A Review of Patrick Lawler’s Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds by Jennifer Dane Clements
Not long ago I saw a photo collection: Two brothers who took one picture every year in the same month, the same pose. They did this for decades, their entire lives distilled in these portraits. In 1994 they wear matching sweaters. In 2001 they look unkempt. Each photograph asks the onlooker to imagine what happened between each set of images–why did he lose weight, why wasn’t he smiling more. The positioning grows expected, even stale: older brother here, younger brother here, chair, table, lamp. Except, as we grow closer to the now, we see the paint has started to chip on the wall, and the lampshade was replaced, and somewhere, somehow, two young boys grew into men.
The framework remains unchanged, the details shift in the smallest of ways. But the overall effect creates nostalgia for suggested things, unseen things, palpable just beneath the surface.
It’s a difficult thing to accomplish, and it’s what Patrick Lawler’s first novel, Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds, spends its pages exploring: The spaces between and underneath. The economy of storytelling. The onus on the viewer to participate in unpacking questions, and meanings, and movements.
Composed in a series of tightly wrought chapters–some a mere three sentences long–the story follows a young narrator and his family, in a small, anonymous town, with small, anonymous descriptors. They seem to both live in and hover over the landscape. The important things are named and renamed, redefined as they change–or as the narrator’s perspective on them changes. Those named things become the notable landmarks of the novel, their evolution or transformation or renaming emblematic of the narrator’s own journey and perspective on those around him.
Lawler says it explicitly: “Our stories repeat themselves endlessly around us–ultimately revising who we are every time.”
It feels at once like reading the same chapter over and over again with certain words replaced, but this heightens the effect of those changed words and phrases. The same photograph, with things just a little older, a little changed. We begin in “the year they named the streets after the elements,” moves into “the year my parents began speaking in a strange language” and “the year we practiced for emergencies.” By the end, the repeated frameworks have become as nostalgic as old photos — in them, we see the history of all the shifts the narrator and the reader have together experienced. And in the rare deviations, we see the narrator looking beyond, departing: “‘This is where we are,’ he said, but his mouth was filled with uncertainty.”
The reader is forced to consider her own story in patterns and revisions, in names and malleable perspectives. I consider my own: The year that smelled of pool water and talcum powder. The year our neighbor’s daughter asked Santa for a penis. The year I drove in circles hoping to get lost, and failing. How best to crystallize time and experience in ways that approximate truth.
Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds is a poet’s fiction, but it’s an artist’s fiction too—because the brevity and economy of language makes the act of reading this novel something beyond reading, because the entire work seems to meditate on how we live in words, how we cohabitate with them in our daily routines and use them as mile-markers for landscapes past. How eventually, we become symbols of the lives we live, and how the uncertainty of detail grants us room to explore.
Jennifer Dane Clements received her MFA in creative writing from George Mason University, where she served as Editor-in-Chief ofSo to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language & Art. She has been published inWordRiot and Nerve and her plays have been produced by Capital Repertory Theatre (Albany, NY), Creative Cauldron (Falls Church, VA), and others. Recipient of the John P. Anderson Award for Playwrights in 2004 and of a 2006 Fulbright fellowship to the Slovak Republic to teach English at the University of Constantine the Philosopher, Clements currently works at a theatre-service organization and serves as a prose editor forink&coda. She lives with her husband in Washington, DC.
One mother who owned
the sea, one father who walked
on water, and in a row boat,
one brother who believed
marriage meant becoming
the roof over a woman’s head.
A room for the night with a view
of the water, the moon a quarter
less than it should have been,
the shape of my wife drawn
into the empty bed one memory
at a time. There were too many
stars to count, a registry
of old gifts and receipts strewn
across the sky, a mess
of things that died getting here.
(Today’s poem originally appeared in Rattle and appears here today with permission from the poet.)
Frank Matagrano is the author of I Can Only Go As Fast As the Guy in Front of Me (Black Lawrence Press). His poems have appeared in Rhino, Cimarron Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Gargoyle and Ninth Letter, among others. He lives and works in Chicago, Illinois.
Editor’s Note: Today’s poem makes a promise with its title. And yet, when the goods are delivered, the reader is surprised to receive them. We enter the poem via a personal worldview in macro, looking to the marriages that shape the poet’s expectations of marriage. And yet, when the poet turns toward his own marriage, when he moves to deliver on the title’s promise, there is something startling in the way we turn toward his loss. How lovely, simple, and devastating to consider “the shape of my wife drawn // into the empty bed one memory / at a time.”
