A Review of Rachael Lyon’s The Normal Heart and How It Works

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Lyon_The Normal Heart_Poetry

A Review of Rachael Lyon’s The Normal Heart and How It Works

By Kirsten Clodfelter

Beyond the page in human form, Rachael Lyon is petite and funny and kind. She speaks patiently and with near-constant laughter. She is bright, warm-spirited, the pet mother of a small, adorable pup named Thomas. She writes thoughtful letters—a better penpal than most of us. She is the sort of person who asks meaningful questions of both close friends and strangers, the sort of person who asks these questions and then really listens as she’s given the answers so that these answers can form the next questions.

Her generosity is so marked that she is the kind of person about whom we might apply the cliché but well-fitting platitude: A beautiful heart. And it is beautiful in the way Lyon’s warmth overflows from it, in the way being around her will put a person almost instantly at ease, but the truth is, since birth, Lyon’s beautiful heart was imperfect. “It’s not that it’s a bad heart,” she explains in “Transplant No. 2,” her tone edged with apology, her voice rushed to explain the defect as something that doesn’t have to define her, “The heart has a bad valve, not a bad valve but a small one. Too small.”

The same pragmatic earnestness that fills her letters and that make her a great conversationalist can be found in the poems of The Normal Heart and How It Works, her first chapbook. Her language, these fragmented moments she offers to the reader, are a type of gentle carrying: “It’s just that mothers sometimes think / of things the way they should be.” But there is a deep, unmistakable power in her writing too, an honesty that does not falter or even blink, and this we can credit to Lyon’s earnestness as well.

In “Moving,” Lyon recounts as she (or an imagined version of her) and her sister, as children, climb through the frame of an unfinished house that will soon be their new home, finally giving into temptation and breaking their “no-touch rule” to mark the territory as their own. And later, after the house in finished and the move is complete, Lyon admits as if in a conspiratorial whisper:

In the summer when I put my face

against the wall, next to the light

switch, I can smell bubbleyum

and sour jealously and something else:

a kind of craving for this place,

or for being pushed beyond it.

That is a craving nearly all of us know. Relating to Lyon comes quickly, easily, and this is true whether she’s discussing something as universal as moving or the complicated relationships between siblings or the specific, unique fears that belong to someone with a congenital heart defect. In deceptively light, conversational language, Lyon brings us right into her body to experience with her the physical and psychological effects of the too-small valve in her heart, the danger that has been hers to dismantle since birth, the “process of becoming a more perfect self,” as she writes in the collection’s introduction.

Five beautiful and haunting poems interspersed throughout this slim book, each titled “Transplant,” thread together her work as skillfully and carefully as the surgeon’s stitch. Just over a year ago, a cardiovascular team at Mayo Clinic fixed Lyon’s leaking tricuspid valve and nursed her back to health after open-heart surgery. Nine months later, she successfully ran her first 5K, with a heart that no longer “beats faster, beats faster longer than other hearts.” But even in light of this transformation, the writing in Lyon’s 2010 collection is no less urgent, no less terrifying. As we read, we are right there with her, nodding in agreement when she tells us in “The Trouble with Glass”:

My fears are numerous.

Rotund and pushing

from my chest:

ribs are cagey

sometimes they let the bad stuff through[.]

Because no matter how perfect or imperfect our hearts, we too have fears, and, like Lyon’s, they are numerous.

Rachael Lyon, The Normal Heart and How It Works, White Eagle Coffee Store Press, 2010: $5

***

Kirsten Clodfelter holds an MFA from George Mason University. She has contributed writing to The Iowa Review, Brevity, Narrative Magazine, Green Mountains Review, and The Good Men Project, 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 writes and lives in Southern Indiana with her partner and their awesome, hilarious daughter. KirstenClodfelter.com, @MommaofMimo

The Final Bakesale

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The Final Bakesale

by

Sonya Huber 

Al Gore did not invent global warming or PowerPoint (I don’t think). He did make a movie about global warming using PowerPoint. And some say it was dull. I was so shaken by it that I immediately started surfing Al Gore’s Internet to buy gadgets with solar panels. I bought a shitty one that was supposed to act as a USB charger for my phone but then I left it out in the rain and it broke. I bought a lamp from IKEA that has a solar charger, but it didn’t really charge through a window, so I had to bring it outside to charge it, and when I tried to use it to read by, its little light bulb was horribly dim, and the light source was probably equally disappointing to the child in Africa who was supposed to get a similar lamp as a result of my purchase. Now the lamp lives on a bookshelf in my basement, its prehensile neck curled around its body in loneliness. I did other stuff and got an energy audit and donate money and stuff. But I did not stop global warming and neither did Al Gore. It is still here, droning on, quietly wanting to kill us, and our demise will be narrated by Al Gore’s droning voice.

