Prose - Page 2

The Pugilist: A Boxing Column (#3)

I haven’t seen the TV show Watchmen (nor have I seen the movie, nor have I read the comics), so perhaps I ought not to comment on it, but while starting the background on this column, an advertisement for the show came up between Youtube videos. Two characters, both female, whose backstories I do not know, speak to each other while sitting inside a car. The older woman, speaking in a tone that suggests a lecture, says masks are worn to hide pain. Although the younger woman protests, she continues the lecture, stating that the wearer is driven by trauma, obsessed with rectifying injustice. Masks, if my extremely limited knowledge of Watchmen allows me to follow this premise, grant the wearer the ability to transform their experience of trauma into a quest for justice.

In short, to become a superhero.

Now I’ll admit, that’s a pretty good premise. It worked for The Lone Ranger, Spider-Man, and Batman (and apparently, Watchmen). But could it work in the real world for a championship boxer?

Deontay Wilder, the current WBC heavyweight champion, is slated to face Luis “King Kong” Ortiz later this month, and if history is any indicator, it is extremely likely Wilder will walk into the ring wearing a mask.

Wilder has been doing this for a couple of years now as part of his pre-fight ritual. They change from fight to fight, but his masks are always ornate, often gold or diamond-encrusted. Some are more intimidating than others—a black skull with spikes is a stand-out—and sometimes the masks are accompanied by matching regalia. For his mega-fight with Tyson Fury in 2018, Wilder incorporated a matching crown and a feathered cloak not unlike Natalie Portman’s climactic costume in Black Swan.

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Boxing is a simple sport, really. It is one of the few to require no ball, no stick, no net. The boxers stand alone, stripped bare to the waist, no teams or substitutions. The object of the sport, too, is simple: to lay low your opponent. This simplicity lends a timelessness to the sport; the paucity of excess feels honest and true. Boxing’s existential silhouette reveals to its audience a shape that is understood to be authentic.

Perhaps we unconsciously see the prize fighter as something apart, something before, intrinsic to our core humanity, necessary in a hunter-gatherer way, like DNA, primal building blocks of what it means to be humans clawing their way through the adversity of an angry earth. In the ring, he can punch and be punched without recrimination; we see the fighter as having sloughed off the shackles of “decent” society, free from the banal niceties and demands of civility—indeed, of civilization. (Wilder carries this transgression a step further: “I want a body on my record.”)

How do we reconcile the sport’s sense of innate authenticity with a heavyweight champion who walks into the ring wearing a mask?

Masks are not foreign to combat sports. They often play a role in the theatricality of professional wrestling. In Mexican professional wrestling, lucha libre, masks are ubiquitous. (Tyson Fury, heavyweight boxer and Wilder rival, recently wore a mask to his weigh-in while fighting on Mexican Independence Day.) Such masks are designed to evoke archetypal figures (heroes, gods, animals) with which the audience can identify the luchador. Masks, in this contexts, are about building character and narrative, about expanding and creating something larger than the man alone. The threat of being unmasked, of being revealed, is a constant threat in, and is sometimes delivered as a punishment to the defeated.

The fear of unmasking is a fear of having a secret identity revealed, but Deontay Wilder is certainly no secret identity. Indeed, he unmasks himself in the ring every time. When he walks out with his face covered, we do not need to ask who – we instinctually ask why. The mask is an engine of wonder, a catalyst for our curiosity. By drawing attention to identity (and its obfuscation), the mask actually forces us to consider the man in a more direct and sustained way. Insofar as we are comfortable accepting the notion that sometimes a lie can be used to reveal the truth, the consideration of identity is also a consideration of authenticity. The we ask of Wilder’s mask is how we develop an expanded conceptualization of the fighter, how we weave the man to into the epics of heroes, archetypes, and gods.

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“The ring is a place where you can release everything you have been going through,” Wilder says. Heroes, per Watchmen, are processing their trauma. The Lone Ranger’s fellow Texas Rangers had been ambushed and killed; Peter Parker lost his Uncle Ben; Bruce Wayne’s parents were murdered. As readers of the comic books, we know their origin stories, but the characters they interact with do not. Unaware of any motivating trauma, they can only judge the hero based on the actions taken in the quest for justice. So too with Wilder. Without attempting to dig too deeply into his own private life for signs of trauma (everyone, including athletes, deserve some measure of privacy after all), we can still delve into what his donning of the mask means with regards to his own quest, his reign as heavyweight champion.

We can see the scope of his vision coming into focus when he is speaking about Muhammad Ali or delivering a beat down to an online troll. We see another glimpse of Wilder’s quest in his slogan, “Til This Day.” When asked about it, he refers back to the four hundred years of oppression that African-Americans have faced, a trauma that continues “(un)til this day.” In setting his own hashtag/slogan in this context, he redefines the context of his championship into something larger than himself alone: his quest for the heavyweight strap is also his quest for justice. Connecting the violence in the ring to the violence experienced outside it facilitates elements of group therapy, a communal catharsis for the trauma of racist history.

“I am already transforming now and on the week of the fight it just takes hold, especially the day of the fight,” Wilder says. “I’m no longer myself . . .”

In this light, the persona a fighter wears is not entirely his own; he is always taking on whatever emotional freight the audience unloads upon him. Much like Batman, he becomes a symbol. If the mask helps Deontay Wilder bear this load, then more power to him. He is the one walking into that ring. He is the one taking those shots. His mask, for all its ring-walk theatricality, is not at odds with the authenticity on display in the ring. Wilder has said the mask gives him access to a side of himself otherwise inaccessible, a side necessary for the destruction and dominance needed. The symbolic dimension is necessary, or at least useful, for both the fighter and the viewer. The mask, like all metaphor, is a way of identifying this by way of that, a rhetoric of expanding, of unfolding, that offers the transformation necessary for the hero’s journey into the ring.

