REVIEW: The Sea Inside by Philip Hoare

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70 percent of the earth’s surface is ocean; about 60 percent of the human body is made of water, too. The sea outside and the sea inside — author Philip Hoare has spent much of his career interested in both. Now, on the heels of 2010’s The Whale, comes Hoare’s next book, similarly populated by leviathans, seabirds, and the occasional man: The Sea Inside.

To be published, with titular appropriateness, by Melville House in the U.S. (it’s already out in the U.K.), The Sea Inside is foremost a work of joy. While writing about modern oceans requires a certain degree of gravity, Hoare balances the seriousness with his own unforced enthusiasm on the subject of the sea. More than once does Hoare slip from the side of a boat to contemplate whales, dolphins, and human history face-to-face. From Hoare’s native Southampton Water, moving through Sri Lanka and into the southern oceans surrounding Australia and New Zealand, The Sea Inside is at once a travelogue, report, and memoir.

It might also be considered a collection of encounters: each turn of the page brings a new friend to Hoare. Here, a seal; there, a curious wheatear. Dolphins of assorted varieties. And whales — so many whales. “I probably think too much about whales, generally,” Hoare discloses at one point. Director John Waters agrees, saying in his blurb for the book that, “

I tell [Hoare] he writes whale porn; it’s better than any erotica that’s ever been written.

He makes his passion like an illness, like a good illness.” And yes, while the lyricism is easy to get lost in, the stories are strongly rooted in Hoare himself — confessional, even. If you get past the joy (and why would you want to?), there’s loneliness in The Sea Inside, too. “Homesickness,” Hoare eventually labels it, but since it’s pervasive even when he’s in Southampton, this seems like a rare instance of imperceptiveness.

The Sea Inside, U.S. edition published by Melville House

The Sea Inside, U.S. edition published by Melville House

But that melancholy doesn’t bog the story; in fact, for a memoir, Hoare is suspiciously absent. Instead, the book is divided into nine seas (“The Suburban Sea,” “The Sea of Serendipity,” “The Silent Sea,” to name a few), each of which visits a different history and place. We are introduced to Azorean sailors, whalers, writers, British surgeons, Maori princesses and warrior kings — and those are just the people. For the animals, there are delightful illustrations, photographs, and antique diagrams to aid our visualizations. That is, Hoare’s writing is vibrant enough but also so referential that without the inclusion of illustrations, we’d be constantly running off to look up exactly what he’s talking about. It’s an effective strategy: Hoare knows how to use a reader’s natural curiosity to stoke the story, likely because he’s being lead along by his own.

The Sea Inside might be boiled down to one passage, in which Hoare writes, “We must wait as the whale blows and rolls through the water. Everything is stilled by expectation, diminished by this deferred miracle. All around the world people are going about their business; we are watching a blue whale about to dive.” Here is the distilled essence of Hoare’s work: one part poetry, one part record, and one part a plea for us to pay attention to these oceans, our oceans — and ourselves.

The Sea Inside will be released in the U.S. by Melville House on April 29th and is available for pre-order.

REVIEW: Hanging Man: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei by Barnaby Martin

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by Ellen Adams

The core of Barnaby Martin’s The Hanging Man: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei is a two-day extensive interview with Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei. In the midst of a 2011 round-up of Chinese intellectuals, activists and creatives, world-renowned and politically-engaged conceptual artist Ai Weiwei was arrested without warning. Unlike some of his counterparts,

he was ultimately released following eighty-one days of imprisonment.

British writer Barnaby Martin, who has known Ai since his landmark sunflower seeds exhibition at the Tate, visited the artist’s compound soon after, thereby defying two conditions of the Ai’s release: 24-hour surveillance and ban on speaking with journalists.

Paired with Martin’s rendition of the artist’s biography, Ai’s words are enough to keep the reader in a steady rotation of compassion and disbelief. Like the 19-year-old countryside soldiers tasked with watching Ai’s every outward movement, one begins to ask aloud what undetectable inner engine is generating such high-risk art and anti-state activism. If you or anyone you know is struggling with the wherefore of conceptual art, I highly recommend this book; Ai Weiwei’s explanation, whispered through the stiff lips of a ventriloquist so as not to jeopardize the careers or curiosity of his jail cell guards, is the best I have come across.

Readers who are familiar with pseudonymous Emma Larkin’s Finding George Orwell in Burma will find a similar scope and structure: close consideration of one individual’s life becomes the home base for exploring a nation’s history and creative world, as well as the Western author’s experiences as an outsider and observer in a repressive regime. As with any narrative, though, the events are inextricable from the stance of the storytelling. One of the most defining elements of Martin’s book — and a perhaps fruitful counterpoint to Ai’s public displays of courage — is the underlying anxiety that colors the journalist’s sentences and decisions. Martin begins his journey to the interview with a preamble of uncertainty.

Given the conditions of Ai’s release, welcoming a foreign journalist into his home could easily jeopardize his freedom, if not life.

Even once safely inside Ai’s compound, Martin openly admits how he struggles to broach the torture Ai endured in his imprisonment. The reader becomes informed and implicated in the complicated ethics of digging into another’s trauma. The stakes are high, in this moment of interview as much as in both men’s larger project of seeking and speaking the truth.

While the interview with Ai Wei Wei serve as the backbone for the book, Martin extends his attention — and the reader’s understanding — to the widespread currents of suppression and intimidation for other high-profile creatives in China. Martin intermittently pauses the transcript, turning instead to prior interviews with prominent writers such as Liao Yiwu, Mang Ke, and Chan Koonchung and their strategies for creating and coping under the regime. Even Mexican conceptual artist Gabriel Orozco makes a cameo in an interview that contextualizes the relationship between art and changing consciousness.

Martin places special emphasis on Orozco’s conviction that art holds the potential to “build a bridge to reality.”

Narratively, these departures from Ai Weiwei’s imprisonment story provide recess from the claustrophobia, if not the risk of the pedestal. More importantly than this variety of voices, however, is a more universal truth that each writer or artist ultimately confirms: the freedom to think, whether encouraged or dangerously exercised, leads to the desire for and creation of a closer version to the truth. As Ai Weiwei himself says at the interview’s conclusion, “I wonder if that’s how this nation will change because now there are a lot of individuals who have their own sensibilities and their own judgment.”

When Martin takes us out of the words and world of the artist, the necessary provision of historical context sometimes trumps the book’s sense of focus. Those already initiated to the events and eras of modern China might be less than enthused about the perfunctory summary; those less acquainted with the nuances of modern China might be a bit bewildered as the tumult of the Cultural Revolution is boiled down to several pages of proper nouns and play-by-plays. Although Martin makes a noble attempt at an on-ramp into his own lived-in expertise, the reader will benefit from search engines and hypertext. Whether it be images of works of the Chinese contemporary art heavyweights that Martin mentions, or of the described-but-not-depicted oeuvre of its most famous living artist, such a need for supplemental information is perhaps, unintentionally, this book’s greatest strength.

By honing in on the specifics of Ai Weiwei’s eighty-one days of incarceration,

<em>The Hanging Man</em> provides ample foundation and fuels a greater curiosity

to the challenges and courage integral to the questioning creative in modern China. It is a book that teaches, but, like the best of teachers, it lays down the tarmac for a further-reaching curiosity. Furthermore, this instinct to seek out more information reminds the reader that such open access to questions, information and analysis are luxuries for which artists like Ai Weiwei must continue to fight.

Hanging Man: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei

by Barnaby Martin

Powells.com

NYPL’s Young Lions Award Finalists Take Readers to Unfamiliar Lands

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Five finalists have been named for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, a prize given annually to a writer under the age of 35 for a novel or collection of short stories. A panel of Young Lions members, writers, editors, and librarians selected the finalists; on June 9th, judges will award one author with the $10,000 prize.

In the running for 2014 are Matt Bell (In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods), Jennifer DuBois (Cartwheel), Anthony Marra (A Constellation of Vital Phenomena), Chinelo Okparanta (Happiness, Like Water), and Paul Yoon (Snow Hunters).

The settings of the novels are as diverse as their authors: the finalists take us to Brazil, Nigeria, Chechnya, Buenos Aires, and a remote lakeshore far away from home. Anthony Marra might be considered a frontrunner, as he’s already won the John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle for best debut novel. For others, this would be their first major award.

Claire Vaye Watkins’ Battleborn won the 2013 Young Lions Fiction Award, as voted on by Karen Russell, John Wray, and Peter Nathaniel Malae. As last year’s winner, Watkins will join the jury to select 2014’s winner.

