The Euphoria of Slime

by Daniel Johnson

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Last week, my girlfriend sent me a link to a string of tweets from a third-grade math teacher at a Brooklyn elementary school detailing the events of a sting operation that went down in one of the girls’ bathrooms earlier that day. The bathroom, administrators had learned, was a local haunt for proprietors and customers of neither drugs nor cigarettes nor Pokémon cards nor Trolli gummi worms, as in my day, but homemade specialty slime: butter slime, fluffy slime, cloud slime, slushie slime, smoothie slime, glossy slime (standard slime), floam, icee slime, fishbowl slime; slime that smelled like bubblegum, chocolate, Swedish fish; slime stuffed with regular beads, styrofoam beads, and glitter. The foiled slimelord, according to the tweets, was named Griselda, and she not only “had the game on smash,” but also “had mad flavors too.” 

The idea of slime as a “game”—rife with hallway territory wars, slime-slinging middlemen, customers who drool over the newest, dankest flavors—is just plain delicious, and far more malfeasant than my original association with the phenomenon. I first learned of it months ago, also via my girlfriend, who, as a way to relax and often before bed, watches videos in which disembodied hands create and play with all sorts of these specialty slimes. She has her favorite “slimers,” and has purchased small quantities of their products, which arrive in clear plastic tubes or Tupperware containers, sometimes accompanied by a piece of candy. Some she keeps in her desk at work, some at home. For her, slime isn’t far from hand-occupational therapy. It both calms and thrills her. 

We’ve watched some videos together. Their allure is both hypnotic and meditative; watch enough, and you’ll notice the distinct and mindless rhythm to the mixing, folding, and swirling. It’s a sensory experience unto itself, separate from the tactile rapture of actually playing with the stuff. I find the suction squelch of slimer fingers depressing into and releasing from a dollop of floam to be downright euphoric. My girlfriend explains her affinity for the videos, in part, as “an ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) thing.” Which is to say, the effect is not unlike auditory-tactile synesthesia, whereby certain sounds induce the sensation of touching or, perhaps more importantly, being touched. 

Consider, too, the strangely pleasing language and verbiage surrounding slime and all you can do with it: glob, blob, jiggle, squeeze, ooze, gum, flub, goo, smush. The almost universal absence of hard Anglo-Saxon consonants echoes the smooth, quieting effect ten minutes with a handful of butter slime might have on a disquieted mind. 

Like so many other video crazes—unboxing, pimple-popping, etc.—there's a vast subculture dedicated to the slime frenzy on Instagram. From what I understand, the community can get hostile and petty. Many slimers are simply entrepreneurial teenagers (often younger, like Griselda) who are quick to accuse people of stealing their ideas, poaching followers, using cheap materials. And I get it. For some of us, theirs may be a therapeutic—albeit a Nickelodeon-nostalgic and super funky—product, but that’s reductive; for slimers, slime is both an amorphous art form and an increasingly lucrative economy. How can anyone be taken seriously as an artisan slimesmith in such a competitive landscape if she can so easily be ripped off by the latest Elmer’s Glue-and-glitter-using copycat? Not long ago, a twenty-three-year-old slimer made enough money off her product to retire and purchase a six-bedroom home. Marketwise, there’s no ceiling here. 

And yet, as with fidget-spinners and booger-balls, specialty slime is just the latest glorious novelty added to the treasure trove of infuriating shit teachers have to confiscate and feel too old to understand. The string of tweets has since been deleted, but the third-grade teacher reported that none of the students were disciplined, despite the significant haul seized in the sting. I like to think Griselda—what a wonderfully villainous name for the folk symbol she’s become!—is battening down the hatches, returning to her basement laboratory, and scheming up a superslime that’ll bring the school administrators to their knees, make all the other slimes look like garden-variety flubber, smash the game anew, and hit the online markets before Christmas. I’ll buy that one myself. 

Daniel Johnson is a graduate of Southern New Hampshire University's MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction. He is currently an Editorial Assistant at Bedford/St. Martin's Press.

Plenty

by Curtis Graham

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A man in his forties

Comes to see my apartment

Today, to see if he wants to

Live here when I am gone.

He squirrels in place

In his black sneakers and

White socks. He tugs the

Belly of his untucked work polo.

 

He looks around and says,

Plenty of room here.

I mean you don’t need much stuff.

You really don’t. I mean,

What do I have at home. A TV stand.

Couple dressers, right. Bed.

What more do you need.

 

We talk about leaks

And a painting hanging on

My wall. He stuffs his hands

Deep inside his pockets,

Halfway up the arms. He leans weight

On either foot and talks to me.