The fact that global warming as an idea is all mathy and graphy and incomprehensibly bleak prompted scientist-filmmaker Randy Olsen to declare the crisis “boring” and a PR disaster, illustrated with “all the same shots of “melting glaciers, polar bears, carbon emissions.” Olsen doesn’t mince words in an interview with Spiegel Online: he calls science blogs posting articles about the minutia of climate change “boredom so putrefied and crystallized it’s in an unadulterated form that could make even a robot want to commit suicide.” I know my science- and journalist and science-journalist friends will leap out of their seats and off of their balance balls and treadmill desks in anger at that quote and also say that this is exactly what makes their jobs interesting and important: bridging that gap and preventing the robots from killing themselves on crystallized boredom. Actually, that is Olsen’s point, too.

Olsen’s idea is that Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, should have told a story, such as the fascinating question of why the world was able to address—and kind of solve—the problem with the ozone hole (yay, us!) but hasn’t done that for global warming.

At first I wanted to hate on this guy, but he’s right. Sort of. And provocative–despite the fact that I love An Inconvenient Truth so much that I bought my own copy to have as a personal talisman to shade myself during the apocalypse, and despite the fact that I give money to anything that Al Gore tells me to in order to throw pennies at said approaching apocalypse.

But, to quibble (which is my only survival skill), Olsen also puts too much on the scientists and science-communicators, and I think he’s missing a bigger point, which is that we (humans in our high-school ways) will go out of our way to look at GIFs of kittens in wrapping paper and give our brains a rest from the thought of mass extinction. It’s not the message that’s boring as much as the fact that we, people, the problem, are boredom-averse and kitten-GIF-prone.

So, without further ado, here are reasons why Mass Death Really Is and Will Be Boring Big Time and why if we’re going to confront boredom, we have to first admit our boredom and take it apart into its component parts, some of which we will recycle and the rest we will use to build solar panels.

1. Death limits one’s social life.

I have never died, so I don’t know whether it would be boring or not. There is the dramatic final moment, the struggle for breath, but really—there’s not much to look forward to. And the lead-up to it can be excruciating and scary, I am told. And I imagine our collective deaths might be very boring, especially with sputtering cable as the brown-outs disrupt our service and our programs. Pain can certainly be boring, and starvation (as one example) has to offer both the opportunity for putting everything in perspective but also takes the cake (sorry) for sheer repetitiveness.

2. No flowers at the funeral. This is a huge problem. If huge swathes of us die together, we each miss out on something we have secretly fantasized about since our parents grounded us for the first time: the idea of everyone being sorry for everything at our lavish or tastefully simple memorial service. We don’t get our playlist and slideshow and moment in the sun if everybody’s crowding the stage. It’s enough to make one feel meaningless, which is BORING. Truly!

3. Zoos will suck, because of all the species extinctions and such.

4. Thinking about all the time I have wasted on “important and painstaking tasks” that an apocalypse such as ours is BORING.

As one example, I have told my son to brush his teeth 5 times every morning, every day, since he was a toddler. In and of itself this was boring, as are many parenting tasks, but they’re made mostly bearable because they seem to be an investment in a developing human who will one day become an adult and invent a new cloud-seeding device that will bring rain when we are all parched and dying. But if he’s out on the edge of some highway scavenging roadkill, his commitment to teeth brushing is only going to be a hindrance that makes him squeamish about his new life on the edge of subsistence. (He’ll be alone because I’ll be dead. I’m fragile—I’ll go quick).