Dear Sir or Madam

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Here’s how Dad nearly lost a kidney: a man calls — a man with a voice as smooth as frosting on a wedding cake, Dad would here protest — and says he needs to speak with Mr. Wasinger about some test results. Despite the apparent and protracted decline of Dad’s body, he hasn’t had any recent business with the hospital as every urinalysis and blood gas and X-Ray only earns a more somber shaking of the head. But Dad — that’s all anyone calls him, even those of us who would rather not — desires only to be a friend so he says sure he’s Mr. Wasinger and wants to know if he passed. Wants so desperately it’s as if God’s phoning about the color of Dad’s soul. So, this phone-beautiful man tells Dad he needs to hear the results in person, not at the hospital but at an old wheat silo out on County Road 18. This is where most, I suspect, would come around to hanging up. The best, most civic-minded might call the police and the worst might send a child to investigate, but Dad, finding himself somewhere off the scale altogether, calls to borrow my Charger.

“I only meant to spare you the particulars of my ruination,” he says when I wrench the whole story out of him.

I dial the police — not that I am one of the good ones — and Sergeant Kidder tells me it’s only some meth addicts out to steal organs. Apparently the addicts — when they’re not only industrious but maintain an adequate front of teeth — get hospital jobs to pilfer pills and chemicals and patient records. They exhaust those — in that order — then find the next town west. They must be getting desperate to reach Ellyss, Sergeant Kidder adds. And I see his point. We are the final bivouac of civilization against the conquering prairie. When the last valedictorian moves away, the wheat fields will come for us. Before he hangs up, Sergeant Kidder says, Really they’re quite clever. I fear and respect them considerably.

Jimmy Kidder and I have known each other our whole lives, and he’s nice not to mention how me and the boys used to chase after him on four-wheelers or how more than once he’s had to ticket bartenders at The Jake for serving me drinks when they ought not have. This might be the first conversation we’ve had that does not end with one of us asking the other if he’s okay.

“It’s a win, Troy,” Dad claims later, scratching his stomach where he must believe a kidney to be, “because I went to the DMV to make myself an organ donor. Someone’s going to keep dancing because they’ve got my kidney. Hell, she — I imagine it’s a little orphan girl — can have whatever parts she can use.” His eyes get tears and his mouth gets a long pull at his Highlife. “Don’t imagine she wants my liver, but baby she can have it.”

This, I suppose, is a truth.

So Dad kept his kidney, but it seems only a matter of time before someone comes for one again. He signs his name — Dad Wasinger, what has become his name — on every special offer, every kiosk mailing list, every petitioner’s clipboard that circulates through The Home. On the phone he is even more exposed though I cannot suffer to sever the withered umbilical feeding him the world. Sometimes I imagine Dad hovering above his medical bed and how if someone were to open the room’s only window, he would float away.

The nightmare is such that in a fit of drunken pity I trade Van a laptop for a guitar amp I haven’t used since my high school band moved away. I slip an orderly twenty so that he’ll show Dad the internet and, I hint, the bookmarked pornography.

And this is where it begins.

Not with the pornography. That Dad never mentions except perhaps when he tells me there’s crazy stuff out there and either winks both eyes or closes them involuntarily during a tremor. At first it’s chain emails full of dirty jokes — the punch line to one is, Whose turtle is it now, Chad? — and then it’s conspiracies that I scroll through to find his irregularly typed, !did you no They s teal even R Dreams!, placed after thousands of other email addresses of which he has added exactly two: mine and the mayor’s. For a time it’s coupons to chain restaurants not found in Ellyss then videos of kittens sneezing then fundraising emails for the Children’s Organ Transplant Association then, finally, this:

Dear Sir or Madam,

I the Deposed King of the God-fearing Land of nigeria humbly ask from one beatific Christ child to another your help. Mountains of wealth I archived in your magnanimous motherland and need a U.S. American brother to help this disciple retrieve. Please good kind wealthy angelic sir assist a fellow human man in His time of need by replying with your address, Security Social, and account numbers so conveyance might be purchased to your home wherein you will receive UNIMAGINABLE EARTHY AND HEAVENLY AWARDS.

Yours,
The Improperly Deposed King of Nigeria

Dad tells me he has already replied and also ordered some Canadian Viagra at discount prices, an offer he forwarded to everyone in his address book which has now expanded to include The Ellyss Prophet’s editor.

At The Jake, I tell Van that Dad might be in trouble. I am thinking of his poor, shrunken kidneys and who might come for them next.

“Who?”

“My dad.”

“I thought Dad was just, you know, his name.”

“It is,” I say.

“That’s a capital-F fucking good omen your dad’s name is Dad.”

Van is not my friend; Van is my pot guy. But in recent years, moored and alone, the distinction blurred, a Venn Diagram converging into a circle with both of us trapped inside. Sometimes on his constitutionals, Dad smokes with us because glaucoma runs in our family, or so he claims. I do it because I have grown bored of spending my income on car stereos then despairing over which to install.

Days I work as the office manager for a trucking company — a job a girlfriend got me a decade back — and nights I go to The Jake where the familiar faces are either disappearing or turning sour.

The Jake is one of two bars in Ellyss — because Ellyss is just big enough to have two of everything, one good, one bad. The Jake is the bad one just as The Home is the bad nursing home. I put Dad there six years ago when I felt 30 taking aim at me. I went from a good home where Dad raised me to a bad apartment because I always settle on the shit side of the town’s dichotomy. Maybe that’s fated. The Jake was Dad’s bar, and I played in between the legs of these stools when I was a boy. My favorite childhood memories taste of stale corn nuts.

“Let’s introduce him to someone named Mom,” Van says. “My mom is named Mom but she’s already married to a Dad.”

I shrug over my beer. I never had a Mom with a capital M. The original one — which is to say the real one — Dad claims dead, but I know the truth is murkier. When I cleaned out Dad’s house, I found an ammo box full of postcards from her in his bedroom. I never read those cards and do not for a minute regret it. I only had to check the postmark to see the earliest arrived when I was 14 and by that time it had been only Dad and me for years. Well, not always, what with the way mothers came and went. But I figure Dad did all right by me, and when some of my ex-girlfriends got to crying about what our breakup would mean to their kids, I reminded them I turned out fine. Still, I spend nights in bed tracing the spaces between my ribs wondering if I am truly as weak as my body feels.

I admit this to Van.

“It’s natural,” he says. “We live to find new ways to die. That’s the secret. Most fail. Just more mice starving in the maze.”

Maybe Van is my friend. Maybe my only friend. So slowly that I failed to recognize the evacuation, my friends abandoned Ellyss. Which is to say they left me high and not particularly dry. And even that I could abide, if not for them having also left behind ex-girlfriends who glare from behind strollers as they walk through autumn mornings. I don’t have anything to do with the kids, at least not in the way of fathering them. But I pushed them on swings where I once swung myself. I gave my old children’s books as birthday presents. I showed the older ones how to make Troy Stew by buying four varieties of Campbell’s. I heard them accidentally call me Dad and did not correct them. Their mothers — who were so damn hard they were brittle — made me promise I would not hurt them. I promised, I did, again and again. And now I’m gone but not very far.

The worst part is that I don’t care a damn for any of the ex-girlfriends save Fran. Well, Fran and Maria. And these are the two I never see. Or maybe that I always see, just never when I am at my best. Like when Maria comes into the Russ’s and my shopping cart is full of microwave dinners. Or when I’m walking home from The Jake and Fran sees me standing in her lawn yelling her name at the stars.

Van says, “Didn’t you cheat on one with the other then the other with the one? Those bridges are burned.”

I remind him there aren’t any bridges in this prairie town.

All night in my drunken sleep I roll over and over the question of which is the good ex-girlfriend and which is the bad. This knowledge can free me, I’m certain, but I wake up red-eyed and no closer to knowing how I can ever choose one or accept neither.

Out of concern for my hung-over appetite more than Dad’s online activities, I pick him up early for lunch. I find him coloring his room with whistles. When I ask what he’s so happy about, he says, “O, Son, you can’t measure the good that’s coming.”

I worry about him more when he’s happy. Why should he be happy? He is shrinking back down into his athletic socks. His skin — burnt crisp over 40 years of fixing power lines too close to the sun — conveys his state, and I can’t imagine a little orphan girl could do a thing with any part of him.

We go to Taco’s for tacos, the Mexican restaurant Dad prefers to Olé’s which is owned by actual Mexicans. The idea of Mexicans beat actual Mexicans to Ellyss by some 20 years, and for the persistent racism of Dad’s generation I am sometimes grateful, even if the tacos taste like meatloaf sandwiches. See, Maria works at Olé’s and to see her would cause a terrible pain in my chest. I know because not seeing her also causes a terrible pain in my chest.

And Fran, too. Both that she causes this pain and that she works at Olé’s. The two are the best of friends and blame only me for our tortuous past.

