booth http://blogs.butler.edu/booth Thu, 22 Jul 2010 06:54:35 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 en 1.0 http://blogs.butler.edu/ http://blogs.butler.edu/booth uncategorized poetry http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Overcast Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?p=322 by Aaron Burch

She had been gone only a week when she returned. It may have been longer. I brought something, she said. She walked in and through the house, and he followed.  In the backyard, she held her hands out to him, together, palms up. Like holding them under running water, like cupping something delicate. The pose reminded him of a painting, though he couldn’t picture one specifically. He wondered if such an image existed and, if not, how one should.  Inside her hands was a pile of plastic stars, the kind that stick to ceilings and glow at night. What we’ll do, she said, is plant them. Water them. Let them grow, like in a garden. And when they’ve blossomed, we can release them into the sky on cloud-filled nights. So, any night we want, we will be able to see a sky full of stars. Like it was all so simple. He looked up at the flat, gray sky.  What about during the day, he asked. Her smile flattened, from bracket to dash, and he was happy that his realism had gained the upper hand, but then immediately sad for her loss of enthusiasm. Water! she said, suddenly. We’ll plant a lake or river underground and grow the blue sky itself! Again, it all sounded so simple. And then he thought of the sky’s blue and what made it so. A reflection of all the water on our planet, someone had once told him.  His father?  A teacher?  A fellow child, making it up, only to become something he still believed all these years later? What he wanted to say to her then was: Isn’t this what got us here in the first place? How, when they’d found those tufts of cloud, they’d put them in her memory box, because they didn’t know what else to do with them. Until, one day, they took them out and buried them in the backyard, like a time capsule, meant only to be a shared funny moment and story. But they’d grown, overlarge and too big for the ground, like produce for a fair competition, until finally releasing themselves into the sky like hot air balloons with their ties cut. They’d floated up into the sky and settled there, clouding over their every day. Why had they never wondered how or where those first seeds of cloud had come to be found? And what would happen when the cycle repeated itself, this time with stars; and how long might it take –- a week? a year?; and what did she think they would do during the star-growing? He looked again at the dull-colored sky, tried to picture it lit with stars, enough to light up everything he saw.
Aaron Burch is the author of the chapbook How to Take Yourself Apart, How to Make Yourelf Anew (PANK), and the very-soon-to-be-released How to Predict the Weather (Keyhole Books), which is either a collection of short shorts or a novella or maybe something else but, regardless, will include this short. He also edits Hobart.
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Auto Draft Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?p=341 341 2010-07-22 15:33:25 0000-00-00 00:00:00 closed open auto-draft 0 0 post 0 ABOUT Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:02:08 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?page_id=13 Booth publishes one piece or author per week, smack dab on our home page. Simple as that. In addition, Booth publishes an annual print issue, usually in the spring. Booth was established in 2009. Our staff is comprised of MFA Fellows and students in the Butler University graduate writing program. You are officially invited to reach through your machine and tickle our ribs at booth@butler.edu. Editor: Robert Stapleton Online Editor: Bryan Furuness Poetry Editors: Amanda Fagan, Jay Lesandrini Prose Editors: Traci Cumbay, Alex Mattingly Art Director: Gautam Rao Readers: Beth Bates, Colleen Card, Alyssa Chase, Corey Dalton, Jodie English, Barbara Litkowski, Jeremy Noren, Krista Ramsey, Shannon Siegel, Natalie Solmer, Kelly Thomas, Eliza Tudor, Amy VanHorn, Steven Woods]]> 13 2010-02-22 12:02:08 2010-02-22 17:02:08 closed open about publish 0 0 page 0 _edit_last _edit_lock ARCHIVES Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:02:42 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?page_id=15 Booth's electronic Berkeley Press archival system.]]> 15 2010-02-22 12:02:42 2010-02-22 17:02:42 closed open archives publish 0 0 page 0 _edit_lock _edit_last LINKS Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:03:22 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?page_id=17 Book Choy Book Choy is written by our Online Editor, Bryan Furuness, and details readings and literary happenings in and around the central Indiana scene, as well as some other tasty lit treats. Booth on Facebook Not just because all the cool kids are doing it. Sign up to stay in the loop with weekly updates. Butler University MFA program Official site for Butler's MFA program, which powers both Booth and Book Choy. Freight Stories A great online fiction mag run by our friends Andrew Scott and Victoria Barrett. Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers Series The official page of Butler's literary guests.]]> 17 2010-02-22 12:03:22 2010-02-22 17:03:22 closed open links publish 0 0 page 0 _edit_lock _edit_last SUBMIT Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:04:05 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?page_id=20 20 2010-02-22 12:04:05 2010-02-22 17:04:05 closed open submit publish 0 0 page 0 _edit_lock _edit_last NEWS Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:58:08 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?page_id=27 Booth print issue #1 features 68 pages of fun and humanity. Fiction by Michael Martone, C.J. Hribal, Erica Plouffe Lazure, and Davy Rothbart. Poetry from Gailmarie Pahmeier, John Gallaher, David Shumate, Julie Hanson, and Clay Mathews. Nick St. John gives us a glimpse at his latest comic narrative. Also, Jonathan Lethem, Kim Addonizio, and Robert Rebein offer good times with work so neat that we don't even know how to classify it. $5 for this collector's edition with a limited press run of 1,000. We'll get a copy in your hands pronto if you send a check or money order and mailing address to: Booth c/o English Dept Butler University 4600 Sunset Ave Indianapolis, IN 46208. Booth #1, pages 28-29: "Surgery" and "The Department of Love" by David Shumate ]]> 27 2010-03-02 12:58:08 2010-03-02 17:58:08 closed open subscribe publish 0 0 page 0 _edit_last _edit_lock Wires that, Usually, We Never Notice Fri, 09 Apr 2010 06:00:08 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?p=38 by Julie Hanson

Richard stopped our car partway up our drive and did he ever have a puzzled look: why’s my wife just standing there, exiled and outside? I pointed in reply to the wires running overhead, wires that, usually, we never notice, and motioned to their juncture with our house where a little fire had started. Just one flame, really, dancing in place on a wire and making no headway whatsoever. Nevertheless, the operator at 911 had ordered me to “get outside” and all this had transpired in the flicker of time it takes to travel four blocks east, buy an o-ring for a hose and travel four blocks back. Richard waited with me there a moment more while first the siren and then the firemen arrived. The three of them stood around in their boots and padded coats, refusing offers of lemonade on a hot and otherwise quiet Fourth of July. They’d already phoned Alliant, who’d sent a man who’d be there any minute. I told them how I’d heard the POP and come outside. Our neighbor, Stan, told everyone he’d seen a spark or something near the ground out of the corner of his eye. Shirley, who must be seventy if she’s a day, came along from three doors down and was startled by a fireman who yelled at her for running underneath the wires. Someone pointed out to everyone that two lights were on inside. That’s peculiar, we’d all thought. Not only that: the oven, air conditioner, and washer which had been on, were off. So Richard carried the two chickens still in the roasting pan down to Bruce and Nancy’s house where we’d planned to eat them anyway in a matter of hours. For nearly twenty years it’s been either their house or Richard’s and mine every Fourth of July. We start around six, we eat, we catch up on each others’ lives. We play a board game or croquet, and, even in election years, Nancy bakes a flag cake. ]]>
38 2010-04-09 01:00:08 2010-04-09 06:00:08 open open wires-that-usually-we-never-notice publish 0 0 post 0 _edit_lock _edit_last 22 pausleal@simps.com http://www.studentgrantshelp.org 10.128.17.254 2010-05-12 08:06:48 2010-05-12 12:06:48 spam 0 0 6 fcglql@srhcoj.com http://kxxzhmvhrinl.com/ 210.187.51.54 2010-04-18 19:58:09 2010-04-19 00:58:09 nnwstzclbygx, [url=http://iuqwlwjuwcyh.com/]iuqwlwjuwcyh[/url], [link=http://kwhvttrojlkf.com/]kwhvttrojlkf[/link], http://nbcowofieqni.com/]]> spam 0 0 13 asdfjieieie@asdf.com http://www.nursingschoolsinfo.com/ 173.233.65.154 2010-05-03 00:01:15 2010-05-03 05:01:15 spam 0 0 14 asdfesaf@sadf.com http://www.yams.com 173.233.65.154 2010-05-03 01:27:45 2010-05-03 06:27:45 spam 0 0 15 botangoklow@gmail.com http://www.lub4dwn.com/ 94.142.131.233 2010-05-03 11:28:58 2010-05-03 16:28:58 Worker]]> spam 0 0 16 ala234l@gawab.com http://genericwpthemes.com 94.142.134.213 2010-05-04 23:34:42 2010-05-05 04:34:42 spam 0 0 17 fjdisa@asd.com http://www.pharmacytechnicianblog.com/pharmacy-technician-test 10.128.17.254 2010-05-07 02:11:37 2010-05-07 06:11:37 spam 0 0 18 haloa88@flosz.com http://www.airpurifierfaq.com 10.128.17.254 2010-05-09 05:17:56 2010-05-09 09:17:56 spam 0 0 148 jolama@gawab.com http://www.penisenlargementl.com 10.128.17.254 2010-05-22 09:04:16 2010-05-22 13:04:16 spam 0 0 334 Korpela@gmail.com http://water-treatment.be-long.com/Calcium-Hypochlorite/ 10.128.17.254 2010-07-13 05:06:16 2010-07-13 09:06:16 0 0 0 242 powersharing@gmail.com http://www.managerassistantblog.com 10.128.17.254 2010-05-30 11:36:57 2010-05-30 15:36:57 spam 0 0 282 Elskamp@gmail.com http://www.choyungweightloss.com 10.128.17.254 2010-06-14 15:27:53 2010-06-14 19:27:53 spam 0 0 291 jiushiqiao4312@gmail.com http://www.airforceone.cc/ 10.128.17.254 2010-06-16 21:01:00 2010-06-17 01:01:00 spam 0 0 298 marionamiraultiilme@hotmail.com http://www.medical-malpractice-court-cases.com 10.128.17.254 2010-06-24 13:14:04 2010-06-24 17:14:04 trash 0 0
Booth 22-23 Fri, 09 Apr 2010 16:21:15 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/files/2010/03/Booth-22-23.jpg 169 2010-04-09 11:21:15 2010-04-09 16:21:15 open open booth-22-23 inherit 27 0 attachment 0 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/files/2010/03/Booth-22-23.jpg _wp_attached_file _wp_attachment_metadata Booth 28-29 Fri, 09 Apr 2010 16:22:16 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/files/2010/03/Booth-28-29.jpg 170 2010-04-09 11:22:16 2010-04-09 16:22:16 open open booth-28-29 inherit 27 0 attachment 0 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/files/2010/03/Booth-28-29.jpg _wp_attached_file _wp_attachment_metadata Booth 36-37 Fri, 09 Apr 2010 16:22:49 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/files/2010/03/Booth-36-37.jpg 171 2010-04-09 11:22:49 2010-04-09 16:22:49 open open booth-36-37 inherit 27 0 attachment 0 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/files/2010/03/Booth-36-37.jpg _wp_attached_file _wp_attachment_metadata Interview with Jane Hamilton Thu, 15 Apr 2010 06:00:28 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?p=44 by Barbara Shoup

