He stole my reading list.

Michael Massing’s article for the New York Review of Books, “Iraq: The Hidden Human Costs” not only stole my thesis punchline, but my reading list as well.  Massing gives Evan Wright and Nathan Fick fair shakes, but seems to be hellbent on the point of civillian casualties; regardless, his head is in the right place.  Most civilians are content shrugging off the costs of war with some nauseating platitude–”War is hell,” or worse, Jefferson’s “Tree of Liberty” bit.

Wright holds them, holds us, to the fire.  Massing promises subsequent articles exploring the “hidden human costs” incurred since the invasion.  Let’s hope his bile doesn’t get the better of him.

Where Fiction Dares, a New Novel of Modern Americana

I’m a seafood snob. I don’t order fish unless I’m close enough to the sea to smell the salt, or unless I’m near a reliable freshwater source. I go to school in Ohio.  Suffice to say, I skip the “Cajun-spiced Scrod” at the dining hall.

My holidays, however, are filled with Ahi tuna, seared, sesame-encrusted and settled on a bed of oriental noodles; little neck clams in a white wine sauce; blue crabs, fresh from the Chesapeake; Oysters on the half shell. Going to a Red Lobster on the Delaware shore would be like going to an Olive Garden in Italy.

And yet I’m intrigued by Stewart O’Nan’s latest novel, Last Night at the Lobster. According to a NYTBR article, O’Nan was inspired to write the novel by a newspaper article about a couple who went for some deep-frozen seafood at a Red Lobster in Connecticut and found the branch restaurant closed.

“That little article made me think it was this loss of a little world and I just started daydreaming about it,” said O’Nan in the NYTBR article.

The novel follows General Manager Manny DeLeon, as he sees his branch through its last day, from the mid-morning food prep to the emptying of the register. DeLeon tries to maintain some sense of dignity, even though a new Red Lobster is doubtlessly being built in a new strip mall in a new suburb somewhere, anywhere he isn’t. There are, according to NYTBR, “nuanced portraits” of tensions between workers, and a lament on DeLeon’s part for a spent affair with a waitress.

True Americana is something that authors constantly grasp at, and some, like Updike and Ford, achieve it spectacularly. I’m shocked that it took someone this long to recognize the loamy, fertile literary peat in places like Red Lobster, or Applebee’s, or any similar fast-food-plus restaurant. I worked at an Applebee’s in Ocean, New Jersey for a summer, and everything about the restaurant, from its customers to its employees, was beyond ridiculous. One of the servers had inch-long fake nails, purple weave and a shrill voice that summoned us hosts across the restaurant to report on any number of things: why we double-sat her, why we didn’t bus her table, if Alonzo’s (her boyfriend’s) baby’s momma had called. On her twenty-first birthday she got drunk off a single Long Island Iced Tea, fell of her bar stool and walked out the door to pick up her daughter from the babysitter’s.

One of the managers was a stalwart drunk and an indiscriminate leerer. He sulked around the dining room, asking how-is-your-meal-tonight with all the enthusiasm of a U.S. Census taker.

The “smoke area” in the back actually functioned as a make-out den for two of our guy servers.

Places like Applebee’s have eluded literature because they’re caricatures of themselves, completely devoid of sincerity or meaning. Even the most creative Post-Modernism couldn’t ennoble the Ocean branch.

In any event, I’m looking forward to seeing how O’Nan’s DeLeon handles his last day as general manager, seeing his ship to the bottom of Red Lobster’s hypothetical ocean, as the corporate goons offer cheery waves and a middling termination bonus. Meanwhile, all the servers chuck their aprons over their shoulders and walk next door to the Olive Garden.

At least they won’t have to fold napkins for the next day.

Richard Ford, the Coolest Old Guy Ever

What a nice time to be Richard Ford.

Having wrapped up his Frank Bascombe trilogy last year with the superb The Lay of the Land, he appears this holiday season as the guru behind The New Granta Book of the American Short Story. This is not, however, your daddy’s Best American ________: the selection of Ford, the choice of now, is crucially important.