Dad orders extra tacos because, he says, he’s suspicious of a Vietnamese cafeteria worker, and I don’t think anything of it. In fact, I enjoy the simple goodness of my gesture so much that I take him for tacos the next day too. We laugh at old stories and let the shredded American cheese rain onto the Charger’s floor mats.

This lightness lasts only a week.

The call comes at work. Before a word is said, I know it’s The Home. I cannot prove it, but those halls hold more oxygen than God’s atmosphere grants us. It leads, surely, to that smell — something so alive it’s death — and the way this woman on the phone breathes like a sparrow.

“If it’s about the bill,” I say, “it’s not that I don’t have the money. It’s that I’m forgetful.”

This, I suppose, is a half-truth.

The nurse insists that I come that minute. I think about how I haven’t shifted the papers around my desk for a while and want to tell her I’m busy. But I know her, or at least I know her daughter. I took Cindy Phillips to the Starlight dance at the Rec. Center in the 7thgrade. At our 10-year reunion, I asked her if I was the first person to have felt her up. Still a prude, she demurred and shuffled her husband away.

At The Home, everything is beige plastic, as if they built the facility after smelting the veterans’ false legs. A fist against Dad’s door sounds like knocking on a portajohn.

“It’s my own damn closet,” Dad says. “Couldn’t I put anything in there? Well, not a hotplate, they were clear on that.”

This confuses me until I look into the closet and see the dressing bench pulled down and covered with lumpy blankets that rise and fall in soft snores.

“Don’t wake him,” Dad says. “He’s still on Nigeria time.”

I try anyway. At first I clap my hands then I turn up the volume on the TV until the accusations on the soap opera crack like heat lightning. None of this has any effect, but it makes me feel like I at least tried. Dad yells over the TV that the man has been living in his closet for days, and that nobody cared until Mrs. Phillips thought something smelled like cabbage.

“It is cabbage,” the lump says.

The man — white and elfin sharp with a frizzy pompadour and a single curl of hair pointing down at a thick black goatee — stands and brushes off his too short pants.

“I am De King of Nigeria,” he says. He wears not a shirt, and I spy what appear to be gunshot scars.

I beg his highness for a brief parley with Dad, and his majesty grants this indulgence by shooshing us away with a limp wristed hand wearing a ruby ring bigger than the cherry suckers I used to buy at the Ben Franklin.

“You’ve embarrassed me,” Dad says. “Now I fear he’ll never trust me to rescue his millions in the name of Jesus.”

“You don’t care about Jesus,” I say. This seems a small point, but I want to win the little ones first.

“That doesn’t mean I’m not a soldier in God’s Army of the Blessed Redemption, my son.”

I am not sure who taught him to talk like this, but I have a theory. Mrs. Phillips glares at us when she enters. He’s been here a week, she says. Dad corrects her by saying it will be a week tomorrow then pulls back his lips to form a big smile. I don’t know about glaucoma, but the Wasingers have strong, bright teeth.

“He’s not the king of Nigeria,” I tell him.

“Of course he’s the king,” Dad says. “He knows all about it. Says he comes from Legos. Plus, his name is King.”

“De King, da,” the man says. He’s changed into a gold shirt and a black silk vest. “Papa, is this de son who brings of the tacos?”

Turns out Dad had been feeding the extra tacos to De King. This Dad explains to me as we drive through town, and when he hands a taco back to De King, he says my liege and bows so that his forehead touches the Charger’s vinyl.

“He’s not even Nigerian,” I say. There’s no chance of offending De King as he’s focused on the girls’ high school track team jogging down the street as he chews with his mouth open.

“Sure he is,” Dad says. “I replied to his electronic letter, and two weeks later he’d taken my savings to buy his plane ticket here, just like he promised. It’s God’s providence divine, Troy.”

I don’t think he knows what these words mean. Watch, I say.

“Perhaps you’d say grace for us, Your Highness,” I call into the backseat.

In the rearview mirror I watch De King stall by picking ground beef from his goatee. He waits for me to take my eyes of him — which I will not do, I don’t care if I run the Charger through the glass doors of the Orscheln’s — before he starts.

“O Lord God of de mother coontry. Bless dis feast and all who live within dis motorcar. Amen.”

“Beautiful,” Dad says.

I drive Dad and De King back, and begin a complex negotiation with Mrs. Phillips over what it will take to get The Home to not ask questions about what’s in Dad’s closet until we can figure this out. I offer the following: I will pay the double rate retroactive a month, and she will let Cindy know I’m thinking about her. Mrs. Phillips counter-offers: no.

But when I see Dad’s expectant eyes I tell him everything went fine. He hid the harder truths from me, and I can do the same for him. In the corner, De King tests the room’s only chair for durability by kicking at its legs then — satisfied — paces regally, his thin head so far back his pompadour is perpendicular with the floor. Dad hugs me for the first time in a forever then kneels to kiss De King’s ring. He says it’s only for a week then all the financial issues will be settled and De King intends to move somewhere more befitting a God-issued monarch. Somewhere like Las Vegas or Boise. I ask De King how he settled on those two destinations, but De King — sniffing Dad’s remote control — only says, “Boy-easy, da.”

I say, “Until then, keep him in the closet. They don’t want the others to know you’re coming into money.”

Dad nods. “Their jealousies vex me so.” Before I can leave De King clasps his hand on my shoulder and says, “Perhaps you’d like princess?”

“No,” I say. “I’m good.”

He squeezes tightly and my arm numbs. He both smells like anise and looks like how anise smells. But his eyes, they’re black and red and not at all shaped like eyes should be shaped. De King nods as if he knows I’m wondering if he is a mortal after all and says, “I take her out your share. Papa give you everyting. Say da.”

He will not release me until I say da. And I need my arm for Cornhole at The Jake so I say da.

Dad sends me updates through Facebook. De King told him about escaping from an African work camp where it was always snowing; Dad set the TV to Univision because De King is worldly; they sneak out to the rec room at night so De King can learn ping-pong. Even though Dad has only been on the site for two days, he already has more friends than I do. One is Maria. One is Fran. And one is De King who in his profile picture has a hand under his goatee while the other shields his eyes from the future or God’s grace or the uncovered neon tubes that light Dad’s room. De King has no other friends — but hundreds of discarded, nearly identical potential profile pictures he must have uploaded accidentally — and out of the same considerable pity that led me to get Dad a computer, I friend him. He never responds.

“It’s a scam,” I say to Van in the alley behind The Jake, “but I can’t figure out what he’d be after.”

“I vant only your happy,” De King says.

I can’t help their presence. Dad needed a constitutional, De King, too. He takes a long drag from the joint and coughs into the night. When it begins to rain, Dad unbuttons his flannel shirt and stands on his toes in a stained white tank top holding the shirt above De King’s head until the joint is gone and we are back in the warm bosom of The Jake. As Dad explains the rules of Cornhole to De King, I take Van aside and say, “Seriously, what’s his game?”

“It’s not Cornhole,” Van says, and he’s right. De King drops the beanbags into his own board and adds three points to his score while Dad claps.

“I mean with Dad.”

Van looks down into the vodka shot De King ordered for him then up at Dad, “And he still has his kidneys? Then it’s kosher.”

I remind him that he is supposed to be my accomplice in suspicion. I remind him he once wanted me to steal the tapioca pudding from The Home so he could test it for LSD.

Van shakes his head, pushes a dollar into the jukebox, says, “Mystery is the heart’s rose.”

As he saunters away, “Smoke on the Water,” comes over the bar’s speakers, and Van might be an idiot.

Drunk, I call the worse of the town’s two unofficial taxis to take us home. The streets of Ellyss are slick with tomorrow’s dew and the moon makes shimmering lakes of the streets. Dad says it reminds him of the war. He wasn’t in the war, but at this drunken moment I nod and so does De King. Tricia, who uses the family van to moonlight as a cab, must think we’re crazy because suddenly I am trying to explain to her the horror and beauty of wars I haven’t fought. And if not then she must think it when we get to The Home and I discover my pockets are empty. Dad offers to pay with his Eagle Scout keychain, but De King insists Tricia leave with his ruby ring which glows like blood in the night.

“I have many and you are as beautiful as this warnight,” he says. “But I must request de service of de toy pony I found on de floor.”

In the morning, I am only my headache when I crawl out from under Dad’s bed just to crawl back when there’s a knock at the door. A pair of white trainers drops off lunch and I hear Mrs. Phillips ask Dad what smells like cabbage. From the closet, nearly a snore, I hear De King moan, “It’s still cabbage.”

I spend the rest of the morning helping Dad move his stuff — only the computer and some old pictures of me as a boy — out of The Home and into the Charger. De King has no stuff. Everything he wears has been seized from other residents, and Dad and I wait as he returns the items.

