Today in a parking lot someone said to me "I can give you a good, free, estimate to fix the rust on that car, man." And I said no because I don't need an estimate to fix the rust I need paint and also because I don't normally accept services in parking lots and then I also did some thinking. Why do people promote free estimates? Have estimates ever not been free? Was there a law, similar to the Social Security Act, passed during the Great Depression to scour the burden of once costly estimates from the economy?
And why do we say other things like "new and improved?" Has anything "new" ever not been "improved?" Even the iPhone 5S had that fingerprint-dealy.
New look same great taste!
I think some people just need to admit that their protein bars never tasted that good and no level of minimalist packaging is going to save that.
33% More Free!
Has anyone openly admitted to raising the price of their product?
"Buy the new Gillette Super Lazor Razor Shavor, it's super expensive!"
Fat Free!
Now this one is pretty innocuous I just mention it because as a kid I thought it meant the fat content of the ranch dressing was not included in the price and therefore a better bargain. However, I could also add that the fat content of your product is irrelevant went you consider the sugar/preservative/sodium/shoe-foam-rubber/polonium content of that same product. A bag of sugar the size of my head is fat free.
I'm out of good ideas. Tell me some other slargons (slogan + jargon) that you see all the time and have always thought were a little pointless. Someone who is good with computers and imagery should make me some ads that are honest and non-hyperbolic. If you do I'll send you something cool and improved with 33% more if itself.
I don't know what it was that convinced me that everyone had it figured out but it was probably something like someone I don't even like getting married or having a second kid. That usually does it right?
So then I'm in the bathroom mad as all fucking hell at winter with the drops of water all over my body feeling like tiny planets passed the Heliopause and my beard looks like shit and there's toothpaste on my nose and it occurs to me I don't have it figured out. Like at all.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Caveats of caveats, all things are caveats. First, let me say this is not a pity party for me or anyone else nor is it an invective against anyone else or me. This is being open and honest and hoping to create a conversation about something which, quite frankly, it disgusts me that no one really talks about.
Depression.
Over a year ago now a friend of mine, a bright star in the darkness that life can all too often seem, committed suicide. When that happened I had vowed to finally open up and talk, publicly, like really fucking publicly, about my own battles with depression as a way of owning up to and hopefully helping others open up and own up. I never did.
The issue was and is that most people who do not have depression, and even many who do, do not admit what it really is, what it really means and what it really does in one's life. As such, I was afraid to talk about it. Well here I am and as a young professional ever-grasping for more opportunity this is a risky thing to be talking about on something that comes up under the top three Google results of my name but I forge on.
To be upfront, depression is a disease. The same way a cold, canker sores, MRSA and syphilis are diseases. And like all of the above, especially the latter, requires treatment. Being a twenty-something male in a patriarchy such as ours makes it damn hard to admit that but this is a fight one cannot fight alone. If you do not get antibiotics for MRSA you will end up with a wooden leg and none of the perks of a pirate ship, syphilis, just look at Stalin. It has to be treated. That said, there are many ways of doing so. Too few people, and this is the result of the rampant negative characterization on many fronts, turn to medication. I remember reading a Times article which had the audacity to crack jokes about the sexual side effects of one of the more popular anti-depressants; the one I happen to take. If there is anything that is going to scare a twenty-something male in desperate need of treatment away it is telling him that he is going to end up with ED as a twenty-something. I can't speak of the side effects for women but it goes without saying that they are not wanting for any more reasons to have their sex-live stigmatized.
I "wrote a letter" as we curmudgeons are wont to do but it wasn't published. I argued, essentially, that while there are side effects, usually the benefits far outweigh them. Diminished sexual function vs. the ability to function at your 9-5? Yeah, I'll take the latter thanks. It didn't help that the Times (and many others) compared the effects to those of placebo. Yes, sometimes one course of treatment does not work. That's why there are lots. Some are even gummy, I hear.
The Times comparison to a placebo is more nuanced than it seems however and might not even be that bad. Based on some research I read about in the New Yorker it appears that the brain can actually heal the body just because it thinks it can. Harvard researchers are seeing signs that people who have been told they are taking a placebo start feel better anyway. There are a wide range of science-y explanations and questions for this but it all adds up to chemicals in the brain. This might not work for say, your splintering, post-MRSA shin, but it probably means a lot for things like depression.
