P.J. DeGenaro – Writer, Editor, Teacher

We're Back!

2012-01-19T19:21:00.000-08:00

Back from the SOPA/PIPA protest. Still no real content. Sorry. In the meantime, I leave you all with the following image.

SOPA-dopa-fly!

2012-01-18T06:11:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure it's worth turning my blog black today when I haven't actually updated it since 1973, but this is an important issue that goes to the very heart of what we hold sacred as Americans. Please visit Stop American Censorship and add your name to the petition. Thanks.

Here goes...

I still exist!

2011-08-26T07:54:00.000-07:00

I have been taking a rather extensive summer hiatus from blogging, obviously. But I'll be back as soon as I have something interesting to share.

Yep, this could take a while.

Thanks for your support.

"The Changing of Stories is a Cheerful Affair"

2011-05-25T07:19:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking about turning this blog into a Colum McCann fansite. I wrote about him here once before, after being left bruised and battered (in the best possible way) by his novel Let the Great World Spin, which won the National Book Award in 2009.

Having subsequently devoured Everything in this Country Must and This Side of Brightness, I have moved on to Zoli.

I'm not sure why this man doesn't win awards for everything he writes. He has not yet failed to pull me entirely into a new world with an opening sentence. An Irishman who has settled in New York City, McCann sings in the tongues of these places and of the people who inhabit them, better than most. But Zoli is the tale of a Roma woman -- a poet, no less -- who came of age in what we now call Slovakia during the 1930s and 40s. As she recounts the story of her life, McCann recedes. He is a mere ghost in this book. Maybe not even that.

I can't say very much else yet. I picked Zoli up at a loud corporate book store yesterday and I'm glad I did, as I needed to escape my own life into something big, dark, difficult, bright-red and reeling. I will, however, quote freely and without fear of repercussion.

I was writing things down then, on any paper I could find, even the labels from bottles. I dunked them in water, dried them out, and filled the emptiness with ink. Old newspapers. Brown butcher sheets. I dried them out until the bloodstains were faint. It was still a secret, my writing. I pretended to most that I could not read, but, I thought, then, surely it could do no harm? I said to myself that writing was no more nor less than song. My pencil was busy and almost down to a nubbin.

Wash your dress in running water. Dry it on the southern side of the rock. Let them have four guesses and make them all be wrong. Take a fistful of snow in the summer heat. Cook haluški with hot sweet butter. Drink cold milk to clean your insides. Be careful when you wake: breathing lets them know how asleep you were. Don't hang your coat from a hook in the door. Ignore curfew. Remember weather by the voice of the wheel. Do not become the fool they need you to become. Change your name. Lose your shoes. Practice doubt. Dress in oiled cloth around sickness. Adore darkness. Turn sideways in the wind. The changing of stories is a cheerful affair. Give the impression of not having known. Beware the Hlinkas, it is always at night that the massacres occur.

All Filler, No Killer

2011-03-07T06:53:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to save my energy for The Book Which Demands to be Written but Skips Away Like Mango in its Little Dancing Shoes When I Open its File. However, I hate to see a blog that hasn't been updated for months. Un-updated blogs are like beach cottages closed up for winter while their owners wheel-and-deal down in big, nasty Facebook City. It's depressing.

Here then, is a very short sample of the type of overwrought stuff I sometimes produce in writing workshops, with similes piled up in all the corners. Though to be fair to myself (and if I'm not, who will be?) this was supposed to be a prose-poem. Or flash fiction. Actually, I can't remember what it was supposed to be.

But my book doesn't sound like this at all! I swear! Well, maybe just every couple of pages or so.

Take it away, Meg!

At midmorning on Tuesday Meg announced she was going for coffee. She asked if anyone wanted anything; no one did. She rode the elevator down. Today was her birthday. Not a milestone, just a birthday. Nobody in the office knew. This was fine, really. She pushed through the lobby, through the revolving doors, through the smell of polished brass and Windex, out into the cold sun.

At Café Dolce she drank her coffee by the window. Why rush back? Birthday, after all. But she had to stand as neither table was free. One held an old-fashioned adding machine, a shoebox of receipts, a chewed pencil. At the other, a man and a woman strained toward one another, two sections of open drawbridge.

Across the landscape of the woman’s back — the apricot blouse through which vertebrae and the hard points of shoulder blades pressed — Meg saw the man's face and recognized it. She couldn’t say from where. Something knocked in her like a fist when he glanced up, his hair fallen forward, shirt open at the neck. She turned away and watched the sun climb the buildings across the street, the taxis moving like yellow fish, but knew anyway that the man had taken the woman’s hand between both of his. His chair rasped against the floor. He swallowed.

The woman's voice darted up like birds. She said, "next time I see you I'll only talk about happy things." A small silence. The man said, "It's all right. When I don't see you, the light goes out of the world."

Just that. Meg put her hand on the window, leaned her weight against it, spread her fingers dark against the sunlight. When the man and woman left she studied their table: a cup smeared with lipstick, a plate, two forks, paper napkins tossed like bedding.

Hey kids! Read it again, and this time don't forget to Spot The Similes™! Fabulous prizes for those who spot 'em all! (Similes must contain "like" or "as." Metaphors not included.)

The Most Literary Rent Party Ever...

2011-01-04T18:40:00.000-08:00

I am sad as hell tonight. And I'm shocked. And I might also be angry, though I'm not sure whether that's an appropriate feeling to have just yet.

Before I explore that, let me clue you in.

It was nearly three years ago, on January 27, 2008, that the New York Times Magazine published an incredible story about a writer named Charles Bock, who only a few years earlier had been my instructor at Gotham Writers Workshop. Those of you who read my old blog might remember how excited I was to hear him read from his wildly successful first novel, Beautiful Children, at New York City's Three Lives & Company.

Well, Charles was recently in the New York Times again, and I nearly missed it. I just now (on Tuesday night) picked up last Saturday's "The Arts" section and ran across this tiny story crammed in among the movie ads on page 8.

It seems that Charles' wife, Diana Colbert, was diagnosed with leukemia last fall and subsequently underwent a bone marrow transplant. At the time, Charles' writer pals (and he has made a great many, because he's a great guy) pitched in to offer household help to the couple.

Unfortunately, Ms. Colbert's leukemia returned and she is scheduled to have another transplant next month.

"We said everything that can be done should be done," said novelist Fiona Maazel, a friend of the Bocks'. So on February 6 the Bock friends are giving "the most literary rent party ever" at Performance Space 122 in the East Village.

Among those who will be auctioning off their services, literary and otherwise, will be the writers Susan Cheever, Jonathan Franzen, Richard Price, Mary Gaitskill, Amy Hempel, Rick Moody and Gary Shteyngart. (OMG, right???) If you're so inclined — and I think I am, despite slightly shallow pockets — tickets go on sale January 10, here.

The article ends thusly:

"'The literary world is filled with good and generous people,' Mr. Bock said. 'But then that's what writing is all about — empathy.'"

But I did mention feeling angry, and here's why: nowhere in the article does anyone say it, but I worry that this fundraiser is not about "household help" at all, but about the cost of the medical procedures. I could be wrong about this and I sincerely hope I am, but if I'm not?

Bestselling author in 2008. Catastrophic illness in 2009. "Rent Party" in 2011.

Only in fucking America.

ADDENDUM: It's been pointed out to me over at The Big Book of Face that I don't know that the Bocks' fundraiser has anything to do with covering medical procedures. However, I think it's safe to assume that were we not dealing with recurring leukemia and two bone marrow transplants, there would not be a fundraiser taking place at all. The United States is the only western nation in which a person's finances can be wiped out due to a catastrophic illness. This has to change.

No! God!

2010-12-29T18:07:00.000-08:00

Facebook doesn't seem to let you post animated gifs properly, but I just love this one so much that I had to paste it somewhere. It was appropriate for a bit of irritating news I got this morning.

Carry on...

Post-Christmas Snowpocalypse Cabin Fever Writer's Block Project

2010-12-26T13:38:00.001-08:00

Snowed-in? Cold? Losing your marbles? Stuck in a novel that you can't get out of? (Ending interrogative sentences on prepositions?) Try this: draw your main character in a moment of crisis, in a decidedly amateurish fashion. Then disseminate your drawing freely on the internet.

That'll do 'er.

This took me approximately two hours. I used pencil, fine-point black marker, and my son's crayons on recycled printer paper. Reference photos for the bridge and the abandoned house were found easily via Google. That diamond-patterned thing is a chain link fence.

No holiday cookies were eaten for the duration of the project.

Happy December 26th, all!

Harrison Withers' Kitten

2010-11-28T09:19:00.000-08:00

What makes you love your work?

Here's a scene from one of my favorite books, Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy. Sixth-grader Harriet M. Welsch is in the midst of her regular Upper East Side spying route, and has climbed to the roof an apartment building in order to peer through the skylight at her quarry, Harrison Withers, a builder of fanciful bird cages:

"He sat at his work table before a particularly beautiful cage, a replica of a Victorian summer house.

"Quiet descended upon the room as he sat studying the cage [...] he looked lovingly, his eyes slightly glazed, at the one small unfinished portion of the structure. Very slowly he moved one piece a quarter of an inch to the left. He sat back and looked at it a long time. Then he moved it back."

I have seldom run across such an accurate and affectionate description of an artist at work, have you?

Harriet the Spy is a book much beloved by former — and, I hope, current — children the world over. It's rare these days to find an eleven-year-old female protagonist who is neither a babysitter nor a vampire; who is not concerned with romance or gossip or clothing. In fact, when Harriet goes out to spy, she changes into worn-out jeans, a red-hooded sweatshirt, fake eyeglasses (to make her look smart) and — best of all — a tool belt that holds her notebook, flashlight, and spare pens. Aside: could Harriet even be published today without some righteous protector of American values musing about her sexual orientation?

Harriet does most of her spying within a few blocks of her house on East End Avenue near Carl Schurz Park. This is the 1960s, so she has to work without a BlackBerry and has no public forum on which to post her notes. She can only write them down in her notebook, and she does so, prolifically. Nevertheless, this notebook eventually falls into the not-so-friendly hands of Harriet's classmates. When they read what she — with unmalicious but deadly accuracy — has written about them, they embark on a campaign of bullying that rings true even to my twenty-first century son.

Yet Harriet the Spy is not so much the tale of a smart girl who doesn't fit in, but rather of the early education of an artist. In this case, a writer.

Harriet is raised for the most part by her nanny, Ole Golly, a woman who quotes passages from Dostoievsky and who never simply tells Harriet like it is when she can show her. When Harriet’s parents — a man who works in television and a lady who lunches, respectively — fire Ole Golly unfairly, Harriet is left with no one to turn to for solace when her notebook gets snatched.