“This isn’t what I want for you,” Dad says. “I want you to live your life.”

“And you?” I say.

“I suppose I want my life not to feel so lived.”

When De King climbs into the backseat, he holds a pair of khakis far too big for him and beams. “He lives in Jesus now.”

That afternoon as Dad and De King unpack, I walk a circuitous route through Ellyss that takes me by the houses of old friends who I want to follow to somewhere far away, but somehow I just end up at the Russ’s. A Saturday, the store is busy with the risk takers who prefer its roulette of expiration dates to the newer Dillon’s safety, selection, and convenience. I walk down the soup aisle throwing cans of chili and cream of chicken and vegetable beef with the alphabet noodles into my cart. I feel like every face recognizes this recipe, but I no longer recognize theirs. I have used them until I found them empty, and here faces are not born as quickly as I deplete them. I have Dad. I have De King. I have Maria.

At home, I make a stockpot full of Troy Stew and lock my bedroom door. Though the working week is two moons away, I leave a message saying I intend to be sick every day. O, and Fran. I have Fran, too.

In the living room, Dad and De King laugh and slap each other’s backs in front of the computer. I pass the time reading the emails Dad sends. They come rapidly in increasingly fragmented internet speak until he is signing his name !)@!). De King sends me messages, too, but only with requests to visit his personal website which automatically plays “Silent Night” while a winking moon rocks on a swing and a snowflake breakdances. There is this message:

Dear Sir or Madam, I need you more than ever. Please, in Lordly Kindness, link yourself to me.

The Irregularly Disposed King of Nigeria

Underneath, there is a picture of Dad and De King pretending to urinate on a plastic fern. It says © TROY WASINGER PHOTOGRAPHY, but I remember only urinating in that fern for real that night after The Jake.

On Friday I hear them whispering to each other outside my bedroom door, and for a time I think they are planning a house meeting so we can set up a chore chart and discuss upgrading the cable TV. But then they are gone, and for the first time in days I am alone. I step into the living room to survey the empty Mountain Dew bottles strewn around the computer and a drawing of black and white stick figures holding hands atop an icy plain. In the background lions dance with brown bears. Across the top it says, NIGERIA, and at the bottom, FLAG. Before I can take it down the door opens. I assume it’s Dad and De King back with sacks full of moon pies and 5-hour Energy until a woman says, Husband.

She steps into my apartment with her chin held high and lowers it only when she kisses my cheeks. She wears a dress of gold and green silk that stops halfway up her shoulders as if the fabric got tired on the climb up the smooth, brown slope. Thin braids cover her ears and a long ponytail cascades down her back. A uniformed driver carries in a set of white leather luggage, a blessing because I never want a time to come when we are alone.

“You ordered a wife?” she says.

This, I suppose, is a near-truth.

She kicks away a can that once held beets and says, “The Nigerian Princess. You received my emails?”

When I laugh she says, “What? You think I want to marry you?”

Her eyes take mine on a walk around my apartment, and I see it as she must see it. More damningly, I smell it as she must smell it. The nose does not like a mystery and Van is full of shit. I am too old to live like this. I know because I am standing on a black t-shirt I got when I played JV basketball.

When I put Dad in The Home, I remember being jealous of how he accepted that there were places he would not return to and would never go.

“I was once like you,” she says then pauses to think about it. “No, better than this.”

I excuse myself — with considerable relief — when the phone rings. It’s Dad. He says I won’t get the money if I don’t marry her and I say that’s ridiculous and he’s says he’s got to go because his druid is about to level up and De King says they won’t be able to kill the dragon unless they find a white mage and I say where are you and I say where are you. He’s gone.

“What’s your name?” I ask when the silence becomes intolerable.

“Princess Kano,” she says. “Like the city.”

“O,” I say, “Naturally.”

She calls me Husband until I insist she call me Troy. She insists in turn I call her Princess — which I thought I had been doing — but I realize I have not risked saying her name at all. I tell her I will put her on a bus to wherever she wants to go.

“Boise,” she says. “I’ve heard good things about their medical school.”

But she is hungry and there is no restaurant in Ellyss worthy of a princess. I choose the opposite of the one where I would normally go, but first we see the town. I drive in widening circles, not talking much but slowing near all the landmarks of my childhood. I am surprised how many places hold memories, and for the hour of the drive the town feels bigger than I know it to be. I even take her out to the decrepit wheat silo where the meth addicts once tried to steal Dad’s kidney and though I say nothing, though she has no idea what has happened, she holds my hand.

“You can’t trust anyone,” I say.

“I agree,” she says. “Or you can trust everyone.”

This does not strike me as agreement.

At Olé’s, I try to sit across from her, but she insists on the same side of the red booth. Sombreros hang from the ceiling and the salt and pepper shakers are tiny maracas. When the waiter comes, Princess slaps my shoulder with the menu.

“Tacos!” she cries.

We order a medley, all the varieties, even the ones that are made out of parts of cows I will not describe to her. While she eats — one bite from the bottom center of each taco, spinning the plate to bring the next one around — she widens her eyes and says De King is not her father. She looks as if this information might cause me to faint though I only say good lord, of course not. Disappointed, she continues. She didn’t know she was a princess until he told her in an email. What choice did she have? And all this time she’s talking I know she’s not lying and she’s not stupid, either. I believe her when she says she was studying to be a doctor, and that she’d like to continue to in America. I say it’s too bad there is only the Veterinary School in Ellyss, but that the university in Boise has a football field blue as an ocean. This pleases her greatly. She asks me to tell her about my family, and though I try to hide my mother behind the considerable adventures of my father — for this has always been my strategy — she will not relent. I tell her about the postcard box, and she says sometimes we must be guarded against the truth.

And this I do agree with, but an argument overcomes me anyway. “I can’t imagine it was anything so horrible.”

She shakes her head. Not a braid moves. “She left. Your father couldn’t. He moved forward where he could.”

Then I see them. First Maria then Fran then Fran and Maria together. They are looking and whispering. Both wear short black aprons heavy with order pads and pens. I am grateful they are friends despite what I did, and suddenly the thing I want most is to be able to explain something to them but I don’t know what.

“Ex-lover?” Princess says.

“Both of them.”

“Past wounds can heal,” she says, “but the future scars before it cuts.”

I tell her she reminds me of a friend of mine, and she says it is nothing, only the limited wisdom of someone who once received a message, who gave up her old life for a new one, who will do it again. In Boise.

A gas station serves as the stop for the day’s one bus, which goes the wrong direction. It will take her to Kansas City then to Omaha and then she will need to get a different bus — likely several different busses — until she arrives, two days later, in Idaho. I try to convince her of the arduousness of such a trip, but Princess only says she is sorry things could not have worked out.

“You should be far more worried,” I say. “Try not to sit by the bathroom.”

I go inside for the ATM to give her whatever I can, but when I punch in my PIN, I find a richer man’s account. Hands shaking, I dial my number and De King answers with a curt, “Ve’re podcasting.”

“The money?” I say. Outside I can see Princess by the pumps washing the Charger’s windshield, even taking a towel to wipe off the squeegee after each pass to prevent streaks. I love that car, and even I never do that.

“I promised,” De King says. “Your money minus $2,526. Wife fee. You are also official Nigerian Knight. Tap your shoulders and rise Sir Papason. O, and I took de tax, too. Do not be angry with this old bear-o-cat.”

And I don’t know what good things are coming. I only know that when I go to buy the bus ticket, I buy two. Outside, I tell Princess that it’s not a journey one should undertake alone.

This, I suppose, is a lie.

And it’s not that I believe in Princess as a princess or a wife. But I believe she believes something and maybe that’s enough.

When I go back into the truck stop to get Princess a water, I call Van and tell him he can have the Charger, and as he’s haggling over how much pot he’ll trade for it, I hang up. I leave the keys with the clerk and buy two postcards. The cards are all black and on the back say ELLYSS AT NIGHT, and while Princess is checking my brake fluid, I begin to write atop a dusty box of Fifth Avenue bars. One I write to Dad. I say I’m going and that he should videochat me so that I can look after his kidneys from afar. The other I write to Maria and Fran, care of Olé’s. I say I’m sorry for not knowing how to live here and even more sorry for not knowing I didn’t know. I say I don’t know how to live anywhere else either. I say I never knew what you wanted or what I could have done to give it to you. I say I am not sure I have learned anything. I say don’t read this postcard. I say I want to take you with me exactly as much as I want to leave you behind. I say goodbye but it might be hello, and I worry those two who once loved me will recognize the sad, smiling contradictions in my handwriting and give me up for good. Then where will I be.

