Category Archives: Writer and Reader

A Sampler of Writing Advice from Glimmer Train


Glimmer Train is one of the top literary journals specializing in short fiction, with several lucrative contests throughout the year. Their online newsletter includes links to brief interviews with their published authors. Here, a sampler of some thoughts on writing, from their latest issue:

Rolaine Hochstein, the winner of their February 2009 Very Short Fiction Award, encourages authors to resist the oversimplifications of the marketplace in her essay “Life Class”:

…I would tell you to ignore the advice I read recently in a magazine for writers: A writer should be prepared to tell his story to the editor in three sentences (or was it three words?). If you can’t do that, says the editor, don’t even bother to submit the work. Boy, do I disagree! If you can tell your story in three sentences, why write it?

I write like a painter, going over the story draft after draft, adding color, changing shape, bringing in light and shadows (chiaroscuro, to labor the metaphor). A dab here, a highlight there, a new insight and, of course, constant wipeouts of segments that don’t belong. All these brush strokes, all these layers, all these drafts. All this time. Three sentences? Uh uh.

Maggie Shipstead reminisces with fondness and satiric wit about the cultural contradictions of Orange County, where she spent her childhood, and notes the importance of letting time pass before writing about raw subjects:

Nominally Episcopalian, my high school, like much of Orange County, was overrun by a vocal crowd of Evangelicals. My calculus teacher got up at a senior banquet and told the class of 2001 that he might not witness the apocalypse, but we certainly would. We would see the rivers of blood and the gold-crowned locusts with faces of men and the Whore of Babylon and everything. Girls wore rings symbolic of promises to remain virgins until they married. Students were encouraged to leave Post-It notes to God in the chapel. Intolerance was tolerated. Conspicuous consumption was exalted. No one could be bothered to recycle. As a smug adolescent agnostic, I found these beliefs and practices both laughable and infuriating. So I left.

Orange County followed. Orange County, right around when I went to college, was suddenly everywhere: in the movie Orange County, the TV series The O.C. and Arrested Development, the reality series Laguna Beach, and so on. The flurry of interest still hasn’t entirely died down. Surely the gold-crowned locusts with faces of men must now be upon us because we have witnessed the Bravo reality series The Real Housewives of Orange County, which, coincidentally, takes place in the very same gated community where I grew up. The series is a useful Exhibit A when I’m describing my teens because it showcases the oblivious, self-righteous decadence that kept me in high dudgeon during those years. Just watch one episode, I say. You’ll see. Recently, while passing through my old stomping grounds, I saw the O.C. distilled to its purest form: an enormous black Hummer H2 weaving in and out of traffic on the northbound 405 with the license plate “4BLSSD1.”…

…As far as the craft of writing, all my blathering about my hometown and high school boils down to this: don’t write angry. Sleep on it for a few years or a few decades. If you’re writing about someone or somewhere only to prove how silly and despicable that person or place is, your written world will have the flatness that comes from small-heartedness. A story should not be a means of carrying out a vendetta, but perhaps a story might be a way to lay one to rest.

Finally, the widely published fiction writer and essayist Thomas E. Kennedy insists that “A Writer is Someone Who Writes”:

Of all the rewards you get or do not get as a writer, the single most important reward must be the act of writing itself. Surely every serious writer has experienced this reward when she or he is working at top end—when you are in perfect harmony with the place your words come from, the place where your stories are waiting to be told. I do not want to seem mystical about this, but in my experience that is a sacred place, and entering it is the closest thing I know to a spiritual discipline. No reward—money, fame, publication—is greater than the privilege of gaining entry to that place.

Finally, and closely connected with that, a word about the words. Henry Miller once said that if you don’t listen when the Muse sings, you get excommunicated. The fastest way to a writer’s block is to be super-critical of the words that are offered up from whatever part of our mind, soul or body that the words are offered up from. A writer has an impulse to write something but generally, in my experience, does not know what he or she is going to say until it is said. To berate and reject the words that are being offered up to you even as they are being offered up is to insult that in you which is most important to you as a writer, that place where the spirit becomes word and takes form.

On that topic, a personal observation: I’ve been to the marvelous AWP literary conference three times now (2004, 2008, 2009), and amid all the panels about what to write, how to revise, where to get published, how to get a job, etc., etc., I remember wishing that more people would talk about why we write. Or, perhaps even more important, why we don’t write. What sustains or interferes with our keeping the faith? What is the purpose of writing?

That moment of “perfect harmony” Kennedy talks about is pleasurable, but chasing it is a recipe for despair. I used to get confused by the search for that high, thinking that if I wasn’t feeling it, the writing wasn’t good. Plus, for me, I don’t think it comes from writing per se, but from what I’m writing about. Writing is like dreaming, and some dreams are better for you than others. I abandoned one of my novels-in-progress last year because it couldn’t rise above what Shipstead calls “the flatness that comes from small-heartedness”. Whatever its literary merits (and excerpts from it had won several prizes), it felt like a spiritual dead end.