Gawker is Defending Snark and It’s Such a Good Feeling To Explain Why They Are Wrong
by Allan Mott
This past Thursday, Gawker published an essay by Tom Scocca entitled “On Smarm.” And while it spends a lot of time discussing this titular subject an equally apt title would have been “In Defense of Snark”. That’s because its thesis is that the use of snark (as found on websites like Gawker) is a direct reaction to the nefarious influence of smarm—which Scocca describes as a patriarchal tool used to squash truth and debate through the oppressive policing of tone and insincere advocation of kindness.
It’s an eloquent essay full of memorable insights, but it is also an extremely self-serving one based on a crucial miscalculation and made possible by the essential arrogance that snark thrives on to exist—the idea that the author alone possesses access to undeniable truths the rest of us are either too stupid or cowed by our cultural overlords to uncover ourselves.
This response isn’t going to be anywhere as long or detailed as Scocca’s essay, but having read it and seen it praised by people whose opinions I respect, I feel compelled to point out where I see he has erred and/or is blind to his own failings. And I hope to do so in a way that proves it is possible to express a negative critical opinion without using the specific rhetorical tool he works so long and hard to defend.
The first bump in his argument came for me in the section where Scocca nominates popular Gawker target Dave Eggers as “the most significant explicator of the niceness rule….” Eggers crime? An email interview the author and publisher wrote 13 years ago in which he said, “Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them.”
Scocca’s response to this is one of incredulity:
Do not dismiss … a movie? Unless you have made one? Any movie? The Internship? The Lone Ranger? Kirk Cameron’s Unstoppable? Movie criticism, Eggers is saying, should be reserved for those wise and discerning souls who have access to a few tens of millions of dollars of entertainment-industry capital. One or two hundred million, if you wish to have an opinion about the works of Michael Bay.
Scocca might have been justified here if Eggers was truly saying that you had to have the exact same experience to properly appreciate and judge a creative work, but that’s an assumption he clearly makes because it is convenient to him and allows him to glibly decry it with examples of movies of dubious merit. (Reading the full essay you’ll note that he doesn’t show similar outrage over the other two subjects Eggers notes, because neither writing a book or meeting people allow for the same level of hyperbole).
And while I cannot speak to what exactly Eggers had in his head when he typed out those words, as someone who has expressed similar sentiments in the past, I would tell Scocca that no, you do not have to make a major studio blockbuster to criticize one, because the experience of simply attempting to put together a no-budget digital short in your own backyard is more than enough to provide valuable insights into the often heartbreaking realities of filmmaking—where the best of intentions are often inevitably undone by forces beyond the filmmaker’s control.
What Scocca fails to realize is that in this statement, Eggers is not pushing for “niceness” but empathy—the ability to put yourself in the place of the artist and to appreciate the inherent difficulties of creating any work of art, much less a good one.
But is it important for a critic to feel empathy? Well, that depends on what you believe the purpose of criticism is—to improve the culture we live in or to destroy it so that it can be rebuilt in the image we’d prefer. Scocca clearly believes in the latter, so it makes sense that he would be offended by the thought he might be asked to show sympathy for the artists he and his fellow Gawker contributors snark against in the name of their anit-smarm revolution.
To the snarkful, those artists are working in service of a status quo they deplore and thus must be brought down to Earth via their dismissive wit. And what is that status quo? One in which the snarker is forced to write about others, rather than be written about themselves.
Because that is what lies in the beating heart of the condescension through which snarkery thrives—anger over the idea that someone else has made their way into the spotlight that the snarkers covet for themselves. It is the most obvious response to a system that is often arbitrary and unfair, abetted by decades worth of academic criticism arguing that the critic serves a greater role in the creation of art than the artist (Author? What author?).
Scocca pitches the battles of snark vs. smarm as one of truth vs. lies and this is relevant and true in the sections where he specifically focuses on hypocritical calls to civility from political opportunists looking to deflect honest assessments of their records, but the problem is that this ignores the fact that the majority of snark seen online is aimed at pop culture and that is an arena where the concept of “truth” is at best highly questionable.
Because as insightfully as any critic assesses a work of pop culture, they are still always operating in the world of subjective opinion—not objective fact. When it comes to the new Miley Cyrus album, there are no universal truths. Some will love it. Some will hate it. Both will be able to defend their positions and neither will be more wrong or right than the other.
More often than not the reason why some will praise a work is the exact same reason others will decry it, so to suggest that one group possesses wisdom that the other lacks—as the snarkers frequently do—isn’t battling against tyranny, it’s just creating a new one where only one opinion is considered enlightened and all others are dismissed as deluded and wrong.
Scocca does precisely this himself when he writes:
Whether a work is…any good is beside the point… we have an entire class of art or entertainment that relies on other art, parasitically, for its protection or certification. Julia Child…became a beloved and admired figure, so how could Julie & Juliabe greeted with anything but love…? “Swan Lake” is essential to the classical canon, so Black Swanmust be taken seriously… .