REVIEW: Happy Mutant Baby Pills by Jerry Stahl

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Jerry Stahl’s Happy Mutant Baby Pills is a hurricane of comedic and satirical horrors involving drug abuse, violence, manic lovers (including their manic sex lives), and ungodly revenge against the United States.

Stahl ventures unapologetically through the darkest imaginable places.

He boldly dives into the minds of hopped-up Lloyd, the heroin-addict protagonist, and Nora, his even more hopped-up girlfriend. In a way, I wish I had been on heroin with Lloyd and Nora when I sat to read Happy Mutant Baby Pills. Stahl’s social satire is not exactly a “pajamas-and-fireplace” kind of book. It is far from cozy, and diving in should require some serious psychological preparation. This is a hurricane few (sober) people can stomach.

The narrative focuses on Lloyd, a sucker looking for a writing career. He ends up as a copywriter for Christian Swingles, an online dating hub for the pure in heart, as well as job as a small print side-effect writer for prescription drugs.

Lloyd’s purpose is to condense the nasty, hairy, and sometimes-fatal side effects for the capitalist drug market.

In contradiction with his career, he shoots up an unholy amount of heroin. He establishes a quick and funny contrast between the effects of his heroin addiction versus the effects of acceptable prescription drugs. The comedy is at its strongest in Lloyd’s seeming lack of attention for the deadliness of heroin in shadow of his fixation on the big, bad, capitalist American monster. It sinks into some pretty gnarly places that are hard to stomach.

For instance, there is a recurring strand of jokes about Nora’s body, whose “purply” clitoris is “so large I wondered if she might be a hermaphrodite. It was shocking, hot, and National Geographic-worthy all at once.” Point blank — let it be known that this book’s humor isn’t for everyone.

But to counteract the rough and pornographic edges,

there’s enough here to be refreshingly funny

. In a “Prayer of Affirmation,” Stahl writes, “Just for today, help me not be who I really am.” There are several fun one-liners like this that offer a breath of “cleaner” air. One thing I particularly loved about the book is Stahl’s consistency of tone and motive from start to finish. The tale was unpleasant but never boring. Stahl’s structure effectively and excitingly builds to a conclusion that finalizes the story well without trying too much to have a “twist” ending. Amidst Lloyd’s wild circumstances, Stahl kept a strong hold on the character, making for an interesting protagonist.

Happy Mutant Baby Pills may be a bitter cup of tea, but I recommend it solely to experience the madness of Stahl’s writing. Somewhere between the “aha!” moments of this four-part story, I developed some disturbing fascination with drug abuse and social irrationality. There is a certain element of fun and mischief in reading something so daring and appalling. So if volatile love affairs, social extremism, and hysteric lunacy are on the agenda for a late-night read, this book is right to take off the shelf. A tip, however? It may be a good idea to shoot up first.

Happy Mutant Baby Pills

by Jerry Stahl

Powells.com

REVIEW: Deep Ellum by Brandon Hobson

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Deep Ellum is more than just a novel; it’s a geography, a philosophy, a mental state, a vacuum, a calligraphy of sorrow. Brandon Hobson weaves together a stirring tale in Gideon who returns home to Dallas after his mother overdoses. Gideon’s reality is a gritty, visceral one that defies pity, yet arouses empathy due, in large part, to the candor with which he confronts the brutality of the situation. The characters are amoral and yet have a code of morality they cling to, defying definition while creating a visible contradiction. The somber tone is supported by a surreal air of drug-induced hallucinations.

We are dropped down Hobson’s rabbit hole and the gravity well rips apart the diction into poetic stanzas of absurd animalism and literary panache.

Everything is masterfully grounded by Gideon’s bleak daily routine, allegorized by winter and the Chicago he left behind:

“I didn’t tell her that in Chicago I’d walked home from work many nights in blowing snow when the wind chill was below zero and I didn’t have gloves because I’d loaned them to a girl at work who’d forgotten hers. Or how the first two weeks in Chicago I’d slept on the floor because I didn’t own a bed. I didn’t tell her I hadn’t been to a dentist in years because of no insurance. Or the times our landlord, an old Puerto Rican guy named Andres who walked with a limp, laughed at me when I asked him about the bugs in the apartment. Or how Andres made racial slurs when he fixed the bathroom sink. I didn’t mention the times I hurt my hand when I punched a wall at work because my boss threatened to fire me if I didn’t start washing my white collared work shirt and look more presentable.”

Everyone populating the world of Deep Ellum lives in the solitary confinement of his or her mind.

They all dream up strange realities. These mental excursions form the clusters that bind them together in a nebula of longing, conduits into their subconscious meanderings. As his mother says:

“My dreams are always like that, watching things happen to other people instead of doing things. I’m a born watcher, I think.”

Gideon’s dysfunctional family takes on added complexity, represented in different rhythms and the shifting staccatos that act as both paean and elegy. Throughout the book, he wears his sister’s jacket, despite people teasing him about it being a woman’s coat. Similar to twins that are conjoined by the forehead, then split apart, Gideon and his sister, Meg, share a mental conjunction, a relationship further distorted by disturbing incest that is more pronounced by the way the information is treated informally. Even when separated, his mind affixes to her, checking for her text messages like IV drips to their bond.

Gideon is an observer — distant and alienated in the existentialist sense of the word. On two separate occasions when he tries to take action and lash out against circumstance, he ends up getting a beat down. The futility of his struggle doesn’t deter his sense of motion. He’s always on the move, always moving from one place to another, as though staying still would amplify his destitution. Sorrow and loneliness won’t drown him, despite being mired in both. His longing for affection and comfort sometimes results in awkwardness as with Desiree, his downstairs neighbor. He has the chance to have sex with her, but he declines in favor of merely laying next to her. She kicks him out, so he goes up to Meg’s apartment.

“Meg was gone somewhere and I was still sort of drunk… I put on one of Meg’s jazz records, something by Chet Baker. I sat in the chair and smoked. I kept thinking Desiree would come upstairs and knock on the door. Or that Meg would text me… For a couple of hours I just listened to music and tried not to think about anything else.”

His

life is a somber jazz tune, neither preaching purpose, nor expounding on mistakes

, but existing in haunting intricacies that both perpetuate time and vanish within it. There are no easy conclusions, no truces, no epiphanies. Instead, plaintive melodies.

Hobson flushes out the quirky cast of characters so that each of them feels distinctly alive.

His younger brother, Bastille, has an odd assortment of idiosyncrasies like walking “in and out of rooms backwards” or the fact that after “he became the youngest contestant to win the National Geographic Bee,” he “collapsed into tears for two days afterwards because he didn’t feel happy about winning.” His mother functions more like a dying sun than a caring maternal presence, though her gruffness and her rough exterior hint at the poor masonry of their family construction. Puig, an older man with a very young girlfriend, shares one of the more disturbing revelations in the book. He misinterprets Gideon’s concern for Meg as rejection, his worst fear, and betrays a trait common to them all: loneliness, bound by the siren calls of Deep Ellum. Even when the family gets together, their voices barely resonate:

“It seemed this would be the moment of a great communication for all of us, but as walked along the fence toward the barn, nobody said anything.”

With Deep Ellum, Hobson establishes a city that is as lively as Twin Peaks, a Walden that offers little peace, no meditation, a reversal of transcendentalism. The residents don’t try to rise. They descend deeper. Deep Ellum is more than a place; it’s a condition, full of elusive answers that punctuate the unspoken questions lingering throughout it streets, calling us back home.

Deep Ellum

by Brandon Hobson

Powells.com

On Joyce Carol Oates Reading at NYU

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by Liz Wood

By way of introduction, Jonathan Safran Foer called out his former teacher Joyce Carol Oates on the harsher things she’d said about his writing.

They were the exact kind of too-honest words that a writing student remembers for years — cutting in ways you have to tell yourself will help you, really, in the long run.

Knife-like criticisms aside, Foer credited Oates with the realization that he even had a thing that could be called a voice worth writing. And the night was in some ways a celebration of her teaching career and current position as Distinguished Writer in Residence at the NYU Creative Writing Program, where Foer teaches. But more than her career, Oates was celebrated by her colleagues and the scores of fans crowding the NYU Lillian Vernon Creative Writing House for her ability to construct voices so compelling they can draw you in whether or not you want to relate to the sometimes disturbed, sometimes haunting, characters she creates.

Joyce Carol Oates read from two pieces, beginning with a segment from a memoir she is currently writing. Reflecting on the memoir project, Oates gave a few statements that would make anyone bet she’d be a great teacher — including the idea that memoir’s special difficulty lies in finding the tone for the heart’s voice that drives it, an almost spiritual tone that replaces a novel’s character study (because how can you ever really accomplish a character study of yourself without sounding like a pompous jerk or a total joke). The section she read entered a reflection on her childhood and family, the murder of a grandfather and the event’s development into a family secret. Pieces of personal history Oates acknowledged sometimes find their way into her fiction–

Oates said she sometimes indulges the fantasy that through writing about a fictional mystery, criminal or psychological, a writer can solve the mystery of her own life.