As for my other novel-in-progress, my characters and I have moved out of the manic-depressive romance phase and into something like a steady marriage, and one benefit of that commitment is that I don’t ask “why write?” as often as I used to. I write because I love them, and I’m learning to love the parts of myself they come from. But I’d still like to hear how other writers resolve doubts about their vocation.

Poet Tom Daley on Finding the Universal Through the Particular


This quote is excerpted from an interview with poet and writing teacher Tom Daley in the April 2009 newsletter from Cervena Barva Press. Daley teaches at several schools in the Boston area and is a member of the faculty of the Online School of Poetry.

I think the most important lesson a writer finding her or his way can learn is the value of one’s own experience of the world as one is framing poems and prose pieces. Many writers come to the first couple of workshops with work that marches in the heavy boots of abstraction and generalization. I always hear some wrongheaded phantom whispering over their shoulder “No one would be interested in your story or your observation. You need to be universal to be understood.” I suggest that that they consider the old Russian proverb, “Taste mouthfuls–taste the ocean.” Or the adage (I think it is Paul Valery’s) “It is a thousand times easier to be profound than it is to be precise.” Precision comes from an acuity of perception, from giving expression to the individual genius that inhabits all mentally competent human beings, from mining the rich lodes of our unique experience in the world. This is the first and sometimes most difficult lesson to teach, because it involves not just a shift in aesthetic orientation, but also an acute shift in awareness.

His advice fits my own experience as a writer, and that of the aspiring authors who send us poems for critique at Winning Writers. We all find that our work is strengthened when we access universal themes through concrete particulars instead of only abstractions.

For me, trusting my personal vision tests how thoroughly I rely on God’s grace. Do I believe that God loves me personally–not just incorporated by reference into the salvation of all humanity–and that He had a good reason for making me the person that I am, with the mission He has given me? I’m working on it…

I’ll be at Wheaton College’s annual theology conference for the rest of this week, and will blog the highlights when I return. Y’all behave, now.

Poetry Roundup: Koeneke, Minnis


How much is too much? I recently read two poetry books, Chelsey Minnis’ Bad Bad (Fence Books) and Rodney Koeneke’s Rouge State (Pavement Saw Press), that were enjoyable and frustrating for similar reasons. Both started with a clever and unique style, and both had that essential ingredient of self-mockery that keeps experimental poetry from becoming a new pretentious orthodoxy. Both books also luxuriated in excesses of language and imagery: Koeneke marrying the Orientalist fantasies of sheiks and odalisques to the trappings of suburban consumerism, Minnis describing poetry as “lickable mink” and a “doorknob covered with honey”. Yet there were places in both books where I felt fatigued, because every poem seemed to be in the same tone of voice and be funny/experimental/surreal in exactly the same way.

The cover of Bad Bad is striped Barbie-pink and white with red gothic-type letters, as if to code it “girly product, not to be taken seriously”. Of course, placing these graphics on the august cover of A Poetry Book invites us to rethink the seriousness of both girls and poetry.

Adopting the persona of a naughty little girl, the speaker of this book deflects criticism by flaunting her frivolity, yet at the same time secretly hopes to impress everyone with her cleverness. This is especially evident in Bad Bad‘s 68 “Prefaces”, my favorite section. Here’s a taste:

Preface 13

When I write a poem it’s like looking through a knothole into a velvet fuckpad…

And it is like buttery sweetbreads spilled down the front of your dress…

It is like a gun held to the head of a poodle…

If I want to write any poems I will write them!

A poem that doesn’t have any intellectual filler in it…

Like two blondes fighting on a roof…

****

Preface 20

I am a poet so I can say things…

And not so that I can have any notion of a literary lifestyle…

I don’t like to be a poet but how else can I be so fitful?

When I say “I am a poet” I expect I am saying something that is neutral of all self-congratulations…

I am saying, “I have a special quality that is like swan shit on marble…”

****

Preface 36

“Poetry writing” is a hardship

Like crying because you don’t like the wallpaper…

It is like bleeding from your anus in the snow…

But I don’t like it…

In the “Prefaces”, Minnis
tries having it both ways: she flaunts her vain and sensual motives for writing poetry, but equally flaunts her self-knowledge, as if to convince us that ironic frivolousness is not really frivolous. That coy refusal to resolve the paradox provides a great part of the pleasure of reading Bad Bad. Minnis’ surprising use of language is the other thing I most enjoyed about the book. Even when I became impatient with its limited range of themes and emotions, I kept laughing at passages that deftly spun from melodrama to true remorse to ridiculousness and back again, such as these lines from “Double Black Tulip”:

………….I write this poem like a girl in a black wig……
…………
…………………………………………………………………………
…………but my heart is the heart of a true skunk…………
…………………………………………………………….
……………………………………………..
…………..this is bad fluffy thoughts.
.     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .
……………………………..like the hurtfulness of chartreuse
…………………………………………………………..carpet………
……………………….I must try not to feel a fake kindness….