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People need dramatic examples, according to Bruce Wayne, to shake them out of apathy. When Deontay Wilder steps into the MGM Grand Garden Arena next week, what will he be wearing? And what will we make of it?


‘Style Is Everything’: Interview with Canadian Crime Master Dietrich Kalteis

This interview originally appeared in the print edition of Issue #13 of Into the Void.

Dietrich Kalteis is the award-winning author of Ride the Lightning (bronze medal, 2015 Independent Publisher Book Awards, Best Regional Fiction), The Deadbeat Club, Triggerfish, House of Blazes (silver medal, 2017 Independent Publisher Book Awards, Best Historical Fiction), Zero Avenue, Poughkeepsie Shuffle, and Call Down the Thunder. The Deadbeat Club has been translated into German, and fifty of his short stories have also been published internationally. He lives with his family on Canada’s West Coast. (Source: DietrichKalteis.com.)

Philip Elliott: Dietrich, you’re one of my favorite writers, and I’m thrilled and grateful for your time and answers to my questions. Reading Poughkeepsie Shuffle recently, I was struck by the level of detail recreating mid-1980s Toronto. Your earlier books are crime novels set in modern-day Vancouver, but your more recent books have veered towards being more historical crime fiction set elsewhere, such as 1906 San Francisco in House of Blazes. What brought about this evolution?

Dietrich Kalteis: Thank you, Philip, and thank you for the interview.

The idea for each story is simply to find the perfect location and time. I used to live in Toronto, and I wanted to capture the essence of a time gone by in Poughkeepsie Shuffle. It seemed a grittier, less gentrified city back then, and some of the places that are now gone just presented the right setting.

My earlier stories were set in modern-day Vancouver, as is the one I’m working on now. I also set Zero Avenue here, at the time of the punk rock scene during the late seventies. It just brought a level of attitude to the story, a perfect fit for my female protagonist, Frankie del Rey, bent on getting her music career off the ground at whatever the cost.

Aside from the familiarity of having lived in both major cities, Toronto and Vancouver also sit on the U.S. border and are both seaports, which allows all sorts of possibilities for crime fiction.

For House of Blazes, I was captured by the level of corruption in San Francisco just after the turn of the twentieth century, and of course, there was the great disaster itself. The story’s about a man being hunted amid the chaos and danger of the fire, which becomes a hunter in its own right, and added much to the story’s pace.

Call Down the Thunder is set in the dust bowl days in Kansas, some very tough times, as well as a very isolated setting, perfect for that story.

What’s different? In each historical novel, there’s been a lot more research required, but each time I delve into it, I turn up all these nuggets. In fact, there are usually too many to include—talk about killing your darlings. And there’s a lot of referencing and fact-checking to get every aspect right.

“Poughkeepsie Shuffle” by Dietrich Kalteis

PE: Your writing is often compared to Elmore Leonard’s, and with good reason. But I find that your style is distinctly your own. It’s extremely clean and very rhythmic with relentless forward motion. How important is voice to you?

DK: There’s something special about Elmore Leonard’s writing—his quirky characters, the situations they get into, his clever humor. He remains an inspiration, along with other past masters like George V. Higgins, James Crumley, Charles Willeford, as well as modern-day greats like Don Winslow, George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane, James Ellroy, and I could go on.

I’m an avid reader, and I think that’s key for any writer. When I started writing full-time, I had to first find my voice, and after experimenting with style and genre by writing short stories for a while, my voice eventually evolved. A writer’s voice and style is everything; it’s what makes his or her work unique.

PE: You have a keen interest in old photography, particularly shots with the qualities of film noir, and of course your writing is visual and cinematic, and in the noir tradition. Does photography play a role in your writing?

DK: I’m interested in photography as art, and I lean to the black-and-whites of talents like Bresson, Meyerowitz and Doisneau.

I do picture the scenes that I write about in finite detail. And I often refer to archived photos, particularly for the historical novels. They help to capture the mood and recreate a setting. Getting the smallest of details right helps to convince the reader.

PE: Being one of Canada’s great crime writers, do you think there is anything distinct about Canadian fiction that sets it apart from its U.S. counterparts?

DK: Canada’s about multiculturalism within a bilingual framework. Its cultural diversity is often reflected in its literature, with literary greats like Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler, Leonard Cohen, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, and many others who have elevated the quality of Canadian writing and brought it to the world stage.

It’s a larger country with a smaller population. And for Canada’s long line of talented crime and mystery authors—elevating Canadian crime fiction to the world stage—it means more places to hide the bodies, as well as offering some less-traveled and unique settings.

No matter what the genre, I’m looking forward to a lot more first-rate Canadian reading in 2019 and onward.

PE: Your novels contain many references to music and film. How influential are these mediums in your fiction?

DK: As with great books, I’m inspired by great films, both for their stories and the way they’re shot. I picture my chapters like movie scenes, and when I write, I listen to music that conveys the rhythm, mood and emotion of what I’m working on.

I look for subtleties, ways to express who the characters are—showing rather than telling—and references to music and films can often help with that, informing who the characters are. Of course, it depends on the story. In some, I’ve used little or no reference, while in others, like Zero Avenue, there’s a runaway train of musical reference.

PE: You have interviewed many crime writers for your Off the Cuff series on your blog. Can you tell us more about that?

