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Gathered Here Together by Garrett Socol (A Review by David Atkinson)

Ampersand (&) Books

$15.00/230 pgs.

As my layman’s understanding of the human brain informs me, human attention is drawn to differences as opposed to similarities.  We are surrounded by immense amounts of information during almost every moment of every day that we are alive as human beings.  To cope with this overwhelming amount of information, we automatically ignore the familiar and concentrate our attention on the unfamiliar.

I suppose this makes sense.  If we can immediately recognize an aspect of our surroundings as something for which we already have processed information, we can utilize that existing information to deal with that aspect and concentrate our processing capabilities on the aspects for which we do not have such ready data.  This simplifies what our brains have to do on a moment-by-moment basis and prevents us from having an epic level freak out on a near constant basis (again, merely as I understand the processing of the human brain which is quite a bit simplified in itself).

Still, though this shortcut style processing probably enables humans to live in an amazingly complex world, there are some disadvantages.  We may miss information that could very well be important because it is automatically classified as familiar and is accessed from memory instead of being freshly experienced.  Do we even really see a tree when we run across one?  Or, do we detect an object of the type ‘tree’ and instead deal with what we remember about trees instead of the particular tree we happen to be in front of?  If we are just remembering instead of experiencing then I would argue that we might as well just permanently retire to our rooms with a cup of tea and a madeleine, permanently forsaking living actual lives in the real world.

I think this is true for fiction just the same way that it is for our physical environment.  To elaborate, I think that we do not process stories as deeply if our brains see patterns so familiar that previously processed data can be substituted for what we can get from the stories.  I submit that in such cases we are really more remembering old stories we have read than actually thinking about the particular story we are reading.  If so, why even read the new story at all?

However, this argument becomes even more academic than it already is for most of the stories in Garrett Socol’s Gathered Here Together.  I mean, Socol seems to have a knack for making sure the brain of the reader won’t relegate what it reads to the realm of the familiar.  Though the stories are firmly grounded in the realm of ordinary experience, Socol seems to have endless ways of making that ordinary experience something new.

I immediately turn to one of my favorite stories in the collection, Sally’s Suicide Checklist.  Bam, right from the beginning even the title jolts my brain into active experience processing mode rather than letting it remain in passive remembering mode.  Then, without letting up, the story begins:

Returning home after having her stomach pumped was not one of Sally Biddle’s favorite activities.  The food in her refrigerator would be growing mold, the toilet seat in her bathroom would be freezing cold, and more often than not – dried blood would have to be hand-washed from the hickory hardwood floor in the living room.  But here she was again, in the passenger seat of Adam Delgado’s white Infiniti, with its tinted windows and new car scent, pulling up to her empty duplex.

“If a dozen people are on the other side of the door waiting to scream ‘Surprise,’ I won’t speak to you for six months,” she warned.

If your brain can recognize anything familiar in this that does not need to be freshly experiences then I think you are Socol and remember writing it.  Any other possibility than that and brain is lying.

For some reason, I find this flippant kind of humor hysterical.  After all, this is suicide, not a cocktail party of the reasonably affluent.  Truman Capote wishes he could have pulled this kind of wit off while he was alive. Perhaps it is the unlikely juxtaposition of the taboo subject of suicide with the flippant humor that my brain finds so unusual, but I can’t help but pay utter attention when I read the story.  In short, there is nothing else to say but that I loved it.

Another example is the story Liquor Store Lust.  In the story, the main character Suzy robs a liquor store in an attempt to pay for her little sister’s tonsillectomy.  Now, I don’t think I would have found the story so interesting if that was all there was.  True, it would be sad, but that sort of sadness is familiar.  My brain would probably have remembered the last sad story I read like that and skimmed over what I was actually reading instead of truly experiencing the story.

However, thankfully, that is not all there is in Liquor Store Lust.  While robbing the store Suzy has the clerk, Troy, put the money in a bag as well as a few peanut butter cups.  He asks why she is robbing the store and she tells him:

“Because my sister needs her tonsils taken out,” she explained.  “Now take off that T-shirt and those jeans.  Kneel on the floor.”

Troy stripped in five seconds flat.  The sight of his nude body, even more ripped than the jeans, gave Suzy a rush; she wanted to touch every part of him.  She peeled off her clothing, and before she knew it, he was on top of her, moving and grinding.