Though I am a fashion junkie, I got bogged down in the 16-page poem “Foxina”, which is basically a list of sensual, outrageous, fetishistic clothing that “the women in the viewing boxes” are wearing. In my opinion, this poem shows up the limitations of a book that is composed of clever fragments. Not every poetry collection needs a traditional narrative arc, but if I’m reading from cover to cover, I like to feel some movement, some development of consciousness, such that the poems at the end of the book could only belong at the end and are informed by the journey that preceded it.

Which brings me to another question: Is a structured poetry book “better” than an unstructured one? Should I be blaming a box of chocolates for not being a three-course meal? I’ve enjoyed a number of collections where the individual poems were not dazzling, but the overall effect was powerful, because the pieces informed one another; like chapters of a novel, they might not all stand alone, but they belonged together. If Bad Bad is a box of chocolates, to be dipped into rather than consumed in one sitting, it’s like the chili-powder-and-Pop-Rocks truffles that my husband bought me for Valentine’s Day. Pacing is everything once the novelty wears off, but what a novelty it is.

The above comments would also apply to Koeneke’s Rouge State, another book whose abundance of surface variation was not always enough to compensate for the poems’ underlying sameness. Rouge State won the 2002 Transcontinental Poetry Award, and the post-9/11 date gives us a key to the poems’ political context, providing a backdrop of passion and fear that is rarely invoked directly by Koeneke’s pleasantly aimless language. The raw material of Koeneke’s poems is Western colonialist fantasies and how they might be processed by people with no cultural literacy–people whose minds are full of catchy phrases and bits of information, but without the attention span or historical awareness to put them together properly. Rouge State is like “The Waste Land” written by a likeable, confused, somewhat ADD-afflicted American teenager deployed to Iraq.

           from #38

…Tonight’s ceremony will require your bride’s
virginity. Spread nard over the bedclothes
and charge it up to the hotel. The poppies mean
we’re leaving. It was a once-in-a-lifetime
sort of thing–the seeds were used for visions
and the husks served as clothes.
On the airport concourse you’ll notice a series
of fluorescent yellow cannisters: please put them down
at once. The people were so sorry when
we told them you were leaving–
that’s why I think they’re doing
that funny little dance.

Such naivete should be dangerous, but a sense of menace is mostly lacking from Rouge State, which relies perhaps too much on its readers’ knowledge of extra-textual facts to give the book its urgency. As with Bad Bad, Koeneke’s poems can be enjoyed for the reckless abundance of their vocabulary and imagery. Some of the poems could be said to have a meaning or a narrative thread, while others are more cryptic. Untitled, they are numbered from 1-50, and I couldn’t say that I discerned a reason behind the order of poems: the speaker doesn’t seem to have reached any insight by #50 that he didn’t have halfway through. In fact, quite the opposite:

#50

Summer acrostic hotshot,
Urgent as a somnambulist.
Create in me a clean heart, Zardoz–
Krazy-glue gentile moils upon me.

Orangutans, start your gonads:
Not one of you gets out of Zaire alive.

The thing I learned at scribe camp:
Hermes is vowels. Graminivores
In igloos eat more teeth.
So much for that Hummer the

Orotund senator sent round–
She got spotted on the parkway, imploring
Apaches to land.
“My, what cheesy palms you have, Sir Swithin.”
All I ever wanted was free beer.

I have come late to the appreciation of this nonlinear type of poetry, so other readers might be more patient about pushing through its difficulties. For me, an author needs a good reason to depart from recognizable modes of communication. I’m less interested in technique for its own sake. For example, in The Cow, Ariana Reines uses fragmentary and bizarre language because the passion of a speaker fighting her way back from madness to sanity bursts the bonds of ordinary rational thought.

The rationale for enigmatic speech in Rouge State might be to show that Americans have lost the ability to think clearly about the political power we wield. However, this seems like more of a conceptual point than an emotional necessity, and once made, perhaps does not need to be repeated so often. Does nonsense-humor trivialize this type of subject, whereas satire might have provided some reparative insight?

I did enjoy Rouge State, on the whole, because I read it over several weeks and could slow down to appreciate the experience of each poem, notwithstanding how familiar that experience sometimes was, underneath the inspired nuttiness of the vocabulary. And there were some brilliant passages, my favorite being this one from #39:

Ego is an autopsy
at which you’re a guest but also its theater,
a space in which no detail is too small to be applauded, but only once
the scalpels go to town.

With more such moments of profound analysis thrown in among the non sequiturs, Rouge State could have been an even more satisfying book. I have confidence in Koeneke’s imaginative powers and will be interested to see the direction of his subsequent work.

