The Education of Oronte Churm

Turkey: A Love Story

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 05:10:53 GMT

Actually, the title of the book I’ve been reading this week is The Turkey: An American Story (University of Illinois Press, 2006), by Andrew F. Smith. I picked it up expecting a narrative history along the lines of Cod, Salt, The Potato, The True History of Chocolate, Spice, or A History of the World in Six Glasses.

There’s some of that here; “Part 1, The History of the Turkey,” includes ten chapters with titles such as “The Globe-Trotting Turkey; or, How the Turkey Conquered Europe.” But chapters are subdivided into sections—Chapter 5 (“The Well-Dressed Turkey ; or, How the Turkey Trotted Onto America’s Table”) contains subheadings from “Tobacco Turkeys” to “Turkey Eggs” to “The Christmas Turkey Dinner”—and the book feels more like a common reader put together by someone who really loves the lore.

Smith, who teaches culinary history and food writing at the New School and serves as editor-in-chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia on Food and Drink in America, writes, “My fondest childhood food memories relate to the traditional Thanksgiving feast and its centerpiece, the turkey…. These memories were surely the beginning of my lifelong fascination with the turkey, a fascination that persists decades after these extended family Thanksgiving celebrations receded into memory. [N]ow, as a food historian, I am concerned with what the turkey tells us about larger social, historical, cultural, and culinary issues and also what it reveals about what it means to be an American.”

He gives a nod to other sourcebooks and cultural histories, including Karen Davis’s More Than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual and Reality (2001) and Sabine Eiche’s Presenting the Turkey: The Fabulous Story of a Flamboyant and Flavourful Bird (2004), and a quarter of Smith's book is 48 pages of notes, bibliography, and resources listed at the end.

Still there’s solid writing throughout and interesting facts including the debunking of commonly-cherished myths that Smith calls “fakelore”:

Despite repeated stories to the contrary, the frequently cited “First Thanksgiving” dinner never happened—at least not the way…described in textbooks and popular magazines. Benjamin Franklin did not propose that the turkey be America’s national emblem. Free-range and organic turkeys may or may not be more flavorful than frozen turkeys purchased in supermarkets. [And] a person would be physically incapable of eating the amount of turkey required to induce [drowsiness caused by tryptophans].

He goes into each of these, point-by-point, in Part 1. But my favorite part of the book is “Part 2: Historical Recipes,” which date from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. I don’t know why old recipes are so evocative, since many of the ingredients are unknown to me or difficult to get, the processes laborious beyond belief, and the results, quite honestly, often nothing I’d want to eat. But they read like a poetry of lost specifics, in which you learn old words and ways to boil, bone, braise, devil, hash, jelly, pot, roast, sauce, steam, stew, and stuff a turkey. There are (sort of) instructions for making turkey croquettes, cutlets, galatine, gravy, gumbo, pie, ragoût, salads (including “flesh sallet of a capon or turkey”), sandwiches, sausage, and soups. Read here about turkey a la daube, escalloped, fricasseed, en pain, with Cèpes, en brochette, and a la Jules Verne. It's all just plain fun, especially this time of year.

The author of one of the listed recipes, for instance, Hannah Glasse, who in 1747 self-published The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, writes of a “Yorkshire Christmas-Pye” made with a bushel of flour, four pounds of butter, and a boned “Turkey, a Goose, a Fowl, a Partridge, and a Pigeon,” all nestled one in the next. Add mace, nutmegs, cloves, black pepper, and salt. Surround the turkey with a jointed hare and “Woodcock, more Game, and what Sort of Wild fowl you can get.” The pies bake four hours in a very hot oven and should emerge with “Walls…well built” so they can be “sent to London in a Box as Presents….”

It’s not a particularly practical recipe for our age, but then there’s little that’s practical about the American Thanksgiving, which is one of its pleasures. After all, the feast centers on a bird with a six-foot wingspan. Thanksgiving is about abundance, freedom from want, even as the earth tilts from the sun and cold sets in. The symbol of the cornucopia, horn of plenty, extends far beyond the idea of a bountiful harvest to plenty of family, friends, food, drink, happiness, and warmth itself.

We wish you and your family a very happy Thanksgiving.

College Internships With Real Turkeys

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 17:23:26 GMT

Last night I ran into this listing, at the online Jennie-O Turkey Store, for a college internship:

This full-time (40 hours per week)… internship will last approximately three months. You will be introduced to a progressive and dynamic turkey breeder or grow out operation, which will provide you with an inside look at becoming a successful Farm Manager. You will apply your managerial, leadership, and interpersonal skills to the daily management of a flock and be given the chance to analyze capital and labor expenses to ensure flock costs are met.

A portion of an online diary reveals a “day in the life of Kelsey who worked in the turkey barns and in our Spicer, Minnesota office….” A few excerpts:

5:00 a.m
Report to work, unlock the office door…put my boots on and head out to 1 Barn.

5:10am
Pick dead birds in 1 Barn. [...] Record the mortality in the barn and bring dead birds to the incinerator. Start picking dead in 2 Barn. Kathy, the farm manager that I work with usually meets me in this barn. She picks dead in 3 Barn while I am picking dead in 1 Barn. The same procedure is done in all three barns.

6:30am
Usually done picking dead by this time, unless the birds are younger, then it takes longer because you have more record keeping….

11:00am
…bring all the culled birds to the incinerator and start it for the day. Then head to the office for a lunch break.

[Etc.]

“It’s everything you’ve wished for,” says the slogan on the company’s Careers page.

All this made me wonder how else America’s college students are helping to feed us this Thanksgiving, so I asked Crazy Larry to find some other food-themed internships. Here’s what he came up with:

Del Monte
Slogan: “Meals that bring families—including pets—together.”

This full-time (40 hours per week) internship will introduce you to a progressive and dynamic corn-processor named Freddy. You’ll aid Freddy in his corn-shucking and de-kerneling tasks by keeping his rubber gloves well-oiled. You will apply your managerial, leadership, and interpersonal skills to the daily management of the ear-soaking tub and to rubbing Freddy’s muscular forearms to prevent carpal-tunnel lawsuits.

Huhtamaki US
Slogan: “Highest category awareness for plates, bowls, cups, napkins and table covers.”

This full-time (40 hours per week) internship will introduce you to our progressive and dynamic brand of paper dinnerware called Chinet. Share in the creation of sturdy beauty by cleaning the brushes for the graphic designer who paints the original patterns for our 9-inch plates and matching snack saucers. You will apply your managerial, leadership, and interpersonal skills to the daily management of turpentine, soap, and water. Other duties might include calling the designer’s mother for him to say he can’t make it to lunch because he thinks he ran over a dog on his way to work and he’s too distraught to meet with her. Also: Stimulants.

Uncle Jiggly Brands:
Slogan: “The best part is that slurping noise the product makes when it breaks suction with the can.”

This full-time (40 hours per week) internship will introduce you to our progressive and dynamic brand of canned cranberry-flavored molds, sauces, and jellies. You will apply your managerial, leadership, and interpersonal skills to the daily grinding of the hooves to make the gelatin for the canning process. Occasional kill-floor duties.

***

My own intern, Bradley, says he’s graduating and moving to California, but if so why’d he rent a house here in town last week? In any case, his position will soon come open. Know any smart, ambitious go-getters who’d like to apply? Here’s the listing:

Churm Enterprises, LLC
Slogan: Don’t be a chump, chum. Choose Churm and cheer!

This part-time (3 hours per week) internship will introduce you to a progressive and dynamic brand of Internet writing and its associated labor processes. You will apply your managerial, leadership, and interpersonal skills to making a list of supplies needed for Thanksgiving dinner, procuring them from the cheapest sources (you’ll be reimbursed after 60 days), cooking them with flair, and serving Oronte, his family and 31 of his dearest friends. Before the day is out: Cleanup! You missed a spot.

What Poet Brian Turner Knows

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:27:22 GMT

Maybe I’m one of those late-bloomers or else just take my waking slow, but I often come to read books long after everyone else already has. It’s fine with me, since by the time I get there the books are succeeding on their own merits, not merely on buzz.

In this case, I’m only three years late to the party for Here, Bullet (Alice James Books, 2005), the fine first collection of poet Brian Turner, recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a PEN Center USA “Best in the West” Literary Award in Poetry, an NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, and many other honors. Brian served seven years in the US Army, including a year in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, and a year in Bosnia-Herzegovina with the 10th Mountain Division.

Here, Bullet begins with an epigraph from Ernest Hemingway: “This is a strange new kind of war where you learn just as much as you are able to believe.” The 65 pages of poems that follow are surreal, lovely, violent, sad, smart, and disturbing—an anatomy of what we too might have learned or come to believe if we had served in Iraq and had the eyes of poets.

As soon as I read the book I knew I’d like to talk with Brian. Today I’m delighted to post an interview with him, conducted by e-mail over the past few days. Additional questions are from Micah Riecker, who first recommended the book to me.

***

Brian, welcome. Can you tell us how you found yourself a poet in the Iraq War?

I had always thought I’d join the military, and came very close to joining the Marine Corps twice when I was 19—having grown up in a military family—but I put that off and opted for college, initially. Once in college, I realized that I wanted to pursue a deeper study of poetry & poetics. To this end, I went to the University of Oregon and earned an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry). Much of the reason I initially gravitated toward poetry is due to the fact that I was terrible at writing lyrics for the rock band I was playing in—a band I still play in (and a band I still do not write the lyrics for!).

How was the MFA useful to you?