DK: Off the Cuff started as a casual weekly discussion with other crime fiction writers, mostly discussing the craft and works in progress. It’s now morphed into more of a bi-weekly Q & A with all manner of writers talking about their latest or upcoming works. It’s fun putting it together, and it’s interesting to find out more about some of the authors I know and admire.

PE: You read at a Noir at the Bar in Vancouver recently. With the internet rapidly becoming our new reality, how important do you think readings are for indie writers today?

DK: I like to take part in public readings, and I do it fairly often. The Noir at the Bar events I organize here in Vancouver are a blast. This is our sixth year, and we’ve got a great regular crowd that turns up. It’s a real party.

Although there are numerous ways of making your presence known across the internet, I think it’s good practice for any writer to read at public events, and it’s a good way to get one’s work noticed, with the chance of signing a few books at the same time.

“Call Down the Thunder” by Dietrich Kalteis

PE: Your next book, out October 15, is Call Down the Thunder, a historical crime fiction novel set on a wilting Kansas farm in the late 1930s, concerning the married couple desperate to fend off the greedy bankers and keep their land, and desperate for rain. What’s new for you about this book?

DK: The protagonists are a simple, hard-working couple that get pushed too far, and that’s new for the kind of characters that usually inhabit my stories. It’s set against an isolated and unforgiving background, and when hard times get even harder, it’s their resolve and savvy that keeps them hanging on, determined to find a way through it, no matter what it takes.

PE: Finally, I have a two-part question for you, the first part purely because of my own need to know: 1) What’s your favorite Elmore Leonard novel? 2) Name three writers/books you’ve read recently that people should check out.

DK: Having read just about everything Elmore Leonard wrote, I’d have trouble picking ten favorites, let alone one. I love them all, from The Bounty Hunters published in 1953, right to Djibouti published fifty-seven years later. His easy style and sense of humor will keep me re-reading his stories for many years to come.

I just finished The Border by Don Winslow, the final of the trilogy that focuses on the war on drugs that started with The Power of the Dog in 2005, and continued with The Cartel in 2015. I’m a long-time Winslow fan. He’s just got this powerful voice and can really drive a story, and these are three books I would highly recommend.

Don Winslow’s Border Trilogy

I also recently read The Jealous Kind by James Lee Burke, released in 2016. It’s set in 1952 Houston, and although he’s another one of my favorite authors, I think this is Burke at his best.

Another one I just finished is Dirty Who? by Jerry Kennealy, released in 2018. Kennealy’s got a sharp style, sets a mean pace, and is just terrific at telling an original story.


Into the Void’s Best Microfiction 2020 Nominees

Congratulations and best of luck to our four nominees for Best Microfiction 2020! Best Microfiction is an anthology of the best stories of 400 words and under. The pieces inside pack punch and depth in their deceptively simple appearances. We love our nominated pieces, each showcasing the power of concise and carefully chosen prose. Read the pieces at the links below.

We’d also like to wish best of luck to the author of “(Pablo)”—3rd place winner of the 2018 Fiction Prize—Sophie Braxton, who is our nomination for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers which “recognizes twelve emerging writers each year for their debut short story published in a literary magazine or cultural website and aims to support the launch of their careers as fiction writers.”


The Pugilist: A Boxing Column (#2)

In her slim but necessary book On Boxing, Joyce Carol Oates—one of the world’s foremost fiction writers but also one of the foremost boxing writers—analyzes the sport. “Boxing” is an art, she writes, but “fighting” is the passion.

“Boxing” in quotation marks might appear confusing, but this term is used regularly by those in boxing circles. Boxing (no quotation marks) refers to the sport itself, but “boxing” refers to the athletic technique of the sport, and often, perhaps even more confusingly, it also refers to a specific style of boxing itself, a style that privileges that technique—fluid and evasive movement combined with crisp and accurate punching—rather than a flat-footed brawling style. Think punching rather than slugging. Think Apollo Creed rather than Clubber Lang. Muhammad Ali’s feet rather than Mike Tyson’s fists.

Vasiliy Lomachenko and his pair of Olympic ring tattoos

There may be no better current practitioner of boxing-in-quotation-marks than Vasiliy “Loma” Lomachenko, the thirty-one-year-old Ukrainian southpaw. As an amateur, he racked up an astounding record of 396-1-0 and won Olympic gold twice. Since turning pro in 2013, he has become a champion in three weight classes (featherweight, junior lightweight, and lightweight) in record time, and he is considered the pound-for-pound best fighter in the world by many.

“Superlatives don’t fully encapsulate the virtuosity of his movements,” writes Daniel Attias for The Fight City. His abilities are summed up in his nicknames. He goes by “Hi-Tech,” short for highly technical, but also “The Matrix,” as he appears to be able to read the source code of a fight, giving his movements a predictive quality, his intuition anticipating punches several steps ahead.

Often dismissed as merely cruel and savage, boxing can yet reach us as art reaches us; it transcends its medium and grants us access to some otherwise inaccessible emotional place within ourselves, a dim yet familiar province in which we can locate meaning. Loma is, in his own words, trying to bring something new to boxing, to become an art form inside the ring.

We see the artistry of Loma’s skills in his ability to seemingly box from multiple angles simultaneously, like a Cubist painting from Picasso or Braque. A beautiful example of this came in Loma’s fifth fight. Gamalier Rodriguez of Puerto Rico was making the fight rough and physical in a way that included shoulders, elbows, low blows and more than its share of tying up in the clinch. Rather that getting flustered, Loma responded by using this in-fighting to his advantage. In the fifth round, when Rodriguez grabbed hold of his left arm, Loma pivoted, leveraging his body to spin Rodriguez a full 360 degrees around. Then, in a blink-and-you-missed-it moment, Loma freed his left hand, delivering not one, but four punches—two left hooks, a right uppercut, and a final left hook—to rattle Rodriguez.