Depression is widely attributed to an imbalance of the neurotransmitters Serotonin and Norepinehprine. The chemicals usually used to treat the disease are typically "reuptake inhibitors" responsive to one chemical or both. "Reuptake" refers to the fact that the cells that produce these chemicals often suck them back up when they are supposed to remain floating in the brain. This also, is where the side effects come in. An SSRI (e.g. selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor like Prozac, Celexa, Lexapro) blocks the "reuptake" of serotonin but it can also block the normal uptake of the chemical causing depression to get worse among other things.
What's important in all the technical jargon above is that depression is based on chemicals, involuntary productions that do or do not occur the way they are supposed to in your brain. Essentially, it is not your fault.
It is not your fault.
What is your fault is refusing to do anything about it. Man up and admit you can't do it alone because you can't and guess what, no one anywhere has ever done anything alone. Yes there are go-getters out there (I consider myself one) there are trend-setters out there (I hope to be one) there are unique individuals out there (I know I am one) but none of those things happen in a vaccuum. You can't be top of the pack without a pack to beat, you can't set a trend without people to follow it, you can't standout without a background. Everything relies on something and someone else. That is how evolution built us. Don't fool yourself into thinking you are bigger than the problem by refusing to ask for help. Asking for help, admitting you have such an unfortunately stigmatized disease, is the bravest and best thing you can do to deal with it.
But wait there's more!
Don't set it and forget it. You can't just go to the doctor, get a bottle of pills and start seeing roses and sunshine and unicorns, but if you can, let me know which doctor you see cause I want in on it. From personal experience, an anti-depressant essentially makes it easier for one to treat oneself. Before the medicine I would wallow, quite literally, in whatever I was feeling (with depression it is often that you feeling nothing at all) and would just sleep or browse the internet aimlessly. What Prozac has helped me do is see that I am not well and take my own steps to get better. Yesterday morning I was feeling that way. I woke up late and just wanted to stay in bed. I figured the cards were already stacked against me because I missed out on much needed time to be productive. It can happen. No medicine is not a cure all. When you get an infection you have to take amoxicillin and usually do something else like rest or eat better. With depression you have to take medicine and take care of yourself. Without Prozac I might have just stayed in bed and let everything get one hundred thousand times worse but I got up and kicked its ass. I picked up my bass, put on some real angry, gritty, nasty Black Flag songs and went to town. I played like I was in my high school pop-punk band again, in my apartment, in my underwear but unfortunately without that one cheerleader who always used to stand near the front at our shows. But hey, it felt good and I ended up making use of the rest of my day. Was it one or the other or both? The answer is probably all of the above with the most importance being that I took the situation into my own hands (specifically my now very blistered fingers) and did something with it. That's the key.
Move and you will move on.
With the help of a friend, I recently discovered the depths of misery and then simultaneously the heights of self-affirmation. To make a long and yet to be concluded story short, she did something bad to me but I got over it in part because I was able to take the energy I had for feeling like crap and turn it into energy for lifting weights and reading lots of books and also because a friend is a friend no matter what happens. Would I have been able to put all that negative energy to positive use without help? I doubt it -- no wait -- I know I would not have been able to snap out of that without help.
There are so many cliches, "bad things only happen because good people do nothing," "life is what you make it," blah, blah, hopelessly-optimistic blah.
But it's all true. If you don't want to be depressed. Stop being depressed. There are a million ways to do so. Find yours. Don't be afraid to admit it starts with a trip to a doctor or therapist. It's better than the alternative, trust me.
If you still don't think it's manly to be honest about your feelings, here are some videos of a guy who could definitely beat the shit out of you telling you about his. They're long videos but they're worth it.
This post is dedicated to the memory of David Sommerhauser.
Our country is now completely dependent on Russia for travel to and from space. A private business would never let any part of its operations be dependent on someone else.
about this
ignoring the fact that these guys
Yes, even the heroic private company that is saving our space program.