In a very general sense it showed me in a very real way that people actually dedicate their lives to the deep study of this art (poetry). I’m from Fresno, in California. When I found out that I was accepted at Oregon, I was working as a machinist. I remember telling the guys that I had been accepted and that I was planning to study poetry (and that it was part of a Master’s degree program). They were incredibly encouraging and congratulatory, but still, I could tell that they mostly thought I was sort of following up on a hobby, that I was putting off getting ready for a “real job” somewhere. Where I come from, being a poet just isn’t a thing people actually do, or become. In fact, doing something you really love, that you’ve always wanted to do—that just doesn’t normally seem like a real possibility. In fact, I’m still shocked at where I am now.

Why did you go in the army as an enlisted member/NCO, and not an officer? Is any of this experience a search for material or to serve witness? To rid yourself of American insularity?

I was raised with a proletarian chip on my shoulder, which has yet to be knocked off. I thought it presumptuous to become an officer prior to having learned the ropes, basically. Once in, I found many officers I respected very much. Still, I wouldn’t ever have wanted to rise very high in the ranks—the best work, the real work as far as I could see, was at the lowest levels, the soldier and lower-NCO level jobs.

I certainly didn’t think Iraq would give me material for a book. As soon as I learned my unit would go, I was honestly worried about where we were going and concentrated wholly on preparing for it.

In joining the military, part of me did that simply because I thought I would get to see places and travel—a very simplistic vision of military life, yes, but that’s part of what I was thinking. Once in Iraq, though, I did see (about halfway through the year there) that I was writing as a witness in my own journals; I was writing as a way to witness my own life and to stave off the blurs of exhaustion that might later make it impossible to remember all that had happened.

You use the carving into stone of the epic Gilgamesh in your poem “Gilgamesh, in Fossil Relief,” as a symbol of “translating” and “reinventing,” and you quote the David Ferry translation (“This is the path of the sun’s journey by night”) at the end. I’m wondering if your experience in Iraq is your own way of reinventing a solution to “the questions we must answer”? Was it a sort of “night journey”? Is this your Gilgamesh?

I’d have to have an ego the size of a civilization to think this is My Gilgamesh, or that I could even come close. I think the year I spent there was a kind of “night journey”—one I wrote my way through as it passed by. I found no answers while there, but found only more and more questions.

Sadly, tragically, criminally—it seems each generation must relearn the difficult lessons of the past.

If anyone who comes across this hasn't yet read the epic of Gilgamesh—I urge you to read it. (I prefer the Herbert Mason version. There’s also a very intriguing collection called Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, The Flood, Gilgamesh and Others.)

You kept secret from the other men in your unit the fact that you had an MFA? Did you ever get caught writing poetry?

No—I mostly wrote in my journals, usually not poetry, but prose diary entries. Sometimes a poem would arrive, or develop. Over the course of the year, however, I wrote the poems which would later, compiled, become Here, Bullet…. I didn’t share that I was a poet because I thought it would undermine my job as an infantry sergeant. Also, in a broader sense, it just didn’t seem to have much relevance to my job, in a day-to-day sense. Oddly, I wasn’t asked what I had actually studied until I had only about one month left in service (I was in for over seven years)—and that was from a newly-minted LT [lieutenant] who had just come from college himself.

Dana Goodyear says at The New Yorker that the only book of poetry you took to Iraq was the anthology Iraqi Poetry Today. Did it shape your view, how you saw people or landscape, or affect the tone or formal elements of your own poems?

I had a couple of other books with me, but that was the primary book I carried as I deployed over there (and I kept it with me the entire time). I think it helped me to see that Iraqi poetry is highly metaphorical and that there is a very, very strong relationship in that part of the world with the oral tradition, poetry in particular. It’s taking time to become rooted, but my study of Arabic poetry and Arabic poetic tradition(s) will be more visible in my work—in terms of craft, approach—in subsequent books I write.

What’s one of your favorite poems from that anthology, and why?

I like much of the work in the anthology, so it’s a tragedy to choose from among the different poets assembled there. Still, I suppose Fadhil al-Azzawi’s poems are the ones that are marked and highlighted most in the volume I had with me in Iraq.

Another amazing poet is Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayyati, who has lines such as:

13 [from “Shiraz Moon”]

They found me at the springs of light, slain, my mouth dyed with red
berries and white mountain roses and my wing planted in the light.

Who can fail to be amazed by poetry such as this?

Your poems imagine or inhabit other experiences than your own. Here, for instance, is “Autopsy”:

Staff Sergeant Garza, the mortuary affairs specialist
from Missouri, switches on the music to hear
there’s a long black cloud hanging in the sky, honey,
as she slices out a Y-incision with a scalpel
from collarbone to breastplate, from the xiphoid process
down the smooth skin of the belly, bringing light
into the great cavern of the body, in the deep flesh
where she cuts the cords which bind the heart,
lifting it in her gloved palms, weighing
and measuring the organ, she can’t help
but imagine how fast it beat when he first kissed
Shawna Allen, or how it became heavy
with whiskey and what humbled him.
What Garza holds in her hands,
thirty-four years of a life, will be given
in ash to the earth and sea
if we’re lucky, by someone like her,
singing low at the chorus
there’s a long black cloud hanging in the sky,
weather’s gonna break and hell’s gonna fly,
baby, sweet thing, darlin.

How much of what’s shown in the book did you see yourself? How much was research? Overheard? Imagined?

Ahhh, the great questions. And, just for the readers out there, they remain unanswered.…

An MFA student here would like to know about your revision process, especially for poems based on intense events. Is revision an act of keeping things fresh in your mind? Or do time and distance allow a transmutation of event into art? Is distance a good thing for either poem or poet?

Prior to this book I would have said that tranquility and reflection are the way to go. Distance is needed. Things of this sort. But I’ve found in my life that I write poems all the way through and that the intensity of the line created in proximity to the event has a value and a quality which is difficult to capture at a distance. It’s similar to the differences between a photographer, who takes the moment as it happens, and the painter, who must stretch that moment into the future and discover it there.

You mention many dreams in the book, most of them nightmares. Do you have these “dreams burn[ing] in the oilfires of night”?

I would think that most people who experience life in a combat zone (whether as a civilian or as a combatant) would carry baggage with them the rest of their lives. They should be changed by it, affected. Of course, a small percentage of our population is sociopathic (and they may or may not carry a deeper weight back).

I’m trying to learn how to live a worthy life. Still, I don’t think I personally have the right to “heal”—only to find a way to live with humility and respect for the losses I was a part of. I am complicit in much pain and suffering and indignity—I have to find a way to live with that, perhaps to struggle to find ways to own up to that responsibility.

I can’t imagine a stronger or spookier title than Here, Bullet. How’d you decide on it, instead of, say, The Hive Humming Its Prayer, which is (also) a line from the book? (Please note that I’m a prose guy, Brian, and well aware of my limitations in this and other questions. But I bear up cheerfully under my shame.)

You know, not to make poetry—or the magic you do with prose, either—become a cult of the initiated, but, to be honest, I have no idea. I mean, at some point deep within the brain, at some syntactic level, down there in the cerebral fluid where the vaulted dome of skull rises over a bizarre world where the past, present and future cohabitate, words appear. They rise up out of the void somehow. When constructing a poem, I often have a phrase to guide me, to egg on the continuation of thought, development. But the title of this book is one of those immediate voicings from deep in the brain and I’d be lying if I said I knew how that came about, or where that title came from.

Not being a poet myself, I’ve wondered where a certain kind of poetic style or form has entered the American scene. Your poetry is condensed, sensory, and uses lots of natural images, but not everyone comes from the Waley-Fenollosa-Pound lineage. (The Iraqi anthology is proof of that.) Who are your influences, and why’s your work look and sound like it does?

Different poems have different sources. For example: I didn’t realize until recently that one of my favorite poems of all times is the wellspring for the title poem (“Here, Bullet”); Phil Levine’s “They Feed They Lion”—the ENERGY of that poem, the rhythmic drive of it, the beat pulse underneath the syllables—here is the branch from where my poem emerges. I read that poem 20 years ago and did my best to study with Levine (which I did) because of that one poem alone.

T.R. Hummer (Walt Whitman in Hell), Yusef Komunyakaa, Bruce Weigl, Tim O’Brien, Kurt Vonnegut, Walt Whitman, Wilfred Owen—these are some of the influences.

What rarely is mentioned by many poets are the influences of their closest friends—Brian Voight and Stacey Brown are two of the strongest influences on my writing. I’ve known Brian Voight since I was seven years old and many of his ideas on art in general (and our arguments about story, politics, representation, avenues into artforms, and more) were incredibly important to my development as an artist. Likewise, my grad school friend and colleague—the poet Stacey Brown—was tremendously important to my development as a writer. Kwang Ho Lee also has influenced me. These three affected me far more than my internal discussions with Foucault, Jameson, or Eagleton.

Any idea of the book’s reception abroad?

I’ve been amazed at the reception overseas. For example, I’ve read more times in Ireland than I have in my home state of California. (There’s just no love at home, you know?)

Bloodaxe Books has supported my work and helped it reach an audience I never would have thought possible. Much of this is due to the hard work of my editor here in America (April Ossmann at Alice James Books)—she pushed the book and made the connections overseas so all of this might be possible (as if she weren’t busy enough!).

I’m planning to return to the UK in the springtime to do some more readings and to do some work with the BBC. I’m also trying to work out a plan to visit Libya for a brief series of readings and discussions there…. It seems that when one door opens, numerous other doors offer themselves afterward.