When we detach ourselves from the logic of smarm, it becomes possible instead to read Julie & Juliaas a chilling portrait of sociopathy, and Black Swanas hysterical junk….
With this, Scocca specifically states that his rejection of smarm gives him a special insight unavailable to those of us still caught in its web. He informs us why many of us praised these specific movies and why we were foolish to do so. He never once considers the possibility that there might be other reasons for appreciating them.
Maybe I enjoyed Julia & Julia because it featured one of my favourite performances by an actor who I personally believe is one of the greatest to ever work in film? Maybe I was especially touched by its depiction of Child’s unique relationship with her husband? And it seems weird to tell me that I only recommendedBlack Swan to others because it references “Swan Lake”—a ballet I’ve never actually seen or feel any particular connection to. The possibility that I might have empathized with Portman’s insecurity and resulting descent into madness is discounted because Scocca believes it is “hysterical junk” and his detachment “from the logic of smarm” apparently makes this analysis irrefutable.
What Scocca’s essay fails to acknowledge is that it is entirely possible to engage in intelligent, thoughtful negative criticism without being condescending or engaging in the self-satisfied cheap shots that define the snark oeuvre. It’s just much harder, because the one thing snark really has going for it is that it is by far the easiest method of public discourse. All one has to do is strike a tone of superior dismissiveness, find fault and run with it for as long as inspiration welcomes.
Being negative in a way that is actually constructive, though, can require real work. It forces you to consider what you are saying and how your subject will react to it. This is something you never have to do with snark, because its whole point is to dehumanize the person you are discussing—to turn them into a thing you can mock for page views and general amusement. Sometimes the crimes of the subject are such that they deserve this kind of treatment, but most often their basic humanity is robbed from them for no other reason than the snarker’s own amusement.
That’s why when I criticize the use of snark, I am not doing so in the defense of smarm and my own desire to silence dissent. I do so because it treats people like things and when we treat people like things it makes the world a worse place to live in. I rally against rudeness not in the name of preserving the patriarchy and the status quo, but because these discourtesies rob us of our humanity—without them we are nothing more than inconvenient impediments to other people’s desires. Civility is not being nice to allow the wicked and corrupt to flourish, it’s the acknowledgement that how we treat each other is the only thing keeping our civilization from collapsing. Being polite is not an act of submission, but an acknowledgement that there is a world greater than us that we are just a part of—that we do not stand alone in the centre of the universe.
But the crucial miscalculation in Scocca’s argument is that the only reason smarm is the antithesis to snark is because both are equally flawed as rhetorical devices. By reacting as it does against the forces he laments snark does as much damage as it prevents. It’s fighting toxic waste with toxic waste—a defence that only leads to more cultural pollution, not less.
No, the true weapon against both smarm and snark is sincerity. To clearly and honestly engage in a debate without invective or adornment and trust that those who you are arguing with are doing so based on their true principles and beliefs and not merely for attention, ego, profit or entertainment.
Sure, it sounds boring, but it doesn’t have to be. My personal hero is a man whose entire existence was devoted to being sincere and whose innate kindness was not a ruse or a tactic, but the defining trait that made him special and unique in a world that needed him to exist. Because I am a flawed person I often fail to follow in his example and engage in the exact same kind of behavior I’ve spent nearly 2000 words arguing against, but his existence proves that we can rise above the battle Scocca describes—we are not obligated to take a side. We can be polite, thoughtful and kind without automatically furthering the ends of those who attempt to hide their corruption behind such principles—we can do so simply because it’s what Mr. Rogers taught us.
This article originally appeared at The Good Men Project and is reprinted here with permission of the publisher.
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Allan Mott was once accused of being a narcissistic goth lesbian by a disgruntled Amazon reviewer. That pretty much sums up his writing career (which includes 12 and 1/2 books and frequent contributions to such sites as XOJane, XOJaneUK, Canuxploitation, Bookgasm, and Flick Attack). His most personal writing can be found at VanityFear.com, where he uses the subject of B-Movies to mostly talk about boobs and stuff. Tweet him @HouseofGlib.
Where Is the Million Hoodie March for Renisha McBride?
by Zerlina Maxwell
It’s been two weeks since the unnecessary and untimely killing of Renisha McBride. On November 2, the unarmed 19-year-old who was in search for help after a car accident in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn Heightswas shot in the face by Theodore Wafer, whose porch she had walked onto. The parallels between Trayvon Martin’s tragic killing and McBride’s are resonating in a national psyche rife with story after story of Black men and women gunned down as if their Black bodies have little or no value. And while we don’t know what will happen to Wafer as a result of the killing (George Zimmerman, the man who killed Martin, was acquitted) we know this pattern of violence must end.
