawls with her blue biro, then walks briskly to the swinging doors, disappearing into the kitchen.

A dry leaf from the vine that clings to the ceiling rafters drifts down to the truck driver’s table. Do you see how the creeper appears to be dying in places? Turning crisp and brown. The fat man flicks the curled leaf from the tablecloth onto the floor.

He looks out the long window framed by red velveteen. The swing is there, planted in the earth, just past the edge of the concrete. And the tangle of mangroves, hiding the brown line of the creek. Most of the water drawn out now by the weight of the moon. Can you see the crabs in the mud? Like the skeletons of dolls, crawling silently from grave to grave. And the hovering mosquitoes? The truck driver cannot. He looks up at the moon in the vast plain of the sky.

Into the dining room drifts the sound and smell of cooking steak. Then the fans above the hotplate in the kitchen are switched on. The fat man calls out.

“I’ll be right back, love.”

He manoeuvres himself out of his chair and through the plastic strips into the front room. Oksana is gone from behind the counter there. The bell rings as he opens the door and steps out onto the concrete driveway, suddenly bright. He shields his eyes and heads for the fuel pump and the truck.

The chickens sound dusty. Their throats. Claws. Wings. Feathers in the dark cages. Can you hear them? The truck driver hears nothing. He swings open the door of the cabin. Tucks his long greasy hair behind one ear and leans down to the polystyrene box he keeps on the floor to retrieve a tepid can of beer.

Look quickly: up there! A pelican flying across the highway. From the direction of the museum. Beating the air with its wings as if its soul was old and heavy. It flaps over the semitrailer, circles over the roadhouse. Floats down to rest, flapping and grabbing with its claws at the frame of the old swing. The bird clutches the rusted steel, fluffs its wings and sinks its gullet into the rancid feathers on its chest. Blinks its eyes, rimmed like targets.

From there, the pelican watches the truck driver. The fat man slams the door of his truck. Opens the can. After a sharp crack the tin makes another noise. Like the truck did — do you remember? A sound of release.

The truck driver makes his way back to the roadhouse. Pushes open the glass door, once again triggering that small bell. Thrusts aside the plastic strips to the dining room and sees, on the checked cloth of his table, a brown steak on a plate with a pile of yellow chips. All framed by the curtains of red velveteen, eaten by moths and silverfish over who knows how many years. How long do they say that the three sisters have been here?

The truck driver sits down on his chair. Svetlana is nowhere to be seen. He takes a drink of his beer and puts the can down. Picks up his knife and fork. Pulls his chair in. Starts sawing off a portion of the T-bone steak, brown juice and oil mixing on his plate.

Do you see that the fish in the glass tank has stopped moving? It floats now, waterlogged. Just below the surface. The truck driver, busy with his food, does not notice.
Enter an old white ute in the driveway of the roadhouse. Watch its slow approach through the windows of the dining room. The truck driver, chewing a piece of steak, watches it too. The ute comes to a stop just outside his window. In a spot near the swing, where the concrete of the roadhouse merges with the mud and the mangroves. And then, further below, the creek bed, crabs clawing their way out of muddy holes. The brown line of water. Soundless clouds of mosquitoes.

Can you see that the pelican, roosting on top of the abandoned swing, has turned its attention to the car? There is the squawk of the door, all stiff around its edges, and an old man emerges. Thin, with bandy legs. He leans on a cane. Closes the car door, which creaks, then bangs. Pats the dog tied by a rope on the ute’s tray. The old Labrador, fur like a doormat, thumps its tail.

The old man walks around to the roadhouse door. There is the tinkle of the bell, again like a reminder of something, and then he is inside. Oksana appears at the front counter — did you see her there just briefly? — but retreats as the old man heads towards the dining room. He pushes through the plastic strips with his cane. Walks past the truck driver and sits down at a table ahead of him. Notice how the old man is too polite to sit with his back to the other fellow? The truck driver, though, keeps busy with his steak.

The old man looks through the window between the tattered drapes to his dog outside. He notices the pelican, like a creature from another world, roosting on top of the derelict swing. Then Svetlana is there, pale and large, like the bird, standing at his other side. The old man looks up at her with watery eyes. Speaks softly.

“Oh, hello there, young lady. Steak and chips, please.”