What about with Iraqi-American readers? Or American vets?

I’m looking forward to learning more about how Iraqi-Americans react to this work—I don’t have enough to go on to answer this question at this time. With current vets, I’ve been amazed at how receptive they are—each has had such different experiences than I have had. In fact, in the book I try to allude to these dynamics: There are a series of poems entitled OP (observation post) poems. These poems are numbered ("OP 71," "OP 798," for example). I was trying to give a nod to the reader, in revision, to beg the question: Where is OP 799, OP 802, OP 27? There are simply, and tragically, far too many stories and experiences for me alone to put on the page. Millions upon millions, in fact.

How close to the Iraqi people were you able to get? Do you speak Arabic?

I’m studying Arabic now, with the hope that I might one day be able to read Arabic poetry in the original. And, I’d love to be able to converse with Arabic speakers—to better learn how they perceive and experience the world we share.

The NY Times’ review of Here, Bullet said, “The day of the first moonwalk, my father’s college literature professor told his class, ‘Someday they’ll send a poet, and we’ll find out what it’s really like.’ Turner has sent back a dispatch from a place [the war] arguably more incomprehensible than the moon…and deserves our thanks…” And in the introduction to Iraqi Poetry Today, editor Saadi Simawe says, “We hoped that translating poetry might contribute to the appreciation of other civilizations and even to peace in the Middle East.” Does poetry have utility?

When I most needed something for my interior life to lean on, poetry is what I leaned on. It wasn’t cathartic. It didn’t get anything off my chest. But it was there for me when I needed it.

Poetry is a portable art. I now carry Phil Levine’s “They Feed They Lion” within me. It is part of who I am and who I am becoming. It is part of how I experience the world. When we allow a poem a space within us, we enlarge our capacity for understanding. I think we allow ourselves another chance find meaning within a confusing, difficult world.

It’s often argued and lamented that “poetry is dead,”but I just saw the cover of US News and World Report with a photo of President-Elect Barack Obama on the cover. The cover-story title, right there visible on news racks all over America? “Promises to Keep.” What does that tell you? It tells me that Robert Frost is deeply ingrained in our larger culture. That is, POETRY permeates our lives, whether we realize it, or not.

I would urge poets to get out and read in the community—go to readings and be a part of them, off-campus as well as on-campus. Create and be a part of something larger than yourself. Share your work and why you do it, why you love it. When I was attending the University of Oregon, I had to catch a bus to campus. While waiting at the bus stop, I’d often read the workshop poems to people there and ask them for their thoughts (never telling them which one was my own).

Last year you got an NEA grant, but one does not often survive financially on poetry alone. May I ask how you provide? Any plans to teach?

I’ve been supported in ways that boggle the mind. The Lannan Foundation has supported my work in phenomenal ways—with a Fellowship, a writing residency, and more. I would stress that whenever another human being sits down and reads a poem you’ve written, it’s an incredible moment/gift.

In very practical terms, I’ve been fortunate enough to do what I never thought possible—I’ve been able to live as a working poet for the last couple of years. Prior to that, and right after the Army, I had cobbled four jobs together (one of them full-time doing electrical work) in order pay the bills (and to keep busy—returning from Iraq I found that I had far too much energy for everyday life back home).

I’m looking for a teaching job for next year. I want to create a life in which I can write and have extended periods of time to do so. I also would like to settle down some, and have a backyard where I can walk barefoot on the grass, pee on the shrubs, that kind of stuff.

All my shrubs are dead, Brian, word of warning. Being a “war poet,” as you’ve been called, is an honorable tradition. But do you see yourself that way? Do you find the title limiting?

I think it would be best for me not to try to place myself within the larger whole—there are far, far too many names I revere there and I would never presume my own name could reach so high up the mountain. I’m honored enough to have someone read my work—that’s an incredible honor. (I’m a reader and a book junkie myself, so I respect the fact that someone would sit down and read my own work.)

Do you worry about loss of material since you’ve left the army?

Writing is a way to investigate the world, and myself within it. The problem I have always had is not in finding something to write about, but in simply choosing one thing to concentrate on for an extended period of time.

Evidently you had a manuscript of poems from your Bosnian experience in 1999-2000. Will it find its way to publication?

Fortunately for us all, no. Many of those poems have made it into literary journals around the country, but the manuscript as a whole doesn’t stand up on its own (and isn’t worthy of a reader’s time, in my estimation).

What are you working on now?

I’ve just completed my second book (Talk the Guns)—a book I avoided writing for quite some time, but eventually realized I had to write. It will be available from Alice James Books early in 2010. (I’m working with the editor on it now.)

I’m also working on my third collection, which I’m very excited about, too—it takes a radically different turn from the first two, in terms of subject matter (and in many ways in terms of style/approach).

Thank you very much, Brian, this was a pleasure. Any last words for aspiring poets who might be reading this?

I send my very best thoughts for your own words and work. It’s a tough gig. It’s tough answering somebody (when they ask you what you do) by saying, “I’m a poet.” And it’s tough getting rejection after rejection while creating that office wallpaper. I know. I also know that if I’d never published my book, I’d still be writing the poems I write. That’s what I do. And if that’s what you do, then the writing is the thing. If someone reads your work and decides to publish it and share it with a wider audience, well, that’s all gravy on top. You already have the poem.

Brian’s generously provided a reading list of literature he’s enjoyed. Click here to download the PDF file.

Desperately Seeking Dubuffet

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 04:59:16 GMT

It’s interesting and strange to me how easy it is to sink into a willful belief that the Internet has everything we might want to know, loaded up by handlers into its magic boxes, if only we knew where to look. After all, if in seconds you can find a recipe for Cheeseburger Soup, chapbooks of “human/computer collaborative poetry,” and an obituary for Mr. Green Jeans, it should be easy to find, say, an image of a certain painting by one of the most famous artists of all time.

One of the early inspirations for my novel was a painting by Jean Dubuffet called “Natura Genetrix,” and for a while I wondered if I might ask to use it as a front cover. I found a small photo of it in a book called Creation Myths, published by Thames & Hudson, which I bought when we were abroad a few years ago. The painting is heavily textured, nearly monochromatic, and seems to show a compost heap of organic forms both evolving up and rotting down amid inorganic matter. I suspect it’s among his “Texturology” series. Neither my publisher nor I have the budget to really hope to be able to use it, but over the last few months I’ve become interested in the mystery of being unable to find it in this, our digital, age.

Creation Myths credits the photo to a man I’m assuming was the owner of the painting in the 1950s. When I google him, no hits seem likely. Google Image has no pictures of it, nor do the art databases. I queried a few museums and the Dubuffet Foundation, and someone directed me to an arts representation organization in New York, who directed me to the stock art/photo houses such as Getty. No one knew how to find the painting or its owner.

I mean, doesn’t that bug you?

I finally got smart and asked Thames & Hudson directly where they got the image, but they only sent me to the Artists Rights Society, which represents the estate of Dubuffet here in the States. ARS replied instantly with the exact dollar figures and terms to get (severely limited) rights and added that I’d have to find the painting or a hi-res image of it on my own. When I asked if they knew of a place to start, they said no, ask Art Resource or Corbis or Getty.

I’ve known half-a-dozen people who got Master of Library Science degrees at one of the best programs in the country, and even as they spent much of their time preparing to serve universities and communities with online tools, they admitted there’s a universe of materials sitting on shelves, invisible to online searches because it hasn’t been digitally cataloged or scanned.

That's marvelous.

Because if Antiques Road Show has taught us nothing else, it’s that priceless art unseen by the public in decades might very well be plastered up in the walls of our homes somewhere, awaiting discovery by those willing to apply themselves. Mrs. Churm is out of town tonight, with a team that's helping a depressed community develop computer resources, so I’ve invited Rory, Dr. Trinkle, and my intern over for a few beers. Bring your sledgehammers, I said. No real reason. Later we’re going to take this place down to the studs to find that painting is all. And when it turns out not to be here after all, my sons and I are hopping a plane to Paris in the morning, on the off chance the thing is sitting in plain view at Les Puces. There must be a solution. Our age has led us to believe in them. On the other hand, we need mysteries, don’t you think?

When HR Meets IT

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 21:03:26 GMT

Before Crazy Larry dropped out to play the train conductor in some holiday “experience” that we aren’t allowed to call The Polar Express down at the mall, he was an IT manager at a famous university. He and his staff provided support to administrators and faculty, some of whom willfully refused to help themselves yet expected instant and total service. There’s a triage for this sort of thing when resources are limited—resources are always limited—but out of some sense of privilege the faculty especially felt they shouldn’t have to play by the rules. You should hear Larry on the subject; he’s quite amusing.

But as a person long accustomed to queuing up, let me tell you: Sometimes those rules are set up to the advantage of the system, not the individual, and should be abolished. A new aggravation has been the introduction of technology, which pretends to make things more convenient, easier, and quicker, even as it imposes another level of bureaucracy and makes it harder to speak with a person when problems arise. Our online ethics training and testing for state employees is a good example. The system isn’t smart enough to know my job description, so it offers only a blanket test. Taking it I’m asked to memorize information about not taking bribes as a procurer or hiring agent, or the rules for putting in bids with the state. But someone did work to make the system smart enough to watch me take the test and judge if I took too little time to consider each question—at which point I can be reported to my state ethics officer.

