Titrations

Residual heat comes from the western wall of a masonry building long after the sun is slunk below the furthest twig of pavement you see. Lean against it; feel it creep around under your shirt like a microscopic domesticated mammal. Pick a star and start there counting. Lose track as clouds.

Wile the way down steps toward your door and put on anything. Sounds of some kind. Turn off all light and then turn back pretend or hope the dark smoke clears with the switch. Strip. Sit at your desk on cold metal. Pimple at the pricks of your follicles and their cells and their nerves. Put on layers of the nicest thing you own. Fill with smoke. Sweat.

Figure the ocean has answers. Ask the questions. Get only waves in reply.

Figure the sidewalk talks. Go five miles and take the bus back. Diesel.

Figure a bottle sings. Play the flute of it; the jaw harp of it.

Palpitate your corners, joints, joists, abutments.

Focus your myopia on grid and dictionary. Compose yourself; look straight.

Moment passes. She leaves without so much as asking you to call tomorrow or suggesting that she will. And so you lean against the still, hot bricks. Your high school chemistry would crystallize a laundry blue liquid into flakes of silver with the addition of something in equal proportions mole and catalyst. Now the precipitate is words but they walk towards cabs and buses opposite where you are sitting subterranean or suborbital: windowed in.

To crystallize these things. The microscopic sensations off the bricks, the appearance of a footprint drying on the sidewalk, the light reflecting on and off of the acrylic lines on the road as cars pass. Where ordinarily your solipsism would permit your reticence there is found a glowing wad of extroversion.

Scour surface for answer. The Internet and it’s Whitmanic lists and shopping malls and those malls’ lists. Part and parcel enigma of emotion to satisfy character count. Slowly slowly dissolve the usefulness of pixel and bandwidth axle.

Question arises moonwise as while you sit next to the speakers on loud and want to crawl into them and walk in circles around the grooves of the record with the guitars and synths following you like ivy and sunlight.

The artifice of intention realizes itself in a heap of fur at the foot of your bed and the motion of moment is the liquid your brain and the hot room and the condensation of alcohol and the tap of  beat and bass in your subterranean or suborbital room.

Photographs do not have wind, paintings do not have dust, a song does not have temperature. Artifice of artifice all things are artifice.

Swimming pool deep end of room by the drain hover. Calculate and extrapolate formula upon panic attack worth of figures to cram this into a bottle that you can hurl out into the hot street to break and splash and dry and break again in the thunder of the storm you see out over New Jersey.

Bitches Ain't Shit

Roughly two weeks ago VIDA  posted the 2011 “Count” revealing the still painful disparities between the roles of men and women in the greater literary world. VIDA’s work is meant to be a launching point for a conversation about the cultural perception of women writers. The numbers are meant to be factual and completely non-judgmental. They are, of course, still sad. Having worked in the trenches, sloshing through table of content after table of content for the organization to help provide the numbers to create the lovely pie charts you see on their website, I felt it was only proper that I give Cannoli Pie a thorough going over. I consider myself to be a feminist and had actually been under the impression that Cannoli Pie would end up with more women published than men. I was wrong. Counting only literature contributions (not letters from either myself or Claire, nor visual art, nor Joe’s recipes) we ended up with a 58/42 split with the scaled tipped to the patriarchy. What shall we make of this? Well, considering this magazine was co-founded and is co-edited it had always been the intention to make sure that gender representation is equal. These numbers point out that there was a lapse in what we considered to be one of the main tenets of Cannoli Pie; it was simply ignorance of our own numbers. This is why we count; to examine and understand the trends taking place in publishing. Clearly, from here Cannoli Pie needs to be a bit more conscientious of just who we are printing. I am not, of course, willing to sacrifice editorial standards for affirmative action style gender pandering. It is more insulting to publish women because we “have to” than to not publish them at all. At least we could pretend the latter is due writing merit or the lack thereof. Rather the right thing to do is to be conscious. Owning our fault is the first step to inviting more women to contribute by indicating we are a publication which is committed to women writers.    

As a bonus to go with "the count" we also have a magazine. There are poems and other round things inside it. Happy Women's Month! Happy π-day!

P.S. our website is undergoing yet another makeover but in the meantime you can read the Issuu edition of our magazine by clicking on the Cannoli Pie link above.

