How I Was Visited by Messengers – a true story and oblique review

Today I went to the bookstore.  I went knowing I wanted a book, but not which book.  I was willing to be surprised.

I wanted a book because all of the books on my shelves at home seemed dull and stale, even the ones I hadn’t read.  Especially the ones I hadn’t read. 

I went to Brookline Booksmith because it was within walking distance.  I was about to write “the only bookstore” within walking distance, but then I realized that this was relative.  A real walker, for instance, might easily have chosen to go a little further and browse the used books at the Boston Book Annex, or a little further still to peruse the remainders at Symposium Books in Kendall Square, whereas a very elderly person or just someone even lazier than I am would have to make do with the rack of commercial paperbacks in the CVS across the street.  I was somewhere in the middle, and so I walked to the Brookline Booksmith.

I went downstairs to the used section but was unable to find anything that didn’t seem dull and stale, like the books on my shelves at home, especially the ones I hadn’t read.  I went back upstairs and paced back and forth along the wall devoted to paperback fiction.  I picked up this book, that book, scanned a few pages, put them all back. 

Then this one caught my eye: 

Today I Wrote Nothing:  The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms.  It is edited and translated by Matvei Yankelevich, who is also the founder and director of Ugly Duckling Presse (although this book was published by Overlook) and a poet in his own right. 

The book caught my eye because it sat so strangely on the shelf.  There between Marian Keyes’s Rachel’s Holiday (“Irresistibly funny,” Seattle Times) and Chip Kidd’s The Learners (which both Newsweek and Entertainment Weekly acclaim for its similarity to the cable-TV show Mad Men), it somehow looked like it didn’t quite belong. 

A trade paperback, but slightly wider and just a hair taller than the average trade paperback – perhaps it had to be that size in order to accommodate Kharms’s extra-large head on the front cover.  On the back cover, in very small print, winked the price, $15.95, also just slightly more expensive than the average fiction trade paperback.  Add to this the nature of the contents themselves – “Selected Writings.”  It wasn’t exactly a novel or a collection of short stories, a “classic” or a work of contemporary “literary fiction” like its fellows – if indeed they were its fellows – on the shelves.  It gave off the vibe of having an editorial apparatus, which put it distinctly at odds with the volumes on either side of it.  And yet it also seemed to promise – if I would only pick it up – to wear this apparatus lightly.  I flipped through the pages.  It featured a mix of poetry and prose, but it didn’t look like it would have fit any better in the Brookline Booksmith poetry section, either.   

I continued stalking back and forth along the fiction wall.  After a while I noticed that I still had the book in my hand, so I took it up the checkout counter for the salesclerk to ring up. 

While I got my wallet out the salesclerk scanned the barcode with the scanner and the computerized register made several beeps.  The salesclerk frowned, looked at the book, looked at something on his screen, re-scanned the book, frowned again.  He punched a number of keys very quickly – he certainly knew his way around that register – while looking back and forth from the book to screen.  Finally he squinted over my head into the recesses of the store.  He didn’t have to stand on tip-toes because in the Brookline Booksmith there is a raised platform behind the counter.

“Where did you get this?” he said.

I said the fiction section and pointed to the proper wall.

“Well, it’s not in our computer.”  He opened the cover to see if by chance there was a price penciled at the top corner of the title page, indicating a used book.

“So in a sense,” I ventured, “you don’t have this book.”

“Hmm,” he said.  The corner was blank. 

“I mean, in contemporary terms, if you think about it,” I went on, “if it's not in the computer, it doesn’t really exist.”

He manipulated the book several ways in his hands as if trying to get it into some kind of focus and then settled for scrutinizing the back cover again.  Behind me a customer cleared her throat.

“It’s off the grid,” I said.

For the first time we made eye contact. 

“Yeah,” he said finally, considering.  “It’s off the grid.”  

Piranesi in Bloomington

      "At first I thought the security camera was looking at me, but after I glanced over my shoulder I realized it was looking at the security camera behind me. That was cute, like something from one of those Pixar movies, but after a minute I realized it was pretty creepy, actually..."

A new story at 3:AM Magazine.