Jane Hamilton is the author of The Book of Ruth, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for first fiction, and A Map of the World, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and named one of the top ten books of the year by Entertainment Weekly, Publishers Weekly, the Miami Herald, and People. Both The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World have been selections of Oprah's Book Club.  The Short History of a Prince was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998; her novel Disobedience was published in 2000; When Madeline Was Young was a Washington Post Best Book of 2006.  She lives and writes in an orchard farmhouse in Wisconsin. In March 2009, Hamilton was a writer-in-residence at Butler University.  This conversation with novelist Barbara Shoup about her book When Madeline Was Young and the newly released Laura Rider’s Masterpiece took place before a group of students in Professor Susan Neville’s Visiting Writers Series class. Barbara ShoupTimothy (Mac) Maciver, the narrator of When Madeline Was Young, grew up in a Chicago suburb in the 1950s with his parents, a sister and Madeline, his father’s first wife who suffered a brain injury soon after their wedding that left her with the mental capacity of a seven-year-old.  Now in his fifties, a doctor with a wife and teenage daughters, he considers the meaning of his parents’ decision to make Madeline a part of their family as he prepares to attend the funeral of the son of his estranged cousin, who was killed in Iraq.  How did this novel begin for you? Jane Hamilton: The genesis of the book was Elizabeth Spencer’s Light in the Piazza, which I saw as a musical when it came to Chicago.  It was about a mother who takes her twenty-six-year-old daughter to Florence.  She’s a beautiful young woman who was injured when she was twelve.  She’s got the mental acuity of a ten-year-old.  The daughter falls in love with an Italian man, the Italian man falls in love with her and, because of the language barrier, he doesn’t understand that there’s anything wrong with her.  At first the mother of the daughter is saying, “Oh, no.  This can’t happen.”  But then she realizes that this is her daughter’s one chance for happiness, and she manipulates the situation so that the marriage happens.  The novella is perfection.  At the end it’s really about being a parent and how you have to let your child into her own destiny. When I saw the musical, I had been working on a book for four years and was at the end of trying to make it do something.  I knew I had to throw it out.  I came home and read [Spencer’s] novella.  The next day I was sitting next to Connie Tillerose at the Memorial Day parade—I see Connie Tillerose once a year at the Memorial Day parade—and she started telling me about this friend of hers whose twenty-something son had just gotten married and his wife was in a bicycle accident and she was now like a five-year-old, and I just thought, That’s it!  Thank you, Connie. So that’s how it came to be. BS: How did you decide what Madeline’s brain injury would be? JH: In the Elizabeth Spencer book, the brain injury was kind of vague, which is harder to get away with now.  I’m not a doctor.  I read about neurobiology and I read about brain injuries.  I had this enormous medical textbook and I got up every morning and went through the whole thing.  But in the end I made her illness impressionistic.  People who’ve really been injured as Madeline was often become obese, and I couldn’t let her do that. She needed to be beautiful. That was important to her and to the plot.  This is the pleasure of writing fiction: Anything is possible--if you can get away with it. BS: The scope of When Madeline Was Young is much broader than Light in the Piazza.  It’s the story of Madeline, of course, but also the story of Madeline’s effect on the family and the story of Mac’s own life—not to mention a story about the 1950s, 60s and 70s, generally, including Vietnam. JH: When I think about that book I remember that my high school boyfriend’s mother told me when I was sixteen that I was neurologically disorganized.  I’m a little embarrassed by how unstructured it is. BS: I think the structure is brilliant.  There’s no one story; Mac tells everyone’s story.  The other characters circle through it, each one submerged in his or her life.  Mac is the one standing outside, seeing it all. JH: He’s very passive. BS: But his attachment to the family is so strong—and he tells the story in a wondering tone that conveys his need, finally, to understand what happened when he was young.  He moves in and out of time, but the timeframe or “now” of the novel is the short period of time between the time he learns that his cousin, Buddy, has been killed in Iraq and the funeral and its aftermath.  Was the funeral a part of your original idea for the book? JH: Probably not.  I must have started the book in 2003, so it was right after we went into Iraq.  I had trouble writing fiction after 2001.  It felt like such a [foolish] thing to be doing.  My stories just felt like—who cares?  I knew pretty early in the writing that I wanted to find some way to talk about war and how it is that families talk about war.  How people get stuck in their own corners and can’t get out.  Their point-of-view never changes, so the fight never changes.  I guess the Iraq war just fell into it—and then Vietnam, which was essential to the novel because Mac lived through it and was deeply affected by it. BS: Generally, how do your main characters develop? JH: Hearing the voices is key to the beginning, really listening for them—being ready to receive.  And writing down the lines.  I think I’m going to remember them, but I don’t.  So now I write them down. BS: It comes more as sound or rhythm, then?  You hear them before you see them? JH: I think I see the character in his place first, and then the voice starts soon after. BS: Was there a conscious decision to make Mac the main character of When Madeline Was Young? JH: I can’t really remember.  I think voice happens at an intuitive level.  Who knows?  There it is, that voice.  I do like writing from the point of view of men.  I like trying to imagine our gender through their eyes. BS: I was fascinated by what Mac seemed to regard as the incidental nature of his own life, as he told the story.  For example, at one point he dispenses with a period in his life with a sentence that begins, “For two years, as a conscious objector, I…” The information just serves as a transition to the next part of the larger story. JH: It all comes back to Willa Cather, of course.  She has a great line, which I can’t quote, about how the artist’s goal is to cut away everything that’s extraneous so that what’s left are only the bare essentials.  But what remains is made of what you cut away. BS: Generally, the transitions in this book were very effective in moving the reader from one level of time to another.  One I particularly admired was, “Mikey O’Day must have come to our doorstep in 1963, a few months before Kennedy’s assassination.  The Fullers, then, had been on the east coast for nearly three years.”  I love the way it so deftly completes the Mikey section and returns the reader to the strand of the Fullers’ lives, sort of like Chutes and Ladders. JH: I was reading Brideshead Revisited when I was working on this book.  He starts chapters saying things like, “In May, the gillyflowers were in bloom and Oxford...”  And you just see it immediately.  I remember thinking, Oh, that’s good to make note of. BS: Was there anything that surprised you as the novel evolved? JH: I was so spooked by having worked for four years on the novel that didn’t work that I showed When Madeline Was Young to my editor early on.  I don’t usually do that because I want it to be mine. I don’t want anyone to tell me what it is until I know it myself.  But I needed her to say, “Yes.  You’re a writer.  It’s fine.” She read it and said, “This might be crazy, but I think Madeline needs a boyfriend.”  This is the beauty of a great editor.  The minute she said it I thought, yes!   I could see the whole thing.  I’d considered it.  It was in my mind, but it probably would have taken me a long time to get there.  So she saved me a lot of time. What surprised me was my character Mikey.   Somehow he’s the glue that holds it all together.  Without him, the book was just a series of vignettes. BS: I love Mikey!  The image of this goofy-looking guy and the beautiful, elegant Madeline just going at it all the time is hilarious.  He must have been fun to write. JH: Oh, he was.  He’s fat and he loves sex.  He sings songs. BS: I also love Mac’s Aunt Figgy.  Her gossip answers Mac’s (and the reader’s) questions about his parents and about some of the events of his childhood and, better yet, she often says what the reader is thinking about Madeline’s place in the family. JH: Mac’s second wife was the one caring for the first wife.  She was a do-gooder, and I knew there had to be a foil for her.  Someone saying, “You know, you really ought to stick that girl in an institution!”  I think of Figgy in relation to a high school friend who married a man that was a million years older than she was and who had a very high position in one of our more recent administrations.  She changed her political affiliation to be married to this man.  I thought it was such an interesting situation to find yourself in.  How did she do it?  How would she have felt if her son had to go to war?  That’s where Figgy came from. BS: Your minor characters are wonderfully idiosyncratic and…right there.  Would you comment on the role of minor characters in a novel? JH: Music is often important to my characters.  I can’t imagine going through life without music, it’s such an essential element in [my] life.  So it seems important to give music to my people. In the same way, our lives are made so rich by the people around us that I want to give my people that, too.  It makes it interesting and fun to write. BS: Elvira, the teenage girl who’s an avid Civil War re-enactor in your novel Disobedience comes to mind.  Her obsession is compelling—and also creates terrific tension in the family. JH: People have said, “I wish she’d have written the book because she’s so interesting.”  But she couldn’t have.  She wasn’t an observer; she wouldn’t have had that much to say.  She needed to be observed. BS: Would you talk about the kind of revision you did for When Madeline Was Young? JH: First, I wrote many drafts, and then I gave it to my editor, as I said, and once she’d put me onto Mikey O’Day, then the path was clear to finish the book.  I always write many drafts, up to the bitter end, but if the structure is fully in place, the words follow.  After the form there is rewriting, then shaping the sentences, filling in details, and understanding more about the characters.   Writing A Map of The World was a dramatic lesson in wandering around in the soup of a story because although I had the beginning, and the last lines, I didn’t know what would fill up the middle. When I wrote A Map of the World I wrote four distinct novels with the same beginning—with different outcomes.  I didn’t realize that Alice had to get into deeper trouble before she came out of her original trouble, which was the drowning of the child, until the fourth incarnation.  In the first one she went to a Sufi community in upstate New York, nothing happened.  Second, she left her husband and went to Michigan.  Third, she went to her own home in Illinois where the father was an alcoholic.  I knew nothing about alcoholism.  I couldn’t figure out how to make her better and get her through it. What finally triggered the real book was an article I read in Harper’s Magazine about a woman named Kelly Michaels, who was 22 years old at the time.  She had been convicted of abusing many, many, many little children in a day care center in New Jersey.  She was in jail for six or seven years, and then she was exonerated.  It was so chilling.  I read that piece and I thought, this is the perfect trouble for Alice.  Also, having the luxury to explore that kind of injustice that happened on so many levels that you can’t get yourself out of the hole was really interesting and horrific.  A nightmare.  At the same time, Alice Goodheart loved being in jail because she was able to pay her pound of flesh. BS: How many pages were abandoned before you got there? JH: Many pages.  And garbage bags. BS: I don’t think that’s uncommon, do you? JH: No.  I’m always amazed when people really know how to do it.  It would be so comforting: today I’m going to work on section 2-A.  Then there’s going to be 3-B.  But that doesn’t work for me.  I remember being at Ragdale back in the day.  Lawrence Block would come with his little typewriter and he would sit down and he wouldn’t speak to anyone for three weeks.  You’d hear, clack, clack, clack.  Then he’d be done.  He’d look up and say, “Is there a party tonight?”  He’d been writing the book in his head for nine months of the year, he just came to Ragdale to type.  I said something to him about the fact that I write a jillion drafts and he asked, “How can it be all of a piece?’ Everyone has a different way.  Somerset Maugham said, “There are three rules for the writing of a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” BS: Having revised and revised until you found the solution that finally made A Map of the World, how did you know it was right to let that other failed novel go? The one you worked on for four years.   And wasn’t it depressing? JH: At the point when I packed it away it was really a joyful thing because I couldn’t do any more to it and it didn’t feel good.  I had been just about to hand it in and I called my editor and said, “This just isn’t going to happen.”  She said, “This is very brave.”  I thought, no.  It would have taken more courage to send this bad thing out into the world that I hated.  I hated it. And one of the things I could not imagine was doing public readings of it because I hated it so much. BS: Your new novel, Laura Rider’s Masterpiece, is very different from your previous work.  To quote Publishers Weekly,  “Laura Rider and her husband, Charlie, live in Hartley, Wis., where they own and run Prairie Wind Farm. After 12 years of marriage, Laura decides to stop sleeping with Charlie, and although lovemaking is his ‘one superb talent,’ she's convinced she's ‘used up her quota.’ Also, Laura has a secret fantasy: to be an author. After she meets local public radio host Jenna Faroli, Laura decides to write a romance and encourages a flirtation between Charlie and Jenna, an experiment that she thinks will help her write her book.” What in the world was the genesis of this book? JH: I was teaching writing on a cruise ship... BS: Oh, boy.  I think I see where you’re going with this. JH: I’ve been very lucky to be able to teach in institutions with terrific, thoughtful, serious students who are real readers.  This population on the cruise was not.  I’d never been on a cruise before.  There’s much to say about the cruise, but I’ll just say that . . . I wanted to shoot myself.  It was a dispiriting experience.  My friends, the other teachers, and I had this huge argument one night about whether life was tragic or comic.   There were just so many things about the cruise that seemed to me because of my mood to be tragic, but how could you not think they were comic when they were so over the top? I’d just been on a book tour with Madeline.  It’s hard to go around with a literary novel right now, so I really needed to cheer myself up.  I was interested in these cruise people.   They seemed to have no awareness that there has ever been a print culture; they seemed never to have read a book.  But yet they desperately, feverishly wanted to be published.  Do not pass Go—just straight to publication.  They weren’t particularly interested in feedback, so I really understood what Jesus meant when he said, “Don’t cast your pearls before swine.” That’s a really complicated thing.  It can really let the teacher off the hook.  Oh, you’re swine.  I’m not going to care about you.   But I felt that I could have done handstands on the table, and they still would have said, “But how do I get published?” What else to do but come home and write a comedy about a woman who’s never read a book but wants to write a romance novel? BS: The book is very funny, but it’s not only funny. There’s something really ruthless in the way that Laura keeps taking things and using them—which mirrors a crucial part of the creative process.  Writers are ruthless. JH: I feel very ruthless.  I try not to use my relatives in my work—but, oops, there they are.  They won’t mind, so I imagine.  Elvira, in Disobedience, the Civil War re-enactment girl, is pretty whole-cloth my cousin’s child.  My husband gave a bit of his genetic material to Howard in Map of the World and he loathes Howard.  There’s some of him that runs through everything, and I think it’s unpleasant for him. The novel I’m working on right now is about an apple orchard, three generations of a farm family.  It’s set in Michigan, it’s not really about his family, but . . . I can’t not write it. BS: Because there’s something in the material that you hope to be able to understand? JH: Oh, yes.  But mainly because it’s just so rich.  It would be such a waste.  It would be like walking past a gold mine and saying, “No, not for me.” Jane Smiley wrote an essay called “Can Writers Have Friends?”  She talks about the problem, and says at the end that she hopes if anybody ever writes about her she’ll remember the thing she says to people: “I used some of your details, yes, but I really was not writing about you.  I was using your details to explore an idea entirely different from you.”  Which is actually true. I would like to think that I bring great sympathy to my characters and show them in a lovely light—and that’s not a bad thing.  On the other hand, I’ve written a couple of books where people come up and say, “I saw myself.  You put in me there.”  And I don’t know what to say.  You were nowhere on my screen?  Or, well, thanks? BS: There’s such urgency in the way you talk about your work. JH:  When I was younger, I had these books that felt urgent.  I didn’t know how A Map of the World was going to resolve and yet I had to write the book. I had to write the book.  But I didn’t have the time and space.  I had to fight for it.  Now I don’t have that issue anymore.  I have my day.  I have a certain calm about that.  But there’s also a certain energy that isn’t there anymore. As I get older I think writing novels is just an incredibly privileged way to spend my time.  I feel so lucky to get to do it.  The painter Morandi said, “My goal is to enjoy the solitude that my work requires.”  Which sounds kind of lame, but that’s what I’ve come to.  And I would feel very lucky to be able to continue to do that. BS: Do you think that creative writing can be taught? JH: I would say that the students that I’ve had who have seemed to exhibit real, raw, unbridled talent—you just want to not ruin them.  Stay out of their way.  I think that you can alert people to technique and help them become good readers.  You can help them develop depth.  The great mystery of being a teacher is that you cannot predict who’s actually going to do it.  Who’s going to have the drive, who’s going to pull it together?  Which, in a way, is what Laura Rider is about.  Laura Rider hasn’t read a book and wants to write a romance novel.  I wouldn’t be surprised if she really did it. ]]>
44 2010-04-15 01:00:28 2010-04-15 06:00:28 open open interview-with-jane-hamilton publish 0 0 post 0 _edit_lock _edit_last 301 slh.f.v.btopwi.bv.p.iw.y.b.v.i@gmail.com 10.128.17.254 2010-06-27 09:08:00 2010-06-27 13:08:00 viagra en belgique cialis achat en ligne viagra pharmacie en ligne viagra vente libre viagra vente libre cialis generique france acheter cialis france cialis generique pas cher pharmacie discount en ligne levitra 20mg prix http://djflfblhdvfg.com]]> trash 0 0 270 Savitz@historical-romance.org http://www.historical-romance.org/ 10.128.17.254 2010-06-10 10:35:31 2010-06-10 14:35:31 romance was amazing and very sensual, the characters are believably flawed (sometimes this is difficult for romance novelists to accomplish) and while it is (as always) frustrating to see how their issues could be resolved with an honest conversation about their misunderstandings, it is easy to see how the misunderstandings come to be and why each character stays within themselves instead of becoming vulnerable. Max's difficult family life is further explained in "A Compromised Lady," which is the story of Richard's romance. I have read and reread this book - LOVE IT. Historical Romance Novels]]> spam 0 0
I Am a Weak Man Thu, 22 Apr 2010 06:00:11 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?p=82 John Baum

I am laying on the roof, wearing night vision goggles and squinting through the sights of a secondhand paintball gun, waiting on her ’81 Chrysler K-Car to come farting down the street towards my house. The truth of this immediate scenario, that this should be embarrassing on several levels—I’m an adult, for God’s sake—nudges at me but I remain focused. Her car slows to a flatulent stop across the street and my breath seizes up a moment before continuing in short puffs. I’m thirty-two years old and terrified of this woman who still thinks this house is mine. Now I live in a storage unit she doesn’t know about.

* * *

Six weeks into the relationship, I went to her place with a plan to let her down gently. She’d started making unannounced visits and leaving random dinners of catfish or spaghetti casseroles in brand new Igloo coolers on my doorstep. A new cooler each time. I have a collection now. She called me "honey." She wanted to spend time with my parents. We had not slept together yet. Recently, sitting in my storage unit, I imagined how that night should’ve gone, how peaceful my life would be if I could have just ended it like I’d planned. But instead, we slept together because I am a weak man. We were sitting on the porch watching the final breaths of a late afternoon rainstorm rise from the sidewalk. The tiny beads of sweat above her lip were oddly enticing. She smiled and leaned forward to kiss me, but something green and Florida-shaped was lodged in her teeth. I drew back and with a finger, gestured to my own mouth, something you can’t do without making a face. She covered her mouth and jumped into the house. I counted the steps from her stoop to my car. Across the street a woman beat a brown rug over a porch railing. I counted the swats with the broom. Then the door opened behind me and I had my opening line ready. But she spoke first. “Better?” She had changed into a white lace number, and I could’ve plopped a grape into her cleavage from ten feet. My car was thirteen steps away. The woman across the street had stopped beating the rug at fourteen whacks. I’m sure she was stunned, too. I have no illusions that some of this is not my fault. I am well aware that I held on a while longer, only because the sex was melt-your-face good. I am a weak man. Several weeks later, she took me to a bookstore, bought me a coffee, and told me to wait at an outdoor table. She went inside and returned with a brand new copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Her eyes were alive as if something were chaotically spinning behind them. Suddenly, I envied everyone else in the world. She slapped me when I asked was she sure. It was a movie slap that everyone notices. And now, from the false safety of my roof, watching her step out of her grumbling car, I see that moment as an unhinging in my soul. I cried. I stood in the parking lot and yelled that it had to be impossible; I asked how she knew it was mine, and she herself became unhinged. Then I made an appointment at a fertility clinic because I am one testicle short of a pair.

* * *

When I was sixteen, I jumped from a trestle into a lake and didn't quite stick the landing. The resulting injury sent me to the emergency room with a dislocated testicle, the left one having lodged itself in a place it did not belong, damaged beyond repair. The prosthetic looked real enough. Even my mother said it looked authentic. The doctor made it clear that implanting the neutical could harm my potency but I just wanted to look normal. I was sixteen and if anything, a lack of reproductive power was a gift.

* * *

With an eye on her, I stand, bracing myself against the chimney, finger on the trigger. As I start to squeeze, two gunshots, real gunshots, shoot-to-kill gunshots, rip through the night and I flinch, lose my grip and the gun slides down the roof, clattering over the gutter, into a holly bush the size of a Volkswagen. My footing slips and I follow the gun, shingle grit digging into my knees and forearms as I scream, briefly airborne, before crashing in the holly bush. There had been no maniacal gunfire, only the two cannon shots of backfire from the K-car tailpipe. Branches jab my ribs and face. I wipe beneath my eye and blood darkens the tips of my fingers. My right arm, perhaps slightly fractured, throbs intensely and I feel nauseous. The sky, grainy and green, appears twice, cut in half by a crack in the goggles. After I extract myself from the bushes I see she is crying. Not laughing, raging, or yelling, but crying softly at the end of the driveway; her entire, skinny, seemingly unpregnant body gently trembling. Just above her quiet sobs is the whisper of a heavy mist that makes the trees sound as if they are hissing at us both. When I remove the goggles the real world--stark, beautiful, vibrant and true, is like the shock of cold water. My nausea is gone. I limp towards her and her hands move, rubbing circles over her flat belly. I’d planned on lighting her up with the paintball gun and then showing her the letter from the fertility clinic, informing me, that I am sterile and will never procreate. All I’d wanted to do was rub her face in the hard fact that she was insane and her delusion impossible. But all resolve crumbles and I ask to touch her stomach just once. I say, "I'm sorry." Her hand covers mine and together we comfort the baby that is not there. ]]>
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Jacques Derrida Writes Postcards to Himself from a Diner in Winesburg, Indiana Thu, 29 Apr 2010 06:09:45 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?p=86 by Michael Martone

I am not the first French writer to venture into the heart of the American interior. It was de Tocqueville, an inspector of prisons, who became distracted by the American character, finding at its heart a stability for the time, crafted by an obsession with equality and its jettisoning of rank, title, primogenitor and the other trappings of the aristocratic landed elites. Beneath such skins, in other words, were other words. Take this "sandwich" for instance. It is an amalgam of the "raw" and the "cooked." A sign for both the great leavened leveling flatness of the culture, nurtured on a denuded glacial plain and its assertion, of its "ness-ness (it is known as "John’s [after the proprietor of the bistro] Awful, Awful," a diminution of "Awful Big, Awful Good"). It is considered here to hold the highest of rank in the hierarchy of "sandwiches," said to be "the sandwich’s sandwich" in the same way one can be "a writer’s writer." This is an application of democracy, after all, at once stratified, but also (in its "bunned" variant) equilateral in its expression of difference and conformity. "Le Pain", the "bun," is the architectural "quotation" of the dome (the English "pan" a verbal and visual pun as well as the literally vexed convex(ed) structure of the bun’s upper segment), the vaulted space that (pantheistically) arches over all uniformly and simultaneously. Elections are held for such sandwiches as I am told by the "waitress," and, here, in an enabling parasitic text attached to the menu, I discover that this particular "breaded" pork (tender)loin has (on several occasions) garnered the award as "best" in the "fair(s)" of several Midwestern States. Significant is that this meat puck be peened flat first to within an inch of its life, its footprint allowed to expand (before the application of its "breading" [that is to say the meat is sandwiched by its own dermis of adhesive dough before said sandwich is sandwiched by the aforementioned sandwiching conventionally yeasted bun]) beyond the edges of the circular boundaries of the "bun" and beyond (and in its continuous beatings and poundings [known locally as "tenderization"]) in all directions, expand into a slim smear, a skid of flesh, even beyond the limits (and this is crucial [in the sense of "crossed"]) of the ceramic "plate" or "platter" that frames the whole meat delivery device’s delivery device. The massive flatness of the (tendered)loin is made even more evident by the rigorously induced rigor of the deep (emphasis mine) fat frying of the dead (though still elastic and recently stretched) flesh into the consistency of plied wood. The now encrusted cutlet is meant to expand (theoretically) horizontally beyond the surrounding event horizon of the plate and, eventually, the place. As I unhinge the "bun" in order to "dress" the sandwich with additional limpid veneers of a single lettuce leaf, a thinly sliced slice of pickle, squeeze-bottled skim of yellow-washed paste of mustard, I realize that the compacted (tenacious)loin is a kind of mirror (mirrored), reflecting not me so much as the surface of "me" ("Derrida") or, even more exact, the (tentative)loin is a kind of anti-mirror mirror (mirror), not reflecting so much as absorbing light into the striations of its now heat-induced, chemically altered coatings, not a skin so much as the scrim that adheres to skin (a scum on the smooth surface of a pond that, in its flatness [both in the dimensional and optical calibrations], argues against even the concept of "depth"), a skin’s skin skinned. The "sandwich" (itself) is constructed out of (empty) "words," ("empty") calories wrapped in the "whiteness" (the absence of color) of white bread. The "self" sandwiched as "sandwich." Not a "prison" of walls (walls) but of floors "sandwiched" together. The sign, "I" and the signifier for "I" (the "’I’") collapse--the serifed capital on the top pancaking upon the serif at the foot. The middle (stuffing) compressed (ground to grout), the whole thing reduced to a line, an "under"line, under lined, a line the thickness of this postal card, the depth of this stamp (the stamp’s intaglio image [of an American author] made of etched and stippled lines), the slick spit of the lick of my tongue positioned between the stamp (as in "to press down") and the card with its inscribed (and inscription of) surface, of place, with its (future) postmark a tattoo (to be) absorbed into the (skimmed) skin. ]]>
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Anniversary Fri, 07 May 2010 06:21:38 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?p=224 by James Crews