I’m on the job market this year (hiring committees, please take note), and I keep running into the same human resources interface when I click through links to job listings. Clearly the software belongs to the same vendor, since it looks and navigates identically and even remembers some of my personal info from school to school. Sometimes it simply wants my name and contact info and lets me upload my cv and cover letter, which isn’t bad, though it could be done quicker and more easily by e-mail.

The worst of them force me to fill in multiple fields, screen after screen: entire employment histories, contact names, phone numbers and addresses of people I haven’t seen since the Harding administration, where and what years I went to high school, majors, minors. Pages with columns and rows of toggle-boxes to indicate what kind of software I know how to use, my other skills, even hobbies. It’s like something a fast food franchise would put together for 16-year olds.

The biggest, best-known departments ask only for a letter and cv to be sent directly to the chair of the hiring committee. As the colleges get smaller, the electronic bureaucracy gets worse, until the tiniest places have application procedures that are an embarrassment due to some unholy union between their HR and IT departments. It's not even fair to those colleges, since the best applicants might very well walk away without applying. And this, Ben, is my issue with technology: its inherent animism. Like cars or handguns or any other technology, HR software wants to get used to the fullest, even when that's not the best thing for people.

Exit Poll

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 03:32:57 GMT

The jubilation on campus last night after the winner was announced was so loud, even at a distance of a mile, that I started looking out the windows in our house like a nosy old man wondering what the neighbor kids are up to. I’m sure I heard the entire drum line from the marching band going at it, and enough voices in sporadic cheering that I thought there might have been an impromptu rally in the stadium.

None of that seems to have happened—I can’t even get confirmation of freelance snare drummers—but campustown did erupt with spontaneous celebration. One student told me the only other time he’d seen such a frenzy was when we went to the Final Four. In any case, at midnight I nearly got in the car to go check out what I was missing, but after I realized my keys were in our sons’ room and that I risked waking them by going in to get them, I finished some grading and class prep and went to bed instead. I was beat but lay awake several hours, thinking things over and feeling history wash over me.

This morning things were back to normal—so much so that it felt bizarre. AOL’s front page had the announcement of Obama’s win, but within seconds had changed to ask if I’d seen Jethro from The Beverly Hillbillies lately and whether I wanted to see a photo of him at age 70. The only apparent change to the world on my walk in was that gas had fallen another cent or two to $2.09 a gallon. I taught two classes, had office hours and ate lunch on campus, and didn’t hear any mention of the election all day, except one.

A tenured professor, who looks like he’d be William Ayer’s squash partner but is in reality a diehard fiscal conservative, stood looking haggard in a doorway. He flipped me off.

“Yeah," I said. "And the mandate you rode in on. House, Senate, and the White House, Baby!”

He laughed and, heading off down the hallway, called at a distance, “You can have them. And good luck with all that!”

You Shall Know Them By Their Music

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 15:10:04 GMT

An acquaintance is so insistent that writing cannot be judged that he uses it as an excuse not to teach: “I wouldn’t know what to say to a class,” he says, proud of his freedom from the trap of standards. Naturally he also argues there are neither good nor bad college teachers—only thinking makes it so—and to suggest otherwise is mere advertisement for self. “Maybe it’s my Ph.D. training,” he says, “but I see everything as relative.” Privately, of course, he condemns a book as mere “magazine writing,” revises his own writing, and, yes, teaches occasionally.

It’s nice to be seen as nice, and Chekhov, that saintliest of writers, works passivity into his view of polite society: “Cultured people must…respect human personality, and for this reason they are always kind, gentle, and ready to give in to others….” One imagines him nodding gently as the Moscow doctors who all want to be writers talk him into coughing fits at dinner parties. (Gorky says that “in [Chekhov’s] sad and gentle smile one felt the subtle skepticism of a man who knows the value of words and dreams….”) But in a series of letters to his brother Alex, who wasn’t writing to his potential, Anton cracks open like a honeydew:

“Not a single sensible word; nothing but sentimentality…. Respect yourself, for heaven’s sake and don’t let your hand grow slack when your brain grows lazy. […] Another great authority, Souvorin, writes to me, ‘When one writes a great deal, not everything comes out equally good.’ […] I write this to you as a reader having a definite taste. […] Better poor criticism than none at all. Is it not so?” (Garnett translation)

We can’t choose to be free of our individual standards; the question is whether or not we’ll discuss them. Unfortunately I can’t retire to my white dacha in Yalta, where I might get the distance to develop a sad and gentle smile. Because I teach I must try to explain myself daily. To do otherwise is a con that some use to buy time to write. They take the pay but don’t teach anything because it’s a hassle or because they disdain students. “I wouldn’t do it that way, honey, but you go right ahead,” Faulkner is said to have told a writing student under his tutelage. But none of that has to do with the ability to judge good or bad writing.

Discussing one’s own techniques and tastes is not dictating them. Indeed, the best teachers I’ve known could do it while explaining other traditions and encouraging students to situate themselves in the history of ideas. They were not among the massive middle-class of American letters that is essentially anti-intellectual. (There is confusion over the term “intellectual” in writing, e.g., the critic who says Hemingway is a “closet intellectual.” I mean only, “Given to study, reflection, and speculation.”)

What’s begun to interest me lately is how quickly an experienced reader can often judge writing. Of course the entire piece must be read, as occasionally even tripe can be skillfully woven or good work bound in sloppy phrases. (Ever read Dreiser’s American Tragedy?) But when my administrator friend privately admits he can read the first paragraph of an essay and usually know if the rest is worth reading, I don’t doubt him. Why, though? It’s an important question, since its answers might offer hope for improvement for us all.

“Why” wanders off in every possible direction. College writers who can’t or don’t care to choose among “to/two/too” don’t fill me with confidence, for instance. Sometimes worn-out images, language, or devices are tip-offs; other times it’s bombastic diction or confused sentences that stagger around leaking meaning. The reasons may be infinite and depend on the sort of writing attempted, but bad writing does have a look, smell, taste, feel, or sound.

I wrote the other day about a book in which Michael Henry Heim (translator of Kundera, Brecht, Grass, et al.) says:

Flaubert once said that the rhythm of a sentence often came to him before the words (and consequently before meaning itself). When I first read that, I thought Flaubert was proselytizing art for art’s sake or merely exaggerating. But the more I translate, the more I see how right he was: I often find myself fitting words to a pre-existing prosodic pattern.

Musicality in prose is a style of competency. It invites confidence but is not the result of confidence alone, as any blockhead is confident. It moves through its own landscape irregularly, surprisingly, but inexorably. (This is no plug for belle-lettrism. Sometimes jagged edges and muscularity are the most beautiful.) What Pound said of poetry applies: “I believe in an ‘absolute rhythm’…which corresponds exactly to the emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed. A man's rhythm must be interpretative, it will be, therefore, in the end, his own, uncounterfeiting, uncounterfeitable.”

It’s apparent when the music of a piece of writing has gone flat. (Think of Bugs Bunny on the xylophone, incorrectly finishing the phrase from “Endearing Young Charms”, to Daffy Duck’s utter rage.) And it’s strange how words can so nearly slip across cultural and linguistic borders in possession only of their music. Robert Pinsky and W.S. Merwin were here last week reading from the Divine Comedy; original Occitan passages were beautiful even without translation.

This musicality, or its lack, is one of the first things I notice in students’ work, and it often parallels the maturity and grasp of the prose. When I read stories by one current student—she’s the one I see, out of the corner of my eye, nodding if I mention Austen, Conrad, anybody—the music plays. Sure, sometimes her prose is marcato when everything around it suggests morendo—she is only about 19—but often there are passages of such startling rightness that they’re clear as trumpets. She aspires to get the words right, and all I need to do is encourage and help with control. Some of her peers, however, want to be granted the style of Hunter S. Thompson or David Foster Wallace without the hassle of having to understand how sound and sense are fused (or reading more than one of those author’s books), and that simplicity echoes hollowly in the intellectual-emotional content of the writing.

Students who reach me without having read or written are not too late, but they are delayed. They truly have no standards, so I try to get them thinking about writing, including the basics of hearing words. When a student writes the line of dialogue, “You’re such a dick man,” he needs help hearing the difference in its rhythm from, “You’re such a dick, man,” which means something entirely different. In an anxious age that encourages students to be technocrats for their own good, it’s important to acknowledge openly that there are better and worse bits of writing for as many reasons as we have time to explicate. This is how literacy helps us educate ourselves.

Is This How Historians Feel All the Time?

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 20:42:10 GMT

Teachers, who age while the students in their classes do not, are big on noting time’s passage. Most often this is done by pointing out what their students have not—and never will—experience directly. My college professors spoke of experiences such as seeing the Stones live in concert—the first time around, when they were good, man. For my generation it’s events like the birth of MTV—when it was still about the music, man.

Children grow up quickly—think of the differences between a ten-year old and a college freshman—but adults often change little in those seven or eight years. Is it any wonder that teachers marvel about current students, How can they not remember 9/11?

I thought that as a man of the world, for whom time is but a lap pool, I was immune to this, but all sorts of freaky things happen when you have children of your own. It struck me like a bolt yesterday (no, Rory, not like a dolt) that the distance of my three-year old son to the Vietnam War is almost exactly my distance to World War I when I was his age. Now everybody knows WWI was a million years ago. I look back at it, and I’m fascinated, but it was a million years ago. But I was born in Vietnam at the start of the Vietnam war, and my good friend Frenchy served two tours there. That was all just yesterday. What weird short-circuit in time has occurred so that Wolfie will look back at my yesterday and get that ancient feeling?

