Winter 2014 - Trial Issue - The Harvard Advocate

*The incident reported below took place on July 1, 2011, at 11:41 p.m. In Blue Ridge, GA. Jim Callihan has been indicted with charges of vehicular homicide, among others. His trial is set for spring 2014. Names have been redacted out of sensitivity to the family.*



1. Summer in Blue Ridge is a time of coming, not going. It is a time when all is provided. The local grocer sells produce only in weeks of drought, and the pesticides used are from spray bottles, intended for skin. Once the evening air has cooled, dinners are taken outside, where dishes are left till morning, licked clean by our nightly visitors. Backyards end at the man-made lake, which was filled years ago in the shape of a spider. This way, it was thought, everyone could live by the water.



2. On warm nights, Jim and I swim in the dark, naked and male, loving the feel so much it leaves us hollow, floating on our backs so the fish don't nip at our peckers. We look up, out of courtesy, talk girls, belch. Back on the shore, we shake our clothes of ants, or worse than Back on the shore, we shake our clothes of ants, or worse than ants, before re-dressing. The morning sun finds our backs marked by the harmless teeth of fish.



3. "Floridiots" come in droves to the town of Blue Ridge, keeping locals off the roadways after five on Fridays. These tourists trade in their beaches and Surf-N-Turf for our mountains and grits. Downtown store owners, who were once tourists themselves, lather on our accent and sell things none of us locals will touch for prices we can't afford.



4. Downtown is a five-minute walk from our side of the lake. This is a fact that realtors selling summer cabins remember, but it doesn’t stop us from driving to church on Sunday mornings. What stops us, usually, is the lack of parking spots. This Sunday, we are running late because my mother can find nothing to wear. We decide to fight it out.

Our neighbor’s truck is parked in their driveway when ours pulls out. This is the second week, but everyone understands. No one doesn’t know. Their pew will be left empty, in case they decide to show, and another family will take up the far half so that it will not seem obvious if they sit this one out. 

    The congregation, with their shined shoes and combed, gray hair, know how to deal with those who are dealing. They understand what the newspaper left out—that it has been a rough ten days for the Callihan family.

    The tendency, here, is to say: “You should see the other family.”



5. In Blue Ridge, the church is beside the courthouse, as is everything downtown, and at the back of the courthouse is the jail. This is where I go when I break for the bathroom as the preacher fields prayer requests. 

    The jail is half full. Its occupants include two DUIs, one misdemeanor for marijuana, and a man being held for the things he did to his daughter. 

    And now, I guess, my neighbor, Jim Callihan.



6. Growing up, Jim Callihan was better than me at everything that mattered. At that point, this was horses, girls, and age. He thought we stopped riding horses together because I was jealous, because he was too fast. The truth is, there came a point when I no longer wanted to wash naked in the creek with someone who had four years of puberty on me. And yes, he was fast.



7. Summers of my childhood were spent playing John Wayne in the woods behind my house. Or my neighbor, Jim, played John Wayne. I played Clint. We liked cowboys, the sweat on horseflesh, the glint



of a spur. The others—the tourists in town—liked the idea of cowboys. They wanted to be John Wayne for the weekend.

     Jim wanted it for life.

     *For life*, I should mention, is not a term we hope gets thrown around a lot. It is something we in Blue Ridge do not wish on Jim Callihan.



8. With a television, toilet, and twin bed all on twenty-four square feet of concrete, the jail cells in Blue Ridge leave little to the imagination. It is not the place I want to be on a Sunday morning, but I decide to play it light.

    “This is a good look for you, Mr. Wayne,” I tell my friend, keeping my eyes on anything but the patchwork of stitching across his nose. I slide open the cell door and sit beside him on the bed. “Two good

Christian boys on a Sabbath morn.”



9. Friendships of a certain length are bound to run through phases. The best was my childhood friend’s cowboy phase, which he did not grow out of but rather increasingly into, eventually leaving me behind. The worst was his faggot phase, which followed shortly after I was no longer included in his cowboy tales of cigars and tits. The brunt of this phase was directed at me, the child faggot, though I’m sure there were others—at school, in locker rooms, surrounded by cowboys.

    These phases you forget when your friends are in need. When your sister’s first boyfriend, for example, who had a year or two of puberty on you, gives you a black eye in the McDonald’s parking lot because you didn’t like the way he was talking to her, you forget that, afterward, she asked *him* if he was alright. 

    And when your childhood best friend is in jail for killing one person and paralyzing another, you forget the time he pinned you to the ground in his backyard because one of his new friends called the game “Smear the Queer.”



10. My mother was upset when she heard the news—what had happened to the neighbor’s son. My father was practical. “Give it a couple days,” he said, folding the newspaper and dropping it on the table. “All this will blow over.” 

    “And when it does,” said my mother, “that family is in for a long vacation.”

    I picked up the newspaper and gave the story a read. “On second thought,” I said, “don’t forget what happened to the last family who said that.”



11. The people of downtown Blue Ridge are not kind to the Callihan family. After what happened, they are cold, petty. They quiet for even the Callihan’s acquaintances. 

    I do not care for these people. They do not make me feel guilty. The most pressing concern they seem to have about Jim Callihan ramming his truck into an Orlando license plate is the effect it could have on souvenir sales.



12. Families vacation in Blue Ridge expecting to show their children some semblance of a culture different from their own: to let them experience a life less complex and a people less sophisticated. They come hoping to uncover the history of the first southern settlers, a history borne in gold-rush towns, tucked under lines of mountains, in bootlegging, butter, and incest.

    In other words, these people* come* for the lawlessness.

    “What the hell did they expect?” asked Jim Callihan, having sobered up for a couple of hours in jail.



13. The wreck was the biggest news all year, and the offender was the doctor’s son. It made sense, then, that the better of the two town lawyers took the case, free of charge.

    “We sure showed them,” said the lawyer to the family. Then, recanting, said, “I’m going to hell for that one, aren’t I, Doc?”

    Laughing: “Aren’t I going to hell for that one?”



14. When the newspaper reported the car accident in Blue Ridge, it told how the children affected were ages three and five, and how it was the five year old who was dealt death upon impact; the three-year-old, immobility.

    We learned the rest through gossip.

    We learned, for example, that the person responsible for the crash was a teenager seen drinking at a bonfire that evening—a bonfire from which I, too, drove home. We heard that he was driving 30 above the speed limit, and that he ran a red light a few miles back, a red light where a police car was stationed. The officer, it was suggested, must have seen who it was in the red truck and decided not to bother turning a siren, because the driver was a good kid from a good family, and because all boys deserve a little fun now and then.



15. In a town where so much of our identity depends on us vs. them, public opinion is easy to gauge. In the case of the fatal car crash involving a local teen, the most important evidence for many in the town was the other car’s license plate. After being un-crumpled and spread flat across the D.A.’s table, the town on the license plate was a town not *here*.

    The Orlando family involved in the wreck requests the trial be moved elsewhere. They refuse to return to this town.

    The lawyer representing the local teen will not allow it. He says, “Jury of your* peers*.”



16. Old teachers bring food to the Callihan house as though it were a funeral. Mrs. Callihan, with a rubber band wrapped around the waistline of her skirt, listens as these women explain how her role is crucial. What a shame, they say, how tragedy can tear apart a perfect family.

    “We are all mothers,” they say.

    They talk with Mrs. Callihan about the good times—how they knew her son. If they had asked me, if Mrs. Callihan needed my stories as she did theirs, what would I have said?

    Perhaps I would have told about feeding fireflies to a found bullfrog, about watching its belly pulse light and dark, light and dark, beneath the cover of my hands, before her son appeared with the three-pronged gig. Or about the time he stood behind me on the bank of the rock quarry and promised, “You jump, I jump”—the day I tasted the lime of the water, turned red, as he ran to the road for help.



17. Jim Callihan rode his horse hard, with spurs. When he had the choice to ride Dollar at full gallop, or wait behind for me and Ranger, he chose to gallop. I could tell what he was thinking by his speed around the trail. 

    I once rode upon Jim washing blood from a gash in his leg. All he said, the water separating at his knee and rolling downstream, was, “Dollar finally grew a pair.”

    Dollar was taking water beside him on the bank, mud splattered along her underside, more his equal in that moment than I would ever be.



18. “John Wayne never stayed in jail,” said my friend, Jim, the third time I visited.

    He had been in jail for two weeks, was growing impatient.

    “John Wayne killed Indians,” I said, checking for remorse in his glare.



19. In the weeks following the accident, the defendant’s family received photographs of the two children, the victims of the crash. The boy, now paralyzed below the neck, is pictured swinging from monkey bars. The girl, now dead, is with her mother, kneeling in a bed of flowers.

    The defendant’s mother had been reading self-help books that instructed her to save reminders like these, to place them conspicuously. This way, the books explained, their family can come to terms with reality.

    It makes me wonder what the people who write these books have been through. What have their sons done?



20. I have heard that people behind bars often ask why their friends haven’t visited. My friend, Jim, asks what people are saying. It’s the first real conversation I’ve had with him since the accident that got him here. I expect him to open up, to confide in me the feelings he had been suppressing—the guilt, the sadness of it all.

    “It could have been me,” he says instead. “I could have* died* in that crash.”

    He asks what I thought, when I first heard the news. I tell him that I was worried, that we all were. What I don’t tell him is that the first thought that crossed my mind was: Good. Now he’s the fuck-up.



21. Autumn in Blue Ridge is for apple festivals. For final bonfires burned over raked leaves, for people in flannel shirts, whose truck windows remain closed. 

    It’s for the forgiveness of summer’s transgressions.

    Or forgetting.

    Even now, I can’t remember. Those nights of early summer, the nights spent in lake water, did the fish bite because they were hungry, or because we were where we shouldn’t have been? Were their intentions as harmless as we thought, or were their teeth marks evidence of our intrusion?



22. The town doctor is the father of a friend. He tells me a story about a woman he treats. This woman has been bitten three times by brown recluse spiders. After the second bite, she brought over friends to search the house. These friends opened her crawl space to find it laden with pearl-shaped eggs. There were so many spiders, said the friends, it looked as though the wooden beams were moving.

    This woman called for an exterminator. When the poison had settled and she was allowed to move back in, she again checked her crawl space. What she found was not what she expected. Three hundred dollars worth of extermination had killed every* other *bug in the house, leaving carcasses scattered across the floor of the crawl space, dragged home by the spiders. She had provided them a feast.



23. The Associated Press picked up the story: the first time Blue Ridge has ever made the news. The story of Jim Callihan ran in hundreds of newspapers across the nation. In each article, pictures of the town were included—of the lake, the mountain foliage.

    This fall has been the busiest the town has ever seen.

    This is that story.

    Last September, the McNally Jackson bookstore in SoHo, New York, hosted an event to celebrate the publication of the critical edition of Chris Kraus’s *Aliens and Anorexia*. The event was called “Alien Insurrection: An Evening with Chris Kraus, Emily Gould, Ariana Reines, Kate Zambreno, and Others,” and Kraus and seven other women were to give readings of the book and discuss “new feminism,” which I had never heard of. The venue was packed, the whole bottom ­floor of the bookstore over­flowing with women: women wearing all black, women with notebooks, women with their hair heaped on top of their heads in the turn-of-the-century Gibson Girl style popular in the lit world. It was clearly an event that both the audience and the panel of readers had dressed up for, and everyone was eyeing each other up and down, unused, I think, to seeing so many other literary women in a room, uninterrupted by the presence of men.



    Yet the event that everyone had dressed up for never materialized. Chris Kraus and the other panelists did read from *Aliens and Anorexia*, but it was almost impossible to understand any of them. Each spoke with her own theatrical affect; some in a quiet, sexy husk, others with an overly-dramatic swell of gravitas. The result was that no one in the audience—which I imagine was mostly made up of fans of Kraus’ more famous book *I Love Dick*—gained any sense of what *Aliens and Anorexia* was about.    



    Inclined to leave, I made myself stay because I wanted to hear the panel about “new feminism.” This, unfortunately, did not occur. After over an hour of reading, ten or fifteen minutes were spent on audience questions, all of which were, like the reading, answered obscurely with varying degrees of performative ­flourish. Then the event ended. There was no panel, and “new feminism” was never mentioned. My suspicion is that this is because new feminism does not exist.



    One of the readers at the Alien Insurrection talk, Kate Zambreno, wrote a book called Heroines that was edited by Kraus and published in 2012 by what Zambreno calls the “dumb cunt” imprint of Semiotext(e), an MIT-based publisher founded by Kraus’ husband, the French literary and cultural critic Sylvère Lotringer. Heroines is memoir-criticism, a hybrid text that blends Zambreno’s investigation into the crimes against the “mad” wives of modernism with an account of her own life. “Mad” is in quotation marks because part of Zambreno’s project is to challenge the pathologization of these women as insane. Perhaps “wives” of “modernism” should be in quotations too; after all, not all the women Zambreno writes about were wives (Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein), some were more famous than their husbands (Virginia Woolf), and several were not from the modernist period at all (Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, Sylvia Plath).



    Zambreno’s initial premise is to accuse the modernist husbands— along with other male conspirators—of their wives’ spiritual, creative, and even literal murder. (Zelda Fitzgerald, as most people know, burned to death in Highland Hospital, the asylum in which Scott had originally placed her. She was confined within a locked room, most likely tied to a bed.) In fact, she claims, few or none of these women were mad in the first place, but were rather driven insane by the impossibility of life alongside men who beat, raped, and neglected them, stole and suppressed their work, forbade them from writing, committed them to asylums, and abandoned them. There are probably few within the cautious world of the academy who would have attempted such radical revisionism for this large and messy collection of cultural figures, and Zambreno’s work is persuasive and important. Yet *Heroines* works best when Zambreno’s touch is light or nonexistent, when she lets the modernist women speak for themselves. Take, for example, this announcement Vivien(ne) Eliot, wife of T.S., unsuccessfully attempted to have placed in the* Times*: “Will T.S. Eliot please return to his home, 68 Clarence Gate Gardens, which he abandoned Sept. 17th, 1932.” Zambreno is a skilled curator of this kind of astonishing, heartbreaking primary material. Perhaps her greatest asset is knowing when to let the modernist women speak for themselves, and allowing their broken, desperate words ring out.



    Zambreno told an interviewer in *The Paris Review*: “I’m not sure I think much about academia.” This is evident in *Heroines*, a text entirely out of touch with contemporary academic feminism. While this out-of-touchness is certainly not a bad thing in itself (it could, under different circumstances, have been a great thing), even the most casual reader of “third wave” academic feminism will cringe at much of Zambreno’s book, and for good reason. As much as she rails against the second wavers, Zambreno still succumbs to many of their most embarrassing missteps: erasing queerness and people of color, embracing gender essentialism, and treating the issue of domestic labor with haughty disdain.



    Lesbianism is mentioned twice in* Heroines*: once, when Zambreno erases it (“I mean, Gertrude Stein was basically a patriarch, right?”) and again when, discussing Djuna Barnes, she irritatingly refers to it as “girl-on-girl.” This absence is certainly a strange choice for a book that includes fairly extensive analysis of Barnes’ *Nightwood* as well as exploration of the biographies of Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Simone de Beauvoir, Anaïs Nin, June Miller, and Barnes’ lovers Thelma Wood and Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, all of whom were unquestionably on the spectrum of what we now think of as queer.



    Throughout* Heroines* Zambreno returns to the idea of a wife: what it means to be a wife and to act as a wife—“to wife” as a verb. In discussing her relationship with her own husband, John, Zambreno goes back and forth between enthusiastically placing herself within the lineage of the abused modernist wives, and claiming that John—who cooks and cares for her, ­financially supports her, and facilitates her career as a writer—is really the one doing the “wifing.” In any case, Zambreno’s point is clear: To wife is to lose. In her words, the wife is the “pawn,” powerless and used. The author Mary Gaitskill, whom Zambreno lists in her book as one of her contemporary heroines, argued in an interview with The Believer that while she and her husband take turns playing the “wife,” what they could really use is a third party to “wife” both of them so they could get on with the important aspects of their lives. As our post-second wave, post-Equal Pay Act society shows us, the idea of wife-as-loser inevitably leads to the desire for a “third party wife.” Indeed, almost all powerful white women—women who, according to popular culture, are the ones advancing the cause of feminism, the shards of a broken glass ceiling glittering at their feet—are “wifed” by poor brown women who they employ to be the loser so they don’t have to, so they can be on equal footing with their powerful white husbands. What Zambreno and Gaitskill don’t acknowledge is that someone is always going to have to perform the domestic labor and personal sacrifices associated with the role of the wife, and that therefore characterizing the wife as loser preserves the hierarchy of some people over others, even if the actors end up being switched. If Zambreno’s argument were more expansive, if it acknowledged queerness not only within the lives of its historical subjects but also as something that exists now, she would probably have found an escape route out of this wife-as-loser trap, born out of a narrow, white, “lavender menace” era of feminism.



    The front cover of* Heroines* is a collage of pictures of women featured in the book. They are all white except Nina Simone, and I was intrigued to see how Simone would be incorporated into a book about the wives of modernist writers. Well, this is how: There is a single sentence about Nina Simone in the entire book, and the sentence is *about her irrelevance*. It is during a scene in which Kate the narrator and John are on a tour of Highland Hospital, the asylum where Zelda Fitzgerald burned to death. Kate feels that the tour guide is paying insufficient attention to Zelda, and illustrates this by writing: “For a moment maybe these tourists are silent, attuned to Zelda’s story: a screwball comedy become tragedy. Or perhaps the guide is now narrating that Nina Simone took singing lessons with Dr. Carroll’s [the hospital director’s] wife as a young girl.” This is how Nina Simone ended up on the cover of *Heroines*. It’s almost comical, like a private school brochure trying to disguise a racially homogenous student population with a picture of a black girl. This lie—this appropriation of one of the most important black artists of the 20th century—is a crime in itself. Yet it also reveals a key flaw in Zambreno’s work: its limited perspective, its ­fixation with the visible. To say that there were no modernist writers of color is exactly the kind of lie, the kind of erasure, that *Heroines* is supposed to be reversing; yet with her whitewashed cast of characters, Zambreno becomes a perpetrator.



    One of the most pervasive ideas about feminism is that it is in constant need of reinvention—a damsel forever in need of saving. From this perspective, “new feminism” is an appealing title, though a completely non-speci­fic one; those outside of academic and activist feminist movements are keen to see every phase of feminism as a revolutionary, back-to-the-drawing board moment, as opposed to something that has grown organically out of centuries of heterogeneous thinking and fighting. The blurb on the back cover of *Heroines* claims that Kate Zambreno “reinvents feminism for her generation.” Is this the “new feminism” that was promised at McNally Jackson? If so, this would suggest a movement encompassing Zambreno and Kraus and the other speakers, along with people like Kathy Acker, and Eileen Myles, and Sheila Heti, and even the horrendous performances of Marie Calloway, whom Zambreno defended in an essay on Thought Catalog called “All the Sad Young Pretty Girls.” Note the word “pretty.” In one of the few negative reviews of *Heroines*, Emily Keeler wrote in the *Los Angeles Review of Book*s, “A feminist friend emails me about *Heroines*… ‘I inherently distrust the kind of woman who is obsessed with glamour, to me a bit of an empty suit.’” It’s true: Zambreno is obsessed with glamour to the point of shallowness, often to the point of absurdity. She fixates on the outfits of the modernist women, describing how she buys ­flapper-style dresses so she can look like them. In perhaps the most ridiculous moment in an often ridiculous book, she writes about buying a nail polish from the “Swiss collection” of the expensive brand O.P.I. as an “homage” to the period of Zelda Fitzgerald’s life she spent locked up in a Swiss asylum. I would assume this was a joke, were this not a book filled with details about Zambreno’s outfits and many trips to Sephora, and which argues that to dismiss these details as insulting to Fitzgerald, frivolous, or vain, would automatically be an anti-feminist move.    



