Excerpt from "You Seem Lonely Milwaukee"

The final story in a Milwaukee triptych I wrote to round out a small collection I am sending out called 11:58. This one was inspired by this awful, awful winter. Every Midwestern winter. (The photo was taken by my student in Literary Journal Publishing, Chelsea Moskow, for an editorial exercise I assigned.)

In the Midwest, there is no spring. There is something called a thaw, in either May or June, in which mud coats the wind, and cigarette butts sprout like crocus from black-feathered mounds of melting snow piles. A false thaw consisting of a balmy thirty-five degrees had just lulled us all into a moony dream before plunging back below zero, freezing moats of briny slush on sidewalks into an armor of ice. This lay beneath a ponderous load of snow and cold like a dragon coiled relentlessly around our feet – a cold so deep even our entrails grew crystals.

             ***

            In early February, after the Super Bowl, cold paralyzed my pelvic energy along with my nasal passages. The Wisconsin winter unsexed us all. We encased ourselves in sarcophagi of cotton hoods, wool flaps and flannel wraps that added more bulk than the cheese curds and poutine and paczkis and hot chocolate with marshmallows by which we devoured and excreted the defeat of knowing we couldn’t get out. I longed to go to bed all day, and yet dreaded going to sleep knowing it would bring the next day on faster. During the week I ducked away from work under the bruised sky and fell asleep in the womb of my recliner before eight, and on the weekends I spent all day working on puzzles wherever I knew my friends and lovers wouldn’t set a cold, dry foot.

The Changeling Draft Uno

Below is a 500-word draft of a story containing the words "troll", "incandescent" and "levitate" as well as a lot of language from Puck's speech in A Midsummer Night's Dream...

The Changeling

On one wall of the ward a mermaid sings the sea to sleep, her mouth a fellatial O. They painted scales up over her breasts, or kids like me will masturbate at her. On the other, Jill watches calmly as Jack tumbles down, smiling, as if chasing his broken crown like a dream. My mind’s eye bolts his golden hair with blood. Strikes love bites of purple on his pansy-white face.

I secondly saw the ghost in the mirror, jumping over my image like a hurdle and galloping toward me with the deliberation of a race horse. Then he crept around the perimeter of my room so fast he left a girdle of flame in his wake. I woke up with the russet morning tonguing my window, hollering and thirsty but appeased, knowing he was a dream, and I am a liar.

After Reading Coreyography

I recently read Coreyography, the new autobiography written by Corey Feldman. I'm usually not big into autobiography, especially written by entertainers, but this particular actor played a big part in my preteen life. Corey Haim, who died at the age I am now, was a particular obsession of mine when I was about 14 or 15. He and Corey Feldman, known as the two Coreys, were both plastered all over my bedroom walls throughout junior high. There was a period in which I was embarrassed to admit the degree to which Corey Haim played a part in my masturbatory fantasies as a child. But now that I am approaching middle age and that he and Mr. Feldman have become something of a legend for good or ill, I look fondly on those days. No different I suppose than little girls' recent obsessions with Justin Bieber.
An important feature of this autobiography is Feldman's testimony regarding sexual abuse he suffered as a child actor, which she also attests was suffered by Haim. I've heard from various sources about the way in which child actors might be vulnerable to this kind of abuse by individuals in the entertainment business. Given the way in which child actors tend to be famous for all kinds of problems including drug addiction, it doesn't surprise me. What does surprise me after reading this memoir, is how naïve, even gullible Corey was when approached by these men. I like to think young people know that when an adult asks to have a "secret friendship" with them that this is probably a sketchy proposition. But maybe I'm the one who's naive.
Having said that, I appreciate the enlightenment that this memoir has provided me regarding situations like these with child actors, since I am currently trying to put together a collection of flash fiction with a child actor as an overlapping and recurring character (see previous post). The memoir also includes a lot of neat behind the scenes information about movies like The Goonies and The Lost Boys and License to Drive. It was fun and interesting and worthwhile to read about my childhood crushes, as well as the movies that were such an important part of what I remember growing up. Thanks Corey Feldman, for bringing those happy days back, even if those days weren't so happy for you.

In the Boy's Room: Draft Uno!

In the Boy’s Room

            One wall of the boy’s room is just shelves full of boy things. There’s a warped batman lunchbox with the top gone that is full of marbles. An old popcorn drum is full of dusty baseball cards. There’s a stuffed bear that won’t sit up and a snoopy doll without a nose. A cyclone must have hit and swirled together a mess of video games and CDs with most of their jewel cases cracked and broken. Horror DVDs and comics. His cross country trophy is turned on its side so the little golden man at the top just looks like he’s tripping and thinks he’s Jacob wrestling with the angel. The boy has emptied his picture frames and they sit facing each other in a lopsided circle. His G.I. Joes are tangled together inside a cookie tin. She takes two out and places them on the shelf face down on top of each other.