New Book Is the Gift You Didn’t Know You Wanted

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 16:56:56 GMT

Question: What do you get the writer, reader, teacher, actor, director, medical doctor, or translator in your life who has everything?

Answer: This book.

Chekhov the Immigrant: Translating a Cultural Icon came to me, in a sense, when I least expected it: While sitting on a blanket at a late-summer community picnic, slapping gnats and closely inspecting the chicken leg in my hand for botulism. I’d long since reached my anti-social stage and had notified Mrs. Churm of the need for our imminent departure, but out of courtesy said hello to the guy on the blanket next to ours.

We struck up a friendly conversation about the odd nonfiction book that Anton Chekhov wrote about his life-threatening journey across imperial Russia in 1890 to the island of Sakhalin, a penal colony. (I’m having this discussion all the time with my accountant.) Three days later, I got Chekhov the Immigrant in my campus mailbox; my fellow picnicker turned out to be its co-editor. I felt like it was my birthday, except I didn’t have to cut the lawn to make the place look nice for my own party. From now on, I vow, I won’t turn anti-social until I’m home and in bed.

The book is published by Slavica, Indiana University (2007), eds. Michael C. Finke and Julie de Sherbinin. Chekhov scholars are called chekovedy (one thing I learned from the book), a lovely name, and something I never knew I wanted to be: chekoved. To me it looks the same as beloved.

It's a collection of conference talks and other material from a National Endowment for the Humanities symposium at the Chekhov Centenary Festival at Colby College in October 2004. Doctors will look to it for how to be more humane; humanists for how to be more engaged; critics for insight to the range of Chekhov’s reception; directors and actors for the essential aspect of his drama; and writers for how his prose can be both quiet and powerful. I’m guessing you won’t see it at your local Borders, because it’s a shambling bear of a book, a miscellany with no “throughline,” other than how so many of us have brought this great writer into our own minds and look to him as a model for what we hope to do—personally, professionally—sometimes whether we know it or not.

That is, it’s about the difficulties of translation in the greater sense. On one hand, all of us translate, all day, every day, as we move among people, places, and things in our lives. On the other hand, it’s about translating literary texts from other languages, a problem of such enormous proportions that it makes me think (sensing it only from afar) that it must be akin to cooking a huge Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings in Ohio and walking it to Brazil to serve it. When you arrive, they say, yes, we eat turkey too. So what?

The book does look print-on-demand and contains a few typos, but in a strange way, that adds to its appeal. It looks and feels like a reading copy you’d gladly rescue from a sale bin or from a bench in a train station where it had been lost, and so far the binding's endured all my pawings. It’s for a general readership and largely free of lit-crit jargon, and university presses hoping for a crossover hit might look to this sort of thing rather than to Philosophy of Buffy books. It also doesn’t cost as much as many other academic press titles.

Contents include fascinating general essays (“On Chekhov’s Art,” by Yale’s Robert Louis Jackson), at least five essays on translating the plays and on performance practice, and eight essays on Chekhov’s influence on Anglo-American writing. There’s a seminar in the “medical humanities,” including an interview by editor Mike Finke with Dr. Robert Coles, on Chekhov and William Carlos Williams. (Coles knew Williams, who insisted he read Chekhov.) There’s an interesting essay on “medical geography” (think of those maps made of plagueish London in the search for the root of disease), and an excerpt—apparently the first time in English—by I.N. Altshuller, Chekhov’s own Yalta physician, which is worth the price of the book by itself.

Altshuller writes about Chekhov, who was dying by inches of tuberculosis, wanting badly to see his plays performed at the Moscow Art Theater, and to be with his wife, a smart, handsome, leading actress of her time. Altshuller quotes a family friend:

…Olga…was to participate in a concert. An elegant V.I. Nemirovich, dressed in tails with an impeccable plastron, arrived to take her there. Olga…came out wearing an evening gown and redolent of delicate perfume. Tenderly she said a sweet good-bye to Anton…with some cute "don’t miss me and be good," and disappeared. Anton…looked after her, then started coughing, long and hard. When the fit passed, without any connection to our prior merry conversation about old memories, friends, and such, he said, "Oh my, it’s time to die."

There’s even a DVD with the book of the Coles interview, useful for a classroom.

Other highlights include a spirited discussion among three prominent translators of Chekhov’s stories and a translation theorist. They talk about working methods and choices to be made. Richard Pevear:

Everything is put together only by the word "and" …. I had noticed this already in a number of Chekhov’s later stories…. Somehow it also describes this vastness of the Russian countryside, this "and, and, and" stretching out. […] There’s a rhythm that represents the landscape. And that also represents the relation of events within the story…. So it’s important for a translator to notice that and not to change it…. It’s a simple enough thing; what is strange is that translators sometimes don’t do it, indeed, very often don’t.

Pevear and Laura Volokhonsky—husband and wife, and the rock stars of literary translation—are of course translators of choice to Oprah, who picked their Anna Karenina for her book club. Pevear charmingly says, “Our editor called, laughing her head off, and said, ‘I love telling you guys this, because you don’t know what I’m talking about.… Do you know who Oprah Winfrey is?’ And I said, ‘No…I think she’s a Country-Western singer.’ Grand Ole Oprah….”

(The year after the centenary festival, Pevear and Volokhonsky were profiled in the New Yorker (“The Translation Wars,” by David Remnick.)

I have trouble managing one pseudonym, but Chekhov used at least 51 in his published writing and others in his private letters. The book includes an interesting essay on this and a list of the pseudonyms, which range from the relatively obvious (A.P. Ch-v, Antonsha Chekhonte) to the comic (Mr. Baldastov [blockhead], M Kovrov [carpets], Young Old Man) to the heroic (Ulysses, Laertes,) to the detached or urbane (Man Without a Spleen, Shampansky [champagne]). (There’s a fascinating riff in this essay by Cathy Popkin on champagne’s meaning in the medical community and in the legend of Chekhov’s death. “Ich Sterbe,” Chekhov said after he’d drained a glass ordered up by his doctor. “I die.” And he did.)

To ask how we bring the idea of Chekhov into our moral and aesthetic lives is to ask, by extension, why he might be important to others. I once had a Russian student tell me that his family thought Chekhov the story writer was a vulgarian (Chekhov the playwright sublime), but for me, as for so many, he’s the humanist with the eternal gaze and the quietly intense images. That’s why the most valuable part of this collection to me is on his influence on writing in English. As Claire Messud says, “To trace the influence of Chekhov on contemporary fiction is like searching for the original cutting from which a vast plant has grown.”

To this end, the book includes essays by Messud, James Wood, Francine Prose, and James McConkey, who organized a seminal festival on Chekhov at Cornell 25 years ago and edited Chekhov and Our Age: Responses to Chekhov by American Writers and Scholars. (A book that itself contained classic craft essays by Eudora Welty, John Cheever, Harold Brodkey, and Walker Percy.) For a writer, these essays are gold. Robert Louis Jackson quotes Chekhov:

Nature is a very good tranquilizer. It reconciles, i.e., it makes a person indifferent [in the sense of detachment or with equanimity]. And in this world one must be indifferent. Only indifferent people are capable of looking at things clearly, of being just, and working. Of course, this applies only to intelligent and honorable people; as for egoists and empty people, you’ll find plenty of indifference there.

Jackson ties Chekhov’s "poetics of seeing” to Tolstoy’s idea that “The word of the Gospel, ‘do not judge’, is profoundly true in art: narrate, depict, but do not judge.”

This "seeing" is a complicated act. Messud quotes Chekhov:

Why write about a man getting into a submarine and going to the North Pole to reconcile himself with the world, while his beloved at that moment throws herself with a hysterical shriek from the belfry? All this is untrue and does not happen in reality. One must write about simple things: how Peter Semyonovich married Maria Ivanovna. That is all.

There are too many valuable ideas for writers spread through the book to relate here. You simply need to read it. Alright, one more. Michael Henry Heim:

In the end, the entire effort of the conference and the book serves as both experience of and validation for what many of have known from our own readings of Chekhov, that he is like a great good friend. As Katherine Mansfield wrote, “Ach, Tchekov! Why are you dead? Why can’t I talk to you in a big darkish room at late evening—where the light is green from the waving trees outside? I’d like to write a series of Heavens: that would be one.”

It’s no longer summer, so there are no more obligatory picnics. The weather has turned rainy, and I look forward to cold-weather pleasures. Since Mrs. Churm is often searching for gift ideas for me for the holidays, I may ask that we all go for a meal at Russian Tea Time, where you can order latkes or potato dumplings called vareniky. A nice cutlet, or stroganoff, or croquettes with the Tashkent Carrot Salad with coriander and garlic vinaigrette. Oh, my sertsa!—that carrot salad. Scalding cups of flowery tea drained from brass samovars, the crude cubes of Muscovado to sweeten them. A slice of strudel or a torte, and since you’re buying, Doug, a glass of champagne for everyone, Veuve Clicquot—Clicquot’s widow—to toast all we hope to find.

We can look forward to all that but in the meantime we have Chekhov the Immigrant to—no other word for it—savor.

Literary Publishing: Inefficient or Inhumane?

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 19:21:47 GMT

I know: I’m the one who chose to write, and to complain about the problems inherent in one’s own choices is tiresome. Hemingway says it more colorfully in his memoirs, A Moveable Feast, when he upbraids himself for getting discouraged (and hungry, supposedly) as an apprentice writer in the early days in Paris. “Outside on the rue de l’Odeon I was disgusted with myself for having complained about things. I was doing what I did of my own free will…. You God damn complainer. You dirty phony saint and martyr,” he says.