Maureen Sherbondy: “Vanishing Sarah”


This piece first appeared in the Knoxville Writers’ Guild Anthology, Low Explosions: Writings on the Body. Maureen Sherbondy’s collection of short stories and flash fiction, The Slow Vanishing, will be published this fall by Main Street Rag. Visit their New Releases page to buy this book at a pre-order discount price of $9 (normally $13.95). MSR has also published two of Maureen’s poetry chapbooks, After the Fairy Tale and Praying at Coffee Shops.


Vanishing Sarah

Bit by bit, Sarah vanished. It began slowly — a swatch of fingertip tugged off. Everyone wanted something: her five children, her corporate husband, the in-laws, the neighbors, her two terriers, the PTA, her four younger sisters, the church parishioners. They were the takers, and she was the giver; this is the way it had always been. She barely noticed the initial throb of missing fingertip. The dull pain was interrupted by the disappearance of the small toe on her left foot, removed by her husband. Then, an ounce of flesh above her hip, which, really, she didn’t mind, as there had been so much extra flesh since that fourth pregnancy. The removal of flesh was like being gnawed by a very large rat. Chomp chomp. First she swatted the hand of the taker, a PTA parent this time; then she accepted this loss and waved goodbye as the ounce of flesh floated out the open window.

Phones rang endlessly with additional requests: to bake two dozen cupcakes for the school bake sale, volunteer for the book fair, organize the church charity talent show. Then the takers became ruthless. They descended, a swarm of hands and teeth. A finger, wearing her wedding band, floated away from the four-bedroom brick house, and then a large toe left the suburban cul-de-sac. Her slightly bulbous nose sprayed with tiny freckles drifted into the sky, a loss which made smelling the burning cupcakes difficult. She saw twenty freckles in the night sky lit up like red stars.

At night, achy, feeling scattered and lost, she closed her eyes (still intact, she had covered those with palms, no fingers) trying to find a dream where only givers lived. But, piece-by-piece even dreams parted.

When the children and husband and in-laws and PTA and church parishioners searched for Sarah, to ask just one last little favor, all that remained was a stain — a perfumed outline of who she had been.

DIAGRAM Essay Winner Matthew Glenwood: “John Henry’s Tracks”


Online multimedia journal DIAGRAM, edited by poet Ander Monson, is a uniquely satisfying blend of the surreal, the philosophical, and the darkly humorous. In addition to original poetry and prose, they feature offbeat and obscure images from specialized texts, hence the journal’s name. Ever wondered about the proper proportions of a love seat? Do you know everything you ought to know about the appurtenances of perpendicular drinking? Perhaps you need ideas for unusual leg positions. DIAGRAM has it all.

On a more serious note, Matthew Glenwood, the winner of their most recent Hybrid Essay Contest, offers the rhetorical masterpiece “John Henry’s Tracks”, a passionate piece of writing that draws connections between the famous folk song, plasma-selling, Hurricane Katrina, and the dehumanization of the poor. Sample:


John Henry was a mighty man,
Born with a ten-pound hammer in his hand.
—”John Henry”*

Some dirt-diggers in the Holy Land claimed to have found the bones of Jesus and his family. Jesus’ son, too. We’ll probably never know for sure if those were the holy bones or not. That kind of news could prove ungentle to dreamers. Like finding the remains of Amelia Earhart under her front porch steps, or the skeleton of a baby bird beneath its nest. We would hope for a wider arc to the hero’s journey than bones at the starting point. It could be called bad news if Jesus, the alleged foreman of Heaven, left bones behind. News that says nobody’s going very far.

But it wouldn’t be the whole truth. There is somewhere to go.

We can go sell our plasma for fifty American dollars a week.

The journey to the Biolife Plasma Center in Marquette, Michigan came easy for me. I just had to follow an abandoned train track for a few blocks. The track met the edge of the woods along the shore of Lake Superior; rabbit, chipmunk and deer crisscrossed it as beasties would any ready made trail, for there were no tracks left on that line. The rattle of my mountain bike startled ducks from the shallow waters of the ditch alongside. In winter, the flat, open space doubled as a cross country ski trail. You might say everything ran on that track except for rails.

The region, too poor to have a reason to run its trains, pulled up many of its train tracks, and commerce that way moved at the speed of wild grass. The poverty of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is probably why the plasma company came to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. That and the local college students, the reliably poor. As any farmer with a bad back could tell you, the easiest of tall crops to harvest is one that stoops to meet the hand of the harvester.

At the plasma center, technicians tap into the natural resource of your veins. The process takes, at most, a couple hours, and you’re paid for it. It’s easy money, and couldn’t come much easier; all you have to do is exist. The plasma company calls itself a “donation center”, but really it is a selling center. Poor people coming to sell the one possession they unquestionably own: the materials of their being. Take away those materials and the world would have no more poor.