Reports that have surfaced since the tragic killing note McBride was intoxicated at the time of the incident, implying that somehow she was responsible for her own death. McBride crashed into a parked car and walked a short distance to knock on Wafer’s door for help. Instead of, say,inviting her in to call 9-1-1 to report the car accident, he shot her in the face. Originally, Wafer claimed the shotgun fired accidentally, and he wasn’t arrested immediately after the shooting based on this version of events—reminiscent of the Zimmerman case.
Now that more evidence has surfaced, Wafer is claiming that he shot McBride in self-defense, even though the door to his home was locked and reports show that she was shot through this locked screen door and from a far enough distance that she didn’t pose an immediate threat. On Friday, Wafer was finally charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter and instructed to turn himself into the authorities. Wafer was arraigned, with his bail set at $250,000.
Beyond these facts, it appears McBride was killed in a manner more appropriate for a rabid animal trespassing on someone’s property than a human being with a full cadre of rights. Her life, like so many others in the Black community, was ended prematurely, for inexplicable reasons that defy logic about self-defense, guns, racial discrimination, and the criminalization of Black bodies.
This narrative is all too familiar. Zimmerman made similar claims after the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2011. Zimmerman claimed Martin posed a threat to his community, in part because Martin was wearing a hoodie. Zimmerman claimed that Martin—who was “armed” with Skittles and an iced tea—was a threat because he didn’t respond to being followed by a strange man, with the “yes, sir” head down humility expected by Black people being interrogated by those who believe they are somewhere they are not permitted to be. Martin’s death and the failure to immediately arrest Zimmerman caused the nation to take notice and Million Hoodie marches were organized across the country, garnering national attention. (Even Beyonce and Jay Z attended one in New York City after the verdict.)
So where is the Million Hoodie march for Renisha McBride?
While there are certainly activists organizing vigils across the country for McBride, they are noticeably smaller at this early stage in the case than the ones organized for Martin. Like Martin, McBride was gunned down inexplicably, and then labeled a threat by the shooter to justify the killing.
There is no question that Black men are under attack by a racist criminal justice system and a society that forever suspects them to be criminals. But when a young Black woman suffers the same fate as Trayvon Martin, the outrage appears to be concentrated among Black women, instead of a universal outrage with mass protests. That has got to change. Black women consistently show up for Black men, and yet the opposite is not true when Black women are the victims of injustice.
That Black bodies cannot simply exist and move about unmolested, without the threat of violence for little to no reason, links us back to the Jim Crow South, when Black bodies were labeled threatening and lynched in front of white communities. As Professor Jelani Cobb wrote in the New Yorker, “African-Americans are both the primary victims of violent crime in this country and the primary victims of the fear of that crime.” Both Renisha McBride and Trayvon Martin died as an apparent reaction to this discriminatory—and common—mindset.
There must be justice for Renisha McBride, for her family, and for her community. Black America is in a constant spin cycle of pain. The reasons given to justify the deaths of Black children are steeped in America’s checkered racial history and white supremacy.
The callousness with which Martin and McBride were killed should compel a national dialogue on race, inequality, profiling, and gun safety, but as long as white Americans refuse to acknowledge that Black people are not inherently a threat, and are capable of innocence deserving justice, the pain will continue. For a nation that claims to have a foundation of freedom and liberty, these killings are evidence of a nation lost and in denial, unable to find its way until all Americans can walk up to a home seeking help after an accident, and not receive a fatal shot to the face.
This article originally appeared in RH Reality Check and is reprinted here with permission of the publisher.
In her first book of published poems, Losing the Moon, Kathryn Levy devised settings for each of her speakers to inhabit, so that we saw the edginess of a rooftop, right before the ballerina plunged to her end, we saw a chilly character jury-rigging blankets to her windows to block out something colder than ice, we saw birds “singing beyond themselves” out there, where the poet masterminded her “nocturnes.” These turns were filled with dramatic presence, sharing the stage with Hamlet as he delivers that speech on quiddity. But here, in Levy’s second collection, Reports, the backdrops all fall away, and we are rawly mise-en-scène in contemporary horrors—there is no furniture to hide behind.
These really are reports. And when Levy shares them at readings, she delivers her lines from memory and not from the page, because she is reporting. These poems have marinated in a growing world-crisis but somehow avoid sounding like journalism. A New Yorker, Levy can write with intimacy and authority about 9-11 and post 9-11, seamlessly suturing the personal to the political in these artfully made poems. With the personal, we learn of a crazy mother and inept father and, even worse, we learn that they are dead. Though this can be crippling in the hands of a less perceptive and skillful writer, instead of confessional tropes, Levy offers us Reports.