 

Shit, plenty of room here.

More than my studio.

I don’t have much, especially

After the divorce. Ha ha. Ha.

You know, half’s gone, but really–

People says to me, Hey Bill

Why don’t you get a table so you can

Eat in the kitchen, and I says

When am I ever not eating

In front of the TV. Right?

Never, that’s when. You don’t

Need a table. It’s like I said.

 

He looks around the space.

Beige matted carpets,

Spackled ceiling

Cracked with leaks, peeling in swaths

Like snakeskin.

Tiny black mold flowers growing

On the sills. The screams of pumps

And boilers behind thin walls.

 

It’s like I said. He shakes my hand.

What more do you need.

How Writing a Novel is like Managing a Warehouse

by Phil Lemos

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I’m writing a novel.  Occasionally I get asked what that’s like.  I tell them it’s exactly like managing a warehouse.  

I work graveyard shift four nights a week as an assistant shift manager at a warehouse near where I live.  Running a warehouse involves unlocking the doors every night, plotting out a game plan for how to tackle the expected volume, and putting all the associates in the right places to maximize flow and efficiency.  Then you record all this information on your laptop so you don’t lose any critical information.  This all happens before the rank and file enter the building.  Once everyone arrives, you make a few announcements, turn on the conveyor belt and the shift begins.

No matter how meticulously you plan in advance, it’s inevitable that the night descends into chaos.  A handful of people won’t show up for their shifts (this number climbs to considerably more than a handful if the Patriots played earlier that evening), leaving gaps that you have to fill.  It’s inevitable that a giant box containing laundry detergent, paint or chlorine will fall off the belt and spill all over one of the aisles.  Twice a week the conveyor belt jams or breaks down.  Sometimes it’s an easy fix.  But conveyor belts can be temperamental, and often you find yourself calling the warehouse engineer at 2am to get him in and troubleshoot it. 

From their first couple of shifts, every employee thinks that they, too, can run the warehouse.  They spend all their time complaining about what the managers do wrong – how we push the volume too fast, too slow, run one line faster than the other, purposely give them shitty scanners that always crap out on them (even though they themselves hit the wrong button and caused it to crap out), screw them over by putting them in the hard aisles or making them work with the shitty employees.  While they do this belly-aching, all the packages that they’re supposed to be picking up slide past them on the belt. 

The three days a week that I’m not working at the warehouse, I cram in as much time as possible working on my novel.  Writing a novel involves unlocking your imagination, mapping out a skeletal version of your manuscript’s structure, and organizing the chapters properly to maximize flow and readability.  Then you record all this information in your laptop, before you forget all the ideas you came up with.  Once you’re properly situated in front of the screen, you pump yourself up, turn on the creative portion of your brain, and start tapping at the keys.

No matter how hard you try to motivate yourself, it’s inevitable that your writing session descends into chaos.  Your creative side won’t come up with enough ideas to advance your story or develop character (or you’re just not in a writing mood because the Patriots are playing), leaving plot holes that you have to fill.  You’ll spill your drink, forcing you to put your ideas aside and grab some paper towels before your laptop electrocutes you.  Or your file will become infected with a virus.  Sometimes you can shut down and restart, but laptops can be temperamental, so you find yourself running over to Best Buy to see if the Geek Squad can save your work.    

From the moment they hear me talk about my manuscript, everyone thinks they, too, can write a novel.  They’ll come up to me and say, “Oh yeah I’m gonna write a novel one of these days,” as if all you have to do is spend a weekend typing a bunch of words and voila, it’ll be in stores the following Tuesday at midnight.  They’ll spend this coming weekend doing exactly that, until they realize that it takes hard work and determination, and they don’t have the patience to devote an insane amount of time to writing 300 pages of prose in a coherent, engaging format.

So, there you have it.  Managing a warehouse and writing a novel couldn’t be more similar.  And explaining this to would be novelists and managers tends to scare both off the task.  Which is probably a good thing.

Last Week/This Week: Shitstorms, Race, and Slime

by Ashley Bales

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We’ve made it to another week without being blown into the ocean or blasted into a radiated hell-scape, though philosopher Byung-Chul Han thinks our values are being swallowed up in a social media “shitstorm.”  Adrian Nathan West’s piece in the LARB reminded me to finish Han’s treatise, In the Swarm, a critique of the effects of the digital age on our lives, sociality and power structures.  It has me glad my foundational worldview is biological not philosophical.  How depressing to always be thinking about the degradation of humanistic values, much better to reject the concept of humanistic values all together.  Ok, ok, our value systems are ecologically and evolutionarily embedded.  They will not get sucked into Han’s “shitstorm” and go poof as easily as our disintegrating civil liberties.  I didn’t say there weren’t consequences, but our humanity isn’t at stake.  I had an up-side when I started this paragraph: grateful to be slaving away at self-production, about to pour over Han’s book.