Our folk songs say that John Henry could drive steel harder and faster than any man. The job of a steel driver was to pound holes in rock by hammering a long metal drill held and rotated by another man known as a shaker. Dynamite was then dropped into those holes—tunnels blasted into mountain stone. Steel driving was done for the mean benefit of the train companies laying track across the nation. In other versions of the song, steel driving was intermixed with pounding spike into the rail lines.

One day a salesman brought a new steam-driven drill to the line. John Henry, fearing for his job and for the jobs of his fellow rail workers, challenged the machine to a contest. John Henry declared to his captain:

Lord, a man aint nothin’ but a man
But before I let that steam-drill beat me down
I’m gonna die with a hammer in my hand

John Henry won. But after beating the machine, he suffered a heart attack and died. That’s to say, he could do no more work for the train company.

Like Jesus, no one can prove the John Henry of legend. Some stories say he was an ex-slave working for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway during the Reconstruction days of the South, following the Civil War. People disagree on where, and if, the events of the song took place. One man thinks the contest of hammers happened in Talcott, West Virgina. But everybody knows that you’ve got to bite the coins that come out of Talcott.

About twenty years ago, a man in my hometown got caught in one of the big machines of the mining company. A rock crusher, if I remember right. He was the father of a classmate. I ought to have attended the funeral, but didn’t. In those high school days I was discovering the books of the American Transcendentalists: Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau. “Transcendentalism” was a big word to me at the time. The idea of it is that you can ride your porch swing to the truth of all flowers. The notion sounds sound to me, still. But, being young, I felt as if I had inherited a mansion up in the blue air; as if everything wrong were, with an idea, suddenly right.

The daughter of the killed miner, my classmate, needed some consoling, but I was too shy, too awkward at social graces, to be one of the people to give it. I had no consoling to give. Her father was a good man of Finnish descent; he left behind a large family. The family had a new lesson to learn about the worst of all possible outcomes. As for me, I had my books which said spirit dances with matter.

Much of my life has passed since those books. Those Yankee writers of old are truer to me now than when I was young, and it’s likely that I need them more now. But an idea isn’t much true unless we are willing to wear its dirt. A frog of ugly sits at the center of true, and his appetite is Void.

Rather than the gift of a mansion in the sky, transcendence now seems to me a lifetime of lonely carpentry. Carpentry on a house nobody can see. And that house won’t shelter from the rain, but make us wetter. Those who ply this trade might not finish even the front steps before the cold evening comes on, before the closing whistle blows. Maybe no one completes the house called Idealism— built, as it is, on the foundation that is the suffering of the world. The hammer is usually abandoned with much work left to do; it hums only a little while with the vibrations of the last nail driven, until stillness takes it.

Had the good miner’s death happened today, I would’ve gone to the funeral. The fact about our portion of transcendence is that some of us get flattened in rock crushers. The fact is that there is blood on the machine.

And in the machine.

Sometimes the crashing waves of Lake Superior, powered by strong winds, sounded like a train through my apartment window. But, in the city of Marquette, the only real locomotion taking place was the centrifugal force of the Autoapheresis-C machine (made by the Baxter corporation) separating plasma from blood. The word “apheresis” is Greek for “take away”.

Read the rest here. Read another piece by this author in DIAGRAM 1.6.

Michael Broder: “The Remembered One”


Poet and classics scholar Michael Broder presented his work at a panel discussion on “Poetic Responses to AIDS” at AWP Chicago last week. He has kindly given me permission to reprint one of those poems below.

The Remembered One

The good die young, but sometimes
    they come back, dripping with something
        we can’t name or identify,
an acrid perfume, or they reach for us
        like a taproot, draining
our sweet wells of oblivion
        until we lie drenched in a common sweat,
        our bed sheet their burial shroud, their moldering crust.

I dreamt of Marcos last night.
    I thought he came to be buried,
        to be done with; but no, that caramel devil,
leaving his tangerine swim trunks wet on the floor,
        toweling his gorgon hair as he sits in my lap,
numbing me with the poppies
        of his opiate grin and reasserting his claim:

Why should you get the house,
    the husband, the PhD, while I chew on dirt
        and feed succeeding generations
of night crawlers?
        I can crawl the night too, you know, the night is crawling
with me, with mine, with ours—
        us—
        while you pretend to walk, awake, alive.

Come with me, why don’t you, make once and for all
    the descent you practiced so ably for so many years.
        I know a place with many darkened corners
where you can crawl on hands and knees
        like in the old days—
What’s that you called it? “the old ich-du…”

We are beautiful there, and legion.
    We will keep you busy for centuries.
        And think what precious memories he will have,
here above—

This is the song you have waited so long to sing, isn’t it?