New Fiction at Unlikely Stories & Gloom Cupboard

Abominable, awful, beastly, blasphemous, cloying, chthonic, creepy, dessicated, detestable, disgusting, distateful, eldritch, erroneous, fetid, foul, frightful, ghastly, grody, gross, gruesome, hateful, hideous, horrid, horrific, hysterical-realist, icky, loathsome, lousy, lurid, macabre, magniloquent, monstrous, nasty, nauseating, nerdy, noisome, nostalgic, objectionable, obnoxious, odious, offensive, outrageous, phony, pretentious, rank, repellent, repugnant, repulsive, revolting, rotten, satiating, scandalous, scuzzy, sensationalistic, shameless, shocking, shrill, sickening, sleazy, sphincter-clenching, stinking, surfeiting, torpid, unlikely, vile, vulgar, wretched, yecchy, yucky...

"The Animal Torture Years," now up at Unlikely Stories.  

And if you're still hankering afterwords, there's new flash-fiction, "Now the Only Drugs" (scroll down) in the Gloom Cupboard for pudding.  

New Story at Meeting House

I'm pleased as pie that a new story of mine, "Hushabye," is now up at Meeting House magazine, a journal of New England literature and arts.  And it's even a New England-themed story.  Pewter! Scrimshaw!  Blueberries!

New Story at The Legendary

Q:  What do you get when you cross a Jim Thompson novel with a chupacabra petting-zoo and grill whatever's left until the meat slides off the bone?

A:  Something like the sensibility of Jim Parks and Katie Moore, legendary editors of the webzine The Legendary. 

Check out the August issue, online now.  It’s potluck, but with fiction servings by Errid Farland, Jill Weinberger, Chris Castle, Rachel Cann, M.E. Purfield, Brandi Wells, Timothy Gager, Brent Powers, Steve Glines, Jeffrey S. Callico, Ryan McBride, Ryan Burden, Liz Haigh, and a little story by me called “Clue,” you’re sure to find something to make you wish you’d brought along a bushel of those individually-wrapped sanitary hand-wipes.  Enjoy.  

Bitter Lemons (Bellapais, Cyprus)

You Can't Have it Both Ways, or, Bob Herbert and the Contradictions of the Black Media Pundit

Given the current climate of media opinion on the Gates Affair, Bob Herbert's truth-telling column in the August 1 New York Times has to be seen as an act of courage.  Gates, said Herbert, was arrested for nothing other than being "angry while black," an unforgivable offense in the eyes of the establishment and its gendarmerie even if committed by a member of the establishment itself - a Harvard professor, say, or a President.  

Black Americans, Herbert countered, should indeed be angry; he concluded his column with a rousing call (even echoing, as you'll see, Malcolm X) for them "to rant and to rave, to demonstrate and to lobby, to march and confront and to sue and generally do whatever is necessary to stop a continuing and deeply racist criminal justice outrage."

Yet back in April 2008, during the Democratic Presidential primary, Bob Herbert devoted one of his columns to the mocking slap-down of Black individual for the offense of doing the very "ranting and raving" he now calls for - the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.  Wright's denunciations of U.S. racism were perfectly reasonable, both in their content and their tone, but Herbert portrayed him as a self-promoting clown, divisive and - in the context of Senator Obama's presidential candidacy - destructive:

"Feeling dissed by Senator Obama, Mr. Wright gets revenge on his former follower while bathed in a spotlight brighter than any he could ever have imagined. He’s living a narcissist’s dream. At long last, his 15 minutes have arrived.

So there he was lecturing an audience at the National Press Club about everything from the black slave experience to the differences in sentencing for possession of crack and powdered cocaine.

All but swooning over the wonderfulness of himself, the reverend acts like he is the first person to come up with the idea that blacks too often get the short end of the stick in America, that the malignant influences of slavery and the long dark night of racial discrimination are still being felt today, that in many ways this is a profoundly inequitable society."

Wright, said Herbert at the time, needed to sit down and shut up (like Bobby Seale during the Chicago 7 trial, I suppose, who was ordered bound and gagged by the judge) so that Obama could more successfully woo "white working-class" voters away from Hilary Clinton.  Has U.S. society changed so much in the meantime, that now more "angry" voices such as Wright's need to be heard?  Of course it hasn't, and Herbert knows it.  He also knows that if he keeps writing columns like his August 1st one, he won't be working for the New York Times much longer. Chances are he'll be returning to form soon.