I seem to have established a blogging pattern of once every three weeks. I know I am breaking all kinds of rules by doing this. First, I should be doing it once a week, second I shouldn't be making a post about how I never post.
However, I think self-deprecation is necessary at times and particularly revealing about personality. I think my problem is that I tend to overthink my words. I know that this blog is not read by anyone for world advice or creative insight. Though, that is probably anyone's loss. I mean, the reason I am not here every other day is I do not want to waste my and your time on petty stuff. That is not to say people who do blog more regularly are petty just that if I were to blog that often it would be.
My writing hunger, occurring only in three week intervals is interesting me and I wonder about the cause. I have reached a few theories about why I come back to this when I do:
Money. Creativity is a function of contentedness and contentedness is an inverse function of stress. When my bank account is nice and cushiony I have the freedom of mind to write rather than worry about which check needs to clear first.
Time. I think I play a pendulum game with my leisure time. I give huge blocks of it away to editing my work, other people's work, my magazine, other people's magazines, political causes, environmental causes and bass guitar solos only to later about-face and drop everything to have some personal time, wherein I write.
Sleep. This one I am still working out. I have had about 1000000 good ideas come to me just before falling asleep and had to pry myself from the warm clutches of my bed. This was a bit of a learning curve. I kept promising to myself that I would write the ideas down in the morning. However I started to realize that they were the beginning of dreams, that is REM stuff spilling into the last remnants of consciousness and if I did not write them I would never see them again. So write I did. Jumped out of bed like I was haunted to get them down. Most are still just ideas but I think they are going places. Other times I cannot make a pen move when I am tired. Others I ramble out forever thinking I am writing the next On The Road to come up with an incoherent piece of crap...which I guess is a lot like On the Road. Right now, I am somewhere in between that REM/incoherrent stage. I am definitely tired but my ideas seem to be coming out well. In fact, this late night post which started as just musing on the strange cycles of my work ethic has actually turned into an analytic Ars Poetica. Which is groovy.
Decision Fatigue This is some pretty neat new science. It seems to be that the more stuff you have to choose between the worse you get at it. Your mind gets tired and actually stops deciding which usually means defaulting and picking something that was actually picked for you not by you. When it comes to writing there is no default. Every word is a choice and to make even one choice badly can ruin everything. Inhibition certainly plays a part when decision fatigue takes over. How many systems have we derived to work around inhibition? I think of automatic writing, first-thought-best-thought and a rather myriad of mental function inhibitors. Inhibition is just the brain trying to protect you from dying so when you inhibit the brain you take inhibition with it. Neat eh?
So here we have it these are my reasons for avoiding my personal challenges. What are your favorite cop-outs? The first step to recovery is acceptance.
I am not positive about the etymology of the word concerted but it calls to mind the image of many things working together to produce one thing more forceful than simply their sum. This marks the beginning of a concerted effort by my constituent parts to work together to make this blog my writing better than I am probably qualified for.
I caught wind of the #OccupyWallSt protest in some abstract internet channel a few weeks ago. I remember thinking, "Hm, is this another psychotic right wing thing?" Some thing suggested the protesters were men and women after my own heart but with the majority of the noise these days being made by the Tea Party I assumed the worst and forgot about it.
The other night I caught an excerpt of this video on the news playing in a bar after the Yankees game. This combined with the macing convinced me that I needed to contribute. Politics be damned, freedom of speech and assembly comes first.
It's just a bonus that I espouse the overall theme of this movement, which, despite reports to the contrary, is quite clear: an unregulated, unaccountable financial and corporate universe is no longer welcome in America.
Of course, there are many other things going on here and while "distracting" it's about time someone made some noise. I saw a great number of signs and stickers against "fracking" the ecologically decrepit method of extracting natural gas by injecting sand, water and chemicals into layers of rocks. There were gay rights banners. Support for teachers, students and universities and as of today organized labor.
It was a bastion of fervent liberalism in what has seemed to be a vacuum of far right denialism. It was glorious. It is also terrifying. Terrifying that it has come to this. Thanks to "Citizens United" and five out of nine Supreme Court Justices it has become apparent that voting and corresponding with elected officials no longer gets anything accomplished. After all, why read an email from a constituent when you can just read numbers on a big corporate check. The Tea Party had also somehow convinced us that taxes on billionaires who pay none and also aren't using their money to hire people is a bad idea.