    Zambreno, having saved the modernist women from the pathologizing, belittling narrative bestowed on them by academic literary criticism, having emphasized that their writing is important and worthy of study, bizarrely appropriates them in order to make an argument for—to adopt a series of the adjectives she uses—“damaged girl internet diary writing.” This genre unfortunately extends beyond Zambreno and the blog that provided the basis for *Heroines*, Frances Farmer Is My Sister. It encompasses Calloway and others—in fact, according to Zambreno, encompasses all of the girls and women blogging on Tumblr (“So many of these Tumblr spaces are gorgeously written.” Are they?). It takes us beyond the premise that there is value in women’s writing to the weirdly essentialist idea that there is inherent value in all writing by women. “A disgust for Anaïs Nin is perhaps a disgust for the girls with their online diaries.” Perhaps. But even if this is true, the reverse is not; just because one woman’s diaries are worth reading, doesn’t mean all women’s diaries are.



     The kind of internet writing Zambreno is fighting for is more regurgitative than deliberate (she actually uses the word “bulimic,” in the true Tumblr tradition of glamorizing eating disorders and thinness). In the online diaries of Zambreno’s “fucked up girls,” suffering—particularly gendered suffering, eating disorders, self-harm, and degrading sexual encounters—is aestheticized. This raises suspicions about much of the critical content of Heroines, fixated as it is on the mental illness, abuse, and suicide of the modernist women it seeks to save. Woody Allen in *Annie Hall*: “Sylvia Plath—interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college girl mentality.” Why else is Sylvia Plath even in Heroines? She’s not a modernist and wasn’t married to one, but she is very popular on Tumblr.



    Zambreno’s “new” feminism is decidedly anti-aspirational. (Stylish) suffering is presented as an integral part of femininity or “girliness” (the words Zambreno uses are “fucked-up,” “toxic,” “damaged,” “messy,” “goopy” (?), “gooshy” (??), and, hundreds of times, “girl”/“girly,” as if it were an intentional fuck-you to feminism that tells people not to use “girls,” but “women”). Zambreno’s feminism is for women whose mothers were feminists in the ’70s and ’80s and who therefore resent the shoulder-padded, you-can-have-it-all, you’re-a-woman-not-a-girl kind of feminism. It is unsurprising that Kraus, Zambreno, et al. are popular with college-educated, white, heterosexual literary women, women who are smart and accomplished and who were told they were inheriting the earth, yet who find themselves still surrounded by Great White Literary Men who would rather fuck them than read their work. New feminism is for women who sleep with men in an era of unpaid internships and ubiquitous internet porn. There’s a moment in Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig’s zeitgeisty* Frances Ha* when Frances’s best friend Sophie, who has a successful career in the lit world, describes the guy she’s seeing: “It’s like with me and Patch…the way he always likes to come on my face.” She adds, “He’s a nice guy,” and later in the movie they get engaged. New feminism is for the women engaged to Patch.



   The problem is that, like the talk at McNally Jackson, like most of the internet girl writing Zambreno defends, there is no substance to new feminism. At its worst, new feminism is a way around feminism, a way of accepting anti-feminist practices under the banner of feminism. Zambreno writes that, earlier in her life, she was “convinced that I was going to be a writer, even though I hadn’t yet written anything.” She later says of the Tumblr bloggers, “Many of these girls identify intensely as writers, as artists,” never drawing a distinction between identifying as something and producing the work (be it art or feminist theory/practice) that qualifies you to adopt such an identity. The same problem exists for new feminism, so often a title with nothing beneath it. New feminism was born into a climate of unchecked sex positivity, of a desire for feminism that was appealing to the general public, and of extreme sensitivity to what Zambreno calls “girl-on-girl crime”—misogyny committed by women, women labeling other women as “bad feminists.” New feminists thus cannot be called bad feminists even when they are; even when they erase women of color, ventriloquize dead female writers, or glamorize mental illness. It is within this lack of borders, of boundaries, that new feminism supposedly resides. But there do need to be boundaries of quality. There need to be standards for what counts as valuable writing, just as there need to be standards for what counts as valuable feminism.



 



    Without these boundaries, everything bleeds out and in, and in place of so-called new feminism we are left with nothing. 

   Believing himself still young, a ditchdigger in the town where I once lived abandoned his dog so that he could travel the world and see what was what. I was only six years old at the time, beloved, and oblivious to the old mongrel’s lonesomeness when we took her in.

   In the mornings she’d rush in, ailing and enthusiastic, pummeling my bare legs with her front paws to wake me out of bed, as if kneading a window for escape: *Up, up!* And in the evenings, when I’d run her down the pavement, she’d scatter gravel underneath her abdomen, clocking particles of airborne terrain across my sight: floured leaf, insect bone, grits of carbon, silt, sod, some clay. I’d fan for a warm breath, catch flashes of the moon eating dusk on the alternating pages.

   *Give me a break you idiot space cadet,* I’d say.

   And once, when we were off up the sloping sidewalk near the school, the sky overhead softened into an unusual spectrum, looking like something oily leaked on the blacktop. Ah, a planet, I attempted to tell the dog, seeing a distant ship flicker the shades of coined metal—aluminum, nickel, copper, brass. It was the one with the ammonia crystalline atmosphere and the baritone name, where it rains diamonds sideways across 240-mile-per-hour winds. Jupiter. But she’d already jogged ahead, her sable gray coat blending to the curbside snowbank. Unwittingly camouflaged, she yelped from the gloom, worried that I’d lose her. This way, I said, lifting my arms to a porch light, casting beckons like shadow puppets. *Psst! Dumbass! Over here!*



      And there she was: legs trawling, eyes loosed to ground, finding relief at my shins.

      Pat her twice on the head.

  

   We called the dog Laika after the Soviet space mutt: Laika, that pioneering canine who took to the air in a satellite. Only, our Laika never made it farther than the tot lot on her own. She was a coward in fact, damaged goods from the kennel, and when she died from bad nerves, we laid her in the same garden from which she once stole tomatoes. I was nine years old. It was October then: The old oaks and haws were already bending under frost and the fields, pro forma, had iced down utterly.

   Sooner rather than later, we hypothesized, the blizzards would follow suit.

   Had it been like any other early winter, I’d’ve spent the days off from school enjoying the particular incongruities of the overlapped seasons: throwing snowballs at cherry leaves, shoveling the walkway under the chickadee’s sigh, forgetting all about autumn until the puddles dried. Idled and without a dog, however, I was summoned to help my mother deal with the birdbath in our backyard. The problem was that the birdbath kept freezing over, and the frogs, bemused at the early winter, kept getting stuck on top, their legs locked under the ice. Most were dead when we found them. For the others, my mother would bring along a steel knife and near-boiling water and try to carve out their legs as best as she could. And a few times, when only two or three limbs were free, a frog would lunge from the ice early, abandoning its final appendages in a kind of premature jubilation. I wasn’t permitted to watch. My mother delivered the wounded creatures to the stream on her own, but left behind thin red stumps in the bath for me to discover later on.



   In Juan Rulfo’s novella *Pedro Páramo*, a mother’s corpse says to her son’s corpse, *Just think about pleasant things, because we’re going to be buried for a long time*. We ought to take any mother at her word, but I’m hard-pressed not to ask: Are things really that fixed? The bonds between atoms vibrate at 10x1014 hertz. The mane down the dog’s nape swaddles as she stalks. Melting snow smells differently on different people, I’ve found. The black hole at the center of our galaxy is imploding at a rate of 70 million miles a day, like a pebble falling in a gravity well.

   I bury myself in such facts each winter: Exposed blood freezes at temperatures just after ice forms; turtles under the ice get oxygen by suckling water into a large posterior opening where special tissues filter the oxygen right into the arteries, like so many gills. And did you know that on the Terra Nova voyage to Antarctica, a British officer, whose frostbitten feet were hopelessly slowing the others down, came up with an idea? Late one night he simply stepped out of his tent and froze himself to death.

   There’s a boldface sign in front of a burned up NASA replica at my hometown museum that says something like, *These brave men gave up their lives for that most sacred purpose of discovery.* Or was it, *behold, skeletons, we have reached the moon!* Next to the replica are scans of Russian space-propaganda posters which are stunning as well as terrifying: They’re these extravagant, stirring images of Yuri Gagarin reaching across the stars, or of people standing in the exhaust of missiles and being blissfully transformed and, sure, disintegrated. One can’t help but be enthralled by the national yearning that the Soviets had in the ’50s and ’60s. The century was pretty rough for them. They suffered revolution, genocide, war, poverty, and half the population was sent to the camps. But somehow, in spite of it all...



Soviet scientists had decided to use Moscow strays for space travel, figuring that such an animal had already learned to endure conditions of extreme cold and hunger. The original Laika had been picked up as a stray wandering the back alley of a Moscow pinball factory that had only recently stopped manufacturing missiles. Laika was a three-year old, 13-pound, husky mix who looked good on camera when she won the lottery. A Russian news magazine described her as *phlegmatic*, saying that she did not quarrel with other dogs and that this was the necessary temperament: *phlegmatic*.

   In the subsequent weeks, Laika was regularly confined in small, rackety containers and spun in the centrifuge. She wore wires in her brain and in her heart that showed how she was doing. And on November 3, 1957, she was strapped inside the Sputnik 2 satellite atop an R-7 rocket and sent 900 miles up through the stratosphere where she died within just a few hours.

   But still she made history: Hers was the first body to orbit Earth.



   Few had heard the true circumstances of Laika’s death until 1999, roughly 42 years after the launch, when some of the scientists involved in the mission went on TV and fessed up to the malfunction that actually caused her to die, for it had been reported until then, that the dog had survived a week, passing only when the oxygen ran dry. A pleasant end.

   In fact, she burned up during liftoff like cigarettes.

   People were outraged at the revelation. My mother couldn’t stand to look at our own Laika without getting upset. *You can’t imagine how the heat is,* she’d say, *how it affects you.* I tried to consider what it would be like to overheat in zero-G. Sweat, I imagined, would not run down the face, and if brushed off would just hang as globules in the air until evaporated. But dogs don’t sweat, so what’s it matter? I was more bothered when I found out that there weren’t countdowns at the Sputnik launches. Like there was no one at mission control, chanting (in Russian), *T-minus five, four, three, two, one, blastoff.* As it turns out, no one did countdowns before NASA—the Americans who a decade after World War II started watching German cinema again and in particular the 1929 Fritz Lang film *Frau im Mond. Frau im Mond* was the first instance of a countdown being associated with a rocket launch. Only in Lang’s film, after each number the phrase *seconds to go* was repeated.



   *The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes,* wrote Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in a book having surprisingly little to do with dogs. Out on the frozen creek, Laika and I once went snooping. She was my Holmes, and I, her watchful Moriarty. *What’ll you discover today, my dear?* On a picnic table at the edge of the woods, a pitcher had been filled with glass, which, upon being emptied into the creek, made a metallic sound, like tin against tin. Where two rills intersect, a mother bullfrog whelped through the ice to her eggs trapped sleeping beneath. Carefully, I cracked the surface with my pocketknife and reunited the family. Laika cheered. It was only upon returning the following day that I learned the sacs were gone, that Laika ventured back for a taste, having been provided with renewed access.

   Another time I asked the dog to shake and instead she convulsed.

   Laika (version 1.0) said *hello* to the people of Earth on a radio broadcast a week before her flight. She barked into the microphone. Soon after launch, she transmitted a continual beep-beep-beep on a radio frequency, which served as a tracking signal. But within a week Sputnik 2’s signal died and all contact with the craft was lost. Laika’s 1,120-pound capsule remained in orbit for a total of 162 days, circling the Earth 2,570 times before burning up in the atmosphere on April 14, 1958. To anyone watching the sky at that time, she made her final statement as a tiny falling star in the night.

   In the waiting room my mother described it as planes of communication wearing thin.



   They did build Laika a window. Despite objections from higher-ups and the large costs of securing a window in a pressurized capsule, the engineers did it so the dying dog could look out—a window for Laika, whose monitored execution had been their one objective in all interactions that had bonded her to them with the keen devotion of every well-loved canine.

   What the scientists didn’t yet know was that once reaching peak-altitude, Laika would have seen nothing but blackness and the faint indigo squint of the troposphere on the horizon miles away. She wouldn’t have bothered to look at the sun, which, without cloud cover, burned unforgivingly against the vessel’s glare shield. And she wouldn’t find other stars. Had she survived the week as reported and lived to see the capsule turn, however, Laika would’ve caught one last view of the forested mainland. She would’ve been the first to disclose those undiscovered countries. And there, there below: a downy avalanche over Peru—an earthquake jolting at 200 miles per hour, disporting itself in amorphous bulks of snow, an extravagant gesture, uprooting the livid conifers and 4,000 lives, 4,000 tiny dots in white. From up above, the landslide would’ve looked like a photograph, moving just inches at a time across the dog’s windowsill—a peaceful wipe of snowflake and dust, almost perfectly still, in witless motion.



   Wintry air makes a wolf’s tongue numb. With sharpened blades, Inuit hunters used to set traps for wolves. They’d dip the knife in seal blood and bury the haft in the snow. The blood would freeze into a deadly popsicle. A hungry wolf would smell the blood, seek out the knife, and lick it until it shredded its tongue to threads.

   I mean, the wolf would bleed to death.

   Laika once came home with petals of blood on her nose. There were muskrats in the garden that liked to fight back. My mother wiped her face and then told us about black holes. She showed a picture of our own galaxy, laid her finger on the chartreuse center and said, *You could never see someone fall into a black hole. *If a traveler were to fall into a black hole, his image would just get slower and slower till he reached the horizon—at which point his image would stick. It’s kind of like Zeno’s paradox, where Achilles never wins his race against the tortoise because the distance of their subsequent movements reduces infinitely, by half the distance of the finish line. Only with black holes the light bouncing off of the traveler would also be shifting to lower frequencies, making him not only infinitely slower but infinitely dimmer and redder too.

   My mother unpressed the bloodstained napkin from Laika’s face.

   Because of black holes there are hundreds if not thousands of dim red tortoises frozen across the universe, she explained.



I watch a snowfall from my bedroom in Clifton, Virginia. The clouds settle and depart as if pulled on a leash. In the evening I take a walk down to the creek where I once scouted tadpoles, checking the rills for frogs stuck in ice. When at one point I think I hear a spadefoot hurrying a croak, I shut my eyes and pray it was instead a sound that only sounded like a frog, because I’ve forgotten my knife.

   Commence countdown.

   *Five*—at two miles above the Earth’s surface, pilots without air tanks begin to suffer hypoxia; blood-oxygen saturation reduces to ninety percent and with prolonged exposure the brain loses its ability to make judgments or retain thoughts. *Four*—at four miles, temperatures drop to negative 55 degrees Celsius and homeostasis becomes impossible; the pilot begins to freeze. *Three*—at six miles, bodily fluids expand nine times their size at sea level, decompressing the lungs and rupturing any abdominal organs containing trapped gases. *Two*—at eight miles, blood begins to boil and all internal liquids vaporize. *One*—at ten miles—the human body inflates, inflates, and inflates and then bursts open from within. *Zero*—in fact there’s one other way to kill a wolf: let it bite down your arm, then wrestle it under you and lace your fingers—one in each eye—and squeeze through both eyes into the brain.

   The panting stops; the blood freezes thick; the sound, it turns out, was a skidding rock. I pick it up and throw it across the icy creek. I recall that in the hours before Sputnik 2 launched, one scientist brought Laika home to play with his son and his daughter.

  

   Sometimes I think of my old mongrel pup: of how hard it was for her to keep her head steady, of the cigarette burns the ditchdigger left on her belly. Other times I think about what it would be like to live on a moon 15 light years away. You could point a giant telescope from there to Earth, and the image would arrive 15 years delayed. Today you’d see Laika and a boy playing together as they did when they first met, racing past the turnaround roadsides and rows of softwoods, winding.

   In the first few years after Laika’s death, I would always dig the snow off the dirt where she was buried. It would make a dark hole, a round of soil exposed under ice, that I’d leave behind, carrying my plastic shovel in tow, counting, *seconds to go, seconds to go.*

   You’ve got to hear about this. Crazy stuff.

   It begins in 400 BC, when a guy who probably isn’t real goes for a run that probably doesn’t happen. The guys who write about this kind of thing back then call him Pheidippides, which is at least a real name. Athens is playing Persia on the battlefield when the home team wins and our runner is tasked with delivering the news—a straight shot to Athens to let the head honchos know they’re good to go in the Battle of Marathon. And so we have ourselves a race.

   Play the tape forward 2,400 years and a French academic is hanging out with a French academic. One turns to the other and says, “Call it the marathon, and make it a thing.” That’s a paraphrase. Long story short, the French academic with the thicker mustache is the founder of the International Olympic Committee—the IOC for short—and he’s just the guy to make this kind of thing a thing. He’s Pierre de Coubertin.

   1896 was the year of the second marathon, then, and in Greece again to boot. Pierre figures it’d be good on the symbolism front if the first modern Olympics go down in Athens too. They throw in a few other events, of course, but the marathon becomes the main show, the crown jewel, whatever you want to call it. So they set up a route from Marathon to Athens. Simple enough—except one little problem. They don’t have a clue how Pheidippides made the trip. We’re talking 1896. Before-Christ territory is long gone. There’s more than one road now. They settle on a course 24.8548 miles long because it feels right.

   Anyway, it’s a hit, obviously. The marathon survives. Pierre finds it to represent everything that needs to be represented. You can get from any feeling in the world to anywhere else in 24.8548 miles. Or 26.2, depending. They don’t standardize the distance for another 20 years. It’s hard to find common ground.

   Pierre’s no athlete, but he’s an educator, and the way he sees it, sports can bring the world together. So that’s what the Games are about.

   Which brings us to my point, which is 1904, when the Olympics are just about dead again. What was dead for thousands of years can die again and so on. Everything’s all good and well in Athens in 1896, but chaos reigns for take two in Paris, 1900. The IOC holds the Games there in conjunction with the World’s Fair—rookie mistake. The Fair easily outdoes Pierre’s gambit of men in short shorts wrestling for world peace. The Games become a footnote of a sideshow. The higher-ups vow to never hold the events together again.

   Next time around they hold the events together again. But now it’s St. Louis’ fault. St. Louis, Missouri, America. They get to host the 1904 World’s Fair as a celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase, a good chunk of formerly French territory that probably keeps Pierre up at night. The Olympics are supposed to be held in Chicago, so what does St. Louis do but threaten to hold their own version of the Games so Chicago doesn’t steal their fanfare. Sure enough, Pierre caves in, fearing for the future of the world that St. Louis will overwhelm his Olympics. He straight up cancels Chicago and straight up gives the Games to St. Louis. It’s a mess. When the time comes in the summer of 1904, Pierre doesn’t even bother attending the Games, which is notable only because he’s in charge of the Games. Maybe it’s because he’s French and it’s a Louisiana Purchase festival. Again, maybe not, and no matter. There’s no use trying to get inside a man’s head.