I literally had to read this passage twice.  Suzy is robbing a liquor store to pay for her sister’s operation and suddenly she’s having (consensual no less) sex with the clerk?  What the hell is going on here?

But…it works.  As much as it causes my brain to screech to a mental halt, it makes total sense in the context of the story.  At the same time, though it works, it jumps out at me as strange and unusual.  My brain doesn’t recognize these oddly juxtaposed sob story and inappropriately timed consensual sex and so it processes the story fresh, really experiencing (delightfully) the story.

Now, don’t take this to mean that these stories are laden with gimmicks or that even all of these stories have this kind of odd juxtaposition.  Some of the stories are quite normal.  Some are happy, some sad, some moving, and some funny.  Regardless of which are which, I got into these stories.  All are well written and enjoyable; I’m just saying that some of these stories are delightfully unique.  In any event, I had a great time reading Gathered Here Together.

*

David S. Atkinson is a Nebraska-born writer currently living in Denver.  He holds an MFA from the University of Nebraska.  His stories have appeared in (and/or are soon to be appearing in) “Gray Sparrow,” “Children Churches and Daddies,” “Split Quarterly,” “Cannoli Pie,” “C4: The Chamber Four Lit Mag,” “Atticus Review,” “Brave Blue Mice,” and “Fine Lines.”  His book reviews have appeared in “Gently Read Literature,” “The Rumpus,” and “All Things Pankish.”  The web site dedicated to his writing can be found at http://davidsatkinsonwriting.com/.  He currently serves as a reader for “Gray Sparrow” and in his non-literary time he works as a patent attorney in Denver.

Ask The Author: Eric Ellingsen

“The People Called Endless” by Eric Ellingsen was published in the November Issue. Eric answered questions for us about laziness, poets and benches.

1. When did we start getting lazy so lazy at being alive?

I don’t know. Maybe we are always starting to get lazy and unlazy at the same time. Maybe there are always not lazy people, molecule people. And those molecule people pass not laziness to other people, swerve into them, cause micro vibrations. And those people cause lots of not lazy cascades to other people who irritate. Inspire. Intricate. And then the concrete people become more liquid, melty, bewildering. And things flow better for a time. I think that the imagination works like that, like a re-heater, a de-solidifier. A feel more machine. If we felt ourselves more in the world that is around us, if we felt that our feelings made a difference in structuring the world around us, maybe we wouldn’t even have to try to not feel lazy. Wouldn’t have to have unboring ourselves warm-up sessions. It’s like the great ocean gyres in the middle of the oceans. All our garbage from every place in the world being caught in storm waters, washed into estuaries, and then into inlets and bays and gulfs and oceans. All the labels wearing off. All the slush mixing together. Every fish in the ocean having some parts per million of people plastic inside. It feels so detached from my life, that it starts a little laziness. And the little laziness aggregates into help-perpetuate-big-laziness-machine. A collective lazy. And writing, like art, as the artist Olafur Eliasson says, should unnumb us. Otherwise, a kind of habituating of the day that we don’t even notice set  in, as Hitchcock says. And then we depress. Depress on massive scales. I mean, I think that feeling things takes practice, a kind of activity, activating, and maybe other words than begin with A. But little laziness’s add up to that forgetting, until we forget how cool it is that there are birds and that we have elbows and the responsinibility not just to feel unlazy but to make that promiscuous unlazy contagious and pathological. That’s long. I’m sorry.

2. How do poets mostly have one liners and deadlines? Who are you really discriminating against?

I don’t know that either. I don’t think I’m discriminating against anyone. Rather, I’m discriminating against a mode. A method of writing which threatens to conditions us. An operational constraint which doesn’t add the novelty of unanticipated mutations. Alloy thinking. I just feel sometimes like there are tons of colonized imaginations and we don’t even know it’s going on. That we are making dead things powerful. But maybe I also just like the way the phrases sound. I mean, I could construct some intricate rational plot around the question which would make the line seem extraordinarily precocious. And maybe I am trying to do that too. But I think some things just feel like they are brushing up against something right, and act as little imagination intimacy arousers. That’s kind of this to me. Poetry lines as arousal primers.