We see Loma’s boxing-as-art late in his fight against world champion Jose Pedraza. Pedraza’s longer reach had kept Loma at bay for much of the fight. Then in Round 11, more than thirty minutes into the fight, Loma slipped under a jab, appearing suddenly next to Pedraza’s body, unloading uppercuts and hooks with shocking accuracy, his arms and fists flying like the paint-strokes of Jackson Pollock. Loma punches with a practiceded calm, like Neo fighting Agent Smith in bullet-speed; his punches land with a clarity of motion and certainty of delivery that leaves Pedraza looking like a motionless collection of targets rather than a champion.

The elite-level abilities shown by Lomachenko have been described by Martin Hines in the Independent as simply “life affirming.”

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When Oates wrote about the distinction between “boxing” and “fighting,” she was making a wider point: without a KO, a fight does not fully deliver its catharsis to the audience. To Oates, a fight that ends with both men standing is less satisfying on a deep, unconscious level; it does not fully evoke the primal imagery of life and death. Loma’s most recent fight with Luke Campbell illustrates the point.

In Campbell, a fellow Olympic gold medalist, Loma found an opponent who drew his art to its limit, or at least to its current limit; two boxers-in-quotation-marks in a contest of technique and style that ended with both men still standing (the fight went to Lomachenko by unanimous decision).

The fight started with a tentative Lomachenko feeling out Campbell; as one of the commentators put it, Loma was downloading information. Campbell, competitive for those first few rounds, was rocked by some vicious body shots near the end of the fifth round. The word from Loma’s corner: Be methodical. Campbell was against the ropes in the seventh, and by the eleventh, Loma had worn the taller man down, and body shots followed by a right uppercut dropped Campbell, who managed to hang on and survive not only the round, but the fight itself, a testament not only to his will but to his chin.

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Yet for all its demonstration of technical brilliance and stylistic mastery, for all its boxing-in-quotation-marks, Lomachenko versus Campbell does prove correct Oates’ theory on the satisfaction of the KO. We saw some fistic artistry from Loma, and there is much to be appreciated in the finesse of a man so dominant in his field, yet truth be told, when the fight ended I found myself longing for the anachronistic figure of the warrior, of some mythopoetic time before weapons were invented (Oates again). Boxing, in its greatest moments, is more than only boxing-in-quotation-marks.

History has shown us that sometimes a great “boxer” needs to face a great “fighter” to draw the gladiator out from within the technician. Muhammad Ali had already shown himself to be a great boxer (“the greatest” by his own, and many others, reckoning), but his fights with Joe Frazier and especially George Foreman allowed him to transform and transcend the purely technical and approach a sort of mysticism of punishment in the ring. Sugar Ray Leonard, heir apparent to Ali, showed similar technical prowess at boxing, but needed brawlers and maulers Roberto “Hands of Stone” Duran and Thomas “Hitman” Hearns to force a barbaric yawp from that choir of angels. And last month’s unification fight between welterweights Errol Spence Jr and Shawn Porter showed us how great challenges create greater champions.

This is how the bruising sport gives contour and detail to man’s raw materials, providing the crucibles necessary to endow form to greatness. As iron sharpens iron, the Good Book says, so one man sharpens another. Boxing is, according to Thomas Boswell, a night out for the carnivore in us. Boxers risk their reputation, their mythos—but fighters also risk their physical bodies, their lives. In the ring, this dichotomy is bridged by body and blood. The gladiator and the artist become one. When we witness that new creation, that amalgamation of dance and destruction, a kind of transubstantiation happens: the ring becomes like an altar and we find beauty in its sacrifice of blood and sweat.

As witnesses, we undergo its catharsis without words, perhaps beyond or even before words. We stand as we stand before a great sculpture or painting, as silent, feeling animals, recoiling from the noise of an over-saturated post-modern consciousness, attempting always to access and unlock our own deeply-grained personal truths, whatever they may be, grasping and clawing at something greater and more beautiful than our selves, even if that grace is shaped by a leather glove.
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The Coarse Grind: Part 14

/
You grabbed my hand and we fell into it
like a daydream or a fever…

My friend died of complications due to drug use last April. I flew home to bury him even though I’d just wrapped an East Coast jaunt with Philadelphia’s Psalmships. I was back home in Texas when I found out, up to my elbows in the 10 pages of the CORE grant application. How many of these deaths have I had in my life, the seemingly senseless kind, since I graduated High School almost thirty years ago? Too many to count. My friend was dealing with some darkness I didn’t know about, in ways that anyone from my hometown is familiar with. It seemed like there was an overdose every year after graduating high school, but we’re all getting on. You’d think that dying of an overdose would be unlikely at this point in our lives. These kinds of tragedies should’ve sorted themselves by now, shouldn’t they? A self-inflicted death is shocking no matter when, I just thought we were over that, commissioned and engaged with our own lives, lives we built from out of the grips of small town America. He’s gone now and it’s tragic and we’re all to follow him down to dust but even if we make it, we’ll all be turning our chips in after 12 summers pass.