Thankfully, the left woke up. Okay, so there is not a single leader, no bullet list of demands, and most of the "Wall Street" banks are actually in midtown but the intentions are pretty clear. Wall Street is a metaphor for out of control financial and corporate universe. The taxpayer funded bailouts meant nothing to them; they blew them on bonuses. Politicians and judges are helping them fix their cash funnels directly to other politicians and judges ears while simultaneously depriving their employees the right to organize to speak using words instead of green backs.
Well, thankfully, we went ahead and organized anyway. This is what the real first amendment looks like; This is what democracy looks like.
More than anything else, this has reminded me that there is a committed left in this country. Something I am very proud of not just because I am left handed. Maybe the protest itself will not solve the problems but I do believe it will energize people to harass their dollar-bill blind folded representatives and convince the politicians who already to listen to fight harder against the right. I will continue protesting and I will also be writing, emailing and calling. You should too.
Oh, right, this is a literature blog and since I'm sure you cannot single out the famous poets and professors who were there from any of these pictures I'll close with a quote:
I think it better that in times like these
A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
-WB Yeats "On Being Asked for a War Poem"
Poetry should be silent, the poet should be silent: a citizen more than an artist.
I can only personally account for roughly three years of Caleb's life. The other details of this history have been accrued through applying biblical numerology to his blog posts and anecdotes from Creative Writing professors we shared. It should be noted that probably no part of the following history is true but parts of it might be.
Caleb was born to wandering shepherds Brian and Diana sometime around the reign of Herod II
Caleb was a precoucious child whose first love was music. It has been said that he was capable of playing Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" on a 25 key Schoenhut at age 3.
For his loyal service to Giovanni Verrazano, a street in Staten Island bears his name.
To pay for college Caleb sold used office furniture to an up-and-coming Greg Daniels.
Caleb took the only known photograph of Helen of Troy. Unfortunately it was shot on a roll of Kodachrome which he forgot to develop before the chemicals were discontinued by Kodak in 2009.
Caleb converted Jonathan Goldsmith to a full-time Boulevard Wheat drinker.
More amazing than all these is the real life genius of Caleb's writing and his untreated workoholism. When I signed up to participate in this tour it was for two novels. Now it's two novels and a novella. All the while he has been helping other writers revise and publish as well as running numerous blogs, forums and podcasts. If there is something this man can't do it hasn't been invented and done by him yet. Cannoli Pie published an excerpt of Stranger Will here and a review of it here.
The first book of Caleb's I ever read came with a picture of him shirtless holding a guitar. I am not sure what I was supposed to get from that. Perhaps this is related.
This is a guest post byCalebJRoss (also known as Caleb Ross, to people who hate Js) as part of his Stranger Will Tour for Strange blog tour. He will be guest-posting beginning with the release of his novel Stranger Will in March 2011 to the release of his second novel, I Didn’t Mean to Be Kevin and novella, As a Machine and Parts, in November 2011. If you have connections to a lit blog of any type, professional journal or personal site, pleasecontacthim. To be a groupie and follow this tour,subscribe to the CalebJRossblogRSSfeed. Follow him on Twitter:@calebjross.com. Friend him on Facebook: Facebook.com/rosscaleb
I have commented before on the New York Times's haphazard increase of Opinion Writing. I was not naive enough to believe it would be the last of my complaints. This time I am singing (Henry Rollins style) in a very different register. The basic outline of my last argument was that Opinion Writing needs to be kept far away from news to try and preserve the sanctity of bias. This time, the absence of basic proofreading is the flaw and the potential victim is "Writing."
Mark Bittman writes about a tenet of the food movement for this past Sunday's Review: eating in not out. True to the nature of Opinion Writing, Bittman is very anecdotal in his telling of the story. There is research that backs him up on some of his better points such as the social and nutritional value of meals where the entire family is gathered at the same time over the same food but Bittman hardly nods to it.