I guess the best opposite of a dead line I can think of is Paul Éluard: “The earth is blue like an orange.” That line is a Rube-Goldberg device. It contradicts the 2^nd law of poetry thermodynamics. It has one hand under the table doing pants things, like Einstein had one hand under the table when writing his love letters as he says. It’s reproductive. But maybe I had read something that really felt contrived that inspired me into that line, or de-spired me to write that line. I hate the commodification of language and words. And by one-liners I also mean those teachy meaning lines, you know, the I have a revelation and want to tell you a life truth lines. What a Siren song. So somehow I think our pre-perceptions of what a line of poetry is, our expectations and safe containers, condition us into writing dead lines. Lines without squirm or squamaticity. And we need to be aware of that when it’s happening and strangle those lines without remorse. That’s a long response. Maybe I just wrote that line in the hopes of getting to write a long response to a short question or, to get to say at the end verbivocovisual.

3. What is the biggest small question you have asked?

Why?

4. Can’t we pass a law that life-time sentences people for boring someone to death?

I don’t really like laws, but that one might be the exception. If you want to make that as a law I will pay taxes in that land. But aren’t all writers literally life time sentencers? I do wish there were big ambulance save our imagination sirens for knowing when boring was coming so we could get out of the way. Instead of a law though maybe a rule, like Inger Christensen’s rule in it: Build into the rules of the game the inevitable breach of the rules as if it were a rule. Imagine being able to write a 250 page poem that never gets boring? It’s like a wetland of ideas. So much diversity proliferating in the overlapping niches. That’s like any ecological system of difference. No boring allowed. Just borning. Or, if something has to be boring it had that kind of overwhelming anxious transference of experience that Becket’s Watt has, like when he has 5 straight pages of frenetic pacing, he walked from the table to the window, from the window to the fireplace, from the fireplace to the table, and on and on and on. An on and on and on trance.

5. Create a bench for us that repels homeless people. How would it do its job?

I love that. I think I need to steal that line. The idea comes from Mike Davis book City of Quartz. It’s a repulsive way of city planning creativity warped into a teratological application. It’s like when you see those anti-skating benches in public spaces, finely polished marble materials which the owners sink steel bracket braces into to prevent skid marks, and to reorganize and select for appropriate flows and population patterns of behavioral tendencies: suit wearers in place of hightops, smoothie drinkers in place of joint smokers. In Barcelona, on the other hand, the city commissioned designers who thought of big sand pits around the benches, island play boxes in the boardwalks. And the sort of material palate added another texture to the city, and that texture also slows down the body, gets it ready for sitting, a warm´-up to the plop-down, while also restricting a range of Ollie. There are other urban laws like that which Davis doesn’t talk about but which are just as atrocious, like cities combating shooting up by using mono-frequency light bulbs in bathrooms and alleys so that needle users can’t see their veins. Or the high pitched frequencies which are played in public space which only kids can hear because the decibel range is outside adults hearing range. The frequencies cause the kids aggravation and the need to leave. I think this is totally insidious, designing mechanisms which illicit an overwhelming feeling which you are conscious of feeling, but where the source is designed to remain invisible. Somehow I think this is the same with writing, but maybe I’m just heavy petting your question without turning you on.

6. Where did this story come from?

Everywhere. I don’t know. I don’t even know if it’s all the way here yet. I don’t think so. It probably came from something I read in PANK. But, probably from an issue you will publish in five years. You should see the other stuff you all will publish. I would suggest you ask me for something else.

Are You Happy?

Daniel Nester has a new essay up at The Poetry Foundation.

The February issue of elimae features Lisa Marie Basile, Beth Brezenoff, Scott Garson, Margaret Bashaar, Matthew Burnside, Meg Pokrass, Joseph A.W. Quintela, Eric Burke, and Mel Bosworth.

J. Bradley has work in Ginger Piglet and Stymie where he is joined by Matthew Lippmann and Tyler Gobble.

Robb Todd, whose book, Steal Me For Your Stories, dropped this week, also has stories at LitnImage and Fwriction Review.

At Smalldoggies, a story by Tracy Gonzalez.

Over at Light Reading, a very short story from Tania Hershman.

Unsaid 6 is available for pre-order and includes Lincoln Michel, Brian Kubarycz, Joseph Scapellato, Amber Sparks, Aaron Burch, Jonathan Callahan, Miguel Morales, and more.