The parroting and bluster of outrage culture by news media and the consumer, and even the inane and droll posting and reporting from our own lives, fame worship, enthrallment with the ego above all, War, murder, the post plunder of post-industrial America, any and every self-realization and unkink of our personalities, our families, our husbands and wives and children we’re giving this world to—none of it will make a damn when the world temperature climbs. Yet we go on. I do. I get in my car every day, drive to the shop with my serving whites hung on the suicide handles of a 2009 Honda Element. I bartend corporates, serve the rich and deliver up to thirty lunches to Hill Country. The older I get the more I understand that it’s all in service to myself. I’ve less illusions about that than ever. I’m in it, this hulking machine lurching ever forward to the days when the oxygen in the very air we breathe will be at a premium. I’m working for the man and that man is me as giant masses of ice buckle at the seams in the warming winters and the sun burns on above us closer than it’s ever been before. I’m not sure what I’ll do with myself this summer or how I could ever live down doing six thousand miles to the southern tip of the Eastern Bloc and back last year. I know I’ll have to get my shit together, whatever that means, but it will no doubt involve capitalism and reprising my role as a wage earner and tax payer to the sinking Empire of America but don’t too wise—once it’s gone it won’t matter. If I’ve got any salt left I’ll take it back overseas, work just as hard but live well with the Dutch or as an English teacher in Vietnam, upping my blues harp playing and Yoga practice as 12 summers pass.

Morose, eh Good Reader? Cynicism is a copout and it’s all the rage. Between laziness and futility what’s the difference? If there’s fighting in the street and you get the call, will you answer? Would you have stood down the armed guard at Kent State? Take a firehose to the face, police dogs, tear gas—or would you do it their way? Would you knock on doors and canvas the dying towns in the too-hot spring? Will you organize and get on the horn and get heard? There may be no difference between cynicism and laziness except this—the cynic knows it’ll come to no end so he’s paralyzed. The lazy doesn’t care if it will but he’s just as immobile and anyway it won’t matter by the time 12 summers pass.

To further make this column egregiously odious and black I’ll bring it back to the only thing that really matters to me and that is myself. I’m paralyzed and I’ve got my reasons. My habits and disease, said cynicism, anger and worse—a futility that takes my wind and an insight slightly above the curve of the MAGA red hats and the other side. The other side used to be you and me but right and wrong were never really nailed down were they? As long as war isn’t murder and the suffering of another is not our own we’ll only be held to a dubious morality. The dubious morality of a country built on slavery is its own potent harbinger but the arrogance of consumption and terminal greed of the corporation are what will clip links from the food chain and make the whole world tumble, diaphanously down, which it will, bet—and not long after 12 summers pass. I’m caught somewhere between futile and useless. I spend inside or outside of 14% of my life with my neck bent to a screen and investing in a world that only exists in the mind. Social media engages my complicity while it sells my identity to any and every bidder. This is only one of the ways my life is fucked and the world is too, but I can change. That’s all I can do, as hard as it is—write daily, exercise and BE with them, really be with them, as exhausting as that is. We are all we have and our work, too. You and I share this time here, with this column, and to me that is everything. It puts a slant on the doom and tumult, it lets a little light get in for to see and to plan the next jaunt. I’ve got to get back out on the road and see you again my Friend—hold you in my arms, look in your eyes, tell you I love you and beg you not to die, please, at least not before 12 summers pass.

JIM TRAINER’S POEM OF THE WEEK

JIM TRAINER’S LATEST COLLECTION OF POETRY AND PROSE

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I’m Tired of Burying Tod Clifton: A Short Essay After the Christchurch Shooting

On Friday, March 15, 2019, forty-nine people were gunned down by a white supremacist in Christchurch, New Zealand. The shooter streamed the massacre live so that his compatriots could watch online. He published a manifesto before his rampage, a document full of ironic memes and callouts to an online echo chamber. This person killed forty-nine people in order to make a political statement; he used bullets and hatred to say . . . what? Violence has often been the calling card of white supremacy, almost as if its adherents know that their ideology wouldn’t stand up to muster on a debate stage or at the ballot box. When hatred is so blatantly put on display, when the dead are mocked and scorned in the hopes of furthering political aims, people disgusted by such terrorism often wonder if the political process should be discounted or ignored. When hatred flies from the barrel of a gun or out of the mouth of prominent world leaders, the narrator’s words in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man are brought into sharp focus: “And could politics ever be an expression of love?”

Chapters twenty-one through twenty-three of Invisible Man follow immediately after Tod Clifton’s murder at the hands of a police officer. In chapter twenty-one, the narrator organizes a funeral that turns into a parade, one that culminates in a brilliant and timely speech. As the narrator plans his event, he states that “it would be ruthless, but a ruthlessness in the interest of Brotherhood,” indicating to himself and to the reader that he understands politics in that moment. Using tragedy to further a political aim—in this case, to show Harlem that the Brotherhood had not abandoned her, that it would continue to work for her—is nothing new, but this is the first moment in the text that the narrator shows not only an aptitude for politics, but a desire for it. He gets to work, organizes the funeral, and marches with the demonstrators. When they all arrive at the burial place, they look to him.

What were they waiting to hear? Why had they come? For what reason that was different from that which had made the red-cheeked boy thrill at Clifton’s falling to the earth? What did they want and what could they do? Why hadn’t they come when they could have stopped it all?

He speaks for five pages, a searing monologue that speaks to Tod Clifton’s death. His audience is moved, touched deep by his words. He ends strong. “His name was Tod Clifton, he believed in Brotherhood, he aroused our hopes and he died.” With this speech, the narrator answers his own question about politics and love. It is clear by his words, his rhetoric, his passion in front of that crowd of Harlemites that he loved Clifton like a brother. It is clear that he is not just saddened by Clifton’s untimely death, but that he is angry that his brother was snatched away from the world because of the color of his skin. His love moves the crowd to action—“I was approached by a group of civil-liberties workers circulating a petition demanding the dismissal of the guilty policeman, and a block further on even the familiar woman street preacher was shouting about the slaughter of the innocents.” His expression of love became political.