   Which brings us to Tuesday, August 30, 1904, 2:30 p.m. Welcome to Francis Field, Washington University, St. Louis, USA. Built for the occasion. Built for the run. The race starts here and ends here, an oval come full circle. It still hasn’t fallen over if you want to go looking for it. It seats 10,000—I looked it up.

   The marathon’s always been a summer sport, all the way back to the Battle of Marathon. Might as well declare it’s also always been a battle. But it’s not for afternoons. It gets hot after noon. Simple as that. Heat is no stranger to a St. Louis summer, and this one was skulking into the 90s in both Fahrenheit and humidity. No use keeping count. Hard to say what the organizers thought could go right here.

   At last it’s time to give the race a run. 36 sign up, 31 show up. It’s going to be that kind of day. But then—the Cuban. He makes it 32. This guy, Felix Carvajal, is a postman. Pheidippides might have delivered the news, but he didn’t have much to say. “We won!” he said. “Joy!” And then he died. Felix had a few more words in him. This guy could talk. He was known to be a chatterbox at mailboxes across Havana. He could talk as fast as he could run, they probably said, and he could run. That’s how you wind up in a marathon.

   Thing was, he’d found himself in the wrong millennium. It was no longer a race to deliver a message. It was just a race. The Cuban delegation had no need for a courier and that was that. Felix was offered no funding.

   No problem. Hat in hand, he runs the length of Cuba, sprinting in circles around town squares till crowds form. He declares he’s going to the Olympics to claim glory for his countrymen. He’d read about the Games in a newspaper he delivered. He mentions he needs their spare change. His countrymen fill his hat.

   One small bunk on one big steamer later, Felix rolls into New Orleans. Then he rolls onto the New Orleans craps tables, and that’s when he loses all his money. Again, no problem. This is Felix. He hops a freight train, then another when the first starts heading the wrong direction. Throw in a few bouts of hitchhiking and next thing you know he’s here in St. Louis, penniless, starved, and delirious. But here. The way these amateur Games work, if you can reach the race, you can run the race. At 2:30 on the big day, Felix reaches the race. He walks up to the starting line with all of his possessions, which are the clothes on his back.

   The clothes on his back include a thick long-sleeved shirt and everyday trousers. Below them are walking shoes, and above them is a beret. Almost proper attire for a well-mannered day. There’d been one of those days a few months ago.

   They can’t let him run like that, naturally. Rules are rules, even if they just made them up. They delay the race to find a pair of scissors, which are eventually provided by an American shot-putter who’s charmed by Felix’s broken English. He cuts the trousers. Felix rolls up the shirt and refuses to part with the beret, doing the French academics proud.

   At 3:03 p.m. they can finally fire the gun and the dying can begin. The thirty-two runners commence the third Olympic Marathon. Exactly 14 will cross the finish line. I say exactly only because it could have well been 13-and-a-half. Like I said, that kind of day. Not to spoil the story.

   So now we’re running. William Garcia takes the early lead. You haven’t heard about him yet and you won’t hear about him for long. His snippet goes like this: he almost dies. Some runners are able to almost die and still finish the race, and we have a few of those here, but William isn’t one of them. William’s problem is the emergence of modernity, which brings him to his hands and knees and rips his stomach lining. This is 1904—Henry Ford’s halfway down the alphabet. What better way to watch a marathon than to ride along with it. Most of the runners can’t even run along. But this is 1904—the roads aren’t ready for the cars. Dirt roads, rocky, uneven, aimless, more dirt. The brave new world of spectators hops into cars and counts down the miles with them. An overzealous pair of race officials drives straight into a ditch and all but kill themselves. And then the railroad trains, and the delivery wagons, and the trolley cars. America stops for nothing.

   The wheels kick up dust, the pipes kick up exhaust fumes. The forces combine into a devilish coat of unbreathable suffering that funnels straight down William’s throat. His stomach hemorrhages. He wavers, he wavers, he falls. A couple driving their brand new car find him passed out on the side of the road when they just miss running over his unmoving body. You’re not going to win a marathon by staying in place. He gets carted off to a hospital. A few pleasant days later, he comes back from the dead. And that’s that. He returns to his California home and his day job as a lather. He lathes.

   And then there were thirty-one, again. Fred Lorz is the next to go. He’s a tall guy, jovial. Known to tell a good joke. It can be assumed then that he knows as well as anyone you need a good setup for a good punch line. Well, here’s his setup: cramps. Hits him right after mile nine. He slows to a walk, gives in to exhaustion. He’s a New Yorker, a bricklayer by day. He trains at night. Oops—sun isn’t out at night. He waves the white flag and hops into his manager’s car. They head back to Francis Field to collect his belongings.

   Even so, USA’s still looking good. Of the starting thirty-two, nineteen are red-white-blue. Of the 651 athletes competing at these Games, 526 are born or bred American. Travel’s a hassle these days. Even the best high jumpers can’t jump the Atlantic. It’s easiest to reach America when you’re already here.

   Point being, don’t count Fred out. He winds up winning the race. In the meantime, it’s about to get awkward. Enter Len Taunyane, alias Lentauw, because officials decide that’s less ornery to spell. Spectators can best recognize him as the African savage with no shoes. That’s relative to Jan Mashiani, the African savage who has the shoes. Together they’re the first black African competitors in Olympic history, and Len the first to run the marathon barefoot.

   They weren’t supposed to run the thing. They were only here for the World’s Fair, headlining the Boer War Exhibit at the Fair’s Anthropology Days. If you want to know what Anthropology Days are, bad news: It’s a forum to decide once and for all how natives stack up against the white man. Filipinos, Patagonians, Pygmies, Japanese, Native Americans, everyone from everywhere, science for the world. Fair officials give them physical assignments and record their performances. And what do you know, survey shows they’re inferior. No matter that the competitions include gems like greased-pole climbing, and no matter that some are tasked with archery despite having never picked up a bow. No matter that none of them is an athlete.



   So now that that’s settled, the only remaining question is how to sell more tickets. The answer, of course, is to have some savages try to run two dozen miles with no training, apparel, or warning. One of those days in one of those centuries.

   So that’s how Len and Jan wind up at the starting line next to the last three winners of the Boston Marathon in the third Olympic Games. Despite just about everything, Len manages to keep pace with the early leaders. Then a wild dog chases him off track to the tune of a mile in the wrong direction. Marathons are hard, but marathons that are two miles longer are harder. After a nice reprieve from the monotony of racing, he shakes off man’s best friend and gets back to the torment at hand. Despite everything, he finishes ninth. Jan limps across the finish line twelfth. Media consensus is that they’ve done the savages proud. A few decades later it comes out that they’d been educated men enrolled at South Africa’s Orange Free State University. Among the 32 runners, they wear bibs 35 and 36.

   But backtracking to the civilized. Even they are getting tired. And thirsty. Organizers figure this is the perfect opportunity to test out the emerging field of purposeful dehydration. They serve up two spots for runners to get water—a water tower at mile six and a well at mile twelve. Next thing you know everybody’s dying of thirst, but at least it’s on purpose.

   Sammy Mellor, winner of the 1902 Boston Marathon, cramps up and quits. John Lordon, winner of the 1903 Boston Marathon, vomits on the mile-ten marker and quits. Mike Spring, winner of the 1904 Boston Marathon, loses the gift of forward motion and quits.

   And the fun just keeps on running. Frank Pierce, the first Native American to compete, collapses from exhaustion and hitchhikes back to the stadium. Two Greeks who have never run a marathon before do a bad job of marathon running. Arthur Corey, a Frenchman, manages not tov fall over but brings the wrong legal papers and is forced to register as an American. You can’t win around here. Not even the winners.

   Well, of all possible outcomes in an infinite universe, Felix the Cuban finds himself in the lead. Thing is, this is Felix. He hasn’t eaten in two days. He’s hungry. Put yourself in his shoes. They’re heavy walking shoes, never meant to be run in, especially not for 24.8548 miles. And maybe your stomach hasn’t ruptured like some stomachs have, but hunger is hunger, and like a mirage, there before you appears an apple orchard. So what are you going to do but take a breather, have yourself some fruit, take a bite from a rotten orb, endure severe gastric discomfort, and pass the time by practicing your English with spectators on the side of the road. That’s how Felix finishes fourth. He returns to Havana a national hero and resumes his mail route. He never runs a marathon again.

   But try as they might to lose, somebody has to win. Arthur Corey, the man without a country, is going to settle for second. Arthur Newton, an American with a history of always finishing but never winning, is going to finish and finish third.

   Somebody’s got to be left, and his name is Thomas Hicks. Tom’s from lovely Cambridge, Massachusetts, and all this time he’s been clinging to the leading pack. But everyone in said pack gives up and suddenly Tom’s the leader. Everyone knows something he doesn’t.

   Each mile’s getting longer for Tom. His manager rides alongside him, demanding he go faster. Says the guy in the car. Tom’s getting dizzy. It’s getting hard to stand. His manager pulls him over to the side of the road and gives him a dose of strychnine sulphate, which happens to be the first documented use of doping in modern athletic competitions, and also happens to be rat poison. He washes it down with some brandy. He keeps running.

   Footsteps come from behind him. Tom looks over his shoulder. It’s Fred. Fred smiles and waves. Fred runs past Tom. Fred disappears into the distance. Poor Tom and his morale.

   Fred, of course, has travelled the last eleven miles of the race in a car. But just as Fred broke down at mile nine, the car breaks down at mile nineteen. Fred still needs to get back to Francis Field to pick up his clothes. He is a marathoner, and he has had a breather, so why not run. He jogs the last six miles back to the stadium.

   And so we proceed to the finish. Ten thousand fans see Fred enter. Fred sees ten thousand cheering fans. And then the race clock still ticking, and the finish line tape unbroken. Time for that punch line. Instead of picking up his clothes, Fred runs a lap around the track, crosses the finish line, and wins the Olympic Marathon. They stick him on a podium. President Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter places a laurel wreath on his head. Someone says, “Wait a minute. That guy drove here,” more or less. They take off the wreath. They ban him from racing for life. He says it was just a joke. He says he thought it’d be fun. They cut the ban to a year.

   Back on the course, good old Tom’s just conscious enough to process the news he’s in first again. His manager does the only thing there is to do. He gives Tom another dose of rat poison. One more sixtieth of a gram and it’ll be lethal. One of those days from the good old days.

   Well, Tom comes stumbling into Francis Field to no fanfare. The crowd’s already cheered for a winner. He staggers, he sways, he gets dragged across the finish line by his manager. He collapses. He’s placed on a gurney and rushed to a hospital. He’s lost ten pounds. He’s the winner. The next day he’s alive. He announces his retirement.

   Three hours, twenty-eight minutes. The slowest-ever winning time for an Olympic Marathon. It’s so late it’s time for dinner.

   Long story short, you can’t get to 2014 without living through 1904. Here we come, Sochi. USA! USA!

George Saunders is the author of two novellas and four short story collections, including *Civil War Land in Bad Decline* (1996) and his most recent work, *Tenth of December* (2013). A New York Times bestselling author and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and MacArthur “Genius Grant,” his career has been met with both popular and critical success. He now teaches creative writing at Syracuse University’s MFA program. This fall, *Advocate* Features Board member Warner James Wood conducted this interview over email. It has been edited for concision and clarity.



* *



*Alright, George, let’s get you warmed up: If the zombie apocalypse started right now, what skill would you bring to the table to save the human race? Would you be a guy I’d want on my zombie-defense team?*



* *



Earnest, respectful negotiation. So no, you don’t want me on your team. My understanding of zombies is that they pretty much plow right past the “earnest respectful negotiation” phase.



* *



*Good to know. Now, I’ve read a few interviews in preparation for this one, and interviewers seem to always ask how an author developed her voice or style over her career. To spare you from that one, how did you develop your approach to answering interview questions over your career? You’ve had quite a few.*



 



Practice, practice.



* *



*Fair. Let’s jump right into it, then. How was 7th grade for you? Were you the bully or the bullied? The class clown or the scholar?*



 



I was neither bully nor bullied. I’d say I was part clown, part scholar. I had a lot of comic impulses but too much respect for (fear of) authority to be a full-out clown. The big incident that year was that I inadvertently pulled out a chair on a nun, who went down in a heap. It was a complete accident but afterward I learned something valuable and not-so-great about myself: I immediately stopped saying it was an accident as soon as I saw how much respect I was getting by going along with the popular assumption that I’d done it on purpose.



* *



*Very funny. In fact, your work is full of jokes. One of my favorites comes from *The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil*, where you describe the President’s Palace as “decorated with paintings of various types of animals the President liked to eat, served on plates, although in the paintings the animals were still alive and had all their fur on and looked a little panicked.” Tell me, does your mother find you funny?*



 



Occasionally, yes. She always did, God love her. Actually, it’s funny you should mention her, because one of the reasons I’m a writer is that when I was young I got addicted to what we might call “approval from females.” I had two sisters, and the aforementioned mother, and a lot of girl cousins and aunts, and was the only boy on my mom’s (Texas) side of the family for a pretty long time—and I think I picked up some sort of urge-to-entertain from that arrangement. And both sides of my family are very funny—it’s kind of part of the package, on both sides, that you learn to play along and participate.



I don’t tend to think in terms of jokes, per se—that’s too much pressure. For me it’s more useful to think of trying to really be in whatever fictive moment I’m in, as concept-free as possible—that way, if there is a joke (or an opportunity for a deepening move, or a nice description) I’ll be there to receive it, so to speak. And this is a process of simultaneously “imagining” the moment and inhabiting the actual sentence—looking to see if there’s some detail of the imagined world that you missed while, in the same instant, feeling around in the sentence to see if there’s some way to make it tighter/better/more unique. Sometimes a funny bit is the response—but I find it more useful to not try and steer my work toward funniness—or toward anything, really. There’s energy in any bit of prose and that energy is actually telling you where to go. Or, as I heard Stuart Dybek say once, “The story is always talking to you; you just have to listen.”



 



*“Imagining” is definitely a strong suit for you. With many of your stories, I’d say you’re in the business of world-making. Sometimes these worlds are theme parks, sometimes kooky offices. What are some of your favorite “created worlds” you’ve either been to or read? Where did the fascination with these originate?*



 



It’s really more a technique than an interest. Something happens to my prose when I set a story in one of those places. My natural sincerity and sentimentality and my minimalist prose instincts get cross-purposed in a productive way.



 



I do like those places though—I had a really wonderful day at Six Flags over Texas when I was about ten, and never forgot it—that particular delight of being somewhere that is simultaneously artificial and gorgeous. So maybe there’s some relation between my affection for those places and my prose—just that, when I “make” such a place, I get a little thrill that is not unlike the thrill I first got all those years ago, seeing some mechanical fish in an artificial pond. But honestly, my feeling is that a writer is maybe more akin to an athlete or musician than he is to a critic—the point is, if something works, you do it—and the reasons why it works are maybe not so essential.



 



*Since you brought up music, there’s a picture of you online where you’re rocking’80s-style long hair and a guitar. I’ve always heard that timing is the most important part of comedy. Has music influenced your rhythm?*



 



I’d imagine so, though I’d be hard-pressed to articulate just how. One thing playing music (or listening to it, for that matter) does is make you aware of the fact that it’s not just what you say, but how you say it. The other beneficial thing about playing music, especially playing live, is that when you’re doing that, there’s no confusion about your purpose. You’re supposed to provide pleasure. Being smart, “advancing a theme,” sneaking in a message—none of that gets you much. I had a big breakthrough in my writing around the time of my first book, and that was the essence of it: (finally) remembering to allow myself to be entertaining again. And I’m sure all those years of playing music helped me make that jump.



 



*But you do a great job of sneaking. I’ll be reading one of your stories and rolling with the funny business, and the next thing I know I’ve been stabbed in some emotional underbelly and have arrived at some semblance of morality. Not everyone can get there without seeming sentimental, and you do it without me even noticing it’s happening. Do jokes operate in your stories to etch away at your readers’ fortification so you can stick them where it hurts? Or why else pepper such dark stories with comedy?*



 



I don’t have a theory on this, honestly. To me it’s something like riding a bike. If you feel that you’re leaning right, you adjust left. It’s an intuitive thing that happens when I imagine my reader—I’ll be reading along while editing and just feel, you know, “Ugh, too serious” (or too sentimental, or cloying, or preachy—whatever) and then adjust accordingly. Some of this happens along what we might call high/low lines—if I find I’m writing sincerely and earnestly, and have gotten the bang from that (that is, this ideal reader is with me, and feeling the bang with me) and then I feel that, however, we might be inching out on to the thin ice of Too Much of That Shit, I’ll drop into a lower register and seek the humor, as a sort of pressure-release valve. That way, you have it both ways—you get the high/elevated/sincere feeling, and just when the reader is about to look askance at you for going over the top (being too overt in your heart-string-pulling), you recognize that, back it down—and in the process win an extra iota of readerly trust. It might be akin to a conversation, really, especially with someone you’ve just met. You are, in a sense, demonstrating range—showing that you can go high and go low, and at the same time demonstrating an awareness of, and respect for, your reader, by being acutely attentive to where she actually is at any given moment. You’re in conversation—it’s not a lecture, not (merely) a (tone-deaf, audience-ignoring) performance.



* *



*How do you know when you’ve reached “Too Much of That Shit”? When a joke’s gone flat? And I’m not taking “Practice, practice” for an answer this time.*



 



My main revision thing is just to try and clear my mind of what I thought about the piece yesterday and go through it the way a first-time reader would. That first reader is approximately me if I hadn’t read it a zillion times already—it’s actually a kind of simulation of that guy—a simulation I’m running in my mind. And I just watch him. When his energy drops or his resistance comes up, I edit accordingly. So at a bad joke (or at a less-good repetition of an earlier joke) I’ll see the reading energy drop just a tad. That’s the sign that a cut is in order. (Or an adjustment.) That’s it, really. Just see what that inner reader is feeling, adjust. Make the changes that this process calls for, reprint, clear the mind—read it all again. Rinse, lather, repeat, for like ten months. Or however long it takes for that reader to be pleased, start to finish.



 



*Do you have a particular reader whose “inner feeling” you trust for advice? Or are you a door-closed kind of writer?*



 



My wife reads all of my stuff before it goes out, but I really try to have things in order before I give it to her. I don’t like having a lot of readers because ceding authority to a reader feels to me like a form of taking one’s hands off the wheel. And I find that I am easily swayed by the opinions of others. So if someone reads something and goes, “Oh, I like this part,” that makes it hard for me to cut it later—which might be necessary to get to the highest version of the story. Likewise, if somebody doesn’t like a part, that sort of kills it for me. And it might just be that more revision is needed before that bit gets up to speed. So for all of these reasons, I really, really like to maintain control of a piece for as long as I can.



 



*Did there come a time in your writing life when the blank page stopped being so frightening?*



 



Yes, and honestly it was when I learned to revise. If you are confident in your ability to convert shit to gold, or at least tin foil, then there’s nothing to worry about. You just go ahead and—well, let’s divert from that metaphor. You just type and type, knowing that it’s all conditional and temporary and that you can form it into something interesting by going back over it again and again. I love this idea that your first draft is NOT YOU. It’s just “of” you. It’s “for you”—to work with. Who you are as a writer is much more about your method of (and courage in) revision. (And this is also true of your 100th draft— it’s still not you, but only of you.)