Do you notice how his head rocks slightly? How he holds onto the walking stick, which he has laid on the gingham tablecloth in front of him, his hands mottled and jittery? Svetlana pays no heed to these signs of age. She scrawls on her notepad with her biro. Holding it close to her nose. Then she bustles off, bun firm on the top of her head. The hems of her black pants hectic around her ankles. She disappears through the swinging door. A leaf from the vine on the ceiling floats to the floor.

Now the truck driver, still chewing and holding his cutlery ready, regards the newcomer at the table ahead of him. The old man is watching his own fingers. Do you see how they look? Bony and unsettled, like crabs, on the wood of the cane. The fat man, swallowing his steak, decides to intervene.

“You’re English, then. Still got quite an accent.”

The old man looks up at the bloated face of the truck driver, framed in uncombed hair, and then down again at his fingers on the walking stick. The wood of the cane is old and dull.

“Yes, yes,” he says, “fair enough. Well, Welsh, actually, but yes, yes.”

Like the truck driver, the old man has yet to notice the fish tank on the nearby wall. The dead fish now belly-up against a corner. Do you see it there? Washed out and swollen. Pressed against the glass. As if something — the wind, a tide — had pushed it into that place.

The truck driver, without putting down his cutlery, wipes his mouth on his flannel sleeve. “My dad had an accent.”

The old man, quaint in his manners, dutifully looks up from his cane. He has a blanched face and moist eyes. The truck driver, knife and fork in hand, slowly grins at him. The same grin he gave Svetlana.

“One time, when I was a kid, a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses came to the door. Two old birds. You know the type I mean. Dad was yelling at them, and the old birds looked all confused. They asked: ‘Why don’t we go out with our wives?’ Then Dad yelled louder” — and here the truck driver mocks an Italian accent again, performing flourishes with the knife in his right hand — “‘No, I said, Why don’ta you get on with your lives?’”

The old man looks down at his cane. Scrawny hands curled over the stick. There is the sound and smell of frying steak. The fans in the kitchen go back on. And can you hear the chips spitting in the oil?

The fat man’s smile fades. He lowers his knife and studies his plate. There is a little meat left, hard up against the pale curvature of the bone. The truck driver stabs a chip with the fork in his left hand and stuffs it into his mouth. Suddenly the old man speaks.

“Oh, my wife has been dead for years.”

Now the dog outside the roadhouse starts to bark. The noise grows. Becomes relentless as a machine. The truck driver and the old man look through their windows framed in that old red velveteen. Can you see what has happened? The Labrador has finally noticed the pelican. It reverses on the tray to get a better view of the bird over the roof of the ute. The rope tied to its neck stretches, grows taut. Do you see how the dog’s belly contracts with every noise? And do you hear how with each bark, austere as a gunshot, there is an echo? The noise ricocheting between the mangroves and the roadhouse wall. And listen: there is another noise. In the clamor, the chickens, hidden within the dark cages on the semitrailer, are beginning to stir.

The pelican stretches its neck, jowl emerging from the oily feathers on its sternum. It looks first to the mangroves. The pocked banks of the creek. The crabs slipping back into their lairs beneath the mud. The brown water from the tide — coming back in now, do you see it? — trickling in after them. Then the bird turns to regard the barking dog.

Inside the roadhouse Svetlana emerges from the swinging doors with another T-bone and a pile of fat chips. The old man turns away from the window. He makes room on his table. Lays the cane across his lap, still holding onto it. Svetlana places the dish on the checked tablecloth, along with cutlery wrapped in a paper napkin, skin-tight. She starts to move away, but the old man stops her.

“Could you cut the steak for me, please, young lady?”

The old man makes a tutting sound, looking down at the plate. Shaking his head. Svetlana unscrolls the knife and fork in a single movement. Lays the curled napkin on the table. Pulls the plate towards her and, hunched over her work, begins carving the steak. Rigorously skinning the meat from the bone, where there is still blood. Then dicing up the slab of cooked steak. The dog outside keeps barking.

Suddenly there is an alien noise. Inside the dining room. Can you hear it? Wheezing. No. Weeping. It is the old man. Head down to his chest. Look: his shoulders are shaking.