A fever, a freakout, a lesion-like spot newly risen and the frenzied drive to the clinic for a cheek-swab, negative, on our anniversary no less. Now dozing lover, I promise never to compare this labored breathing with the dusk the cicadas’ so-called singing hangs over this day. I will make of our useless plague-fear a blanket and drape it across the bare shiver of your shoulders where the last, thinning pages of sunlight stretch like blank vellum. I won’t trace celebration or wasted in Vaporub on the faltering rise and fall of your chest. Which is to say, though I have cancelled the reservations and postponed the party, we will make the most of this, make do, and maybe love too, later, if you’re in the mood. For now, I will let you seduce me with sleep-sounds that always say, his, his. As long as the cicadas, those noisemakers, keep strumming their complicated timbals into annual need, these twin plastic men holding hands in tuxedoes on top of the tiered white cake in the fridge will keep waiting as if for their slow waltz to begin. ]]>
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The Top Five Kissing Spots in Warsaw, Poland Thu, 13 May 2010 06:14:23 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?p=94 by Karen Kovacik

5) At the Café Antykwariat, preferably in the back room, at the table tucked into a prewar armoire—warning: no door—which will mean less privacy but a good view of the 1920s pinup in fedora and smoky stockings, perched on the sink in a train compartment, or the trapeze artist wearing only sequins, dizzy above the lion. 4) In the last row of the Kino Kultura during a thunderstorm, while watching Forman’s Loves of a Blonde, or just after, when the Soviet-era sconces turn on, and the matronly usher opens the exit door onto a courtyard even smaller than this cinema, now dark and wet. 3) At a Chopin concert in the rose garden of the Park Łazienkowski, when the flowers are past their prime, and the pianist has departed from the standard repertoire, and you’re trying not to touch, but she’s embarked on a tarantella, and you sit ear to ear, not breathing, feeling each willow-switch of sound. 2) In the PZO, the Polish Optical Warehouse, which once stored carpet samples and now houses artists—you can’t miss the blue eye winking on its roof—and on one weekend each June, its padlocked doors open, and you pass a man canoeing through the courtyard’s sandy soil and a woman dressed as Marie Antoinette singing Puccini, and holding hands, you wander through corridors of eye charts that open onto exhibits, such as the three fresh graves, their soil mounded in the shape of women’s bodies, and you wonder if you’re the only person turned on by death and Fellini. Apparently not... 1) On a pedal boat in the Park Kamionkowski, which abuts the Wedel candy factory, so everything smells like chocolate—even the dragonflies hovering over this cocoa-colored pond surrounded by poplars desperate to propagate, giving off the white fuzz that catches in your hair, and all the cyclists, runners, and squirrels are trying to stave off time, even when the sun melts into the chocolate water, and you stop pedaling for a good ten minutes, semisweet, bittersweet, filled with cognac and rum. N.B. Not recommended: a) Taking the elevator to the top of the Stalinist Palace of Culture, where you will look out over the microscopic sellers of ersatz amber, knockoff colognes, and hyacinths, and feel like Satan tempting Christ, the Vistula River now yours, the billboard ads for pushup bras, the trams impatient to get past the newly restored Hotel Polonia with its buttercream facade, where no one can afford to stay. b) The KFC on Jerusalem Avenue, even if 25 years ago when the storefront belonged to Natasza, a Soviet-era Lane Bryant, you saw a man standing in his window above the neon “N,” blowing smoke rings, naked. ]]>
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Collision Physics for the Math-Averse Thu, 20 May 2010 06:00:41 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?p=191 by Sarah Layden

Timing Scenario 1: The hit absorbed by the small car with excellent safety features prevented the big car from hitting a third, uninvolved car, an aged hatchback that would’ve crumpled like a wadded sheet of paper. In that car would be small children, a young mother cavalier with seatbelts. Her cigarette inches from the child in the passenger seat. The collision that would push the glowing cherry directly into the child’s eye. The collision that could’ve happened a mile up the road, but was prevented by the driver of the small car leaving five minutes late (Timing Scenario 2). There was coffee to be drunk, email to be checked, breakfast nearly forgotten but a piece of bread quickly toasted, quickly eaten. An email reconsidered, edited carefully, then reworded. The momentary regret of hitting “send.” The clock checked, the panic of where-are-some-socks. Mass: Bigger cars have more mass. In a collision with a Crown Vic, the Crown Vic wins. Always. A massive car. It owns the road, even – especially – when it runs a stop sign, pushing the mass of the smaller car into the mass of a pine tree. First rolling over a big clunky object, the mass of the front bumper. When the wrecker arrived, pine boughs sprinkled needles that amassed in small piles on the wet winter ground. The car dislodged easily as a tooth. Gravity: Items traveled about the car cabin before landing about the floorboards. Open purse scattered its contents (wallet, receipts, the doctor form), a CD (Peter Tosh, “Legalize It”), cell phone. At the moment of impact, the driver saw only the backs of her own eyelids. Meanwhile, inside the cabin, the possessions hovered in a perfect equation of flight. Pitch & Frequency: No scream. Just a single word shouted repeatedly, then hoarsely. No! No! No! No! No! The airbag’s pop and hiss, smoke rising, the scent of gunpowder. A wheezy-whistle breath. No! No! No! No! No! See how much a person wants to live. Hear the fuss a person makes over death. Like death is a very, very bad dog. Parallel Universe: The driver of the smaller car remained in bed, skipping the doctor visit entirely, opting instead for the latest issue of People, a pot of coffee, a couple cigarettes smoked next to the cracked bedroom window. Bored, the driver eventually climbed into the small car for a trip to the drugstore, where she purchased dark chocolate, US Weekly, an embarrassingly large box of Super Plus tampons. Returned home, watched Seinfeld and Golden Girls reruns. Slept easily, not dreaming of the sound of crushed metal. Escape Velocity: A bent frame maligns the driver’s side. A shove, a crank, and the door slivers open. Had the car ever stopped moving, had the driver? But there she is, doubled over on a stranger’s lawn beneath a stranger’s pines, free. ]]>
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o Mon, 24 May 2010 18:35:21 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/files/2010/05/o.jpg 250 2010-05-24 14:35:21 2010-05-24 18:35:21 open open o inherit 247 0 attachment 0 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/files/2010/05/o.jpg _wp_attached_file _wp_attachment_metadata Winesburg, Indiana: Beau Morrow Thu, 27 May 2010 06:28:30 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?p=102 by Robin Black

“Blood is in our blood, son,” my father used to say. He was the real butcher. I’m just a man who sells meat. He worked in the slaughterhouse at the north edge of town like his father before him and his father before him and his mother before him. My great-great grandmother, Lil. The way they told it, she was the sweetest girl ever raised until her young husband was gored to death by a crazed, escaped bull. And after that she was a snake. A picture of her hung on our kitchen wall when I was growing up, right between the crucifix and the clock. A tiny woman in a long black dress, a veil over her face, standing right up against a hanging side of beef. When I was little, I thought her hands were soaked in blood but at some point I figured out that was gloves. Then I decided she probably wore them to cover up the blood. I hated to look at her and I looked at her at every chance I got. “You can’t fight your fate,” my father would say. The fact is, I tried to as hard as I could. Genes or not, I knew I was no killer. I pretended to myself that the milkman was my father and that milk ran in my veins, white, bloodless blood. I understood it was weak, but when I dreamed of cows, their udders were full and my hands were on their teats. I could hear the tinny, rhythmic squirt into my pail. I patted them on their rumps when I was through – like a friend. And I knew it would just about kill my father if he found out. It took me to the day I graduated school and was scheduled to go to the slaughterhouse the next morning, the five am shift, to tell him I wanted to own a dairy farm one day. An hour later he was dead. A heart attack. From shock. I understood then that I could never fully leave the world of meat. I started at Karl’s Finer Food the day after the funeral. But calling yourself a butcher when you’ve never butchered anything, just displayed it all prettied up with parsley sprigs and Easter basket plastic grass, is like calling yourself a musician because you can work your car radio. It’s the kind of dishonesty that eats at your soul. And maybe my whole life has been about finding the one person alive who could understand that. Delia Barrymore, the podiatrist’s wife. She was peering down into the sweating meat case one steaming summer afternoon, a kid or two hanging off each arm, when she said “If you don’t actually kill the animals yourself, are you truly a butcher? Aren’t you more accurately a species of meat salesman?” And she looked right at me with green-blue eyes which are as close to circles as any eyes can be, and right when I realized they were the most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen, her children all looked up at me with the exact same ones so that suddenly it was like there was just no escape from ten green-blue circle-eyes seeing right through my claim to butchery and me seeing all that beauty in all of them. There was just no escape. I said to her, “You’re right. You’re exactly right. I’m not any kind of butcher at all. I’m just a man who sells meat.” “It must be very difficult for you,” she said. “To be living that lie.” And her voice was full of understanding, full of care. She ordered two pounds of ground round and I gave her ground sirloin instead, no extra charge. My mother used to say only people who see you for what you are can truly love you. If they don’t see you clearly, they’re just looking in a mirror and loving themselves. I know she saw my father for what he was. “He was a butcher to his bones,” she told me just before she died. “If he couldn’t take it out on the cows, God alone knows what that man would have done to us. Oh, how I loved him . . . ” Then she expired. Delia Barrymore saw me for who I was. I didn’t kid myself she loved me, but I loved her right away. She would come in on Tuesday afternoons between four-thirty and five, and we would talk. She said she wanted to understand my relationship with meat. That she could tell it was complex. I told her about my father, and his father and his all the way back to Lil. She asked me to bring in the picture and I dug it out to show her. I described how I ran screaming from the family slaughterhouse as a child and never set foot in it again. How I knew I had let my father down, knew I didn’t deserve to be called a butcher. That I was more like a mortician making the dead in my care look more palatable to viewers. That I felt like a fraud every day. We talked about what it would take to get Karl to take down the big red BUTCHER sign and put one up that said MEAT SELLER or PURVEYOR OF MEATS – her idea - or even just MEAT. “It doesn’t have to be about me,” I said. “Did you ever notice, it’s the only sign in the market that’s about the person working there? It should be about the meat.” She told me she agreed. She said she had always loved meat, any meat. That she craved it constantly. She talked about how sometimes she was hungry for meat in the middle of the night. In the morning when she woke up. She used the word insatiable and then the word comestible and every moment we talked was a torture of desire - as though I was alive for the first time, as though I had been just another piece of dead flesh until she arrived to see into my heart, into my soul. As though I had never seen the value of inhabiting a living body until then. Of being a red-blooded American male. As she spoke, I imagined each part of her, like the drawing hanging on the wall, a dotted line between her hip and flank, her leg and butt, each section something to savor, to taste. She would come in, week after week, fewer and fewer children hanging off her all the while, until by the Tuesday after Presidents Day, she was there all alone. It was her on one side of the counter, me on the other. Only meat between us. She picked out a rump roast and I wrapped my best tenderloin, keyed it in as soup bones. One dollar and seventy-nine cents. But before I could hand her the package, she said she’d mentioned something to Karl about the sign, that she’d told him she thought the word butcher was frightening for her children which was why she had stopped bringing them in, that she didn’t believe it was a proper reflection of good family values to have a word on display that means killer, especially not on an enormous red sign - as though it were covered in the blood of the dead. And that she’d heard other mothers say the same. That local children were having difficulty with sleep, dreaming of a killer holding a huge sharp knife, lurking in Karl’s Finer Foods, often taking the form of Karl himself. Little sparks of spit flew from her mouth, bright and glittering, like there was some kind of flame inside of her. She said she’d told him it seemed highly preferable to them all, all the mothers, just to have a small sign, maybe blue with gold letters, that said Meat. That the children’s nightmares would surely stop. That the community would feel at peace. Then she stopped talking. She was barely looking at me then. Her cheeks were flushed. Her chest rose and fell with deep breaths. Ribs. Breasts. Shoulder. I gave her the tenderloin - and I told her that I loved her. After all those months. I couldn’t help myself. I told her it was really my heart that she held in her hands. And it was. She leaned toward me so her body pressed against the glass of the case. Two great big teardrops spilled from her eyes onto the white package in her hand; and for a moment we both stared at those salt water orbs, watching as they soaked into the paper brightness, dark circles appearing where each had sat, as though she had pressed her circle-eyes to the package of meat. And for just another moment I thought how lucky it was I hadn’t used the heavy wax paper because then her tears might have rolled onto the floor and been stepped on by other customers instead of making something so beautiful, so perfect. “You should never have to lie about what you are, ” she said, and touched my hand. “I love you,” she whispered. “But this is wrong.” And then she left. Two days later, the Butcher sign was gone. By Friday, the new one was up, just like she’d described. Blue with gold lettering: MEAT. Delia Barrymore and I have never exchanged another word. She still comes to the counter on Tuesday afternoons, and I still give her the best meat I have, all the while charging her for tripe, but neither of us speaks. We don’t have to. I know exactly what she wants. And she knows exactly who I am. She stands on one side of the meat case, me on the other, just like we’ve stood every time. Flesh between our flesh. Death surrounded by desire. Insatiable. Comestible. Insatiable. ]]>
102 2010-05-27 01:28:30 2010-05-27 06:28:30 open open winesburg-indiana-beau-morrow publish 0 0 post 0 _edit_lock _edit_last 306 Cavitt291@aol.com http://www.maldivesvids.com 10.128.17.254 2010-06-29 04:13:26 2010-06-29 08:13:26 trash 0 0 313 jiushiqiao4312@gmail.com http://www.airforceone.cc 10.128.17.254 2010-07-01 21:45:48 2010-07-02 01:45:48 trash 0 0 314 shijiuyi3404@gmail.com http://www.obsneakers.com/adidas/adidas_world_cup_2010 10.128.17.254 2010-07-01 23:02:45 2010-07-02 03:02:45 trash 0 0 332 shijiuyi3404@gmail.com http://www.obsneakers.com/world_cup_2010_products/adidas_world_cup_2010Adidas 10.128.17.254 2010-07-12 03:48:40 2010-07-12 07:48:40 0 0 0 273 Brigitte.Wolf@gmail.com http://www.unicef.org 10.128.17.254 2010-06-10 14:00:58 2010-06-10 18:00:58 spam 0 0 281 lfcwbj@jmizqz.com http://ieankjpslooz.com/ 10.128.17.254 2010-06-14 09:22:18 2010-06-14 13:22:18 wystxqcozgpi, [url=http://fuevlzvzagfz.com/]fuevlzvzagfz[/url], [link=http://jwapsivpzqjp.com/]jwapsivpzqjp[/link], http://dtultvkvvaex.com/]]> spam 0 0
Two Poems Thu, 03 Jun 2010 06:36:01 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?p=107 by Gerald Locklin

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: Divan Japonais, 1893 The Artist of the Advertisement, The poster, the color lithograph, The Artist of the Entertainment, Of the Entertainer, Of the dancer Jane Avril; The flat-chested, thin-armed chanteuse, Yvette Guilbert; the critical Edouard Dujardin. Of drink, sex, music, gambling, Pleasure, Gaiety, Desire. Paris was the Other, Orientalized, Of Victorian England. Only the Artist, As so often is the case, Was at the Party but not of it, The Historian of the Orgy, The (like Voltaire) Philosopher. But the Parisians understood God all too well, His supreme talent for Narration, Plotting, Achilles’ Heels, Retaliation, Rising and Falling Actions, The Economy of the Cosmic Melodrama: Around the corner lurked The Infernal Century.