****

Michael Broder holds an MFA from New York University and is completing a PhD in Classics from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His poems have appeared in Bloom, Court Green, and Painted Bride Quarterly, among other journals and anthologies. His essay on Sappho is included in My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them, edited by Michael Montlack and due out from the University of Wisconsin Press this spring. His book manuscript, This Life Now, is awaiting a publisher. Visit www.mbroder.com for links to online publication. Michael can be contacted at mb*****@*****er.com .

Back from AWP and the World Is Ending


I’m back from the AWP literary conference in Chicago with my suitcases full of books, and my email inbox full of work that will be keeping me busy for some time. In days to come, I hope to share photos and anecdotes of our many memorable moments at the conference, plus brief reviews of some poetry books and journals. I will say this: you haven’t lived till you’ve seen a sign language interpreter trying to keep up with Dorothy Allison’s “Frog Fucking”, a performance piece which includes some toe-tingling action with two women and a strap-on, as well as a scene where she and an equally drunk gay friend compete to see how many buttered carrots they can shove up their asses. (I hope my accountant isn’t reading this…there goes my business-expense tax deduction.)

Allison’s piece was arousing, unsettling, comic, angry, melancholy, even spiritual. She was generous with her honesty about the entire range of emotions and roles we can play with our partners, showing how sex can help us integrate the parts of ourselves we might have considered unacceptable. The comic side of sex is a great equalizer, teaching us humility; the complete exposure of our kinks and quirks in a trusting relationship can clear away shame and self-deception.

All this is to say that I am not a prude, but the following item in the Springwise business trends e-newsletter still had the power to shock me:


The web has spawned new ways to track just about everything under the sun—from our finances to the foods we eat—so why not our sex lives too? Indeed, Bedpost is an online application now in private beta that helps consumers do just that.

Bedpost is an entirely personal application, password-protected from the prying eyes of others, and stresses that it offers absolutely no social networking features. Rather, it is a way for consumers to keep track of the sexual encounters they’ve had by logging in and entering some key details after each one. Users begin by creating a profile for the partner involved in their most recent encounter and then clicking on the calendar to indicate when the encounter happened. Then, they enter not just the time it happened, but also how long the encounter lasted, some descriptive tags and a star-based rating of the experience. The site then records all that information and presents it in a map of activity for the month on the user’s dashboard. For a historical view, Bedpost tracks summary statistics including frequency, average rating, and totals for the month and year so far. “Solo sex” tracking is also available.

I’m sorry, but using a spreadsheet to keep track of your masturbation episodes has to be the ultimate in pathetic geekiness.

I suppose some form of “Bedpost” has always been with us: Don Giovanni had Leporello and his “catalogue”; the playboys of our parents’ generation had their little black books. But the efficient coldness of tracking and rating your one-night stands on a computer, as if they were just another form of business contact data, seems to be taking us one step further toward sexual dis-integration of mind, body and spirit. 
 

Poet Robert Cording on “Craving Reality”


The literary journal Image, a journal of the arts and religion, celebrates its 20th anniversary this year with an issue featuring various writers and artists addressing what it means to be fully human. I was moved by this essay by poet Robert Cording, “Love Calls Us to One World at a Time“, whose title is a riff on one of my favorite Richard Wilbur poems. Both poem and essay celebrate the inextricable union of finite and infinite, spirit and matter–a creative tension that the religious mind is so often tempted to resolve in favor of rejecting this world, not realizing that this disconnects us from direct experience of God and the people He has given us to love. Cording writes:


A few days before his death on May 6, 1862, Henry David Thoreau was asked by Parker Pillsbury, a former minister become abolitionist, that question so many would like to have answered. Noting that Thoreau was “near the brink of the dark river,” Pillsbury asked Thoreau how the “opposite shore” appeared to him. Thoreau, according to the biographer Richard D. Richardson, “summed up his life” with his answer: “One world at a time.” Thoreau’s reply, polite but firm, was in accord with the way he deliberately chose to live his life. Just months before his death, he was still collecting material for projects on the succession of forest trees and seed dispersal, newly taken with nature’s economy of abundance and its genius of vitality. Years earlier, in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau had come to a similar understanding: we need, he said, “not only to be spiritualized, but naturalized, on the soil of the earth…. We need to be earth-born as well as heaven-born.” Thoreau, who is too often mistakenly placed under the convenient label of pantheist, was not choosing to be “earth-born” over and against being “heaven-born.” He believed, rather, that both births depended on each other. To be “heaven-born” did not lie in redirecting attention from the natural to the supernatural, but in seeing more deeply into the sources of the natural. Those sources, like creation itself, were always a mystery.

In his famous poem, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,” Richard Wilbur enacts the way love calls us to extend ourselves toward a world which will always remain irreducible in its otherness and yet open to our understanding and recognition. In Wilbur’s poem, the soul cannot exist free of the body’s restrictions. Each day it must learn to keep a “difficult balance” in a world which asks us, as Wendell Berry has said, “to suffer it and rejoice in it as it is.” As Thoreau’s life had taught him, if we try to leave behind the earth, if we choose religion simply to quiet our fears and prop up our hopes rather than connect us with the sources of life, we ignore the call of love and heed only the usual summons of the self and its needs….