5. Less intellectual stimulation and no “future” to plan for unless I am dreaming of coming back as a cockroach.

I like to read, and reading is interesting. I am a personal essayist, so I get off on esoteric distinctions about the positioning of a narrator in a narrative. I have all this expertise that will suddenly be useless. So that’s a bummer. My main form of intellectual entertainment: gone. Instead we’ll all be living in a world like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Well, some of us will be. I’ll be one of those people who will get eaten right away. That’s who you kill first: the personal essayists. But then again, maybe if I find Randy Olsen, he’d hook me up, because he says that the story of the big Bake-Sale has to be told in a way that’s personal so that people can get it, using “the narrative instinct.” Okay, Randy, this is my audition to be on your team. If I can’t get on Randy’s, I want to be with Bear Grylls.

6. It is a universally acknowledged truth that nobody likes to fuck up.

Global warming feels like a big fuck-up because it is. I didn’t start the fire, as Billy Joel annoyingly sings, but here I am every day shoveling fuel onto it. Like the Germans alive during Hitler’s reign, we could be wracking our brains with ways to self-immolate and do something drastic to put our bodies in front of the tracks or in traffic or whatever it might take (even Al Gore doesn’t seem to know), but I don’t see many of us lighting up in that way. So there’s the horrible but vague responsibility thing, which leads to a curdling regret in the stomach. I have to say that curdling regret is the least sexy emotion known to mankind. Let’s think about Jennifer Lawrence instead. By the way, if you are beset with this stomach curdling, as I am, please buy Mary Pipher’s book The Green Boat because it is like a temporary antacid and makes you less want to give up.

7. Kids dying: right. That’s not boring, that’s excruciating, but we call it boring because it lives near excruciating in the “Shit, No!” center of our brain. For God’s sake, I was driving behind a pediatric transport ambulance yesterday on the highway and I started to cry. The ambulance was decorated with images of fingerpaint handprints. Put a knife in my eye. And inside was one North American kid who had health insurance and who might have had a broken collarbone or something. But the big Fish Fry would involve lots of kids. White kids, privileged kids who have massive Lego collections, including my son. Just think of the waste of all that money spent purely on Legos. I should have spent all that money on buying a plot of land for subsistence farming (when I couldn’t even raise a head of broccoli in my pathetic two-foot garden). I really should have developed a completely different skill set. And I didn’t. I fucked up. (Back to # 6.)

8. This Story is so Boring Because It Has Happened Before! I Already Saw This One!

Here’s the messed up obviousness: kids die all over the place, every day, of preventable diseases like malaria and dysentery caused by contaminated water. That is also “boring,” by which we mean: Holy Fuck. What the hell can fix that? My twenty bucks, really? Then how come it keeps happening? How much money do you need to fix that forever? Couldn’t you just tax us all and prevent that from ever happening again? Oh there’s all kinds of geopolitical issues involved including the IMF and debt to the World Bank and … naaarrrgggghhhh. Where is Bono? Bono is the closest thing we have to Bat Man. Can’t he just fix this?

Boring is the idea that the same shit keeps happening. Yes, as always, through the recorded history of human existence since colonialism, the brown people near the Equator and on islands and shorelines with smaller capital reserves and fewer opportunities to invest in infrastructure will get it in the teeth.

It’s boring when the sequel is just the same as the first 100 volumes.

9. Uneasy is Boring. Super-uneasy vagueness lives right near the “Shit, No!” brain-center.

Boring is the idea that the authority figures promising security and telling us to sock our pennies away might be wrong: instead of skimming our money into retirement accounts, we should invest in the rest of the world, in a post-currency place where hydroponics and water filters and swamp coolers will ensure some small measure of survival for us and others. But… is that right? I don’t trust the stock market but I don’t know what to do about it. I couldn’t even make a gingerbread house last night out of graham crackers with my kid. And really, I also really don’t even know what I’m teaching next semester or how to get my son to read more. So Super-Uneasy is pushed to the background by Daily-Uneasy. It’s only when I am done with grading that I even really think about the big GW (not the other GW, who is happily making an oil painting as you read this).

10. There are no aliens. If there were aliens with green bile and nefarious shiny outfits to fight, we’d be all over this shit like Will Smith. There would be web-cams and guns and t-shirts and boobs and kitten GIFs and cake and everything good.

And in the conclusion I am supposed to make the Final Countdown less boring, but really, it’s a yawn. I’d much rather watch something else.