And hey, PANK 6. We just got it from the printer and it’s the most beautiful issue yet–heft and heart and more. GET IT NOW.

Ask The Author: Riley Michael Parker

Riley Michael Parker’s “Silver Dagger” appeared in the November Issue. He answers a lot of questions about houses for us.

1. Have you ever written a story where no blood was spilled?

I have, I have. I write stories in a few different styles, and one of them is somewhat whimsical, perhaps romantically absurd, and most of those pieces have little to no bloodshed. It is not often, however, that I ever submit any of those stories, as I usually write them for specific people, and when I do submit them they do not often get snapped up. If anything, I have been rewarded for my blood lust, and encouraged to go further into exploring everything that violence has to offer (quite a bit, it turns out). My current project is a western called ALL THINGS END IN BLOOD, and it has had a lot of interest given to it (I think I know who it’s going to publish it, but papers have yet to be signed).

That said, if someone wants to read a piece of mine without bloodshed, kissing me usually works. I write a lot of fun, optimistic work for the folks who give me kisses. Or, you know, you could just send me an e.mail and I’ll show you something. Your call.

WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE is an astounding film. Dawn is such an intriguing character — so hopeful, but almost meaningless within her world. You want everything to be ok, but it’s not that kind of movie. The romance between her and that boy is so real to me. It just rings so true. A lot of romance, whether we like it or not, has roots in aggression and a need for attention, and this film presents this concept so elegantly. I do not take my stories in the same direction, but I have always felt a great affinity for Todd Solondz. In all of his films he focuses on the small moments between people, the strained relationships that build our lives, and I love that. It sounds pessimistic, but happiness comes only between moments of desperation, anxiety, and loneliness. There can be an abundance of happiness in a person’s life, and for many people there is, but true character develops when facing hardships or when trapped in conflict, which is why nine times out of ten drama is more fulfilling than comedy. Todd Solondz has the rare ability to take dark, painful subject matter and infuse it with humor, and I hope I have that too. Most comedy, after all, is built on a foundation of shame (think David Brent from the British OFFICE), foolishness, miscommunication, violence (things like TOM AND JERRY), heartbreak, and tragedy. Comedies tend to take these elements and place a quirky, self-absorbed character in the middle of everything, and then we all laugh at how ridiculous this person acts. Drama is built from all of the same things, but continues on past the punchline and shows how people deal with these issues and move forward, developing beyond their own previously established persona. What I think Todd Solondz does is he writes comedies, and then directs them as if they are dramas. He is aware of his characters’ absurdity, but he still recognizes them as human beings, and that is beautiful.

[PANK]6 Cometh

This week, [PANK]6 begins showing up in bookstores and mailboxes all around our little blue globe. Watch out or order it here now. Look to the February 19 New York Times Style Magazine for a little [PANK]6 love, as if you didn’t already know it. And in case you still need some convincing:

Stick your tongue into Dan Alamia’s A Man’s Mouth wherein a very small nation find’s itself inexplicably lodged.

Peek through the keyhole of Thomas DeMary’s Butcher’s Block wherein time gerrymanders the demographics as suns set and skies burn.

Then submit to Karrin McCadden’s How to Miss a Man wherein she teaches you how to be a graph, a grid, with numbers perfect and lines that never touch.

[PANK]6 also features new writing from the likes of Frank Hinton, Matthew Lippman, Christopher Newgent, Sherman Alexie, Helen Vitoria, Keith Taylor, Ocean Vuong, and Ashley Farmer, among many others, a 288-page calvacade of furiously spinning word dervishes, language contortionists, bearded poesy, and feats of amazing story. [PANK]6 is a litmag thick enough to slake a working man’s appetites, juicy enough to wet a working girl’s fantasies, weird enough to keep the both of them guessing, and just mean enough to sucker punch them both in their sweet spots when they ain’t looking.

Come get some.

The Third Reich by Roberto Bolaño (A Review by Joseph Michael Owens)

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

$14.95/288 pgs

I made a mistake in writing this review, or, perhaps more specifically, before writing this review: I read a couple reviews online. I did it on a whim and it was only because I was rating it on Goodreads (5 stars) and moving it to my “read” shelf. I think it was more out of surprise than anything else that I read a few of the reviews in the first place—surprise because more than a couple of them were less than favorable.

