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+ Read the entire story at Smokelong Quarterly
+ Visit Casey Hannan’s site

An excerpt from Justin Sirois’ Falcons on the Floor appeared in Issue 13 of Dark Sky Magazine. A brief yet exciting blip of fine writing. In those few pages, he beautifully described a woman in an abaya riding on a rickety tractor toward two Iraqi young men, one of whom was severely dehydrated. I did not know anything about the novel as a whole, but the excerpt read like a short story. It was focused and intriguing and I would have been satisfied with just that. Now, having read the novel, I am relieved that I did not settle for just the excerpt. It was but a hint at the wonderful flavors that would prove to be a very satisfying dish.

At its core, Falcons tells the story of Khalil and Salim, two young Iraqi men who flee Fallujah on the eve of the first siege of the city, but the story unfolds through masterful language (provided in part by the book’s collaborator, Iraqi refugee, Haneen Alshujairy), revealing a multi-layered story of perspective, friendship, and loss.

I hesitate to call this a brilliant first novel. It is a brilliant novel. Sirois demonstrates a succinct mastery of active language that manages to strike a lyrical cadence. The prose is poetry at times.

What’s down there?

The black water says nothing.

Mute leviathans – stripped of pigment and devoid of conscience. The croon hungry, kindles as knives. And the river knows we’re here too. Sons of the river and sons of Baghdad, we’re here, and I know the drops leaking out of our armpits and eyelids were once molecules of the river. It smells us as we float, knowing our bodies belong to its ancient body. It won’t hesitate to swallow us whole.

At times the dialogue and action move so fluidly and with such grace that it feels like he is retelling a personal experience, or like he stumbled upon such a story, which just happened to take place on the eve of the sieges.

There are three ways to approach this book – though, if you choose to keep a singular view, you will limit yourself and miss out on a well-crafted story. You can take it as a war story (a neutral approach to a war story) that demonstrates the emotional and friendly ties that carry on despite the apparent violence. You could also separate the themes of friendship, love, and loss entirely from the sieges and you would still feel Sirois crafting a solid plot while pulling strings inside you. I say that the best way, the third way, to approach this book is to combine the two and let the intended story unfold. Don’t limit Sirois’ ability.

It would have been easy to take a story focused on the eve of the first sieges of Fallujah and construct from it a soapbox of sorts and stand on top of it and scream. But Sirois handles the story with delicate, yet seasoned hands and lets it live in the moment.

One interesting aspect of the book is the change in perspectives. The book opens with the story of an unidentified character telling of pining love and teenage awkwardness. The story is brief and leaves you, at first, unsure about its place in the rest of book. This becomes increasingly apparent as the proceeding pages tell the story of Khalil and Salim. However, the perspective shifts again from third-person omniscient to first-person as the book moves to the “Selected Word documents of Salim Abid.” The book then returns to the third-person omniscient before ending on the perspective of a U.S. soldier, perhaps the same character from the book’s opening chapter.

All in all, such points of view give Sirois principal command of the story. He exists silently as creator, carefully guiding your imagination through layers of internal struggle for each character and how these struggles unite them. He captures the vulnerable youth and fragility of pining love, the strength of friendship, and the way all can ultimately be lost.

In his “Introit,” Thomas Lynch writes, “If the English master, Auden, was correct, and ‘art is what we do to break bread with the dead,’ then the Irish master, Heaney, was likewise correct when he suggests that ‘rhyme and meter are the table manners.’”

I’m sure Lynch fully understood the truth in these quotes as they relate to The Sin-eater: A Breviary, but these words perfectly set you up for Argyle and his hunger for iniquities. In the book’s twenty-four poems, Lynch not only breaks bread with the dead, he guzzles their beer. This may seem an irreverent gesture, for Lynch only half listened to Heaney’s words. These poems do not rhyme and are written in what Lynch himself calls an “imprecise pentameter.” Lynch seems to have forgotten his table manners, and rightfully so. However, the language, the overall layout of the book, is “suited to the brief meditations and reliance on numbers and counts that were part of the churchy rubrics.”

Among its religious and existential themes, The Sin-eater explores the palimpsestic nature of sin. It is the irreverent tale of Argyle, a “wounded pilgrim” who “by force of hunger”

had his holy orders and his mission.
He had the extreme unction of his daily bread

who travels through Ireland performing his rites, feeding on the sins of the deceased (figuratively speaking, the rite consists of a loaf of bread and a bowl of beer that the sin-eater must ingest in order for the decedent’s sins to be absolved), and collecting a nominal fee. However, to say that Lynch simply tells a story through the book’s twenty-four lined poems would be to barely see them at face value.

Argyle’s situation is complicated. How does one cope with eating the sins of others, the sins of strangers? He hates the legalism and the arbitrary powers the priests exhibit, yet he depends on the people’s religious inclinations and superstitions.