Still, Harriet is that most lucky of creatures, a writer who knows at a tender age that she is a writer. Her keen observation of other people’s lives leads her to admire the industrious (those who have a “profession") and to feel a sort of queasy contempt for those who would rather just boss other people around. Or play bridge.

I never considered Harrison Withers anything but a minor character in the book until I re-read it last year. I now feel that he’s something of a grownup döppelganger for Harriet: a working artist whose craft transports him, and who has a plainly visible muse in his twenty-six cats. I don't know whether Fitzhugh chose Harrison’s name specifically to echo Harriet’s, but it's true that his fortunes rise and fall along with hers.

Harrison must hide from the city health department (men who wear hats. None of Harrison’s friends wear hats, and this meant something in 1964.) He lives in a two-room apartment. His cats occupy one room; he works in the other.

“Sunlight flooded the other room but here caught glints from tools, from the tiny shining minarets which topped the cages. Harriet liked to look at this room. The cages were beautiful soaring things, and when he was in this room, Harrison Withers was a happy man.”

As Harriet watches, Harrison comes home to feed his cats. (It's worthwhile to pay attention to the names he's given them. If you ever read Harriet the Spy to a child, you might well be asked about them.)

"'There now, children,' he spoke to them gently. He always spoke very softly. 'There now. We're all going to eat now. Hello everybody -- yes, yes, hello. Hello, David, hello, Rasputin, yes, Goethe, Alex, Sandra, Thomas Wolfe, Pat, Puck, Faulkner, Cassandra, Gloria, Circe, Koufax, Marijane, Willy Mays, Francis, Kokoschka, Donna, Fred, Swann, Mickey Mantle, Sebastian, Yvonne, Jerusalem, Dostoievsky, and Barnaby. Hello, hello, hello.'"

He feeds his cats kidney, but eats only yogurt himself, then goes to his work room. Harriet watches him work and writes: “he loves to do that. Is this what Ole Golly means? She says people who love their work love life. Do some people hate life?”

Later, in a scene that foreshadows Harriet’s own misfortunes, she spies Harrison sitting at his work table, but he is not working. “His face was the saddest face Harriet had ever seen.” The other room has been emptied of cats. “They got him, she thought. They finally got him.” She writes: “I will never forget that face as long as I live. Does everybody look that way when they have lost something? I don’t mean like losing a flashlight. I mean do people look like that when they have lost?”

Harriet, meanwhile, has lost her friends. More importantly, she has lost Ole Golly. Worst of all, once her habit of keeping notes about her schoolmates is discovered, her mother takes Harriet’s notebook away. At this point, even the youngest reader must feel as if her teddy bear has been ripped straight from her arms.

Harriet is completely isolated in school. She does her work, but gets no pleasure from it.

“She found that when she didn’t have a notebook it was hard for her to think. The thoughts came slowly, as though they had to squeeze through a tiny door to get to her, whereas when she wrote, they flowed out faster than she could put them down. She sat very stupidly with a blank mind until finally ‘I feel different’ came slowly into her head […] and then, after more time, mean, I feel mean.”

Harriet’s parents ultimately bring her to a child psychologist. The doctor spends some time observing Harriet — he even lets her write notes about him in front of his face — and ultimately tells the Welsches that there is nothing wrong with Harriet, that she will no doubt be a writer and should be encouraged toward that end, and that, most importantly, she needs to hear from Ole Golly.

Ole Golly writes a letter encouraging Harriet to pull herself together and get to work: “you are eleven years old and haven’t written a thing but notes. Make a story out of some of those notes and send it to me.”

Armed once more with her notebook, Harriet continues with her spy route and comes around again to Harrison Withers’. She expects to find him still moping, but instead he is working away at a cage, humming and even tapping his foot. As she watches he gets up to make himself some lunch: a tuna sandwich (like a cat) and a Coke (like a human being.)

The reason for Harrison’s newfound happiness is a tiny kitten, who walks into the room “as though he own[s] it, to the accompaniment of loud cooing and baby talk from Harrison Withers.”

“It was a funny-looking little black-and-white kitten which had a mustache which made it look as though it were sneering. It stopped, looked at Harrison Withers as though he were a curiosity, and then walked disdainfully across the room. Harrison Withers watched in adoration.”

“So that’s it," writes Harriet. "Wonder where he got that cat. I guess if you want a cat you run into one someplace. Hee hee. They ain’t going to change Harrison Withers.”

Probably there are artists who will tell you that they work just fine without a muse. I don’t buy it. I think they just haven’t realized that they have one. Because a muse can be something as simple as your favorite band or a neighborhood coffee shop where you do your best work. Or, as in the case of William Butler Yeats, a muse can be as complicated as Maud Gonne. And if your muse is of the Maud Gonne variety, you have to work like hell turning summersaults to keep it in your life. If you’re Harrison Withers, you try to keep the hatted men from the health department away from your door — even though they probably do know what’s best for you — and you let your muse wipe its little paws, claws-out, all over your heart. Because as bad as Kitty makes you feel, the bird cages look really, really dull without him.

As for Harriet, she takes Ole Golly’s advice and writes a story – about Harrison Withers – in one solid day of work (10:00 to 3:00.) Then she mails it off to The New Yorker. May your own muse make you as stout-hearted.

A funny thing happened to me on the way to the forum...

2010-11-22T09:11:00.000-08:00

A couple of childhood friends have accused me of shutting down the dialogue when people don’t agree with me. Apparently I got them all hot and bothered, then I flat-left them. I picked up my toys and went home. I grabbed my boa and flounced off.

“Why do you get so upset when people disagree with you?” they asked.

“I prefer an open forum,” they said, “where people listen to other opinions tolerantly.”

Yeah, me too, except that Facebook isn’t really an open forum. I’ve had people ignore my friend requests, or un-friend me, or fail to answer my messages, and I’m pretty damn sure that people who find me really annoying have hidden me from their feeds – just as I have hidden them. That’s the beauty of Facebook; you make what you want of it. You get what you get and you don’t get upset.

Now because my offended friends actually comment on my posts extremely rarely, I didn’t have them in mind when I posted that petition in favor of extending unemployment benefits, or that possibly-debunked-by-Snopes jpeg about how a 1950s housewife should stfu in the presence of her man. For the most part, only the usual suspects responded, and they responded in the usual way, and it was all good until the outside agitators showed up.

Frankly, I use Facebook to talk to like-minded people, most of whom I’ve met during the last twenty years. I had lost touch with the-two-who-are-now-mad-at-me a long time ago, although it was one of them who invited me to join Facebook, and in retrospect I’m glad she did. But maybe we knew back when we stopped talking that we weren’t the right friends for one another. We were young then, and now we’re not. People change and move on, and Facebook can't really fix that.

As for my mind being closed: yep, it is. I mean, it would be really difficult at this point for anyone to convince me that the rich will create jobs for the rest of us provided we don’t make them pay their taxes. It would be difficult to convince me that a woman should be submissive to her husband because that’s the only way a heterosexual couple can keep their marriage going. It would be difficult to convince me that most unemployed people are lazy and are somehow gaming the system; therefore everyone's benefits should be cut. (And just for good measure, it would be really, REALLY difficult to convince me that it’s okay for a parent to be forced to hold a fundraiser to get chemotherapy for their child -- something that is UNHEARD OF in “socialist” western Europe.)

These are some of the viewpoints I have been asked to listen to with an open mind. I can’t do it. I can’t do it because – well, because they’re ridiculous viewpoints – but also because I didn’t just wake up one morning in 2008 and decide, “hey! I guess I’m a liberal feminist now!” Rather, these are beliefs I’ve held since I began to study how the world works, probably at around age fourteen. I have read and studied and debated with some fairly bright people and I’ve found that I still agree with myself. That’s thirty years of liberal feminism, which has survived intact despite the best efforts of Reagan and Bush I and Bush II (or Chimpy McFuckface as my friend Steve calls him) and all their ilk.

So calling me out for closed-mindedness on Facebook probably won’t make a dent now. Sorry.

At a certain point, sitting back and listening to the other side means that nothing is getting done. Of late, it seems to me that only one side “listens” while the other side steamrolls right over them. I can’t necessarily tell the Democrats in Congress what to do (though God knows I’ve tried) but if I want to do a little steamrolling on my own Facebook page, I will. I’ll be all, “you know what? There is no point in going on about this so I’m gonna stop.” And you can unfriend me if that doesn’t suit you.

What are Little Books Made of? Update!

2010-10-20T07:14:00.001-07:00

Somebody at Scholastic wrote back! Here is the text of her email, in its entirety:

Thank you for your thoughtful email regarding how gender is portrayed in The Girl’s and Boy’s Books. As you note, these books are very popular with young people who are taken with the illustrated nostalgic style. That being said, I don’t think anyone wants to return to a time when girls were not encouraged to participate in sports and boys were not free to explore their creative or artistic potential!

I have forwarded your comments to our editors for their consideration. We want to thank you for taking the time to share your concerns with us. I know you will find many books in our catalogs through which your children can learn about interests and talents that transcend gender and allow them to reach their full potential.

Woo to the hoo.

What Are Little Books Made of?

2010-10-06T08:37:00.000-07:00

Who doesn't love the soft, colorful, cheap-o newsprint of the Scholastic Book Club order form? Whenever my son brings one home in his backpack, I'm transported right back to Mrs. Brown's third-grade class at Birch Lane Elementary School. Sun-warmed pencil shavings, a terrarium full of newts, the eraser ripping a big hole in my yellow composition paper -- but I digress.

So we were looking through the thing with our usual excitement last night ("Werewolf Tales!" Judy-freaking-Blume! "Math Dictionary!") when my eye fell upon the following:

I'm aware that books like these are all the rage right now, but this pairing must be the nadir. Boys learn to tackle a komodo dragon (not a good idea for anyone, no matter what your genitalia look like) and girls learn to... make a bracelet.

This shit would not have flown back in 1975. No way. We were Free to Be You and Me, am I right? So I have already sent the good people at Scholastic Book Clubs an email. We'll see what comes of it.

View My JPEG!

2010-09-16T13:40:00.001-07:00

Don't mind me, dear readers; I'm just cruising for clients. If you know anyone who might be interested, send them a link. Work of this nature can be done easily over the innertubes. Thanks!

This Really Does Pertain to Writing

2010-07-29T09:50:00.000-07:00

I'm sure I'll regret this on some distant day when a potential employer decides to google me, but I'm posting it anyway. The topic is pizza. No more, no less.