            If she could just flush the boy away. If she could empty the mental picture frame that contains his pimply big-eyed face. But he’s still friction in her mind: belly, tongue, fingers, teeth. Rubbing on the fly of his jeans. Rubbing his foot with hers. Doesn’t he remember steaming up the windows after stealing the cow’s car? Doesn’t he remember the playhouse his dad built for his sisters before leaving? When the bee crawled into the sleeping bag they shared? She can make him remember. She has prepared a speech full of profanity that he will not soon forget.

           

           

S. by JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst: Teaching Potential Alert!

Although I haven't finished reading it, I am getting really excited about the possibilities for teaching with the new novel titled S. by JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst. The book itself is supposed to be a novel written by a mysterious East European author, but I believe it is Dorst who writes the text. In the margins of the book are about four sets of notes that I believe are composed by Abrams. The notes consist of a dialogue between a female undergrad and a male graduate student investigating the identity of the mysterious author and developing a relationship along the way. In the books pages the authors have inserted several other texts such as postcards, newspaper articles, and telegrams.

This book excites me because it illustrates so many possibilities for my scholarship and teaching. The notes along with the text of the novel and the footnotes of the novel comprise the kind of multi-voiced and multidirectional narrative that interests me, and that I was trying to play with in my own dissertation. The character in the novel also suffers from amnesia like my Kate. Much of the book examines the notion of a life as a story that can be erased and rewritten. I am also interested, as we move into a digital age, and what this book has to say about the hardcopy or the artifact of the book. The conversation between the two students that occurs in writing on three separate timelines can be compared to email correspondence by online lovers who have never met. But because the writing exists only in this volume that the two pass back and forth, it is private and not public. This also connects to notions of privacy and surveillance which I discussed with my English 102 students this semester.

I would ask students to question what it means that the conversation between the two students happens on top of previous conversations. In some places, for instance, they refer in writing to notes they took previously and rethink them.
What does this suggest about the notion of revision in writing? How might we examine the significance of different fonts, handwriting styles and the positioning of actual text? What can we say about text being multidirectional or even having direction? What are the differences between the types of mediums that you see here in terms of purpose and context? What role do images play?

The book also questions the place and practice of academia, the tensions between self and author, and examines corporate practices as well. Here are some lines that struck me during my last reading:
In the novel text:"To be a self rewritten from a lost first draft."
This is exactly the situation that I see my character Kate in. The grad student asks in his notes, "does the rewriting make us different people? Or just a product of ongoing revision?"
Also in the novel text: "Stenfalk chuckles and claps his hands as the others curse him. 'This,' he says, 'is precisely what campfires are for. The sharing of stories. There's a spiritual connection between flame and narrative."
S. Nods. He understands Stenfalk's proposition intuitively; we create stories to help us shape a chaotic world, to navigate inequities of power, to accept our lack of control over nature, over others, over ourselves. But what do you do when you have no stories of your own?"

Yes. I may mark further lines from this novel as I read. The relationship created here between narrative, evidence, and memory is fascinating to me and intimately connected with the scholarship that surrounds my own novel. Also pretty fun to read. I've been reading the text of the novel first along with the grad students initial notes on it, and then reading the notes between Jen and Eric after each chapter. But you can read it many ways, and there's even a decoder that you might use to crack some kind of code that exists in the footnotes. In this way, the book contains many of the advantages of a digital text. Something to think about.

Seamus Heaney Passed Away Today

Here's a video of one of his best poems...might share with students this coming week. Click below!

Digging by Seamus Heaney

The Pharmacist

The sign said "vibrators," right at the top of the list, in big red letters. The other items included Netty pot's, heating pads, nicotine patches and other hodgepodge, but "vibrators" caught Melanie's eye and made her smile. She needed toothpaste, not the dark green gelatinous mass they offered at the shelter that tasted like old lady candy, but a nice thick abrasive paste. She wanted to scour the enamel like a porcelain sink. She longed for erosion.
Making sure she appeared to have purpose, eyes scanning her surroundings while keeping her chin determinedly up and forward, she had almost entered the drugstore/check-cashing establishment on 42nd, but an argument wasn't suing inside between the stouts Pakistani man behind the counter and an older grizzled black man she recognized from a shelter she frequented. She had gotten along well with this man, and had never seen the symptoms of his personality disorder. She didn't ever want to, so she had continued walking, knowing somewhere on some corner nearby there must be a Walgreens, surely there must be. But as she walked, she drifted further and further away from the familiar, away from the pawn shops and cricket stores and gas stations and Liberty Tax services she knew from hanging around this rescue mission or that shelter. The air grew quiet and missed Halo the streetlights. She felt as if she had wandered into someone else's dream. It had to be someone else's, because she had stopped dreaming long ago.