In the self-titled first poem, we are introduced to the ritual, to the character of Argyle and his place, or lack thereof, among the people of the parishes he visits:

Argyle eased the warm loaf right and left
and downed swift gulps of beer and venial sin
then lit into the bread now leavened with
the corpse’s cardinal mischiefs, then he said
“Six pence, I’m sorry.” And the widow paid him.

Then, in “Argyle’s Eucharist,” we see further into the rite and are led to believe that the supposed ritual has relieved the deceased’s soul of damnation:

Perdition due the recent decedent
thus averted by Argyle’s hunger,
the unencumbered soul makes safe to God,
the decomposing dead get buried under
earth and stone. The sin-eater belches, wipes his gob.

Throughout the book we see that this is not merely a profession, but a means of sustenance. In the first poem, “The Sin-eater,” he contemplates

a bellyful tonight is what he thought,
please God, and breakfast in the morning.

There are times when Argyle enjoys his meals. There are times when he struggles not to fling himself from the cliffs he walks along. Upon reading the poems, you understand what Lynch means when he says “Argyle comes by his irreverence honestly.” He is swithering. He is “grudging and grateful, faithful and doubtful, broken and beatified – caught between a mirage and an apocalypse.”

Lynch, who is also a funeral director in Milford, Michigan, is a sort of blasphemous romantic with Wordsworthian affection for nature and Bryant’s morbid proclivities. He takes a classical and yet modern approach to these poems both in language and with the application of medieval religious rites.

It is important to trudge through the book’s “Introit,” which is full of Lynch’s religious family tree, but it reveals his approach to the overtly ecclesiastical ideas and practices about which he writes.

I was surprised and impressed to discover that a Christian press published this book, as many references are unquestioningly irreverent. Perhaps it’s the prodigal in me, but I have a soft spot for irreverence.

Despite its obvious religious influence (again, and unfortunately, reading the “Introit” is key to fully understanding this), The Sin-eater: A Breviary is not just a book for the religious reader or the prodigal, it is a tale of the filth of the human soul, it is the human condition, it is recompense. It is feasting on the world, then purging it over a cliff or on a bed of human bones or expelling it from your bowels. One of the book’s last poems, “His Purgations,” shows just such a scenario:

Argyle shat himself and, truth be told,
but for the mess of it, the purging was
no bad thing for the body corporal.
Would that the soul were so thoroughly cleansed,
by squatting and grunting supplications.
Would that purgatories and damnations
could be so quickly doused and recompensed,
null and voided in the name of mercy.

The proceeding lines of the above poem to tell us that when Argyle stopped to wash

…his body’s immersion
in the tide was not unlike a christening:

Throughout the poems Argyle finds his solace not only in nature, but in the blasphemous deed. In the book’s final poem he adopts his donkey, Recompense, as his “paraclete” – a fascinating word choice and ultimate resolution to the book for two reasons. First, “paraclete” is the name of the book’s publisher. Second, “paraclete” in Christian theology is the term given to the Holy Spirit as counselor and friend.

This book comes with no shortage of side smirks. Lynch crafts a story of transgression and forgiveness, but, in the end, the true beauty lies in the ambiguity of who has committed the transgression and who has been forgiven. And, personally, I gladly forgive Argyle for his lacking tables manners, and applaud Lynch for hosting such a deliciously irreverent feast.

An earlier me would have read poems that referenced micro-shorts and text messages and immediately written them off. That earlier me would have lost out. The speaker in Lily Ladewig’s debut poetry collection The Silhouettes won’t let me pigeonhole her. She refuses to be predictable. These poems are fashion previews, but they are also history lessons. They are sometimes yoga meditations, and they are sometimes adventures in free diving. They are often French. And while they usually show us the silhouette, they always show us the body.

Poems are often about what isn’t included. And The Silhouettes is a collection of the unfinished line. The series of “Shadowbox” poems spread throughout the book play with space and punctuation. Part of this play is to imply line breaks, but it also plays, as many of her poems do, with suggestion. Just as we guess with silhouettes, we find ourselves finishing the thoughts in lines like, “If I forget to pack enough books//and my lacy underthings” and “To be someone’s cup of tea/or a flight of stairs.”

No matter what context, these are poems about the body. About a body. A body that’s aware of itself and over-aware of itself. A body that is sometimes surprised by itself. That is not to say these aren’t poems of the mind and heart. These are poems of an entire bleeding person. A speaker who is aware of her body when she is moving through the world, when she is in love and when she isn’t. Ladewig writes, “Like if nobody/looks at my naked body then I will never/be truly naked again.” Nobody takes on a new meaning, and we also begin to wonder, “Then what do these/reflections mean?” When she writes, “Do you know/how many people have told me/that I have a lovely figure?” we remember the gloom a person can have living inside a body, any body.

Lily Ladewig’s poems serve as a good reminder. We often mistake the surface for the entire person. We often forget that our minds own bodies. We often mistake a silhouette for an empty outline.

Order The Silhouettes here.
Read more of Lily here.

Order your copy of Ark Codex as a pay-what-you-want PDF or a $40 full color book.