In other depressing, internet-related news: Amazon ‘pays 11 times less corporation tax than traditional booksellers.’

Toni Morrison discusses her career-long exploration of writing race without color as a means to “…defang racism, annihilate and discredit the routine, easy, available color fetish, which is reminiscent of slavery itself;” Thrity Umrigar is pressured to write only characters belonging to her race; and Mountainview Alumna Nadia Owusu explores the complexity of blackness and her experience as the lighter skinned black girl at her boarding school. Owusu writes: “I used to look to literature to help me understand how to exist in an often racist world.  I sought to understand the unjust rules, and admittedly, how to make them bend in my favor.  Now, I read to understand how to reject them, how to rewrite them.”

This week on the blog, Phil Lemos compares writing a novel to managing a warehouse, a new poem by Curtis Graham, and Daniel Johnson considers the sensory ecstasy of Instagram slime videos.

Ashley Bales is a current student of Southern New Hampshire University's MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.  She holds a Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology, teaches in the Math and Science Department at Pratt Institute and is web editor for Assignment Magazine.

Faculty Picks: Sartre, Gyasi, Kurtén

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Richard Adams Carey-- Jean-Paul Sartre’s eerie first novel, Nausea, published in 1938, could not be described as plot driven. Action? Well, protagonist Antoine Roquentin is a writer (and a loner) struggling to finish a biography of minor 18th century politician, to rekindle a romance with a former lover, and to resist the blandishments of a lonely autodidact who will be revealed to be a pedophile.

The real action is all within. Roquentin’s primary adversary is something that might be viewed as depression, but for Sartre it’s an especially clear-eyed grasp of the human condition. Trivial moments and objects are described in revelatory detail, in passages that ring with both their beauty and the hollowness glimpsed at their core. The result for Roquentin is a sense of nausea that “spreads at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom of our time—the time of purple suspenders and broken chair seats; it is made of wide, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain.”

The novel is written in diary form, and its final sentence—“Tomorrow it will rain in Bouville”—is life-affirming in the sense that at least there will be a tomorrow. Sartre’s hero endures, and if we could read his description of that rain, the imagery would be stunning.

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Jo Knowles-- I recently read and loved Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (Knopf, 2016). It's a riveting historical novel that follows the descendants of two sisters born on the Gold Coast of Africa who were separated by slavery, and the horrors that follow for generations, both in Africa and in America. The plotting, the characterization, the deep emotional punch every chapter packs is remarkable. Each chapter reads not so much like a short-story but a novella, and by the end of each, you feel cheated by having to leave the character you've just come to care deeply about. It's a masterful novel that explores the development of institutional racism and the deep and lasting impact of slavery that much of America still has not fully grasped.

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Craig Childs-- I was asked what I’d read last. Having just finished writing two books in the past few weeks I thought, do I even read books anymore?

Then I remembered my research. Towers of it. The last book was Pleistocene Mammals of North America by the eminent, late paleontologist Björn Kurtén and his late co-author, born in Leadville, Colorado, osteologist Elaine Anderson, a dear friend who worked an Ice Age field camp with me in the 90s.

Printed in 1980, Pleistocene Mammals remains the hardcover manual on the general distribution, habitat, and fossil specifications for Ice Age animals, or anything else to live on this continent in the last couple million years. The drawings of teeth and jaws, jumping mice and mammoths, are simple, clean, and scientific. The language is often clinical, “the posterior mandibular foramen is larger than the anterior...”

But it’s a book that tells you something, a sort of time machine. You pass through pages showing ranges of sabertooth cats and Ice Age seals, and a world is reborn.

To write, you are not just in your own head, not just reading as a lark. Reading becomes solid work. You have to learn different ways stories can be told. Call it research, or world-building, this is where the good stuff is.

How to Write War: Learning from Tim O’Brien

by Eddie Dzialo

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Though it seems like a different life, I used to be an infantry officer in the Marine Corps. I deployed to Iraq in 2008, Afghanistan in 2009, and I usually don’t elaborate further. I don’t avoid talking about my service to protect myself from painful memories. Some of the proudest moments of my life happened during those years and the people that I deployed with know a side of me that no one else can. When I avoid the subject of my deployments, I do so because I know I will become the focus of the story. And I’m not the point. I’ve read too many war books, written by people who aggrandize their heroics, their condemnation or support for the political ideologies that fuel combat. I didn’t want to become one of those people. Shortly after getting out of the Marines, I stopped reading books about war altogether.