 



*I’d love to hear about how you get into a story. One of my favorite writers, Amy Hempel, says to start at the point of most contentment, the most satisfying moment, instead of the most jeopardy. Your stories are typically short and alive from the first sentence; is that a product of revision or do your drafts begin that way as well?*



 



She’s one of my favorites too—a total master. I think I usually end up cutting a bunch of stuff and finding the opening that way—that is, sort of backing into it. I try not to get too obsessed about making a big wonderful opening. Too much pressure. I just want to get in there and get started, knowing that the story’s going to earn its keep, really, with what happens in the middle and the end anyway. (If we think of a story as a series of meaningful events that produce the next meaningful event, then the first big sign of progress for me on a given story is when I dimly perceive what those events are, or what the first few are—and then the beginning is usually the minimum thing I have to do to make the first meaningful event happen.)



    So mostly I just throw some scraps down and start working with those. Kind of like a guy who shows up for an important social event and sneaks in the side door, knowing that the success or failure of the event doesn’t depend on his fancy entrance. So often there’ll be some long intro stuff that I’m very proud of, and that I think is just essential to the meaning of the story, that winds up proving inessential and gets cut. Always a happy moment.



* *



*How about the flip-side—what are your thoughts on endings? Many of your stories seem to end in the worst possible ways. As in, I’ll find myself thinking, How can this get any worse? And then it does. Way worse. Then it ends. Do you ever feel an urge to throw your character a bone once in a while?*



 



I think I’m throwing them a bone all the time, by paying really close attention to them—trying to give them the widest scope of action I can. This tendency you’re talking about—the piling on of worsening circumstances—is not really an attitude toward character, but toward story—for some reason, I get more heat when I think of my pieces as lab experiments. If we want to learn about “love,” then we have to test it. So those turns in the plot are ways of turning up the heat.

    There are, of course, lots of ideas about endings, and each writer winds up discovering his own, by just trying to accomplish some, you know? Some that don’t stink. So I don’t have a big theory on endings—each story should produce its own ending, unique to itself and hopefully new in some way. But my current understanding of (my) stories is that each part should serve to crank things up, even up to the very last phrase or sentence—the heat keeps going up. Which is another way of saying that the rhetorical basis of the story is understood (by writer and reader) and is exhausted—we go through all of its rooms, so to speak. Things get more complicated, the various moral hallways are investigated and closed-down, until there is one stretch of hallway left, and we run down it and…I don’t know. Burst through the wall? But a story has an essential underlogic that is really what it’s about. So I don’t care at all about whether that process entails a “happy” or “sad” ending for the character. I want the ending to be happy for the story—that is, I want the ending to use up and actualize all of the energy it has been creating along the way.

    So, for example, a story like “Puppy” in the new book might qualify as one where things get worse. But the ending there felt, to me, sort of happy, in the sense that the internal logic of the story has been honored, and in honoring it, the story made a sort of interesting machine, wherein two well-intentioned people, who both love their kids, have produced this unintended and negative consequence. And if it’s working for the reader, she should feel: Yes, it is sometimes thus. And it is sometimes thus, I think—our love for others and our excellent intentions are sometimes insufficient, and sometimes this is even unbeknownst to us as we act. So a certain light gets thrown off, at that realization—and that’s happy.



 



*Great. Let’s segue a bit. I’ve read that you were a geophysicist in college, and at a reading in Cambridge (at the Brattle Theatre last spring) you talked about how you did some of your favorite writing on-the-job at oil companies. Who were you reading back in your geophysicist days? When did you decide to start writing things down?*



 



When I was a geophysics student I was reading a lot of Ayn Rand and Kahlil Gibran, and just starting to read more serious literature, most of it from the 1920s and 1930s: Hemingway, Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, Dos Passos, Faulkner. Then when I went overseas I had lots of reading time (I worked four weeks on and two weeks off at an oil camp in Sumatra) so I started branching out, sort of haphazardly.

The day before I came back to the crew I would go to a bookstore in Singapore and just load whatever I could fit in one suitcase. So it might be Herman Hesse and Dostoevsky and Mailer…just whoever I’d come across that I’d heard of. Sort of hit-or-miss. I started writing at that point. At night you had a choice: Go get wrecked in our little “bar” (a thatched hut a stone’s throw from the office) or go off and do something on your own. There wasn’t much to do—there were big lizards in the woods and now and then a tiger would be spotted. So I would read, or sometimes go back over to the office and write early attempts at stories—which, of course, were mostly just thinly veiled accounts of whatever trip I’d been on last, with a clever “frame”—usually some old fading guy in a senior home “remembering” his brilliant youth in Asia, when he’d worked on an oil crew in Sumatra, etc. etc.



* *



*As a scientist myself, I have noticed there seems to be a stigma within writing circles against those less well-versed in literature. You seem to have taken a rather distinctive path to where you are now. Did an interdisciplinary approach help? Hurt? How about your time in the work world?*



 



I think it helped and hurt. Not having had the same formative influences, exactly, as my peers, I tend to come at things from an odd angle, which can sometimes be good. The travel I did (and the type of travel it was) maybe ramped up a certain tendency I had anyway, which was to think of fiction as fundamentally a moral-ethical endeavor—a way of understanding the world better and figuring out how to live in it appropriately. My travel also politicized me pretty early, in a real visceral way. I was basically an affable earth-raper, and learned about things like imperialism and oppression and the queasy smashing power of capital by being part of a group that was (affably) doing these things. So my background got me into some strange and interesting places I wouldn’t have been allowed into otherwise, and allowed me to be there naturally, i.e., without that distortion of behavior that a known journalist in the room causes.

    On the other hand, I find I’m a little under-confident in my writing, which has to do, I think, with my sketchy reading and critical background—I got a late start in general, and am still trying to come to grips with longer forms.



 



*I promised myself I wouldn’t ask, because I don’t think I’ve read a single interview where you were not asked, “Is a NOVEL in the works?” So, no, I’m not going to ask that. But since you mention your coming to grips with longer forms, why do you think we care so much about your writing a novel? In our sound-bite generation obsessed with Tweets and lists, wouldn’t you think we’d be partial to the short forms over the long?*



 



I don’t know—I think I’d be wary of that “we” pronoun. Seems reasonable to me that people would enjoy Twitter and so on and also be able to switch gears and go off and read Ulysses. I think people do things like that all the time. Our minds are really good at making boundaries and conceiving of different modes of activity, I think. The same guy “reads Tacitus” and then seconds later begins to “play badminton, in comical shorts.”

    As for whether I’ll write a novel—I think it’s a natural and understandable question—even flattering. I’ve had that same impulse when reading short-story writers I like—to want to see, more directly stated, their “world-view” and have the pleasure of seeing a world created over many pages and so on. But the thing is, when I start out to write something, I’m not “deciding” anything. I’m just trying to see if I can get something going. So many times, I’ve had something that was long—even novel-length—suddenly inform me that it was not a novel after all, by being boring. I think the questions, “Why the short story?” or “Will there be a novel?” both embody a certain misunderstanding of the process by which a work of fiction gets generated—or at least how it gets generated by me.

    That said, I think the story form is very sophisticated and takes some indoctrination. A casual reader might find his expectations of “a story” more directly satisfied by a conventional, novel-length, realistic work. It “feels” like life, or like the stories we tell about life. (“That guy? Started out poor, got rich, married a beautiful girl, had it all, then got greedy, lost it all.”) The story is, I think, a more specialized and compressed and exaggerated form. It’s about a certain moment coming to fruition. It doesn’t care so much about “how things turn out”—but rather about “what just happened?” Just as a certain experience in poetry is necessary to understand really great poetry, a person reading a story is well-served by having read a bunch of others and having cultivated a sense of what a story does uniquely.



 



*Do you have any predictions for the fate of the short story once us Tweeters are out of our universities and into the world? Will they come more so into focus?*



 



I don’t think it’s gone out of focus or fashion. It’s always been a more niche form, I think—but a particularly American one and you can’t drop into any decade without finding amazing story writers working in it. What happens, I think, in the media, is very similar to what you see in fashion magazines: the world is doing what the world does, but the magazine proclaims that “Skirts are back!” or “The Return of Red” or whatever. Also—I mean, the Twitter generation is out in the world, already, and they are also reading fiction, long and short—so I don’t know. I run into brilliant young readers all the time, who are fully engaged in real life and e-life and reading life, and are actively engaged in trying to sort all of that out, in order to live in the way that makes the most sense of them.

    Along these lines, the one thing I have observed (in myself) is that, the more I’m on-line and texting and so on, the less well I am able to process big complex blocks of text. I know this because I resisted having a smartphone for a pretty long time, then dove in and went overboard, and could absolutely see, over those first few months, the diminishment in my reading capabilities. I definitely got more distractible, was skimming ahead, more easily bored, etc. etc. So I’m trying to watch that. It’s a commonplace that working on screens rewires the brain, and I am just thinking that I’d prefer to retain my ability to track complexity in prose, and am trying to adjust my habits accordingly.



 



*Do you ever feel pressure (from readers, from publishers) to write in a different form? You’re someone who has been very successful exclusively writing short fiction—what you think about the state of the art form?*



 



I’ve never been pressured at all about this, honestly. I did OK with a first book of stories and so from then it’s just been perfectly fine for me to write whatever I liked. Now, that’s a good position to be in, and it’s helped immeasurably that I have a great agent (Esther Newberg at ICM)—she understands me first and foremost as an artist, and trusts me to make those sorts of calls. But basically I think a writer, especially a new writer, has to be very frank and strict with herself (while also being joyful!) and cast aside all of “should” and “must” and “preferable to” statements and do what she wants. That’s where the power is. What gets you excited, what sort of writing leads you into confusing and rich places, and so on.

    Now and then I feel some pressure from myself to write a novel, but that pressure is just the desire to fully inhabit what talent I have before I kick off. So due diligence might require, every few years, reopening the novel door—just saying to myself: Any interest there? Or, in the middle of a story, if I feel some sense that it might want to be longer, allowing that attempt. Just see if it works. There are particular charms that a novel presents, and it would be fun to get to do some of that—to be able to write text that is not so slavishly bound to functionality as my model of the short story requires. But again—that desire might be real AND the result might stink—in which case, it would have to be discarded.

    I guess what I’m saying generally here is that, in my experience, we can formulate a lot of questions about craft and aesthetics and what writers should and shouldn’t do and so on—but the bottom-line is the creation of some sort of undeniable text—something that calls up something intense and non-trivial in the reader, and engages her at the deepest level—is the one and only job. And a writer can’t choose what, of the many things she can do, might produce such an effect. That is, actually, “the apprenticeship” or “finding one’s voice” or whatever we want to call it: that process of finding out what you can do, at that given time, that will produce an undeniable energy.



 



*Alright, let’s call this the home stretch. It’s “career” time. As both a writer and a teacher of writing, I’m curious as to how you feel about the institutionalization of creative writing. It seems like everywhere a young writer looks points toward academia, first as a student, then as a teacher. I’m not extremely knowledgeable about the history of creative-writing-as-career, besides it not being one and then being one and now being one only in the face of the university system. Do you think this is healthy for the arts? What’s the role of the writer as we become increasingly dependent on the institution?*



 



It’s a really good question. I always tell young writers that there are two big roaming falsehoods that have really picked up power in the last ten years: (1) If you want to be a writer, you have to have an MFA, and (2) If you get an MFA, you will be a writer. Both are false as hell. Part of me longs for the days when getting an MFA was, for friends and family, sort of a head-scratcher, as in “What IS that? Why would you want it? Isn’t it going to screw up your life?”

Now, as you suggest, it’s assumed that writing is a career (rather than a vocation) and I think that’s wrong. Demonstrably wrong, when you look at how many MFA grads there are every year (lots) and how many books are published (few). And beyond that, look at how many published books are daring and important and beloved. It’s as hard now to be an essential and original writer as it ever was—but maybe we’re obfuscating that fact with all of this false-hope-giving professionalism. One thing I’ve noticed is that there seems to have been a shift in how young writers feel about being writers—from “I know it’s nuts but I just HAVE to try it or I’ll die,” to “Well, I guess I’ll go ahead and consent to being an author, by getting a master’s in it, since I pretty much wouldn’t mind having a book out someday, which would be pretty cool, I guess, to do that for a job.” I don’t see this at Syracuse, but more when I go around to undergrad programs—this idea that one becomes a writer by dutifully trodding a certain professional path, at which time the system plops out some Recognition. Now, having said that, I’ll rush around to the other side of the table and say that, if someone is really burning to try the artistic path, the MFA world is a wonderful way to do that, so that, later in life, you won’t feel like you chickened out. There’s certainly no harm, and potentially a lot of benefit, in spending two or three years closely reading texts and writing and revising your own with the help of a community. And there’s benefit to doing that, even if you never publish a word—your mind has been sharpened and you’ve become a more spacious human being.



 



*Continuing a bit from that, we’ve all read or heard your address to Syracuse grads last spring. What advice would you give to young writers, particularly recent grads or future recent grads, when they’re faced with what my parents would call “real-world” jobs vs. finding ways to devote time to the craft?*



 



I think the main thing is to try and void out that distinction. We all have to earn a living. And that’s often how we find our material anyway—by wading out into the real world and seeing what’s beautiful about it and what’s sinister and so on. So I’d say the main thing is this: if you think of yourself as writer, you are one. If you think, “This thing I’m doing is part of my writing life”—then it is. Whatever a person is doing, she’s living, and if she’s doing that living with her eyes and heart open, then, I’d say, potentially, she is feeding her artistic life. There is, of course (always) the issue of time—how in the world does a young person put in all the hours she needs to put in, to foster the necessary breakthroughs and find out who she is, artistically, AND, at the same time, provide for herself? To which I would say: Yes, right, exactly. That is the issue. Everyone has had to face it. So I don’t think the goal is to avoid the slog so that one “can write.” My experience was that it was only when I was chest-deep in the slog that I came to understand what I was supposed to be writing about. But here’s another argument for the MFA program, and also a thought of when a person might want to try it. If you are out there working and writing, and making steady progress, each story better than the previous one, new technical problems presenting and being solved—maybe you don’t need to go back to school (yet. Or at all). But if it starts to feel that you’ve hit a plateau—you have plenty to say, but are frustrated in your ability to say it, and your stories aren’t getting better the way they used to get better, and they all seem to stall out at the same point, or manifest the same problem—then maybe that would argue for a few years of dedicated writing. But you wouldn’t want to cash in that chip too early, I think—I’ve seen young writers who hadn’t quite lived enough come to our program, and then they’re frustrated—they have the chops but nothing to subjugate those chops too, so to speak. But every writer is different, and, of course, has to decide for herself—and even that (the way she makes that decision) is part and parcel of the artist she is.



 



*Alright, last question. You have said in past interviews that you hoped your newest book,Tenth of December, would be your most expansive work to date. You went on to say that you aimed to reach readers with this collection that you had not yet reached with the others. I’m always fascinated by writers’ intention for readership. There’s a theory on writers that says they invariably come from a formative experience where language meant power, and the greater the readership, the greater the power. Others might say they want a more expansive audience because what they have to say is important, political. Some I assume just want more money. Will you tell me a little about how you perceive your readership, and how that perception may have changed since your earlier works?*



 



Well, basically, when I’m on my deathbed, I want to feel that, in my life, I was daring—that I’d gone as far as I could in the direction of making whatever beauty I could manage to make. That I’d swung for the fences. Now, I’ve noticed that my work isn’t for everyone. That might be because the masses are too lowly to get me (ha) OR it might be that I am unconsciously writing in a way that excludes people, out of insecurity. So when I say I want to reach a larger audience, what I mean is: I want to write at the top of my register. I want to be brave. I want to tap into that part of me that is genuine and curious and thinks well of my audience. Of course, I also want to avoid blundering into the sentimental or banal. Basically, I want to find a way to be maximally communicative—and that is going to contain two vectors, basically: (1) how many people read it and (2) how deep it is. I once saw Frank Conroy draw his big arc on the chalkboard and at one end writer “W” (for Writer) and at the other “R” (for Reader). He said that every writer is somewhere on that arc—more attuned to the Reader (at the extreme end would be someone bending over backwards to be accessible and liked) or more attuned to the Writer (at that extreme end would be a writer so deeply internal that he didn’t care if his work was unintelligible). Conroy’s point was that the writer has a part to play in placing himself on that arc. Part of it is disposition, part of it is will. I think I am in the process of trying to move myself slightly in the direction of the “R”—because I have an instinct that my best writing will result from that attempt.

    For me, this is an ongoing journey that started—well, even during the first book. I had figured out how to write dark, minimal, somewhat cartoonish stories that moved along pretty quickly and were (to my surprise) coming closer to expressing my real and urgent feelings than anything I’d ever done before. But to do that, I was deliberately clipping off certain modalities. (That might actually be a good working definition of making art: “clipping off certain modalities.”) So in the next book, I tried to edge up a little closer to the cliff: put more of the physical world in there, experiment with pitching the prose a little higher, be o.k. with more ambiguity, etc., etc.

    I think that’s what writing is, essentially: trying to modify one’s approach so that more light is given off. And we do this by constantly interrogating our own stuff. Too sentimental? Still truthful? Am I properly respecting the real darkness of the world? How about its luminosity? Is the prose getting more full? Am I getting it right about human cruelty? Human kindness? Etc., etc.

    I’m actually not all that concerned about audience, per se—but am very interested in learning to write with my full humanity. That is: learning to resist my instinctive fealty to certain moves that got me through the door in the first place. This involves—well, it involves the basic faith that beyond those moves are...other moves. And those might even be deeper.

    The goal, I think, is freedom. Freedom from our fear of failure, freedom from mere habit, freedom from the urge to protect oneself. Having actually done something in writing can make a kind of prison for the writer. He might start to think that way (the way he just did it) is the only way to do it. He could start to associate his artistic self with that one methodology, and thereby limit and freeze himself: a nightmare. The goal is to keep freeing yourself up to go in whatever direction feels most interesting and urgent.

I



     After my Grandfather died, he waited in line for one year. His ashes, inside a lacquered box, sat among the ashes of others in a cold concrete bunker nestled in the Chinese countryside. Each box bore a tiny black-and-white engraving of the deceased. The owner of the bunker kept track of burials by scrawling a name and date on the lids.

     A single light bulb hung from the ceiling. It was rigged to save electricity by shutting off when it sensed no movement. Whenever someone came in on funeral business, the bulb flickered on. Otherwise, the dead waited their turn in darkness.



PROPERTY RIGHTS



     There are seven million people living in Hong Kong, making it the fourth most densely populated city in the world. Its citizens are dying faster than ever, at numbers that have doubled since 1970. Forty thousand people now die each year from the standard gamut of reasons: drowning, old age, suicide, electrocution, severe allergies, traffic accidents, heartache, stress.

     A century ago, these 40,000 souls would have found eternal peace at the foot of some sacred, pine-forested mountain chosen for optimal feng shui. Such postmortem peace is now impossible, as most of this once-sacred land has been developed into condominiums or factories.

     The line between the yang world of the living and the yin world of spirits is vaguely drawn in Chinese theology (an amalgam of Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian beliefs). This line blurs more each year as millions of Chinese flock to live over the old bones of their ancestors, creating a literal juxtaposition of life and death.

     Property rights, for example, work for the dead in much the same way as for the living. In China, property exists in a state of perpetual leasehold. Whether a high rise or a hovel, residential property may be owned only for a period of 70 years. At the end of this period, the property is either re-leased or the hapless owners evicted.