And check out an excerpt we published in DSM 15.

Brandi Wells can do things other writers can’t get away with. This was discussed, in some respects here, but the premise of that particular discussion might have not been overly singular.

Please Don’t Be Upset is Wells debut out this year with Tiny Hardcore. The introductory story, “Instructional,” originally ran in a web edition in PANK. The story is sort of a ‘how to rape a kind-of willing girl’ guide, and it sets a clear tone for the language and humor that is evidenced throughout the book.

Pull my skirt up roughly (because, really, doesn’t it have to be a skirt? It’d be hard to rape someone in jeans).

Pull your cock out –

But isn’t that awkward? Do you pull it out with one hand and hold me down with the other? Maybe you lean hard against me so I can’t get away.

Much of this collection is written in second person, and the narrator often seems sarcastically unsure.

In “A Dozen Notes to Ruben” (c’mon Wells, next time be pretentious and call it ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Boyfriend’) Wells writes:

I have seen you eat a piece of your sock, dig in your ear with your glasses and then sniff your glasses, scratch your butt, pick your nose, belch, fall down, and piss on my bedroom floor and I still love you. Please never tell me if you see me do these things.

Here lies Wells’ true talent — the trait which lets her reach topics where others cannot stray to — a sort of calm, uninhibited honesty.

Take for instance this bit of near sex from “Claim”:

We didn’t have sex, but would reach into each others’ pants. I wrapped my fingers around his cock and held it. He cupped my pussy in one hand. We fell asleep that way and with our foreheads pressed against each other. The warmest parts of our bodies, touching.

When at her best Wells reminds me of Amy Hempel’s “The Most Girl Part of You” (which is apparently being turned into amovie, kinda). The best stories in Please Don’t be Upset are saturated with quirk and vulnerability.

Consider “Sock Addiction,” the story of a would-be girlfriend, who accompanies ‘Joe’ to a department store and “aids” his endeavor to fill all of that store’s socks with cum.

We make the rounds twice a week and rotate stores, so it doesn’t look suspicious. And I start wearing tights, so pulling up my skirt won’t be so revealing, but he convinces me to take them off too. So I stand in the sock section, tights dangling in my hand, while he’s smack, smack, smack. I worry someone will hear him, so sometimes I pretend we’re having a conversation.

“We should probably try to grab lunch early,” I say.

“Maybe we can see a movie,” I add.

This relationship peaks before it crashes:

I start dressing up for our trips to the department stores. I buy lace underwear, thongs at first and then the crotch-less sort. I work out so my thighs will be toned and my ass will be firm. He appreciates it. I can tell because he fills almost twice as many socks. He holds my hand afterwards and I help him return the socks to their display rack.

But ultimately, due to the nature of the relationship, the courtship has to fail:

But after a few months Joe seems less interested. He doesn’t ask me to hike up my skirt and when I do anyway, he doesn’t look. He just jacks off into the socks. He doesn’t say a word. I help him put the socks up and he holds my hand loosely for a few seconds before he lets it go. And after a few more weeks, he quits calling me to go with him. I follow him and stand an aisle over and peek at him through the racks. He jacks off into a sock while rubbing another across his chest. I think he sees me, but he doesn’t say anything and we don’t make eye contact.

Wells is at her best when she works in first or second person. I was not blown away by her third-person offerings (though I’m a little suspect of the third person sometimes, because if anything is fragile enough to be shattered by the existence of a single ‘I’ then it is perhaps a gimmick best left unexplored((and I’m not entirely certain I believe that at all))).

“Contortionist Ballerina,” which is written third person,  didn’t seem to fit in the book — but it originally appeared in Mid-American Review, and I think writers have to watch out for that. I think there is a tendency when putting together a collection to include stories that have appeared in ‘higher tier’ magazines because there is a thought that its presence in the collection will further legitimize the collection. I have absolutely no way of knowing if this was Wells intention, but “Contortionist Ballerina” seemed to fall a bit flat, seemed a bit lost.

Still, most of this collection had me gleeful, God damn it. I liked the fuck out of it. Here’s a last scene from “A Conversation with My Obligation” just to make you smile one more time:

“Do you think you could lie on the table?”

My obligation climbs up onto the table, but at the last minute I have to hold it down. I pin it with my knees and hold its arms behind its head with one hand and cut down its belly with the other.

“There’s no glitter,” I say.

My obligation laughs. Inside my obligation is an identical obligation, eating a pickle.

“I like pickles,” that obligation says.

I got three more Tiny Hardcore texts which I’ll be reviewing in the coming days. I was supposed to have one up each day this week, but then life came along, raped me in the ass while I was wearing a skirt.

I’m gonna go check Facebook.

____________________

Brian Oliu’s So You Know It’s Me originally ran “on the Tuscaloosa Craigslist Missed Connection board from September until November of 2010” and I envy folks blessed enough to have read them in their original incarnation, oblivious to the conceit they were built around, and filled with the assumption that they are entirely sincere, rather than just artistically sincere. It must have been beautifully voyeuristic to read the well-pitched cadences, the miniscule details. You would certainly assume the narrator mad. Acid rattled. Something. You’d check back in. You’d see patterns emerge. You couldn’t know who it was.