The narrator’s speech could have been given after the shooting of Trayvon Martin. It could have been recited after Eric Garner was suffocated to death by police. It could have rang out after Tamir Rice was shot down in the street. This speech could have been spoken after Anders Breivik massacred seventy-seven people in Norway. It could have been given after Dylann Roof attacked a church in South Carolina, killing nine. This speech could be given this week, as forty-nine families bury their dead after another white supremacist went on another rampage. Hatred, it would seem, is more effective at silencing than love is at motivating.

God, I’m tired of burying Tod Clifton.

The narrator of Invisible Man has spent the totality of the novel trapped inside a system designed to keep him down. He was a slave of the boot-strap myth in the South and while at Bledsoe’s school. He was treated as less than human at his first job in the North. He was nothing more than a pawn to the Brotherhood, who rebuked him for his speech at Clifton’s funeral. But there, on that hill, mere feet from the cheap coffin that housed his friend, the narrator spoke truth to power. It is only after this speech, only after the Brotherhood’s condemnation, only after he disguises himself to avoid Ras the Exhorter-turned-Destroyer’s men, that the narrator is able to realize his freedom. “All boundaries down, freedom was not only the recognition of necessity, it was the recognition of possibility.” He is finally free to fight with all that he is.

I wish I could tell him that he would have won that fight.

Can politics ever be an expression of love? Better, can love ever be a political statement? The narrator’s speech at Clifton’s funeral, while fictional, is a resounding yes to both questions. Love can drive people to help others, to stand in solidarity against oppression, to fight when they have nothing left. Just as the narrator was in the twentieth century, we’re still facing white supremacy, but it’s breathing its last breaths. In desperation, it lashes out with hateful violence, rhetoric pulsing with angry animosity, and bullets in the hopes of silencing those that would stand against it. I, for one, will follow the narrator’s example as white supremacy rears its ugly, dying head once again. We’ve buried Tod Clifton before, too many times. This week we do it again. Let us respond, in these awful moments, with the narrator’s love.


‘On the Way’ Examines What It Means to Be Tethered to Someone Else

I’m really good at connecting ideas. In fact, it’s one of the few things I’m good at, drawing lines between disparate and competing thoughts, bridging distances and collapsing gaps that separate notions and objects. Unfortunately, this skill of connection has not translated to my interactions with other members of the human race. I find myself, more often than not, alienated from other people. My history of broken relationships—romantic and otherwise—bothers me; I feel that there is something wrong with me, some deficiency that keeps me from connecting with other human beings. This might be one of the reasons I couldn’t put Cyn Vargas’s collection, On the Way, down.

In this debut collection, Vargas manages to strip human connection down to its messy, infuriating, and ultimately beautiful core. With authentic prose, she straps relationships—familial, friendly, romantic, sexual—to chairs and shines on them a bright light, breaking each down with a calm, introspective interrogation until they reveal their secrets. Every story digs deep into what it means to be tethered to someone else in an honest, unrelenting way that will leave readers both squirming and desperately needing more.

The book opens with “Guate,” a story of a mother who is kidnapped in Guatemala and a daughter who refuses to believe or accept that she’s gone, and closes with “Fossils,” an examination of falling in love again after having already had your heart broken, running the gamut of human relationships in between. There’s “Next in Line,” about a DMV instructor who falls in love with a student to which he’s administering a driving test, and “Get It On,” which follows a man struggling to rediscover sexual desire for his now pregnant wife. It was impossible not to cry while reading “At This Moment,” a story of a woman who comes face to face with the father who raped her as a child at her grandmother’s funeral twenty years after the assault, and I will likely carry Grandma Helen’s astute observation found in “The Visit” with me for the rest of my life: “Things happen, dear, and not always in the way you expect. Usually never.” The way Vargas writes makes each story feel like it’s being told to the reader by a friend they haven’t seen in too long. Every character is constructed in such a way that you’ll swear they’re sitting next to you on the couch or chatting your ear off on your morning commute, divulging confidences and offering sage advice.

Cyn Vargas handles the questions surrounding human connection like only a true master of letters can: by not offering any concrete answers. Instead, she builds real lives out of language and invites readers to come and explore those lives with her. While I might consider myself awful at connecting with other people, On the Way shows that I am far from alone in this regard and that that’s okay because nobody knows how to connect perfectly with others.

Buy On the Way (Curbside Splendor Publishing, 2015) here.




The Coarse Grind: Part 13: The Burning Creed

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The past is the past and it’s here to stay . . .
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

Christmas Eve 1995 I slept in Cromwell Park. It was cold but I had a sleeping bag.  It was what it was. The 2-3 months that followed though, in the winter of my twentieth year, were touch and go man.  The roots of a deep-seated trauma I wouldn’t live down for over twenty years. Until yesterday. I was out, doing my corporate lunch gig when I got a text for a bartending position.  We went back and forth and eventually the offer was rescinded. That’s when I realized. Asking for $15 an hour isn’t a life or death situation, man. Everything’s gonna be alright. I’ve heard it said.  I’ve seen it believed. I got it then, from my head to my gut, and it was a game-changer. I made my last delivery and headed home, fortified with this revelation. You could even say I relaxed. It changed everything and put me at ease.  It ended a twenty-three year long panic attack that was my employment history. Employment, getting by and surviving had me scrapping and feral and anyway devoting precious bandwidth to work that didn’t even pay a living wage. I was working for the money and to support my Art but I was working so I wouldn’t end up outdoors. This isn’t to say I’m free now or that I won’t hate putting wherever I’m at with this column down, and heading back out on the road with 2 hot bags and an iPhone this morning.  It’s just that I’m relaxed now, imagine that, and I loosened my grip the tiniest bit, cleared some space in my brain and am better devoting it to the real work–which is getting words to page.