When she and I were once together at a writers’ colony, I heard her report that for her, writing is “like sticking your finger in a light socket all day.” That scary image has stuck, so that when I am working, I always ask myself if I have done the same. And true to that, Kathryn Levy’s Reports will galvanize her readers, because this author risks everything. She is our soul sister, and we can trust that her Reports need no fact-checks.
Kathryn Levy, Reports, New Rivers Press, 2013: $14.95.
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Susan Hankla is a faculty member of the Virginia Museum of Fine Art’s Studio School, where she is adjunct professor in creative writing. Hankla’s published works appear in PoetryNorthwest, Southern Poetry Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, New Virginia Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Sun, Laurel Review, and others and in chapbooks published by Burning Deck Press and Mill Mountain Press. A recipient of the Virginia Prize for Fiction from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, she has been a fellow at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and at the Robert Frost Poetry Festival and Conference. An exhibiting visual artist, she collaborated in a show at Randolph-Macon College called “Artists and Writers” with her husband, Jack Glover.
In the beginning was the word, was the
breath that shaped it, the mouth
that cupped the breath and the body
that made it. I am merely flesh, remaking
myself every seven years. I breathe to escape
my origin, caressing the unseen
with syllable like rings of smoke
that open to dissolve. Trust me, you will
always be alone. We will always be separate in time,
the distance between our bodies in bed
the distance between your death and mine.
We come together at night to pretend
that loneliness is an animal we can cull. But
I watch you sleep, hair splayed across your pillow,
slack mouth breathing for your singular life.
(Today’s poem originally appeared in Thrush Poetry Journal and appears here today with permission from the poet.)
Kristin George Bagdanov is an M.F.A. candidate in poetry at Colorado State University, where she is a Lilly Graduate Fellow. Poems of hers have recently appeared in or are forthcoming from The Los Angeles Review, 32 Poems, CutBank, Redivider, and Rattle. Her chapbook We Are Mostly Water was published by Finishing Line Press in 2012 as part of the New Women’s Voices series.
Editor’s Note: If I had to sum up today’s poem in one word it would be “powerful.” With this piece Kristin George Bagdanov takes on the heavy and the deep; without fear, without apprehension. “Trust me,” she tells us bluntly, “you will / always be alone.” We can love, but “We will always be separate in time, / the distance between our bodies in bed / the distance between your death and mine.” From its biblical entry—as captivating as the origin story it evokes—to its repeated waves of brutal honesty, today’s entry is as well-wrought as the human body in all its striking, singular existence.
Dropping Guy Davenport’s name—even among the literati—often results in little more than “Sounds familiar …” or “Didn’t he write …?” To me, that is almost as tragic as the loss of the author himself to cancer on January 4, 2005. A MacArthur Foundation Fellow, Davenport bequeathed to us more than half a dozen collections of fiction, several books of essays, two volumes of poetry, assorted translations of Greek poets and philosophers, as well as an edition of drawings and paintings. How to account for the obscurity of a writer whom critics almost universally acclaim a creative genius? America, it seems, long ago lost its taste for the new and unusual in literature and has little patience for work that doesn’t hold itself upright with a backbone of what-happens-next.
Combining structural elements of essay, poetry, and narrative, Davenport virtually reinvents fictive form as he makes forays into various fields—history, aesthetics, physics, botany, philosophy, and religion among them. Made up of fragments, progressing by allusion and inference, his fanciful tales are nonetheless discernible wholes, lyrical mosaics in which language itself is as important as what it conveys.
“All at first was the fremitus of things, the jigget of gnats, drum of the blood, fidget of leaves, shiver of light, boom of the wind.” Here is a handsome illustration of Davenport’s style. I had to look up fremitus, but of course it was implied by the context. Jigget, however, doesn’t show up in any dictionary I could find. But we think of jagged, we think of jiggle and, since we are dealing with gnats, probably settle for jerky flight or perhaps erratic buzz. There are other words of this ilk: bodger, vastation, conder. And words that seem to be neologisms but aren’t (guidon, quitch, awn). Davenport isn’t showing off; he’s having fun—frolicking in language and inviting us to join in.
“C. Musonius Rufus” (out of Da Vinci’s Bicycle, now a New Directions Classic), from which the above line was taken, is one of the most beautifully written short stories I’ve ever read. In one thread of the narrative, Davenport imagines the Roman Emperor Balbinus speaking from the grave: “Then I went down to where iron grows. Down past root seines in loam like condered oakgall and down past yellow marl hard with quartz the splintered ores begin. Green, edged, with the black metal horses hate and wine sours next to, and which thunder has entered. Chill, sacred iron, bitter with lightning.” The dead ruler offers one gorgeous meditation after another while the other thread of the narrative follows the plight of the stoic philosopher Caius Musonius Rufus, who has been sent to a prison camp in Greece.