Pizza!
A Blog Where Fierce Pizza Lovers Talk About Pizza
(and sometimes "Mad Men," too. But Mostly Pizza!)

Let's give a big Pizza! welcome to this week's guest-blogger, Burgrgrrl. Take it away, Burgrgrrl.

"against pizza"
posted by Burgrgrrl, 29 July 2010 at 14:21

pizza is to food as a swimming pool is to a warm bath. i dont love pizza. much as i love cheese. much as i love tomato sauce. much as i love crust... i *still* dont love pizza. pizza is a cheesy saucy privileged circle of imperialism flung at the marginalized foods/F-oodes/fudz of this world...

my friend kaiserroll said this on my previous post, and its my new favorite statement ever:

"So dont tell me you're a pizza lover. Your pizza never did a thing for me, or my burger, or my new england clam chowder (all white and creamy good.) Your pizza never did a thing for my panini, or my taco.

You know what? Fuck pizza and pizza lovers. There, I said it."

its all about radical love for the food/F-oodes/fudz, or what. anyway. radical love. the end.

COMMENTS:

pepperoni65:
Um, why was someone who hates pizza invited to write for a pizza blog?

tartarsauce:
@pepperoni65: it's all up there in Burgrgrrl's post. Why don't you read before you get angry?

Fresh Basil:
Wow. This blog is supposed to be a safe place for pizza lovers of all kinds. A post that says "fuck pizza and fuck pizza lovers" might be upsetting to some.

KaiserRoll:
This isn't all about you and your privileged shoesies, Fresh Basil. Where's MY safe space? You "pizza lovers" with your fresh basil and sundried tomatoes and fucking brick ovens come on here whining about safe spaces. Well I hold you directly responsible for all the marginalized kids in the midwest who only have Domino's and Chucky Cheese. Mull that over! Directly responsible, Ms. Pizza!

pepperoni65:
Again, if Burgrgrrl and her friends don't like pizza, why are they here? Why invite someone who clearly has hostility toward pizza to write for a blog called "Pizza!" Not getting enough page views lately or what?

Mozza Rella (Moderator):
@pepperoni65 and Fresh Basil: Burgrgrrl was invited to guest-blog here because she is a tireless worker for marginalized foodstuffs the world over. Read her post before you react; it's all in there. Institutionalized pizza has hurt the foods/fudz that Burgrgrrl advocates for. Just because you identify as a pizza lover doesn't give you the right to come in here and whine without listening.

Cheese:
Ain't pizza a food?

Crusty:
You guys, I really think we need to step back and listen to viewpoints from food advocates who have been harmed by pizza. Burgrgrrl is trying to open up a dialogue here. I for one think this is a great post. I love your writing, Burgrrgrrl. Hearted. So hearted. <3 <3 <3

Fresh Basil:
How is saying "fuck pizza and fuck pizza lovers" opening up a dialogue?

KaiserRoll:
Sigh. Again Fresh Basil, this isn't about you! It's all up there in the o.p.! Didn't you read? It's about radical love for non/pizza food/F-oode/fudz.

tartarsauce:
@Fresh Basil: check your privilege, asshole.

pepperoni65:
Oh, I see. "Fuck pizza and pizza lovers" = radical love.

Mozza Rella (Moderator):
Okay, I've read back through the thread and I can see why some who identify as pizza lovers might have been upset by this post. But you have to understand how advocates for marginalized foods/fudz and/or foodstuffs have been denied a safe space to speak their minds. Don't you see? It's all there in Burgrgrrl's post. We all need to listen to one another without overreacting. Also, I have a full-time job and I can't be expected to deal with this crap.

Anchovy:
Maybe the reason people keep having to explain Burgrgrrl's post is that it doesn't make any sense.

tartarsauce:
Whoah! Check-ity-check-check your PRIVILEGE, Anchovy!

Mozza Rella (Moderator):
Anchovy has been banned.

Badass!

2010-06-21T20:28:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: the two women I refer to here were really perfectly reasonable, but I like to exaggerate. No haterade.

Know this: I find it infuriating that otherwise intelligent people cannot seem to discuss gender without sounding like rejects from the Blue Collar Comedy Tour. (The ladies want your money! They want to get married! Men are scared of commitment! And we’re dumb! Because we have penises! Am I right, guys?)

Even so, I found myself doing this very thing, albeit in a small way, on a friend’s blog the other night.

The post in question is a bit hard to describe, as it covers a lot of ground. But to drastically oversimplify: it’s about the fact that dark, realistic movies can be far more frightening than any horror movie; and the best horror fiction doesn’t necessarily require supernatural elements, because our own lives are rife with events that can turn horrific on a dime.

I found so much to respond to that I wasn’t sure where to begin, but I did want to say something. (Do I ever not?) Also, my pal began his post with a reminiscence about taking his high school girlfriend to see “Deliverance.” She was not impressed. And therein lay the seed of my comment:

“[It’s been] my experience that people of the straight male persuasion are often drawn to very dark movies involving warfare, violent crime, and general bad stuff [and] yada yada yada...”

I prefaced this by admitting that yes, I was generalizing, but that my thoughts were based on my own experience, and your mileage may vary.

Response from a subsequent female commenter? “You’re generalizing.”

Yes, I think I said as much. But continue!

“I’m a woman and my favorite movies are ‘Dr. Meat’s House of Puppy Rape’ and ‘Toddler Massacre IV’ (which is waaay better than ‘Toddler Massacres I through III inclusively.) Basically, I am badass. But if you’d rather watch Jennifer Aniston crying in a pink bridesmaid’s dress, I guess that’s fine.”

Okay, she didn’t actually say that. But it was implied!

So I reiterated that my comment was merely based on my own experience. I added that—in my experience—men tend to gravitate toward these difficult, violent movies, whereas women just tolerate them. (I didn’t add that sometimes women tolerate these movies because of the men. In other words, boys, we sometimes feign enthusiasm for stuff you like because you look good and we want to do things to you. I hope you don’t think you invented this strategy.)

Later, another female commenter weighed in. “I guess I must be a dude because I like yucky stuff,” she wrote. “Furthermore, I’m badass.”

Sigh.

Never one to let anything slide, I announced that I, as a non-badass, was off to watch “SATC2” and cry in my raw-cookie-dough ice cream, which I planned to eat directly from the container with a spoon. (Because the girls drown their sorrows by eating, dawg!)

Maybe I over-reacted (because the womenz be emotional, bro!) But I really, really hate being made to feel un-badass. Because I’m pretty badass.

***

If you were a high school guy when “Deliverance” came out, you missed Vietnam by the skin of your teeth, and were just a bit too old for subsequent conflicts. I know several men of this generation, and while they are each quite different from one another, they do share similar taste in books and movies. Dark stuff. War stuff. Man against nature stuff. Man against The System stuff. Man against Man stuff. Your Catch-22’s, your Cuckoo’s Nests. Anything in which a man is tested to the very limits of his being by his own environment.

It might just be the case that certain men are built for this stuff, and if they don’t encounter it in Life they look for it in Art.

Or, they might just be badass.

It doesn’t matter. Because really, none of us are vacuum-packed. When you sit down to watch a movie or read a book or listen to a piece of music, you do bring your gender with you. You also bring your age, your ethnicity, your religion, your socioeconomic status and your sexual orientation. You bring your scars, your heartbreak, and the things you thought you’d hidden away from yourself. You bring along the person you were at six, and at sixteen, and at sixty-six. We all contain multitudes.

The sad fact of life is that everyone, of all genders and backgrounds – even down to the sunniest Mary Sunshine at the PTA bake sale -- has known real horror and has been to some dark places. Some of us want to escape all of that when we go to the movies; others don’t.

But if you really want to prove you’re badass, read a newspaper on any given day in any given year. Then decide to go on living anyway. If you can do that, you’re badass. You are one badass motherfucker, girlfriend.

And So, the Adjuncting Year Draws to a Close... Not with a Bang but a Whimper.

2010-05-05T09:39:00.000-07:00

The three people who read this blog already know that I had a rough academic year, so I won't belabor the point. What surprises me at this juncture is the regret (mixed, of course, with profound relief) that I feel at having decided not to sign on again for next September.

The idea of turning down work, particularly during this economic, er, clustercuss, makes me very uncomfortable. On the other hand, the icey claws of doom I felt digging into my shoulders every time I drove through the college's front gate were somewhat worse than uncomfortable. And it's not as if anyone was offering me benefits or a living wage or even a chance of becoming full-time faculty, so...

What follows is part of an email I sent to my students last week:

As most of you are aware, I have a few problems with the way the First Year Writing program was set up. Overall, I would have preferred to give you more freedom in selecting writing topics. I would have liked to let you do some creative or personal writing as well. I would have preferred to leave the research/citation aspect of the class up to someone who's an expert in that area, as I think it distracted me from just getting everyone to write.

I sincerely hope that this does not turn you off to the idea of writing. I hope that you will all go on to take literature classes, poetry classes, and creative writing classes. I hope you will all discover (whether by reading or by writing) that words really do have power in this world. They can inspire you, make you feel connected to others, and set you free.

In that second paragraph lies my regret. Because I actually think I'm a pretty decent writing teacher. But I was given three freshman classes with fifteen students apiece, and two fifty-minute periods per week in which to teach them to write. Oh and, I wasn't supposed to supply the "content." The "content" was to come from their first-year seminar instructors.

Now, this school is not Harvard or Yale. There are some pretty serious academic "issues" at this school. There are ESL students, and students with learning disabilities, and students who are only there because their parents told them they have to go to college.

There were students (lots of 'em) who looked at me blankly when I asked them what they liked to read. There were students who could not or would not put away their handheld electronic devices even on threat of expulsion. There were chronic cut-and-paste plagiarizers who couldn't even be bothered to make the fonts match.

But I still think I could have taught them to write.

I wanted them to write about things they cared about; about things that excited them or moved them or scared them. I wanted them to feel free to write anything at all without being judged. I could have corrected their grammar, spelling and punctuation just as well in a personal essay as in a research paper... and I have no doubt in my mind that I would have read some amazing and revelatory things while I was at it.

The Upshot of National Poetry Month

2010-04-28T06:41:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of April, I decided to take Robert Lee Brewer's Poem A Day Challenge, and write a poem every single day during the month.

Well, I gave it a shot, but after two weeks I had to shift my attention to my students' research papers. I have roughly forty students, each of whom was required to submit two drafts of a 12-15 page paper.