In 1982, Granta published its famous “Dirty Realism” issue, in which Ford appeared alongside Raymond Carver and Tobais Wolf, laying claim to a new canon like conquering frat boys, laconically swirling bourbon in lowball glasses.

Ford, venerable by 1992, was invited by Granta to edit The Granta Book of the American Shorty Story. He underscored the 1982 issue with his selection: T.C. Boyle, Vonnegut, Cheever, Carver, Updike, Welty, Tan. The “American” short story was being discussed without Young Goodman Brown, or Bartleby; or, for that matter, diamonds big as the ritz, or white elephants.

The collection was criticized as being too white, too male, too fraternal, especially considering that two of the selected authors–Wolff and Carver–were also in the 1982 issue. Despite criticisms, the collection stood without faltering as evidence of a new force in American literature, one which understood the short story better than anyone since Hemingway; better, perhaps.

Without stretching too far for relevance, I think Granta’s new collection comes at a time when American literature needs such a statement: That, despite all the jargon, scare-slang and intellectual numbness of the Bush years, the American short story endures, and furthermore, triumphs. Ford chooses a new generation of writers to join the old ones: Alexi, Lahiri, Packer.

Of Lahiri, he chooses “A Temporary Matter,” the opener from Interpreter of Maladies. If any short story could possibly say This Is America Today, it’s “A Temporary Matter.” When you pick up The New Granta Book, make sure it’s the first one you read. It speaks to the importance of Ford’s new collection better than I could.

(Here’s a link to an article Ford wrote about the short story as a form.)

Crackberry Speak

Since my family really got “wired,” I’ve owned second-string cell phones, the ones that come free with the plan. After a long string of dependable, if not sometimes idiosyncratic, Kyocera models, Mom took pity and urged me to pick out “whatever cell phone I wanted.”

Like that certain cheerleader–a little melancholy to the smile, a little thickness to the build, a little sarcasm in the swish of the pom-pom–the LG Chocolate wasn’t the best, per say, but the most appealing. It slid open. It was white. It was smooth, and when I touched it, it responded with a spry, eager click. It took pictures. And in less than a year, I’d owned two, both dying from ailments so catastrophic and terminal that they could only be replaced.

After the latest aneurysm, I spoke the word “BlackBerry.” It was a dependable technology. It had earned its stripes in the DC-Metro area, and with a few generations’ distance from whatever hiccups plagued the first, I felt comfortable calling it a safe bet. Who knows? In a years I could have a middling job as a pup reporter with some middle-rung paper. It might come in handy.

Happy Birthday: The BlackBerry Pearl 8130, the newest, sharpest and sleekest of the Pearl “Smartphone” series. On paper, it shines: It can juggle up to 15 email accounts, access the internet, execute SMS, MMS and BlackBerry messages, take two-megapixel pictures, provide directions; along with the other standard amenities. Navigation is handled by a trackball.

In practice, it lives up to its pedigree. The idea behind the “Smartphone,” I think, is to combine the versatility and power of a PDA with the compactness and access ability of a cell phone. Example: yesterday, while waiting for a friend to squeeze through a battery of red halter-tops, I read Nicolai Ouroussoff’s architectural review of the new New York Times building. On my phone. Am I embarrassing myself, or is this still cool?

The BlackBerry is another issue entirely. Debuting humbly in 1999 as a pager, the device evolved along with the modern cell phone, always staying a few integers ahead of the curve–and ahead of most wallets. When the familiar color-screen QWERTY 7200 series hit the market at a relatively affordable price, young Potomacians and the Bridge-and-Tunnel crowd pounced. By 2004, the number of BlackBerry users had reached two million, having doubled within ten months.

Enter CrackBerry. A unique form of Stimulus Addiciton emerged as the cheery Smartphone vibrated every time an email, text message or call was recieved. Users started feeling phantom vibrations, reaching for emails where there were none. Inane, wandering letters from friends, timestamped somewhere between 8 and 9 a.m.–the commuter surge–came post scripted with “Sent from my Verizon Wireless Blackberry.”