Hem also had a theory that you should never discuss your casualties, and I think that’s generally good advice. Complaining in print about the literary establishment—lit mags, agents, publishers—only highlights that you’ve worn the wrong blazer to the club luncheon, and members will see that you’re the type who will try to eat their radishes with your oyster fork. You’ll sound disgruntled, jealous, or disrespectful. You’ll sound, funny enough, as if you deserve not to be invited back.

Let’s be clear: I love writing, but "the business of writing" is beyond tedious. Even the term bothers me. Crazy Larry, an actor friend, and I call it “poking the hole” instead. I know, it sounds bad, but picture poking a stick into a hole in a big hollow tree. You don’t know what’ll be in there—bees, bear, or honey—but it needs to be done if you want to eat. I use the word “eat” metaphorically, since precious little money ever resulted from "the business" for most writers I’ve met or read about.

Researching publications; printing and photocopying stories, essays and poems; stuffing and addressing envelopes; writing and printing cover letters; and getting it all stamped, in the mail, and logged is a pain. And it’s not just that the process is tedious, expensive, and may generate only rejection slips. It’s that all that busywork fills me with the death-loneliness, as Hem calls it, of recognizing another wasted day in my life.

Yet this year that clerical work yielded good results, in part because I did more of it, in a more organized way, than ever before, including hiring some help. I’ve had a novel, a story chapbook and seven other pieces accepted, and I’m still privileged to have two online platforms where, due to open-minded editors, I can be as ambitious as my energy and skills permit. I think this would qualify as a good year for anybody. That’s why I hope the following will be taken in the spirit of scientific observation, not as sour grapes.

I’ve had too many recent adventures in the business to relate here. For instance, the story of my encounter with a small but prolific regional press. They’d sold a book in their list to PBS for a documentary adaptation that got national attention, so I was happy when I came home one day and found a contract for my novel in the mailbox. But as I read the boilerplate I discovered they wanted me to pay them to publish my book, and it wasn't just that they turned out to be a subsidy press, but that they intended to make a neat $12,000 profit before a single book was sold. (A second seemingly reputable publisher that also accepted the novel and also revealed itself to be a subsidy/author house, wanted only four grand in pre-publication profit.)

Or the agent who called meetings but didn’t remember why after I’d driven several hours to make them. Or the young Ivy Leaguer at the fine New York agency who was keen on literary memoirs but seemed never to have heard of famous ones such as Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. Or publishers who insist collections (both fiction and nonfiction) cannot be sold regardless of the prose and demand that manuscripts have what they call a “throughline.” (I had to ask what that was.) I told an established writer some of this and he said, Forget it, it’s the end times for our culture anyway. He sent me a photo of ancient Confucian stelae that evidently translated as, Many literary gatekeepers are lower than snail dung. Maybe it was filthier than that.

But my biggest gripe at the moment is with certain literary journals. For reasons that most of us have nothing to do with, literary journals have become the gatekeepers for all sorts of professional literary advancement, but that’s an odd thing, especially since readerships are often suffocatingly tiny and homogeneous, and in many cases the primary readers are overworked young grad students, some of whom love Ayn Rand more than anything (or worse, subsist on episodes of Amazing Race). After reading through a journal's entire slush pile, what begins to stand out for anyone is the formalistically or topically different, so good work can go unnoticed while sterile but sensational work gets accepted. (If one were looking for a corollary to the “workshop story” effect in American literature, this might be it.) Cronyism does indeed exist in this world, and authorial brand names are sometimes automatically, lazily favored. I cannot wait to become one.

On top of all this, as if in acknowledgment of their power, many journals are slow, slow, slow to respond to the writers they rely on, yet they demand no simultaneous submissions (you shouldn’t send that piece anywhere else until you hear back from them).

I’m told I should feel good that I almost exclusively get the “good” rejection notices from journals these days, the ones that pass on what I sent them but ask to see other work. Yesterday I got one from one of the best-known lit mags in the country. I didn’t even remember submitting to them and checked the date of my cover letter. It was sent April 13th. The rejection slip was from the editor herself (considered a blessing) and read:

"Although we have decided against using this manuscript, we were interested in it and would be glad to see more of your work after the editor returns from leave on Sept. 1, 2009." [my emphasis]

So they had the piece six months, rejected it, and encouraged me to try again in a year. I don’t know what to even say about this. Is it inhumanity? Inefficiency? A sign that the journal is having a terminal crisis? The editor of Ninth Letter, a very influential young literary journal with the great good taste to include a piece by me in its next issue, told me they get a lot of submissions—a lot—but generally respond within eight weeks.

When a writer living in Paris in the ‘20s sent something out to a journal in the States, I suppose he understood he’d need to wait for months, even a year, for word. After all, it had to steam across the Atlantic—both ways— on a packet, find its editor by way of Model T and bad roads, wait to be read, decided upon, sent down the pneumatic tubes to the assistant editor and from there to the mail clerk, and so on. But why do journals pretend it’s still early-Twentieth Century business as usual? We have instantaneous e-mail and electronic submission capability; many journals are online or have online versions or presences, all of which bypass old-fashioned typesetting, printing, and binding requirements. There’s software that can log and track. And most of the biggest lit mags are snuggled in the warm bosoms of universities, so there’s a large pool of students likely willing to do grunt work for intern credit.

Teachers at those universities could never get away with telling a student, Do your work this semester, and when we have it all in hand we’ll get back to you with your grade. Not gonna say when. Don’t take any other classes until you hear from us. Grades will be pass/fail. If you fail, you’ll need to start everything over. Most will fail. And if you must know, you won’t hear from us for at least six months. Often longer. Sometimes not at all.

Personally I’d prefer an e-mail rejection that said only, “Kiss our literary butts,” if it was sent promptly, rather than have to deal with the current system. But deal I do, because I like what they serve in the clubhouse, and when I get in in, I sit with a grin and say, What a good boy am I.

Please, No More Edsels At Least

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 04:47:30 GMT

I wrote a while back about my feeling that the complexity of technology is accelerating so rapidly that we can’t even understand how little we understand about it anymore, so I was interested to read this essay by John C. Orr over at The Kenyon Review, called “Back to the Future: The Continuing Appeal of The Education of Henry Adams.” (The book for which this blog is named.)

As Orr points out, Adams

… glimpsed in the dawning twentieth century…a version of technological sublimity, the sense of awe and terror in the face of new inventions. …Adams was essentially in the first generation to experience what has been called the technology gap, in that he was born into a world in 1838 where the most advanced technology was easily understandable and relatively easy to replicate. [W]hat we often fail to recognize amid the witty urbanity of The Education is the profound frustration he felt at not being able to understand the technology that was transforming his world. In response, he set out to educate himself about the new horizons that modern science was opening….

But what separates us from Henry Adams is the ease with which most of us adapt to new technology without having the slightest inkling of how it works. By and large, we have neither the initiative nor the leisure of a Henry Adams to spend hours trying to understand it. Thus, that gap in our understanding causes us only momentary frustration if we experience any at all.

[A]s he predicted, the curve of acceleration continues. He stared owl-eyed at the dynamo; I occasionally stare owl-eyed at my flash drive, and the sense of a new force of occult power inhabits me every time I pray to my computer to save the file that I have been toiling over just as Adams prayed to the supersensual force of the dynamo.

Anything that can be done to heal this "gap" seems worthwhile. Recently the provost of a large state university wrote in a newsletter that extra money would be diverted to help liberal arts scholars in a world—and campus—devoted to the technological:

The members of our faculty most in need of discretionary funding are humanists and artists in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the College of Fine and Applied Arts. The Humanities/Arts Flexible Scholarship Support Program will make available to these faculty members $1,000 in research funding per faculty member per year….

But the money appears to be earmarked for particular uses:

As Arden Bement, the director of the National Science Foundation indicated recently, the future leadership of our nation will depend on our ability to solve critical problems facing our society. The solutions of these problems can only be found at the intersections of engineering and sciences with the arts and humanities.

Those particular intersections will, of course, be important in matters big and small, as well as in matters that I imagine few Americans who’ve grown up since the 1950s thought we’d be talking about now, such as how to feed our people. (Michael Pollan’s piece in the Times magazine this week was an open letter addressed to the future President-Elect and was titled “Farmer in Chief.”)

But are all—even the most important—puzzles at the intersection of Engineering and Arts, of Science and Humanities? The future leadership of our nation, as the provost puts it, will be saddled with billions, maybe trillions, in debt. They’ll need to find ways out of difficult wars glibly started. They’ll have to decide what constitutes ethics for a country under pressures it hasn’t seen since it became a world power. Most of these critical problems, it seems to me, will require great minds, not new technologies or their explications. In America we’ll need Lincolns, not just Fords.

I’ve been re-reading Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare this week. Maybe it’s masochism after all the other bad news. The book is an account of the three years Miller spent traveling around America when he’d returned in 1939 after an expatriate decade in France. The jacket copy says, “Miller’s bad dream of the forties is still with us. He saw a nation of big business and little men, mass media at once soporific and violent, giant industries …polluting the environment, of credit buying, cheap cars and gadgets ad infinitum, of misinformation and prejudice—a spiritual and aesthetic vacuum.”