That, my friends, is one hell of a lot of "based off of's" and "Michael Angelo's" -- not to mention all the "they's" and "it's" (and "itses") that don't appear to refer to anything specific. After slogging through this stuff, poetry seemed like a faint, pleasant childhood memory.

Nevertheless I wrote a few little ditties that I think are sort of acceptable, so I guess I'll just post them here.

In conclusion, April was a very busy month and a huge amount of changes were dealt with by a lot of people. Based off of this huge fact alone, one can see very clearly why PJ stopped righting pomes.

Spirit Level

It's an instrument designed to indicate
whether a surface is level (or plumb)
and as we know, all things must be plumb
or they won’t work right --
the door will hang crooked in the doorway
and your dishes will slide off the shelf
and smash into shards.

A good spirit level might be
an oblong of rosewood and copper
with a bead of yellow liquid (the spirit)
in the window, and if you're a very good leveler
you can lay your level directly
on top of a spirit and cry, begone!

For a vertical project (like a doorway
or a particularly tall spirit)
you might want to use a plumb bob,
which is a heavy metal doodad on a string.
The plumb bob should be heavy enough
not to bob on the surface,
but to plumb the depths.

The spirit level was invented in the 17th century
by a man named Melchisedech Thevenot.
He wrote a book called The Art of Swimming,
in which he described certain methods
of bobbing on the surface --
and remaining level -- while plumbing
the depths of the spirit.

Long Island

Where I was spawned like a fluke
in the waves off the flat south shore,
and tossed alive on the Freeport docks
by a drunken man from Captain Lou's fleet.
Where I swam in the blood-warm water
of Great South Bay, finning through
estuaries between grassy islands,
never losing sight of siding-covered Levitts
with extra pieces tacked on, above and behind,
or the gasoline bloom below
the Atlantic Beach Bridge, trucks rumbling
over me, spiked on the beak of a plover.

Love Poem

Some people are atheists.
There's nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't work for me.
I'm not stolid enough to take what's hurtling toward us all
.....-- illness, loss, pain, war, ravages visited
.....upon the innocent and undeserving,
.....let alone unfulfilling jobs and Republicans --
and have it all happening in a godless void to boot.

And I think loving you is something like believing in God.
I'm good at it -- abiding and humble.
I trust that you're there even when I get no response.
And just when I've convinced myself
that the resounding silence is my answer,
you manifest in the most surprising ways.

National Poetry Month Challenge, Day Three

2010-04-03T20:28:00.001-07:00

I still intend to write a poem every day in April, but because I don't want to inundate this blog with wretched doggerel I'm just going to post them to my Facebook page (which is a veritable smorgas bord of wretched doggerel anyway.) Anyone with a burning desire to read my poetry may friend-request me over there.

Don't all jump at once. :)

National Poetry Month Challenge, Day Two

2010-04-02T20:05:00.000-07:00

Today's prompt was "water," but I ended up with fish.

Trouble the Waters

This river is a-churn with bass
both largemouth and small,
slender flounder,
herring not yet pickled,
catfish, blue crab and shad.

And here I’ve flung myself
face-down in the bracken,
my arm plunged in up to the shoulder
tugging at that one damn tomcod
I can never have.

©2010 by P.J. DeGenaro

Time for a Shout-Out

2010-04-02T17:45:00.000-07:00

And that shout-out goes to The Furnace Review. They seem to have liked my story. I find this really humbling, because as far as I know my Mom is not on their staff, and they didn't have to like my story at all!

I also have a newfound love and respect for the google-tubes, God bless 'em.

The Cruelest-est Month

2010-04-01T16:36:00.000-07:00

April is National Poetry Month, and because I don't already have enough to do I've decided to take Writer's Digest columnist Robert Lee Brewer's Poem-a-Day Challenge. This means that I will attempt to write one poem each day throughout the month of April, no matter how suckish the results.

To keep myself honest, I will post the poems here (with apologies in advance for any stomach upset this may cause you, the hypothetical reader.)

In order to stimulate our poetry muscles, Mr. Brewer will put a prompt on his blog every morning. Today's prompt was loneliness.

Here then, is my loneliness poem:

Darkness presses its face and palms
against the back window at two a.m.
while the TV plays a marathon of reruns—
and later, the knife sale
the gun sale
the semi-precious stone sale
the secret to flattening your tummy
the secret to tightening your ass
the secret to prolonging
your pleasure and hers.

We must now switch to Classic Movies
where the heroine is sobbing with
the back of her hand pressed against her lips,
but her great shining rolls of hair
and black arabesque eyebrows
never move.
While everyone sleeps in their separate rooms,
only the heroine remains, weeping.

We must urge the heroine into action.
Push her out into the night
set her astride a horse,
or better, a motorcycle.
Give her a sword, a gun, a battering ram, an incantation.
Urge her to make straight for the castle,
for the solitary light in the tower—
onward, onward.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius...

2010-03-03T07:40:00.001-08:00

...will NOT be found here. It's just my own short story, "Everything is Not Yet Lost."

Take a look at what the rest of the Adirondack Review has to offer, too. It's pretty sweet.

Let the Great World Spin - Hell Yes.

2010-02-25T14:36:00.000-08:00

Colum McCann's seventh book opens with the following brief lines: "Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey."

Anyone familiar with New York City will recognize these as the streets that border the World Trade Center. And the Trade Center -- whose twin towers were not quite completed by the summer of 1974 -- is the fulcrum from which McCann’s great world spins.

McCann gives us a New York City on the brink of bankruptcy, whose poor neighborhoods are rife with unemployment and heroin. The infrastructure is decaying, garbage rots on the streets, Central Park is no-man's-land of muggers and miscreants, and President Ford has told the city (albeit not in so many words) to drop dead.

Yet this is also a time of creative foment for New York. Artists have homesteaded SoHo, and two energetic and long-lasting musical movements -- hip-hop and punk-rock -- are born from the chaos. In this climate, a unauthorized tightrope walk between the Twin Towers might be seen as an act of revolution.

Every major character in this generous, sprawling book bears witness to French funambulist Philippe Petit's walk between the towers on August 7, 1974. It is this event, among others, that connects them to one another.

Mr. Petit (never mentioned by name) is the lynch-pin of the novel, but he is only one among a diverse cast of characters, each of whom in turn holds center stage. One of the most fascinating of these is Corrigan, a young Irish monk who sets up a freelance mission in a housing project in the South Bronx. Undaunted by the blight that surrounds him, celibate Corrigan ministers to a group of prostitutes beneath the Major Deegan Expressway.

Corrigan is a modern-day Christ figure, even down to his initials (J.C.) He suffers from a condition that causes him to bleed and bruise easily -- a plot device that a lesser writer than McCann could not have gotten away with. What is refreshing about Corrigan is his stubborn refusal to judge the women under the Deegan; nor does he ever try to impose his faith on them. Instead he brings them coffee; he keeps his door unlocked so they can use his bathroom. In one endearing scene he fails to get the joke when the women bring him a birthday cake covered with cherries. His one temptation comes in the form of a nurse at a nearby hospital; a woman who -- like Corrigan, like Philippe Petit, like Colum McCann himself -- has traveled a long way to end up in New York City.

Equally as vivid as Corrigan is Tillie, who despite her great intelligence and her best intentions has become a prostitute, a heroin addict, and a grandmother at age thirty-eight. She is consumed with guilt at having set her daughter Jazzlyn on the same path. McCann endows Tillie with an unforgettable voice -- spare, articulate, profane and incantatory. She could have easily become the hooker with a heart of gold, but McCann writes too well to let that happen. Rather, in what might be the strongest section of the novel, he allows Tillie the time and space to tell her own story unflinchingly.

McCann, a native of Ireland who now lives in New York, has a gift for capturing voices. He writes movingly and believably of Claire and Gloria -- two southern women who end up living disparate lives in New York City. They meet in a support group for mothers who have lost sons in Vietnam. Their relationship is a loaded one; made awkward by issues of race and class that were far from being resolved in the 1970s. Yet during the course of a day filled with misunderstandings, they manage to make a deep connection.

McCann is less effective when he brings characters in for walk-ons. One example of this is Fernando, whose sole duty in the book is to take a photograph of the tightrope walker that will one day belong to Tillie's granddaughter. For the most part, however, McCann endows his players with authenticity, originality and dignity.

At last, in what can only be called a death-defying feat of literary imagination, McCann lifts us 110 stories above Manhattan, and places us right inside the mind of the tightrope walker. We are privy to every sensation of his body, the tiny pain of an old injury, the buffetting of the wind, each minute adjustment he must make to remain upright and aloft.

"The core reason for it all was beauty," McCann writes. "Walking was a divine delight. Everything was rewritten when he was up in the air […] He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake."

These lines may hold the true heart of Let the Great World Spin, a book haunted end to end by 9/11 but that notes the event only briefly. For those who call it home, New York City is the center of the world, the point from which everything else spins out, always being created and un-created by forces from within and without. Let the Great World Spin is a substantial, heartbreaking, and delightful read for anyone who loves New York City and humanity in all its variety.

A Few Selections from the Tweet Deck of History...

2010-01-22T07:09:00.000-08:00

Im in G'burg honoring the dudes who got killed! They shd inspire us to <3 liberty. Govt of, for, and by ppl rulz!
#TheRealHonestAbe

@all my GFs, I'm lookin fear in the face, doin that which i think i cannot. How bout u?
#Ellie Roosevelt

ignore me laugh at me fight me I WIN!!1!
#MohandasG

And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent.
#Martin Luther King, Jr.

@#Martin Luther King, Jr. thats what SHE said!
#LyndonBJohnson

And Now, Excerpts from the Journal of a Great Woman of Letters.

2009-12-17T18:09:00.000-08:00

Ann Beattie once said, "[…]the problem with diaries, and the reason that most of them are so boring, is that every day we vacillate between examining our hangnails and speculating on cosmic order." Consider yourself warned, and read on.

21 January
This story is not going well. What if we took the essential core of the thing (fear of the loved one vanishing) and turned it on its head? Ah, she will be the one who vanishes.

23 January
Query: why does it only rain when I leave the house to go for a run? Such that I get completely drenched in two minutes. Then when I decide to go in, the sun comes out. This rather pisses me off.

12 February
What happens to our heroine now? Does she enjoy her self-imposed exile? Is it like being a ghost, a fly on the wall? Is this why men do it? Does a man prefer exercising this tremendous power over his own environment to exercising a warm body in his bed? -- Set the scene in 1990. There is no email, there are no cell phones. You can't even google-stalk. For instance, you could have never stayed in touch with [redacted] in 1990. Yep, no way could you find his narrow ass in 1990.

Time for lunch.