You’ve got to keep working.  Working and writing and publishing—and getting words to page. Write bad. Write good. Rhyme couplets for goddesses or detail your failing libido in blog form. But get words to page. Amass a body of work. Get words to page, rip it out the reel and throw it on the pile. Make that pile heavy, a stack of paper with words on the page so heavy it tips the scales and catapults you into the wild thin air of a creative life.  This body of work is also a living thing inside you at all times. It sits square in your brain when you’re sitting in a brown office and haggling with the company over dollars per hour. It’s a world and a refuge you’ll want to head back to, once you leave Babylon behind, get off the highway and pull in, take off your workshirt and get the world off your neck.  It’s that important, and more—it’s your why of life and that why will sear through any motherfucking how.  Ask Father Friedrich or Philip Levine.  Fyodor or Rollins, Fran Lebowitz or Patti Smith.  Invest yourself in the life and these luminaries will be in your company.  You’ll be standing on the shoulders of giants and it’s not just that your heart will roar so great and loud it’ll strike the world to reckoning with you and the peculiar fecund of your love but that your heart will be the world.  This has been it, for me Good Reader, the burning credo I’ve culled from the spells of witchy women who took me into their thrall and sway, from poets who yelled down the centuries at me while they delivered the U.S. mail or steered a city bus, from writers who stripped calf torsos for dollars and cents in the American Century—artists all who stood in front of their work so the firing squad would only take them out and leave their truth, bare and standing there, in the light of day and for the world to see.  

You’ve got to keep publishing.  Self-publishing or on their dime but you know where I stand.  Cut the pages by hand and glue the spine. Be like Justin Arnold and by hook or by crook manifest your work in book form.  Give it mass. Give it weight. Give it a shape you can hold in your hand. A book is indisputable proof that you have fulfilled your destiny.  The 5 collections I’ve published are hard proof. Every poem in each collection is a record and a document of me, sitting in front of my machine, doing the work, being the writer I always wanted to be—and getting words to page.  Those 5 collections are my why manifest. They’re not just the why of my life, they are why I’m a writer. Why when people ask what I do I tell them I write. I get words to page. I write the truth, mine, and no one else’s. But I don’t tell them that.  I tell them I’m a writer.  I’m a born poet and a punkrocker, a romantic with a bad attitude and a heart many sizes too big but I don’t say that . . . I just say I’m a writer. I get words to page but when they ask me I tell them I’m a writer. Unless they’re paying $15 an hour then I’ll be whoever they want me to be.

VOX POPULI VOX DEI.

JIM TRAINER’S POEM OF THE WEEK

JIM TRAINER’S LATEST COLLECTION OF POETRY AND PROSE



Lindsay Stern’s Debut Novel Explores the Successes and Failures of Communication

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While hiking recently, I noticed a sign that implored walkers to stay on the path, because “plants grow by the inch and die by the foot!” (exclamation point included.) I was amused by the felicity of this message as it applies to not only plants, but many things in life. Humans, in a sense, grow by inches, then die as a whole five- or six-feet. More subtly, the phrase also fits with relationships. There’s a certain mysterious element to how intimate connections developed over many years can disintegrate within moments, how one misstep can ruin a steady accumulation.

There are occasions of such near-relationship-disintegration in The Study of Animal Languages, Lindsay Stern’s debut novel, which deals dexterously with communication as it fails and succeeds in human and animal relationships.

The novel begins with a subtly comedic scene in a rest-stop bathroom (in the women’s room, of all places, since the men’s is out of order) where the speaker/main character, Ivan, resents the ramblings of his father-in-law, Frank. The dialogue is perfect, and Ivan and Frank are characterized efficiently. Frank, we quickly learn, has bipolar disorder and dislikes taking his medicine because it keeps him from feeling like himself. At the same time, though, he expresses frustration with the “gaps” he feels when off his medicine, or when he’s in “normality,” as he calls it, and struggles with the “ability to summon the cast of mind required to shop and chat and pay bills.” There’s irony—or perhaps synchrony—in the way he describes what happens when these “gaps” set in: he hears the voices of everyone around him, even in crowded places like Grand Central Station, where “voices untangled into words, hundreds of words, each one significant.” Already, we can see a disparity in the amount of listening Frank does compared to Ivan, as well as each character’s comprehension of what is heard.

At the same time, it’s impossible to know how much of what Frank says is actually comprehended, grounded in reality, and how much simply exists in his head. (This is a particularly salient question as the story progresses and Frank exhibits increasingly strange behaviors in manic episodes.) And as he flips from moments of clarity and fuzziness, Frank gets at one of the fundamental conflicts in this book, and one that is fundamentally conflicting in everyday life: the inability to truly understand others’ experiences of phenomena and feeling, and the imperfect way language attempts to create such an understanding.