Written in 1989 and found among Roberto Bolaño’s papers after his death, The Third Reich is tabbed as “a stunning exploration of memory and violence.” Whether or not this is the first of Bolaño’s books the uninitiated should read is debatable. I’ve read The Savage Detectives and half of 2666, so I more or less knew what I was getting into with The Third Reich. On one hand, The Third Reich is a fantastic illustration of Bolaño settling into the voice that would make The Savage Detectives and 2666 so fantastic and celebrated. On the other hand, Bolaño probably did not publish this manuscript during his lifetime for a reason. One reason could be that it simply wasn’t finished.

Much like another2011 posthumous release—David Foster Wallace’s “unfinished novel”The Pale King—readers need to understand what they are getting into when they crack this book open. Let me make it clear that I think the book, as it stands in its current form, is still fantastic all on its own. However, it is definitely not The Savage Detectives or 2666. It doesn’t have the bulk to build up an epic head of steam like those other two novels do. Irrespective of that detail, I took a great deal of pleasure in seeing where the prose and the narrative go above and beyond the rest of the bookin flourishes of a little extra brilliance and cleverness that would ultimately come to define Bolaño’s later novels.

Calling the The Third Reich an“exploration of memory and violence seems appropriate” enough.  Udo Berger is the German national champion of “The Third Reich,” a tactical WWII-themed board game he’s completely obsessed with. Even while on vacation with his girlfriend, Ingeborg, at a lush Spanish resort, Udo is unable to tear himself away from a game he’s begun with El Quemado (ominously known as “The Burn Victim”), a potentially dangerous man who rents pedal boats to tourists on the resort’s beach. Right away, Udo and Ingeborg meet another vacationing German couple, Charly and Hanna, who introduce them to a pair of locals called the Wolf and the Lamb. One night, Charly disappears without a trace, and Udo’s seemingly well-ordered life is thrown totallly into upheaval.

“I’m a nervous wreck,” [Udo] confesses. “But my face remains unchanged. And my pulse is steady. I scarcely move a muscle, though inside I’m falling apart.”

End plot synopsis.

For readers familiar with Bolaño’s work, this plot seems, for all intents and purposes, prototypical. Bolaño became a master of psychologically stringing his readers along and The Third Reich is no exception. Bolaño balances the book’s narrative on tightrope strung, nearly unwavering, between remembered events and events occurring in the narrative in real time. However, he blurs the two sides together in the last few pages as the novel slowly dissolves from realism into a horrifying lucid dream sequence. The ending is simultaneously abstruse and troubling (but in a trulyfantastic and memorable sort of way).

*

Joseph Michael Owens has written for various publications including Specter Magazine, The Rumpus, The Houston Literary Review and InDigest Magazine. His short collection, Shenanigans! will be released in 2012 by Grey Sparrow Press. Joe lives in Omaha with four dogs and one wife.

A Forsley Feuilleton: The seducing letter I got in the mail from Marie Calloway

Give The Rumpus five buckaroos a month and they’ll send you a Letter in the Mail almost every week from a more important person than yourself – like Dave Eggers, Nick Flynn, Emily Gould, and Jonathan Ames.  By buckaroos I mean dollars, five dollars.  An online literary publication with the quality of The Rumpus, to sustain itself, needs your buckaroos, and sending cowboys that don’t do rodeos and unimportant people whose names you forgot won’t help at all.  But sending five dollars a month for a weekly Letter in the Mail will.

And if they’re all as good as the seducing letter I got in the mail from Marie Calloway this week, there’ll be buckaroos, of the dollar variety, flowing like fiber out Stephen Elliott’s rumpus.  Calloway’s letter is far superior to the last Letter in the Mail.  Sorry Margaret Cho, but your letter included neither a sex offer nor a nude photo.  Calloway’s letter included both:

“hello,” she wrote. “i’m marie calloway.”  She then thanked me for this column, A Forsley Feuilleton, and, after telling me how it has broadened her mind, said, “please look at my tumblr if you want.”  I didn’t want to, but since she said, “please,” I made an attempt.  The attempt was in vain because she didn’t like being watched.  But she did like being looked at. . .  Why else would she send me “some art me and some guy made?”  Even though I didn’t get to read her tumblr blog, I did read her writing at Thought Catalog and can say, with confidence, that no – if you’re reading this Miss Calloway – I didn’t “hate it since it could be seen as self-absorbed narcissism.”  I love self-absorbed narcissism, especially if that was what motivated you to send those nude photos, invite me to have sex with you, and add me as a friend on Facebook.