For her second reading, Oates chose a story that explored parallel circumstance to her memoir excerpt while inhabiting an entirely different register. She fully inhabited the podium as she read “Toad Baby,” a story from her most recent collection, HIGH CRIME AREA, taking the voice of a young woman in a family irrevocably broken by the death of its patriarch, constructing a dynamic so unbalanced any attempts to summarize would do it no justice. In total Oatesian fashion the story turned the cozy molding-bordered living room that is the Lillian Vern House into a wave of gasps and shudders. And then Oates broke with the voice, looked up from the work and returned to her elegant self.

The NYU Creative Writing Program Reading Series has some incredible fiction writers and poets scheduled to read this spring–Gary Shteyngart, Rachel Kushner, Dan Chiasson and Lydia Davis are just a few. Check out the full list here/

The Dead Generations

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Click to purchase the Kindle edition

The Dead Generations

by Jared Hohl, recommended by The Agriculture Reader

Early in the gray morning, the crop dusters gathered in the pilot’s lounge of the Riperose Municipal Airport and saw a big summer storm approaching. It swirled on the radar in pixelated green, moving east across the image of Iowa. The crop dusters declared a whiskey front and immediately set about pissing the day away.

The bi-fold hydraulic door of hangar ten opened with a de-pressurizing whoosh of air. Keith Custer, the young on-site groundskeeper, went over and turned on the big overhead lights. One of the baby-faced southern pilots brought in a brand new grill.

“These Iowans can’t cook for shit,” he said. “No offense Keith.”

“You’re probably right,” Keith told him.

They ate boudin sausage and drank beer inside the hangar as the rain came down. Keith nursed a bottle and tried to look busy sweeping with a janitor’s broom. Big Doyle Fowkes had the cowling off his plane. He was in there with wrenches, covered in grime.

“Damn, Doyle, you still gotta work on that piece of shit plane of yours?”

“Poor sonofabitch. You’re looking like a pile of greasy rags.”

“Or something that’d turn up on the end of Honeycutt’s dick.”

“I’m clean as cotton,” said Bob Honeycutt, the sixty-three year old wife swapper who lived in the off season in a place called Romance, Arkansas.

“How you ever gonna wash all that shit off in time to make it to the bar?”

“Maybe Old Cotton over there can give him a rubdown.”

“Fuck y’all,” said Honeycutt with a smile.

Later, Honeycutt got to talking about a secret down-south sex club. He spoke about how married women would show up alone sometimes and how you could get a married southern woman to do just about anything you wanted her to if you smiled and were polite and gentle and wore an expensive suit while you were chatting her up. He said he and his wife had taken on plenty of married women in their time. He said he’d had them doing things their husbands couldn’t even dream up.

“Changed them inside and out. Touched them in a deep way,” Honeycutt said, licking his thin, wet lips. Some of the younger guys were laughing. The crop dusters with rings on their fingers were sucking on their beers or trying to change the subject.

“If an old codger like you ever did anything with my wife I’d string you up and kill you,” said Pete Shanks. He was forty-something, so short he needed the help of a little plastic booster box to step up onto the wing of his own airplane. Pete was wearing an overly fancy western shirt that was faded in places, with great curls of loose stitching blowing in the occasional penetrating gust of wind.

“Well,” said Honeycutt. “I don’t intend to come between a man and his wife, but sometimes I can’t help myself.” He ended this one with a wink toward the younger guys who let out big laughs, the kind that went on too long and were meant to help encourage a fight.

“It’s all just a bunch of bullshit anyway,” said Shanks. “He’s at some ranch in the boondocks chasing sheep with his pecker out. Then he goes and gets drunk and calls it his sex club. HA!” He looked around the room, but no one else laughed. Some of the guys made faces at each other. The awkward silence just rolled on. This was routine for Shanks. Doyle felt sorry for the man in about a hundred different ways.

Honeycutt was leaning back in his folding chair with a bottle of beer held loosely around the neck, just as calm and comfortable as can be.

“You want to believe it’s a story that’s your prerogative. But there’s another chapter you might be interested in knowing, Shanks. That’s the one about how you’re just the type of guy whose wife shows up to the club. Kind of guy who’s all tense and worried about things and doesn’t know how to relax and enjoy all the varieties of life.”

Pete stepped toward him and pointed with the hand that held his beer. “You think you can tell me about my own wife? That what you think, Bob?”

“I’m just talking about women, Shanks. I’m talking about life. There are a lot of pleasures out there to be discovered by the sensual man. A lot of forbidden things to try.”

“Just what the hell do you mean by that?”

Honeycutt looked at the others. “He’s a bit slow, isn’t he?” He leaned forward. “I like the taste and touch of another man’s wife, Shanks. I don’t know how to make it any more clear than that.”

Shanks smashed his bottle on the hangar floor and wide-stepped it over to Honeycutt like he’d been practicing it in his hotel room the night before.

“Listen here you sonofabitch!” His face was red and his fists were clenched at his sides. A white piece of plastic was beginning to poke through the frayed Aztec printing on his collar.

Honeycutt was still slouched in his chair. He waited a couple seconds before he looked up at Shanks.

“All right,” he said. “I’m listening.”

Somehow this threw Shanks for a loop. He must have thought stomping over to Honeycutt would be statement enough. He stammered around for awhile looking all over the place like he hoped a miracle would come zooming in and rescue him. He was shaking a fist in the air when he finally got some words out.

“You keep your hands off my wife!”

It echoed throughout the entire hangar and a big boom of thunder sounded directly afterwards. The rain crackled like static on the cement outside. Honeycutt broke into a smile and soon all the pilots went into an uproar. Shanks turned in a circle before he understood what was happening. His anger was big, but it couldn’t compete with guys bending over out of breath and tears coming down their cheeks. Shanks looked around and smiled and shook his head.

“Damn,” he said. He even laughed a little himself. “Goddamn,” he said again. Honeycutt gave him a friendly pat on the back. Shanks stepped away quick. “I’m gonna go take a piss.”

When Shanks went into the bathroom Honeycutt leaned forward and said, “Hell, I don’t know, maybe I have had his wife.” And then he laughed and so did a few of the others and just after that something flew from clear across the hangar and hit him square in the mouth. He stood up quick, blinking in confusion, and then he leaned over and parted his lips and a whole river of blood poured out.

“Jesus!” said one of the young guys.

“Now that was just one step too far!” said Shanks. “How much do you expect a man to take?!”

Honeycutt was standing there with blood going all down his chin. He looked at Shanks and put his hands on his hips.

“Had to resort to violence, didn’t you? Because you couldn’t handle it any other way and because your mind weren’t quick enough to figure out what was really happening, what’s always been happening. You done lost and been lost this whole time and you ain’t never gonna recover. Not in your whole damn life are you ever gonna recover. A motherfucking hothead like you.”

The words came out surprisingly clear from between his red teeth. He spat a blob of blood onto the cement floor.

“Talk about a man’s wife like that,” said Shanks. “In front of a whole group of people!” He stood over near the bathroom, trying to remain angry, but anyone could tell he was shook up by the sight of all that blood.

Some of the guys were hanging out near Shanks and the rest were beside Honeycutt, but there wasn’t going to be any fight. Doyle went and got a handful of paper towels and gave them to Honeycutt to hold on his mouth. Keith mopped the blood from the floor.

“I got to go to the emergency room now and get my lip stitched because you’ve got half a goddamn brain,” said Honeycutt.

“You provoked this whole thing right here,” said Shanks.

Honeycutt shook his head and went out of the hangar.

“He better not smash up my truck or anything like that,” said Shanks.

“He ain’t gonna smash your truck,” Doyle told him.

“Let’s go to Keo’s,” said one of the young guys. That was the bar they always went to after work. They all grabbed beers on their way out of the hangar.

“I’m going home to my wife,” said Shanks.

“You better get there before Honeycutt does,” said one of the guys.

Shanks didn’t do anything. He didn’t have the anger for it anymore.

Keith and Lotto kept drinking even after all the others had left. They sat in lawn chairs outside of Keith’s trailer, watching the empty beers pile up.

Lotto’s real name was Richard Garff. He was a mechanic and he was nineteen years old. He’d won five thousand dollars two years ago on a scratch-off ticket and spent most of it with the Snap-On man, buying a toolbox that cost so much he couldn’t afford any new tools for the thing. The crop dusters called him Toolbox for awhile, but within weeks he’d hit another scratch-off jackpot, this one for two thousand. First he got a ratchet set and then, later that night, he blew the rest at the strip club over in Coralville. After that everyone just called him Lotto.