Da Vinci’s Bicycle is an excellent introduction to Davenport’s impressive oeuvre. Taking historical figures—James Joyce, Richard Nixon, Gertrude Stein, and Robert Walser—as points of departure, often weaving between eras centuries apart, Davenport dazzles page after page. In “Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier” he writes “All of nature is series and pivot, like Pythagoras’ numbers, like the transmutations of light. Give me a sparrow, he said, a leaf, a fish, a wasp, an ox, and I will show you the harmony of its place in its chord, the phrase, the movement, the all.”
Harmony is perhaps the key to entering Davenport’s writing: nothing in existence is separate, each is related, and Davenport not only perceives the connections but also communicates them; they are ours if only we are willing to sit for the performance.
The four longest stories in The Jules Verne Steam Balloon create a sort of novella. Hugo Tvemunding and his girlfriend, Mariana, lead a life both idyllic and ideal: there are simple repasts laid out like still-lifes, meticulous descriptions of the meadows and forests through which they wander, innovative and prolonged sexual encounters. Davenport presents, in sumptuous detail, the Greek concept of arête—excellence of mind, body, and spirit. Mariana, addressing Hugo, eloquently sums up this life in “absolute kilter”: “…your eyes fly open at six, you hit the floor like an Olympic champion, hard-on and all … jog three kilometers, swim ten lengths of the gym pool, nip back here for wheatgerm carrot smush while reading Greek, communing with your charming freckle-nosed kammerat Jesus, shower with unreasonable thoroughness while singing hymns, … teach your classes, Latin, gym, and Greek, meet me, bring me back here for wiggling sixtynine on the bed, tongue like an eel … race off and instruct your Boy Scouts in virtue, knots, and nutritive weeds, sprint back here … teach me English while fixing supper, show me slides of Monet and Montaigne …” and, after another roll or two in the hay, it’s time to start all over again.
The collection takes its name from three daimons (“spirits who possess or guide or tempt”) or perhaps three quantum particles (one of them is named Quark) incarnated as young boys who are spotted floating over modern Denmark in an antique balloon. Bearing a message from the Consiliarii, Davenport’s concept of elohim or some other divine council, they are clever, polyglot, and charming.
A Table of Green Fields, a collection of 10 short stories—including a veritable prose poem inspired by a single line from Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal—continues in the vein of The Jules Verne Steam Balloon. Nature, sexuality unimpeded by social constraints, and Davenport’s own tireless wonder, his (implied) insistence that everything we need to be happy is pretty much within arm’s reach, run like currents through this book as well. Fremitus? Indeed, frisson, palpable thrill, sail shook so hard by the wind it sings in a kind of vibrato. Time and again in his writing, Davenport intimates that art possesses a beauty no less astounding than nature’s—he recommends both in large quantities, and woe to him who sacrifices up one in the name of the other.
Let Davenport’s writing also be recommended unreservedly. The truth is, if an author like Guy Davenport is allowed to sink into oblivion, then not only is the American soul unlikely to be spared “the inert violence of custom” (Emerson’s phrase), but it’s also unlikely that it’s worth saving.
An Open Letter to Charlotte Raven about My Footwear and My Feminism
By Kirsten Clodfelter
Dear Charlotte,
I appreciate that you have words of wisdom to share with the next generation of “hip” young feminists as we get dressed each morning, but the truth is, I don’t want you in my closet any more than I want Republican legislators in my vagina.
Admittedly, I am not exactly the poster girl for “girly.” Aside from the two days a week that I’m on campus to teach, I write from home, where I hang out with an awesome but not quite fashion-adept toddler. (Yes, you read that right. I have a Master’s degree and did not seek full-time employment in order to stay at home with my kid—BY CHOICE!) Most of the time, I live in yoga pants, rarely brush my hair, and sometimes go three entire days without showering—like, in a row. But I do own a pair or four of high heels, and occasionally I even wear them.
As someone who didn’t win the genetic lottery as far as grace and poise are concerned, it is true, as you argue, that I sometimes look silly when I put on said high heels. But no part of that silliness is due to the fact that while wearing them I also identify as a feminist.
And I get that. I do. But I also wonder if in many ways that male gaze isn’t already broken by the act of acknowledging it, by a feminist—or anyone—stopping to practice genuine self-awareness when considering what’s attractive or interesting or fulfilling outside of the boundaries established by those patriarchal norms.
In this space, we might find that kick ass, grrl power Doc Martens are sexy or awesome or strong, but so too are pleather high heels. Or crocs. Or whatever. (For the record, Dr. Marten was a nazi before he staked his claim in the footwear market, so I’m just going to stick to my Rocketdogs.)