* * *

Sir Thomas Lawrence: Portrait of Arthur Atherley as an Etonian, c. 1791 What an arrogant and odious Pretty Boy—in a way the Blue Boy Really wasn’t. Soft-brimmed hat in one bare hand, one suede Glove in the be-gloved other, longcoat over vest, Maroon on white, with girlish curls to frame A prematurely predatory countenance— No wonder “city boys”—day students—scholarship recipients Like Forster and Orwell came to despise all Etons. But Marion Davies easily discerned a value in The image and the execution, and perhaps it gave her added pleasure That she and Hearst bought and sold aristocratic fops To adorn their Santa Monica Beach House: Refuge of the cinematic Brits. Citizen Kane is a great film—the fourth time I watched it I could finally See why: the fascination of Welles inventing a non-verbal language, That of Film, for this most Modern and American of Arts, The inflections of the lighting, camera angles, editing, The coloration or the absence of it, The musical accompaniment or silencing of it. And Hearst would soon teach Welles, What Hearst and his “whore” had always known: That money matters And that it matters nowhere more than Hollywood. ]]>
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Interview with Nick Flynn Thu, 10 Jun 2010 06:28:34 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?p=117 by Jay Lesandrini

Nick Flynn is a poet, author, and teacher of writing, among other things. He is best known for his memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir, and has been translated into ten languages. He is also the author of two book of poetry, Some Ether (Graywolf, 2000), which won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and Blind Huber (Graywolf, 2002). He has been awarded fellowships from The Guggenheim Foundation, The Library of Congress, The Amy Lowell Trust, and The Fine Arts Work Center. His latest work, The Ticking is the Bomb, is a memoir that interweaves passages from his childhood, his relationships with women, and his growing obsession—a questioning of terror, torture, and the political crimes we can neither see nor understand in post-9/11 American life. In November, 2009, Flynn was an artist in residence at Butler University. Booth Poetry Editor Jay Lesandrini sat down with Flynn to discuss poetic craft, the art of the memoir, and the nature of writing. JL: When you decided to write, why did you gravitate toward poetry? NF I did, eventually, gravitate toward poetry, but I started with fiction, with short stories. When I started writing, in the early 80s, everyone was reading Raymond Carver, and his short, distilled, realistic fiction. I loved Carver, still do, but when I tried to write like him it didn’t work, for my temperament. The other fiction I was reading at the time—Borges, Calvino—meta-fictions, which self-consciously talked about the process of writing and what it is to create something, to create a fictional world, I liked that they allowed the seams to show, that they broke down the fourth wall. I’d studied some poetry as an undergraduate with James Tate—at the time I had very little knowledge of contemporary poetry beyond Bukowski, Plath—his workshop exposed me to a whole variety of voices, of possibilities of contemporary poetry. I got the idea that poetry could move in the way that my mind worked, that it could mirror experience in a way that seemed closer to my experience of what it was to be alive. In poetry one could move very quickly through time and space, from image to image, and make connections, often associative, intuitive. You didn’t have to describe the whole room you are going through, you just had to walk into a room and say what the impression was. The impression was more important than the actual physical details. JL: The reason I ask is that I noticed an underlying sound, a poetic sound in all of your work, even your first memoir, which actually seems much like a collection of prose poems collected into a long narrative. And so, that’s why I assumed that you had started out in poetry. NF: I started out much more narratively—my life was somewhat inchoate, early on, and narrative was a futile attempt to impose some order. But any musical sensibilities, the sonic elements of language, weren’t well-developed. And I didn’t really trust my intuitive gestures, or want to linger too long in the subconscious. So a lot of my writing has been trying to move toward the intuitive, to figure out how to create a tension within a poem, or even a longer piece, between narrative and the unknown. Part of that was just the distilling process of writing poems. It took me ten years to write my first book of poems, Some Ether, and so much of that was just distilling it down, and one of the essences that emerged, was sonic, how it sounds—how the actual choice of words is going to influence sonic resonance, which will influence the emotional resonance; and how to get that is going to become the texture of the thing you’re writing. And how this is a threshold into the subconscious, into the unknown. A lot of the work of writing, probably of all art, maybe of life itself, is about how to create and maintain, and then release, various tensions. A lot of my work deals with certain “hard subjects,” which I think most art deals with—if you’re going to do that the question then becomes how to create tension—think of Nirvana, part of their genius is having these very melodic moments right next to really thrashing moments, which is one way to create tension. The way that gets played out in a poem could be to layer a “difficult” narrative by using language that is more lyrical, or using softer consonant sounds, or using Romantic, rather than Latinate, words—any of these could soften the impact, and create a certain tension. Or the opposite of that—if you’re writing about something seemingly benign, hard consonant sounds can feed a sonic tension. It’s generally not a conscious decision—in revising, your ear notices a lack of energy, and so you revise until the language begins to glimmer. JL: That’s interesting. In thinking about conscious and unconscious writing, how much weight do you give the poem’s appearance on the page versus its sound. In Blind Huber there are so many varying styles with regard to how the poems look on the page, that each poem seems to have an individual visual feel. So I wondered if that was a conscious thing, or did it just happen in the writing of the poem? NF: One of the great pleasures of writing poems that you miss in prose writing is that you don’t get to play with the placement of language on the page, as if you’re a sculptor and words were your clay. In prose writing, generally, there is the assumption that language is invisible, where this is not the assumption in poetry. Language is part of the whole structure of it, the look of it, how it’s placed on the page. It’s a recognition that you’re working with a tangible material in poems, as well as an abstraction. And so, to answer your question, it’s not a conscious decision, but more like finding for each poem the form that it wants to be. And by doing that—by doing a lot of revisions or trying different ways until suddenly it clicks—you’ve discovered it. It seems like it was already there, that the form is already there, you just have to discover it. But how do you teach that? JL: Yeah. Yeah. That’s why I’m asking. NF: The trick is how to teach intuition. How do you teach intuition? You can teach craft things. There are great essays written on line-breaks, on the image, but how do you teach someone to develop their intuition? Triggering Town, that’s not a bad place to start, but the thing is, it’s not an intellectual process. It’s almost more of a physical process. So part of that is how you encourage free-writing to students, to make it almost like breathing, to make the writing process more like breathing, so that you have to do it for the same reason you have to breathe. Why do you breathe? That’s not a question. And so you make it into a regular, daily practice—the writing, and then the intuition will have more access. JL: So do you do that? Do you write every day? Do you have a schedule? NF: There have been periods in my life when I’ve written every day. I had a ten-year stretch when I had a daily writing practice—an hour a day. In the woodshed, the jazz guys call it. And now it changes, it varies depending on where I’m at in a project. After those ten years in the woodshed, you get a sense for it. A project demands certain steps to build it, and part of it is that daily writing, the intuitive writing, the delving deeply into the subconscious, but not all of it. So you do some of that—the daily writing practice. Maybe for a couple years, at the beginning of a project. JL: I can see how the daily writing can help to shape your overall work. I was thinking that because you published a book of poems first, that the poetry must have influenced your other works—the play, the memoirs. Do you find that to be the case as well? NF: There’s an image that appears the first book of poetry, and then again in the memoir, and then again in the play—the image of my father putting himself in a trash bag. I think it’s in all three, and in each one it’s represented in a slightly different way, and you realize that the form of a play, the form of a non-fiction memoir, and of a poem—when you’re taking the same image, and how when you take this substance and put it into these vastly differing forms, that each form has a certain specific physics. The physics of a poem is different than the physics of a memoir, and it’s fascinating, to me, to see how the same image transforms depending upon the container. And then to see it in a play—in a play, you don’t have to describe the image, it is right there in front of everyone. In the play the main character, in one scene, is pulling a trashbag up around himself and taping it to his waist. Another character in the play simply asks him “what are you doing?” “Oh, preparing,” he answers. It’s off-hand, he gets to be off-hand while he’s doing something that’s ostensibly troubling in some way, and perhaps that has metaphoric levels to it. The metaphor becomes alive in a play, whereas in the memoir it’s more laid out. The action in a play, I found, contains these metaphoric levels, beyond language. JL: It’s interesting that you chose that one. The image that stands out for me is the house fires, of watching the fires burn, which I think is in everything, including your new memoir. I first noticed it in Some Ether, where the poems “1967” and “Trickology” are on facing pages with two versions of that same image. I don’t know if it was in the play, but I noticed it in the excerpt I read from your new memoir, and I recall it from Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. I searched through the play to try to find it, but I didn’t find anything with burning houses specifically. NF: I guess I never noticed how many houses are burning, but I guess you’re right. In the play there is talk about this sort of chaos just beyond the frame of the play, of houses burning, of looting and collapse, but it’s happening out of sight, it’s going on just around the corner. I didn’t want to have it be the focus. JL: So, I guess my question is, do you realize that certain images recur in your work, or does that happen subconsciously? NF: I think for all of us there are images that you keep coming back to, or that keep coming back to you, and you don’t know why. A friend was just talking about this. There is a piece of sidewalk near her house, and there were leaves mulching in the gutter, and she keeps returning to it, and she has no idea why that image keeps flashing through her mind. It’s very specific. It’s very direct. And somehow it has emotional content to it, but she doesn’t know what it is. With these images, you’d think that once you place them into something—you find a container for them—then okay you’re free, and you get to move on. But apparently not. JL: Maybe the question is “did you find the right container?” NF: I have a sense that these things don’t actually have an answer to them. I think that they’re mutable and they’re changeable, these images, and the reason your subconscious is presenting them to you is not so that you can say “Oh, that was the day I saw my mother sleeping with the postman, and then I looked out the window at a broken tree;” and then “Ok, I understand it now, why this broken tree keep appearing to me, seemingly unbidden, and now I can move on with my life.” I don’t believe that is why your subconscious keeps feeding you that broken tree. That tree is a much larger glimpse into the universe than we’re able to contain. We all have this little constellation of images floating around in us, these little image clusters, and each of them are unique to ourselves. A thousand people walked by that little corner with the mulching leaves that day, and the only one who is holding onto it is my friend. JL: Right. NF: The only one, you know? And why? We don’t know why. We’re never going to know why. We’re not supposed to know why. It’s enough to honor that it has snagged on your subconscious, to notice it. The image itself contains this power, this sort of shimmering energy, and you can go into it and try imperfectly to attach a meaning to it, but you’re going to bounce off it again. I don’t think that there is a container to contain it beyond finding the place where somehow it holds attention in a poem. I probably have only a handful of these images that contain this emotional resonance. It might be a very small amount for each person that keeps coming back. Fiction writers can maybe make up more, but yet, look at Cormac McCarthy, it seems like he’s in the same universe often—sort of lonely, you know, the road, going across a landscape—these sort of images that he hasn’t quite comprehended, and as an artist, I don’t think it’s our job to even comprehend them. Our job is to respect them. To honor them in some way. To be in awe of them. JL: I think I heard Joseph Campbell once talk about the artist being a conduit of the collective unconscious—the artist as being the person who is able to go out there and grab these ideas and hopefully make some sense of them and then present them to the people through art. It’s kind of along the lines of the Socratic allegory of cave type, you know. NF: There’s also the whole idea of catharsis, which goes back to the Greeks, as opposed to a Freudian idea of catharsis, which is how we think of it now, mostly. With Freud you name the broken tree or the mulching leaves and then you travel to the land of the subconscious and you figure out why you’re stuck with that thing. It’s “Rosebud” at the end of Citizen Kane. If only you could understand that thing, and what it represents—usually a trauma from childhood—if you could understand it, then you would be free. Once you comprehend it, you’re free. With Freud, the subconscious can be mapped. Whereas with Jung—this was where he broke with Freud—with Jung the subconscious was bigger, it was the collective unconscious of the whole universe, which I think is much more poetic. And so, regarding the whole idea of catharsis, I prefer to go back to the Greek idea of it as a daily practice, that you wake up every day in your same skin, and you have the same constellation of images that you had when you went to sleep the night before, and you have to figure out a way to navigate your way around them once more. It’s not like you get through anything, it’s just that you find a daily practice that allows you to move through it in a way that’s not going to destroy you. JL: And the writing is a part of that? NF: Writing is a daily practice. Definitely. These days I see it as a meditation practice—as I understand it, in order to have a meditation practice, you need three things, like the three legs of a tripod: the dharma, the sangha, and the mediation. I think it’s the same for writing: the dharma is the writings, the poems that we’re reading, the books that have come before us and influence us; the sangha is the group that you go and talk about these teaching with, which can tap into the collective unconscious, which is the function of a writing workshop; and the meditation practice, which, for a poet is the daily writing. If you don’t have all three of those, then the tripod doesn’t stand up. JL: The practice part is interesting to me. At this point in my life I have to balance work, home, and now school with my writing, and so I don’t practice as much as I should. You said that you wrote every day for ten years, and so I’m wondering whether you could actually see yourself improving over time, or did you just happen? You know, in today’s world we want everything instantly. NF: For me it happened instantly, it just took ten years. I don’t know if you meditate, but for me it was excruciating the first hundred times I did it. You suddenly realize how insane you are. You hear voices chattering in your head. You’re supposed to be conscious of your breathing which makes you not be able to breathe, and suddenly you get desperate about breathing and your uncomfortable sitting, everything is just wrong and at some point, if you’re lucky, you realize that all that stuff is with you anyway, it’s just that you haven’t allowed yourself to sit still for a moment and feel it. And then, after a couple of years of that, you actually can’t go through a day without doing it. It’s just like running or swimming, suddenly you realize that it’s no longer a burden, it actually is your life. You’ve made it your life in some way. And that’s what Stanley Kunitz would say too: If you read a poem that you really admire, what you have to do is to become the person who can write that poem. Which is a simple way to say something profound—that you have to change your whole life to become the person who can write that poem. Which means all these things. But I think that there is a very clear path to it. These three things. Do it. A daily practice. Fifteen minutes a day, whatever the practice is, and then it will slowly get bigger and take over your life, but it will take over in a way that you can accommodate because other things will get pushed aside because you’ll say “I actually need a half hour to do this, so what do I give up?” And it is a process of giving things up too. JL: I’m going to change gears just a little bit. One of the things that I wanted to talk to you about is audience. When we were little kids being taught to write compositions in school, one of the things that was driven home to us is to know our audience before we start. Does that change for the creative process, or when you’re working on a creative piece? Do you think about an audience? Do you have an audience in mind when you’re writing? NF: For me, I never think of an audience. What I mean is I never think of an audience at the beginning, when I’m first writing. It’s one of those things, like one of those crazy Kafka-like movies where the police come in and take your notebook and you’ve admitted to horrible things, but it’s just your subconscious talking. You actually haven’t done anything. Think of Berryman:
But never did Henry, as he thought he did, end anyone and hacks her body up and hide the pieces, where they may be found. He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing. Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up. Nobody is ever missing.
You can’t think of the audience if you’re going to write like that—dark and troubling, or ridiculously ecstatic, or embarrassing. It all needs to come out in your initial writing. That’s why you do that prewriting, and then you figure it out, especially the stuff that’s this shimmering around, the “oh I shouldn’t have written that” stuff. The last five minutes of writing, after going at it for an hour or so, is when you get to the really weird shit, and you’re troubled by that. That’s the stuff that you have to go back into and see what’s troubling about it, and if you’re thinking about the audience, it’s not going to allow that, it’s going to stop that in some way—the true plumbing of those depths. But at a certain point, I do think you need to consider the audience. Like for Some Ether, when I was shaping the book—most of my friends are not poets, they don’t read contemporary poetry—I wanted it to be a book that someone who didn’t have access to poetry could pick up and somehow be carried along by it in some way, enough by whatever energies, whatever tensions. So, at a certain point, I did want that. I did think about that. JL: I was just thinking of how newer or younger writers, like myself, should think about audience, and whether they should allow the audience to shape their writing at some point? NF: I think it comes much later in the process, hopefully. You should try to find the poem. I trust that if you are true to trying to find the poem, if you honor that the poem is already there and you just have to find it, then that means that there is already an audience for it. You don’t have to be conscious about it. JL: I wanted to make sure I talked to you about writing a memoir, and the shaping of memories. You wrote your first memoir years after it happened. I assume it’s the same for a lot of writers. So, how do you deal with the memory gaps? How do you fill them in when you’re writing a memoir? NF: Well, I don’t know about you, but I have memory gaps about what I just had for lunch. My memory gaps happen immediately, constantly. The mind is set up that way—to forget. That’s one of the essential features of how we survive as human beings is that we forget, that we don’t remember everything we see. It’s not that we remember things, it’s that we forget 95% of what we see because the brain filters it out because it’s not necessary. But then, what does snag on the subconscious is what becomes the memoir—like why you look at that pile of mulching leaves and then asking yourself that question of why that keeps coming back to you. Investigating it in some way, going into it and writing all around it in some way, even if you’re not going to find a final answer. I don’t think there is a final answer, but respecting as much as possible the image that is given to you. I have a terrible memory. I felt like I was ridiculous to write a memoir. I remembered maybe five things from my childhood. There’s not much. Other people were talking about these long memories of certain places. Part of it is probably the result of a trauma memory where things are forgotten, when you block things out. But most memoirs have some element of trauma in them, I think, for the simple reason that every life has some element of trauma in it. That’s the nature of life. There is some type of suffering, and you’re going to expose it. You love your parents dearly, they’re the most perfect parents in the world, and then they die. That’s trauma. The parents could be perfect. You don’t escape it. There’s always going to be this thing where you’re in the midst of something, something intense and you’re focusing on this certain thing, and you miss that thing over there. I was sitting with my grandfather while he’s dying, and I was focused on this little bell next to his bed. A little bell that has a little crane’s head on it, that he’d ring and this Irish girl who would take care of him would come into the room and ask “what do you need now?” That’s the thing that I could hold—this little object that I could go back to. The job of writing a memoir, of any sort of art I think, but especially memoir, which is why it interests me right now, is to honor that constellation of images and to investigate them as deeply as possible. JL: So you have that part of the memory. You remember that part. But there’s something else happening and how do you as a writer fill in what’s missing to make it a story? NF: Well there’s a whole constellation of things happening. In every room of the house there’s something happening. On TV there is something is happening. One could do a little reseach and discover, or remember, and say, “oh, that was the day that plane went down in the Hudson River, I’d forgotten that. That’s what we were watching on TV. I forgot that.” You could do that as research if you wanted to, which might be interesting, but I wouldn’t do it at first. The first thing is to honor the memories that you have. And to honor the imperfections and the mistakes that your memory makes. Aristotle talks about the mind and the act of making a mistake, and that leads you right into Freud and his “slips of the tongue.” Those are the keys to the subconscious, and you want to honor those. So, memoir has nothing to do, initially, for the most part, with doing research. You might think “I seem to remember it was back in ’63 and the Beatles’ album Help was out at that moment, and we were listening to it at the house on Third Cliff.” And, the worst thing you could do as a memoirist is to go and try to verify all of the information before you write. You should just write that. And get it wrong. And then later you can say, “oh, Help wasn’t out for two years, and we weren’t living there at that point, we were over there, why do I remember it this way?” That’s the interesting thing. That’s why someone would want to read a memoir, because it’s your own personal interpretation of events. It’s you as an individual interpreting something and then making it universal in some way, and not just something that someone could just Google in five minutes and find out the answer to it. JL: So, where does the truth fit into a memoir? I know that when I get together with my brothers and we talk about an event from our childhood, there ends up being three different stories. We each remember it differently. So, is it just a matter of arriving at the truth for you, and giving that to your reader? NF: I think to acknowledge that as part of the writing, that slippage of memory, that imperfection of it, to acknowledge it in the writing in some way. To say “this is how I remember it,” or “I’m not sure if this is how it happened.” I do that in the new book, it’s all about the imperfection of memory. I see this thing, and for some reason I remember it this way, and I even say that I don’t want to go back and look at it because I like this memory. But if you acknowledge it to the reader then they will say “he’s not saying that this is the way it is, he’s saying this is how he remembers it.” Sebastian Junger does it really well in The Perfect Storm, where he starts the beginning of a chapter “we can’t know what happened on the boat that night, but these are the things that we know happens to a body when it drowns.” And then he goes into sixty pages describing them as characters in the book drowning—sixty pages—but he set it up in the beginning that he can’t know and then he recreates it. Readers are smart enough to go along with that, if you’re honest about it. We keep it in our heads sixty pages later, that this is a re-creation. JL: Do you ever go back later and change the way you remembered something? For example with Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, the way it was written in these small pieces, was there something you wrote later in the process that changed an earlier memory and so you had to go back and revise the memory? NF: Oh, of course, if it’s necessary. I do it much more in the new book. I will actually say that I remembered it this way, and then two months later I found out this. I’ll just say that; then wonder “why did I remember it that way?” and just let it hang like that. It’s a very different structure, the new book, than the first one. In the first memoir there’s a starting point and an endpoint. There’s a chronology: I started at the shelter on this date; I leave the shelter on this date; my father showed up on this date. It’s located in time and place. This new book, The Ticking is the Bomb, is a constellation of images, a ball of energy, like a little planet encrusted with images, and each image has a thread attached to it that leads to the center, which is the subconscious. You can just pull on one of the images, monkeys, say, and you will find it is attached to a thread, and on that thread are several more monkeys. And they all lead to the center, to the subconscious. And, hopefully, if I’ve pushed it far enough, it’s not even my subconscious, but a collective subconscious. A mystery, at the center, of everything.
Jay Lesandrini lives in Carmel, Indiana. He is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing from Butler University, where he serves as a Poetry Editor for Booth.
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Winesburg, Indiana: Grudge Wright Thu, 17 Jun 2010 06:36:03 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?p=123 by George Singleton