I don’t know if Oliu got any responses, but I hope he did.

In 23 posts, Oliu give us an eerie glimpse into the mind of a lonely man. It is always a man’s mind he shows us; each post is: M4W. Oddly the posts are numbered: 1,3,5,7,9,11 .  .  .

I never understood why.

I’m not sure exactly what to call these kinds of books: these books built around structural conceits. Last week I reviewed I Am A Productive Entrepeneur, which functions similarly. Each section, chapter, segment working around a structural premise. In Svalina’s book, each section was a discussion of a business endeavor. With Oliu what we get is each segment functioning as a Craigslist Missed Connection.

Here is a Missed Connection from Austin, TX that I pulled offline just today:

Okay, first you catch my eye on the bus (search for previous post: “Freckled Cutie”). Then you match and trump my wit (and so charm me) at checkout by saying you break the rules of grammar. Plus not just the freckles, but eyes that gleam with smarts and soulfulness, and such a smile. We’re both rebels, live across the street from each other. Let’s be buds, hang out, defy grammar, plot rebellion, break some rules, and have fun, plus confirm my suspicion that we may be kindred souls. You’ll find me good company and a good friend to know.

These things are actually pretty awesome, and I can see how Oliu got the idea. There’s a kind of poetry to these posts. They have a kind of hauntingly humiliating ring to them.

Here’s part of my favorite piece in this book:

Here is a list of everything that will be gone: the stadium where I saw you, the frozen yogurt shop where I saw you, the gym where I saw you, the bookstore where I saw you, the store where I saw you, the store where I saw you, the intersection where I saw you, the classroom where I saw you, the shopping center where I saw you, the parking deck where I saw you, the party you never came to, the church where I saw you. Where will that leave us? If you want to find me while we are drowning amidst the droning, I will be there thinking about home.

This piece is my favorite because it helps to congeal the collection, gives the whole a gear that traditional Missed Connections can’t get to.

When you read a real Missed Connection, your heart beats oddly. Your mind sputters to create the author, the person missed. Here, with that element subtracted, the nervousness erased, because there’s no sense of voyeur, your mind looks for other creases, other bits of mottled fiber in the story, something greater to pull the parts together, create tension, create panic.

The language throughout is great, and it’s a sweet single-sitting read, but it’s not until a little over half way through that you really get a good sense of tension, curiosity. That being said, I think it’s perfectly timed. At the moment you wonder, “What the fuck is going on,” Oliu steps up with an answer, and the piece becomes a great meditation on loneliness and obsessive compulsive behaviors.

Aside from this, So You Know It’s Me is a sort of love song for Tuscaloosa. I’ve never been, so I couldn’t get all the references, but what emerges is sort of a creeps’ guide to common places you’ll see girls who won’t talk to you in Tuscaloosa — but in the best possible way.

This was the first Tiny Hardcore Press book I’ve read, but I’ve got one more for each day of this week, and I’m pretty stoked to tear into all of them. If the rest are as good as this, my week’s gonna fucking rock.

____________________

I’ve had Derek McCormack’s The Show that Smells lurking on my shelves for years. It’s a selection from Dennis Cooper’s “Little House on the Bowery” series. I can’t heavily recommend it, but it’s interesting.

The dubious deal with this text is it presents itself as a vampire movie, and there are too many characters and too many tricks.

There’s great energy to the prose, some great tongue-in-cheek gaffes and some interesting experimentation with representative symbols.

It’s extremely minimal. The whole thing takes place in a mirror maze. In an area the size of (what felt like) a two-car garage.

Here’s how it opens:

Jimmie Rodgers.

Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers.

Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers.

Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers.

Jimmie Rodgers in a Mirror Maze.

Whenever a character is introduced into this book/movie/play thing, they appear thusly. There are some interesting uses of this technique, as when a vampire in bat form emerges:

V.

Carrie Rodgers. V.

Carrie Rodgers. V. Carrie Rodgers.

V. Carrie Rodgers. V. Carrie Rodgers. V. Carrie Rodgers. V. Carrie Rodgers. V. Carrie Rodgers. V. Carrie Rodgers. V.

Carrie Rodgers and a bat and me in a Mirror Maze. The bat becomes Schiaperelli. Her blouse is batwinged. Becoming!

But at 108 pages, with a word count probably shy of 17,000, there seemed to be a lot of such entrances. I didn’t count them, but there were at least twenty. And while the first instance of it was quite humorous, it became a thing to glaze over.

Actually, I glazed over quite a bit of this. It makes me feel bad. I’d go back, try again. There were probably too many characters. Too many super-minor people, completely undeveloped. That’s an MFA type word, right there. I feel like an ass typing it, but it’s really all you can say.