Sorry I Didn't: a Post to She Knows Whom

Sorry I didn't buy you a bundle of crimson sex organs grown in a warehouse in the Meadowlands by immigrants making less than I do with chemicals that have more constiuent parts than I do. Also, I meant to pick you up a polysteyrene ursus americanus holding a facsimilie of symmetic ventricles but the pick up truck along Hylan boulevard only carried ursus maritimus and the ventricles more closely resembled arotas which is frightfully illogical if you really understand their distinct functions

I didn't pay thirty-two yuan for a sheet of recycled paper thickened up with petro-resin and embossed with half naked infantile angels and someone else's words professing something about someone, perhaps you; sorry about that.

Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave my heart into my mouth or Chinese trinckets or thickened, folded sheets of tree pulp or dying flowers or a spa treatment or oysters or wine or my credit card balance but I do feel the same about you as I did three days ago and as I will tomorrow and countless days after that.

The Mortician: An Essay on Writer's Block

It is raining. This is melting the snow. It took a few good days of rain to finally melt last year's two feet of snow and that came around March. It is January and it snowed two days ago. This snow is gone already. 

I had started mending my friend's parents' lawn today. Maybe this is why I falsely believe it is spring. I put on a worn out shirt and my cowboy-tight, ripped work jeans. It was like theolddays. April. Mucking a golf course east of Wichita before undergrad on the east coast. 

It is muddy here in this Staten Island yard; not as muddy as the trenches of Kellogg, nor as silty but overgrown and reeking of years of rotting peaches from a lone, diminutive, un-pruned tree. Mulberries poke their heads out through weeds like rye. These must be cut by me and cut again and cut again. It rains harder.

Harder. Hard enough to dampen my clothes faster than my body heat can dry them out. I retire to my car. Tilting the seat toward Kill van Kull where a ship passes. I doze with my knees poking through their well-deserved holes. I doze like theolddays only, now, I don't get paid for lounging. Rain means another day I have to wait for a check. This keeps me from dozing. I head for coffee. Find some at a deli. It is terrible. 

I hope some voodoo or wishful thinking will clear the rain. I am paid by the job not the hour now. It kills me to wait here as opposed to theolddays where I would sleep in the heat, my check trickling up like a broken sprinkler-head futilely trying to nurse a new berm. 

I suck the coffee through the hole in the lid; let the windows blur. I go in and let Mrs. Spinelli know I will be back in the morning. Another day the check is delayed.

I drive around for awhile in the false spring. I drive deliberately through puddles and listen intently as the water meets the running boards like a dozen snare drums. There are new suspension parts behind my tires, it is good to get the salt off.  Salt begets rust. Rust begets break. Break begets wreck. Wreck begets repair. Repair begets bills. Bills beget a necessity to work with my body again.

This is a writer's problem.

The mind is no use to anyone so the body must be sold. Turn a spade, watch a child or cat or watch many children and be called a professor. My mind is no use to anyone but the mortician. She will dissect my brain and make my poems expensive realizing they are so rare: like diamonds except with less dictators and more women.

Enhance Your Shelf Life NOW: Debunking the Debunking of Sexism

This Salon article would be laughably ignorant if it were not so painfully ignorant. In it, male novelist Teddy Wayne (an author who has written a novel I have never heard of) complains that Jennifer Weiner (author of, apparently, many novels I have never heard of) complains too much. Using some less than artful euphemisms, Wayne argues that Weiner is wrong in her assertion that the New York Times  is "sexist, unfair, loves Gary Shteyngart, hates chick lit, ignores romance." 

Weiner goes to great lengths to prove her point. If you are like me, however, pictures make a lot more sense than words so here are some from an organization (VIDA) for which I intern. (I am admitting my bias here, see)

VIDA is an organization devoted to women in the literary arts. To boil it down to absolute terms, VIDA is seeking to create a conversation about women writers and cultural perceptions of them and their work. VIDA's most fundamental project is The Count. This is where I come in. As an intern I am in the trenches doing this counting. It sounds straight forward of course, "how many men?" "how many women?" It is not. Often bios do not reveal one's gender. Often names do not either. For example, my dad's name is Alex, so is my female cousin's. Part of a Counter's job is to definitively ascertain the gender of an author. Then we can actually count them. But first! we must figure out how to categorize their work. Is this a literary piece in and of itself? For example a poem in Poetry. Is this a critical piece by one author about another? For example, the contents of the book review section of the Times disclosed above. Whose literature is being talked about? Obviously and as expected, mostly men. There is another pie chart to accompany this one over on the official count page. It is reveals whose opinions about literature (the reviewers) are being published. Again, as expected, mostly men.