     The dead, too, face the possibility of eviction. China’s most esteemed burying ground, Babaoshan (“??? Eight Treasure Mountain”) cemetery in Beijing, is not so much a holy mountain as a quiet gap in urban sprawl. Regardless, the upper echelon of Chinese society engages in bidding wars over its plots, which start at 70,000 yuan, or about 11,500 dollars for a 20-year lease. If a family’s fortune has turned by the end of those years, the formerly exalted government official or wealthy businessman is expelled from his resting place like a loaf of expired bread.



II



     Once Grandfather’s year in exile ended, our entire extended family packed into four Toyota cars and prepared to inter him in his (semi-)permanent resting place.

     It was raining that day. For a long while we drove into pine-covered hills, until an empty city emerged from between the trees. Tall black columns rose from stone steps which went up and up until they brushed the grey horizon. Blurry, colorless portraits stared at our small party from every direction.

     Cousin Jiang held up an umbrella to keep Grandfather dry. We climbed stone steps until we reached a small slab nestled between two columns. On it was Grandfather’s face, etched in ink. Elder Uncle Hu raised the slab with a tire jack, revealing an opening underneath.

     “Well—here it is,” Uncle said, hesitation in his voice.



SAFETY NETS



     Since Neolithic times, the Chinese have been obsessed with remembrance after death. To be forgotten by descendants is equivalent to hell. One’s ghost would enter the next world as a low-ranking personage, looked down upon by other spirits. To guard against this fate, the ancient Chinese buried their dead with plentiful provisions, including a large supply of the deceased’s favorite food and alcohol. In certain eras in ancient China, wealthy individuals would be buried with mementos, servants, or even wives.

     Today, wine is still poured into the grave-earth. Oranges, meat buns, and other delicacies are left on graves to fill the air with pungent smells of decomposition. Wax fruit, plastic jade bracelets, and paper Rolex watches are common offerings. A cigarette might be lit and left burning on the grave. Lung cancer is one of China’s leading causes of death.

     Despite strict rules governing food and alcohol provisions, religious requirements have long been lax. A wealthy family might have employed both a Taoist and a Buddhist priest to officiate the funeral, or invited an expert in the Confucian classics to preach filial piety as the dead were ushered away.

     Unlike their modern counterparts, the ancients enjoyed a short waiting period between death and spiritual peace. According to tradition, spirits remain on earth for seven days, after which they enter heaven, or hell, or are reincarnated. These seven days are fraught with danger for the family of the deceased. Traditions, some common, others unique to individual families, must be meticulously obeyed. Any small misstep—the presence of a mirror, the color red, the misuse of a title—might cause the spirit to transform into a vindictive ghost.



III



     “Turn around,” commanded Aunt Pearl.

     “What?”

     “Turn around. You can’t watch,” she repeated as she gripped my shoulders and steered me to another gravestone (marked “?? Zhang Xin”) a few feet away.

     “Why can’t I watch?” I protested, plucking at her lean fingers. “He’s my grandfather.”

     “Of course. And he was born in the year of the pig,” she said. For Aunt Pearl, no more explanation was needed. According to Chinese superstition, dogs and pigs have “?? mao dun,” instinctual conflict, and if I were to witness the interment, he would come back as a ghost and bring me bad luck.

     I glanced at my father, who stood near grandfather’s grave. He shook his head as if to say, Let it be.

     Sighing, I obeyed Aunt Pearl’s demand and spun around. She clicked her tongue with satisfaction and returned to tearing apart sheets of fake dollar bills. Each bill bore in clumsy English letters the logo “Hell Bank Notes” and the confident claim “guaranteed legal tender for spirits.” Later we would burn them on Grandfather’s grave to send him pocket money for trinkets and snacks in the other world.

     Uncle Hu grunted as he cleared debris from the grave. I scanned the other gravestones, which bore black-and-white portraits of mostly expressionless faces. I could tell the age of each person when he or she died. Most faces were old and lined. Every so often a young face peered out from the frame, with eyes black and cold.

     Aunt Pearl finished tearing the Hell Bank Notes. The pine trees rustled impatiently. Sounds slowed and faded, while the grey faces around me grew accusing and hostile. I felt a great desire to turn from them, to turn around, to look, to make sure my family was still behind me, to make sure they had not vanished into the other world and left me alone.

     A loud crack broke the quiet. I spun around in time to see the edge of a red lacquered box vanish under the stone slab, into darkness.

     We kowtowed in succession, three knocks each. When my turn came I could think only about the wet dark hole in which we had buried Grandfather. I kneeled dumbly on the cold pine-strewn ground until Aunt Pearl tugged at my arm.

     We set off firecrackers to frighten away evil spirits. They fizzled into the air and burst dully against the rain. Bangs echoed intrusively from column to column and suffocated among the pines.

     We squeezed into our four Toyotas before the echoes died. Uncle Hu drove the first car, his fingers pale against the steering wheel. We sped away and away from that empty stone city, none of us turning to look back.



HISTORIES



     Cremation was not always the norm in China. Although Buddhists regularly burned the bodies of their dead, other religious and ethnic groups considered cremation taboo. Tibetans, for example, believed only criminals should be burned. An auspicious Tibetan burial, known as Sky Burial, involved placing the body on a high mountain peak to be picked apart by vultures and the natural elements.

     In modern China, however, cremation has been law since 1956 when 151 communist party officials, including Chairman Mao Zedong, signed a Funeral Reformation proposal. Given the nearly half-billion Chinese deaths that occurred from the 1940s to 1960s, there was a simple logic to incineration.

     According to the China Funeral Association, modern China has a death count of over eight million people each year. Four million of these bodies are cremated, which brings the cremation rate to 52.7 percent. The Association would prefer 100 percent.

     At the Yishan Crematory, the workers are mostly middle-aged and balding. Ashes work their way under their fingernails, leaving the hands of handlers permanently black. The pollution that hangs as perpetual smog over China’s cities does not hold a candle to Yishan, a factory for processing the dead.

     Yishan is in Shanghai, a city of 14 million with a death rate of 100,000 people per year. Most of those 100,000 pass through the crematorium. Four hundred bodies a day are ferried by motorized lift to 24 incinerators. The incinerators belch toxic smoke into the air and into nearby neighborhoods, perpetuating some cosmic joke about the cycle of death.

     It is a most innovative facility. In previous years, blood drained from bodies was disposed through the sewer system. But the sheer volume of displaced blood eventually grew to become a health hazard. Yishan developed an embalming method that uses freezing instead of bloodletting to preserve bodies until they are ready for cremation.

     Many Yishan workers are kept busy digging graves or carving gravestones, but they never seem to keep up with demand. Some would-be customers resort to do-it-yourself mounds on the sides of railway tracks or on the hillsides of scenic preserves.

     Wealthy families have the option of circumventing the Yishan process altogether. Some send bodies abroad to be buried in the United States or Canada, taking advantage of various body shipping services that promise to deliver goods intact and in acceptable condition.

     With so many bodies going through the crematorium, mistakes do happen. Instead of servants or wives, some families burn a fire-resistant memento with the body. The object serves the dual purpose of comforting the soul of the dead and verifying the ashes’ former identity.

     According to the workers at Yishan, the funeral business is a business of life. They do whatever they can to smooth the post-death process for their customers.



IV



     In China, four (“? si”) is considered an unlucky number because it is phonetically similar to the word for “die.” The combination of four and eight (“?? si ba”) is even unluckier because it sounds like a curse - “?? die now.” Buildings often skip over the fourth floor and jump directly from three to five.

     Even in cemeteries, where the dead already reign, one rarely sees a fourth burial terrace or a tombstone numbered four.



FINAL DECISIONS



     The combination of Taoist, Buddhist, and Confucian thought in China complicates end-of-life decisions.

     Taoism urges harmony with the Tao (“? the Way”). Death is a part of life, the flow of the universe. In dying, one returns to the primordial void.

     Buddhism urges freedom from suffering. To accept death is to accept the futility of suffering and to ease the suffering of caretakers. Life is transient and impermanent, and a single death has no effect on the scheme of the cosmos. Besides, there is always the chance one may be reborn as a being higher than human.

     Confucianism urges communal harmony, especially within a family. Followers of Confucian thought think constantly of their ancestors, their children, and their relations, however distantly related. If one person’s sickness creates discord and suffering for the family, it might be better to end the problem at the source. And if one’s relations make proper preparations, death and the journey that follows will pass like a dream.

     Despite the diversity of Chinese beliefs, the overarching message they impress on the Chinese psyche seems to be: Let go.



V



 



     “I can’t go,” declared Grandmother.

     “Mother,” said Aunt Pearl with impatience, “Not this again.”

     “I won’t go,” Grandmother repeated.

     “You must go,” said Aunt Pearl, “We buried the old father last May, and now we must go pay our respects. It’s the one-year burial anniversary. You’re his wife.”

     “I don’t care. I’m not going to that damned place.”

     “Dear mother, for heaven’s sakes, why not?”

     “Because you saw how he died,” hissed Grandmother, “Feeble, in his bed, with his bedpans. Such indignity. Smoking a cigarette until his last moments. Selfish. He was the type of man who kept his best thoughts for himself. When Hu was sent off to labor in the boonies, did he raise a finger? No! I was the one who walked miles for my son—your husband. But when Little Sister went to Beijing for college, who took a vacation in the big city to visit every year? Him, of course. The old fogey was selfish and self-absorbed. I was the one who kept this family together. How dare he leave me so suddenly, in that way, with such—such indignity. I will not go visit him. He should be the one to come visit me. He should be the one—he should be the one—”

     “Don’t say that,” exclaimed Aunt Pearl, aghast, “How would you feel if he really came back to haunt you? You’d have a heart attack, and we’d be burying you next!”

     “Oh, I would have some choice words for him,” said Grandmother.

     “Oh—dear!” Aunt Pearl quickly made a bow to Grandfather’s home shrine in the corner of the kitchen. The grey face in his portrait remained impassive. Uncle Hu, standing silent by the door, looked at his watch.

     With an air of finality, Grandmother sat down on a kitchen chair and repeated, “I’m not budging. I’m too old. I waited so many years, in bad weather, for him. He can stand to wait a few more years for me.”

     Aunt Pearl wavered between Grandmother and Uncle Hu like an indecisive bee. Finally she exclaimed, “Ai-ya! Have it your way, then. Don’t blame me if he comes back and haunts you for being a faithless wife,” and then, with genuine anxiety, “Mother, if you still insist on your blasphemy, make sure you hang a frond of palm and a clove of garlic over the door. You can buy palm fronds for cheap at the fourth street market. Oh, and the garlic must be extra pungent. That is the only way to ward away ghosts.”

     Aunt Pearl shepherded the entire family out the door. On the street waited four gleaming Toyotas, the same ones we used last year. As I climbed into a back seat, I looked back over my shoulder into Grandmother’s kitchen window.

     Grandmother stood in the middle of the room for a moment, arms folded, watching us go. Then, as the door of the last Toyota clicked shut, her entire body relaxed. Perhaps it was a trick of the tinted windows, but the lines of grief she had accumulated in the past few months seemed to melt from her face. Her lips formed a slow, secret smile.

     She sat down cross-legged, in the fashion of a small girl, in front of Grandfather’s shrine. With tenderness, she picked up his black-and-white portrait and placed upon it a single kiss.

   Nothing says happy holidays like a trip to the mall. Drooping garlands swaying to a decaying cassette player, bleary-eyed consumers everywhere, holiday spirit in the air; the most wonderful time of the year. In between stops and swipes, a child’s will and insistence drags his family onto a different kind of line, to a path striped with candy canes straight to the North Pole. Each step leaves an imprint in plastic snow, all leading toward the big man at the end. For every child, this time is the most important part of the holidays, the moment to speak face-to-face, man-to-man, with Santa Claus himself.

   The Mall Santa does not appear to a kid as just another minimum wage impostor. Even Jews flock to this icon for a moment on Santa’s lap (I know from personal experience). To someone with baby teeth, regardless of this man’s height, weight, skin color, odor, he is one of a kind, the imagination realized and rationalized.

   So what happens when this youthful exuberance grows up, gains a belly of its own, and looks for something new to brighten the holidays behind a tidal wave of credit card bills and spoiled eggnog? Sitting on Santa’s lap is a no-no once you have student loans under your belt. To bring out the holiday spirit in this crowd, you’ve got to introduce alcohol, drive up the sex, and mash it all together into an event that Santa would not be proud to sponsor.



*



   The first step in attending a Santa Claus convention: Find a suit. A quick search online brings the cheapest set of suit, beard, and hat to around 35 dollars. On top of this order, I throw in a few other presents for my family, since the holidays are about giving, not receiving. Also, free shipping.

   Running late the morning of the event, I try on the costume for the first time. As I pull the pants up, it appears 35 dollars buys itchy polyester and extreme vanity sizing. With no time to change, I hop out of the house carrying the rest of the costume, and race away in a Honda sleigh.

   The steering wheel glides under my polyester gloves, realigning the vehicle while shooting my hat into the passenger seat. It falls into a pile of synthetic flannel, a crumpled assortment thrown on top of a faded Thomas Guide and a half-eaten bag of Reese’s Pieces. My hand reaches into the glob of red clothing, pulling out a warped belt, gas money, and more Reese’s Pieces before turning its attention to the radio dial and raising the volume to drown out my own rendition of “Feliz Navidad.”

   By the time Rudolph makes his way onto the radio, I reach my first destination and unlock the child lock on my mother’s car to welcome friend number one. It has been months since we’ve seen each other, so we exchange the usual pleasantries while driving to friend number two’s house: how’s school, nice weather today, still no girlfriend; nothing unexpected, until I shoot a glance at his sorry Santa hat and ask, “Where’s your costume?”

   He says no one is going to have a costume, to which I point at my red sweatpants, white gloves, and the rest of the Santa suit beneath his rear end. When we pull up to friend two’s house, three honks drag him out the front door, with only a splash of red on his head to brighten up his faded jeans and field jacket. For the purposes of our holiday excursion, let’s call these two friends Buddy and Ralphie.

   Once we reach cruising altitude on the carpool lane and the carols die down to “Silent Night,” Buddy reaches around his seat and pulls out the bag of candy. He offers the bag to Ralphie before placing it on the pile of clothes. Until thirty minutes ago this pile sat in an Amazon Prime box waiting for the opportunity to be ripped open like a present on Christmas morning. It sits once again, folded, but incomplete without the liberally sized pants now draped across my thighs. Rather than complete the look for myself, splitting the costume three ways seems to be the most utilitarian option, which the passengers agree to with a nod.

   “What is this again?”

   I glance over my glasses into the rearview mirror.

   “It’s an X-rated Santa convention.” At least that’s the paraphrased answer I pitched over text message last night.

   Once they realize that itching cloth will soon be draped across their backs too, the holiday spirit drains from their eyes and exits their mouths in groans. From the passenger seat, Buddy eyes his future outfit without confidence. Reaching between his legs, I grab the oversized buttoned-down top and launch it at his head.

   “Merry Christmas.”



*



   Attending SantaCon requires no invitation or press pass, just a costume and a wallet to keep pace with your stomach. Beginning with a local gathering of the San Francisco Cacophony Society (known for “experiences beyond the mainstream”), SantaCon has since spread holiday cheer to over 321 cities in 44 countries around the globe. Through a coordinating website and word of mouth, the gathering adds new cities each year, crawling between locations during the holiday season. When the calendar flips to December, SantaCons pop up daily, with the majority scheduling their gathering of Santas on a work-friendly Saturday afternoon. Today’s festivities lie on the Saturday before Christmas, celebrating Santa’s return with an hour-long drive from the heart of Los Angeles to the coastal town of Long Beach.

   From the hours of two to three in the afternoon, Kelly Clarkson’s Holiday Hits fill the vehicle before the freeway ends in palm trees and a soft breeze. A few twists and turns through a neighborhood of hedges shepherds us to a strip of pubs and small-town shops. Here, neon signs invite us to holiday deals and happy hours. Five minutes along this commercial road ends with a painted sign, which along with the GPS announces you have arrived at your destination. Behind the welcome banner congregates a horde of Santas, each with at least one red article of clothing, and most with a full snow-white beard.

   Even with sweat beading under their beards, each Santa remains in costume and character. Over the roaring laughter on this street corner, the shopping bystanders and driving rubberneckers seem imposing and out of place. A honk from behind reminds us to mind our place in line, but the following ho ho ho blurs it once again.

   Parking takes 15 minutes, five to find a spot on a one-way street, ten to parallel park. Exiting the vehicle proves to be a greater challenge, as my pants tumble down and pool around my brown boots. What a day to wear green boxers.

   “Let’s see what Santa brought this year.”

   Without a workshop to produce presents, I turn to the contents of the vehicle to dole out gifts. For Buddy, the top half of the costume looks about the right size, fitting snugly over his black hoodie. A full beard and head of white hair should work for Ralphie, who ends up hiding his childish face behind polyester whiskers. “It itches,” he says. “And tastes like plastic.”

   With the costume spread between the three of us, we walk down the block as three Santa Clauses. At the corner I tighten the belt to the smallest setting, but the pants continue to sag with each step. On the other side of the block, a piercing whistle whirls us around to see one of our hats alone in the crosswalk. We each run our fingers through our hair, and Ralphie discovers his error and runs back through traffic to pick it up.

   Twenty steps bring us to stop number one, where the identical costumes transform into individual homage. Held together by their identical exteriors, each attendee brings his own take on the suit to today’s festivities. Before we can further examine the differences in fit and take a look under each beard, a man stumbles into our path and sticks out his hand.

   “Welcome to SantaCon,” he says, “I’m not the official greeter but I guess since no one’s doing it, it’s officially my job now, right?”

   He waits for us to respond, swaying and exhaling thick, wet breaths. Without a red suit, his black costume seems out of place, until he lurches forward and bobs his hat, bowing the toothy smile of Jack Skellington perched atop his head. Nightmare Before Christmas, the first riff on the theme.

   “Thanks for noticing. Why don’t you all go on inside and have a drink. Welcome to SantaCon!”

   A silence sinks into our conversation. Surrounded by chatter in every direction, we make the move toward the bar while the unofficial greeter stares at the spot we just left.



*



   Each SantaCon coordinates the event in a different manner, and light national oversight gives the local chapters free reign in determining the course of the day. A quick view at the itineraries online reveals a heavy emphasis on pub crawls, progressing from bar to bar each hour until the carols lose their tune, along with Santa’s dignity. Some lucky and larger conventions begin with a parade, but most end up devolving along the same liquor-ridden path. The Long Beach SantaCon falls into this larger group.

   The path into the bar is packed with other Santas, so we slide by them, past the glass façade into a quiet table by the bar. With only two seats, I grab the first one, and ask Ralphie to “come sit on Santa’s lap.” He does, for ten seconds, then hops up and leans against the window next to a table of elves. Instead of bringing them into the conversation, he stares over their heads outside, where Jack Skellington welcomes the Grinch to the festivities.

   Gazing out the window draws the waitress’s attention, who bounces over to hand us three menus before carols at the other end of the bar summon her away. Instead of deciding between a heart attack in a bun or in a taco shell, we look at the same person spread throughout the crowd over and over again. Each conversation, unique to the Santas involved, blends into one roar.

   “So what’ll it be, boys.”

   I flip through the menu once more, pause for a moment over the nachos, before slamming it shut and asking for water. We all ask for water.

   The silence she leaves behind fills with the sound of screeching chairs and shuffling feet, accompanied by the sight of Santas flowing out the front door. Ten feet out the door, ten feet to the right, and they arrive at the next destination and push their way inside.