Breaking News: the other subscribers to The Rumpus’ Letters in The Mail didn’t get any nude photos, sex invites, or adds on Facebook from Calloway.  What can I say?  Maybe those subscribers should try to get a column on PANK’s blog so they can become celebrities like Adrien Brody and I.  Then they too will start getting seducing letters from pretty young girls. Before I started writing this column, I was giving my writing away in zine-form on the streets of San Francisco and the only letters I got in the mail were those from my landlord informing me that either my dog or I would be living at a shelter in a week’s time, those from a collection agency trying to bully me into paying the hundred grand I owed the Emergency Room for fixing me up after an ambulance ran me over, and those from my Number One Fan that usually started off as adoration but quickly descended into threats of strangulation, castration, and lobotomization.

Ok, I admit – even with this critically acclaimed PANK column – those are still the only letters I get in the mail.  And that seducing letter I got from Marie Calloway was a fake.  I wrote it using a cut-up technique, in the tradition of William Burroughs, with words from her fictional short story, “Adrien Brody.”  Or was it a non-fictional journal entry?  I don’t know.  I do know that Calloway’s “Adrien Brody,” like Burroughs’s novella, Queer, was a little sexually shocking, a little thought provoking, and a lot captivating. . . and I wish I was subscribed to The Rumpus’ Letters in the Mail so I could get a real letter from Calloway.

But I’m not subscribed to Letters in the Mail because my girlfriend only gives me a monthly allowance of five dollars, and I need at least one Jumbo Dog a week from that guy with the dirty fingernails at the Daly City BART station.  He charges a dollar twenty-five, so my five dollar allowance can get me either four Jumbo Dogs or four letters each month. . . four Jumbo Dogs or four letters. . . four Jumbo Dogs, four letters. . . decisions, decisions.  But the fact of the matter is that I’m an MTV-raised, semi-literate American who usually uses phrases like “the fact of the matter” to express opinions, and I care more about Jumbo Dogs than literary letters.  And, besides, the founder of The Rumpus admitted how lazy he was in an email to me, so I bet subscribers to Letters in the Mail will end up only getting three, at most, letters each month.

Even though I went with the Jumbo Dogs, I still made an effort to get this week’s letter from Calloway.  I went to The Rumpus Stuffing Party with intentions of slipping her letter into my pocket while the other stuffers were busy stuffing.  But there were too many stuffers.  I not only failed at stealing Calloway’s letter, but I also failed at getting into the Stuffing Party.  There was no room. Too many other MTV-raised, semi-literate, Jumbo Dog addicts whose girlfriend’s only gave them a monthly allowance of five dollars had the same idea – for there’s no way that many people volunteered to stuff letters into envelopes all night if it wasn’t with intentions of stealing Calloway’s letter.

Why do so many people want Calloway’s letter?  I want one bad – so bad that I wrote my own – and it’s not because I want her to tell me how much she admires my writing and how much she wants to come meet me and my pecker. No, no, no – I want a letter from Calloway for the same reasons we all read, discussed, and obsessed over her story, “Adrien Brody”: we enjoy confessional writing with some shock value told with a voice not yet diluted with the teachings of MFA professors. . . just as we enjoy Jim Carroll’s Basketball Diaries and Harmony Korine’s Kids.

I suppose by ‘we’ I mean ‘me.’  Basketball Diaries, Kids – that’s my shit.  I can only guess why you people read, discussed, and obsessed over “Adrien Brody.”  And my guess is that it’s all, at the source, biological.  The male readers of Calloway’s story are biologically enchanted by pretty young girls, especially girls that face paint with cum.  And the female readers of Calloway’s story are biologically threatened by pretty young girls, especially girls that face paint with cum.  I wonder if any members from the queer community read, discussed, and obsessed over Calloway’s story. . . if Truman Capote got his hands on it he’d probably just, biologically, say, “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”  But that’s just a guess, just as I’m guessing that whether you’re enchanted or threatened, you’re going to read, discuss, and obsess over a story like “Adrien Brody.”