When I entered the Mountainview MFA program, I wrestled with how to write about my own experiences in a way that would overcome the trappings of war narratives that I so detested. As I struggled, my mentor recommended I read The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, to show me how O’Brien navigated the difficulties of writing about combat. I agreed to read it only to prove my mentor wrong, to explain why I was against such books. It would be my excuse to walk away from writing about my experience. But my mentor was right. Halfway through the first story, O’Brien had already posed and answered the questions I hadn’t even known to ask.

I understand what O’Brien was risking by writing those stories: making the book about himself.  In writing war, you are never what’s most important. Any fear that Tim O’Brien might have written this book for his own edification leaves with the story “On the Rainy River.” Tim O’Brien, the story’s protagonist, is present, but as a frightened teenager who’s been swept up in events that he was powerless to stop. It’s self-deprecating, discussing fear with a brutal integrity that does not allow ‘heroics’ to intrude on the story’s honesty. “...I was too good for this war. Too smart, too compassionate, too everything.”  These earnest emotions allow O’Brien to downplay his role within the stories and allow them to become more powerful than himself.

 “How to Tell a True War Story” gave me the words to understand my discomfort with war narratives by explaining what a war story is, what it isn’t, and what it can achieve.

What it isn’t: “A true war story is never moral...if a story is moral, do not believe it.” By not attaching lessons to his war stories, O’Brien is making a conscious effort not to bend them towards a purpose. He doesn’t give the atrocities any value. A real war story has an “...absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.”

What it is: “In any war story...it is difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.” Though the book is a work of fiction, The Things They Carried blurs the line between fiction and reality. The men named in the dedication are characters in the stories, and the opening sentence of “How to Tell a True War Story” is “This is true.” The reader cannot distinguish fact from fiction, just as O’Brien struggles to resolve his memories of war. “When a guy dies, you look away...pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot.”

What it can achieve: The most emotional scene in “How to Tell a True War Story” occurs when one of the characters tortures a baby water buffalo. The more the baby struggles, the more pain the character inflicts upon it. “It wobbled and went down sideways. Rat shot it in the nose.” As disturbing as this story is, the reader is left wondering if it really happened, if the author spliced an event that he witnessed into his fiction. To O’Brien, veracity is relative. “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.”

I still approach books about war with a healthy amount of skepticism, but by reading The Things They Carried, I witnessed how Tim O’Brien embraced his past and discussed it with honestly and humility. It’s a book that was selflessly written for other people, and I think that each time I reread it.

Devils at the Stateline

by David Moloney

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In a woeful attempt to find an adjunct job for the Fall, not much established itself as definite. As for outlook, I shot for hopeful, but landed on urgent, so I returned to my old job at a Stateline package store. The store’s sign stood tall overhead for passerby, announcing the tax disparity between Massachusetts and New Hampshire: Low beer/cig prices before you hit Taxachusetts. But the two states didn’t only share a difference in tax code. MAGA hats were prevalent on the northern side of the border, along with Confederate flag bumper stickers, or the actual flags waving above muddy Ford F-150’s. To me, the occupants were driving around in too close proximity to my blue state with their “Old Joe” middle fingers out the windows. But working that counter, selling Rave menthols and twenty packs of watered down beer to customers who shared different worldviews meant the job was just a job. I held no prestige. I couldn’t forbid selling to anyone when I wasn’t the owner. I merely owned tenancy in myself, but so did Wells Fargo and Great Lakes student loans.

Anyways, there was Michelle, a peculiar woman I worked nights with. She first introduced herself, about a month back, as a prophet of the Lord. She entered the store with an air of familiarity: raspy, smoker’s voice, bloodshot eyes, a pooch for a belly signaling years of Budweiser consumption and little Debbie night caps. Not as a ribs-through-robe prophet, with long, silken hair, sandals, and plaintive authenticity found in scripture. She was but of the maddening, contemporary flesh, chubby with a fondness of thirsty Thursday’s on the lake, not something dreamt up by early writers: a calm, preaching of what an all-loving God would reveal in the coming age. There was no direction in her proclamations. She told me, rather quickly into our first shift, that I had demons around me. They weren’t satisfied demons; the demons surrounding me were hungry. You never know when crazy is going to show itself, or what crazy really is. I thought I knew crazy, until I’d seen Michelle, wearing the store’s black button down, a Dunkin Donuts large coffee straw sticking out of her breast pocket, tickling her sun-burnt cheek, explained how when God decided it was the end, giant grasshoppers would be tasked with removing the sinners.