If you can’t believe this inclusive view of feminism is possible, then I’m curious to know what other behaviors I engage in that would draw criticism or ridicule. The Belle Jar has already come up with a pretty decent list, but I’m still looking for a handbook or something to clarify the following: Is it anti-feminist to tweeze my eyebrows? Wear my hair in a high, tight ponytail? Don pantyhose and pointy-toed flats? Gorge on holiday cookies? Birth a child? Go to the dentist? These intentional actions could be considered forms of self-harm too—they’re at times uncomfortable, restrictive, or bad for our bodies, and some are done solely for aesthetic value. But do you know what seems much sillier than a feminist wearing heels? One who says that other women are less feminist because of how they dress.
I agree, whole-heartedly, that in the context of feminist discourse, asking if a feminist can wear high heels is a tired, trivial question. But rather than dismiss it in the moment with a witty one-liner or, better yet, just ignore it completely in favor of talking about something more meaningful, you dedicated an entire column to parsing what a feminist looks like—to you. Fortunately, many of us already know that feminists can look like a lot of different things.
But what about the people who don’t? By anointing yourself Dress Code Monitor of the entire movement, you give permission to non-feminists to continue to objectify women and to make value judgments based on a person’s attire. These ideas perpetuate the terrible myth that a woman can’t be intelligent or taken seriously (by either gender) if men find her attractive, that the way a woman dresses or behaves makes her responsible for her sexual assault, that we need not look farther than a woman’s ankles to determine her worth. This is irresponsible and dangerous, and it definitely isn’t feminism.
As far as respecting the human body is concerned, there is a pretty significant leap between, say, wearing heels and female genital mutilation (SFW, no photos)—a type of self-harm on which our attention and concern might be better spent. And as someone who was previously married to a verbally and emotionally abusive spouse, let me be very clear in assuring you that there is absolutely no—as in fucking zero—similarity between putting on high heels and regularly being devalued, manipulated, or intimidated by someone who claims to love you.
The most troubling part of your piece, though, comes in the moment that you narrow your definition so that “[f]eminism emphatically isn’t about making women feel comfortable about bad or harmful decisions or choices.” But what you’ve missed is that feminism is emphatically about no longer universally dictating what constitutes a “bad” or “harmful” decision for another woman.
In her book, Gender Communication Theories and Analyses, Charlotte Krolokke elaborates:
Third-wave feminism manifests itself in “grrl” rhetoric, which seeks to overcome the theoretical question of equity or difference and the political question of evolution or revolution, while it challenges the notion of “universal womanhood” and embraces ambiguity, diversity, and multiplicity in its transversal theory and politics.
This is the reason that it isn’t acceptable to revoke Alisa Valdes’ feminist card because it took her awhile to recognize her abusive relationship, why it isn’t acceptable to slut-shame Miley Cyrus or Danica Patrick because of what they are or aren’t wearing, why it isn’t acceptable to make a blanket statement positing that wearing heels is a stupid decision, to offer a battle rally that “fear of seeming judgmental” shouldn’t stand in the way of others being, well, super judgmental about a person’s wardrobe.
Here’s the cool and actually not at all annoying thing about feminism that your piece left out: Women get to practice it wearing whatever the fuck we want. I can identify as a feminist while wearing a flannel button-down or stilettos. I can call myself a feminist with glittered curls or a purple mohawk, while listening to Tori Amos or Taylor Swift or Ke$ha. I can be a feminist with a baby on my hip or while getting cozy in the kitchen baking cupcakes for my feminist boyfriend, and I can do it without narrow, divisive views like yours boxing me in with the static vision of what a “real” feminist looks like.
Love ya like a sister, maybe,
Kirsten
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Kirsten Clodfelter holds an MFA from George Mason University. Her writing has been previously published in The Iowa Review, Brevity, and Narrative Magazine, among others. A Glimmer Train Honorable Mention and winner of the Dan Rudy Prize, her chapbook of war-impact stories, Casualties, was published this October by RopeWalk Press. Clodfelter teaches in Southern Indiana, where she lives with her partner and their awesome, hilarious daughter. KirstenClodfelter.com, @MommaofMimo
Comics are a brave medium through which to tell an adult story. While some of us know of Alan Moore’s Watchmen as comic literature and saw Chris Nolan turn Batman into Oscar bait, for plenty of people comic books still bring to mind stunted writers and readers who can’t handle real books.
Sex Criminals, written by Marvel veteran Matt Fraction and with art by Chip Zdarsky, is a real book. One of the realest and bravest books out this year. Sex Criminals addresses the shame, thrill, and occasional loneliness that come with sexual awakening via a bitingly clever metaphor that lends itself to fast-paced storytelling.