I should be able to stop here because the point is made fairly clear by all the incredibly straight forward evidence that VIDA presents. Unfortunately, Wayne somehow read all this and came to a different conclusion. Look at the above pie chart one more time. Seriously, I'll wait. Study it. Got it? Okay now read this:

 In short, midlisters are middle-class professionals scraping out a living — and being a midlist male author who writes about males is a distinct financial disadvantage. Not only will you not get reviewed in the Times, but you won’t get reviewed in the women’s magazines that drive sales

That thing about women's magazines had something to do with the incredibly condescending view Wayne has about women's book clubs (or something) but the important thing is that he really believes males are reviewed less in the Times. Remember the pie chart, right? Okay.

Wayne did raise a point that VIDA has not looked into or at least has not published any awesome pie charts on: shelf placement. Is Wayne on to something when he moans that if you are a male "Barnes & Noble will relegate you to the back shelves"?


I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt so I looked into it. One of the perks of being an enormous literary nerd with no job is that I also have no friends and so can while away an entire afternoon jotting notes about book shelves and not worry that there is a whole world out there waiting to be grappled with, engaged in and employed by...

Anyway. I really wanted Wayne to be right because if nothing else it would prove that while the scholarly world(we'll call the Times scholarly...for now) overlooks women, maybe the commercial one does not.

I went down to my neighborhood Barnes and Nobel; below are the hard numbers. I started with the front shelves. If the men are all on the back shelves it should be easy to prove Wayne right by just counting the first shelves I see when I walk in. I chose the shelves "New Fiction" and "New Writers" to also look into Wayne's "book-editor-friend's" statement: “When we buy a debut novel by a man, we view it as taking a real chance.”

Hm. Okay, strike one, we'll get this next one.

"Taking a real chance," eh? Okay, strike two. I get three right? (There were only two categories that pertained to fiction and/or new writers but sure, 3 tries it is.)

An entire shelf dedicated to a man? Damn. Guess that make strike 3 right? (Yup, but I'll give you an honorable mention. Janet Evanovich had her own shelf too, right next to the $2 reese's bars under the cashier's stand. Women's literature is evidently equal to that of sugary impulse buys.)

Now that Wayne's little reverse sexism theory has been shot full of holes lets sink this ship for good. But first! Wayne tell us how he really feels:

Yet the Franzen-Weiner-Picoult-Stockett universe is the literary 1 percent; they’re all doing just fine, male or female. If you’re upset that you’re deprived of two separate reviews and a profile in the Times, as Weiner evidently is, then, to quote Brad Pitt in “Moneyball,” you have “uptown problems, which aren’t really problems at all.”

Got that, female writers? You should be happy with money. We do not need to have intelligent discussions about women's writing so long as we give them money. Shut up, look pretty, here's a royalty check. Which might explain Wayne's parting shot:

 male authors are somewhat like male porn stars: getting work, but outearned and outnumbered by their female counterparts, who are in far greater demand from the audience

I have no idea what Wayne was hoping to accomplish with his invective. It seems obvious to me that sexism remains an enormous force in this country. The examples are numerous and growing daily. Pick one. All male presidents. All male presidential candidates. Predominately male CEO's. Predominately male editors and on and on and on. I suppose Wayne was more worried about authors that never make it to the B&N shelves but maybe hangout on the St. Mark's shelves. I point you again toward VIDA. The reviews conducted by The Paris Review, Poetry, Boston Review and Granta all qualify as the "midlist" writers that Wayne was talking about and only one publication (Poetry) covered an equal or greater number of women compared to men. The simple truth is that Wayne (and anyone who believes him) is wrong; blatantly so. And to finish this all up, take a careful look at the author picture on the right. I happen to be a male writer. I am even openly heterosexual. Yet here I am lending my voice to feminism. Clever ploy to get in good with the ladies? No. Resistance against an unfair system which is silently repressing equal expression? Absolutely. If we men are really the great writers all the major journals and critics say we are, we will not mind a little fair competition and discussion with women. Those who defend the status quo have something to be afraid of: their own inadequacy.