I found her seriousness comical at first. But then, it was disconcerting. Were their demons around me? I pulled packs of blue Parliament and silver Montclair out of the overhead slots, rang up make-your-own micro-beer sixer’s for the bearded (dare I say it) hipsters, exchanged empty propane tanks for fresh ones, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the hypothetical demons hovering over me.

 

Sure, we all have demons. That isn’t a fresh take on the metaphor. It had come to my attention though, that certain demons were running amuck, ostensibly as stridulating insects, swarming man-eating locusts, but visible only to the new age prophets such as Michelle. Michelle told me that her husband couldn’t see the fanged hoppers, which was a shame, because they only came to him when he slept at night, and he was a restless sleeper. She seemed to believe he would benefit from a sight or two of the demons. It would be a relief; his heavy caffeine consumption wasn’t to blame for his restlessness, nor the sleep apnea, which his fat ass (her words) could use as a crutch. He needed a manifestation of the demon to reveal itself. To him, there was no sense in her ramblings, she said. Her words, warnings, meant nothing. He needed to take sight of what she knew to be true. Because she could see the demons, she argued, she was relieved of the suffering. She could see their hunger, and welcomed it. Everyone’s hunger, she said, was worth satisfying. She could see the gluttony, the alcoholism, the neglect of oneself, the lack of faith, the ones waiting to be fed on, their destruction, as satisfying both God and the demons. God sent her, and others like her, to attempt salvation. The demons just reaped the battles she failed to win.

As she rang up her customers from behind the counter we shared, with a smile on her face, each customer walking up with their vices, paying for their demons, she held her confident smile. There was always that long straw in her pocket, and every so often she bent her face towards it, and rubbed her cheek on the paper covering. I wondered if she knew a majestic comfort in the touch, the wood pulp embrace of the straw covering, that I was missing. 

David Moloney is a graduate of Southern New Hampshire University's Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.  He currently teaches writing at UMASS Lowell and Southern New Hampshire University.

Zweig's Blessed Freedom, Destroying Obedience

by Garrett Zecker

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Stefan Zweig was arguably the most famous worldwide author of the early twentieth-century, and his resurgence in popularity in the last five years comes as no surprise. On the 75th anniversary of his suicide, new translations from Pushkin Press, The New York Review of Books, and Hesperus Press fill shelves. Scholars are fiercely debating one another on the value of his work. George Prochnik has delivered a sparkling new biography. New interpretations and adaptations pull Zweig’s work from obscurity, most notably Wes Anderson’s cobbling together of several of Zweig’s novels to create his masterpiece The Grand Budapest Hotel. Perhaps what is most surprising is the large number of American readers and scholars who remain unfamiliar with his work.

The noteworthy editions published by Pushkin Press of London have encouraged me to revisit his work. Anthea Bell’s translation of his Collected Stories capture Zweig’s fledgling development of a new twenty-first century voice. The pieces energetically catapult the purpose and form of story over his forty-year career from Romantic frame, through the verbose Victorian, and into an approachable metafiction we’ve come to expect from our contemporary narratives. But Zweig would encourage readers not to mistake the self-depreciating ordinariness of his work, so much so that I don’t doubt he would go as far as to enthusiastically promote the merits of Anderson’s film above his own writing. Still, his pieces read as if Sholem Aleichem’s oral histories were pressed through a Joycean sieve. He presents most of them in what was an already antiquated form, such as epistolary correspondence or frame stories. Rereading these works in 2017, I am reminded of his strangely protean political and emotional existence as a writer in exile. Zweig’s failure to identify with nation, voice, and allegiance is beautifully apparent through the existential angst present in the forty year development of work presented in this collection. Unfortunately, the very confusion that makes his work so powerfully unique is likely the same that led to his early demise thousands of miles from his crippled fascist homeland.

As twenty-first century writers, we find similar difficulty in balancing the many ways in which our sociopolitical identities intersect with those of our culture. Zweig’s aggressive honesty and self-actualization isn’t afraid to confront the intellectual and political (Mendel the Bibliophile), the emotional (Letter from an Unknown Woman), the sexual (Leporella), and the existential (A Summer Novella), and he does so in a manner that recognizes that exploring the wandering truth of oral-history style narrative is just as valuable to the message as it is to the structure of the story itself. Zweig’s form holds on to the human voice in a manner quite unusual for its time, and it provides a valuable model for capturing authenticity in today’s work. Piecing together a narrative from our disjointed world is no easy task. Zweig’s enthusiastic and innovative prose reminds us to capture the pacing of conversational voice, essence of identity, and living personal consciousness in our work. Zweig’s hurly-burly world was definitively different than ours in terms of our external conflicts, however his vibrant presentation of the human condition feels more relevant than ever.