The central theme of the article is that the cost of food as a deterrent to eating healthy is a myth and that other factors such as time/convenience and elements of addiction play the most prominent roles. As I am acutely aware, it is cheaper to cook food at home than to eat off of the dollar menu at a near by fast food hovel. I also agree, and I think science does too, that there are other social and biological factors that affect this unhealthy consumption.
Bittman claims to know the solution: fresh vegetables and dried beans from the grocery store and a change in the socialization of meal time. This is all well and good except that he either neglects to mention or is blissfully unaware that people often opt for the much less nutritious offerings at the supermarket because of prices. Macaroni and cheese is cheaper than a head of broccoli, white bread is cheaper than whole wheat and soda is cheaper than milk. This is where the problem is. The grocery store is no safer than burger joint. Bittman is right to hurry people out of McDonald's but he's wrong to rush them into the A & P. This is a fault of the anecdotal nature of Opinion Writing. Because Bittman is only giving his opinion he can do it without researching much of his argument. In fact, most of the points he makes in the article he also makes in his bio on the Times website. This, combined with the fact that he is not specifically reacting to any recent news regarding these food issues means he is pontificating rather than reporting.
The real gaffe is when the article cites examples that actually prove itself wrong.
The People’s Grocery in Oakland secures affordable groceries for low-income people.
Political action would mean agitating to limit the marketing of junk; forcing its makers to pay the true costs of production; recognizing that advertising for fast food is not the exercise of free speech but behavior manipulation of addictive substances; and making certain that real food is affordable and available to everyone.
(italics mine)
And herewith is the issue I have with the writing. Someone, should have read this over in an effort to weed out this glaring contradiction. If it really is so much cheaper to eat from the grocery store why are there non-profits focused on making grocery food affordable? If Bittman is aware of the cost of groceries why did he assert that they are so much cheaper in the first place? Does anyone really know? It makes for a very confusing logical loop that simply should not be.
I will not go all John Simon here and start blaming Bittman for the Fall of the English language or something silly but this case does point out that it is becoming increasingly acceptable to write disregarding the logic of your own statements. Articles are taking the form of long-winded monologues about personal invective with no regard for their validity. I probably agree with Bittman on the issue of food but I disagree with his way of writing about it. He is actually making some good points but he is making them in a way that comes of as sneaky, skewed or wrong which hurts everyone involved. I fear that opinion writing is moving more in this direction of unanswered monologue and hope that, as a journalistic medium, it falls out of fashion sometime soon.
Don't worry, it is not lost on me that my bemoaning Opinion Writing is in fact Opinion Writing. This, however, is a blog not a newspaper. I have also made the effort to carefully elucidate my point with written examples and pictures of sweaty hardcore punk rockers.
This is Ian Mackaye, friend of Rollins (above). He is responsible for aspects of the food movement in his own right.
There is a ton of talk about how human activities affect aspects of nature. Global warming is a contentions issue, perhaps it shouldn't be but some minds are hard to change. It is undeniable that ocean surface temperatures have been on the upswing for the better part of two decades and it is well know that ocean surface temperature is an important carburetor for extreme tropical weather. I will not attempt to make assumptions about why ocean temperatures have risen. Even global warming science is uncertain about all the causes and the magnitudes of difference each makes. There is a separate, indisputably human contribution to the devastation wrought by tropical cyclones which we are not working hard enough to mitigate and in many ways are actually making worse: over-development of the coast.
The first solution is the most obvious and is a lesson I picked up pretty quickly living in flood-prone Wichita, Kansas. Simply, stop building houses where nature is volatile, i.e. flood plains and low lying coasts. Around Halloween 1998 it rained a lot in Kansas. I remember trick-or-treating in the rain for the first time in our new, more affluent neighborhood. My dad was not terribly keen on us staying out so long but I heard rumors that people who live in big houses give out bigger candy bars too. In the end I think I ended up not with bigger but perhaps more candy simply because as the few families roaming the streets for sweets, we were rewarded in spades for our bravery (read foolhardiness). The real treat would come the next day. We didn't have to go to church! Now, if you know anything about my Catholic parents, which you probably don't, you know they would not miss Sunday Mass for hell or high water. However, when the water is high enough to flow OVER the bridges of the Cow Skin Creek (a small tributary of the Arkansas River) locking us into our subdivision, a single exception can be made.