He was skinny, but strong. Lotto drove up to work in a pickup each day even though he didn’t have a license. When the Co-ops pulled in with their big commercial chemical trucks, Lotto would hop into the cab and drive them to the far end of the airport’s ramp where he parked them in a long line. Somehow he knew how to work the power take-off switches in any kind of truck, could find the fuel shut-off valve in a split second, wasn’t intimidated by any of it. He would taxi the airplanes wherever they needed to go and could fly them as well.

“C’mon,” said Lotto. “I want to show you something.”

Keith followed him out to the Air Tractor in a daze. He knew Lotto was going to try and fly the thing, but he didn’t try and stop him. Already it felt like a kind of prophecy. He even helped him undo the tie-downs.

“It’s a taildragger, but I think I got it,” said Lotto. “Get on up there.”

Keith climbed into the cockpit and Lotto squeezed in beside him and pulled the hatch shut. It wasn’t meant for two people, but they were both small enough to fit. The air was hot and stale. Everything was quiet in there.

“This doesn’t seem like the best idea,” Keith said.

“Course it does,” said Lotto and he fired the ignition.

The engine seemed louder than normal. Oh well, thought Keith, oh fucking well. Lotto pushed the throttle until the plane was speeding down the runway. He jammed on the rudder pedals like they were stuck or he was having trouble keeping the thing centered. The beacon light flashed messages at Keith. He saw a ball of fire and metal at the end of the runway. Thoughts zoomed through his head just before the wheels left the ground, but he couldn’t make sense of them. Everything was muddled and mushed except for his heart which rat-a-tat-ed to make his whole body shake. Up into the air they went, like some kind of nightmare.

“Damn this thing is loose!” Lotto hollered. He jerked the stick back and forth to show Keith how crappy it was. He flew low because it felt more natural that way. He thought about those kinds of things. Lotto felt like a bird when he buzzed the shadowed treetops. The way he moved in that plane was just like an eagle looking for something to kill. He’d once shot a bald eagle from the sky with a high-powered rifle, but he never told anyone about it. Thirty aught six. Ka-boosh! And later that same day he sprayed a calf’s brains all over the pasture, its ear tag twitching in all that red jell-o muck. Lotto had killed tons of things in private. It was what he liked to do. In Missouri, he knew the caves. He could escape to the darkness of old rock, places that no one else knew about, even the people who owned the property. He’d get there by boat, creeping along the muddy banks. He was invisible at night. He knew his way through every forest.

Keith shut his eyes. He sat crammed into that cockpit, squeezing his corner of the seat. This was what it felt like when young people died. He tried to shrug his whole life away. The moment lasted forever. For awhile it seemed like maybe they were going to make it, but when Lotto finally went around the loop and lined up with the runway Keith took it all back. He prepared for the engine to come through the instrument panel, cutting him in half, a split-second feeling of lightness before his torso and arms and head were ground to wet meat under the collapsing shape of the plane.

He spent the rest of the night in the trailer on his computer glued to a gore site, gawking at uncensored photos of crash victims and suicides, the destroyed, the murdered. He drank and clicked through a thousand images. Every picture was him. It didn’t matter what he was looking at, could be some dead guy laid out in a ruptured mangle of machined metal and torn rubber or some blue-faced teen girl strung up in a closet. It was Keith’s head mashed open on Highway One, revealing the liquefied brain inside, nostrils split wide, a muffin icing dollop of yellow fat squeezed from an armpit gash. He was the slaughtered Mexican informant, all limbs removed, something mannequin about him, a Hollywood prop with a clenched hand shoved in his mouth, eyes slippered shut and powdered with a grey coating of mysterious dust. Keith was the alley jumble of body parts, wet and shining. He was the blackened fly-ridden corpse three weeks in the rice paddy. Keith was the video of the press conference suicide: the suddenly slackened body, the vanished magic, the fluttered heart pushing out its final run of blood.

Interview with “Used Books” Artist Ben Sisto

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by Josh Milberg

The afternoon of Saturday, March 7th, I was walking down Broadway along the division between Bed-Stuy and Bushwick when I saw books on display in a gallery. To be more precise, I saw the same title shelved over and over. I walked into “Used Books,” an exhibition by Ben Sisto, curated by Joshua Caleb Weibley. The component I’d seen from outside was called “Interaction of Interaction of Color” and features 25 different print-runs of an art theory book that details how colors are perceived differently when put near to or pulled apart from others. That book is, of course, called Interaction of Color. Sisto purchased his copies second-hand through online retailers like Albris, Abe Books, and through local shops like The Strand, Book Thug Nation, and Spoonbill & Sugartown.

I emailed Sisto to find out more about the exhibition, which runs through March 16th at Scott Goodman’s Good Work Gallery (1100 Broadway, Brooklyn), and about his take on books as objects.

Can you explain how you’ve applied concepts from Interaction of Color to the books themselves — as artifacts?

I should start by saying most of my works start with the title or some kind of pun. If all goes well from there, the pun leads to a deeper discussion about production, values, attribution, etc. But I like having an ice-breaker.

I picked up a copy of Interaction of Color from Book Thug Nation and two things came to mind. First, this is a really important book with reference to art history and color theory, which I’d never read. So I bought it (still have not read it). Then, I remembered Imitation of Imitation of Christ, an anonymous fashion project from the ’00s that playfully jabbed at Imitation of Christ, a fashion label Chloë Sevigny was involved with.

These two titles merged and I thought “Interaction of Interaction of Color.” So the next thought is: If that project were to exist, what would it look like? The most obvious concept was to display a few copies of the book side by side, allowing their respective wear and tear to be showcased through comparison.

Ben Sisto, Interaction of Interaction of Color

Ben Sisto, Interaction of Interaction of Color

What anomalies or differences have you found from copy to copy (e.g. typos, different artwork, dog ears, marginalia, types of paper used)?

The project really took shape when I compared early and late print runs (there are 28 runs in all). Actually, this project is why I know about print-runs, how they are accounted for. In looking at two copies, I noticed the back-cover images were not exactly the same. The image is a collage of leaves on a blue background; some leaves are torn at the edges, but the tears have slightly different shapes in later runs. Well, different according to me, and most people I’ve shown.

I called Yale to get to the bottom of it. I had crafted a tale in my mind where some printer accidentally damaged (in my version he/she spills a Dunkin’ Donuts “Great One” coffee) the original in error and then painstakingly created a bootleg to replace it. Yale looked into it for me, and we learned the collage was actually originally created by Eva Hesse when she studied under Albers, which we all thought was a nice tidbit.

So the mystery lives on. But, in addition to that aspect I really find the respective book’s yellowing over time, price stickers, inclusion of a URL in later years, etc. to all be quite beautiful when looked at as a group. One has an old Rizzoli sticker. One was likely used as a cutting-surface. One was sent from Australia, but all were printed in Massachusetts. Many journeys in there.

Now that e-readers make it possible to read works without pages or binding, do you think there are any particular features that book manufacturers should employ to keep books relevant, at least as relevant as they’ve been for the last few years?

I’m not sure I’m the best person to comment on this, honestly. For my part, I buy mostly used books which I plan on chopping up and re-displaying, because I’m interested in copyright infringement’s potential to produce a positive economic impact on secondary markets. I’d like someone to see a work I made with five $2 books, and then make it themselves for $10 and have our collective $20 go towards Housing Works.

When I buy a new book, it’s usually an art book. My main gripe with art books is when the hand of the designer/layout-team overpowers the work itself. A lot of art books end up as graphic design projects with images used like lorem ipsum copy. I’d much rather just see images of the work alone on the page and, as needed, related interviews and timelines towards the end. Keep it classy.

Are there any features you’ve seen or would like to see employed in electronic texts that might further divorce them from printed works?

I wouldn’t say they are divorced at present, or that they ever will be. They coexist. I can read a short story on an e-reader on the train, but feel and understand the same content differently if on the beach with an old paperback folding and bending in my hands. It has sand in some of the pages which I’m okay with. In fact, I enjoy. I would be less okay with sand inside an e-reader. They are different experiences, and it’s important to try and revisit content across multiple platforms and see what’s lost or gained with each translation.

I actually think that we’ll get to a point with culture/technology where you won’t be able to tell the difference between a printed and electronic book, anyhow. Not to sound overly Kurzweilian, but I do believe that within 100 years or less, life born from or in collaboration with “artificial” intelligence will have the option to experience the printed page if desired. Or not.

For the next two questions, imagine we’re in the future. All traditional libraries have disappeared and only a small percentage of the population still own actual bound books, but there are books in museums where you can read for a bit if you like. Which books are in the museum?