   In the wake of the migration, other customers emerge from the shadows, and follow their own, unique trajectory back to the bar. The only similarity between these men and the Santas is their facial hair, except these beards are attached by wrinkles, not glue. Between their spots in the back and places at the bar, the football broadcast stays on the same channel, but for the first time we can hear that the Trojans are up by three touchdowns. A silver and black Santa storms in with a Raider’s bobble-head dangling from his cap, and seats himself with the regulars.

   Five more minutes of looking and two more inquiries lead us to vacate our seats and follow the exodus out the front door. Outside the establishment, Santas continue to converse over paper bags, sipping from these containers during lulls in the conversation. The entrance to the next bar resembles the Berlin Wall. Outside we wait our turn, but only so many Santas can fit through one chimney before it closes off for good.

   Motioned behind a velvet rope, we fill the front of the line while others file in behind us. Two girls in red short shorts walk by when a cab rolls up to the curb and spills out a pile of Santa Clauses. Behind this crowd arrives an elf in a green body suit. Between his legs hang a stocking and two tiny jingle bells.

   With no sign the line will lead anywhere any time soon, we vacate our spots behind the rope, and run back into Jack.

   “Welcome to SantaCon!”

   Rather than engage him a second time, my hand shoots out and grabs the photographer, asking him to take a picture of our group. Pictures from SantaCons around the globe can be found online to either relive or live the moment. Most pictures accumulate through a collage of shaky camera shots, but the DSLR attached at the wrist to today’s photographer will hopefully lead to clearer memories.

   Eager to commemorate the day, our photographer guides us to the proper lighting, and I trade my camera for a pose. Three clicks of the camera, followed by a pause as we wait for the electronic shutter on my phone to release us from stretched smiles. These sounds never arrive, and when the phone returns to my hand, the pictures do not. It seems that touch screens are not compatible with Santa’s gloves.

   Once again, we ask Santa for a picture for Christmas, and he obliges with the same smile, removing his gloves and snapping three memories. This time my phone captures the memories, along with an oil smudge across the home button.

   I turn to my left and reenter the original pub, filling the same table as before. Now the table is empty, except for three thin circles of water. This time Ralphie sits on my lap without me asking, so I shove him off into the window.

   A new waitress walks by and offers us drinks, but all three Santas just ask for water.

   “Drink all that water and you’ll have to pee, and have you ever tried peeing in a Santa suit?”

   This comment swivels our attention to the bar, where the last Santa standing pushes off his stool and makes his way toward us. He sways a bit, just enough to crunch the can inside the brown paper bag in his left hand.

   “Hello Santa.”

   “Hello, Santa,” we say.

   “So why isn’t Santa drinking?”

   “Santa is in college,” I say.

   “Did Santa forget his presents at the North Pole?”

   “Santa’s workshop is a bit short on funds.”

   “Even Santa needs a gift during the holidays,” he says, lifting up his can and drawing a long sip.

   The conversation continues, and the only information we gain from this man comes from his red, velvet uniform. No personal information, no authenticity, just anonymity behind Santa’s fraying whiskers.

   “Did you know there were over 400 Santas last week in Eagle Rock?”

   I did not know that. Eagle Rock would have been much more convenient, only a 15-minute drive. We could have even stopped on the way and bought another costume.

   “I think there’s at least 80 of us here tonight,” he adds, “are you guys sure you don’t want beers? Santas don’t let other Santas not drink.”

   Again, we refuse, placing the blame on Santa’s preference for milk over alcohol. Sandwich Bag Santa bids us adieu with three high fives and a ho ho ho before venturing onto the patio to socialize with more short shorts Santas. This time their shorts are different colors, but at least their hats are all red.



*



   A quick look at the SantaCon website brings up today’s schedule, which leaves us 35 minutes to kill before attempting pub number three. The options at this point include round three at bar number one, round two in bar two’s line, or another store along the boulevard. We take our chances with the final option, moving out and perusing the shops along the street.

   This path leads nowhere, until a globe of gumballs draws us into a bike shop. Inside, the chessboard flooring draws our attention to the second level, where bikes shrink to skateboards and neon helmets lose their padding. Whimsy bleeds onto the wheels, whose marbled foundation spins round and round to make solid colors. The floor plan leaves room for one of us to go for a spin, and Ralphie seizes the opportunity to be the first skating Santa. That is, until a glare from the upper management ends his reign.

   Now with ten minutes left before five o’clock, the skateboards return to their racks, and the door sensor announces our exit from the store. Along the way to our destination a hat tumbles again into the crosswalk. This time Ralphie turns around and grabs it before a car does.

   On the other side of the block, groups of dancing Santas cross our path and flamenco into a random bar. A double-checking of the itinerary labels this location as stop number five, which, when coupled with the volume of their entrance, pushes them much further into the evening than planned.

   More Santas flood the streets, turning our walk into an upstream trek. By the time we pass the original pub, the regulars’ whispering are the only signs of Santa’s presence. The silence around these men sole into the street, only to be interrupted as a belly falls out of the second establishment and shouts “SantaCon.” He watches us for a response, shouts “SantaCon” one more time, before hobbling away toward our destination. Rather than follow him, we find we are all suddenly tired, and agree to call it a day. The boulevard takes us away from the shops and back to the car. With each step the beach crashes closer to our feet, pulling us out to the water, and rather than stop at home base, we continue down the sidewalk toward the setting sun, passing sand-caked pedestrians returning from a sun-tanned day. To answer their sideways glances, we shout “Merry Christmas.”

   The targets of these outbursts fall behind our quick pace, but never fail to respond without a smile. After delivering our well wishes to a real life Mr. and Mrs. Claus, someone accosts us from a second-story balcony. Turning up to face the source of this outburst brings us face-to-face with a six-year-old elf, who shouts “Merry Christmas, Santa” before running into the recesses of her home. At the end of the block, the street opens onto Pacific Coast Highway, where only a row of palm trees and traffic separate us from the beach.

   We wait on the side of the freeway until proper timing propels us across the street. We hop the knee-high wall and sink into the ground.

   Still a long ways from the water, a bike path leads us on a course that slopes to the coastline. We flow in the opposite direction of traffic, looking each passerby in the eye as we bring holiday cheer along the coast.



*



   I couldn’t sleep the night before SantaCon. It was like the night before Christmas, except the only creature stirring was tossing and turning in bed.

   Around the world, other Santas begin and end their night according to their choosing. In Birmingham, a parade dumps the inaugural convention of Alabama into their first bar, while the Santas in Buffalo slide along the snow-covered sidewalk between locations. Eugene follows a similar, shaky path as Long Beach. Shanghai rests for the night, having already completed the day’s trials with minimal arrests. Here, we sit on the damp sand, just beyond the tide, and sing “Jingle Bells.”

    A specter is haunting the World Wide Web—the specter of smarm. 

    Or so Tom Scocca, features editor at Gawker, would have it. His bombastic opinion piece “On Smarm” took the online literary world  by storm last December, drawing not just affirming nods from fellow smarm-conspiracy theorists but replies from big names like Maureen Dowd and Malcolm Gladwell as well. (It also drew a fair number of unique page views: more than “I Can’t Stop Looking At This Weird Chinese Goat,” but less than “Two Minutes Of Nothing But Goats Yelling Like Humans,” which is fairly strong on the Gawker scale of buzz). 

    In Scocca’s view, the proliferating complaints about snark and its dominance have got the whole thing upside down. We do not live  in an age of snark, he says. We live instead in an age of smarm— and here, Scocca argues, in a succinct eight and a half thousand words, be the real dragons. Scocca is reluctant to explain just what he means by snark. He would rather talk about smarm, which he defines like this: 



*Smarm is a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves. *



    The real danger of smarm, Scocca writes, is that it lets people off the hook: It uses niceness as a cover for evasion. Faced with any kind of criticism, the “smarmer” tries to silence the critic without addressing the content of the objection. 

    Armed with this exciting new term, Scocca’s essay assembles a formidable parade of smarmers for us to scrutinize—smarmers in literature, smarmers in journalism, smarmers in politics. Isaac Fitzgerald, editor of the newly created BuzzFeed Books section, cops a particular bruising for his determination to publish only positive book reviews, in adherence to the “Bambi rule”—*If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.* The “no haters” ethos of BuzzFeed, Scocca claims, has allowed that website to thrive in the “online sharing economy,” where agreeability leads to popularity and popularity leads to value. Other so-called smarmers are called out, as well: Joe Lieberman, Niall Ferguson, and Jonah Lehrer— Mayor Bloomberg even gets a look-in—not to mention Malcolm Gladwell, and from there, naturally, the whole political discourse of Bush-era foreign policy. 

    Special attention is reserved for Dave Eggers, the “most significant explicator of the niceness rule,” the “true prophetic voice of anti-negativity,” whose by-now half-famous “sell-out” rant in an interview with* The Harvard Advocate* in 2000 culminated in a feverish invocation to create rather than dismiss: “Do not be critics, you people,” Eggers fumed. “Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them.” 

    Scocca uses Eggers as his point of entry and exit in the piece. Eggers’s rant must surely be the epitome of smarm. *Don’t call me a sell-out*, Scocca’s puppet-Eggers seems to say. *You have no right, because I am out here doing real work, whereas you are simply sniping from the sidelines*. Such a glass-jawed refusal to be criticized must no doubt be an act of bad faith. And surely, if the world is run on smarm, then the only right response is to rebel—to defend at all costs the right to criticize and interrogate. 

    Except that Scocca doesn’t really make this case in his article. For one thing, he is wrong about Dave Eggers. (For another, he seems to misrepresent most of his sources.) Scocca’s essay is strongest where it critiques the ways in which the politically powerful make appeals to niceness as a way to silence debate. But only very few of his examples fit this framework. Throughout the majority of his piece, Scocca is actually on the defensive: He conceptualizes snark and smarm as opposing forces, hoping to use the ubiquity of smarm as a justification for snark. By stretching smarm so thin, however, Scocca fails to articulate a useful or coherent sense of the concept. 

    I found Scocca’s essay to be rather appealing when I first read it through, and this appeal is what makes “On Smarm” worth returning to—the article has the potential to operate quite forcefully, as long as its sources are not double-checked and as long as its rhetorical tricks remain unexamined. Scocca earns his supporters through an extensive use of double-negative: Anti-negativity is smarm, which is bad (because Bush!), so we must prefer its opposite—negativity, and therefore snark. But this double-negative hinges on a false set of alternatives. One can refuse smarm and refuse snark as well. In fact, snark and smarm are not so incompatible, as Tom Scocca’s lengthy screed confirms. “On Smarm” reveals itself to be a botched manifesto for snark—and in its dreary and self-interested botching, it begins to take the form of Scoccan smarm. 

    One must argue back against Scocca’s piece, not for the sake of positivity, but for the sake of the real casualty of Scocca’s argument: all the useful and productive forms of negative speech. 



* 



    “On Smarm” was met by an odd reception. Malcolm Gladwell posted a reply that insisted on the value of “niceness.” Maureen Dowd affirmed her conviction of the need for negativity. Ryan Kearney at *The New Republic*, meanwhile, jumped in to defend Scocca’s pillorying of Dave Eggers. A strange ambiguity characterized the whole debate, propelling it ever further into abstraction. This unease was neatly captured by Dylan Matthews, Tom Scocca’s interviewer at the *Washington Post*, who confessed that he “kind of” sympathized with one of his readers who complained that he or she was “completely unable to construct ideas out of those words” that had been published. 

    If the categories at play in Scocca’s argument—snark and smarm, negativity and criticism—are proving difficult to mobilize in the snarknado’s aftermath, then this is not because they are overly intellectual or remarkably intricate. It is because they are bullshit categories, or at least poorly defined ones. This vagueness in terms is not incidental to the thrust of “On Smarm.” It is integral to the logic of the piece, and to the scope of its ambition.

    The key misdirection at the heart of the essay is Scocca’s unwillingness to address the question of snark. At first, he appears to accept the definition he lifts from Heidi Julavits’s essay in* The Believer*: “a hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt.” But then, without any explicit justification, it becomes clear that defending snark is his real intention. “On Smarm” is even framed around the rhetorical question: “to what is [snark] responding?” 

    The answer, of course, is smarm. And what makes smarm appealing is the fact that it justifies snark. “Some snark is rotten and harmful and stupid,” Scocca confesses. “Smarm, however, is never a force for good.” Changing the subject to smarm allows Scocca to avoid the task that he seems remarkably eager to avoid: Not once in the over 8,000 words of this *snark de triomphe* does he give a positive example of snark. 

    Scocca’s trick lies in suggesting that every one of his critics is necessarily a smarmer. Smarm, then, begins to mean “resistance to snark.” Which Scocca wants to quash, for all of the obvious reasons, but he refuses to do so by arguing directly with his critics—foremost among them David Denby, who wrote a book on the topic called* Snark*. He does not argue for the merits of snark, nor does he attempt to show a difference between what he and his colleagues do and what Heidi Julavits has identified. Scoccan snark, like Scoccan smarm, would rather talk about anything except itself. And so we are taken on this ponderous journey through time and space-breaks (with, admittedly, a few solid insights along the way), only to find out that the destination is an outdated, indirect justification for what the former Gawker editor A.J. Daulerio has decried as “snappy snarky snarking snark-snark shit.”

    The double-negative that lends “On Smarm” its rhetrical force is enabled by this cultivated ambiguity of terms. If smarm is anti-negativity, then we should opt for anti-anti-negativity—that is, plain old snarky negativity. So unless you believe that every gesture should always  be positive, congratulations! You have just joined Team Snark. No, you don’t get a free t-shirt. 

    After Scocca’s initial attack on Dave Eggers, he takes a second to anticipate the reader’s objections. His response to these is telling. “That’s it,” Scocca writes. “You’re getting it. That’s smarm.” By insisting on snark as the natural alternative to smarm (and vice versa), and by keeping the argument locked in abstraction, Scocca can claim any ideological ally he likes—and he can smear just about anybody he likes, whether or not he has the necessary evidence. 

    David Denby’s book on snark, which was one of the inspirations for the essay, is never addressed in the piece. Instead, in a section lumped in near the end, Scocca recounts a review Denby wrote on Spike Lee’s* Do The Right Thing* back in 1989, which (in Scocca’s retelling at least) made a problematic stance on race and violence. “Keep this in mind,” Scocca writes, “when David Denby puts himself forward as an expert on the terms of appropriate and inappropriate response.” Denby on “snark” goes completely unaddressed. Scocca tries to disqualify him by attacking him ad hominem, using a completely tangential point to mobilize the reader’s moral suspicions and to make Denby seem not up- but downworthy. Does this open Scocca up to criticism—for using snideness and suggestiveness instead of actual argument?

    *That’s it*, Tom Scocca might reply. *That’s it. You’re getting it. That’s smarm. 

*    Scocca also proposes through a suggestive parenthetical aside, devoid of any context, that Chris Jones—with whom he has previously had a public spat—is a sexist. What if one took Scocca to task for this laziness, as well? 

   * Yes, yes*, Tom Scocca cries, triumphant. *You’re getting it.* These objections are not smarmy at all, however—they are an argument back against poor, unfinished, self-serving criticism. Scocca’s use of “smarm” permits the kind of evasiveness that he associates with smarm in the first place. *Stand back,* he seems to say, *in the pose of the smarmer. What I’m doing is important, and it’s us against them. If you argue with me, then you are part of the problem, not the solution. So hush now, people, hush. *



***



    Tom Scocca’s screed feels decidedly out of place on the pages of Gawker.com. It doesn’t fit the web design; it doesn’t fit the tagline *Today’s gossip is tomorrow’s news*. It also sits uncomfortably in Scocca’s own writer’s profile: days before “On Smarm,” he published a literal ranking of the sauces. Such diversity of output is an asset, not a liability, to Scocca and his employer. Still, the curious placement of this essay is part of the story of its production, and there is something to be gained by reading “On Smarm” in the context of Gawker’s current identity crisis—which is also Gawker’s branding crisis, since content and marketing are never too far from each other in the Gawker Media empire. 

    As Scocca’s argument builds to a crescendo, he connects the alleged smarm of Dave Eggers to the marketing discourse of personal branding. Spuriously linking Eggers’ *Advocate* rant to an essay called “The Brand Called You” by Tom Peters, Scocca associates the style of smarm with the “credentialism” of the marketer. (Remember that Scocca has linked BuzzFeed to marketing, as well, through the currency of agreeability.) What Scocca brushes aside, however, is the fact that negativity can also be a brand, as long as it works in predictable ways. And he should know, since the best example of this kind of branding happens to be his employer, Gawker Media. In fact, one of the products available on Gawker’s advertising page is something called a “Partner Post,” which offers companies the following proposition: “Your message, our signature tone.” As Chris Matthews at CNET puts it: 



*Here is a brand that is very open about what it is. And it is very open about where its priorities lie. Every customer of Gawker knows precisely what the product is, why they are using it and what to expect…The relationship between brand and user is clear, consistent and, therefore, functional. *



    Snark is imperative to the Gawker Media empire; it is the “signature tone” of the Gawker brand. If we are going to accuse Dave Eggers of smarming back at his critics, in the interests of defending his brand, then we might level the same accusation at Tom Scocca. 

    The Gawker brand is currently faced with a unique set of pressures, a situation which makes Tom Scocca’s screed all the more valuable as a rare moment of insight into the self-understanding and the worldview of a senior Gawker editor. It would be unfair to demand that Scocca be consistent with the priorities of his employer: By no means is “On Smarm” necessarily *the* Gawker manifesto. Still, we can read it as one possible Gawker manifesto for the moment. Scocca does, after all, refer to his “personal stakes and connections,” and his piece is listed at the top of Gawker’s “The Best Gawker Posts of 2013.” 

    Gawker’s identity crisis is an enviable one: As the world’s most successful blog over the last decade, it no longer fits its underdog image. Gawker Media (which also owns Deadspin, Lifehacker, Jezebel, and io9, among others) enjoyed over 100 million unique page views in November couldn’t find this. With ultra-low costs and high advertising revenues, the Gawker bloggernaut is one of relatively few consistently profitable media enterprises. An anti-establishment bent gave the cheek of early Gawker a sense of rebellious moral purpose. But the original Gawker concept—snarky, pitiless, shamelessly ratings-driven—is increasingly under pressure from its size and its influence. As Carla Blumenkranz at *n+1* has convincingly argued, the sarcasm that is charming from an underdog can seem bullying in the mouth of a top dog. “You could say that as Gawker Media grew, from Gawker’s success,” Blumenkranz wrote, “Gawker outlived the conditions for its existence.” 

    Another threat to Gawker’s traffic dominance comes in the form of the cat-crazy BuzzFeed and the choir-preaching feelgood factory of Upworthy. Gawker’s dedication to both popularity and seriousness has seen it tugged in two different directions. As Andrew Phelps at the Nieman Lab reports: “Half of people think Gawker is diluting its high-quality material with Chinese goats; the other half think Gawker should stick to Chinese goats and stop trying to do real journalism.” 

    Last December, after BuzzFeed’s November traffic had surpassed that of Gawker, Gawker’s chief Nick Denton responded with a surprising defense: “The crowd will eventually choose the juicy truth over a heartwarming hoax,” he told the *Financial Times*. Denton also complained about Upworthy: “even smarmier than BuzzFeed.” The happy union of snarkiness, traffic, and truth-telling appears to be unraveling for Gawker. After years of cultivating snark as a way to keep the bastards honest, what ever is Gawker to do when its editors wake up one morning and realize with a shock that now they are the bastards? Hence Nick Denton’s appeal to the moral high ground— and hence Tom Scocca’s too, perhaps.   