Even respected and accomplished writers like Tao Lin, Stephen Elliott, Roxane Gay, and Rae Bryant can’t stop biology from influencing their likes and dislikes:

Tao Lin, according to the New York Observer, liked Calloway’s “ability to describe a memory objectively and interestingly and without preconception or judgment”. . . but, biologically, he just liked the thought of luring Calloway, without preconception or judgment, into a Paris hotel room.  On The Rumpus, Stephen Elliott writes that he liked Calloway’s story because it was “riveting, fresh, and written with a distinctive new voice”. . . but, biologically, he just liked the thought of Calloway cradling him like a baby while singing lullabies in her distinctive new voice.

Roxane Gay, over at HTMLGIANT, makes it clear that she disliked how Calloway wrote “behind the safety of a persona and did not afford the same courtesy to the man she writes about so intimately”. . . but, biologically, she just disliked the thought of Calloway getting away with using a fake name when she, Roxane, was forced to go through adolescence in Omaha, Nebraska with the last name Gay.  Rae Bryant, on The Nervous Breakdown, wrote that she disliked Calloway’s story because “the lack of nose in ‘Adrien Brody,’ in (her) Jungian perspective, was a missed opportunity”. . . but, biologically, she just disliked the thought of Calloway, even with a lack of a nose, getting the kind of attention that Adrien Brody, the actor, gets.

You don’t think the young Calloway will ever get the kind of attention Brody gets?  I disagree.  No one paid attention to Brody, his movies, his acting, or his nose until he, like Calloway, wrote a seducing letter to an older, more accomplished, and better connected man in his field.  That man was Roman Polanski.

Unlike the situation with Calloway, who chronicled her exploits in a published story, most people don’t know the details of Brody’s escapades with Polanski.  Journalism is dead, and the only news we get is from blogs and the bloggers that run them – bloggers like Jimmy Chen at HTMLGIANT.

Chen was the only one to report on the Brody-Polanski affair.  But he got it all wrong: he reported that it was Polanski who sent a seducing letter to Brody.  Does that make sense? Polanski was already a legendary director, both for his films and his molesting, and Brody, at the time, was an unknown actor.  It was Brody that initiated communication and it was Brody that sent the revealing thigh-high photos and it was Brody that offered his body to the director.  Polanski then, because of biology, gave Brody and his nose a chance: the lead role in The Pianist.  Brody turned that opportunity into a career launching moment, making him, at twenty-nine, the youngest to ever win the Academy Award for Best Actor.

Will Calloway be able to do the same – turn this “Adrien Brody” opportunity into a career launching moment – with her literary pursuits?  I have no idea.  The only idea I have is to learn from the girl, to learn how to get the attention I crave as a writer.  And, from what I’ve learned so far, the best way to get such attention is to let older, more accomplished and better connected members of the literati fuck me.

So, dear readers and fellow writers, please fuck me.  Fuck me, Tao Lin, in a Paris hotel.  Fuck me, Stephen Elliott, with my own Letter in the Mail.  Fuck me, Roxane Gay, by morally banning this column.  Fuck me, Rae Bryant, with a devastating analysis of my writing.  Fuck me, Adrien Brody, with a highly publicized slander lawsuit.  Fuck me, Roman Polanski, with. . . actually you should stay out of it.

Like Calloway, I’m from the MTV-generation.  We were raised on Jumbo Dogs.  All we want is attention, and we’ll do whatever it takes to get it.  I’ll even spread my cum all over the internet with hopes that it will impregnate the consciousnesses of as many people as possible.  Consequences be damned. . . After all, when The Rumpus asked Calloway about the repercussions of her fucking story, she said that they were mostly positive and that she got a lot of exposure for her writing.  “Obviously there were a lot of negative reactions,” she concluded, “but they seem to have overall little relevance to my life.”

Ask The Author: Mary Jane Newton

November showed these four poems by Mary Jane Newton. Mary Jane talks about comic strip characters, Duran Duran and stanza building.

1. How can one be too big and too everywhere?

More easily than being too small and too everywhere. Bigness and everywhereness definitely coincide, which is not to say they’re identical. That would be too easy, and life’s anything but easy. So, the short answer, I guess, is practice.

2. Would you ever work a love crisis hotline? What advice would you have for me if I called?

Would l? I already do. I’d give you the same advice as I give everybody else: “Sorry, wrong number”.