****

…Great art, according to Iris Murdoch, delights us “because we are not used to looking at the real world at all.” In her Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, she uses Plato’s system of thought to give, ironically, a place to art and the artist that Plato did not envision in The Republic. Murdoch argues that the moral life in Plato is a “slow shift of attachments wherein looking (concentrating, attending, attentive discipline) is a source of divine (purified) energy…. The movement is not, by an occasional leap, into an external (empty) space of freedom, but patiently and continuously a change of one’s whole being in all its contingent detail, through a world of appearance toward a world of reality.” We know, of course, that the simple exposure to and even the study of great art may or may not lead to transformation, to care for the other. Art requires our consent, and in Murdoch’s view, our “morally disciplined attention” in order to enact the change from “a world of appearance toward a world of reality.” What we may learn from art is its closeness to morals, since for Murdoch the essence of both art and morals is love. And love, as Murdoch defines it in her essay “The Sublime and the Good,” “is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real”; it is the “discovery of reality.”

Great art is the enemy of fantasy; fantasy always leads to the creation of idols. Our weakness as human beings is our tendency to make idols of whatever is at hand, whatever makes the world easier, more understandable, and meets our most immediate needs. Poets have always argued that the imagination is the opposite of fantasy. Imagination is an exercise in overcoming one’s self, of extending oneself towards what is different from ourselves. And, in their loving respect for a reality other than oneself, imagination and art call us to attend, with devotion and care, to a world which will always remain a mystery, but a mystery in which love calls us to the things of this world where we may become most fully human.

State of the Block 2008


As a very inconvenient snowstorm descends on our little town’s attempts at First Night outdoor revelry, I am inspired to look back on the highlights of 2008 here at Reiter’s Block.

Books of the Year

Poetry:
Ariana Reines, The Cow
The Cow is like putting Western Literature through a sausage-making machine. The Cow is about being a girl and also a person. Is it possible? “Alimenting the world perpetuates it. Duh. Plus ‘the world’ is itself a food.” The integrated self equals sanity and civilization (whose machinery creates the slaughterhouse), yet the body is constantly disintegrating, eating and being eaten, being penetrated and giving birth. With manic humor and desperate honesty, Reines finds hope by facing the extremes of embodiment without judgment or disgust. Winner of the 2006 Alberta Prize from FENCE Books.

Fiction:
Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Precocious, decadent classics students at an isolated New England college kill someone during their attempt to recreate a Dionysian rite, then go mad covering it up. What I love about this book is that it works on so many levels. It’s a great thriller, but also a novel of ideas, and a modern-day Greek tragedy about hubris and tempting the gods. The protagonists experience the ultimate punishment of getting exactly what they asked for. Having chosen to live in their own superior, imaginary world (a campy mixture of the Roaring Twenties and ancient Greece), they are judged by that world’s merciless, fatalistic standards. Occasional intrusions of 1980s America into their reverie are sometimes comical, sometimes heartbreaking, a reminder that there is a real world where their games have consequences.

Nonfiction:
Byron Brown, Soul Without Shame: A Guide to Liberating Yourself from the Judge Within
An unparalleled practical guide to living in grace. Learn to be present with your true self and allow your spiritual growth to be directed by love, not fear. This book is written from an Eastern meditation perspective but is wholly compatible with a Christian worldview.


Magazines of the Year

The Open Face Sandwich
Brilliantly deranged literary journal of innovative prose and found texts. Highlights from the first issue include a short memoir by Ariana Reines, excerpts from the unpublished novels of Hortense Caruthers (an author so reclusive that she may not exist), and lovely photos of Atlanta roadkill.

Chroma: A Queer Literary and Arts Journal
This British literary journal publishes and promotes edgy, lyrical, and challenging prose, poetry and artwork by lesbian, gay, bi and trans writers and artists. They also offer an international queer writing competition.

Bloom
Queer fiction, art, poetry and more. Editorial board includes Charles Flowers and Dorothy Allison.

10 Magazine
Gorgeous British fashion mag with an attitude.

Photo
Monthly French magazine about artistic and commercial photography. Go track down their October issue celebrating Patrick Demarchelier. Delicious!


Personal Milestones

Best decision: Dyeing my hair red.

Proudest accomplishment: Being sane.

Second proudest accomplishment: Publishing several chapters of my novel-in-progress.

Biggest indulgence: Thrift-shop clothes and Barbie dolls.