"Well we can go on Monday to make up for it."
Lots of houses along the creek were destroyed in part because the Cow Skin is a creek in name only. It's actually part of a well established flood plain. The flood plain in Wichita is so volatile that a canal was dug at what was once the western edge of the city. On an ordinary day there is naught but a trickle. After a big rain however, the Wichita-Valley Center Floodway (aka The Big Ditch) actually has more water and a faster current than the 1,469 mile Arkansas.
The city of Wichita has since spent a ton of money buying people out of their homes to widen and deepen parts of the creek in order to ease flooding and it has been a mostly well executed and well received project. I for one, got a kick out of the massive digs and walls that were built around the creek over the years. I felt like I was witnessing the Midwest's answer to the Aqueducts. I couldn't help but wonder though, why are we buying people out of the homes they built directly in harm's way? Why did we allow development so close to this time bomb of a creek?
To put things simply, we would see a lot less damage from these kinds of storms if we would stop putting things directly in front of them. The evacuation zone on Staten Island (where I was nervously riding out the storm) saw significantly less damage than the same areas in Manhattan despite the smaller surge afflicting the latter. This is due both to the fact that Manhattan has none of its original wetlands to protect it and that the island has been developed all the way from one edge to the other. New York City is spending time and money trying to reclaim the area's swamps and that is a good thing. Swamps are the natural first defense of the continent against storm surges. Their mucky ecosystems are very efficient at dampening the impact of rising tides; way more so than, say, a parking lot or a high rise. This is all well and good and ecosystem restoration should definitely be encouraged and continued but a much easier starting point is to just stop building stuff on beaches.
Extent of the surge. Park behind my apartment.
Significant erosion on an exposed beach.
Bonus points to whoever knows the literary reference used in the title.
Collectively, the majority of internet writing matured beyond one person's rants about his or her personal peeves around 2005. Evidently the same is not true for print as Neil Genzlinger just did that in the New York Times. I must say that I am not a big fan about the Times' recent switch to more opinion pieces (I think the rise of opinion news is proof of the decline of IQ; I digress) but the new Sunday Review has been a mostly engaging section.
Genzlinger's article might have been amusing if attached to that section and roughly 1000 words shorter but it somehow found it's way to the New York (i.e. local) section of the paper and my feelings are a little hurt. Firstly, this thing is not news, it's definitely opinion. Secondly it's really poorly formed opinions. Nobody likes a terrible busker, but nobody really writes major publication articles about it either.
Thirdly and mostly I was struck by the author's (how should I call this) immaturity, hubris, ignorance, animalistic denial of intellect? Probably all of those.
Advocating for annoyances he wished were punishable by fines he wrote:
This woman took five minutes to order a glazed doughnut and rummage around in her purse for the money to buy it. Lines exist for a reason: They give us time to get ready for the transaction ahead. Ms. Clueless shirked her preparatory responsibilities and instead made me late for work[...]
You caught that right? This mystery woman caused our hero to be late for his job. She made him be late. I suppose he just omitted the part of the story where she forced him at gun point to stay in line and miss his train because of some fetish she has for control and high calorie foods, something like a reverse of the story Death by Doughnut.
Okay, I get that this thing is a farce but the attitude it represents is very real and tragic. Yes, tragic, as in really depressingly unfortunate and nearly unstoppable. There is this condition of deniability going around like a commutable virus in an elementary school though instead of sneezing we are saying "not my fault." It's an old existentialist thing going back (at least in my experience) to Sartre. You are entirely in control of yourself and that is all. An example: walking to work this morning you are killed when a tree struck by lightning falls on you. People would argue that was natural an unstoppable and so forth the truth is otherwise. You didn't have to walk to work that way, you know that lightning strikes trees during bad weather and that walking under one is dangerous. Of course we cannot set up our entire lives to avoid all possible iterations of mortality, we would go insane if we tried (paranoid schizophrenia, agoraphobia etc.) which is where the fact that all you can control is "you" comes in. You can accept that there is a slight risk of the tree falling and walk under it anyway and so on and so forth.