The complete set of all possible books.

What has our culture lost when most of our books are behind museum doors?

Here, I think a more appropriate question is, “What has our culture lost when most of our cultural products are behind closed doors, generally?”

The greatest threat to the printed word, to education, to democracy right now is the debate over network neutrality and the open Internet. If we lose this one, we (as in “We The People”) are doomed.

So, here I’d like to plug the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, and Public Knowledge, if I may. This isn’t a perfect metaphor, but they are fighting to ensure admission to the museum stays donation-based, sliding-scale, etc.

Ben Sisto (b. 1980) lives in Brooklyn, NY. He earned a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art in 2002 and has since organized or somehow been involved with maybe 1,000 events or so, art shows, concerts, DJ nights, readings, mini-festivals, etc. Most recently he ran Public Assembly (RIP) in Williamsburg and above it, PACS Gallery. At present he produces cultural programs for Ace Hotel New York and is the world’s leading expert on the history of “Who Let the Dogs Out?”

Dispatches from the Road: Made To Break Seattle

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February 26th marked the inauguration of the national book tour D. Foy is making in support of his debut novel, Made to Break, set for release from Two Dollar Radio on March 18th. The timing couldn’t have been better: it coincided with this year’s AWP conference in Seattle. Here is the first installment of his tour blog.

2/26

A brutal but amazing day.

I rose at 3 a.m. for pick up at 4:30, then hopped on a 5:40 flight out of La Guardia, narrowly escaping yet another storm hammering NYC courtesy of our new, exceedingly unwelcome chum, Polar Vortex.

At a layover at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston (they actually named an airport after him?), I somehow experienced a preponderance of obese men in camouflage hunting jackets roaming the terminals. I was not surprised. A crappy burrito and a-very-difficult-phone-call-I-didn’t-want-to-have-with-an-old-friend later, I was informed via Twitter that I’d just walked past Ursula (whom till then I only knew on Twitter). We met and chatted, then boarded the plane for very different seats. Did this seemingly chance encounter augur more to come? I’ve had an Indiegogo campaign up for a few days now, and the last people I’d expect have, like rabbits from hats, been appearing to support me.

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After another five-hour flight packed into the window seat by Robin, a heavy-set academic from a border hamlet near Mexico and fellow AWP pilgrim who talked my ear off about the dirty machine that is capitalism, I snared a cab to the Grand Hyatt, intending to freshen up with a nap before my reading that night. But instead of sleeping, I thought of Robin’s father, about whom Robin had also talked incessantly. Robin never said so, but based on his many fraught innuendos, it seemed impossible that his father — a Norwegian manic-depressive who spent his life tripping through a litany of failed endeavors, from carpentry, computer programming, farming, selling cars, and etc. — had not committed suicide.

I went down to the Starbucks attached to the hotel: my concierge had informed me that it was one of only a few cafés with a Clover press, which makes coffee with twice the normal caffeine. Satisfactorily juiced, I proceeded to my reading with Cari Luna, Jeff Jackson, Matt Bell, and Sean Madigan Hoen up on Capitol Hill, at Still Liquor. Tod Goldberg, our nimble-witted host, decided in the midst of reading my bio that I looked like a punk-rock Don Draper, and announced as much to the packed house. Everyone laughed. I shrugged and got up to read sans mic, Abe-Lincoln style start to finish.

2/27

I experienced a very surreal moment. I’m spoiled at home: without fail I stumble straight for the coffee first thing each morning and stand before the machine mumbling and drooling until it’s ready, and would never at pain of death be caught outside my apartment until my system’s caffeinated. Today, though, I awakened in the Grand Hyatt after having been up for 24 hours and was forced into the world to forage for caffeine. I put on my flip flops and sweats (i.e. pajamas) and quasi-sleepwalked to the Starbucks, where, to my horror (really), I found it teeming with bushy-eyed AWP attendees, with fresh clothes and styled hair and shaved and made-up faces, AWP badges dangling from their necks as they chattered and texted and did all the other things people with functioning brains do. I felt like one of HG Wells’ troglodyte morlocks risen from a twenty-year coma, forced to take a chemistry exam. Or something. The next day, in response to my Facebook post about the same, the writer and critic Vince Passaro commented: “Do you see now how AWP fosters conformity among those who should never ever ever consider conforming? See? It was happening to you right there? Who are all those fucking Ohioans anyway?”

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I roamed the book fair all day with Jeff Jackson, my friend, label mate, and author of Mira Corpora (lately shortlisted for a LA Times Fiction Prize), picking up more books and swag than anyone has a right to. That evening, I dined alone at a fancy sushi joint near Pike Place Market, then hit a reading up the hill, put on by Gigantic magazine, featuring the likes of Adam Wilson and James Yeh. There may have been a thousand people from Ohio milling about the conference, though I wouldn’t have cared if they’d hatched from eggs. Conversations great and small had the feel of no less than the epic. And anyway, for whatever it’s shortcomings, Ohio is the home of Two Dollar Radio, my publishing house, and of its power-duo founders, Eric Obenauf and Eliza Jane Wood-Obenauf. In my opinion, these guys will in years to come be recognized en par with James Laughlin of New Directions and Barney Rosset of Grove for the groundbreaking work they’ve been publishing. Grace Krilanovich? Anne-Marie Kinney? Karolina Waklawiak, Scott McClanahan, Bennett Sims, Jeff Jackson? That I’m among this company is hard to believe, honestly.

In sum: this was the first day of my first AWP, and it was signature.

Overheard on the street that night:

Punk kid to the girl walking her dog: “Hey, dude, you look awesome in that jacket!”
Second punk kid to first punk kid: “What the fuck is a Chinese light bulb?”

And then:

The white hipster kid walking up the street with a boom box on his shoulder, playing Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean,” his gang of his friends around him, and, as the kids pass by, the middle-aged lesbian couple pointing at the boom box while saying, “What, that’s a thing again?”

2/28

photo 4

Another day on the floor of AWP’s book fair, hobnobbing with everybody and their uncle.

But the big event this day was my reading that night. Yet another power couple, Carrie Seitzinger and Matty Byloo (of Small Doggies Press and NAILED Magazine), organized a reading in a private studio in the Queen Anne hood of Seattle. But for Jeff, JS Breukelaar, and Patrick Wensick, I had no idea who the other writers were. We drove out to this seeming No Man’s Land, convinced we’d be our own audience but — lo and behold — instead arrived at another packed house. But way, way, way better were the amazing writers we were graced to share the stage with: the aforementioned kings and queens, plus Brian Tibbetts (editor of the Portland Review) and the mindblowing poets Rachel McKibbens, Robert Lashley, and Jacob Rakovan (the last two of which actually made us all weep). I walked away with more gratitude and awe for the indie publishing scene that I’d had going in. Since the economic collapse of 2008, the ensuing, more concentrated consolidation of the major publishing houses, and the exile to the hinterlands of obscurity of writers absent any perceived commercial promise, the indie houses that have manifested to fill the void are putting out truly great stuff. It can only be a matter of time before that great stuff attains the wider attention it deserves. A thought: the internet is villainous in 101 different ways, but it’s surely a major factor in the literary renaissance now under way. The presses at work today would’ve been inconceivable twenty years back, much less ten, I think. The reading tonight was undoubtedly the best I’ve been to in years.

Some vintage Seattle neon along the way to the reading:

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Patrick Wensick, JS Breukelaar, and me:

Patrick Wensick Jenny Breuklaar and D

At the FSG Literature party that night, I hung with the crews from Mellow Pages Library and Electric Literature and rubbed elbows with the likes of Joseph Riippi, Matt Bell, and Adam Robinson. Later, in our room, until 3am, Jeff J and I engaged in spirited debate about Picasso, Warhol, and Dylan. He loves them all. I don’t. Mad respect to Sir Jackson!

3/1

MTB on Shelf at Left Bank Books Seattle

More bookfair hobnobbing. More swag. More fatigue. This thing goes on and on!

I met my pal Ron Tanner for lunch at Mod Pizza and talked about our sugar addictions. Ron is a veteran of national book tours and knows every bakery and café, it seems, in every town across the country. He told me about the pie places I should hit in Portland. He might as well have been talking about heroin.

But that night, I hit my last reading of AWP, at Left Bank Books, with Jeff again, plus Scott McClanahan, Joseph Riippi, Noah Cicero, J David Osbourne, Juliet Escoria, JS Breukelaar and others, all of whom, again, were incredible. I can’t remember the last time I’ve attended three successive readings, each of which was nutty good. But best of all, I got to see for the first time ever my book on the shelf of a bookstore. The feeling is ineffable. Had I not been surrounded by pals, I would’ve cried for sure.

Here’s what the end of AWP looks like the morning of departure:

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