3. How can one export love that is made?

There are two methods that work, reliably. A sieve and a colander. It depends on the fineness of the grain.

4. What comic strip character best embodies you?

Mrs Geriatrix from the Asterix series — you need to meet my husband to understand why.

5. How do you build your stanzas within poems?

I don’t build them, they just occur.

6. What Duran Duran song is the best to listen to when reading each of these poems?

Remind me, which parallel universe are we inhabiting here?

If All They Had Were Their Bodies?

I’ve returned several times to the title of Michelle Reale’s new chapbook, If All They Had Were Their Bodies (Burning River, 2011), posing it as a question of its characters. What if these characters—these vulnerable, sometimes cruel, and often-mistreated children, women and men—had only their bodies? Often, thanks to the twists of trouble and human nature in these stories and to the harsh realities rendered, these characters would fare better in the world with only their bodies and without emotions and spirit—they wouldn’t be so susceptible and wouldn’t suffer so much. In the end, though, the collection reaffirms that it is better to risk our hearts than to deny them.

There’s a strange and aching loveliness to the thirteen short fictions and prose poems in this collection. The relationships in these domestic stories are fraught with complexities and the characters experience and/or inflict cruelties both small and large. To various degrees, the characters throughout these stories suffer afflictions of body and/or spirit that aren’t always easily understood by the reader, but are very much felt. The tensions between these characters are nuanced and layered and subject to imagination and interpretation. Each time I read these brief, powerful stories I took away more.

The language, subtleties, and subtext throughout are skillfully handled. The story “Some Cities” opens with a woman nursing her seriously ill lover. In a reversal of health, when he recovers, she declines: “He was flush with vigor, while she took to braiding her brittle hair, going barefoot and crying at the vulnerability of the common housefly.” This sentence and the image of ‘the vulnerability of the common housefly’ beautifully capture the essence and excellence of this chapbook. Michelle Reale’s story endings also repeatedly surprised and delighted and again speak to her gift. The last sentence from “Some Cities:” “She told herself she was as brave as someone in her position could be.”

Here’s a wonderful excerpt from the title story “If All They Had Were Their Bodies,” a story that centers on boys and girls and the ways we’re conditioned to value the superficial and are blind to so much beyond the body:

“[The skinny girls] hold the fragile scaffolding of their wraith-thin bones in their own arms, rocking gently as if they were their own babies. They are conclave and vulnerable, dressed in the colors of sickness.”

Here’s another:

“A fat girl on the wall crosses thick thighs, revealing a musical note tattooed on the puckered skin at the back of her knee. A skinny girl spots this, tracing the form. Her eyes become bright. She closes her eyes and sings the note aloud. She thinks of the possibilities there. She takes small, wobbly steps toward the fat girl, who is so surprised that she makes room for her on the wall. They sit silently, side by side.”

In “Bocartes,” a jaded, sometimes heartless father laments, “He just can’t seem to figure out the formula for thriving.” This is true of the many characters throughout this collection. “Bocartes” is an ironic story about gardening and what we can’t keep alive. This ending also slices and stays: “He lets her water the flowers and watches as she holds the hose over each one, letting the water beat the delicate petals down. He knows that later they will burn in the sun.”

In the second half of the collection, in “Chicken,” “Mercy,” “Picturesque,” “Swayed.” and more, Reale peoples her stories with larger families, harsher cruelties and more troubling transgressions. The stories chronicle how desperately we need family love and bonds and how often we fail at it. The final story in the collection “After He’d Gone” depicts just such yearning and failing with stunning brevity:

“She was looking at me like she did sometimes, like it was my fault, all of it, whatever. I never asked for this, she’d said once, and I knew she meant me and my brother. I said ‘I was just …’ I couldn’t think what. She patted the cot for her cigarettes. They were on the floor underneath and I got them for her. The pack was almost empty.”

Jen Michalski, author of Close Encounters and May-September captures something so apt and gorgeous in her praise of this collection:

“Michelle Reale’s stories are the tiny shards, glass birds, that lay around you, seemingly harmless, after an explosion. Glittery diamonds, impossible to resist, to fondle, they cut your skin deeper than you think possible when you take them in your hand. And then, without warning, they fly away.”

Glass birds that cut and then fly away. It’s a fabulous and fitting image for this collection.