The book is told in the first person (?). I didn’t really understand who the narrator was until he raped a guy very late in the book.

The villain here is a woman vampire named Schiaparelli who make perfume, clothes and takes the soul of Carrie Rodgers in exchange for saving Jimmie Rodgers who has Tiberculosis and who is also a carnival singer—hillbilly music.

These are sequins:

(((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((

These are crystals:

*******************************************

These are bats:

VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV

Here’s a joke from the book:

What do you call a pervert vampire in makeup? Mascary!

The design on this book is remarkable. The premise is interesting. The prose is energetic and, for a spell, engaging, but for so slim a book it felt I had to labor through.

I don’t know much about Akashic or the project they had with Dennis Cooper. I’ve only read one Cooper book. Closer.Well. I think I started it, couldn’t get through. Made it ten or so pages in.

Maybe I’ll let that be tomorrow’s book.

This one – The Show that Smells (a reference to what carnies call animal shows) — felt too quirky, too bent on textural innovation.

At what point does innovation become laziness? I mean, this book is a Vampire Movie. That’s the claim. It’s got a cast of characters in the pre-pages. There’s a director names — Tod Browning. Browning, of course, died in 1962. I don’t know, maybe he was too dead to do a real solid job on this one. Like, maybe his death made it hard to give direction. Maybe, because he’s dead, he had a hard time knowing when to yell action, when to yell cut. This book came out in 2007. Most likely it came together in 2006. Forty four years of death could definitely dismantle one’s mechanics with celluloid storytelling.

Also, the last film Browning did was Miracles for Sale, in 1939. That was nearly 70 years before this feature, and on that gem, he had the pleasure of working with Robert Young and Florence Rice.

If you read the cast of characters he had for this outing, you begin to sympathize:

Jimmie Rodgers – Himself

Carrie Rodgers – Joan Crawford

The Reporter – Derek McCormack

The Carter Family – Themselves

Coco Chanel – Herself

Renfield – Lon Chaney

The Vogue Vampire – ?

That’s tough right there. Not only did he have the author portraying a character from his own script (can you imagine the arguments that ensued in terms of vision?), but the majority of his cast was representing themselves, and only masters such as John Malkovich can pull of that kind of artistry, and theses folks (Jimmie Rodgers specifically) are not John Malkovich. Sure, there’s Joan Crawford, but she had a good thirty years of dead on her too, and hadn’t made a public appearance since Mommie Dearest, so she had a lot riding on her for this one.

All that aside, I will be interested in seeing what McCormack cooks up next. There’s a lot of good things going for him. He’s got good presence.

____________________

I got I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur in the mail a few months ago, and I’ve picked it up a few times, restlessly leafed through it, and I initially found it enjoyable. I just finished reading it for real though, and it’s a great and odd little book.

It’s built around a systematic conceit, which, by now, has been highly discussed in various venues. Svalina tells us of 44 businesses his narrator has started and exactly what those businesses did.

The functions of these businesses are generally absurd/surreal/non-realistic. The most realistic of these businesses was a pencil store.

(Though I say that and simultaneously realize the most well known entrepreneur in recent history is Mark Zuckerberg, and Facebook isn’t much less surreal than the businesses proposed by Svalina’s narrator).

The crux of this work is the logic employed, the aphorisms introduced and the humor that builds throughout. The narrator stays nearly a stranger to us, except through his reactions. Not much action, most everything is driven through analyses, explanations.

Here are a few of Svalina’s great one liners:

[W]hat is the function of the human super-organism other than the extension of the few, lucky, brutal vanities?

What form of cannibalism is this urge toward equality?

[B]eauty was not the result but the mechanism.

Without a middle, we would never be able to perceive that which could not exist.

What a perfect commodity is mystery!

The descriptions of the many companies’ different clienteles also proved wonderfully entertaining.

Here’s who bought “the opposite of blinders:”

Our first customer, fabulously wealthy adventurers, men who’d flown hot air balloons through hurricanes & swallowed live scorpions by the dozen simply to impress their cabdrivers. . .

And here’s the discussion of the type of money wealthy patrons used to purchase stars:

What else do we make the money for? Not the money that feeds the children or the money that makes you feel good as you mail it to charity. That’s simply lifeblood. I mean the money that is like the ambient guts of the universe, suspended in the absolute zero of digital savings. This money does not want to be used. It wants to present with explosion & continue into the slavering ineptitude of timelessness.

But alongside the wit Svalina buries tragedies. At one point the narrator reveals:

[W]hat I can’t stop thinking about is how the more you need something the more you are unable to see it. I used to love my son so much. & now that he is dead I am not sure what it is that I love when I love him.

There is only one other mention of this son. I think I might have hoped for this relationship to be further revealed, but that is most likely due to my intense love of narrative and my semi-maudlin respect for emotion. I don’t mind crying.