And this is where my naïve mistakes began. I had money and time, which turns out to be a dangerous combination for a fledgling comedian with zero anecdotes in his repertoire. I had time, money, two free motel ink pens, and an endless supply of Mankiller’s Motor Court memo pads. What did I know? I sat in the motel room, or down at the Henry David Thoreau County Park where all the stray dogs have disappeared, and tried my best not to think like this: Jumper cable walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Man, you look horrible.” The jumper cable says, “Don’t get me started.” A sixteen-penny nail walks into a bar and the bartender says, “Can’t serve you. You’re already hammered.” A right-wing radio personality walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Can I get you anything?” and the guy says, “No thanks, I’m already really fucked up.” A hairbrush walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Hold on, buddy. Don’t bristle up on me.” You’ve heard them all, I’m sure. People always wonder, where do jokes come from? Answer: Me. When I got heckled—nightly—some genius in the audience would always yell out, “Hey, Bazooka Joe, vaudeville’s calling and it wants its act back.” I didn’t care. It was my shtick, as they say. Even people in Whinesburg can have a shtick. Some comedians had woeful childhood stories, some stuck to tales of a horrific marriage, some did prop comedy. One guy wore a bag over his head and went by the Unknown Comic, from what I’ve gathered. Me, I had my Blank Goes into a Bar: A tongue depressor walks into a bar and the bartender says, “Get out of here. You make me gag.” A blow up rubber sex doll walks into a bar. The bartender says, “What’ll you have?” and the sex doll pauses before saying, “It was just on the tip of my tongue. Well fuck me.” A pair of pliers walks into a bar, but the bartender says, “We don’t serve tools.” A screwdriver walks into a bar and orders a vodka and orange juice. The bartender says, “What are you, a cannibal or something?” Some confetti walks into a bar and the bartender says, “I can’t serve you seeing as you’re already torn up.” A rectal thermometer walks into a gay bar and gets a hero’s welcome. Nine million, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine lottery tickets walk into a bar. The bartender says, “Sorry, we don’t serve such losers.” A rasp walks into a bar and asks the bartender, “Can I drink here if I promise not to grate on your nerves?” An air horn walks into a bar and the bartender says, “If you’re intent on blowing, follow the rectal thermometer next door to the gay bar.” A bi-polar woman walks into a bar, but the bartender says, “Last time you were here you split without paying.” An atom walks into the bar and the bartender says, “Last time you were here you split without paying, and all hell broke loose soon thereafter.” A candelabra walks into the bar and the bartender says, “Can’t serve anyone already lit.” I bought loaves of white bread, some lunch meat, peanut butter, and wrote my jokes. I drowned out the senior citizen bikers congregated nightly at the fire pit. I chewed beef jerky, seeing as that seemed a proper thing to do. My motel television didn’t have but two clear channels, but I intentionally kept it on channel 2 ½, all snow, to keep me focused on what would be my nightly routine: A linebacker walks into a bar. “Hey, don’t rush me,” says the bartender. A bowling ball walks into a bar. He says, “I’d like a pint of Mad Dog 20/20.” The bartender says, “You can drink better wine than that. You’re not in the gutter anymore.” A bowling pin walks into a bar. He says to the bartender, “I’m thirsty, and I don’t have any money.” The bartender says, “Spare me.” A spigot walks into a bar and asks, “What do you have on tap?” A spigot walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Sorry, but we don’t serve drips.” A ceiling fan walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Draft?” A blood drive nurse walks into a bar. The bartender says, “You want another pint this soon?” A rabies victim walks into a bar. The bartender says, “I guess you’re ready for another shot in your stomach.” A revolving door walks into a bar. The bartender shakes his head and says, “Turn around.” A bottle of white-out comes into a bar. “I can’t serve your type,” says the bartender. “Disappear, buddy.” A chunk of fresco walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Can’t serve you. You’re plastered.” An ATM machine walks into a bar and orders drinks for everyone. The bartender says, “What are you, like, made of money?” A length of bubble wrap walks into a bar. The bartender says, “I’m going to keep a close watch on you. Don’t pop off.” A champagne cork walks into a bar. The bartender says, “I’m going to keep a close watch on you. Don’t pop off.” Carbon paper walks into a bar. The bartender says, “I guess you’ll be wanting an old-fashioned.” A typewriter walks into a bar. The bartender says, “I guess you’ll be wanting an old-fashioned.” Dr. Kevorkian walks into a bar with a little Chinese boy. The bartender says, “We don’t serve youth in Asia.” I got six hundred of them. I cannot stop, I know. Where would I go to talk to someone about getting it to stop? Maybe Bloomington. Maybe Indianapolis. I hear there are people in Indianapolis who want to officially change the name of the city to Nativeamericanapolis. I’m betting those people don’t have much sense of humor. People say that you have to live in a sad area in order to come up with funny two-liners. I don’t know about that. I’ve never read an official study. I’m not sure that there are any official studies, here in Winesburg. ]]>
123 2010-06-17 01:36:03 2010-06-17 06:36:03 open open winesburg-indiana-grudge-wright publish 0 0 post 0 _edit_lock _edit_last 322 Descoteau1098@aol.com http://www.maldivesvids.com 10.128.17.254 2010-07-06 19:32:41 2010-07-06 23:32:41 trash 0 0 333 Parco5@gmail.com http://www.easycash4life.com/article-marketing/successful-article-marketing/ 10.128.17.254 2010-07-12 13:40:38 2010-07-12 17:40:38 0 0 0
Two Poems Thu, 24 Jun 2010 06:43:31 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?p=128 by Charles Harper Webb

OTHER LIVES Not long after, in this life, I closed my guitar case for good, an A & R man from Arista— his plane to LA. delayed—drops into Seattle's Embers for a drink. And stay, and stays . . . Halfway through Practicum in Psychotherapy, I leap out of my beanbag chair. "We’re doing surgery with stream-rollers," I scream, and head North, where I work as a fishing guide, court backwoods girls, but marry the Great Trout Stream . . . A last growth-spurt takes me to 5'11", 175— enough to make the college baseball team. I'm no Derek Jeter, no Pee Wee Reese, but I out- hustle everyone and, at shortstop, lead Houston's Astros to their first World Series victory. . . Of course I also have a life where my pipe- cleaner spine bends me into a side show . . . one where Linda's boyfriend brings, besides his fists, his dad’s shotgun, and I don't see 17 . . . one where I torture kittens, drop out of 7th grade, and marry a 300-pound alcoholic lesbian. In some lives, Julie has our child, and I work twelve-hour days for nothing but the pay . . . I strangle in the birth canal . . . I come back, paralyzed or missing limbs, from Vietnam, and wars where I'm not even American . . . more lives than atoms in the stars over Baltimore on the October night (or was it too cloudy to see?) when an egg Emily Jewell had carried for thirty-six years was set upon by shoals of sperm: millions of vanished futures, plus one half of me.

* * *

A QUIVERY UPPER LIP Just as the poem starts running on its own—just as I'm getting the feel of the reins, starting to flow with the rhythm, and enjoy the pounding in my spine, earth bounding by under my feet, wind whipping my hair as the crowd howls—just as I hope the poem will last forever, it turns a corner I hadn't seen coming, and hammers into the home stretch. I feel its knees flex, haunches tensing for the leap that will carry it into history; and I grow heavy with regret. The dead weight of all my losses slows these lines I can't prolong much more, even if I add a pearl mist breathing off an Alpine lake that mirrors stands of lodgepole pine. Even if— especially if—I add the love I've never ceased to miss. She knocks. I throw open my door, and step into the kiss I've dreamed about, and finally feel now, in this poem which, like the kiss, possesses a life of its own, and a place in my life that will be over all too soon—this poem that has to end (so long) right here. Right here and now. Good- bye. Good- bye. . . ]]>
128 2010-06-24 01:43:31 2010-06-24 06:43:31 open open two-poems-2 publish 0 0 post 0 _edit_lock _edit_last 308 http://thendoftheline.wordpress.com/2010/06/29/from-charles-harper-webb%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9ca-quivery-upper-lip%e2%80%9d/ 10.128.17.254 2010-06-29 09:05:05 2010-06-29 13:05:05 trash pingback 0 0 325 gaifuchen8022@gmail.com http://www.obsneakers.com/ 10.128.17.254 2010-07-08 05:29:41 2010-07-08 09:29:41 trash 0 0 342 jiushiqiao4312@gmail.com http://www.pumashoes.cc/ 10.128.17.254 2010-07-17 21:20:12 2010-07-18 01:20:12 Puma Shoes store offers you all kinds of puma shoes, like Puma Clyde Shoes,high quality and affordable price.]]> 0 0 0 353 blackbird4evar@yahoo.com http://www.cbrxx.com/members/-motorguy.html 10.128.17.254 2010-07-22 01:17:11 2010-07-22 05:17:11 0 0 0 354 AllisDove13@msn.com http://hubpages.com/hub/ForceFactor 10.128.17.254 2010-07-22 04:02:55 2010-07-22 08:02:55 0 0 0
Why I Hate The Wizard of Oz Thu, 01 Jul 2010 06:23:17 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?p=98 by Robert Rebein

Imagine having the land of your birth, a place about which you feel complex and wildly ambivalent feelings, reduced to a banal cartoon. You meet someone, and out of nowhere, this well-meaning stranger flashes a hideous smile and asks, Where’s Toto? Oh, that’s right, we’re not in Kansas anymore …You get this in Indiana, New York, South Carolina, California. Even as far afield as Paris, you get it. Kansoz! Ah, oui. Les munchkins ... How to say you hail from a place uninhabited by tin men and sweet little girls in pinafores–a demanding, starkly beautiful place with twenty-mile views and sunflowers as big as your head and night skies so clear it’s no cliche to believe yourself to have been born among stars; where the wind blows without cease and flies bite like vampires and the stink of the slaughterhouse overhangs everything like that cloud in White Noise; where it is not unusual for a kid like yourself to receive his first shotgun at ten, drive a semi at twelve, solo in a Beechcraft Debonair at fourteen or fifteen … Does that sound like Oz? you want to ask. You don’t, though. Why bother? When the tornado came and swept you away, as you knew all along it would, it was not to drop you into some technicolor fantasy, but rather into the same drab world of Applebee’s and Best Buy the jokesters inhabit. That’s the context here. That’s the reason you refuse to join Dorothy’s fan club. ]]>
98 2010-07-01 01:23:17 2010-07-01 06:23:17 open open why-i-hate-the-wizard-of-oz publish 0 0 post 0 _edit_lock _edit_last 317 trenagay@sunflower.com 10.128.17.254 2010-07-05 15:58:07 2010-07-05 19:58:07 trash 0 0
How the World Ends Thu, 08 Jul 2010 05:47:56 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?p=240 by Jason Calsyn

1. Doesn’t.

2. Jesus is back, and he’s pissed.

3. Meteor the size of Detroit hits Detroit.

4. James Lewis of Medford, OR is three days late paying his cell phone bill.

5. Um, we’re out of food.

6. Bang.  Whimper.

7. Chicago Cubs win World Series.

8. Simultaneous nuclear explosions here here here here here here and here.

9. Orgasm rends fabric of universe.

10.  Giant Space Midgets.

10a. Tiny Space Giants.

11.  Becky Thomson gets mustard on her prom dress. 12.  Rise of the Robots.

12a. Rise of the Insects.

12b. Rise of the Squirrels.

13. Man on stump achieves complete enlightenment, transforming all matter into pure energy. 14. Water shortage, global warming, pandemics, all that stuff. 15. It just kinda stops. 16. Ends?
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Winesburg, Indiana: Dear Class of 2011 Thu, 15 Jul 2010 06:47:26 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?p=133 by Deb Olin Unferth

Dear Class of 2011, The room as I sit looking at it (once again) is the usual square-and-rectangle composite, only now it contains an additional rectangular item: this handheld reading device for which I thank you, though it will not stave off loneliness, if that’s what you were thinking. At this point I don’t even care anymore. It’s fine, let it be there, loneliness, I like it. In fact I’m so used to it, I prefer it that way because then I can do things exactly as I think they should be, exactly as I want them. I have all my news stories lined up on my new handheld reading device, hundreds of them, and I’ll read them in the order I think is best. For the next two years I will be slowly catching up on my news story reading. Two years from now, while you are home for the holidays, come check in on me and I assure you I will be almost caught up on my news stories, all my favorite columnists, all the little tips for daily living and pieces of nutritional advice that you know I’ve been waiting for, my favorite stories about the White House, what one government said about another. I will have read them all and have a solid schedule for reading future ones. If I’m busy one week, I’ll have to hurry home and catch up on my news story reading because one can get far behind with these handheld things and you know the pain, the sense of a lack of completion one feels when one has to delete a bunch of news stories unread—not that you missed something important (though you may have, who knows), but that you didn’t complete the series. (Where does that need come from? I don’t know.) Now that I have this new handheld reading device I can plan away and download furiously, every tip and news bit and update, get them all on this thing before it’s too late and they vanish, before the Internet space hatch closes over them and they are gone. What will happen if they do vanish? Nothing, of course! Who cares. It will be simply another incomplete project like all the others. Who cares. I never finished Ulysses (who cares). I didn’t clean out the car (who cares). I don’t know how to love (who cares). I’m alone in this room (who cares). My only baby died (who cares). My brother’s in a wheelchair (who cares). The sky glows (who cares). I never figured out what I wanted (who cares). I still have years to go (who cares). I can hear sounds outside—school buses, voices, rain (who cares). This minute will never end (who cares). Yours, Emily Walls Emile Durkheim High School English ]]>
133 2010-07-15 01:47:26 2010-07-15 06:47:26 open open winesburg-indiana-dear-class-of-2011 publish 0 0 post 0 _edit_lock _edit_last 343 pausleal@simps.com http://www.medicineball-exercises.com/ 10.128.17.254 2010-07-18 20:57:26 2010-07-19 00:57:26 0 0 0 344 pausleal@simps.com http://www.government-grantsnet.org 10.128.17.254 2010-07-18 23:34:07 2010-07-19 03:34:07 0 0 0 348 christina@reduceclutterinfo.com http://www.ReduceClutterInfo.com 10.128.17.254 2010-07-19 23:08:41 2010-07-20 03:08:41 0 0 0
Story Problems Thu, 22 Jul 2010 06:54:35 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?p=139 by Gailmarie Pahmeier

Every Sunday the same story, supper of pot roast and potatoes, sweaty pitchers of sweet tea, fruit pies or pudding or ice cream. After she cleared the food away, our mother worked at the kitchen sink in her lovely apron, the one with cherry blossoms and ruffles, her heavy rubber gloves a squeak as she sponged the tile counters. My sister and I would’ve gladly helped, our own little aprons drawn snugly around our waists, would loved to have worked alongside her, so sure we were of becoming her, of being beautiful and necessary. But on Sundays after supper my father helped with homework or taught us how to change a tire or how to shimmy our bodies out of basement windows during fire drills. We dreaded Sundays after supper, thought everything he meant to teach unlovely, unnecessary: how many girls did we see slithering out of windows? Isn’t there always someone to call when a tire goes flat, some sweet boy? And who cares if a train leaves one depot at a certain time and another’s coming from the opposite direction at a certain speed, who cares when they’ll meet, when they’ll pass each other on some double tracks in some never named small town? Who cares? You got a cow on those tracks, you care, our father said, and that became the mantra my sister and I’ve shared for years: unplanned pregnancies, failing grades or job searches, failing marriages, bad investments, blood tests, our country gone completely crazy, so many cows on the tracks and no way to save them, no skills to calculate the coming trains. The moral here is pay attention, listen up. Try this one: If the California Zephyr, eastbound at 38 miles per hour, goes through Verdi, Nevada at 11:51 in the morning and a Union Pacific freight, westbound at 16 miles per hour, goes through Sparks, Nevada at the same time, where will they pass? The answer is that they’ll pass right in front of the house I now live in, where I’m cooking pot roast and boiling potatoes this Sunday afternoon, waiting for my lover to come, there’s a tire to be changed and a window’s broken, and I’ve got a story to tell and I really need to tell it now. ]]>
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Cameron Diaz and I are in Love Thu, 29 Jul 2010 06:56:59 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?p=144 Fiction by Edward Porter