Perhaps language will always fall short. Or, even more troubling, perhaps what does manage to be communicated isn’t meaningful to begin with. The latter idea is shown in Frank who sometimes uses words, but without communicating coherent thoughts or ideas. A more extreme representation of this disparity between words and meaning is represented by the birds that Prue, Frank’s daughter, studies. Prue is a successful ornithologist and researcher whose work focuses on—as the title suggests—the possibility of birds communicating intelligently, like humans. She gives a provocative lecture about her research on this topic, which shows that zebra finches can “discriminate between different configurations of the same units of sound,” as she tested by playing recordings of notes in various orders, like rearranging words in a sentence, to which the birds consistently responded differently. When being questioned, somewhat aggressively, by the audience after the lecture, Prue distinguishes between syntax—“the rules that govern vocal symbols”—and semantics—the meaning behind the vocal symbols. While her research so far indicates that bird communications employ syntax, she has yet to prove that there are semantics as well. However, she believes that there are semantics, which, to almost everyone else, sounds preposterous.

The lecture is considered outrageous and taken as apostasy for this logic and for the way Prue beleaguers her colleagues for being hypocritical and anthropocentric. The hypocrisy, she explains, is shown by scientists who accept research—such as Jane Goodall’s—that provides evidence for certain animals’ likeness to humans, while continuing to use other animals as test subjects in unethical ways.

The amount of tension which these ideas diffuse throughout the lecture hall is unprecedented and indicative of the fragile ego which surrounds academia and the “eggheads” who find themselves ensnared in it (as Frank calls them). Prue’s husband, Ivan, the speaker and primary character to whom I have not yet dedicated enough time in this discussion, is particularly affected by his ego, at times consciously, and at others, un-. Stern does a wonderful job of characterizing him, showing his less admirable qualities from the beginning of the book, as he spends time with Frank and considers the recent stress he and Prue have been experiencing in their marriage. He uses language as a tool for harm, telling Frank that Prue is very “touched” that he will be attending her lecture, but immediately admitting (only to himself) that his use of the word “touched” is “an accusation, neither intended nor deserved,” because Prue doesn’t actually want Frank to attend. He continues to act self-interestedly, shamelessly choosing when and when not to speak up for his wife in moments when she could use his help. At one point, she looks at him with a plea for help in steering away from an unpleasant conversation, and he smirks, thinking, “You dug your grave, now lie in it.” The book, then, is all the more interesting because the speaker’s moral fabric is not tightly woven, or at least, is held together by self-interest (for the majority of the story). After her lecture, when Ivan finally has the chance to express his horror for what Prue presented during it, she tells him, quite cleverly, that “your passive aggression is the bravest thing about you.”

At the same time that Ivan is passive aggressive and able to manipulate language, he is unable to accurately read other forms of communication, such as body language, which leads to misunderstandings and an inappropriate situation with a student. In some ways, by reading others’ behavior as sexual cues that aren’t actually sexual cues, he exhibits one form of what you might call (bare with me for being reductionist here) “animal” language, with sex taking priority over rationale. After all, sex is the only positive thing going for Ivan and his wife. There’s a funny moment when Ivan is teaching and struggling to get a response from students who stare at him “blankly, probably thinking of food or sex.” Sure, it’s not the most original thought—his idea that we are all just pleasure-seeking animals—but it’s funny in context of the book’s playfulness with the animal-human boundary.

Ivan himself plays with this boundary as he admits his own unhealthy relationship to food, which he binges semi-regularly. At first, I found this habit odd and unnecessary to the story, but now I see that it pokes fun at the difference between humans and animals and what both do for pleasure. Ivan confesses (for some reason, to us, the mysterious readers of his thoughts) that “while I’d never admit it, I prefer the feeling [of a binge] to sex. It is the closest I have felt to transcendence . . .”

The animal-human threshold, then, is not so impermeable, as we learn through such boundary-pushing moments and boundary-breaking moments, like during a climatic scene at at the aquarium that becomes an awful and awe-inspiring moment.

The book is full of such aw(e)ful moments. Ivan comes across as sharp and witty, thanks to Stern’s sharp, witty writing that creates a tone fitting for a philosophy professor. The conflict falls into place with the marriage of two intellectuals of distinctly different, yet tangentially related fields: epistemology and the cognitive world of birds and animals. By seeing the story through the eyes of one character, we have the opportunity to follow his logic and ways of perceiving each situation as it unfolds. We adopt his biases, blind spots, and denial of reality, like one adopts Elizabeth’s when reading Pride and Prejudice. I found myself most frustrated with the way Ivan failed to talk honestly with his wife throughout the duration of the conflict, how he remained in a mystified state about where they stood until they weren’t even standing anymore. From the first time he expressed marital doubts, I wanted to shake his shoulders and yell, just talk to her! But that, of course, is the point. Language is impossible to use when it’s most needed. And when it’s not needed—well. Perhaps that’ll be the subject of Stern’s next book.

Buy The Study of Animal Languages (Viking, 2019) here.



Announcing Our 2019 The Best Small Fictions Nominees

We’re thrilled to announce our 2019 The Best Small Fictions nominees as chosen by flash fiction editor Laura Halpin. Lauren S. Marcus was a winner of last year’s The Best Small Fictions for her story, “The Collector,” in Issue 5, so fingers crossed for this year! You can read the nominated pieces at the links below. Congratulations and best of luck to the following fantastic writers:

  1. Ruth Brandt – Shooting Waters – Issue 7
  2. Marrie Stone – How to Visit Your Father in a Nursing Home – Issue 8
  3. Julián Esteban Torres López – The Obituaries Editor – Issue 9
  4. Lisa Piazza – A Bird Knows What a Bird Is For – Issue 9
  5. Emer Lyons – Staring at the Wall – Issue 10