Last Week/This Week: New Students, Old Arguments, and a Death

by Ashley Bales

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The world is full of change and tragedy: John Ashbery died, fall 2017 semesters started across the country, and I am reading a book on my phone.  That list may suffer from issues of scale and context, but not sincerity.  A tragic loss is followed by the inevitable ticking forward of academic clocks to the tune of incoming freshman that will soon demand post-millennial identities, and a stubborn holdout (me) is pushed along. 

The academy continues to rage at itself: down with historic-contextualism, three cheers for practical criticism.  Roth’s irate review of Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History by Joseph North may go a bit too far in bashing literature departments by dismissing their central goal of “the production of knowledge” as a backward facing circle jerk. But one can only hope that the call to action from both author and critic for a more pedagogical focus in which literature may be experienced as opposed to simply contextualized will be answered. For better or worse, my students want nothing more than for me to tell them about themselves—the little egoists. 

As I I shuffle my own way up the ivory tower—hearing the scholars rumble, still closer to the students—new semesters mean new jobs.  Mixed feelings is how I’d describe the revelation that one of these new employers has a tenure-like system for adjuncts.  Tenure-adjacent, you won’t get fired, but you won’t have the time or energy for any frivolous writing (or knowledge production).  The other new employer had me interviewed by students for a week not to see if I got the job (which I had), but if my class would be a good fit for them.  The pedagogy there runs deep.  Perhaps there’s hope after all?

In other shocking changes to what we read and its context: a Page-Turner post on “The Promise and Potential of Fanfiction” proved portentous as “Alleged Author of…My Immortal…Announces Book Deal.”  Sometimes these things happen and there’s no fighting it.

For antidote: Mountainview visiting author Joshua Cohen has a new story out in Wired, and faculty member Justin Taylor reviews Jenny Zhang's Sour Heart in the current issue of Bookforum.

This week on the blog we'll have current student Garrett Zecker discussing Zweig on the 75th anniversary of his suicide and Eddie Dzialo on the difficulty of writing war.  Alumnus David Moloney finds "Devils at the Stateline."

Ashley Bales is a current student of Southern New Hampshire University's MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.  She holds a Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology, teaches in the Math and Science Department at Pratt Institute and is web editor for Assignment Magazine.

Faculty Picks: Thien, Shepard, Bellow

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Robin Wasserman-- I've spent my summer lurking in Parisian cafes, drinking infuriatingly tiny cups of so-called coffee and trying not to feel like too much of a cliche when I pull out my journal and surreptitiously scrawl down some profound thought. (Said profundity slightly limited by the aforementioned caffeine shortage.) I'm a promiscuous but loyal customer: one cafe for writing, one cafe for critiquing student work, one cafe for hot chocolate, and one cafe, in the shadow of my favorite Parisian church (and, conveniently, favorite Parisian crepe stand), for reading. The last one is obviously the best one, but it's upped the stakes a bit: A book has to be pretty great to distract me from the wafting scent of nutella. Fortunately, I had Madeline Thien's Do Not Say We Have Nothing, one of the most absorbing and ambitious novels I've read this year. A story within a story within a story about the Cultural Revolution and the struggle of art and artists to survive in the face of oppression, Thien's book is brutally beautiful and a reminder that making art is both a privilege and a necessity.

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Justin Taylor-- This September Tin House will publish Jim Shepard’s first collection of nonfiction, The Tunnel at the End of the Light: Essays on Movies and Politics. Shepard’s cinephilia has been well-represented in his fiction (cf. his stories “Gojira, King of the Monsters”, “Boys Town”, “The Creature from the Black Lagoon”, his novel Nosferatu) so it’s a treat to read his wonkish and acerbic takes on the classics: “Badlands, and the ‘Innocence’ of American Innocence”, “Fool me Twice, Shame on Me: Saving Private Ryan and the Politics of Deception.” The essays first appeared in The Believer in the early and mid aughts, so the “politics” of the subhead largely concern the depravities of the second Bush administration, which periodizes the book but hardly dates it. Indeed, Shepard’s meditations on “the power and resilience of the lies we tell ourselves as a collective” have grown—if anything—even more dispiritingly prescient than they were a decade ago. I was going to say this is all less grim than it sounds, but it isn’t. What it is is smart, earnest, and unsparing. 