Cameron Diaz and I are in love. She calls me when she is in New York. We don't meet at her hotel because it's surrounded by photographers and reporters. She escapes them and meets me at a diner. I ask her how she pulls off the escape, but she won't tell me. She likes having secrets. "If I wanted to," she says, "I could walk through the hotel lobby, no sunglasses, no wig, right past all of them, and they'd never even look at me. That's not how I did it, but I could. If I wanted to." She tells me about Marilyn Monroe. "She's walking down Broadway with a friend, just window shopping, poking along. This is at the absolute height of her fame, after DiMaggio, after the dress and the subway vent. No one notices her, no one pays any attention. At some point Marilyn turns to the friend and says, 'Hey, you want to see her?' The friend thinks about it and says, 'Okay.' Marilyn doesn't whip off her scarf or anything, she just begins to walk differently. Suddenly people are screaming, 'My God, it's Marilyn Monroe,' and flashbulbs are going off everywhere. See, she changed who she was inside." Cameron Diaz and I eat at the diner around the corner from the DSNY Manhattan 6 garage. She likes to watch me eat. I get a grilled cheese sandwich and French fries, extra-crispy. She gets a Diet Pepsi, and unbuttered rye toast. The toast is just for show, she doesn't touch it. She watches me eat the fries. "Do it slow," she says. "Put more salt on that one. How's the grilled cheese? Did they butter the toast and fry it on the griddle first?" I nod. "Okay, take a cheese bite now. Oh, that's good. That's really good." She squeezes a dab of lemon into her Diet Pepsi, and takes a sip. Later that day she says, "People ask me what was it like to be in this movie or that movie, what was it like to act with so and so. I tell them I don't remember: I was in starvation delirium. We were shooting for ten weeks and all I ate the whole time was three slices of tomato and a carrot. I got incredibly sneaky about food. Like right now we're lying in bed, we're naked, but while I've been talking to you, I could have eaten an English muffin and thrown it up, and you wouldn't have noticed." Most of the time I don't get to see her. I do my garbage route in the Bronx with the other guys. We go down 134th Street at four A.M. 134th is the worst street they have for volume of refuse, for lack of proper bagging and containment, and for rats. We keep a sharp eye out for mongo—discarded but usable household items—our chief perquisite. I swing huge sloppy cans up onto my hip, and flip them into the truck. The movements come from low in my body, deep in my power core. I am, frankly, exceptional at my work. It's all in my back and hips, and especially the muscles in my ass. Even at the age of forty-seven, my glutes are extraordinarily powerful. Of course, my upper body is powerful as well. But I do the key work with my lower body. The truck's hydraulics rip a long tear in the fabric of dawn as the gate compacts the garbage. Citizens scream at us from the windows. "Maricons!" they yell. "Cocksuckers!" As if we come at four A.M. on purpose. As if we bounce and roll the cans on the pavement for maximum noise. As if we make sure that the crusher pistons on the truck are never greased so they squeal as loudly as possible. Actually, all of that is true. Cameron Diaz and I meet for sex in a cheap hotel, the Hotel 17 on 17th Street. We alternate between there and the Hotel 33 on 33rd Street. She stands in the shadows, away from the clerk while I sign in. In the elevator we fall over ourselves kissing and giggling. The tiny room is carpeted with acrylic green shag, the sheets are scratchy and rough, and through the walls we hear other couples banging around and shouting. None of this matters to us. We make love like crazed animals, like monkeys, like goats. She knows that I admire the famous Richard Avedon photograph of Lauren Hutton, the one of her torso and breasts taken from below, her face barely visible. Cameron Diaz recreates this for me now, dropping her head back so I see her breasts lifted high. She is encouraging me to objectify her. Then she flings herself forward and runs her hands madly over my head. "Does my gray hair arouse you?" I ask. "Oh God yes!" she says. "It's like I'm fucking my father!" Afterwards we snuggle, spent. I talk to her about my work, but I can tell she isn't listening. "I'm sorry, I can't concentrate," she says. "I'm just so incredibly fucked right now. Fuck like a weasel—nap like a ferret. That's my motto." She falls asleep, and I lie there watching over her for an hour. When she wakes up, she is someone else. She sits up and cries, her back towards me. "I have to go," she says. She walks out the door without kissing me. I try to think tolerant thoughts. Her life has many pressures. It isn't easy to be Cameron Diaz. I leave my wife for Cameron Diaz. This is sad for both of us, because my wife is a decent person, and I have always been fond of her. "You're lucky I don't cut your dick off in your sleep," my wife says. "I know," I say, "thank you." If my wife cuts my dick off in my sleep, I won't be able to fuck Cameron Diaz with it. "Who are you leaving me for?" my wife asks. "I can't tell you," I say. It is important for Cameron Diaz that she not get any bad publicity. My wife is well-liked, with many friends. They threaten me on the street. "Don't ever show up at one of our parties again," they say, "because you will be out on your ass. On. Your. Ass. You're lucky she didn't cut your dick off in your sleep." "I know," I say. "She should have," they say. "Well, she didn't, so what can you do?" I say. My coworkers ask me why I left my wife. I tell them I left her for Cameron Diaz. It is the first time I have told anyone who I am seeing. I trust my coworkers to be discreet. But they laugh. "You are so full of shit, Ed." I discover no one believes me. It becomes a good joke. I tell all my friends I'm seeing Cameron Diaz, and they say the same thing: "You are so full of shit, Ed." As it turns out, the best way to conceal my affair with Cameron Diaz is to tell everyone I know about it. I explain this to her, and she agrees. She calls this "hiding in plain sight." I move to another apartment alone and furnish it with mongo from work. Now, when Cameron Diaz is in town, she comes to my place, and we don't have to have sex in sex hotels anymore. One day Cameron Diaz is lying on her stomach in my mongoed bed. I look with longing at her shapely ass—miracle of genetics and Pilates—and ask if she will allow me to penetrate her anally. She says, "I'll tell you what I've told every man who ever asked me that, and by that I mean every man I've ever slept with. You can fuck me in the ass the day you let me shove something long and hard up your ass in return." She looks satisfied, like she has settled the matter, but to her dismay, I am looking wildly about the room for an appropriate object—fair trade is good bargain. "Okay, I lied," she says. "You can't fuck me in the ass. No one can fuck me in the ass. That's the whole point of being Cameron Diaz—no one can fuck you in the ass." Unfortunately for me, we go for long periods of time without seeing each other. She lives in Los Angeles. She is away making movies. I leave messages on her cell phone to let her know that I am thinking about her. Sometimes she calls me back a few days later, sometimes not. I can't help reading in the newspapers that she has been seen with this actor, or that producer at a club, or opening. Although I know these stories are often factually mistaken or deliberately misleading, I also know that she sees other men. She is honest with me, and makes no attempt to deceive me on this count. This is only fair: after all, I was still with my wife when we met, and Cameron Diaz never complained about that. My jealousy is volcanic. I have fantasies of confronting these celebrities, of engaging them in combat, of destroying them with my powerful garbageman hands. But I know I can't live my life in a fantasy world. Eventually one day, the phone rings and Cameron Diaz says, "I'm flying in tomorrow morning, can you take off work?" The disconcerting thing is that none of my feelings of jealousy, or, let's face it, abandonment, retain any sense of coherence once I'm in the same room with her. For better or worse, I trust her completely. Cameron Diaz is free to go away for a long weekend: a first for us. Our relationship is progressing. She takes me by limousine up to Connecticut. In the car, we fool around, our hands down each other's pants. With the flick of an electric switch she could raise the partition between us and the driver, but she chooses not to, and the man watches us in the mirror out of the corner of his eye. I believe she is aroused by this. To my mind it is a strange if forgivable abuse of class relationship. To have the servants watch her having sex—to not care if the servants watch her having sex—is perhaps a form of luxury. Perhaps even the Cameron Diaz's of this world need the occasional perverse validation of their success. It only goes to show that she is human. We pull into a large estate on the water. The house is feudal, baronial, Camelotian. "It belonged to a friend of mine," she says. "We keep it exactly as it was, in her honor." Inside, the place is lavish in a New England Calvinist kind of way: there is a superabundance of unvarnished coat pegs. Pictures of Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy line the walls, and stand on dressers and desks. "A great woman," I say, with respect. She nods and says, "So thin, for so long." Cameron Diaz and I have frenetic sex all over the mansion. We exhaust the geometry of anatomy. Finally, she bends me over an unvarnished pine desk and uses one of Kate's Oscars on me. I am grateful the little guy's hands are smugly clasping the sword hilt at his waist instead of upraised in victory. She makes me guess which one it is. "The African Queen? Jesus Christ. Slower." "Wrong. Katherine Hepburn didn't win one of her four Oscars for The African Queen. The Oscar for best actress that year went to Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire. Guess again." "Um. Oh God. Morning Glory?" "That is an outstanding guess, but no, this one's for The Lion in Winter." There is an oil painting over the desk, brilliantly colored, semi-cubist: a blue cow, and a purple and green rooster. "See that?" "Mmmf." "That's a Chagall. Now you'll always be able to say you've been fucked under a Chagall." Cameron Diaz and I go out on the beach at night. We walk along the margin, my arm around her. The mood is poetic: lapping water tintinnabulates through the shells, shells, shells, and the moon is a ghostly galleon over Long Island Sound. "No one knows what I want," she says. "What do you want?" "I want to be a housewife. I want to marry you and move out here to some country town. I want to see you up on the roof in a checkered flannel shirt, fixing the shingles, cleaning the gutters." "Do you want to work on the roof too?" "Don't be ridiculous. I'm inside on the couch, eating chocolates and drinking non-diet Pepsi." Back inside, we watch Looney Tunes videos. She is a Bugs Bunny connoisseur. "Bugs Bunny taught me everything I know about acting, about life. When in doubt, I ask myself, what would Bugs Bunny do?" Daffy Duck charges through a door frame and off a cliff. He stands in mid-air puzzled. He looks right, then left, then up. He scratches his head and taps his foot. He happens to look down and does a double-take. Only then does he begin to fall. "There's a world of meaning right there," she says. "Never look down. As long as you don't look down, you can do anything. Also, if Bugs Bunny opens a door, don't run through it." After the weekend, after the limo driver drops me off, I feel hopeful at first, even grandiose. We have taken some steps together. No promises have been made, but things have been done and said. Then I look around my mongo-strewn apartment and stare at the lack of Cameron Diaz. After four days of non-stop intimacy, the sudden and utter dearth of Cameron Diaz wrecks me. I burst into tears and sob for hours. "You little girl!" I tell myself. "Snap out of it, Porter! You're a top garbageman in the biggest, dirtiest city in the world, for God's sake. That used to mean something to you." But my heart is all fluttery. It flitter-fluts back and forth between an opioid sense of bliss and a completely explicable feeling of impending doom: I have allowed myself to hope, and am now hostage to fortune. As I get to know Cameron Diaz better and better, I see she suffers from an unusual form of stress, one that most people wouldn't understand. Cary Grant once said something like, "Cary Grant: glamorous, debonair, equal to any occasion. Every woman wants him, every man wants to be him. I only wish I were him." I see Cameron Diaz look at herself in the mirror, compare herself to Cameron Diaz and fall painfully short. I know that I function as a refuge from all this pressure, but still, every time we fuck, I sense her asking, "Does this guy feel like he just fucked Cameron Diaz?" We banter, and she doubts herself, "Sure I'm funny, but am I as funny as Cameron Diaz?" I want to tell her to just be herself, but of course, that's the problem, that's asking so much of her. This is what I mean when I say it's not easy being Cameron Diaz. Cameron Diaz finds a dog. She shows up at my door one day with a hideous puppy. She cradles him in her arms, and looks up at me with pale blue eyes. Actually she looks down at me, I forget that in heels she is two inches taller than me. She doesn't give me her customary stem-winder hug. "I got him at the animal shelter," she says. The dog is a Rottweiler-hyena mix, with vestiges of Mako shark. He is fat and muscular, his fur a satanic black dappled with sickly yellow. A third of his body mass seems to be head, and he yawns wide to reveal rows of serrated yellow teeth, set at every conceivable angle. A bite wound from him would resemble a shotgun blast. He stinks of pee. We put him in the bathtub, and wash him with Johnson's Baby Shampoo. When we take him out of the water, he gets cold and shivers, and we rub him with towels and hug him between us on the bed to warm him with our bodies. After a while, he falls asleep. In his sleep, he pees quart after quart onto my bed. "I love him," says Cameron Diaz. "He's a monster," I say. "I know. I'm calling him Oliver Stone." Cameron Diaz and I videotape ourselves having sex. Her experience in the motion picture industry comes in handy. For example, I stand holding the camera while she fellates me on her knees, and naif that I am, don't notice the upright mirror (mongo) next to us. "Shoot the mirror," she says. "It worked for Orson Welles." We get excellent footage this way. Later, we watch the video together. I find it both embarrassing and exciting. Our bodies seem sweet and vulnerable, there is something ridiculous and yet brave about the whole thing. It doesn't look like pornography. "I was afraid my cock would look small," I say. "I don't know what it is about us men, we're always worried about that. It doesn't look particularly small right there." "No, it doesn't," she says. "Now you'll always know that for sure." She is especially keen on a section shot from above and behind that shows the muscular action of my powerful glutes to advantage, although it also features my unfortunate plenitude of back hair. The obvious contrast in our relative beauty is matched by an apparent disjuncture in scale, as though a fairy princess were set upon by an ogre. It is a trick of the angle and the light. After we watch our movie twice, she erases the camera's memory. When Cameron Diaz comes over now, she often brings Oliver Stone the dog. Oliver Stone grows quickly, and soon he is an immense grotesquerie of a mongrel. Sometimes we don't make love, but instead take Oliver Stone to the dog run. I try to accommodate this change in lifestyle because I see how much Cameron Diaz loves him. The three of us play fetch and chase together and I try to find an increased closeness in this. One day in winter, the three of us are walking in Central Park, and Cameron Diaz splits off. She needs to leave something with Paul Simon's doorman. When Oliver Stone and I approach the agreed rendezvous point, I see Cameron Diaz standing there, her face beaming, suffused with love. I am giddy, weak-kneed at her beauty. My heart is full to think she waits like this for me. Then she whistles and claps her hands, and Oliver Stone tears the leash out of my hand. They dive at each other and roll in the snow. I see now, perhaps too late, that his extraordinary ugliness is a threat. Until recently, I have been the ugliest, neediest thing in her life. No more. It is an unfortunate aspect of this bitch of a life we lead that insight always comes, but always too late to help us. We take Oliver Stone back to my apartment and feed him. He is ravenous: he tears through great hunks of dog food and bones and meat and leftovers. He can out-eat me without breaking a sweat. She watches him snuffle and gulp smelly gobs of raw chicken liver. "How long are you in town for?" "Shhh." I ask Cameron Diaz if she will come to a dinner with some of my friends. I mention it several times. I push the question firmly. With reluctance, she agrees. She comes over early to watch me cook duck in my newly mongoed rotisserie. As seven o'clock nears, she becomes fidgety and irritable. When my first guest rings the bell, she says, "I'll just be in the bathroom." I buzz my friend in, and then I hear the window in my bedroom shoot up. I go back there just in time to see a steel grapnel retract its claws, and disappear from my windowsill with a flick of nylon rope. Looking out the window, I see Cameron Diaz's Spandexed form vaulting to the top of the back fence, flipping over it, and disappearing into the night. Stunt coordinators and martial arts instructors taught her to do these ninja tricks when she made the two Charlie's Angels movies. Now she whips them out at the least opportune moment. It is intensely annoying and disappointing, and yet it is impossible not to love such a woman. I tell my guests, "I'm sorry, but Cameron Diaz couldn't make it. Or rather, Cameron Diaz was here until a moment ago, but she just left. I'm sure you'll meet her another time." Their faces show by turns amusement, disgust, and concern, according to each one's natural bent. Dinner goes badly: the duck has a sour aftertaste suggestive of rodent.  I get drunk and pugnacious.  When one of my friends disparages the sacred honor of the New York City Sanitation Department, I offer to fight him.  It takes several guests to hold me back, while others hurry my antagonist out the door. "You don't step on Superman's cape," they tell him. Everyone leaves except Seamus, my best friend since we were altar boys, now, curiously enough, a rabbi. He says, “This... thing, you have with the shiksa? It’s farblondjet. It’s no good for you. One person only, you’re fooling. At most.” Easy for him to say. Seamus has never gone out with Cameron Diaz. I forgive Cameron Diaz for escaping. "I was anxious," she says. "I was depressed. It has nothing to do with you or your friends. I would have been terrible company, and I wanted to spare you that." I accept this. After all, it is still hard to be Cameron Diaz. But I can't leave it alone. "You've never introduced me to your own friends or your family. I honestly wouldn't mind meeting them. It wouldn't be imposing on me, truly it wouldn't." She doesn’t reply. "Are you ashamed of me?" "Don't be silly," she says. "How could I be ashamed of you? You're perfect." I can tell she can tell she hasn't convinced me. Cameron Diaz and I make love for the last time. Intuitively, I know it is the last time, although I can't face it. She can't face it either, or rather, she won't look at me. We don't have intercourse. She goes down on me, making me come as quickly as she can, to be done with it. Then I go down on her. Cameron Diaz's pussy is exquisite—closely trimmed curls, demure lips, a well-developed, eminently lickable clitoris. It smells and tastes of nutmeg, cinnamon, and salt. It is the platonic ideal of a pussy, by which I mean it is a pussy even Plato would have gone down on. It is the center of my universe. She comes, then pulls me up to her. "Oh Ed," she says, and I know I will never hear anyone say that like that again. Cameron Diaz breaks up with me two weeks later. We are walking along the river. "It's no one's fault," she says. "The pendulum swung towards you for a while, and then it swung away. I hope we can do this like civilized people. I just don't need a man in my life now. I have so much anger. This business. My family. Men are just not what I need. At the moment." I say, "What about becoming a housewife? What about me up on the roof with the shingles?" "That's why this is so painful for me. That was my dream. And you were that guy. I'll always have that dream, and you'll always be in it. But I can't have that reality. It's just not one of the things granted to me in this life. I have to be myself. In a way, giving up that dream is the first mature, responsible, adult thing I've ever done." "Couldn't we still have sex?" She laughs. "We can't do that. It wouldn't be fair to either of us." "You're leaving me for Oliver Stone the dog," I say. "Don't be ridiculous," she says, turning away. "Oliver Stone the dog is a dog." "That's what makes it so sad," I mouth, but don't say out loud. For weeks, months, I tell everyone I'm fine except for the harpoon through my chest. No one else can relate to how much it hurts to lose Cameron Diaz.  They don't have the frame of reference. I am depressed and can't even masturbate to relieve my depression. How can I generate interest in sex after fucking Cameron Diaz and knowing I will never fuck her again? No one else will ever understand me like she did. For the rest of my life I will trudge a howling wasteland of frozen ashes, tortured by the memory of color and warmth. Even my job seems dull. The garbage seems like just garbage. Then I get over myself, somewhat. Time is a restorative. Once some of the sadness retreats, I realize how angry I am, and send Cameron Diaz a long letter. In part, it reads:

… I don’t know why a man should mean less to a woman than a dog. I’m not criticizing: perhaps you have a clearer, more honest sense of your priorities than most women. For a long time I thought I was patient and understanding. Now I think I was just a masochist. However, I want you to know that I never idealized you. I never put you on a pedestal. I was always willing to accept you just for being Cameron Diaz.