13 February
Here is the table of contents for my first collection of short stories:

Crossroad Blues.............5
Fifteen Years Later........30
A Walk in the Woods........48
All At Once It is Quiet....63
Stranger...................70
The Passenger..............78
Letter Never Sent..........94
Around the Seven Oceans...102

Now all you have to do is write the fucking stories and get them accepted somewhere. How hard can it be? I mean, how fucking hard can it be?

27 February
Glimmer Train can suck it.

1 March
I had been fishing only once, on a chartered boat off the Freeport pier. It was rough that day and the water sloshed up on deck. Dad was jovial with the company of other men. Mom in her madras Land’s End gear clutched the rail, smiled with bloodless lips. Isn’t this fun, Donna? Buckets of bait at our feet and one big dead fish staring up with a goggling eye.

Maybe I need to drop fiction and be a poet.

2 March
Must not keep checking email. Only interested in hearing from [redacted], and there's little chance of that happening, as he is embedded with the Faribund Marquez People's Liberation Front, deep in the jungles of San Paolo.

Or so he says, anyway. Is there even a country called San Paolo? Must google. BRB.

No! I knew it! He has gone off somewhere with that talentless she-devil, [redacted!] That can be the only explanation for his long silence. Oh, the very idea takes root like a poisoned seed in my belly and sends up shoots to twine about my heart!

5 March
I really need to drink more. I love drinking. I want to go back to the James Joyce Pub and have like 90 more surfer-on-acid shots.

7 March
I think I have a couple of stories that have some meat to them and the best thing to do might be to start them from scratch without even looking at earlier versions, because I think after this last round of workshopping I have truly learned how to write.* I hope Professor [redacted] thinks so too.

He better give me an 'A.'

In fact, if he does not give me an 'A,' I'm going to go into his office and demand retribution. What is he, like 110 lbs. soaking wet? I can take him out.

12 March
Found in a two-year-old notebook, the List of Possible Titles:

Big-Ass Keychain
Full Throttle
The Living Room
Famous Pink Tanktop
Creepy Teeth
When's it Due?
Flapping in the Breeze
The Furies of New Jersey
Bobblehead
Turnkey Operation
Hero of the Beach
Ringtone of Death

Ides, March
Just start typing. Type anything. The trick is to keep typing. Neieiadskdja;ldjdkd. Hlaba shak rue saint divine. "Rue St. Divine." I love that. "Brown eyed girl across the street on Rue St. Divine." There's no Rue St. Divine in Dublin, is there? Is it a joke? It's some kind of Irish joke that the rest of us aren't in on. Heh heh, Bono. I love that fucking song. Anyway anyway anyway banana. I don't really want to write poetry. It's too like mannered, or studied or something. I like to have lots of room and write long loopy sentences and just keep fucking going into infinity. Respect mah infinitah. No, I mean, I always feel like poetry has some trickery in it. That thing that Professor [redacted] said not to do in fiction, which is what all the new fiction writers do, which is to leave the cruxy (sic) thing to the very end and spring it on the reader. That's bad fiction. But poetry is ALWAYS like that – you leave the killer-diller thing for the last line. It's gonna fuck up my fiction to start doing that again, yo! He'p me! I'm serious.

I'm gonna keep typing until 9:18, seriously, and then maybe I'll shower.

20 March
I had a vision of love, Mariah Carey!

23 March
I think my poem is going really well, actually. I might end up liking poetry after all, although I will not defect from fiction (despite what [redacted] thinks.) Poetry to me is still cheating. Fiction is hard. Fiction is a challenge. Poetry? Schmoetry.

No, it's hard too. It just doesn't take as long. You can do fifty rounds of editing on a poem in two days. Fifty rounds of editing on a story? I think not. That would take at least 50 days, and you don't want to do that! And what about a novel? Shee-it, man! I don't know how people write them tings (sic). Probably they don't waste a lot of time doing FREE WRITES. Freedom fries, freedom toast, freedom writers, freedom fuckers, freedom suckers. Why do you hate my freedoms?

28 March
Being in a place where you can see someone modeling the worst extremes of your own behavior is a blessing.

1 April
[Redacted] loved my poem. Yes, I showed it to him. I had to, and besides Prof. [redacted] said it needed no changes. Even so, I am dispirited right now. Maybe it's the weather. The [redacted] thing is hard, man. I really [redacted]. [Redactely-dactely-dac-dac-dacted]. Searching for the purple (rainbow) fish, if you will.

2 April
Meditations on the word "father."

3 April
12:20 pm. The male cardinal. He's sitting in his usual bush, just looking toward the kitchen window. I looked up from my book, and said, "there's my friend." Little red bird.

7 April
Oh my god, I hate that class soooooo much. Especially that one guy. I want to [redacted]slap him. "Poets shouldn't editorialize… there's a difference between rock music and poetry… and poetry and the editorial page…" What a pompous redacting asshole.

(Also, the phrase "I wanted to know more" is going to be disallowed in any workshop I lead.)

26 April
As the Killers say, he doesn't look a thing like Jesus but he talks like a gentleman. On his celly, anyway.

*Not so much.

In the Bleak Midwinter...

2009-12-14T06:01:00.000-08:00

My students' essays are piled up around my house in drifts. I've plowed through about half of them, and I intend to finish up the rest today. (Yes, today!) And then I'm going to write the greatest blog post ever written -- only I have no idea what it's going to be about.

Any suggestions? Writing Lady needs a prompt!

Scaffolds of skin and whiskers

2009-11-12T19:38:00.000-08:00

I made my students write about this poem, and subsequently fell in love with it. Talk amongst yourselves.

Your Catfish Friend
by Richard Brautigan

If I were to live my life
in catfish forms
in scaffolds of skin and whiskers
at the bottom of a pond
and you were to come by
...one evening
when the moon was shining
down into my dark home
and stand there at the edge
...of my affection
and think, "It's beautiful
here by this pond. I wish
...somebody loved me,"
I'd love you and be your catfish
friend and drive such lonely
thoughts from your mind
and suddenly you would be
...at peace,
and ask yourself, "I wonder
if there are any catfish
in this pond? It seems like
a perfect place for them."

About Richard Brautigan

From deep in the vault of the unpublishable: The Future is Unwritten

2009-09-29T14:57:00.000-07:00

Written hastily this summer...

Tanya opened her eyes in the town of her youth, in the parking lot behind the FoodMaster. She was seated on the still-warm hood of a green Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. The first thing she did was poke her tongue over to one side of her mouth, then to the other. No teeth missing. Not even a filling. She pulled her tee shirt up to find her stomach flat and free of scars; the pain gone from her shoulder and knee as if lifted with a pair of celestial tongs. When she pinched the skin on the back of her hand it snapped right into place. Her fingernails were painted a lurid purple. She threw her head back and laughed up at the wet black sky.

An elderly man approached the car, buttoned to the chin in his raincoat, pushing a loaded grocery cart. The cart had a bad wheel, and wobbled. "That's my car," he barked.

Tanya slid to her feet. "Do you know what time it is?" she asked.

The old man did not look at his watch. "It's late, that's what time it is," he said.

"Thanks." Tanya began to walk away. Then she spun around and added, "by the way, do you know what year it is? I do! It's 1987, and I know now what I didn't know then!"

The man put his grocery bags into his trunk and slammed the lid, keeping his back to Tanya. She turned and ran out of the parking lot into Jefferson Avenue, then took a left on Decatur, joy flooding her limbs like sweet coffee. A fine, cold mist was falling. The pedestrian walkway on the Grand Street Bridge was slick with it. The trucks rumbling from one end of town to the other were almost close enough to touch.

First Tanya caught the scent of strong tobacco, then she felt a buzzing blue energy all along her right side. That was when Joe materialized and fell into step beside her.

"I wish you wouldn’t keep doing that," she muttered. "It freaks me out."

Joe didn't answer. He blew a smoke ring. As Tanya watched, it grew a tiny pair of wings and flew off over the Passaic. "What are you doing here, anyway?" she asked.

"Just thought I'd remind you why I granted your wish in the first place." Joe tossed his cigarette in the gutter, where it sprouted into a clump of daisies. "Just making sure you don't get distracted by matters of a personal nature."

Tanya turned to look at him, but his eyes were hidden as always by black plastic sunglasses and his long pale face was impossible to read.

"I thought," she began, "that I might be able to do this one tiny thing for myself before I go off to save the world."

"And you can," Joe laughed. "But I'm going to be your nanny."

* * *
Spratt's band was already on stage. They were called Juliet and the Spirits, and Tanya smiled at the memory of explaining to her mother that not only were there no girls in the band, but that none of the boys were gay. And there he was — Spratt. He played lead and sometimes sang, but he wasn't singing now. He was as thin as a greyhound and his hair was laquered into bright purple knitting needles. He played his black Telecaster with great urgency, like an overwound toy robot. The veins stood out in his arms and neck.

Joe leaned close to Tanya. "Might have got somewhere without that git of a singer," he shouted. But then he seemed to see something in Tanya's face — something that made him push his sunglasses up onto his forehead. His eyes were quite fierce, and Tanya tried very hard to determine what color they were but couldn't, and she realized then that Joe never seemed to have much color about him at all, but existed in black-and-white like an old photograph, and all at once she was terribly afraid. At the snap of his fingers they were out on the sidewalk in front of the club. Tanya's ears rang in the sudden silence. She clapped her hands over them.

"Your wish," said Joe, lifting her chin gently with one finger, "was to come back to this particular year so that you could see your mother again, and then to fix up all of this, remember?" And he pulled a crumpled postcard of the New York skyline out of the very air, and held it in front of Tanya's eyes.

"I know. But it's Spratt. I have to save him, too." Tanya didn't know what else to say; she just looked up into Joe's black-and-white face. He was a little bit like her big brother Sal, a little bit like Humphrey Bogart. Joe knew all about rock'n'roll and youth and passion, surely he would understand.

"May I point out that even in your own time this lad Jimmy is still alive and well?" he asked.

"If you call that living. With that simpery poetess and her goats on the cheese farm."

Joe laughed. He produced a cigarette from his shirt pocket. It lit itself with a tiny blue flame and he tucked it into the corner of his mouth. He looked at Tanya and waited.

She kicked at the pavement with the toe of her boot. "I wouldn't have made the wish at all if I thought you'd really stick to the restrictions," she said. "Anyway, how do you know that by changing Spratt’s life — okay, and mine — I won't still somehow do that other thing? Isn't the personal political, after all?"

Joe frowned, then reached out a white hand to tousle Tanya's hair. "Some restrictions may apply," he said, "and the future is unwritten."