Gaurenteed, you’ll never find a more vanilla, inoffensive spread of language than in a BlackBerry message. While AutoText allows lightning-fast dispatches, predicting words based on context and probability, it also discourages words it doesn’t know. Typing your way to most compound words is like hacking through half a mile of Vietnamese jungle with a dull machete. God forbid you want to spell something so exotic as “fuckhead,” or “shitbird.” Most proper names, too–though, oddly enough, most Jewish surnames slide out easily, as if they were invited. Thus, even the most spirited complaint is sanitized. Example:

“Some birdbrain burned the coffee this morning. Fucking retard.”

Turns into:

“Some idiot burned the coffee this morning. What a retard.”

Suitable for the dinnertable, but I didn’t mean idiot; I meant birdbrain. Styrofoam speech is the price of convenience, and when it’s a labor of frantic backspacing to shape le mot juste, most will choose the supermarket-brand word. Welcome to the commuter’s lexicon, the lazy locution. Smile like you don’t mean it–unless you’re ready to spell it out.

Margaret Atwood, Oracle

November 10: Peacoat weather, and the Kenyon Review Literary Festival is underway in Gambier, bringing small-time editors, authors, poets and eccentrics to our freshly leafless Ohio village. The centerpiece, of course, is Margaret Atwood, recipient of this year’s Literary Achievement award. While sycophants in Cleveland, Cincinatti and Columbus top off their cars with antifreeze, Mags slips into CMH on the beefy arm of David H. Lynn, Editor and Pontificus Maxiums, fresh from the previous night’s $1,000-a-plate gala in NYC.

As a Student Associate of the Review, I was invited to a cozy Q&A seminar that afternoon. A circle of chairs was set up in Weaver Cottage, with a rather imperious leather armchair reserved for Ms. Atwood. I came late, and settled into the only chair left–the one next to hers. As the room buzzed with tea-parlor chat, I wondered, perhaps stupidly, what she would look like in person. Probably shorter.

In fact, she was; and older, too. My earnest days under the tutelage of Paul Watkins taught me that author photos are always 15-20 years younger than the author actually is, but Mags, at 68, looks far more wizened than the pixie on the back of Oryx and Crake. She settled into her chair, exhaled, and smiled. “So,” she said, “I understand that you all have questions.”

After the inevitable cold-feet silence, an impetuous Associate pitched her question: What does Mags read while writing?

“I read things by accident,” she explained. She easily falls into old favorites, or anything at a bookstore that grabs here interest, really. Or research. Obviously. Magazines, too, at airports.

“Seldom:” she said, “Hello, Allure. Often: Discovery, Scientific American. Sometimes,” she admitted, with a smile that I can only describe as naughty, “Gentleman’s Quarterly.”

She began to unpack her fascination with scientific journalism, as she has done in many prior interviews. Unlike Ian McEwan, whose defense of scientific writing imagines the form as a medium of clarity for muddled times, Mags likes neat things; like, say, dragonflies genetically mutated to serve as surveillance devices.

“Soon,” she said, “We could all be the proverbial fly on the wall.”

Sometimes, she said, she reads National Geographic, because “They’re very good at digging up bones.”

While she doesn’t watch TV, she does “Surf the ‘net.”

“If I could recommend a particularly amusing YouTube video,” she said, with that pursed smile, “It would be ‘Introducing the Book.”

Her stillness amazes me. I’ve never seen such economy of movement in a human being before. There’s no wasted gesture, and every smile, narrowing of eyes, or change in posture is made with surreal deliberation, as if each were the product of half an hour’s thought. With this awe I swallowed and posed my question. I imagine it went something like this:

“Uhm. So, in a few of your novels–Oryx and Crake, The Handmaiden’s Tale–there’s a sense of alarm, Orwellian future-shock, and, ah, social imperative. They, um, look out as much as they, well, look in. Do you feel like the writer should pay as much attention to social issues as they do issues of, mm, story, or aesthetics?” Deep breath. Re-cross knees, tilt head. Chew on finger? Don’t chew on finger.