Lest readers think the title’s purely referential, allow me to educate. This is a comic where one character refers to his power as “Cumworld,” and there’s a panel illustrating “brimping,” undoubtedly the silliest sex act one will ever see. Make no mistake, Sex Criminals is about sex. Strange, silly, lonely, polarizing sex. Protagonists Jon and Suzie have both gone their whole lives feeling different. While it’s bad enough feeling like a weird teenager brimming with hormones, when Suzie and Jon independently discover masturbation as adolescents, they learn of an additional magic: the ability to stop time when they orgasm. Yes. Still reading? Hang on.
Their paths don’t cross until later in life, when they meet at a party and hook up. In that space after sex, where they’ve both always felt alone and strange, they find each other – joined in their time-stop continuum. (Remember “Cumworld?” Suzie isn’t a fan of the name either.) So, like any young, hot-blooded couple would, they use their newfound technique to commit crimes.
Sex Criminals isn’t porn, but it is full of sex. Apple has actually refused to sell it via the iOS ComiXology app due to its graphic content. (A somewhat hilarious choice, as there’s nothing in this book that isn’t in the lyrics of plenty of popular songs.) Criminals isn’t graphic novel literature, and it isn’t trying to be—but it’s far more than just a comic book. It’s both irreverent and deep; it stares in the face all of our weird societal feelings about sex and does something interesting with its tongue—maybe a raspberry or maybe a big French kiss. It’s unafraid and hilarious and real.
In issue 1, Suzie tearfully explains to readers that she uses the time stopped by her orgasm to dress and go downstairs, to say to her alcoholic mother all of the things she can’t say when time is moving normally, while Jon describes the loneliness of not understanding sexual desire for most of his young life. And then they bang and rob a bank. These people are real. Artist Chip Zdarsky never loses sight of that for a second, portraying them as beautiful and flawed, real and cartoony all at once. Every panel is stuffed full of visual jokes and commentary that encourages a laugh right when the awkward part might start. Just like the best sex.
Criminals is the story we all need—it isn’t afraid to address how we view sex workers in the same panel that it picks on the ludicrous names they sometimes choose. Is there a more perfect way to comment on we feel about sex? Perhaps not—as of early last week, Time Magazine named Matt Fraction’s Sex Criminals its number one graphic novel of the year.
Sex Criminals is a comic book for literary fiction fans, something that’s not always easy to find, and hopefully not the last of its kind.
Matt Fraction, Sex Criminals, Image Comics, 2013: $3.50 (print)/free-$2.99 (digital)
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Tini Howard lives and writes in Wilmington, NC because she got the idea life would be better there. So far, she’s not wrong. For more of her writing on comics, check out her blog or follow her @tinihoward.
THE BATHING SCENE FROM MARGUERITE DURAS’S THE LOVER
By Joan Prusky Glass
“Very early in my life it was too late.”
– M. Duras, The Lover
I read The Lover when I was fifteen.
The girl’s red doll lips became my own.
The power she had over
the Chinese man mine too.
His weakness became fuel
for a journey I was preparing for.
I needed him and despised him
before I knew why.
There is a scene in which
the man, on his knees,
bathes the girl’s slender body,
barely pubescent.
She looks down at him coolly,
braids hanging over her shoulders.
Immodest on purpose.
The lover draws a washcloth
across her hips tenderly,
with grief in his eyes.
Perhaps he is trying to wash
away the power he gave her.
She notices him loving her
the way you might notice
a penny tossed into the well
when your pockets
are filled to the brim.
(Today’s poem originally appeared in TRIVIA: Voices of Feminism and appears here today with permission from the poet.)
Joan Prusky Glass lives with her husband and three children in Derby, Connecticut. She is an educator and child advocate by profession. Her poetry has been published or is upcoming in Decades Review, TRIVIA: Voices of Feminism, Bone Parade, Milk Sugar, Harpweaver, Pyrokinection, Literary Mama, University of Albany’s Offcourse, The Rampallian, Visceral Uterus, Up the River, Haggard & Halloo, vis a tergo and Smith College Alumnae Quarterly among others.
Editor’s Note: What draws us into today’s piece, and what makes us resist against it? Where does the reader’s experience end and the poet’s begin? Where does the poet dissolve into the girl; where does the girl begin and her author end? Is today’s feature about power? Scandal? Sex? Love?
Today Joan Prusky Glass blurs the lines between perception and art, between experience and literature, between revulsion and beauty. The poet paints a watercolor of words, one vivid pigment bleeding into the next, so that we are both moved and unsteady. We are left not knowing where we stand; unsure of the medium, of the players, of ourselves.
As It Ought To Be 