Brought to you by your very favorite general, General Foods.

2009-09-11T14:40:00.000-07:00

Or maybe Nabisco.

Teacher, there are things that I don't want to learn.

2009-09-07T17:30:00.000-07:00

Well, I've got a day job now. I'm teaching four sections of First Year Academic Writing -- or, if you were born before 1990, "Freshman Composition" -- at a local institution of higher learning.

You may call me Professor PJ now if you wish, although Adjunct Lecturer PJ would be more accurate.

Between planning, photocopying, and trying to figure out where to put myself between classes, this job is sucking up a lot of my time. It is also just sucking in general.

Expect blog posts to be (even more) sporadic for the next few months.

"In conclusion, why I think teaching First Year academic writing is important is because its due to the fact that young people cant write very good nowadays. For example, in some of the dye-agnostic essays which I recieved last weak some of the sentences were so bad they liturally made me loose my breathe. Their are some very uneducated people being aloud into colleges and universitys today which in my opinien is a very big problem which we are facing today."

Blog Update... In Color!

2009-07-14T08:06:00.000-07:00

A few years ago my son came down with the flu, and for a week or so would wake in the wee hours of the morning, when his fever spiked. I would dose him with Tylenol, then bundle him downstairs to watch TV — which was the only thing he wanted to do.

Despite the lateness of the hour, we could choose from a range of children's programming on the various isotope channels of Nickelodeon, Disney, and PBS.

I remember looking at my son — who was wrapped like a small mummy in his blankets, whose cheeks were pink and blazing — and saying, “you know, when I was your age, there were no kids' shows on in the middle of the night. In fact, there wasn’t any TV at all in the middle of the night! If you were sick, you just had to lie there and deal with it.”

My son merely regarded me with his skeptical, fever-glazed eyes, and said nothing.

***
I’m getting old. I admit it. My cell phone is the most basic model (it doesn't even take pictures) and I only have it at all in case, god forbid, something happens. I pray twice daily for the demise of reality television, and for MTV to play music videos again. I despair of the fact that most TV stations — for the privilege of whose presence I must pay — play the same handful of shows every day in blocks of eight or ten, broken up with disorienting chunks of corporate advertising. (E.g.: Sonic. I have never even seen a Sonic. The nearest one to me is in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, apparently. Yet they must titillate me with their value menu.)

And if you happen to be awake in the middle of the night, and are too old for Noggin, your viewing choices boil down to:

The Misshapen Twins Real Estate Millions Show,
The Confederate Weapon and Jewelry Screamathon, or
The Old-Time Penis Enhancement Hour.

I think it would be better for everyone if TV went away over night, like it used to.

***

Television used to be a much friendlier thing. A tactile thing. How often do you touch your TV anymore? Time was, everyone touched their TVs. Your TV was excitable. It completely fell apart if the lady across the street turned on her vacuum cleaner. Then you would have to caress the vertical hold knob and the horizontal hold knob with your fingertips just so.

Also, you had to get up to change the channel. The Very High Frequency! The Ultra High Frequency! And if you could manage to set the dial between Channel 5 (WNEW New York, your Metromedia Station) and the wintery wasteland of Channel 6, you could hear real satellite signals, like mating calls of birds in space.

All the TV stations were local back then. And the people who worked for them had to go home at night and sleep, just like you.

Watch this:

This particular programming day ended with a sermon from a mustachioed Reform rabbi. Oh Television, you are practically one of the family, aren't you. But my traitorous heart belongs to the WCBS announcer, who is obviously a WASP with terrific hair, and whose sensible voice belies his intensely passionate nature.

This was the era of "technical difficulties" and endearing human error — wait a minute, is that boy in the yellow slicker really the Seal of Good Practice? — but there was also a sense of ceremony to the end of the programming day, jingoistic patriotism being our secular national religion, if you will. And even though by the seventies this was tinged with cynicism, it makes me sad that we've lost it. Not the patriotism, but the ritual. It was comforting to end the day with a nice proper bang, like being away at camp and hearing Taps. The day is done. Go to sleep. It's good for you, and we care about you.

But if you can't sleep, here is our test pattern, which looks rather a like a celtic cross, don't you think? And our electronic om will be with you all through the night. Or until 6:05, anyway.

Other People's Stuff

2009-06-14T08:35:00.000-07:00

Alone with the Goddess
by Linda Gregg

The young men ride their horses fast
on the wet sand of Parangtritis.
Back and forth, with the water sliding
up to them and away.
This is the sea where the goddess lives,
angry, her lover taken away.
Don’t wear red, don’t wear green here,
the people say. Do not swim in the sea.
Give her an offering.
I give a coconut to protect
the man I love. The water pushes it back.
I wade out and throw it farther.
“The goddess does not accept your gift,”
an old woman says.
I say perhaps she likes me
and we are playing a game.
The old woman is silent,
the horses wear blinders of cloth,
the young men exalt in their bodies,
not seeing right or left, pretending
to be brave. Sliding on and off
their beautiful horses
on the wet beach at Parangtritis.

Linda Gregg (1942- ) was born in New York, raised in Marin County, California, and was educated at San Francisco State University. She published her first book of poetry in 1981 and has slowly gained many admirers, including the poets W.S. Merwin and Gerald Stern. Among her many honors, she has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. Her poetry is often admired for its ability to discuss grief, desire, and longing with electrifying craftsmanship and poise. She currently teaches at Princeton University.

Hot New Old Writers! Digressions! Mild Obscenities!

2009-05-11T13:46:00.000-07:00

Readers of my old (defunct) blog may remember a couple of posts about Charles Bock. Charles is the author of the novel Beautiful Children, a New York Times Notable Book of 2008 and the winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Sue Kaufman Award for First Fiction. I was fortunate enough to be Charles' student at Gotham Writers Workshop in the summer of 2005 -- before he was even anybody!

His novel garnered a lot of attention, partly because of the incendiary nature of the material (missing children, Las Vegas, the sex industry) and partly because Charles is a great guy with a boatload of talent and a heart the size of Nevada. Yet almost no one who reviewed Beautiful Children failed to mention that Charles was, at thirty-eight, a bit mature to be publishing his first novel.

Well. I'm about a quarter of a way through the first draft of my own first(?) novel, and I'm a wee tad bit older than Charles. Also, I'm a woman. If you were to ask me what my novel is about, I would say creation, destruction, sex, and loss. The protagonist is a wee tad bit older than Charles Bock. And she's a woman.

If the publishing world considers Charles Bock to be past his use-by date, what in the world will they make of me???

If only I'd begun writing when I was young and dishy! Thing is, I was so f*cked up back then I couldn't concentrate long enough to Tweet (had Tweeting been an option) let alone dash off a short story that would set the balding, paunchy loins of Academe astir.

(A word of advice to the currently f*cked up: don't be like me. Write it all down. Then sell it to the New York Times Magazine. Be sure to include an exhaustive list of all your psychotropic medications, as well as a few photos that show your edgy haircut to good advantage. The graphic design department will have a field day.)

But I digress. What really concerns me is this: if I want anyone to even glance at this thing I'm writing, will I have to have a sex-change operation, trim fifteen years from my age, and move to Brooklyn? Change my name to Jonathan, perhaps? Or should I just crawl back into the Yellow Wallpaper?

F*ck that. Seriously.

And the first person who mentions chick lit or cougars gets his jugular ripped out and eaten.

So It Has Come to This...

2009-04-28T06:36:00.000-07:00

April has been a rather challenging month for me, both personally and professionally. If you watch the following video, just think of Bobby as me.

Or, if that's too silly, just think of Bobby as the Hero of Many Faces who must go into the Underworld (the Garage) to confront his Shadow Self in an Epic Rock Showdown.

Back to the grind, for now.

Here's a chunk of something-or-other. I put a picture next to it. Enjoy.

2009-03-29T05:59:00.000-07:00

Jay drove me to the place where the new houses would be built—streets curved to wrap around a golf course, on the west side of the Massaunee Reservoir. The new streets would have names like English hunting dogs. Jay explained to me about points of reference and benchmarks and triangulation. I made myself look out through the windshield and not at the side of his face. Flashes of tree and sunlight. Yellow line down the middle of the road, and coming toward us Audi, Honda, Lexus, Cablevision truck. I nodded and said I see. His voice pitched for me only in the tight space of the front seat, and both of us looking straight ahead the way two people might look at a ceiling. He told me about Guillermo and Ray, how they would walk out ahead of him into the land and put markers down, and how Jay would peer into his instrument whose name I forget—I want to say astrolabe but that’s not it—and measure the distance out to and above the markers. Somehow these triangular slices of space that went straight up into the sky would become places to put houses and yards and driveways, the ninth hole, the eighteenth.

We parked on the side of the road and got out of the truck and walked into the land, in between trees that I couldn’t identify, and it always bothers me that I know lots of names but can’t pin them to their proper objects. Jay walking at my left, and that whole side of me hot despite the wedge of space between us. Our feet on the ground in synch: his boots, my boots. His leather, mine suede. Tree trunks that were rough or scaly, the old ones fat and deeply pitted, with bark that was never brown, but grey or mustard or silver, sometimes green or blue. Never brown. Little spidery bushes, dead branches around the base of each tree, tugging our ankles. Don’t know a red oak from a sycamore from a slippery elm, or whether those evergreens are pine or fir. No idea. The ground not hard but I could feel under my soles that it would be in a week or two. Shed leaves, faded and half-turned to pulp by the previous day’s rain. The wind was blowing. Loose cellophane wrappers catching the sun. Cold. Should have brought coffee. Should have picked some up in town and taken it with us. Should have brought a picnic, red grapes, a blanket to spread on the ground. No, not a blanket.

Among the trees whose fate he had helped to seal Jay was quiet. He stopped walking to rest his hand on one, a straight-growing tree in midlife, with leaves still hanging on. The wind roughening his hair. His face in the speckled sun, his expression beatific. Blessing the tree. No, just resting his hand there as on the small of a woman’s back. A different kind of blessing. A thin hand, the skin like caramel from being outdoors. Not tan, because tan is for leather or baseball mitts. Jay’s hand was nothing like a baseball mitt. A baseball mitt has no raised vein to run from the knob of the wrist, to skirt the base of the thumb and up to the first knuckle of the index finger, pumping life. I would not want to touch the back of a baseball mitt with my fingertips. I would not want to put a baseball mitt in my mouth.

Looked up at the trees instead. Staghorn sumac, shagbark hickory. Too late. Should never have come along for the ride. Because what about the skin under his chin, the crease in front of his ear? The way he touched a doomed tree? I’d been looking too hard, and I was gone. Bang. And he turned to me and smiled, the still center of the blowing world, and I had to smile back as if everything was normal.