I know. Boilerplate post-breakup letter. But I had to write it. I don't have her address, so I look up her public relations firm on line and send my letter through them.  Six weeks later I get a manila envelope back. There is a picture and a letter.

Dear Ed,

Thank you for your letter. I love my fans!

Love always,

Cameron

Her name is signed on the photograph in lipstick, along with a smooch mark. Someone else, someone who didn't know her personally, might think she'd signed it herself. But since I am her former lover, I can see it's not her handwriting, and it's not her lips. It's not even her brand of lipstick. A new girl is assigned to my route.  She is young, with pasty white skin and long dirty blond hair that catches grease and dirt. They call her "Pigpen" behind her back. She only has one arm. You'd think that it's a problem for a garbagewoman, to be missing an arm, and you'd be right. But she is dead-game. She one-arms fifty-gallon pails up onto the truck and kicks them over. She uses her teeth on the plastic bags. Still, it's hard for her to keep up. "Man, I'm going to get fired," she says. So I pick up slack for her. My glutes, quads, and dorsals are equal to the occasion. I double-dump full pails, my wrist flexors bulging. "Gee thanks," she pants. "You're really saving my ass." "Don't be ridiculous," I say, with insouciant nonchalance. "You're doing most of the work." Later on, in the locker room, she says, "Thanks again for helping me. And for being so—nice about it." She blushes and tries not to stammer. "When I got assigned to your route, I was afraid you—wouldn't even talk to me. After all, you're kind of a legend around here." Her hair wet and momentarily clean, a cute green hospital cap on her stump, she is sexy, in her fashion. Her eyes can't meet mine and can't look away. My mere presence makes her feel deeply alive. "I'm only a legend in your mind," I say, but it's false modesty. ]]>
144 2010-07-29 01:56:59 2010-07-29 06:56:59 open open cameron-diaz-and-i-are-in-love future 0 0 post 0 _edit_lock _edit_last
Winesburg, Indiana: Frances Parker Thu, 05 Aug 2010 06:02:18 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?p=149 by Barbara Bean

I have been a doctor in this town for many years now. You won’t find me in the phonebook, but if you go past the sign for Chief Raintree’s Village and the llama farm by the trailer sale lot and then take that winding road, which can be foggy at night and deceptive, you will come to an abandoned church–not abandoned anymore, that is. My dogs will be out front but don’t let them scare you. My friend Ansel is the pharmacist I use, the one at the drugstore on the square downtown that still has the real chocolate malts. He measures out the pills right in front of you. He’s also the one who’s been remodeling that big three story house perched on a hill above Ash Street for about ten years now. They had that St. Bernard tied up by the garage for awhile and a truck parked out front that had “Barely Gettin’ By” written on the side. You might have seen it. The front yard is a profusion of flowers this summer–lilies, daisies, bergamot–and the siding is half-way up. A nice slate color. But the brick sidewalk in front is still all torn up. It’s just a few houses up from the homeless shelter. Sharon, my partner, always says, would you trust a pharmacist who has started over so many times on his house and still can’t get it right? And I say, would you trust a doctor who lives in an abandoned church full of unpacked boxes and musical instruments and paintings and who still isn’t moved in? Barely gettin’ by, Sharon, barely gettin’ by. That’s my motto. My father was a luthier by trade–he made violins and cellos. He believed that if you shone a red light on an instrument, it would sound different than if you shone a blue light on it, that color and sound were somehow connected. He conducted all sorts of experiments with wood. He was always trying to discover the secret of Stradivarius, cooking amber in the front yard, mixing vermillion with rosematter, simmering the wood over a fire for months on end. He believed that if he could just discover the secret, he would be a rich man. I used to love the fact that he believed there was a secret–that was the thing I admired most about him--that he never gave up trying to find it. But I don’t really think there is a secret. Red light, blue light, if you tell someone that a violin is a Stradivarius it will sound good to them. My father would spend hours walking around with a violin in his hand, tapping, tapping the wood, then listening, his head cocked to one side. What was he listening for? I always start by leading the patient through what used to be the sanctuary when this was a church, past the one or two old church pews stacked with books and drums and gongs, past what used to be the altar, now with a tapestry of Jesus hanging there, because why not? he was a good man, and into the healing room, where I listen, carefully, until I hear the sound of his heart. I listen for a good long while. ]]>
149 2010-08-05 01:02:18 2010-08-05 06:02:18 open open winesburg-indiana-frances-parker future 0 0 post 0 _edit_lock _edit_last
The Endless State Thu, 12 Aug 2010 06:06:32 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?p=154 by Brent Fisk

After the third accident, not his fault, Amtrak desked my Uncle Dave for good. At family gatherings he leaned against the wall like a tree planted too close to the house. He buckled the sidewalks with his feet, downed power lines with his tight smile, and bourbons. When I was young he had a quarter for every coarse word, another when we cracked his back with our socked feet. I remember waiting up late as he drove the snowy interstate from Dearborne to Newburgh, his face at the window high on the door, a soft knock, a wisp of hair floating above his woolen cap, saying, Indiana is a goddamned endless state. He loved his drinks over ice, the sprawl of us wrapped around his neck or leg, peppered by our southern drawl, Are there bears in Chicago, lions in Detroit? Do Polacks really run the streets? He told us of drunks stripping naked in cars, deer ghosting the fringe of the train’s strong light. The house sagged when his haversack leaned near the door. He’d find a less direct route home, run parallel to the old freight ways. I think of him whenever I see a lone goose fallen from the flock’s steady vee. The call of the others pulling him along on a wake of blue air and fading light. ]]>
154 2010-08-12 01:06:32 2010-08-12 06:06:32 open open the-endless-state future 0 0 post 0 _edit_lock _edit_last
Two Poems Thu, 19 Aug 2010 06:00:15 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?p=185 by Marty McConnell

Nine of Rods watches too much Law & Order

steam rises from my wet leg in the cold October apartment. another month and ten to fifteen degrees before the landlord releases the heat. the third finger of my left hand is a necrotic blue where the pen bled out, necrotic a word I learned from the TV show about the girl tortured beyond belief, showing just enough for primetime, enough to wrestle its way into my sleep because I didn’t turn away, hung on through the long shot of the cops finding the chamber, the girl alive in the drawer, her nails black, necrotic, dying at the ends of her hands, the words nuzzling their way into me, sexual sadist, serial killer, necrotic, a world I slid just past the door of as a kid, as a girl, stalked by a man, the words paranoid schizophrenic sliding around my ankles like taffeta as I accelerated toward Ohio, away from home and the neighbor with dead icebox eyes. the stove is on and open, the heat of the almost desperate and alone, dangerous maybe but not more than a day-long roast -- whatever’s sacred about the human body has to do with its ability to generate heat, to keep on despite everything. the bath starts to get cold, I’m no longer young, someone on the street below is yelling, someone else singing what could almost be a lullaby. I turn off the stove, the night goes on, we’re all just a little on fire.

The Magician is a Drag King

there’s a mouthful of man 
where my cunt used to be. note
how I lean against this pole like I’ve got the right chromosomes
for this game. like I was born
with this name. I guess
you could call it a compulsion

but tell me you don’t code switch 
from morning bed to subway wait
to secretary to barstool to bed again – 
the stretch from femme to boi to butch to man’s the feathered edge of a scalpel, so close
the sweat even smells the same. and here
I am, your rock god andromorph. you want more than the cock in my pants and that’s good, that’s
what everybody’s looking for, a little
freak in your Friday, a shapeshifter lover so you’ve got every excuse to call
the wrong name, to name the wrong
body, the wrong end, to want 
what boils low in the belly

where the good words don’t go 
but the letters tat themselves together
like lace under old ladies’ fingers into um
and oh and the thousand practiced hesitations – I like to let a little nipple
show, sometimes, to flash the twat
behind the dildo. I’m that snap 

between nod and wake on the train
when your cheekbone hits the stranger’s
shoulder, the what damn the where

am I – transgression’s the infant
I give birth to every time the stage lights
go up. you’re a sucker 
for the sideshow and I’m your spirit gum queen, your strapped-down 
goddess, your husband with a little extra
in between, I’m Venus with a goatee
I markered on myself, no Hottentot

can shame me, you can’t mock
this, I made this, my playlist
is gay bliss, go on DJ, 
break it down – everybody wants somebody. every body wants some body. everybody wants. some. body. a girl’s got to use every tool she’s got and beg, barter, or steal the rest. come on, you know you want to be transformed. you know you want to be a star. stick whatever you want in those slacks. bind, pack, beard if you want – what matters
is the saunter. the walk. how you carry 
what you’ve got. the snake around your waist is incapable
of lying, uroboros at the strip 
joint, satan at the cabaret. unravel
what makes a man a man. name one thing I can’t buy at the five and dime 
or the costume shop. when I take
the streets as me or the dude I now know

I can be, the sidewalks clear. this swagger
is a 21st-century alchemy. say you know me.
tell me now, who’s the man. ]]>
185 2010-08-19 01:00:15 2010-08-19 06:00:15 open open two-poems-3 future 0 0 post 0 _edit_lock _edit_last
Winesburg, Indiana: "The Librarian" and "Professor Helen C. Andersen" Thu, 26 Aug 2010 06:14:38 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?p=159 by Kate Bernheimer

1."The Librarian" As the town librarian, I don’t have many opportunities for social contact. That suits me fine. I live in a secret compartment behind the front desk. If you pull out the first volume of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women series, the entire wall of shelves swings open—and there you are, in my apartment. It’s not as small as you might think. It has just enough room for just what I need: a wooden table with one wooden chair, a single mattress with a white coverlet, and a one-burner stove for my teakettle. I don’t need much food; what I need I store in the crate on the front stoop of the library. It used to be for returned books, but since no one comes to the library any more, I tuck my bread and cheese inside it, wrapped in a kerchief. Sometimes, I will leave a jar of water in there, covered of course, and the night air cools it quite nicely. I will go out on the stoop in the morning to sip it in as I watch the sun come up in the sky—over the church across the road—over the small hill. Then I take the skeleton key, and I open the library door. This last gesture’s for show, in case anyone driving by sees me go in—they will think that I am just then arriving. No one knows that I sleep in the library, not even my mother, Helen C. Andersen, who lives down the road. She thinks I live all the way over the hill toward the next town, in a small trailer she purchased on a small piece of land for me and my sister and goats. It is not that I don’t like the trailer: I love it! It’s a wonderful trailer. Metal, with a canopy and the sweetest casement windows you ever did see. No, it’s just that when sister died, I felt sorry for those poor little goats. They missed her so—she really loved them. It is not that I didn’t love the goats, but they were so needy. I let them move into the trailer and then there was less room for me. They began to nibble at the curtains—who could blame them as the curtains had pictures of carrots on them, and embroidered images of parseley—I go back to freshen their water and give them some time out of doors, in the goat run. Then I go back to the library. I don't understand why no one ever comes in . . . the books are so lonely. I sit at the front desk all day. Nothing. No one comes in. As I said, this suits me fine, of course, though I pity the books. Lately I have been reading The Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti, and my dreams have become cat-like and rat-like back there in my secret compartment. “Come buy, come buy” I am lately tempted to plead in the morning, at the top of the stairs, as cars whisk themselves by with nary a glance to the library, or to me. This change—I think it has to do with the weather. Autumn is so sad. It is good that behind the shelf, in my secret compartment, I have a small fire to keep me warm. And I have all of the books I would ever need to keep me company here—it’s true, though, I worry about the goats and my dead sister. I should visit them all more often, I guess. Perhaps next week, after I finish repairing the fairy-tale books. They’re so . . . frayed . . . so . . . misunderstood. I neglect everything. I can’t stop myself. 2. "Professor Helen C. Andersen" The new fabulist moved into her office this week. It is next to my office. I asked my chair to assign her an office on the other end of the building, because I am a very private person, but he assigned her the office next to mine. My chair claims I will be a good mentor for her. He put in a one-way mirror between us so she could observe me. But why would I be a good mentor for her? She has streaky blonde hair with pale pink highlights; she wears three-inch heels and straight-legged jeans. Why would she need mentoring from me? Let’s be realistic here. I have lived in this town for my entire forty-three years and wear my grandmother’s clothes. I am not a good mentor for her. I can see that she judges my outfits by the way she watches me through her side of the mirror. My life was nice before. It was quiet. I did all my research at the town library, where my daughter is the librarian. There is a desk in the children’s room always waiting for me. But then I was asked to keep watch over her. Why? She showed up in town with her pink and blonde hair and her new collection of stories about flying ponies, and everyone loved her on sight. But I’m dutiful. I know my place. I started going to my office at school more often—in order to mentor her of course. If I am asked to do something I do it. I am a realist that way. And one must help the town’s newest women fit in . . . it isn’t easy. The women in this town can be cold. My other daughter was a real victim of them. How do you stay so thin, I asked the new one over lunch just today, in an effort to mentor her. Is it natural, or do you have a problem? I asked her. People in town may start to think you have a problem, I told her, if you do not gain weight. As for me, I have problems. (This is just between us.) One of my problems, it seems, is that when I sit down to write, I do not write about flying pink ponies. My stories do not come to me through telepathy, as the new fabulist says her stories do come to her. They appear on my forehead and I read them in the mirror, she told me, her eyes brimming with tears in an effort to manipulate me. As for me, I have a very large forehead and I fear it makes me look like a man. My new project is to find things out about her to expose her as the fraud that she really is. For example, did you know that she was once hospitalized for attempted suicide? If nothing else, I will always have that. I mean who does she think she is? I’ve had enough of that with my daughters. And pink ponies. Pink hair. This town was a lot nicer before her arrival, before she came here. Now, when I look in the mirror, there is a terrible glare. She’s on the other side of it—always—I fear. ]]>
159 2010-08-26 01:14:38 2010-08-26 06:14:38 open open winesburg-indiana-the-librarian-and-professor-helen-c-andersen future 0 0 post 0 _edit_lock _edit_last
As is Thu, 09 Sep 2010 05:29:41 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?p=247 by Brian Oliu

1 item found for BRIAN OLIU ITEM TITLE                                                                                      BIDS                      PRICE       TIME LEFT AUTHENTIC brian oliu **AS IS**                          0                      $9.95          11h 22m Meet the seller Seller:          beoliu (8) Feedback:    91.6% Positive Member:      since Nov-22-82 in United States Item #45192910201 AUTHENTIC BRIAN OLIU torso **AS IS** You are bidding on one (1) authentic BRIAN OLIU. The item has some damage or imperfection as noted here, and is sold AS IS.  The item is sold under the impression that it will be used for parts, because the item is beyond repair.  This item DOES NOT WORK and is being sold as NOT WORKING. From The Manufacturer: There came a point in BRIAN OLIU’s life that he felt he deserved more space in the world.  Those who chose not to gain mass were giving in, giving in to nothing; the air presses against them, creeping up and eating away space in between thighs and underneath chins.  Everyone is allocated a certain amount of characters, and to use any less than the allocated amount would be going against our creator and doing us a disservice.  As a result, everyone wants to touch BRIAN OLIU, to be a part of something so large, if only for a moment.  They wish to wrap their arms around his body.  They want to jump on top of him and ride him like a greased pig.  They punch him in the chest.  They want to feel “safe”.  BRIAN OLIU has never felt safe.  BRIAN OLIU is the freak show, the tilt-a-whirl, the moon bounce, the prize with the button eyes, the funnel cake, the carnival. The seller acknowledges that the item being sold is defective.  The seller acknowledges outright mistreatment of the item.  The torso currently measures 1.5X2.5X1.5.  At one point, the measurements were much smaller, took up a significantly less amount of space in the world.  The original size of the item, sans defections, is completely uncertain. Bloated like this listing.  The item is *special* because of said defects; said appraisers have told him multiple times since birth and have done so as recently as the future point of sale. BRIAN OLIU is a temple and a gift from God, and the seller has breached this contract. Shipping: The buyer agrees to pay for shipping, which may or may not cost more than the item itself.  There is nothing passive about the gravitational mass of this item.  The seller’s first grade science fair project, made of foam core (which floats), illustrated how much an average first grader (seller > 60 lbs) would weigh on the various planets in the Milky Way.  This, even today, reminds the seller of chocolate and nougat:  the wrapper picked clean of caramel pus and disposed in a 12-gallon cafeteria trashcan.  The solitary dollar crumpled in item’s pocket since five minutes before the school bus came was FOR LUNCH, and was not used FOR LUNCH.  This is a typical memory for the seller; that of deadlines and diets and sweat pants shopping.  BRIAN OLIU is so fat that when he walks he breaks Three Bridges Elementary School all-purpose room tile.  The seller would dream about the day when he would board a rocket ship, fly to the moon (he weighed the least there), and see a red digital 16.6 blinking back at him.  Jupiter was the seller’s favorite, until he realized he would weigh 253.3 pounds on Jupiter, a horrifying number then, a goal now.  His project would be on display along the walls of the cafeteria for a week, until someone dumped ketchup on his popcorn moon. The seller won honorable mention for his project, beating out countless baking soda volcanoes and slingshots; the reward was an ice cream social. The average adult human male has approximately five liters of blood in his system at one time.  BRIAN OLIU has almost 50% more than most humans.  One can ascertain that BRIAN OLIU is 50% more alive than everyone else.  One liter of blood weighs approximately one kilogram, or 2.2 pounds.  On days he would get kicked in the stomach in sterile high school hallways, or days he looked in the mirror a little too long, the seller would imagine punching down on the crest of his nose and letting pounds of plasma and tissue gush from his nostrils.  As he felt the gravitational pull to the earth loosen, he would open a bottle of aspirin (with his eyes closed) and take three.  Aspirin helps with circulation.  Other days, it would be the stripping of fat with a piano wire; the makeshift soup skimmer cutting through hardened lipids like NO FOOD METAPHORS hot paperclips through Styrofoam. Item Defects: In between the sixth and seventh rib lies the item’s heart, which will not be functional at the point of sale.  The result of this is likely to be congestive heart failure (ICD-10: I50.0), occurring because of the inability to produce enough blood to cause the seller to function correctly.  Multiple times a day, the seller will feel as if his heart is about to cease pumping blood, his veins and aortas filling up with air, formulating a carbon dioxide spider.  These moments come and go, and happen often in stale bars with sticky floors and while sitting alone at his desk.  The seller will clutch at his chest, say the first nine words ‘Our Father, who art in heaven, hallow be thy…’ and collapse.  It was so strange one minute he was standing sitting at the bar at his desk and the next second moment he was on the floor floor and he was gone dead.  BRIAN OLIU is so fat that he’s going to contract heart disease and die out of complications from obesity.  The morning after, everyone will gather at his former house, and someone will bring Dunkin’ Donuts Munchkins (the official food of mourning), and another person will laugh and say “Brian always said that Munchkins were the official food of mourning,” and there will be some wince-smiles, and people will no longer feel guilty about eating fried dough and powdered sugar in the at the wake of such a tremendous fall.  Well I can’t say I was shocked. Images: <torsofront.jpg> <torsoside.jpg> <certificateofauthenticity.jpg> <donorcard.jpg> Buyer’s Contract: Upon the winning of the item, the buyer agrees to follow the regulations set by the seller in regards to the usage of parts, as illustrated in the table below: Heart:  Eight year-old boy with juvenile onset diabetes Intestines:  48 year-old father of three with Coeliac disease, who just wants to participate in the transubstantiation on Sundays. Kidneys:  55 year-old first time grandmother with chronic renal failure. Lungs:  33 year-old prisoner suffering from pneumothorax after taking a plastic spoon shiv to the left pectoral. Liver:  22 year-old first-round draft choice of the Indianapolis Colts on Injured Reserve because of haemochromatosis. Pancreas:  24 year-old supermodel with cystic fibrosis Regrettably, there is some fear by the seller that the usage of parts is not possible; severe obesity renders otherwise good organs useless.  Not only is the torso not aesthetically pleasing, but also the fattened liver and the swollen heart are rendered useless by the seller’s ineptitude and disregard for his product.  In fact, the only plausible use for the parts encased within BRIAN OLIU is as a delicacy.  BRIAN OLIU is so fat that upon his death, people who are going to die in double-digit days are unable to use his slop. Therefore, upon the conclusion of the bidding, the item is to be desiccated and mummified.  The buyer agrees to cut open the item and begin packing the insides with crystallized sugar.  The buyer then agrees to pour molasses onto the item, filling in pores and stretch marks with high fructose syrup.  The buyer will then use red licorice rope to sew the chest cavity shut, and then spackle the lacerations shut with cake frosting.  BRIAN OLIU will never spoil. This would be a perfect item for collectors.