Verses to Live By:
“Perfect love casts out fear.” (1 John 4:18)
“Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To his own master he stands or falls. And he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand.” (Romans 14:4)
“I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” (1 Cor 2:2)

Good times:

Northampton Pride 2008:



Confirmation into the Episcopal Church:



10th wedding anniversary:




“Darwin’s Sacred Cause”: The Anti-Slavery Roots of Evolutionary Theory


One of my favorite classes at Harvard was “Nature, God and Religion”, taught by James R. Moore, a visiting lecturer in the History of Science Department. Jim, a leading expert on Charles Darwin’s life and cultural context, always made complex ideas seem accessible and lively, giving us a taste of the radical zeal that inspired 19th-century thinkers who grappled with the relationship between science and religion.
 
Jim and his colleague Adrian Desmond have collaborated on several books about Darwin, the latest being Darwin’s Sacred Cause, available now for pre-order from Penguin Books UK. In this study, they argue that Darwin’s passionate opposition to slavery motivated him to seek a common ancestor for all human races, countering the conventional wisdom that non-whites were distinct and inferior species. Here’s an excerpt from Jim and Adrian’s fascinating interview on the Penguin Books website:


What was the initial spark that inspired you to write a book arguing such a revolutionary thesis?

We asked the big question in our 1991 Darwin biography: “Why did such a rich and impeccably upright gent go out of his way to develop such a subversive and inflammatory image of human evolution? He had everything to lose!” But we only partially answered it, showing how Darwin covered his tracks and kept ominously quiet for thirty years on the subject, before publishing The Descent of Man in 1871. The question kept niggling: `Why did he do it – and why did he wait so long?’ We knew that contemporary radicals, Christian and otherwise, had opposed slavery, and then it dawned on us that the Darwin family’s anti-slavery brotherhood beliefs could have driven the ‘common descent’ approach of Darwin’s particular brand of evolution.

About ten years ago our thesis began to jell. Jim was particularly interested in The Descent of Man, which no one seemed to have read. Why was two-thirds of a book supposedly about human evolution devoted to beetles, butterflies, birds and furry mammals? Darwin’s answer was: to prove his theory of `sexual selection’. But why was sexual selection so important to Darwin? Jim’s answer: because it was his prize explanation of racial common descent – why black people and white people looked different but were still members of the same family, not separately created species, as pro-slavery demagogues were arguing. Meanwhile Adrian realized how Darwin’s work on fancy pigeons and hybrids, leading up to sexual selection, also served to undermine pro-slavery science. What’s more, Darwin had originally intended all of this to go into his great work on evolution, which was finally published as The Origin of Species – a book that everyone knows `omits man’. No Eureka moment for us, then, but a lot of loose ends came together to tie a gloriously satisfying knot.

2009 is the Darwin Bicentenary, as well as the 150th anniversary of the publication of his Origin of Species. Why has it taken so long to discover the moral motivation behind Darwin’s theories of sexual selection and human origins?

The Descent of Man hasn’t been read, much less read carefully. Over and over, scholars have called it `two books’ crushed together (and it is unwieldy, over 900 pages). That’s one reason. Another is this: only in the last generation have Darwin’s private notebooks, letters and marginal jottings become fully available. Without these, it was difficult to trace the development of his views on human origins. Above all, though, there has been great reluctance to see Darwin as more than a heroic `genius’ uncovering pure gems of `truth’ beyond the vision of ordinary mortals.

To most of his admirers, Darwin was a `great scientist’ getting on with a great scientist’s proper job, not a Victorian gentleman with a moral passion making all life kin by solving that contemporary `mystery of mysteries’, how living species originate. But historians today see Darwin quite differently: they emphasize the social and historical context that made it possible for Darwin or anyone to craft a theory from available cultural resources. One such resource in Darwin’s world was anti-slavery, the greatest moral movement of his age. Our thesis is that the anti-slavery values instilled in him from youth became the moral premise of his work on evolution. Many scientists and philosophers think that explaining genius and its insights as we do saps the power of science and, given the challenge of creationism, is an act of treachery. The reluctance to dig beneath the surface of Darwin’s books into the social and cultural resources of his times is as dogged as ever.

And why is Darwin’s moral motivation important?

This is perhaps the most radical and upsetting idea: that there was a moral impetus behind Darwin’s work on human evolution – a brotherhood belief, rooted in anti-slavery, that led to a ‘common descent’ image for human ancestry, an image that Darwin extended to the rest of life, making not just the races, but all creatures brothers and sisters. In his family `tree of life’, all share a common ancestor. It’s vital to realize that Darwin’s science wasn’t the `neutral’, dispassionate practise of textbook caricature; it was driven by human desires and needs and foibles. Even our most vaunted theories – such as human evolution by a common descent with apes and all other creatures – may be fostered by humanitarian concerns. This throws all Darwin’s work – so vilified for being morally subversive – into an entirely different light.

Pre-order the book on Amazon here. Listen to an interview with Jim and Adrian here (recorded for Dutch radio, but in English).