It’s an odd, uneven book, often self-indulgent, and Miller tries hard to be shocking, amoral, and ecstatic. Sometimes he sounds unhinged or like a child. (“I see no reason why I should lose my balance because a madman named Hitler goes on a rampage…. A great scourge never appears unless there is a reason for it…. Those who believe that the only way to eliminate those personifications of evil is to destroy them, let them destroy…. I don’t believe in that kind of destruction.”)

But he has it right when he says, “We have everything—everything it takes to make people happy. We have land, water, sky and all that goes with it. We could become the great shining example of the world; we could radiate peace, joy, power, benevolence. But there are ghosts all about, ghosts whom we can’t seem to lay hands on. We are not happy, not contented, not radiant, not fearless.”

You know who is fearless, radiant, content, and happy these days? Lt. General Henry Obering, Director of the Missile Defense Agency, who as I write is on C-SPAN briefing the press about a successful anti-missile missile test, one of those critical intersections between engineering and humanity.

What the AWP Board President Knows

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 05:35:02 GMT

Today I’m pleased to post an interview with Ron Tanner, President of the Board of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), the professional organization for creative writers around the world. Ron is a writer and teacher of writing, as you might expect, whose work has appeared in journals such as New Letters, Iowa Review, Massachusetts Review, and Story Quarterly and in the anthologies Best of the West (W.W. Norton & Company, 1991), The Pushcart Prize XIV (Pushcart Press, 1990), and 20 Under 30 (Scribner, 1986). His 2003 collection A Bed of Nails (BkMk Press) was selected by Janet Burroway for the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction.

I met Ron through MySpace a while back and was intrigued by the variety of his interests, from playing drums professionally to old-house rehabbing to recording oral narratives in the Marshall Islands. (I offered to let him fly me out to the islands to help, but he declined.) He graciously agreed to this interview even as he readies for the upcoming AWP conference in Chicago.

***

Welcome, Ron. Tell me, how’s a drummer in the Nevada casino circuit who tunes his bottom tom-tom lower in pitch than normal rise to power as head of the board of a professional organization for writers, with 30,000 individual members and 475 institutions?

The AWP board is composed of writers in mid-career who have had considerable administrative experience. The board’s charge is to advance AWP’s mission to help writers and writing programs. A few years ago, as I surveyed the horizon and considered when I’d step down as chair of my department, I thought I might lend a hand at AWP. So I ran and was elected to the AWP Board. From there, I worked my way up to the presidency by taking on increasing responsibility. It worked out great because I became president just as I ended my nine-year chairmanship of my department.

In the past it’s certainly been a kind of cliché that writers would have the sort of varied resume that you (and I) have. But on your website you give a lot of free, good advice to aspiring writers, and you seem to focus on young people and the choice to do (or not) an MFA. What about all the older writers who, like your friend, “made a meager living, burned up a couple of marriages, and then, when he was 43, surprisingly, miraculously…sold his novel ”? I guess I’m wondering how you reconcile your own meandering path with that of the early professionalization represented by the AWP.

The early professionalization we see among our younger colleagues in writing is a product of American mainstream culture, which has increasingly emphasized specialization and professionalization. That’s why so many undergrads (prodded by their well-meaning but ill-advised parents) think that an undergrad degree should lead to a profession. Actually, an undergrad degree should make you ready for the world. Period. That is, it should make you a more thoughtful, articulate, and humane individual. Most History majors don’t become historians, right? Most Philosophy majors don’t become philosophers. Most English majors don’t become English.

It’s true that grad school is mainly about professionalization. That doesn’t mean that any grad program, like the M.F.A, can guarantee a job. It simply guarantees that it will help students approach the field in a professional manner. It is then up to the students to make the most of their talents and opportunities.

I must admit I am envious of how many writers get so early a start nowadays—and the many great programs and contests and opportunities available to them. AWP reflects this new, enriched world of writing and we’re certainly happy to help any writer get a chance, no matter what his or her age or background. It just so happens that more writers are getting an early start because the resources are in place to make that possible. That simply wasn’t the case when you and I started.

That said, I worry about a careerist mentality—or pressure—that compels younger writers to feel hounded and older writers to feel discouraged.

Have you noticed increasing numbers of artists crossing forms recently? That is, drummers who write, writers who paint, sculptors who do interpretive dance? I seem to have, though I can’t vouch for their proficiency in more than one form.

Yes, I agree, it seems we’re seeing more interdisciplinarity among artists, probably because art is increasingly a multimedia enterprise. I’ve started illustrating some of my writing, for example. I’m not much of an artist but am competent enough to have fun at it. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do but the publishing world didn’t welcome. Now there’s room for illustrated novels, thanks to the rising popularity of manga and graphic novels. It’s all a product of an increasingly technologized global culture.

What can the AWP do for the likes of us? As you know, I'm a member, but with those dues I could buy my little boys new pirate outfits with swords sturdy enough to run me through.

AWP is the nation’s primary advocate for writers of all kinds, both in and outside the academy. The AWP Chronicle, published six times a year, keeps the membership in touch with issues in the field, especially issues in teaching. The AWP job list is a comprehensive catalogue of academic and non-academic openings, which we update every few months, as a service to our members. The AWP website is more than 1,000 pages deep. It has forums, links, and articles about writing and the writing scene. It contains the 40-year archive of Chronicle articles, for example.

The AWP award series, which now offers $2,000 to each winner, publishes a novel, a collection of short stories, a book of poetry, and a book of nonfiction every year. The Intro Award series publishes student writing. The AWP online Guide to Writing Programs is free and a tremendous resources to students and program directors, offering a survey of every writing program in the country. The AWP conference brings together 8,000 writers to share their work and discuss their interests and ideas. And AWP is a vigorous lobbyist for writing in the schools, high standards in teaching, and the rights of faculty.

What about adjunct faculty? I know a guy….

AWP is a staunch advocate for better treatment of adjunct faculty. In the main, adjunct faculty are being exploited because they work long hours for less pay and have no job security and few rights or privileges. A recent AAUP study shows that, nationally, tenure-track hires now comprise only 37% of full-time faculty at colleges and universities, whereas in the 1970s tenure-track hires comprised 57% of the faculty. Nationally, part-time hires now comprise 65% of higher-ed faculty.

AWP understands that colleges and universities are having a tough time and we’re sympathetic to their dilemma. But we don’t believe that increasing the number of adjunct hires is the answer.

Considering how writers act when they’re around each other, is there really any call for us to get together en masse at yearly AWP conventions?

Writers should spend more time, not less, in each other’s company. Networking—in the best sense of the word—is vitally important for us. We need to compare notes and talk about issues and ideas that inform our lives as writers. We learn from each other. Also we need the good company. In short, we need to share quality time in a mutually-supportive community of like-minded peers. Most participants of the conference feel that it has been an invigorating and illuminating experience, and many feel that once a year is not enough.

I don't know. I'd be thrilled to see some people just once a year. I guess you’ll be checking on each of us individually at AWP Chicago? Lunches, tuck-ins at night?

I wish. We have an incredibly accomplished staff that does all the heavy-lifting at the annual AWP conference. But they are overworked, and so increasingly we Board members have taken on duties to help them. Mostly we’re responsible for meeting and greeting guest speakers and ensuring that the hundreds of panels get underway on time and in good order. That means that our time is mostly booked every day and night. So I don’t get much opportunity to unwind or hang out at the conference. But I enjoy helping make it run well.

Until recently you were chair of the Writing Department at Loyola University. With all this admin duty, you still find time to teach?

I was chair for nine years, taking the department through three changes of identity. I just stepped down this year, as I took on the presidency of AWP. Being chair was eye-opening and educational in more ways than I have time to articulate. Anyone who becomes an administrator learns fairly quickly that the world is a complicated place—much more complicated than many faculty want to believe. Issues of funding, for example. Resources always remain finite even as our dreams entertain the infinite.

I think you just wrote the title for a new story: “The Dreaming Chair Entertains the Infinite.”

Being an administrator in a university is not so different from being a politician. There are competing constituencies to contend with and wildly varying expectations to negotiate. I learned a lot.

As for teaching, I didn’t do much—one course per semester. Now I’m teaching three a semester. Administrative work is necessary and can do much good. But, on a day-to-day basis, teaching has it beat hands-down.

Tell us about your Marshall Islands Project. I’m interested that you mention a novel on the MI in your bio for Bed of Nails, published in 2003, but the grant year for the MI project seems to have been 2007. How did your interest in writing about that place predate your project visit?

I lived in the Marshall Islands as a teenager. It changed my life. My father, along with a crowd of other engineers, programmers and physicists, worked for the military at their top-secret missile research center in the Marshall Islands. The missile test site is still going, on an island called Kwajalein. There’s plenty about it on the Internet, if anybody cares to look.

When I lived there, I was struck by the cultural divide between Americans and Marshallese. They lived on one island, we on another. Over the years, I thought a lot about them and how they have been treated by global powers, handed from the Spanish to the Germans, then to the Japanese and finally to the Americans. The Marshallese didn’t get their independence until 1986.

I visited the Marshalls in the 1990s and did some research for a novel, which took me 10 years to write. It’s a complicated topic, American influence in the Marshall Islands. Don’t forget, we conducted 67 nuclear tests out there from 1946-58.

Like people of most developing countries, they have a lot of challenges. The average life expectancy is 60 years; one out of three adults has diabetes; the average age of the population is 18 years—it used to be 16. That’s why I called my novel “A Nation of Children.”