Now away from the theoretical stuff and back to reality. The Doughnut Lady did not make Neil late to work. Neil made Neil late to work. If one of my employees came in for a shift and blamed his tardiness on the person in line in front of him took to long to pay (or more often "the bus was late") I would say, "So?" and hand him his write-up. God may work in mysterious ways but everyone knows how the devil works: idle hands, sub-prime mortgages, Four Loko, all instances of people trying to spread responsibility or take none at all.
Before this irrevocably crosses that IHATEITWHEN-rant line we supposedly graduated from in the 0's I'll make the very strict point to be gleaned from this somewhat humorous article. You are in control of your life. Don't read that as just another "carpe diem" tattoo or shitty book turned Julia Roberts movie, realize it as the only truth there is. If you don't believe me, spend an entire day doing absolutely nothing and let me know what happens, write down your goals and then just stare at the list, open your bills and don't pay them; you get my drift.
While Claire is out I am feeding, cleaning up after and playing with her lop-eared friend.
As such, I figure it within my rights to leach just a smidge of the popularity from her weekly post.
Okay, I can handle being carried but this other rabbit over here is making me nervous.
May not look like much but that irregularly antisocial rabbit is actually being held and remaining calm about it. It's also his first mirror pic.
Rabbits generally do not like to be picked up. It reminds them of, well...
...scary things.
So you can imagine how much training, petting and treating it took to make Mr. Monster comfortable enough to be held. I got clawed on a few of his more impatient days, and while that eagle may look like a tough guy a rabbit has some pretty nasty moves (and sharp hind feet) when he wants to use them.
At some point I am going to have to wake up to the reality that I am not going to earn a living selling poems. I am pretty sure the only people who do are the people who translate the Greeks and then sell the books to college literature surveys. This harsh reality has led me to ponder what an English degree can do well that other degrees cannot, besides being able to lick hundreds of manuscript queries a week without getting a single tongue paper cut. The conclusion? Pick words for people and charge for it.
This series is not meant to be a treatise on people confusing their and they're. If you still need help with that you have probably already stopped reading because nothing on this page has exploded yet. Rather, I hope to point out that I can word things better than many people who actually get paid to do it. This blog started as something devoted to the way people misuse a particular word. It quickly had to leave its original calling because the misuse of the word, though flagrant, was not as commonplace as I had at first guessed. Beyond that, the name sounds cool and suggests that I am out to change something. Which I am and now, full circle being reached, we have gotten back to words.
For this first installment I will go with probably the two most abhorrent words I can think of. These two are fine by themselves but together they are like Sid and Nacy: bad for each other and everyone involved.
"a Novel"
I like novels, I know people who write novels and I mean them no harm and so forth but these words have got to go or need to make new friends. Both would be good.
The problem as I see it is that the words "a Novel" are a threat to my intelligence.
"Ok, um, err, it's a big thick papery thing at Borders it's either a novel or a book on tape in a box that looks like a novel."
Seriously, you don't need to tell me I will figure it out.
Or is it that you are concerned we will mistake your "novel" for something else? A steaming pile of misogynistic bovine leavings?
Perhaps.
I just leaned over to my book shelf and checked, yes, a good friend of mine has the words "a Novel" in the title of his novel. I do not blame him but I do sort of blame his publisher. I imagine it was their fault. It is an endemic epidemic really and I doubt that any one person will change it soon and maybe the words themselves do not need to disappear but they could stand some company.
Allow me to widely misquote something if you will. Futurama did a series of straight-to-DVD movies after their first cancellation. The second in this series, The Beast with a Billion Backs was styled after 1950's monster films. The liner notes had a mini "movie poster" that featured the tagline "A MONSTER OF DUBIOUS MORALITY!!!" Which is hysterical, but moving on. Such a tag would go well after "a Novel." Caleb Ross's Stranger Will would do well with that actually. Stranger Will: a Novel of Dubious Morality.