Magnificent.

2009-03-06T10:14:00.000-08:00

My friend LJ, who is a far better writer than I am, gave me some food for thought last night in an email exchange. She said:

"I think what we might call mystical experiences — those human experiences of a beyond-human dimension that come across as pure love, pure grace — are really, really hard to write about. It's sort of like Martha Graham said when asked to explain a dance: 'If I could tell you, I wouldn't have to dance it.' How do you speak of something unspeakable?"

I replied as only someone who has been in one too many writing workshops could: "probably the best way to go about it is reflectively and with plain language. Write what you actually experienced, with as much sensory detail as you can muster. Then you'll have a base of honesty that you can edit and make pretty later."

Yeah, right.

Speaking of honesty, I'm afraid it might be the case that mystical experiences, pure love, and pure grace are beyond the capabilities of even the most brilliant writer. We simply don't have the words to put these experiences across to others. We can only show little slices, pass around little hors d'oeuvres.

Take sex for example. We all know how it feels, but have you ever tried to tell your friend about it the next day? It would be an arrogant writer who truly believed he or she could give the reader the full-on experience.

Words have their limitations. Maybe that's why it's so hard to get people to read.

Music, on the other hand, will rouse even the most apathetic, insular teenager. And he will defend his own musical taste to the death if he has to. Music hits us on a different level. It's up there – or down there – with food, warmth, simple human contact. We must have had music before we had words.

***

I've posted the following video because, as a song, it's an example of excellent writing.

I wonder sometimes if growing up with rock-and-roll has done us a disservice in a way. We're not very patient readers or writers, because we want our peaks and valleys right away, within four or five minutes. We want to be swept up all sweet and dizzy like we are during the climax of a song (or any kind of climax for that matter.)

Poetry can sometimes do this for us, because a poem can be brief like a song; it can build quickly and peak and resolve.

But how does a writer accomplish this over the course of a short story, or an essay, or a novel, when she has to worry about plot, back-story, action, and theme? Is it even possible to carry your prose-reader up to the dizzy heights? Maybe not, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't give it a shot.

Watch this if you can.

The song opens with suspense. I'm not a musician, but there's a sound in the background, a high, soaring kind of thing. Right from the beginning, the music is carrying you up into the sky.

"I was born to be with you in this space and time." Talk about your opening lines! Then listen to what the music is doing. Is this what Leonard Cohen meant by "the minor fall, the major lift?"

"Only love can leave such a mark
Only love can heal such a scar"

Bono is a genius of elemental lyrics. I believe this is because he's spent so much time reading the Bible. Anyone who wants to write should read the Bible. Not the whole thing, just the interesting parts. Genesis, Job, Song of Solomon, the Psalms, the Gospels. Even if you don't believe a word of it, it's great literature. Love, sex, murder, friendship, betrayal. Everyone, from Shakespeare to Faulkner to Flannery O'Connor, is just imitating.

But I digress.

If Bono is the voice of U2 — the body, earthy — then The Edge is the soul. Wordless, evanescent, wingèd. He has bells on his fingers. Just watch him. He doesn't strike poses; he doesn't make faces. He doesn't belabor his point.

Now listen:

I was born
to sing for you
I didn't have a choice
but to lift you up (see Bono raise his arms, hear the song rise with him.)
and sing whatever song
you wanted me to

I give you back my voice
from the womb
my first cry
it was a joyful noise
oh, oh!

Born, sing, give, voice. Womb, cry, joyful noise. These might be words to stick on a bulletin board in front of your desk.

Now here's the love scene: Edge plays a solo, Bono sings back at him. The guitar is the sound your soul makes at the sight of its Beloved. Bono is your voice — your imperfect human voice, trying to express. Can't. What else to do but make primal noises like an infant, da da da?

The denouement takes you down. It becomes a little dance party for a minute, then takes you down further. Down, down, down. Boom.

Even David Letterman was moved by this song, in his own goofy way. I don't know if a book or a story can shake you quite like that, but I think we should strive for it. And I think this song might be a good template. Unfortunately, we have to work without a backup band.

Artificers and Persons of Low Degree, Go Not Thither.

2009-02-24T06:48:00.000-08:00

Last weekend a little gem of a book, Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation, found its way into our house, compliments of the White Plains Historical Society.

From the Introduction:

At the age of fourteen, George Washington wrote down 110 rules [...] drawn from an English translation of a French book of maxims [and] intended to polish manners, keep alive the best affections of the heart, impress the obligation of moral virtues [...] and, above all, inculcate the practice of a perfect self-control.

Here then, for your amusement and enlightenment, is a sampling of those rules. Enjoy, but make no show of taking great delight.

***

Show nothing to your friend that may affright him.

Shake not the head, feet, or legs; roll not the eyes; lift not one eyebrow higher than the other; wry not the mouth; and bedew no man's face with your spittle by approaching too near him when you speak.

Be no flatterer; neither play with any that delights not to be played with.

Let your discourse with men of business be short and comprehensive.

When a man does all he can though it succeeds not well blame not him that did it.

When you deliver a matter do it with passion and with discretion, however mean the person be you do it to.

Being at meat, scratch not; neither spit, cough, or blow your nose, except if there is a necessity for it.

Let your recreations be manful not sinful.

Labour to keep alive in your breast that little celestial fire called conscience.

Short Story Fragment (Silly)

2009-02-11T06:27:00.000-08:00

The bar was tended by a black-haired Dubliner named Colm. He wore a silver crucifix in his ear that hung almost to his shoulder. He appeared to be made of nothing but bone, sinew and nerve. I went demented with lust every time he took money from my hand, every time he called me Kelly — with just a faint trace of condescension for my parents' Hollywood-dream of Ireland. All I could do was be grateful they hadn't named me Tara. Colm and Del had just moved into a walkup on Avenue C.

On off-nights the three of us went dancing at the Industrial Park, where the drinks were strong and the music throbbed in our limbs and made us reel. Del and Colm were the kind of people who looked better limned by strobe lights, like players in an old black-and-white film: Del a dark-eyed houri temptress, Colm a villain who would tie you to the tracks. They were glorious, mirror images of one another — an incestuous brother-and-sister duo who might have been imagined by Anne Rice.

And where did I fit into all this?

"You have to write about it," said Del. "'Cause Colm and I are too drunk to remember. Plus we're both functional illiterates." We were making our way back to their apartment after a prolonged revel, stepping around the city's walking and sleeping wounded, the piles of uncollected garbage.

"I'm quite literate, thank you," Colm said. "I see Kelly as the mythical Irish colleen authoress, with her reddish-brown her and her healthy pink cheeks. Miss Kelly O'Neil Cuchullain of Ballybrack and fooking Ballincorney—"

"I'm only half Irish."

Colm ignored me. "You're the image of fookin' what's-er-name—"

"Joyce James," Del said, laughing.

"No. Fookin'—fookin'—argh, she wrote novels about country girls with drunk dads, and unwashed farm lads, and cows shitein' in the milk. Edner O'Brien!"

"Edner?"

"E-D-N-A," he said. "Edner O’Brien."

The Arts = Jobs

2009-02-09T15:19:00.000-08:00

Please check out AmericansForTheArts.org and take action if you're so inclined. Thanks!

Touching Strangers

2009-02-01T11:27:00.000-08:00

Here's some visual food-for-thought for writers and non-writers alike:

Photographer Richard Renaldi spent a year asking strangers to touch, and then taking their photographs.

What is striking about these pictures is how often the larger or more robust person of the pairing (or of the group) naturally assumes the posture of protector.

Another striking thing is the dignity that the models radiate. Is it peculiar to the sort of person who's willing to pose so intimately with a stranger, or can any of us call it up at will?

(Navigation arrows are underneath the pictures.)

Por mi amigo...

2009-01-30T12:35:00.000-08:00

el Padre Mickey. Is this 80's enough for you?

Wire, "Ahead." Seems to be super high-def-alicious or something, so it might explode your modem. Ouch.

Nature, Red

2009-01-21T17:16:00.000-08:00

or, Bountiful Acres

By the sixth day, the rain had come to feel like a part of our bodies — the oleaginous coating on the feathers of a doomed species of predatory bird. The water table rose. Local brooks, creeks and rills overran their banks, breached our foundations and spilled into our homes, crumbling the sheet rock like so much feta cheese. We outfitted ourselves day and night in yellow vinyl slickers, hip-waders, and space-age moisture-wicking outerwear while the din of our electric sump pumps became commonplace as sparrow-song.

Personally, I'd had my fill of Noah and Deucalion and Utnapishtimin jokes by day seven, and was already dreaming of a luxe hotel suite in Abu Dhabi or Death Valley — but there were rumors of a high-pressure system developing over Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and in a guardedly celebratory mood I ordered a pizza and ventured into the torrent to pick it up.

Giuseppe's was a hole-in-the-wall Italian place that specialized in molten parmigiana dishes and crenshaw-sized meatballs, but tonight the neon sign in the window shone like a roseate beacon of redemption. The kitchen was busy, my pizza wasn't ready, so I took a seat at the bar and glanced up at the TV — tuned to the Weather Channel, of course. I ordered a glass of Shiraz from Donna, the barmaid.

Four others were ranged in congenial silence along the bar, their faces pale as tallow, their spinal columns curved as if to shelter guttering internal fires. To my left a big, flaxen-haired man — who would have looked just as comfortable drinking his beer from the skull of a vanquished foe — grunted at Candy Willoughby, the evening weather-anchor. To my right, the Cherniskes — a couple I knew slightly from the Woodcrest PTA — huddled together in matching hunter-green Land's End Squall jackets.

A tall man with kinked-up graying-red hair held court at the far end of the bar, the putative head-of-the-table. Built like a sprig of sparganium, he wore a frayed denim jacket over a Motorhead t-shirt, and his bony wrists were encircled by fetishistic black bracelets. He had a luxuriant goatee, and what could only be described as a spit-curl dangling over his forehead.

"This rain is pretty bad," he announced to no one in particular, his face splitting into a demented grin, "but I can tell you about some real ecological disasters, boy-howdy." He took a gulp of his colorless drink and grabbed a fistful of pretzels from a bowl.

"Whatever. I love the rain."

We all turned as one toward the source of this new voice: a tiny girl with severely center-parted black hair, standing just inside the doorway, shrugging a leopard-print plastic raincoat from her shoulders. She strode the length of the bar, hopped onto the stool beside the red-haired man and inclined her lissome torso toward him. Austere yet carnal, she might have been the bastard progeny of Jane Austen and Betty Boop.