    Gawker’s proud fixation on page views has an immense influence on its content—which need not pose a problem to a small, snarky gossip blog. But this fixation becomes problematic when Gawker begins to take on real news, and when the interests of virality begin to clash with newfound claims of journalistic responsibility. As Felix Salmon has reported, when a suspicion arose that one of Gawker’s viral posts had linked to a fake (“Grandpa Writes Letter Disowning Daughter After She Disowns Gay Son”), Gawker’s editor John Cook had the following to say: 



*I’d rather be calling bullshit on stuff like this than calling attention to it...But we are tasked both with extending the legacy of what Gawker has always been—ruthless honesty—and be reliably and speedy on top of internet culture all while getting a shit-ton of traffic. Those goals are sometimes in tension. *



    Caught between responsible journalism, gossipy snark, and an army of viral cats, the Gawker brand is facing serious pressure. Thankfully, Tom Peters has a pointer for moments of crisis: “Go back to the comparison between brand You and brand X—the approach the corporate biggies take to creating a brand.” For Gawker, there is nothing so priceless as an opportunity to carve out distance from BuzzFeed on the grounds of its own seriousness. At best, Tom Scocca uses Isaac Fitzgerald’s comments at the launch of BuzzFeed Books as a token excuse for timeliness. At worst, it is a cynical tool for defensive self-branding. 

    But this is snark that we are talking about, here. Snark doesn’t position itself in the marketplace: Snark flips the bird and wanders off. Snark doesn’t respond to David Denby with a many-thousand-word treatise, smarming its way out of real criticism. Snark, at its best, has no time for the moral high ground. 

    Tom Scocca makes the case that smarm is usually the weapon of the powerful. What would a world look like where the beleaguered Gawker Empire continues to snark but adds smarm to its arsenal? The comments sections for “On Smarm” gives some indication. When one commenter objects that the problem of snark in reviews has not been addressed in Scocca’s essay—and adds that the affected world-weariness of young Gawker writers seems “unearned, and cheap”—he is met with the following reply from Scocca: “‘Unearned’ is on the Smarm Bingo card.” 

    In reply to Malcolm Gladwell’s rather dashed-off response, which challenged Scocca’s selective use of quotations from the Eggers interview, Scocca wrote: 



*Malcolm Gladwell deepens our understanding of smarm by explaining that when Dave Eggers wrote the words ‘Do not be critics,’ he meant people should be critics. *



    By this point, Scocca is simply pointing and accusing. Yes, you’re getting it, he is saying. That’s smarm. And he is using that accusation as a way out of the argument. 



* 



    What Scocca seems to ignore in all this is the difference between gratuitous negativity and valuable criticism. Scocca wants to take the world’s fact-checkers and conscientious objectors as his allies— though it is unclear whether they would choose him as their ally. When he conflates negativity (the saying of negative things) with negativity (a stance of sneering dismissal), he erases the possibility of a productive or creative kind of criticism—something different from critical-ness. In either case, the task remains to rescue productive criticism from Scocca’s sinking ship. 

    Luckily, as it turns out, a good start on this difficult task has already been made by Scocca’s own sources, in the many parts of their works that he neglected in his quest for incriminating evidence. David Denby’s Snark spends a vast number of pages sorting through exactly which kinds of negativity he finds unhelpful and which kinds he supports. Far from being opposed to negativity as such, Denby ends his book with a note of praise for Stephen Colbert’s critical powers and with a plea for his readers to go out and commit some “vituperation that is insulting, nasty, but, well, clean.” Denby, it turns out, is not opposed to negativity at large (I certainly got the impression he was while reading “On Smarm”). 

    In her own Believer essay, Heidi Julavits is not out to trick you when she writes: “To be perfectly clear—I am not espousing a feel-good, criticism-free climate.” She goes on to confess an “intellectual crush” on the “curmudgeonly” critic James Wood. Even in his overwhelmingly negative book reviewing, Julavits argues, there is a positive belief in the better possibilities for contemporary fiction, along with “room for a dialogue with Wood, which indicates there’s something to wrangle over.” Taken in full, Julavits’s essay is much more a plea for productive criticism than it is an attack on snark itself. Tom Scocca quotes her with the following line: 



*“If snark is a reaction to this sheer and insulting level of hyperbole, fine—” *



but then he cuts her off there, removing the second half of the sentence, which asked why the writer (who has not chosen the book cover or written the PR copy) should have to receive the disdain. Scocca silences a voice that does believe in the uses of negativity: He would rather paint her as one more member of the worldwide Smarmy Army. 

    The difference between takedown negativity and productive negativity was exemplified in that other great drama of last December, the *Love Actually* saga. Christopher Orr of *The Atlantic* came out with a ruthless critique of the much-beloved Frankenstein’s Monster of a rom-com. After much online grumbling, Orr clarified his point. He held disdain for *Love Actually*only because he thought it missed all the important parts of love: his negativity, under pressure, clarified the possibilities that the film left out. In doing so, Orr was making a set of positive, descriptive claims about love. He was telling a love story of his own. 

    Over at Jezebel, meanwhile, at the girl-targeted holding of the Gawker Media empire, Lindy West produced a breathtaking, hilarious takedown of the film. Her intentions were clear from the get-go: the piece ran under the title “I Rewatched *Love Actually* And Am Here to Ruin It For All of You.” West was in no mood to cut Richard Curtis any slack, and her piece admitted no quality to the more successful elements of the film. (In her frenzy, West also denounced something that was actually fairly realistic in the film, and fairly easily double-checked: the presence of Portuguese guest workers in rural France.) West’s piece makes for enjoyable reading, but she has approached the film with different aims from the aims of a critic. She came to snark, and she took no prisoners. 

    By no means do I believe the Lindy Wests of the world should have their keyboards taken from them. West’s piece is certainly not without value. Yet it is not a meaningful contribution to criticism in the way that Christopher Orr’s essays are. Tom Scocca defends the role of snark in messianical terms, as if it is the only available answer to BuzzFeed’s Bambi Rule and his smarmy opponents. In the field of arts criticism, at least, this is plainly not the case. There, negativity certainly has its place—but we should be careful not to confuse the playful vanity of the takedown rant with the productive critical output of those who will stand hard by their claims. And if Scocca wants to refute the criticisms of snark that are posed by Denby, Julavits, and Eggers, then he must do so on terms more specific than his essay presents. 



* 



    Which brings us back to poor, poor Dave Eggers, victim now of not one but two attention-seeking takedowns, if we count Tom Scocca alongside his old mates and allies who launched* n+1* in 2004 with a vitriolic—and since partially retracted—attack on Mr. Eggers and the “Eggersards.” 

    “Do not be critics, you people.” It is certainly no coincidence that Dave Eggers was speaking to *The Harvard Advocate*when he made this argument. Eggers was offering specific, pragmatic advice to a group of undergraduates. He was also provoked by a line of questioning that was grating and self-satisfied in tone. The* Advocat*e interviewer began by communicating his hopes that Eggers was finally free from the “perfidious yoke of those Massachusetts McSweeneys. Talk about a McFaustian bargain!” It is also important to read the Eggers interview in terms of the very specific discussion that was being entertained. The *Advocate* president was not arguing about the quality of Eggers’s work—he was questioning Eggers’s legitimacy purely on the grounds of the material conditions of how Eggers was publishing. This discussion is a familiar one for young people who are interested in alternative culture and suspicious of the influence that mainstream success might have on an artist’s integrity. Does success alone make you a sell-out? Is Dave Eggers, then, a sell-out? The crucial point here is that no one was asking questions about the honesty or the quality of Dave Eggers’s work. He was not being fact-checked by the *Advocate* president. He was on trial for complicity with power, and the punishment was tossed on the don’t-read pile. So, when Dave Eggers says, “Do not dismiss a book until you have written one,” he means exactly what he is saying: Do not dismiss it, out of hand, without having read it. He is arguing specifically about the proposition that mainstream success might make somebody unreadable. Against that proposition, he says: No. Read them. 

    And then, of course, you can do whatever you like to them. Dismissal is not the same as negative feedback; dismissal means not even thinking about it. Eggers clearly admits the existence of “fair and helpful book critics.” What he is arguing against here is specifically the kind of negativity that knows it’s out to get you in advance: the kind of negativity that won’t even listen. He is arguing specifically against snark, not against negativity at large. 

    The overblown tone of Eggers’s speech in this interview is certainly worth criticizing. Nevertheless, his words take on a different meaning when they are read in their proper context. The “sell-out” accusation was never targeted at Eggers’s work—it was targeted at the fact of his success and his activity. 

    As a former* Advocate* president myself, I feel inclined towards Eggers’s words in the context of undergraduate literary culture. The line being adopted by the Eggers interviewer is one that brings out the worst in us, as student editors: It prefers the easy gains of ridicule to the real rewards of the learning that goes on when one exposes oneself to new and alternative ways of thinking. If anecdotal evidence is worth anything, then I shall be the first in line to testify that snarky talk from college *literati* finds its roots, more often than not, in one’s own creative insecurities. I have seen it, and I have done it myself. 

    By structure and by necessity, the *Advocate *staff must make negative decisions: stories must be rejected from the issues, and would-be editors must be rejected from the masthead. Although our authority is scant, we find that we need to be critics—which is fine, for the most part, because we do believe in criticism. But the exercise of that criticism must take place in a creative community of young people, a community where vulnerability is necessary if anything interesting is ever going to get done. What kinds of criticism we might permit ourselves in such a field is a difficult question to answer. There is a value to open-mindedness and generosity, here, which goes above and beyond the responsibilities of established writers. And there is a value to giving each other the benefit of the doubt. In national politics, ambition is a danger. Among young artists, we could show a little more patience for each other’s ambitions, as long as they are honest. 

    The debate on snark and smarm has been dominated by the kind of thinking that maintains that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It is easy to like Tom Scocca’s essay on these grounds: He doesn’t like racism, he doesn’t like sexism, and he doesn’t like Upworthy. This kind of opposition, though, is a false one. If criticism really were a case of balancing Boo against Yay, mixing snark in with smarm, then it would be an easy job indeed. Leon Wieseltier of *The New Republic* seems to accept this binary at face value when he says, in Maureen Dowd’s column: “I never thought I’d utter a sentence like this, but I stand with Gawker against BuzzFeed.” 

    God forbid that those should be our options. Awesome and Yuck are not a ying and yang for online journalism—they are a Scylla and Charybdis. Snark and smarm alike should be treated with suspicion by truly thoughtful criticism. They are evasive, self-congratulating techniques, both of which are anathema to the needs of a productive creative community. Snark and smarm are friends who pose falsely as enemies, and one can stand against both of them at once. 

    The snafu over “On Smarm” poses serious questions about what might be missing in this phony set of undesirable alternatives. In a new media landscape that is increasingly obsessed with counting page views, meeting quotas, and delivering “the perfect feed,” the answer might be something like thoughtfulness. Or perhaps, in this brand-dominated online space, which specializes in figuring out what we want and then giving it to us, the answer lies in something like surprise. Something like courage. 

On the first day she painted nothing. She breathed in the cool lucid morning and watched the light cast her husband’s skin red, then gold, then glaring white as the sun edged above the house and scared away the shadows. He lay twisted away from her, face down on the driveway. She had him stretch his arms by his sides and splay his legs akimbo. She worried that his knee and back would bother him but she had no other choice.

Dante’s dad describes everything gone wrong in terms of what’s happened to Aerosmith. He’ll take it back to RunDMC and Walk this Way.

1. The bikini I wore in Capri, the one you said made me look like a starlet. After one last swim, I rinsed it out, promised myself to retrieve it from the bathroom after I finished packing. But it was only when we were on the mainland that I remembered, already on our way to the airport. I’m sure the hotel can send it, you said. It was a five-star hotel, the most beautiful place either of us had ever stayed, with the sort of view you expect on a honeymoon. You were still married then—separated, but still married—and our affair had already lost its sheen. You look like a Hollywood starlet, you said, watching me climb out of the pool. You wouldn’t swim with me and so I lapped in the water alone. And then, dripping, grateful to be noticed for a moment—because you had stopped noticing by then—I stood still, in that inky blue bikini, brand new, purchased before we left New York. You look like a Hollywood starlet, you said, but you were looking past me as if I were already a memory, a picture to be filed away. In the business class lounge in Rome, waiting for our flight back to New York, I emailed the hotel to ask about the bikini, and they said it was gone. No sign of it, they said, with deep regret.

Everything was either rain or screens. The screens shined out and lit up the rain in bulbous shapes. The rain was dripping on the screens too. Mai took her flats off and walked barefoot to the bus. She could feel the gum spots on the sidewalks.

Officers Nebsky and Hallahan retrieved the money during a routine car stop, down Ocean Parkway coming off the Belt, heading west towards Coney Island. The car had been going 70 miles per hour at the end of the avenue, running three red lights. They had been nearly off-duty—they were already on their way back to the precinct—Officer Hallahan had never been in this situation before, and he did what Officer Nebsky told him. The money was in a black garbage bag in the trunk of the car. The driver, a lean man about 6 foot one, 6 foot two, from what they could estimate when he folded out of the car, was cool and collected, even when they asked to see license and registration, even when they asked if he minded if they took a look in his trunk. His name was Paulson Denihew, and he was, in fact, 6 foot four, according to his license. While Officer Nebsky ran Denihew’s license back in their squad car, Denihew asked Officer Hallahan if he might take off his suit jacket, though it was winter, the end of a day of cold sun. Officer Hallahan obliged this request, and Denihew carefully removed his jacket, revealing a perfectly pressed white dress shirt underneath it, the pearly textured kind that Officer Hallahan knew must have cost at least 400 or 500 dollars—he had uncles who worked on Wall Street. Denihew folded the jacket over his wrist and he and Officer Hallahan waited for Officer Nebsky.

Excerpt from The Beast of Gévaudan, a novel

         It suddenly started raining and the only place the Archivist could find to park his car was on the other side of campus. Rain hadn’t been predicted; the sky was clear when he left his apartment, the late spring constellations clustering brightly overhead. He couldn’t see them until he came out from under the trees, though. The Archivist’s street was lined with hawthorns, a fact he would remain ignorant of for the rest of his life, being uninterested for the most part in the living world. Like the stars, the hawthorns’ white flowers were in clusters. Everything was clear and bright, the air so sweet it made him sneeze. Where on earth was the moon? Behind something else. He was trying to locate it when the heavens opened.

         The parking spaces were divided into color-coded areas and came with stickers to match. The red stickers were the most expensive, allowing the operator of a vehicle to park close to the most important buildings; next came the green stickers, followed by the blue, and finally the yellow. The Archivist had never bothered to pay for a parking sticker. He usually walked to work, his apartment being a little less than a mile away from campus. Tonight was a special occasion, though. A local poet who had gone on to achieve greatness had donated her papers to the university, and she was to give a reading in the rare books room, followed by a reception with the Chancellor.

         The Archivist knew the Poet. He had little admiration for her work, and it irked him that he’d been asked to participate in the event, having been charged with providing an introduction for the Chancellor, who would in turn introduce the guest of honor. The Lonely Thoroughfares, the Poet’s first book, had appeared at a particularly difficult time in the Archivist’s life, and he felt like she showed an astounding lack of sympathy for her subject. “Little thing little sniveling thing…” Reading his personally inscribed copy, the Archivist had thought it was almost as if she wanted to make fun of the lonely, of the sorry spectacle they presented, traversing the vast empty thoroughfares of their loneliness. Often in these poems tracks of some kind could be discerned leading into the distance; there would be a leafless tree, an indistinct sound, a choked cry. “Little vagrant…”

         Only one of the critics had remarked on the theft from Hadrian, otherwise Fortuna spit out accolades. As a girl the Poet hadn’t been what you’d call pretty, but at some point that had changed. If the most recent author photo was to be believed, even now, with age making inroads—especially around the eyes and mouth—she remained quite attractive. The photographer had posed her in a straight-backed chair, which seemed appropriate, given her unyielding nature.

         Clearly the evening’s event was going to be unusually well attended. By the time the rain began to fall, those places where a sticker was no longer necessary after five o’clock were already full. The rain was coming down with a force and persistence that made a mockery of windshield wipers. Though the Archivist had put them on their highest setting, he could barely see; every time a car came toward him his windshield turned to a sheet of golden, rippling scales, like a sudden eruption of galaxies or the heaving flank of a giant fish—it would have been beautiful to look at if he didn’t have to drive. Twice he got honked at, once he almost hit a woman he thought he recognized from the political science department. She darted out in front of him in a white, ankle-length raincoat, only to be pulled back at the last minute by her husband, who shook his fist at the retreating car.

         “I’m sorry,” the Archivist said, but of course they couldn’t hear him. As one of the introducers, he had given himself more than ample time to get to campus and park; by now time was running short. The energetic level of conversation that preceded one of these events would have begun its decrescendo into muted speech and, finally, silence. The Chancellor would be scanning the room, pointedly checking his watch, looking for the Archivist. The Poet would be seated in the front row, her head bent over her manuscript, the white stalk of her neck just begging to be slipped in a noose or kissed. XOXO. What kind of an inscription was that, after all those years? “We’ll give him a few minutes,” the Chancellor would be saying, his small mouth pursed with fury. Meanwhile the first weed whacker of the season would have begun tidying the edges of the flowerbeds outside. Like the undead, the university groundskeepers never slept.

         The space the Archivist finally found was at the edge of the blue section, so far removed from the center of campus as to be practically yellow, near Fraternity House Row, a fanciful assortment of structures off to his left whose high gothic style married uneasily with the immense gas grills and piles of athletic equipment filling their courtyards. The Archivist maneuvered his car into the space between two sport utility vehicles. Though it seemed impossible, the rain was coming down harder than ever, its rhythm weirdly syncopated, as if it were being hurled at the body of his car in fistfuls and not falling uniformly from the sky. When he finally opened the door, the Archivist could hear a young man communicating with another young man at the top of his lungs, a string of insults perfectly audible above the sound of the rain. It would be so wonderful to be one of those young men, the Archivist thought, with nowhere to go and no need to make a good impression. He could be drunk and obnoxious and it wouldn’t matter. He could pass out in the driving rain atop a pile of shoulder pads and the world would keep spinning.

         Naturally he hadn’t brought an umbrella—he was going to get drenched. He was going to look pathetic, not unlike Hadrian’s soul. “Little thing, sniveling thing, O where can we put you, dripping and alone?” Immediately ahead and to the right was the apse-shaped back end of January Hall, an immense Romanesque edifice housing several obsolete departments. Once during a snowstorm the Archivist recalled hearing one of his student interns telling another intern that there was a tunnel connecting the basement level of the library with this building. The January Tunnel, the intern explained, pointing down the staircase leading to the stacks, and the Archivist found himself picturing a horsedrawn sleigh flying through a narrow passageway, the occupants wrapped in furs, the tips of the women’s noses bright red. The door at the other end brings you out behind January Hall, the intern had said, near the blue parking lot.

         A curtain of rainwater fell from the eaves of the building; if there was a door there the Archivist certainly couldn’t see one. The Chancellor was no doubt preparing to begin his introduction. The only solution was to take a chance and make a run for it—though if the intern had been lying, by the time the Archivist got to the other side of campus he’d be wet through, the light wool suit he’d bought for the occasion clinging unbecomingly to his sticklike figure. “He looks like you,” the Poet had told him merrily, the first time she got him to play a game of Hangman. She hadn’t been the Poet then—she had just been a standoffish child waiting her turn at the water fountain outside Saint Roch Elementary. When she lowered her lips to drink, he could hear her braces hit the bubbler.