For nonfiction students in particular, these essays are a solid model for a certain kind of personal-critical essay that puts engagement with a published work of art at its center but is not a "review" of the work in question. And for all Mountainview students, the essays have much to teach in terms of how to approach your close reading assignments and craft papers. Though the essays are polemical and make no pretense of "objectivity" (why would they? how could they? they're framed as persuasive arguments) Shepard is a rigorous of reader of texts--which in this case happen to be films and not books, but the point is the same. He is meticulous in his inspection of the material, noting craft elements like camera angles and minutes of screen time for a given character the way you might keep track of point of view shifts or the page-lengths of a given scene. Once he understands what something is, it's only natural to ask how it got that way, and to explore whether--and why--it succeeds or fails on the terms it has set for itself. 

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Benjamin Nugent-- For years I’ve considered myself a short-story writer, and I have just this month discovered Saul Bellow’s short stories. This is like considering yourself a drummer, and then, after years on the road, finally getting around to checking out Led Zeppelin. Track after track, you go, “Wait, what?” First you are filled with joy. Then you are filled with shame.

Here’s the businessman protagonist of Bellow’s “A Silver Dish,” published in The New Yorker in 1978:

"Woody, now sixty, fleshy and big, like a figure for the victory of American materialism, sunk in his lounge chair, the leather of its armrests softer to his fingertips than a woman’s skin, was puzzled and, in his depths, disturbed by certain blots within him, blots of light in his brain, a blot combining pain and amusement in his breast (how did that get there?) Intense thought puckered the skin between his eyes with a strain bordering on headache."

We’re outside the guy, looking at him, and we’re also inside him, feeling what it’s like to be him, at more or less the same time. As a bonus, we’re considering his symbolic significance. (Bellow is interested in the fact that Woody looks “like a figure for the victory of American materialism” but he’s also determined to make Woody more than a figure, to make him flesh.) When you’re writing short, it helps to be able to dig into a character quickly, the way Led Zeppelin digs into a rhythm. Bellow does it fast.

Boring Poetry: “Paterson” and the Observation of Repression

by Curtis Graham

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The setting is a lustless marriage bed with gray sheets. Paterson lives an objectively boring life.  The only thing more boring than his job as a bus driver, is his poetry.  He is content.  If he has aspirations, we don’t know what they are.  We keep waiting to discover what he’s repressing.

Paterson’s poems appear handwritten across the screen, narrated earnestly in fits and starts by an endearing Adam Driver. The audience is part of the world with whom Paterson is afraid to share his work. We never hear a completed poem, and have to take his wife’s word that his poetry is spectacular. Driver’s voice expounds about the brand of matches he uses, and the burning sensation that love can give. He pairs physical descriptions with a writerly affect that even poetry students could snub.

But first person camera moves immerse us in Paterson’s existence, no matter how bland, and reveal that his sense of self is derived from observation of other people’s lives. Sitting at the front of his bus, he is a pair of eyes in a rearview mirror.

A middle school boy tells his friend he’ll dress as a shadow for Halloween and the camera shows us Paterson’s view: their feet nearly touching beneath the seat. This image is mirrored in the feet of two construction workers. They exchange stories of their weekend hook-ups. A woman offers them romance, and each turns her down for vague reasons. They bounce their heels on the floor, their feet as close as possible without touching.  The camera rises, and we see the men sitting close together. One looks away before affirming that, definitely, he will call the girl back. A vertical pole divides them.

In the climax of the film, Paterson’s dog destroys his poetry notebook. His unphotocopied, unsaved, kept secret from the world, notebook, and in feeling Paterson’s loss, the poems gain significance. Each represents an unrealized life pulled through that rear-view mirror not from his own repression, but the repression of others. And we can finally feel his loneliness.

After the loss of his notebook, Paterson proclaims he is not a poet, but a sage Japanese tourist knows better and presents him with a new one, filled with blank pages. Where this convenient stereotype came from or went to subsequently, is uncommented on, but Paterson is redeemed and begins writing again.

Adam Driver’s voice returns to give us the line, but by the time the screen fades to black, we hardly remember it. The scrawled letters fade into the single word that is important to us: Paterson. We’re left with the hope that Paterson will continue seeing the people around him, even if they never see him. 