I’m no scientist, no engineer—I didn’t see what I could do to help in the Marshalls. But then I said to myself, I’m a writer, I can teach writing to just about anybody. That might be helpful. And I know how to build websites. That might be helpful too. So I came up with the idea to teach Marshallese college students how to gather stories from their elders and post these on a website that the students would build. It took a while to find funding, but eventually I won a grant from the National Park Service, which supports cultural preservation in the Marshall Islands.

I had to put my life on hold and leave my wife and my university for a semester. But it was worth it. The students and I interviewed 28 Marshallese elders and preserved their stories on the Story Project website, which is now complete except for the translations, which are still coming in. The Story Project site is a twenty-first century model of cultural preservation, everything digitized and universally accessible. This is especially important given that predictions put the Marshall Islands under water within 50 years.

Is the novel done? Are you shopping it? And what of the memoir mentioned on your bio at Loyola, the one about the house?

My novel about the Marshall Islands needs revision, a bit more plot one publisher tells me. I’ve finished another novel, about Baltimore, which also needs revision before I let my agent see it. The memoir—called “Renovation: A Love Story”—is the story of my girlfriend (now my wife) and I buying an abandoned frat house and bringing it back from the brink of ruin. A feature about it appeared in THIS OLD HOUSE magazine in January 2008, and then the magazine put the story on the Internet, where it was one of the most-read house stories for three weeks. All told, about 1.5 million people saw the story. We got tons of email. My agent is trying to sell that book. Also I’ve just put together a second collection of stories, which I’m sending around.

You live in, love, and pour your vital energies into some Baltimorean version of Animal House?

Everybody told us we were crazy to take on a 4500 square-foot wreck of a house, especially since we knew nothing about doing that kind of work. But it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And Jill and I are crazy about old houses. I built a website to showcase all we did with the house. It was an adventure.

Let me turn to your published work. The Mid-American Review calls your collection of stories, A Bed of Nails, “an exercise in eclecticism,” in part because it “could, basically, be cut into two different parts: stories, and the stories from the futuristic revolutionary war.” Janet Burroway, who chose it for the G.S. Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, says, “At first I felt that this was actually two collections, one concerned with life as we know it and one as we fear it will be—but came to believe the worlds are perfectly married ….” How did you intend it all to work?

It took me years to make that collection sensible. It nearly won a number of contests, including the Flannery O’Connor. But editors kept telling me that the collection didn’t “hang together.” I thought, Who said a collection must hang together? It’s a collection! Nowadays publishers feel such pressure to package the goods with a single theme. It’s about marketing, not the writing.

I must have re-arranged the stories half a dozen times. Finally, I interspersed the revolutionary militia stories throughout because I realized that, in a collection, most readers would appreciate that other-world in incremental doses. Then, as you proceed through the book, that other-worldly vision grows and gain clarity. Most readers have responded well to that. I was grateful that Ms. Burroway understood what I was trying to do, as did the Towson Literature Prize committee, which gave the book an award.

As I read I thought of a similar split in the stories of T.C. Boyle—call it realism versus fabulism. But you seem to offer less possible salvation than he does, even more uncertainty for the characters’ futures. Your stories suggest a kind of terminal illness of human bodies, bodies politic, of the spirit, of the environment. Yet you seem like an engaged, even sunny guy. Is there anything to say about worldview as it represents in fiction as opposed to who we are when we walk around?

I find few writers bleaker than the brilliant but apparently nihilistic Mr. Boyle. The revolutionary militia stories you refer to were actually chapters from an illustrated novel, “Kiss Me, Stranger,” which I finished recently and am shopping around. The book is more hopeful than the individual stories suggest. Granted, there’s no happy ending. But that’s what makes life interesting. At bottom, “Kiss Me, Stranger” is about survival. We do prevail, though by fits and starts.

Your sympathies seem to lie with those who are lonely, alone, those who know that others have an advantage over them. Again, they seemed trapped.

Yeah, we’re a lonely lot, I’m afraid. That’s why community matters. We do our best work in community, though it’s difficult for many of us to find one or to fit into one. I wouldn’t characterize the problem as a “trap” so much as a dilemma. The dilemma creates friction or tension and our efforts to deal with this create movement in our lives—that’s why it’s good material for stories.

The stories in Bed of Nails have many cultural referents: Ruth, Cassandra, Hermes, Mussolini. The futuristic stories in particular seem wistful of some past we readers know, but because the stories are set in destroyed worlds where context has been obliterated, the cultural references seem like little more than shiny bits in a dump. The characters are always picking garbage, ferrying garbage to sea for dumping, trying to recycle and make do with their lots. One could read a story such as “Garbage” or lines such as, “I fear their disappointment when they realize we’re going nowhere” as self-referential. What role do you think art/writing itself plays in stories about a world where mere existence is about all the characters can manage?

Most of us are not heroes. Most of us spend the greater part of our lives holding things together and, if we’re lucky, making some advances. We’re so thoroughly distracted by the landfill of pop culture, it’s remarkable we get anything done. Americans produce a lot of garbage, both literally and figuratively. Too much garbage. As a teacher, you know how difficult it is keeping students focused on the things that matter. But that difficulty extends to grown-ups too. I’ve never seen grown-ups so busy, so distracted.

Art takes a measure of this distraction, clarifies it, and gives us some distance from the white noise, however briefly. Sometimes it’s enough (in art) to clarify the challenge of living in the twenty-first century and to show how some of us are dealing with it. That doesn’t mean we’re “winning” or rescuing children from burning buildings. Still, there is value in seeing others resist the seductive distractions of our culture. There is value too in seeing others (in stories and novels) making advances against overwhelming odds.

Who else do you read and admire? That cultural mashup in your stories—“Fly Me to the Moon,” the shoes of Imelda Marcos (sort of), the slogan “Yield to the Young” that’s reminiscent of, say, the Khmer Rouge—reminds me of Barthelme, for instance.

As a younger writer, I greatly admired Donald Barthelme and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., so they certainly had an influence. Also Don DeLillo, especially in White Noise, which I think resides among the great American novels.

You've mentioned two novels, a new collection of stories, and a memoir that you’re shopping or readying to do so. What are you working on now?

The Baltimore novel. I’ll revise that one this year and see what happens. Having lived in the city for 16 years, I feel ready to give it a try in fiction.

Thanks very much, Ron!

For more information, check out one of Ron’s websites, or contact him at rtanner@Loyola.edu.

The Engineers Think On It

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 03:47:29 GMT

I was in a diner in a nearby town recently, the kind of place where The Beatles on my t-shirt were a band of suspicious foreigners. The dry-rotting building had multiple levels filled with Naugahyde booths and tables with mismatched chairs. It’s known for pie.

The engineers were there. I suspect there are only a dozen civil engineers in the world, and here eight of them were. They stood in line to order, deeply tanned, all-American guys wearing dusty calfskin work boots, dark blue jeans with belts, collared shirts and baseball caps over baseball haircuts. They all had cells and PDAs and used them while they waited. It was clear who was in charge—he and his second-hand man were the most voluble. The ones in the middle spoke deferentially to their bosses but freely with one another, and the kid at the bottom watched silently. They were working on a project for the university.

They sat at the long table next to mine with plastic baskets of sandwiches, chips and garlic pickle slices, and munched purposefully. After a while their elder said something about Iraq, and they discussed the crazy amount of money to be made there. Their voices drawled sleepily like airline pilots’, and they paused to wipe mustard off the corners of their mouths with paper napkins and to sip Coca-Cola. Two women sat down nearby. The engineers went quiet, for the same reason they’d have held the door open for them. Then another man joined the women and they looked at each other and turned back to their conversation.

They had a job to do, but they weren’t going to rush it. There was pleasure in the food, companionship, and the pause, but they intended to get back to it. The work they described took neither nature nor the human into account. You were either with them or against them, and they’d be astonished if you were against them.

I dawdled over my sandwich, reading a volume of poetry, and they looked my way a few times. They were too polite to say anything while I was still there, of course, even to each other, but the kid registered their glances and took an extra-large bite. He put it in his cheek and worked at it like a squirrel, smacking his lips a little in my general direction.

I thought of James Dickey describing working in a business and how

…every day I used to take a book of poems with me just to touch, every now and then, or as a reminder of the world where I lived most as I wished to. And I remember also the very distinct sense of danger I felt when carrying the book…the distinct and delicious sense of subversiveness and danger in carrying a book…as if it were a bomb, here in this place that had no need of it, that would be embarrassed and nonplussed by it, that would finally destroy it by its enormous weight of organized indifference….

The engineers got up to leave, and as they ambled out, each loomed for just a second in my light while he tried to read what I was reading. It was a collection by William Carlos Williams.

I looked up, and their faces were puzzled, curious, suspicious. They might have caught just a title or two—“The Flower,” “For A Low Voice,”—but no more. These things lacked utility and a guy probably shouldn’t think about them, but they did.

Free Chapbook Just for You

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 13:44:28 GMT

Our friends at Featherproof Books, one of the most innovative new presses going, have a grand deal for you: They've made one of my short stories into a chapbook, and you can have "The Stork" for free. All you need to do is download it, print it, fold it, and enjoy! I hope you'll share the link with all those you love, hate, or feel indifferent about.

I'm Going on Sabbatical

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 02:40:30 GMT

An adjunct's sabbatical, that is, which means I'll be staying in the teaching harness until I drop but taking a few days off from this blog to make a revision deadline for my book. Please check in next week, when I'll have colorful stories about the (5-minute) sabbatical I took in France (the one in my head).

By the way, here's an opportunity in the National Parks for some of our friends eligible for real sabbatical leaves. I knew I should have been a botanist.