She arches an eyebrow, comma-shaped. Her eyes are a perfect, glacial blue, deep like pools of cold water.

“When you say ‘The Writer,’” she says, “Who do you mean?”

“Um.” I lunge for an answer. “You?”

She proceeded to dismantle my question: In addition, what did I mean by “should?” Should the writer do anything but what the writer does?

“Writing doesn’t start with a directive to yourself,” she said. “Nobody forces you to be a writer. And by the way,” she added with an almost imperceptible wink, “there’s no pension plan.”

Heuristic as her logic may have been, I couldn’t argue. I’m an English major, and empty phrases like “the writer” are pistols very close to my belt. What does she care about “the writer” as an empty, abstract concept?

I bow my head and smile. Humble pie.

“Are you all writing?” she asked the room, as if my question inspired some doubt as to whether or not we practiced the craft; or really, if we’d ever picked up a book at all. Nobody raised their hand. “Let me ask a different question: who here is not writing?”

Again, no hands. Plenty of polite smiles, though. I cringed still. She smiled sweetly, as if she had finally realized that this was not Kenyon College, but North Star Assisted Living, the old folks’ home up the road.

Next question, from a practically-minded English major: When she first started writing, how did she support herself financially? After some positing exposition, Mags eased into what is, more or less, the story of her career.

A small girl in Canada circa 1956, there were “no visible writers” in her vicinity.

“My idea of writers was that they lived in other places,” she said. “I had no idea that I would ever make any money out of it.”

Her first attempts at writing courted the ladies’ magazine market. That’s where the money was: cookie-cutter True Romance stories. Mags found them easy to write. They flew off the typewriter.

They were rejected to the last.

“As it turns out, I couldn’t use the vocabulary,” she said. “It seems to always build up to one sentence: And Then They Were One.”

Availed of this particular career path, she “decided to be a journalist.” It seemed proper. Her cousin agreed, telling her that she “would end up writing obituaries and ladies’ pages.”

University, then: she hated “logical positivism with a passion,” and perhaps in rebellion, determined to “to go France, live in a garret, get TB, and drink absinthe.” At work she ran her novel through her typewriter, unnoticed among the rows of other women seated at chattering typewriters, unaware that a bastard first novel was being born in their midst.

(Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky, Associate Editor of The Kenyon Review, slouches in a chair behind the students, his eyes sliding back and forth beneath half-lids, lizard-like. I wonder if he’s falling asleep.)

After the first novel was not a first novel, the First Novel emerged, was published, and was optioned for a movie.

“It doesn’t matter if the movie ever gets made,” she said. “You still get the money.”

She was whisked away to France to write the script, but instead haunting a garret apartment and drinking absinthe, she found herself in a modest mansion, uncorking bottles from Bordeaux and the Cote d’Or. Her co-writer, Tony Richardson–after the “Hungarian scriptwriter” who had his own, incompatible artistic agenda whose thesis could be summed up as “alienation”–looked “like a parrot.”

They lived in the house with an assisting entourage of artist and film types, hammering out a script for The Edible Woman. Inevitably, perhaps, things fell apart. A pretty “assistant” was stolen. A swan dive into the shallow end of the pool ended in blood. Maybe it was an excess of wine, a collective overflow of grape-acid; whatever it was, the movie was never made.

My money is on the assistant.

Regardless, The Edible Woman established Atwood as a writer to watch. Her first novel made money, and the piqued expectations of the literary world gaurenteed her more.

“From that point on, I didn’t have to hold a regular job,” she said.

From there, the Q&A proceeded with courtly predictability, all the standard questions fielded with diligence: How did she see herself as Canadian writer? How much does she think of the reader when she wrote? What kind of music does she listen to? Bleakly, does she think the novel–the paper novel–will last?