Brian Oliu is originally from New Jersey and currently lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. His work appears/is forthcoming in Hotel Amerika, Caketrain, WebConjunctions, Ninth Letter, Bat City Review, New Ohio Review, DIAGRAM, Brevity, and others. Great Item. A++++++

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247 2010-09-09 01:29:41 2010-09-09 05:29:41 open open as-is future 0 0 post 0 _edit_lock _edit_last
Excerpt from the American Heritage Thesaurus of Smells Thu, 16 Sep 2010 06:27:59 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?p=197 by Kathleen Balma

wet pavement – synonyms: a shuffled stack of singles, a pear, the tornado-safe corner of a basement. antonyms: rubber signature stamps, distilled regret, thin burnt white buttered toast. copper – synonyms: a fat tampon, strep throat. antonyms: unsmearable lipstick, ferrets. mildew – synonyms: carbonated water, the day before frost, sidewalk hopscotch chalk, that luxurious raincoat called home. antonyms: eucalyptus, tiger balm, a mint plant doused in cat piss, a row of ashtrays by the sink. insect repellant – synonyms: pine, latex, chlorine, greeting card sections of grocery stores. antonym: a curd of hope. salt – synonyms: dead fresh water fish on a sleek river bank, milk that aspires to be cheese, the cusp between the body and arm commonly known as pit. antonyms: a naked margarita, a first or last date, a lint-covered lidless cherry chap stick. ]]>
197 2010-09-16 01:27:59 2010-09-16 06:27:59 open open excerpt-from-the-american-heritage-thesaurus-of-smells future 0 0 post 0 _edit_lock _edit_last
Poem Thu, 23 Sep 2010 05:58:40 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?p=254 by Jason Bredle

So far we’ve been focused on here and now, yet not focused on here and now but there and yesterday—a red kitchen, ceramic roosters, gravel driveway, basketball hoop and fence separating us from the woods. I remember these things fondly, but how will I remember here and now when it becomes there and yesterday? I’ll remember being in love with you and I hope you’ll remember me being in love with you. I’ll remember the silence and the crickets, the sky reddening above the orange groves, trout and eggs, one cat in my arms, the other running toward us with a bird in her mouth. ]]>
254 2010-09-23 01:58:40 2010-09-23 05:58:40 open open poem future 0 0 post 0 _edit_lock _edit_last
Composting Fri, 08 Oct 2010 05:02:38 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?p=260 by Chad Redden

Composting requires time. It also requires a level space away from the house, out of direct sunlight, but accessible for watering, preferably by garden hose. Composting requires water. Once you have found a location for your compost pile, you must layer the compost materials like lasagna. This should be easy to envision.  After all, you made him lasagna so often—at least once a month, right? Begin the bottom layer with his books. They take up space you could use for porcelain angels and they tempt you to read them.  Already, you’ve spent a few years examining their spines, hoping they would provide answers as to why he slept under them on the couch while dead bluesmen mumbled in low tones on the stereo, instead of sharing a bed with you.  To accelerate the process, shred the books to pieces, and combine with soil and worms. The next layer: his t-shirts and jeans that you still haven't washed, the ones you arrange on the bed in the shape of his body.  Stuff these with his old baseball cards, cassette tapes, Dali prints, and fishing lures.  Put the scarecrow on the pile. Add collection notices for the ambulance, emergency room, the funeral home, and the cemetery that still arrive in the mailbox. Make sure they are dry:  excess water will slow the process of decomposition by inhibiting nitrogen production.  Remember, composting requires a perfect balance of nitrogen to facilitate the activity of microbes.  Refrain from adding autumn leaves; these will be required later. The next layer should be kitchen scraps.  Do not add lasagna.  It will release a foul smell into the air, attracting scavenger animals, who will dig up the whole pile, which is the last thing you need.  It should be safe, though, to add the doughnuts you carried home from the survivors' meetings. Clutching them may have kept you from scratching your wrist raw when it was your turn to speak, but now it is too late to eat them and they are attracting mice and roaches to your bedroom. Do NOT add the styrofoam cups and cigarette butts from those meetings into your compost pile. Even with time, worms, nitrogen, and water, these items will only corrupt the final product. In fact, you yourself should drink lots of water. It will flush your system of those toxins. I’m surprised your therapist hasn’t suggested something similar. Finally, when they arrive, cover the pile with autumn leaves and the shards of a shattered porcelain angel. This will create a nice cap for the heat produced by the pile, pushing warmth downward and stimulating the activity of microbes, those fantastic workhorses of decomposition.
Chad Redden currently lives in Indianapolis where he attends IUPUI as an undergraduate student majoring in Creative Writing. His work has appeared in analog and digital publications such as Allegheny Review, Escape into Life, Fiore, Bianncle, Genesis and Angelic Dynamo.
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260 2010-10-08 01:02:38 2010-10-08 05:02:38 open open composting future 0 0 post 0 _edit_lock _edit_last
Winesburg, Indiana: Reverend Dave Fri, 15 Oct 2010 05:06:37 +0000 http://blogs.butler.edu/booth/?p=269 by B.J. Hollars

For a time, life in Winesburg was good, and the Lord Our God blessed our town with prosperous yields, fertile soil, and faithful Christian soldiers.  My flock was rapidly expanding, the pews in First Family of Christ Living Center and Day Care overflowing with spirits in desperate need of saving. I was happy to oblige. "I will show you the One Way," I bellowed from the pulpit.  "I will lead you to the glorious land of salvation." In addition to Sunday service, I also held Ladies' Night each Thursday, during which I offered a similar message, though slightly altered to appeal to the female audience. "Rise up and lower yourself for His Humble Servant, the Rev. Dave," I preached, "and I will make my deposit into your temple!" Some of the more God-fearing women were skeptical of my advances, though I assured them the Lord smiled upon those whose passions knew no bounds. "But…is promiscuity not a sin, Reverend?" inquired the buxom Jackie Patch, to which I pressed a firm hand to her left buttock and replied, "My sweet lamb, the commingling of sacred temples is a blessing to God." That very night she and I blessed Him several times, glory to God in the highest.

*

There are two types of laws in Winesburg—man's law and God's—and while I left Sheriff Gordon to dole out his half, I took much care in doling out the other.  There was never any doubt whether or not a car was double-parked, though the great moral questions required interpretation, and I was the town's sole interpreter.  For years, the Lord rewarded my interpretations by bestowing upon me an entire cornucopia of Winesburg's most eligible bachelorettes, and, never one to shy away from the Lord's generosity, I helped myself to his bounty on a nightly basis. And then one night—prior to commingling with a young, thick-thighed maid by the name of Bridgette Steepleton—the contemptible Pastor John infected our quiet town with his heresy.  He was a bicep-laden, square-chinned Pentecostal from the sinful city of Fort Wayne and had no qualms about storming into the only lit building in town on Thursday night—Emile Durkheim High School—and interrupting the  PTA meeting to make his presence known. "Something is rotten in the state of Winesburg," Pastor John informed the Parent Teacher Association—a literary reference lost on all but English teacher Ms. Lydia Hatcher who began clapping wildly from her place in the second row. "Point of clarification," corrected PTA Secretary Joseph Lowry, licking the tip of his pencil.  "According to the zoning board, Winesburg is classified as a town, not a state.  I'll make a clarifying note in the minutes." "Duly noted," Pastor John humbly agreed before starting in on his true purpose—publicly decrying the town's spiritual leader (me) for having taken part in what he deemed "improper relations" with many of the "fertile, young lambs" of the congregation. I, an at-large member of the PTA (a post I regretted as soon as I realized childless bachelorettes didn't attend PTA meetings), cloaked myself in God's protective graces by faking sleep, resting my head against my chest and snoring at a pitch just loud enough to assure the other PTA members that my lack of rebuttal was due to the exhaustion of their overworked reverend and not a sign of weakness.  I tried to deduce exactly what had brought this cretin to our town, but the possibilities were endless. Had I helped myself to a few handfuls of his congregation's tithes during my stint as a traveling preacher? Had I imbibed too deeply from the blood of Christ he'd offered? My sins—while modest—were far-reaching. "I challenge Rev. Dave to a faith-off," Pastor John continued, interrupting my speculation.  "Tomorrow evening, in this very auditorium, I will stand before you and perform the five signs as indicated in the book of Mark.  I shall cast out devils, speak in tongues, take up serpents, drink deadly things, and lay my hands on the sick to heal them." In a matter of moments, the PTA meeting had become far more interesting than the association ever imagined, and quite suddenly, voting for the approval of a new fleet of pencil sharpeners no longer seemed a priority. "I know not where your so-called reverend is hiding," Pastor John began as several heads turned in my direction, "but make him aware of my challenge.  Tomorrow evening, come prepared to witness miracles performed by the truly faithful." With that, the forked-tongued pastor swept across the gymnasium floor and allowed the PTA meeting to continue precisely where it had left off. "Very well then.  Any new business?" asked PTA President Donald Crumble. There was none. "Motion to adjourn?" The motion was seconded. The association scuttled into the hallway to partake in punch and cookies, at which point I, the town's spiritual leader and at-large PTA member, snapped awake and quite heroically snuck out the emergency exit door.

*

The following afternoon, as Pastor John spiritually prepared himself for the miracles ahead—anointing his body with rosemary-scented oil just beneath the basketball hoop of the Emile Durkheim High School gymnasium—I watched on from a cracked door in a nearby janitorial supply closet.  What I witnessed was nothing short of shocking—a man seemingly in complete control of his faith.  He appeared somehow exempt from the world's temptations.  I sent the ferociously beautiful Helen Koppelford (Emile Durkheim's head cheerleader) into his recently anointed arms offering leftover punch and cookies from the PTA meeting, and he refused her kindly, sending her on her way without casting so much as a lustful eye. As she walked away, Helen spied me from my place within the closet and shrugged, as if she too could not understand a man whose faith was not the least bit shaken by the great depths of her low-cut halter.

*

Hours later, when Pastor John left to relieve himself in the boy's room, I leapt from the janitor's closet, returning home to begin my own spiritual preparation—two Advil and a whiskey sour.  As the clock struck seven, I gathered my suitcase of faith-healing tools and set off toward the high school.  The school's doors were flung wide, and a carnival atmosphere had developed, my once-faithful flock now anxiously awaiting my trial. I placed my suitcase beside a chair facing the audience, while alongside me Pastor John had his own tools—a chicken wire crate full of coiling rattlesnakes as well as vials of strychnine. The crowd took their seats as Pastor John approached me, held out a leathery hand and whispered, "So you're the lecherous old codger who knocked up my niece, eh?" I stared at him, foggily recalling a feisty, red-headed vixen with the same square-chin, the same Pentecostal upbringing.  She was a young lamb whose temple I'd breached on several occasions, glory to God in the highest.  However, I hadn't yet been aware that my Essence had played a role in her child's not-so-immaculate conception. "Perhaps this was God's will," I began, stuttering.  "Glory to God in the…" "God's will," he scoffed, fiddling with his snake box.  "Allow me to show you God's will." And then, with the precision of a skilled mountebank, Pastor John proceeded to cast out devils, blather in tongues, slurp down strychnine, lay his hands on Henry Compton (a long time sufferer of whooping cough) and drape an entire knot of rattlesnakes upon his sweaty head.  My flock watched on in wonderment, praising the Lord for bringing this righteous man to their humble town. "Hallelujah!" they cried.  "Praise Him!" Impressed with himself (though I will remind you pride is a sin), Pastor John returned the snakes to their box before offering an extended bow as the crowd erupted in cheers, overcome by the power of the Lord. Pastor John returned to his chair while every eye in the room shifted toward me, creating a silence louder than the tumbling walls of Jericho. "My loyal flock," I cried, beginning my reverend stroll across the length of the gym floor.  "Before being swayed by such vapid parlor tricks, allow me to show you the One Way.  Allow me to lead you to the glorious land of…salvation!" I had hoped words alone might reaffirm my place as Winesburg's spiritual leader, though a few of the men crossed their arms, assuring me that they required miracles. "To begin," I said, stammering, "allow me to…cast out a devil." I turned to Pastor John, arms outstretched, and shouted, "Scat, devil!  Git a move on, you serpentine scoundrel!" I made a few kicks at the air while Pastor John took a sip of water, unfazed. "Very well then," I continued, unlatching my suitcase.  "On to miracle number two." I pulled out my abridged Latin dictionary and began reciting languages in tongues foreign to the ears of Winesburg, though when that, too, failed to impress, I took a full swallow of the day-old punch from the PTA meeting, which was pretty lethal in itself.  A few of my faithful were already heading toward the exits, so I upped the ante, offering Henry Compton a spoonful of Robitussin to soothe his throat before concluding by pulling two writhing garter snakes from my suitcase and thrusting them toward heaven. When I fell to my knees shouting, "Glory to God in the highest!", a single clap echoed off the cinder block walls. As that clap dissipated, it became suddenly clear that my services were no longer needed; that all my canoodling and commingling had backfired, that on my path to saving souls I had, perhaps, desecrated one too many temples. Shoulders slumped, I collected my suitcase and headed toward the door when quite suddenly, a miracle revealed itself.  Pastor John toppled to the floor, collapsing in a heap on the free throw line.  The strychnine was proving too powerful—even for a man of his faith—and the people of Winesburg turned once more to their spiritual rock (me) to save that wicked pastor from death's greedy embrace. "My children," I shouted, leaping into action, "we must pray for a doctor!  We must pray for this terribly sinful man to receive the medical attention he requires!" We clasped our hands tight as Dr. Grover Rayburn—a longtime member of the congregation—walked unsteadily toward the sick man, his cane clicking, and pronounced the pastor "still alive." "But he ought not to have drank up all that poison like a damn fool," Rayburn diagnosed.  "If he was smart he'd vomit it right back up." Quite heroically (and with the Lord's strength), I lifted John's sweaty head into my arms and forced him to drink what remained of the day-old PTA punch.  Almost immediately, the poison came flooding out of his mouth like a red sea and the congregation cheered my miracle—claiming it the truest display of spiritual healing they'd ever witnessed. "I am no hero," I proclaimed modestly as Pastor John continued retching beneath the basketball net," for the Lord God has blessed me with great strength and fortitude and…" "Rattlesnakes!  Goddamn!" a voice cried out, and I turned to observe the last of the snakes slithering from their unlatched cage and winding around the wood-paneled floor.  God spoke to me then—a voice I hadn't heard in years—whispering, "Dave, this moment calls for divine leadership."  And then it struck me: this moment, quite simply, called for Reverend Dave. Like Moses on Sinai, like Christ on the Mount, I climbed to the high ground, leaping heroically to the top of the bleachers.  While some of the more brazen men tested their own faith to recapture those snakes, I stood atop the bleachers and prayed for their wives, promising the Lord Our God that if, heaven forbid, anything were to befall those gentle souls, I might offer their wives sanctuary on all the coldest and loneliest nights.
B.J. Hollars of Fort Wayne, Indiana is an instructor at the University of Alabama where he received his MFA in 2010. He's served as nonfiction editor and assistant fiction editor for Black Warrior Review and currently edits for Versal. He has work published or forthcoming in American Short Fiction, Barrelhouse, The Southeast Review, among others. He has edited the book You Must Be This Tall To Ride: Contemporary Writers Take You Inside The Story. Go to: www.bjhollars.com or www.YouMustBeThisTallToRide.net.
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269 2010-10-15 01:06:37 2010-10-15 05:06:37 open open winesburg-indiana-reverend-dave future 0 0 post 0 _edit_lock _edit_last