Still, it’s puzzling why Svalina would allow his narrator to break form the few times he does without giving us closure in this regard. Perhaps, however, Svalina’s reluctance to do so is in good form. Is it better that I’m curious about the son, or would it be better for me to know specifics about him? Which approach would allow the son to continue to live in me? If I knew why he died, where he was when he died? The business started just before his death? The business started afterwards? What he smelled like? The color of his eyes?

Which way makes him more real to me?

Aside from this human intrusion, where the narrator discusses the boy, he tells us once of a sexual escapade, his father’s death, and once, while on vacation, when he almost died. There is also one or two odd divulgences that sort of got me head scratching.

When the narrator discusses the business “that made music that nobody knew was music” he claims “Before Brian Eno was born, everyone wanted to be Brian Eno. Now that Justin Taylor is about to be born, everyone wants to be Justin Taylor.” I have no idea what Justin Taylor he is talking about.

I think the greatness of this book is best represented in these two juxtaposed businesses.

I started this one business that employed generous looking, kind-hearted looking people to walk by you & smile warmly at the exact moment when all you can think about when you see a building is how tall it would have to be to ensure that the fall would kill you.

I started this one business that took photographs of hamburgers & gave them out to hungry people in war-torn, famine-struck parts of the world.

That kind of back and forth makes this slim beast a bright read.

____________________

At some point in time a friend of mine, who I haven’t spoken to in person for nearly a decade, gave me a copy of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur and told me it was amazing. I think was twenty three. I picked up the book about a dozen times in the span of a year, but I couldn’t enter it correctly. There is a blatant allusion to Guy de Maupassant’s “The Piece of String” in the introductory scene, and it enraged me. I picked up the book, read a few pages of the syrupy prose, set it down as if hassled to have held it. I shelved it. It stayed shelved. For years.

The first time I heard Fugazi I fell in love. The first time I heard Elliott Smith, the same. The first time I saw My Name is Nobody, The Princess Bride. The first time I read Burroughs’ Junky, I was smitten. The first time I read “By the road to the contagious hospital / under the surge of the blue / mottled clouds driven from the / northeast—a cold wind.” I nearly shit my pants with joy.

I’ve noticed I have two modes when exposed to new art: intense, wild, beautiful infatuation or extreme distaste, hatred that the thing exists.

Rarely do I allow something to exist without my loving or hating it.

But the strangest thing. . .

About three years ago (or seven or fifteen, I have a two-year-old daughter and since her birth, life is hard to keep compartmentalized) I picked The Voyeur back up. I don’t know what spell encouraged me to do so. I saw it’s blue binding perched on the shelf. It seemed to need me to hold it, and I obliged.

I’ve read the book only once, but I now know it to be miraculous. It’s an odd semi-Faulknerian telling of a murder mystery in a small town. The central suspect is a stranger. A man who has picked a bit of string from the ground. If you know the Maupassant story, you assume the tale will end in the stranger’s wrongful accusation of theft and subsequent death with grief. That’s not how The Voyeur ends. This, along with the prose, which is hallucinatory good, make the book genius. The allusion, which immediately soured my opinion of the text, became the fulcrum that the grandiosity of the story was hoisted against.

I was wrong. I so often am.

There are other books out there which I’ve had the same fate with. Most recently, I picked up The Confederacy of Dunces after giving it a few paltry attempts, and I think it might be the funniest book I’ve ever read.

There are also books out there that I currently can’t stand, but I’m afraid to form opinions of. I’ve tried Infinite Jest a handful of times and think it’s garbage. . . but is it? I mean, will it always be? To me?

This uncertainty of my initial response makes me less than willing to write many reviews (I’m also highly passive aggressive, and I’m always putting off my own self-imposed deadlines just to prove to myself that I’m not the kind of fucker that would allow me to give myself orders: it’s beyond the last visible dog).

I’ve only written one semi-negative review. I reviewed Magdalena Zurawski’s The Bruise for American Book Review, and while I concluded the review by saying the book was award worthy (it was the Ronald Sukenick Prize Winner), I said that much of the book was boring. There was an internet stink over it.

Weird thing is, if I read that book now, I would like it more than I did then. But, by reviewing it, I constructed my only allowable opinion. I have to hold dear to that opinion forever, or so I’m told.

Truthfully, I don’t like reviews. I’m a bigger fan of questions than answers. The whole premise of a review is: what did you think of it? Necessarily there must be, at some point, at least a shadow of a thesis. The whole thing seems very five paragraphs long. And while I understand the necessity of it, and even love when my own writing gets reviewed, and have been wooed to books by good reviewers, I’m not a big fan of actually reviewing.

That being said, I’ve given myself a ridiculous assignment: during the month of February, in the year 2012, I will read a book every weekday and write a kind of review of them.

My mission in this is two-fold: 1) It give me a great excuse to read a lot; 2) I’m hoping it teaches me to better train my initial-response reflex. Of course, I’m not certain that any of this will work.

I will also, most likely, revisit a few books to discuss my initial and latter opinions of the texts.

We’ll see how it goes.

Howdy, February.