“Yes, I do,” she said. “It’s a very tactile form.” A pause. A strange, quiet smile tugged at the corners of her lips. “The book is a violin,” she said, “and the reader is like the violin player. But you cannot know who that reader will be. You cannot try to manipulate the reader.”

Margaret Atwood is old, and in the shadow of the novel question must lurk a dozen other, ancillary questions: will her novels last? Will she last? Her answer doubles as a credo–thou shalt not manipulate the reader. Thou shalt not stretch too far for self-preservation. None of Roth’s embalming fluid. Just natural ingredients, and the lush, young jungle of Oryx and Crake.

A Season for all Dorks; or, Eugene, Go Buy Call of Duty 4

A lot of deep thinking gets done on my doorstep. There , Eugene bums me a Turkish Gold, takes a first drag, and say something like:

“So, Call of Duty 4 is fucking awesome.”

And I say something like:

“Mass Effect comes out this month, too.”

Gene shakes his head, mutters “Goddamnit” at the ground. Then, “I’m running out of money.”

I tactfully suggest whoring out Aubrey, our housemate. She shouts something from inside. We scratch the idea. I tactfully suggest Gene whoring out himself, or whoring out myself, or maybe a dual whoring–tagteam as fetish appeal, complete with Mexican wrestling masks. Someone would pay. Someone would help us keep up with Quarter 4’s ridiculous videogame release schedule, which has so drained dear Gene’s coffers.

A brief summary of this Quarter’s “Must-Have” titles: Halo 3. Assassin’s Creed. Mass Effect. Call of Duty 4. The Orange Box. Bioshock. Were one to be kind to oneself–and prudent, not buying games of marginal interest like Timeshift or Virtua Fighter 5–one would be dropping a cool $359.94. Not to mention, dozens of hours with a controller in hand, staring at a screen while the world leaves concerned post-it notes on the door.

This isn’t counting PC or Wii giants like Crysis, Super Mario Galaxy or Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. Truly, it’s been a red-letter season for the industry, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since 2004, when Halo 2 and Half Life 2 both dropped before Thanksgiving. Halo, in fact, has secured itself in the popular imagination, getting ink on every paper from X-Box Official Magazine to The New York Times. Halo 3 netted $300 million in first week sales–smashing box-office records–and was blamed by the film industry for a corresponding slump in ticket sales. Everyone in the industry, from lead designers to coders, is putting a new car in their garage.

The question demands more scholarship and thought than is presently available in this venue, but I can’t help but ask: to what extent are video games supplanting cinema in the American imagination? Daring academics are already beginning to incorporate games like Half Life 2 into larger questions of narrative and story-telling. Is it possible that as interactivity becomes more, well, interactive, storylines branching further, the player’s choices becoming more complex, other, more static forms of storytelling will seem outmoded?

The knee-jerk Orwellian in me recoils, of course. But it’s a thought.

Either way, Eugene did buy Call of Duty 4, and the game has rendered such priceless moments as:

“Holy shit, you just blew his fucking arm off.”

“Spun him right around.”

And:

“Wait he doesn’t know you’re there. Use the knife.”

And:

“Fuck my balls!” (Eugene.) “Where the hell did that come from?”

“From your flank, dumbshit. Use the grenades that god gave you.”

“God has nothing to do with this.”

“You’re in Chernobyl. Think. God hates communism, and you are God’s vengeance. Use. Grenades.”

Such things my generation sees through the pixelated crosshairs of a sniper scope. Now let’s hold hands and pray for our brave new world, where we don’t tell war stories–we fight them.

Ryan Adams: He’s a Card

In all of his borderline-schizophrenic, pedantic glee, Ryan Adams unleashed himself upon the Lifestyle Community Pavilion in Columbus, Ohio. He ranted, he raved, he gave Albert Einstein a shout out. As a freshly self-proclaimed Cardinal, Adams is, at best, molting, struggling to simultaneously escape the trappings of commercialism, solo-status and a checkered discography. Revision, boys and girls, is the word of the day.