Svetlana abruptly stops cutting. Stands up from the plate. The cutlery still in her hands. A morsel of brown meat falls onto the worn carpet. Svetlana does not see it. Instead she sees, through the window between the ragged curtains, the barking dog on the back of the ute. And the pelican on the top of the swing. Do you see it there too? Its head high. Its gullet bulging. Its wings spread as if for flight. Dripping greasy feathers from their undersides.
Now it is evening. The sky bleeds all the way to the horizon. The frogs, lying in the marshlands, are sending their echoes. The crickets join in. See how the clouds of mosquitoes are beginning to rise as the earth turns to the night? To the never-ending blackness of the universe, where they say that everything — even all of this — began? And look: here come the starlings. One. Three. A dozen or more. Sweeping through the insects. Their noise shrill as panic. Their tiny hearts like ticking bombs.

The highway is black and silent. Beneath the bridge the creek is full, the water still as mud amid the mangroves. The museum is empty and dark. Across the tarmac road, the sign on the glass of the roadhouse door reads CLOSED.

But look! Tatiana is there on the tyre swing. Gently rocking. Her feet on the earth, among the shoots of the mangroves probing their way unseen through the mud. She wears black pants, like her sisters. But, as legend has it, her veil is on. There is no breeze to lift it. Can you see how impossible it is, in this shiftless place, to glimpse her face, to get a proper look?

Let us leave her. Look to the marshlands that open up just beyond the concrete driveway and the white roadhouse with its cottage out the back. A flock of ibises has appeared there in the swamp grass. Against the evening light. The silhouettes of their black heads like pickaxes.

JULY MIX by Aaron Burch

Posted on by 007595

The BACKSWING G-Mix

In 2009, my now-stepdaughter made me a mix CD. “To help make you more street,” she said. She was 13. I was in Champaign, IL, having gone back to school for my MFA. A move that possibly made her worry about my street cred? Or, probably more likely, the move and MFA had nothing to do with said worry. Or, maybe most likely of all, she was 13 and wanted to show off and share music she was excited about and I asked her to make me a CD and she took that as a challenge. Whatever the impetus, I was about to get hooked up.

(A year or so later, after expressing my huge love for the mix, she made me a second CD, which I remember her claiming was “even more street,” but she may have set her own bar too high. The first CD, the below mix, may be too perfect to be topped.)

I remember living alone in Champaign, back in school at 30, drinking a lot and rocking the shit out of this CD. I remember starting a reading series, Stories & Beer, and using ~15 seconds of baseball-like “walk-up music” for each reader and going back to clips from songs on this mix a lot. I remember hearing that Chris Rock would listen to Method Man’s “Bring the Pain” before big standup concerts, to hype himself up, and thinking of “Roger That” and “Hustlin” as equally hype-generating. I remember, the next year, going on a reading tour with Amelia Gray and Lindsay Hunter and a lot of these songs acting like a kind of soundtrack through the southwest, to the extent of using “Roger That” and “Hustlin” as actual soundtrack for a tour recap movie I made.

So, other than this intro, I present the below playlist sans commentary. You don’t really need me to say anything about the songs individually. You don’t even really need to have read this intro at all. Just enjoy.

Like Snoop says, “for Kings only.”

2009

  1. I’m Going In, Drake feat. Lil Wayne & Young Jeezy
  2. Roger That, Young Money
  3. Overnight Celebrity, Twista
  4. Spit Your Game, Bone Thugs N Harmony (feat. Notorious BIG & Twista)
  5. I Can Transform You, Chris Brown feat. Lil Wayne & Swizz Beats
  6. Must Be the Ganja, Eminem
  7. Wasted, Gucci Mane feat. OJ da Juiceman
  8. Onto the Next One, Jay Z feat. Swizz Beats
  9. Drop the World, Lil Wayne feat. Eminem
  10. My Chick Bad, Ludacris feat. Nicki Minaj
  11. Baby, Justin Bieber feat. Ludacris
  12. So Lonely, feat. Twista feat. Mariah Carey
  13. I Wanna Rock (King’s G-Mix), Snoop feat. Jay Z
  14. Hustlin remix, Rick Ross feat. Jay Z & Young Jeezy
  15. Up Outta My Face, Mariah Carey feat Nicki Minaj
  16. Lollypop remix, Lil Wayne, Static Major, & Kanye West
  17. Every Girl in the World, Young Money

***

— Aaron Burch is the author of Backswing and the editor of Hobart. If street cred was money, he could buy at least a 2003 Toyota Corolla and a stack of chains. He lives in Ann Arbor.