Like I said, I do not think its Caleb's fault that his title has the words novel in it and even if it is I can still chalk that one up to Caleb being a writer of our times. I do not think a writer wants to put "a Novel" after his or her work though. Much the way I do not title my poems "D.B. Cooper, a Poem." I suppose I could start, just to even out the score. I worry that people would be offended by it though. After all I do not need to remind people that it is a poem when
the lines look
like this
and there are
inanimate objects
are carnivorously
personified
and such.
I think "a Novel" is entirely a product of The Marketing Department. I did some very un-academic, non-scientific looking into and reached the conclusion that the newer the book the more likely it is to be called "a Novel." Additionally, product descriptions make those words more important than the author/publisher did. Don DeLillo is a fine example of both points.
This is his novel from the 1980's
This is from 2003
We see "a Novel" has been added to the title of the newer book, yet the subtitle is roughly a quarter the size of the main title. Now look at this picture.
The two parts of the title are now the same size. The latter picture is from a website trying to sell you the book.
J.D Salinger raises another point.
His says "a novel by" which is more of a description than a footnote to the title which is nice. However his "buy now" page on the same website does not remind you that it is a novel. One could argue that it should. DeLillo got the "a Novel" treatment and his was only a tiny blip at the end why is Salinger immune? Is it because we all know that Catcher was a novel and but cannot say the same for Underworld because it is new? Was DeLillo's "a Novel" really part of his title and therefore on the by page whereas perhaps Salinger did not write that it was simply added to the cover? Who knows.
That is sort of my point with this whole thing. Who invited these guys? Perhaps they are of value but I err on the side that they are not. The naked words, usually followed by a colon which indicates description, "a Novel" are a distraction from the art in hand. A title may be the only words you ever read by a given author. It would be nice if those words freely and clearly expressed exactly what the author wants you to know without having to lug around a dangling marketing appendage.
For those who were holding out for an explosion: here is a simulation of the moon colliding with a theorized sister moon. Read the story in the journal Nature.
A few days ago Claire asked her friends the following:
When you begin a new project, how do you choose to start? Do you plan it out first, mapping the steps and setting deadlines? Or do you dive in without more than a second thought? And either way,why?
I spent so much time answering the first question I am going to have to do this one separately because it is an important question. It should be noted however that I am not famous or considered any type of expert at anything so if you choose to follow my methods or advice you do so at your own peril.
--
A project for me begins with the most engaging part of the story or poem. I used to call these "thunder bolt lines" because they take awhile to make their impact fully known (think of the flash then the boom) and because I usually end up a little deaf and blind afterwards, that is, I feel sick until I can write it down. That's as close as I get to some magical fairy like muse experience. The rest is all good ol' fashioned elbow grease and maybe a little (read lot of) wine or scotch.
Recently, the thunder bolts have ended up being titles rather than lines which is interesting to me.
The elbow grease mentioned is usually research. I haven't been a law enforcement officer or a world renowned painter in a creative rut so I have to read up on it. For this novella like thing I have been writing for a year or so now I intend to do research on painting. The world renown part is all my creative hubris imagining what it will be like when everyone worships and anthologizes me. I am also considering practicing with a handgun at a shooting range for the only novel I can honestly say I have ever attempted to write. They say "write what you know" and you can't know everything, but sometimes you have to write about everything so research, even for creative work, is important.
Now "writing" for me is a generous term. The above mentioned longer works of fiction are being written mostly in my head at the moment. The novella, actually is entirely in my head and while not concretely productive, it is still important. It prevents the story from being tainted by the wrong kind of critics. I believe in making a story mine before I get it out there. Others probably disagree with me.
Poems are a bit of a different beast. My preferred method of working on a poem is something of an ekphrastic method, i.e. writing about art. I typcially do that not by actually writing poems about pottery or something but by writing poems while or directly after reading the work of a good poet or in many cases the news. I am not sure what the merits of this are but it is fun.
Finally, I do not pretend to know when a piece is finished. I know what I am trying to get across but I never know if I am getting that through to others. When, and only when, I am certain that a piece might possibly be finished does it see the light of day to anyone but myself and perhaps a first reader. Advice from friends is one way to see where it is and rejection from a magazine or publisher is another. Both are good.
My answer to Claire's final question, the one about organization, should be self evident.
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