Appearing with backing band The Cardinals, Adams opened the set with a searing rendition of “Peaceful Valley,” trading fiddle for guitar. After Adams indulged a long, twisting solo, scooting into the shade of amp towers in platform shoes, the Cards eased into “Magnolia Mountain,” walking down the chords and bending their knees to the song’s slinking pace. As expected, The Cards are at home with their Jacksonville City Nights and Cold Roses material, with guitarist Neal Casal dueling with Adams, drummer Brad Pemberton laying down the alt-folk sleep-waltz, and Jon Garboff winding his slide guitar through the songs like Spanish moss. While hearty and fufilling, the night’s most interesting moments came from the the meeting of two tides: Heartbreaker and Love is Hell-era Ryan Adams–a boozy wreck, swaggering from verse to verse with ragged genius and Ryan Adams the Card, soulful, centered and “heavy as the rocks on the riverbed.”

“Shakedown on 9th Street,” a frayed hop about a heist gone wrong, was the first to receive the Cardinals treatment. Pemberton asserts himself with a metronomic beat; Casal leans into Adams’ rhythm with squealing runs. Jazzed-up, sure, but eyebrows weren’t rasied until “Bartering lines,” another Heartbreaker song, came on heavy and grave as a thunderstorm, acoustic traded for electric guitar, the mining-town played down in favor of a bolder, sturdier rock. Instead of drawling the line “Ten cents up / two bucks down / ship it off and turn it into fumes,” Adams belts it out, bending before the microphone as Casal crunched his chords like a steamshovel.

“Halloween” head divided the crowd, drawing both approving cheer and boos. Adams took to the piano–topped by an electric jack-o-lantern–and slowed it down, turning the wry burn-out’s anthem into something slower, reflective, almost ruminative. Pemberton laid down an eighth-note heart on the drums; the rest of the Cards stayed in the shadows until the last chorus.

Ryan Adams, 2.0. Before playing “Two,” he halted his guitar boy to wring out a fan, telling him that no, they would not be playing that song tonight, and why didn’t he just try to enjoy “the rest of the fucking show?” Following the blowup Adams apologized, and offered a credo, of sorts: he was in a transitional period; he wanted to be a Cardinal, not the “boozy” artist of “Come Pick Me Up” (the song in question); and the transition was akin to “becoming a trannie,” with your “balls half on.”

After this bizarre valediction, Adams dedicated Gold’s “The Rescue Blues” to Albert Einstein–”Spooky E” to his “hood.” The question asks itself: has Ryan Adams fallen off the wagon?

Though I love the Adams of “Magnolia Mountain,” I wonder what we lost when we lost the boozy howler of Heartbreaker. Transition is Adams’ prerogative, and nobody is going to hold sobriety against him, at any price. But I wish he’d make up my bed, so I could make up my mind: do I light a candle for the romantic, or do I find another love, now that he’s found God?

Pinecone Races

Something I did with my mum as a three-year-old: we collected cones from the pines bordering our Catskill, New York property, put them in a brown paper Shop Rite bag and took the Oldsmobile to the old railroad bridge leading into town. Standing on one side of the bridge, we’d drop the cones into the water; on the other side, we’d see whose slipped first from the shadows, spinning a little in the current.

It was a trick we learned from Winnie the Pooh. Who knew what happened under the bridge? Something emerged on the other side.

Coming from a college senior, I think the metaphor is obvious.

In my case, the metaphor is applicable. Somewhat. For the semester, let’s say. The resume needs some sexing-up, and it needs to, well, go somewhere. Grad School feels like a distant tingle, and my bones are saying: next year. Or maybe the year after. But with my Honors project, the rest of my year has already fallen into place.

Not true for most. The hand-wringing and hear-tearing among the Senior class is considerable, comparable only to the entranced navel-gazing an panicked draining of pint glasses. For all the highfalutin blahblah it seems to engender, the Scare comes down to a single word: Now?

Yeah, now. No “next year.” No second chance.

Little pinecone in a graduation gown, spinning down the steps with a diploma, smiling up and down the creek.