Occasionally people who edit magazines or edit anything will complain about writers who still put an extra space between sentences like this.  The writers were once told to do it and they kept doing it for years.  And years.   And years.         Years.

But there’s a really simple way to change all the doubles to singles in MS Word. All you do is:

1. Go to “Replace…” under “Edit.”

2. In the “Find:” field, enter two spaces.

3. In the “Replace:” field, enter one space.

4. It will go through your doc and get rid of all the extras. Unless the person you are editing is really zealous and included some triple spaces. In that case, just run it again one more time.

Boom. Maybe lots of people know this trick, but I discovered it just by fooling around and I find myself using it all the time.

Rust Belt Bindery of Moorehead, MN has just produced a limited edition, illustrated chapbook of DSM 14 contributor Blake Kimzey’s story “Up and Away,” a story from the same series as his excellent “A Family Among Us.”

The story is accompanied by three original paintings, all inspired by the story. It is a first edition of 75 and is being bound at Rust Belt. Each copy is an original work of art, meticulously hand-bound, and costs $14 (including shipping).

Matthew Vollmer’s essay “epitaph 45″ appears in Issue 15 of the magazine. Matthew sat down to answer a handful of questions about the essay and the meaning of orangutans pissing in their own mouths.

Who died?

On one level, a version of myself. On another level, nobody. Yet. The epitaph could be read as one penned for the future occasion of my passing. But that sounds pretentious. Which is why I wrote these in third person. I needed distance. I needed not to say “I” or “my.”

Who do you imagine wrote the epitaph?

A recording angel.

I’m intrigued by epitaphs. What made you decide to write these, and only in one long sentence?

I started writing epitaphs sometime last spring. I can’t even remember why or where the idea came from. But I was immediately drawn to some of the tensions between conventional epitaphs (which are short and pithy and frequently attempt to describe, in elevated language, the best version of the person who is now dead) and my own, which go on and on and focus on specific anecdotes or particular observations, and often catalogue the speaker’s anxieties, obsessions, and shortcomings.

To answer the second part of your question, it’s pretty simple: I’m a huge fan of long sentences. I enjoy reading a sentence that seems afraid of what will happen when it reaches a period. And, more often than not, a long sentence seems more capable of capturing the epic thought-stream that is human consciousness. (Not that we actually think in sentences. At least I don’t.) A long sentence, deployed properly (see the work of Jose Saramago and Thomas Bernhard), is an event–a comet made of language.

As I’ve pointed out, the conventional epitaph is usually compressed, and often not even a full sentence (after all, it has to fit on a tombstone), and so writing a long-winded epitaph — one that could be two to three to five pages long — is clearly absurd. And so, this defying of sense and convention, I think, ends up generating a certain amount of structural tension, which, I think, is essential. But it also poses unique challenges to me as a writer: make this all one thing, keep it connected, make it work. Which means I have to ask questions like: How do I begin the sentence? How do I sustain it? How can I employ (and avoid) repetition? How can I ensure that the rhythm of the piece maintains its integrity? And how the heck am I supposed to end this thing?

What is the deceased’s conflict with “… staring into screens watching fat guys lip synch to Moldavian songs and busty babes biting their lips and orangutans peeing into their own mouths?”

I guess there I’m trying to capture the absurdity of what it’s like to surf the internet — i.e., to own this super-powerful machine (one that would have been impossible to conceive of in my youth) that allows a person unlimited access to knowledge and information, but which the user, more often than not often pilots into the realms of utter superficiality and base humor. Also, this particular epitaph is, in part, an elegy for the deceased’s son’s youth. And the epiphany here, I guess, is that the speaker’s realizing that he’s probably spent more time with this machine than his own son, which then snowballs into a list of all the things he should have or could have been doing, had he been a more responsible father.

Also, I wrote this after having a realization of my own: that of what my son is most likely to remember about me, when he thinks of what I do for work. I imagine most people have memories of trying to get their parents’ attention. If I think about this, I remember my mom in the kitchen, saying, “Just a minute.” I remember my father stacking or cutting wood, or leaning over the head of one of his dental patients. So what will my son remember about his mother and me, two people who are both writers and educators? That we spent a LOT of time staring into our machines.

Is everybody in the 21st century neurotic and conflicted like the deceased?

Neurotic? Probably. Conflicted? I dunno. I think most people are too oppressed to feel all that conflicted. Feeling conflicted, now that I think about it, is probably some kind of luxury.

Glenn Blake’s Return Fire is set, like his first collection, Drowned Moon, along the rivers and bayous of east Texas, where families, legends, memories, and entire neighborhoods sink into the subsiding land and rising waters of natural and man-made disasters. “Who in his right mind would’ve settled here?” Bobby Dean thinks.