"I love the rain," she said again. "It makes me want to curl up under a pile of velour blankets with some good erotica and a brick of hash."

The Viking tore his eyes away from the television screen and stared. Al Cherniske coughed into his freckled fist. The girl asked Donna for a cinnamon-quince-persimmon mojito.

"So," the red-haired man said, dropping a stack of bills on the bar, "Has anyone here ever heard of a town called Bountiful Acres, New Jersey?"

We hadn't, but we wanted to. Why not? We all leaned forward like bromeliads toward a distant sun.

"Bountiful Acres," the red-haired man went on. "City of the Future, the New Urbanism. A small, walkable village with restaurants, retail, and single-family homes — you could have a Victorian Vision with genuine-faux gingerbread scrollwork or a Pride of Provincetown with dormers and a widow's walk — all built on the former site of the Heving-Moroder Industrial Spinnaxle Corporation.

"As luck would have it, the pond at the center of the former Heving-Moroder site was the only body of water in the continental United States known to harbor the Wetuchawan boring-beetle. Also known as Carabus jersiensis, this tiny creature — roughly the size of a coriander seed — is host to the parasite that causes Falkenstein's hemmorhagic fever in mammals."

Neither the Viking, nor the Cherniskes, nor I, had ever heard of Falkenstein's hemmorhagic fever.

"It's pretty unpleasant. The parasite gets in through your bare skin and rapidly grows to pythonic proportions, ulcerating your veins and arteries and reducing your vital organs to a greenish-black sludge. If you're lucky it might work its way out through your nostril or eye-socket. If not…well, the Wetuchawan Indians used to say you exploded like a toad thrown against a boulder." The red-haired man squeezed his lime-wedge, dropped it into his glass, poked it to the bottom with a straw.

"Well," he continued, "an outbreak of Falkenstein's hemmorhagic fever would certainly be a liability for the developers of Bountiful Acres, who had hoped to sell to some twenty-thousand yokels their own little eighth-acre parcels of the American Dream. So they bombarded the pond with Pyrethrin and N-Octyl Bicycloheptene Dicarboximide. This was, of course, the end of the Wetuchawan boring-beetle.

"The trouble began with the smaller household pets. Your hamsters and guinea pigs; your parakeets and Guadalajaran jumping pygmy rats. During a single week in April of 2005, they began to exhibit neurological symptoms: staggering, seizures, spastic limbs. By the weekend, nothing but tiny burial mounds in the yards of the pastel-colored Victorian Visions and Prides of Provincetown marked where these pets had lived out their little pilose — or pinnate — lives." The red-haired man paused here for a breath and a swig of his drink.

"That summer," he continued, "two stillborn babies were born in the same cul-de-sac. They were perfectly formed on the outside, but their inner workings were revealed by the medical examiner to be as incomprehensible as any found among the hypothetical fauna of Alpha Centauri or the Small Magellanic Cloud—"

"Oh my goodness," murmured Myra Cherniske, her motherly forehead ruching over her irriguous grey eyes. "What a terrible thing. What a tragedy."

The black-haired girl gave a feral smile and drew closer to the red-haired man, as if to suggest that she, anyway, was undisturbed — perhaps even titillated — by malformed dead babies. "You’re T.C. Boyle, aren't you," she murmured, her right hand vanishing somewhere beneath the bar. "I'm Delia. I'm working toward my MFA in creative writing. At Benington."

The red-haired man — or T.C. Boyle, if indeed it was he — inclined his goatee toward the girl. "No kidding? That's just peachy-keen."

"Keep talking," Delia hissed, and blew on the small silver cuff that gripped the cartilage of T.C. Boyle's left ear.

"Okey-doke," he said. "So before long the young children had become every bit as as incontinent and doddering as the inhabitants of Bountiful Acres Silver Sunset Manor for the Aged. The first one to die was a little girl—just three years old and exquisite as a della Robbia, with golden curls and a fondness for bunnies (of which there were none left in the neighborhood, anyway.) She collapsed one morning on the hardwood floor of the breakfast nook in her parents' Victorian Vision. She lay prostrate in the butter-yellow sunlight that streamed through the custom-milled mullioned windows, her blood oozing darkly from every—"

"Will you just shut up," roared the Viking. He had come to life like a jammed snack-machine that's been soundly kicked, and he was angry. He lumbered to his feet. "You're one miserable son-of-a-bitch, you know that?"

I looked from him to my Shiraz to the weary azure-shadowed eyes of Donna, the barmaid. "Your pizza, hon," Donna said, and placed the box on the bar in front of me.

I slid off my stool, listing a bit, as if a few microns of N-Octyl Bicycloheptene Dicarboximide had already wormed their way into my neurons and dendrites. The pizza box was spotted with unctuous stains, its cardboard thin as the skin of a winter-starved roebuck. Inside, the pizza was warm, viscid, intestinal. I hefted it in my hands.

In my mind, I was already hurling it at T.C. Boyle’s head.

Fragment

2009-01-02T08:27:00.000-08:00

Cody collected road maps from Hagstrom and Triple-A, and world atlases from Hammond and National Geographic. He did this in order to look up the distances between points, which he then recorded neatly in his looseleaf binder. It was very important to know precisely where he was on earth at any given moment. Because if he didn't know, he felt very disconnected, as if he could at any moment go spinning off the earth like a man ejected from a spaceship.

For example, Cody knew it was 4.872 miles from his house to the county hospital, to which the ambulance would bring Mr. Green’s body.

It was unfortunate, but Cody couldn't help himself. When he said—or even thought—the name 'Mr. Green' he would invariably have to go on to Mr. Blue, Mr. Red, and Mr. Yellow. Or sometimes Mr. Lime, Mr. Olive, and Mr. Chartreuse. It was another way he had of controlling the waves of information that crashed against him, a way of diminishing their power. Otherwise he could become very confused. Anyway Mr. Green didn't mind, and he had seemed to understand that Cody wasn't being a Smart Alec.

Cody stood on the Greens' path in his pajamas and bathrobe and velcro sneakers, thinking Mr. Lime, Mr. Olive, Mr. Chartreuse. The pulsing ambulance lights only made it worse. Scarlet, cobalt. The wind drove like needles into his exposed ears, but he had learned that it didn’t feel that way to other people, and he was fifteen now, and so he ought to be able to stand it.

He saw his neighbor, that large, bearded man, Jeff, bending down toward Mrs. Green, who sat on her steps in her nightgown. It's all right, he reminded himself again, the cold doesn't feel like needles to her. He knew that Mrs. Green was feeling grief, which was mental anguish or pain caused by loss or despair. He had never felt that way himself, but he thought it must be a lot like coming untethered from the earth.

Mr. Green had given Cody a big book once, called The Atlas of the Universe. It was very kind of him, but the book was full of fold-out maps of all the galaxies, and when Cody unfolded them they covered his entire bedroom floor, and they were mostly just blackness with thin white lines drawn between the stars. The white lines had numbers beside them, showing the distances between those objects, in light years of course, but Cody knew those lines and numbers weren't really there, not in the way that Oakland, California and Teaneck, New Jersey—2,906.77 miles apart—are connected by a series of interstate highways. There was nothing really out there except for blackness, and a vacuum, which meant no oxygen, and more distance than Cody could possibly begin to think about. And Cody worried that perhaps some part of Mr. Green was out there right now, spinning out alone through the black vacuum with no white lines to guide him. Cody very much hoped that Jeff would bring him to the hospital so he could keep track at least of Mr. Green’s body.

Where I'm Calling From

2008-12-11T11:08:00.000-08:00

"The night fell on him from the recesses of space, shearing past the immemorial mountains, the oaks and tamaracks and hickories, melding finally in a black pool with the chill, imp-haunted river that tugged at him from below."—T. Coraghessan Boyle, World's End

When I began to write in earnest about six years ago, I set all of my stories in a fictitious town on the south shore of Long Island.

I grew up in Massapequa, New York, at the edge of South Oyster Bay. Massapequa is the ancestral home of the Baldwin clan, and of that most retrogressive of Reagan-era rock bands, the Stray Cats. Jerry Seinfeld lived here in his youth, and I don't think Joey Buttafuoco has ever left.

Apart from the beaches and some pockets of old wealth, Long Island is a rather flat, paved-over place. My early stories were flat and paved-over, too. (In more than one the protagonist never got out of her car.)

But as I struggled with my prose, in community workshops and in graduate school, Long Island began to fade for me. For one thing, it's been some years since I've lived there. For another thing, the indignities of my youth have — finally! — lost their hold on me.

I want to write as an adult now. Not necessarily about adults, but as an adult. These days I live in the Hudson Valley, and my perspective, like my new terrain, has become more complex.

(I hope it has, anyway.)

The land here pitches and rolls, bucks and folds. Neighborhoods — and in some cases, individual houses — must be built to accomodate jutting outcrops of granite. Trees grow thick and tall. At the height of summer, I can barely see the next block. In winter, I can see everything.

In the so-called River Towns the older neighborhoods run precipitously downhill toward the Hudson. From the top of Main Street in Irvington, the river hovers like a mirage above the land. The hills on the other side are soft, shrouded in mist. Further south, looking across from Hastings or Yonkers, those soft hills give way to the New Jersey Palisades — tall, striated cliffs that turn russet in winter sunlight.

The water is slate-blue, asphalt grey, black. Sometimes it is oily-smooth, sometimes churning with froth. Hudson-Line commuter trains rush up from Grand Central Station, hugging the shoreline from Spuyten Duyvil to Poughkeepsie.

The riverfront streets of Tarrytown have not changed much since this picture was taken in 1944. But the non-residential spaces between the railroad and the river are all but inaccessible, gnarled up with fences and waterworks and truck lots, moribund factories and warehouses. (And just try explaining to the guys at the waterworks that you're not trespassing, but researching a novel!)

You have to go pretty far out of your way to dip your toes in the Hudson, and even then you might not want to. For the river is haunted not only by PCBs, but by drowned fishermen and tossed murder victims, headless Hessians and flying Dutchmen, imps and goblins and the mutinous crew of the Half-Moon.

A statue of Rip Van Winkle reclines in front of the Irvington Town Hall. A crop of condos recently sprouted on the waterfront between Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown bears the name Ichabod's Landing. How can one keep from writing in such a place, when the very air and water is full of muses?

Watch This Space!

2008-11-29T18:50:00.001-08:00

Sure, right now this blog is just sitting here, taking up a small amount of bandwidth. It should come to life sometime in the next couple of weeks.

And won't that be a thrill?