***

Sonya Huber is an assistant professor of creative writing at Fairfield University and a faculty member in the low-residency MFA program at Fairfield. Her work has appeared in literary journals including Sonora Review, Creative Nonfiction, Crab Orchard Review, Fourth Genre, Topic, Passages North, Main Street Rag, Literary Mama, Kaleidoscope, Hotel Amerika, and Sports Literate, among others; in anthologies including Learning to Glow (University of Arizona Press), Young Wives’ Tales  (Seal Press), Bare Your Soul (Seal Press), Reading for the Maternally Inclined: The Best of Literary Mama (Seal Press), Mama Ph.D. (Rutgers University Press), and Campus, Inc. (Prometheus Books); in periodicals including The Washington Post Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Psychology Today, In These Times, Sojourner, and Earth Island Journal. More information available at http://www.sonyahuber.com.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: FRANCESCA BELL

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By Francesca Bell:

I LONG TO HOLD THE POETRY EDITOR’S PENIS IN MY HAND

and tell him personally,
I’m sorry, but I’m going
to have to pass on this.
Though your piece
held my attention through
the first few screenings,
I don’t feel it is a good fit
for me at this time.
Please know it received
my careful consideration.
I thank you for allowing
me to have a look,
and I wish you
the very best of luck
placing it elsewhere.


(Today’s poem originally appeared in Rattle and appears here today with permission from the poet.)

Francesca Bell’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in many journals, including burntdistrict, North American Review, River Styx, Poetry Northwest, Crab Creek Review, and Tar River Poetry. She has been nominated six times for the Pushcart Prize. Her full-length manuscript was a finalist in the Poetry Foundation’s 2012 Emily Dickinson First Book Award competition and a semi-finalist for the 2012 Philip Levine Poetry Prize.

Editor’s Note: Ha! That is really all that need be said regarding today’s poem. Ha! But I will say a bit more. That today’s poem is dedicated to all of my poet and writer friends, to everyone who has ever braved the submission process and the rejection inherent within it. We all thank you, Francesca Bell, for turning our collective suffering on its head and for giving us a way to laugh about it. I, for one, will never look at a rejection letter the same way again.

Want to read more by and about Francesca Bell?
Francesca Bell’s Official Website
phantom limb
River Styx
Women’s Voices for Change
Spark Wheel Press

A Review of Patrick Lawler’s Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds

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Patrick Lawler Rescuers of Skydivers

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.

Patrick Lawler, Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds. University of Alabama Press, 2012: $15.95.

***

Jennifer Dane Clements received her MFA in creative writing from George Mason University, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language & Art. She has been published in WordRiot 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 for ink&coda. She lives with her husband in Washington, DC.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: FRANK MATAGRANO

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AUDITING THE HEART
By Frank Matagrano

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.”

Want to read more by and about Frank Matagrano?
Black Lawrence Press National Poetry Month Spotlight 2012
Black Lawrence Press National Poetry Month Spotlight 2011
From East to West
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Gawker is Defending Snark and It’s Such a Good Feeling To Explain Why They Are Wrong

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Mr. Rogers

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 & Julia be greeted with anything but love…? “Swan Lake” is essential to the classical canon, so Black Swan must be taken seriously… .

When we detach ourselves from the logic of smarm, it becomes possible instead to read Julie & Julia as a chilling portrait of sociopathy, and Black Swan as 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.

***

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?

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Credit: Timothy Krause www.flickr.com/photos/timothykrause
Credit: Timothy Krause
http://www.flickr.com/photos/timothykrause

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.

A Review of Kathryn Levy’s Reports

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Kathryn Levy Reports Poems

A Review of Kathryn Levy’s Reports

by Susan Hankla

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 Poetry Northwest, 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.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: KRISTIN GEORGE BAGDANOV

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Kristin-George-Bagdanov

WE DISSOLVE SEPARATELY
By Kristin George Bagdanov

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.

Want to read more by and about Kristin George Bagdanov?
Kristin George Bagdanov’s Official Website
32poems
Flyway Journal
Rattle
Buy We Are Mostly Water from Finishing Line Press

Guy Davenport: A Tribute

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12-Stories

Guy Davenport: A Tribute

by

Vincent Czyz

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.