In “Return Fire,” Bobby Dean, a widower, exacts a precise revenge on one of two neighboring teenagers whose trigger-happy, sunset antics shatter his wife’s bird feeder and a bottle of mescal and kills one of neighbor-Gladys’s goats and set in motion events that do not end with the last paragraph or line of the story. The widower and sheriff, his dead wife’s brother, know who will come calling from across the river, and what that visit from “old man Budd” will mean. The widower is not only prepared for the worst — he welcomes it. “Everything has a way of working itself out,” Bobby Dean tells his brother-in-law. “In this life, we get what we deserve.”

In “Degüello,” the nameless narrator takes a ferryboat across a stygian East Texas channel to a neighborhood of the same name abandoned to the waters of subsidence, like the battleground where “the bodies lay. . . turning to skeletons which grazing cattle chewed for their salt,” like the 200 year old town New Washington that “slid into the bay. The ferry captain tells the narrator Degüello means “sweet revenge — something like that” for what Mexicans did at the Alamo, but now no one lives there any more, “no one in his right mind.” Given by the captain a last chance to return –”You won’t like what you find! . . . Do you know what’s waiting for you! Do you know what’s over there!”— the narrator says, “Home.”The reader senses the traveler going home again knows degüello means not only decapitation, but a last stand.

In “How Far Are We from the Water?”— in these compact and powerful stories, never very far — we find Ryne, in the middle of a divorce, at the end of a date with a nameless divorcee, when her ex-husband Mason returns to what is now her house. Ryne, in a gesture of quiet surprise and menace, refuses to leave.

In “Shooting Stars,” the narrator and his little sister climb out of her bedroom window late at night when “the quiet one” —the father, the ghost of their father? — comes scratching at her screen, shirtless, rifle in hand. On warm blacktop, under a night sky, “a winged thing, with a thousand eyes,” the sister looks for a star to shoot, with a gun that will make for her shooting stars, unaware “there is no fire,” that what they see is light from stars long dead, “like a memory of someone who has passed away.”

A story that begins with warm familial sentiment ends on a note of dread and sorrow. A poignant, comi-tragic story, “Thanksgiving” is told by Sherwood, “Woody,” who acts as a kind of kid stage manager for a family holiday farce. Between dealing with his slowwitted brother Squirt, his grandmother, his drunk mother —”When shes awake, THERES HELL TO PAY — and a perpetually enraged, knock-the kid-down father — “Gotdamn Thanksgiving,” he says — the house catches on fire, “the turkey looks like a burnt football” and is sent crashing through a window, and Squirt for his own safety is left in a river duck blind among the cattails, with “buzzards flying in circles above the bay.” Not even the fish in Sherwood’s aquarium escape the mayhem, one out of the water leaving a trail, “trying to get to my secret passage way, and if he got that far, he could escape.” But there is no escape. He tells Squirt, “Its a game. A mean game.” His father says, “YOU STAND YOUR GOTDAM GROUND. YOU TAKE WHATS COMING TO YOU,” a weird combination of battle cry and stoicism, as the father wallops the kid for his own incompetence.

In “The Old and the Lost,” perhaps the finest story in this collection, reminiscent of Peter Taylor, the narrator returns to East Texas in the aftermath of a hurricane to find a relative, only to discover a rest home without electricity deep in floodwaters. In a counterpoint memory, “fifty years later,” the narrator stands on the lawn of a house where “royalty. . . the king and queen of Sour Lake” lived with their two children, one who “wore braces on her teeth” and the other who wore “a brace on his leg.” One of them “disappeared into the Spanish Moss,” like some of the residents of the rest home, both reclaimed by the sinking land and rising water.

In “When the Gods Want to Punish You” — a comic masterpiece — fire does indeed return, but in a way that is as catastrophic as floods and hurricanes. There is a classical, stoic fatalism to Blake’s characters. There is no escape. If they don’t know it yet, they will. They accept it and wait for it, like Bobby Dean. They see it like we imagine Squirt does, as buzzards circling the sky. They get what’s worse than not getting what you wish for. They ask the gods for a catastrophe, and the gods return fire to the rivers and bayous with an apocalyptic power that sends the narrator of “When the Gods Want to Punish You” off a truck bed “higher and higher. . . until I can see flames on both horizons.” A variation of the phrase “stand your ground” is used in several stories, but it is a recurring motif in all of them. But standing that last ground is as futile as “shooting into the sun” and will likely get one killed as not. And if returning fire is a way of standing one’s ground, the ground itself is sinking into the rivers and bayous. In this life, you get what’s coming to you. But it is, after all, only death.

Richard Wilbur wrote, “Limitation makes for power; the strength of the genie comes from his being confined in the bottle.” The strength of these six stories lies in a similar gift of compression, Bobby Dean’s shattered bottle of mescal notwithstanding. Knowing what lies ahead, Bobby Dean pours another drink and waits.

***

George Williams is the author of Degenerate and Gardens of Earthly Delight.  His stories and essays have appeared in The Pushcart Prize, Boulevard, Gulf Coast, and The Hopkins Review, among others.  He is the recipient of a Michener Fellowship and a grant from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. He teaches at Savannah College of Art and Design and works as a consultant and writer for Corra Films.