         The Archivist took a breath and dove into the downpour. He couldn’t really tell where he was going; when a door marked “January Tunnel” suddenly appeared in front of him it came as a surprise, as did the fact that he had no trouble getting it open. Once inside, he paused to shake the water from his hair and to wipe his glasses dry on the hem of his dress shirt. The tunnel was well lit, at least at this end—it extended ahead of him a great distance where its brightness devolved into dimness. There was the sound of machinery, a routine thrumming coming from either side as well as overhead, and while there were no machines in view the Archivist wasn’t troubled by the noise. He knew it took an enormous amount of energy to keep a university running smoothly.

         For some reason he couldn’t put his finger on he was feeling happy. Naturally it had been a relief to come in out of the rain—though this particular brand of happiness seemed unrelated to anything as simple as relief. No, there was something about being in the tunnel that was making him feel very happy, almost ecstatically so. Against the wall just inside the door someone had arranged cleaning implements—several brooms, a bucket with a mop in it, a pile of rags—but other than that the tunnel was empty. The walls at this end had been painted with the green, glossy paint beloved of institutions the world over, the paint having been applied in what seemed like a spirit of gay abandon. The smooth concrete floor was splashed with it, and it depended in hardened drips from a series of thin pipes running lengthwise along the ceiling.

         The Archivist’s glasses were steaming up—luckily he hadn’t bothered to tuck his shirt back in. Ever since her cataract surgery the Poet no longer needed corrective lenses of any kind, and at night her gray eyes were said to refract light like an animal’s. The Poet was known for her beautiful eyes, eyes that had been made to appear small and beady throughout her girlhood, due to the unusual thickness of her glasses. For a period she’d worn plaid frames, the plaid of the rims not matching that of the stems. She had been one of the unpopular girls, a condition that hadn’t seemed to bother her, the way being one of the unpopular boys had bothered the Archivist.

         Gradually, as he commenced walking, the Archivist realized he was beginning to hear a second sound insinuating itself under the thrumming sound of the machinery—a fainter sound, more personal, really, in that it seemed meant for his ears alone and not merely a function of the university’s routine operations. Faint and precise, a lightly repeated thwap thwap thwap punctuated with tiny clicks, it suggested the presence of a nearby creature with soft footpads and delicate claws, either running away from him or coaxing him on, though as far as he could tell there was nothing there. Ahead on the left he could see a break in the otherwise unbroken wall that turned out to be a short dark hallway ending with a door that no doubt led to one of the windowless basement-level offices generally bestowed upon adjuncts and teaching assistants. How long had it taken him to crawl his way up from just such an office to the one he had now, with its two large windows facing the graceful, pillared arcade that was one of the university’s celebrated architectural features? Longer than it should have, and the journey had been, frankly, arduous—sacrifices had needed to be made, some of them painful, though in the end all of them had proved worth it.

         Based on the sound of the footfalls it seemed like whatever it was he’d been following had ducked into that approaching, secondary hallway— but when the Archivist looked, the only thing he saw in it was a wadded up ball of paper on the floor near the door, a piece of university letterhead on which someone had drawn ten dashes, penciling in an O above the seventh dash, an X above the eighth. OXOXOXOXOX, the Poet had written in her sloppy mannish handwriting across the title page of his copy of her first book. “This says it all,” she had mumbled, and he knew she didn’t mean hugs and kisses but the design running around the base of the domed ceiling of the symphony hall where he’d taken her to celebrate her sixteenth birthday. “Hug, kiss, hug, kiss,” she’d said during intermission, looking up. She’d sounded exasperated. Though the concert had been atonal and difficult to listen to—not unlike the Poet herself—her exasperation seemed to spring from the fact that such things as hugs and kisses existed in the world. The Archivist smoothed the sheet of paper and tucked it in his breast pocket.

         The further he walked into the tunnel, the more muffled the sound of the machinery; short hallways continued to materialize off to the left, each one culminating in a door with a name card taped to the window. Professor This, Professor That, though clearly none of the occupants had even come close to making full professor. The Archivist recognized some of the names from his stint on CAPT (Committee on Appointments, Promotion and Tenure). Professor Bunting had been a noisy feminist. Professor Liu had been dead for years. All of these offices were dark and the tunnel itself seemed to be growing darker, the light fixtures stationed at greater and greater intervals. Occasionally a door had been left open, revealing a room that looked like it had been abandoned in a great hurry, as if under emergency evacuation orders.

         A period ensued during which the Archivist thought he’d merely imagined the sound of an animal padding along ahead of him; in its place all he could hear was the sound of his stomach. For as long as he could remember he had been prone to anxiety attacks—he hadn’t had a thing to eat since breakfast, nor had he slept well the night before. Ever since the Chancellor’s secretary contacted him about the introduction his appetite had suffered and he’d experienced worse than usual insomnia. “Where was I last Saturday night? Up in the ivy tree. False foxes under me…” How robustly had the Poet ridiculed Helen Vendler’s contention that her Pulitzer winning collection had at its heart a need to come to terms with her own anxiety! “Anxiety is to fear what a canned mushroom is to a truffle,” she had sneered, crumpling the review into a ball before pitching it at him. She had a good arm, the Poet; he’d seen stars more than once during recess games of dodge ball. “Any fool knows my subject is fear,” the Poet went on to say. “Fear stinks like skunk. Anxiety is slippery and odorless.” She told him he put too much faith in the written word, a weird statement coming from a poet, not to mention addressed to a man who’d spent the better part of his life among the archives.

         The tunnel floor was showing signs of increasingly poor drainage. The Archivist had to watch where he put his feet in order to protect his expensive Italian shoes and to keep from slipping—at first he could step over or around the puddles, though eventually there was no way to avoid stepping directly into foul pools of standing water. The quality of the light, too, seemed to be decaying, though ironically enough, the dimmer the tunnel got the further ahead in it he was able to see. At last he thought he could make out the shadowy shape of what certainly looked like an animal, low slung and with a tail that appeared surprisingly full, resplendent even. The animal was slinking along the left-hand side of the tunnel, disappearing from time to time into one or another of the secondary hallways, only to emerge once again further ahead. It was difficult to tell what color she was: sometimes her coat seemed spectral and gray, at other times russet, vulpine. Despite what his eyes told him, though, his sense of the creature—the image she created in his mind—was of pure whiteness.

         She would be upset that the Archivist wasn’t there to hear her. She planned to read from her latest collection, the title of which she’d refused to reveal to anyone, though her editor must have known it. The publication date was still a week off.

         She used to like it when the Archivist brushed her hair, which was surprisingly thick for being so straight, and which she wore long, though often wrenched back into a small, tight knob at the nape of her neck. That was the one aspect of their marriage that always went smoothly—the Poet liked to be groomed, though not for too long, and not with any sense of personal involvement on the part of the groomer. If the Archivist expelled breath, made it clear that the act of grooming her was arousing him, she would bat the brush from his hand. “How many letters?” she would ask, leaning close, her eyes sparkling. She would pick up a pad of paper and draw a gallows, underscored by a series of dashes. “How many letters in, oh, I don’t know, ‘dream on’?”

         The first bite, when it came, was more like a playful nip; the second tore through the light wool of his pant leg.

         The main axis of the campus, as the Archivist knew, ran east to west, in homage to the Trail of Tears. The January Tunnel, on the other hand—as the Archivist would only learn much later—ran south to north, in homage to the Suspension of Misrule, also known as Thule.

Comes on and quickly: A thin worm slips sylphlike

             into the inner ear and spirals to line the cochlea

                          in coil, rests, bloats and distends, widens cavity



walls, bloats down to the throat and my head cocks

             under its weight. My evening shadow clutches, clasps

                          a tuft of hair pulling me toward her, serving



as further proof that shadows want flesh to buckle slump, stretch

             horizontal to sow substance where there is none. Especially up-market,

                          up high and uphill, this soil swills envy and its variations.



The torque saddles my spleen and my legs move like crabs,

             corybantic and feral to stand in for gravity and the plane.

                          *Dear shade, dear daemon, do not muster, do not envy.*



With this motion I descend, towed. A shipping heir

             gifts me a bouquet. Tucks one sanguine rose behind my ear.

                          My teeth tear at the rose-tops. The pluck not mine, I cannot stop.



There is nothing precious about the periphery and

             molars are equally useless if they fall out. *Let go please**

*                          *shadow sister watch me swear you one wisdom tooth.*



Unstead unbalanced I bare my rose-stained teeth

             with foreign fury, spit the petals and hurl the stems. Descending, nearing

                          the port now. *Please loosen your grip we are *one *you* one *I*.



The shipping heir follows. Asks a merchant seaman for

             aniseed boiled in water and left on the stovetop of Commerce.

                          The seaman asks his nursing wife who asks



what for. Is this heart-ache or is this worm-

             wood lodged under or has it reached the ear.

                          White linen is most beautiful stained with attar



and umber—when it speaks for itself—for what unstained

             is ever permanent? On this ashy shore I have no resolve or

                          resolution. Drive is driven. *We must hurtle together regardless*.



*Our history is express, likewise our en-

*             *rapture. *Respect’s deckhand once carried a para-

                          sol, which has since rusted over in the aromatic



nothing we will soon be glad to remember

             with clarity. *Sister Anise, sister shadow, I am spinning.*

                          *Retrograde. In sand. Crab-like legs one needle.*



With the three spins before the gyroscope falls

             its needle traces my name in the ash-sand.

                          When the rim touches down my orb-skull cracks.



Captive liquid falls in tears, which fill the cursive:

             a self-portrait too sad to admit agency and yet

                          this is a flavor I have wrung myself. A flavor



for which I have obtained a Protected Designation

             of Origin which means what I choose will choose

                          to swell inside me and it always tastes how it was made.



This flavor is black but brilliant, the incan-

             descent paragon of lustre and forgetting

                          *taste my parsley of enmity, an-*



*imus, anisum.* I taste acquired

             like black licorice or leucorrhea.

                          Like ouzo in brine,* I drink you,* like:



Umbilical. Milk that’s pressed from stalks.

             Umbellifer. Milk of noontime, milk that calls me back.

                          Umbra. Milk of malice, milk that soothes no aches.



A wild wheel leaking prone like spleen: seed and sown.

Call me drag



anchor *ab extra*

on the download



Tiresias 2.0

[x and—not then—y]



abridged. Call

update infected



attachment white

cell count plate-



let and own

house-mowed home



wanna-be hull.

Call me fresh



new coat of age

swamping blind pig



failed footage

cracked monocle.



Call me K



always on my way

to some benighted castle



uppermost prison

right of left



unstamped stockade

illegible keys.

Depression—it’s a public feeling



But what if I don’t like anything as much as I pretend to



 



Darling Darling Darling



What if I don’t even like you



 



The blue night with trees



Everything told me to feel something



 



And yet everything you said was a lie



And all my emotions were for nothing



 



Oh all they want you to do is cry cry cry



Cry they say Cry



 



The animal takes the shape of the spirit



And the I is no I



 



Hardly on the girl



But why?



 



I had two main ideas



That I brought to the forefront



 



But the ideas never moved the audience



To laughter, to pick the pockets



 



So I tapped a little peacock



With the fiery tail



 



Until no one knew what was there









Sadness



It’s a public feeling



 



So I cry and cry



And the silver moon goes shining



 



Thunder and lightning



Thunder and lightning



 



I woke up in mid-morning



 



And it was all chatter



Just thunder and lightning

One more Jacobean kiss

and you’ll wind up related to me.

One more emotion

and I’m coming for you, like a sparrow.

Set your phenomenology

on the windowsill.

Filthy, meet Family. Family,

I want to get marketable again.

In the mean time, what are your thoughts

on a completely male garden?

As little closure, maybe, as there is

a permanence? This being, also, the time

of the wandering Miss Americas.

Loose thumb-bones, rattling

in a mint tin. One more emotion

and both Dakotas will explode.

One more condition

and I’ll be exiting my relevance.

And what was it, finally,

so dead about him, Family?

I think I just saw a fox.

Yes, with its little foxen teeth,

like Ezekiel’s. Of course, you were off busy,

revising your plague journals.

Bringing clock to the belt-line

of Orion. What could’ve you done

about the remaining days

no longer outnumbering us?

Voice of the dying groupie

like a deck of cards being shuffled.

One last electromagnetic pulse,

one last electromagnetic pulse,

and the neutral bodies of the dead

dropping from our larger, living bodies.

The truth? I thought the castration threat

a touch on the heavy side of the tonality.

But you got your point across.

And by then, we were a much

cleaner people, anyway.

At the chunk of rock

              They moor their ship their only memory

It is noon the wind lies down

              On the warm deck

And they gather the lots made of bone

              Shuffle the playing cards

Chance arcs in by the mast

              In the sound of the collapsing cards

The captain will not play the game

              His daughter is different

Master of this place

              Of measurement and particle

He will not let her at the foot of the rock

              He would like to remain faithful to the instruments



Still the ship is moored

              The island is crumbling into the sea

When light goes down the waves come up

              Slip in under the netting

Watching through themselves

              Under the pulsing stars she convokes the crew

Voice a rich mezzo she explains her calculations

              Spilling over a train of papers in her hand

Crafted in ink with symmetric diagrams

              Glossing over the blurred waves

There will be no wind for days she says

              Only the lots will serve here

Only the bones the metacarpals

              Still retain a sense of direction

The crew members must nod taken by

              Her suite of equations her form her diction

The meeting is adjourned

              And the captain unknowing does not observe

Later in his daughter’s tent

              She hums keening music

She is hearing something else

              Which filters down through dusk



The sound of birds tutoring their young

              In the violet hew call

She is hearing rituals for pulling the sun

              Passed down through the blood and sound

And she fixes the bones of the lot

              Painting over unprotected cards

Shapes the many fingers of chance

              With the sign of her death

She will not be wrong she has dedicated everything

              To the density of water the statue of Archimedes the covenant with the dead

For the captain of the ship she will be

              Agamemnon’s love in the Aegean



When morning comes pastel-blue and vaulting

              She has already entered the fullness of it

Again the crew gathers but something is on their lips

              The captain reaches for his lots

Casts the bones up into the blue

              They hang suspended for a moment

Descend down into his fragile hands cupped

              He throws his shock to the waves

Seizes the cards from his oarsman

              Lays out the five symbols but they confirm it

His daughter will be left for the wind

              To appease nothing some statue in the Acropolis

Mixing her body with the rock

              The crew bursts into sound

Wind coming like white noise

              Tone clusters mechanical voices waves piling up

Spilling out from air

              Bones gaining heat

Turning white-hot radiating bodies

              Now the explosion comes

A small bomb shatters them

              Smoke hovers over

Plumes are what is left is

              Time for them in the frames of the sea

The captain’s daughter died here on this rock

              Has it been two thousand years for her

That the sequelae of

such love has no

such effect can’t change

a bit where here

we are in this

coarse mood swing’s doldrums.

Tense is the season

where time usurps a

ginger snap, tachycardia enlists

the wrong man to

the job of whatever

job this really is—

a flank of venison

that outputs offshoots erratically

in tempered limb drop.

I fake back pain

and conceive of highjinks

suited to the rondure

of a crystal lapis

conference umbrella. There, love,

the park menu awaits.

Chilly denizens of fairy

bedtime stories do breaststrokes

in the heat of

fair espousal, gender removal,

plus and minus bargaining.

You must not love

me now nor ever

again says the creatine

injection with suave inflection. 



Denuded for the evening,

suffering Bell’s Palsy, honored

by the draping hard-on

in the wind’s backtalk,

we settle up our

score and make way

on immobile yachts high

above the derby tides.

You move with prolix

spasms, inflated misdemeanors, even

a ringlet of pewter

that you place in

glass ashtrays for mother.

Today and tomorrow are

not polyandrous—in fact

suffrage comes in bins

on liners from token

deposits of a rough

Neanderthal mandarin. Oranges. Stencil

stashes. Sigh. Exhale. Scoop

the muscle tissue contraction

that has too its

Indo-European roots—we

all do, you know.

We all do. Yet

love has channeled the

age’s decorum into a

rare late-hour affect.

Pudgy bottom trawlers, all

of us and them.

When was it one

first heard the spray

at the back of

the throat that clicked

its graceshaped cap in

some kind of rhomboidal

romp? I don’t know.

O, verily, I don’t.

BP has continued setting



out its continued commitment

to environmental restoration efforts

in the Gulf region

despite the company’s legal

challenge to the misinterpretation

of the settlement’s agreement

with the Plaintiffs’ Steering

Committee. Arousal. Keystone Light.

Flick me with the

teeth of your smile

in the patchy dust

rigger you call home

my positive legacy love.

From small denomination bills

a wad is born.

And, your Highness, to

my utter amazement’s grotesque

patience, at least $4

billion donations a year

await gas development plans.

It’s Labor Day, 1935.

A tropical cyclone plunks

down its bushy arms

in Floridian climes, alas.

A flood burgeons its

safe bet, breaks its

belt, a statewide panic

claims anonymous residents lost

in their casual historicity.

Fire. Tornado outbreak. Exploitation.

Silicosis at Coconut Grove.

Explosion in Texas City.

Dam failure: Santa Clarita.

You can keep stemming

the laundry lists of

American disasters privately, which

is to say morosely,



or you can do

so in this poem

and be judged for

it—rightly?—I think.

USS *Indianapolis* goes

down—near Guam—direct

action (military)—drowning, shark

 attack, hypothermia, 879 people

taken. The conceit is

plain, now, it exists

on a plain now.

A plane called Now.

Part of the tragedy

of dying in a

tragedy is losing one’s

dignity, one’s right to

personal, exclusive mourning—a

myth, yes, but one

we’d like not to

have robbed in front

of our very faces.

Rubbed out, the smokestack

plantation mill burned down

in the mudslide with

surprising caution, the witnesses,

onlookers, townsfolk, germs. Considerate.

It’s time. That terrible

time again. The scene

in the movie where

they must go and

part—and we’re not

even really sure the

tenuity of their... Bored

people are cruel because

now comes the momentum

of last resort. Hell

and habitude incurred by

salesgirls with failed aplomb,

pulling, milling, mulling, pilling.



I try to get

you to talk to

me and prop you

up and stuff you

with projected imagined speech.

The charming part is

you do not speak

even then what I

want you to—and

this is called something.

Junior jurors run away.

The fact seems to

be, however, a bullet—

a heart attack, company

dinners, unrelated fifteenths trying

to begin the enterprise

quite. Too many call

this something—this resort—

I try to get

even then what I—

resilient green and shaky

the lives lengthen custodial

bliss, worthwhile forays, unsaid.

Like the Jewish homosexuals

in Proust, we were

poison-ivy heroes, forgotten

on outer limits, played

badly by cameo Demerol

memorials. Is it right

for the dim vision

before me to salute

the end of my

qualities with a glass

of gin? Sometimes, your

voice, an imitation, a

thing said, a point,

is enough to let

gentle nature have its

most ungentle way. The



thriller is ending.

The thriller has ended.

The thrills are gone.

Most profound and subtle sense

be with me, tonight—

my love has evacuated

their sentimental fluids in

borrowed clothes from another

generation—one I hear

about so often, never

see, and this makes

me very lonely, depraved,

abject, foregone, a wasp

and wisp and gasp

with lisp. The cusp

of my love is

love, I think. A

kind of Calvinism in

reverse, if you think

about it. Love, goodnight.