My New Barbershop

by Daniel Johnson

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I got my hair cut by the same woman, a family friend—we’ll call her Allison—for twenty-one years, mostly at an in-home salon her husband built for her as a gift. Allison charged us cheap and came to understand the contours of my misshapen skull. She always led off a cut by spinning the chair around so my back was to the sink, gently tipping my head under the faucet’s stream of warm water, shampooing me, and using her wondrously long nails to scratch my head until the product was thoroughly distributed. From this—the scratching—she knew I got a boyish, puppy-dog pleasure. It was something, I know for a fact, she didn’t do for anyone else in my family.

I’ve asked every woman with whom I’ve been romantically involved to, at some point, scratch my head, scratch harder, use your nails. Reliably, most have fallen short of Allison. It is at my insistence that the specter of Allison’s hands stalk the landscapes of both simple haircare maintenance and—what?—foreplay, post-coital murmurings. I believe pleasure spectrums articulate themselves over time. Somewhere along that process of individual definition, the gestures involved in a routine, pre-cut wash warped into sensations I register as deeply ecstatic; for the vast majority of my hairdressed life, I must have looked forward to Allison’s cuts because I found them to be strangely and thrillingly intimate.

Now that I live in New York, I go to a barbershop packed away in a corner on the first floor of a high-rise near Battery Park. Its name: Barbershop. Intimacy-wise, it’s got the charm of a roadside motel truckers hit for some suspect crank and a quick midmorning fuck, cash up front. It’s the size of a rather large storage closet, with dirty white tile covered in unswept clippings, lit by overhead bulbs in frosted, flypaper-yellow plastic encasements. It’s manned always by the same four Israeli guys who talk less to and more over one another in their native language, and never to me. I find this both melodic and merciful; I’m terrible at any conversation when I’m in a leather chair being examined, reshaped.

I go there on my lunch breaks. I’ve been five times; they still don’t know my name. My first visit, I told the guy what Allison texted me to say when they ask what we’re doing: one on the sides, three on top, long enough so that I can style it, low fade in the back. At that, all four men switched their buzzers off and, almost in unison, told me with great urgency not to say this ever again. That, next time, if I said it, they’d actually do it, and I’d be a “crooked, unhandsome man.”

“Next time, you say, same style but shorter. That’s it.”

Once I had left and the lingering social terror had abated, something almost likeable revealed itself about the jaggedness to that experience. Living in New York City, there’s an inherent pressure to establish yourself as the prototypical Regular at the places you frequent: You walk into a café, you’re third in line, and by the time you get to the counter to order, the barista has already brewed your usual. I often feel myself crave for my transactions to be an acute combination of personal, neighborly, intimate. I’d very much like to experience the bodega equivalent of being the only one in my neighborhood to get a warm wash and a head scratch before I buy an egg and cheese on a roll. And so too often, I think, are strictly transactional experiences interpreted—distorted—as rude.  

There’s a concrete ceiling on my relationship with Barbershop. It falls stories short of any familiarity appropriate to walk in and say, “Just the usual today.” I don’t find it cold. I find it absolute. Same style but shorter. It’s easy.  

Admittedly, my hairstyle looks different each time I leave. The only consistency is in their method: the guys there tug my head around, press the corner of the buzzer blade behind my ear, come just short of drawing blood. They either forget about or ignore the bald spot where my crown meets the back of my skull, and fail to compensate for the receding hairline on the right side of my forehead. But I’m out of there in twenty minutes tops. They always ask me to come back—about as friendly as they get. They say it to everyone.

Daniel Johnson is a graduate of Southern New Hampshire University's MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction. He is currently an Editorial Assistant at Bedford/St. Martin's Press.

DFW on Lynchian violence in the new Twin Peaks

by Eddie Dzialo

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I started watching David Lynch’s movies when I was too young. They didn’t ruin me, but I did see them before I was old enough to understand them—if they can be understood at all. When I was twelve, I saw Lost Highway for the first of many times and developed flu-like symptoms. 

Now, at thirty-three, I am a father in the middle of remodeling my kitchen but still manage to make time to watch Twin Peaks: The Return. And I do so with the same level of enthusiasm that I had for Lynch when I was in middle school, minus the uneasy nausea. Part of that, is accepting that good art is the successful transfer of emotion from artist to subject. And those emotions don’t have to make you feel good. David Lynch’s work becomes particularly interesting when studying his portrayal of violent subject matter—the material that sent my stomach reeling at twelve.

In his essay “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” David Foster Wallace wrote: “an act of violence in American film has, through repetition and desensitization, lost the ability to refer to anything but itself.” Watching Lynch’s films are so surreal (and nauseating) because the visual and narrative devices Lynch uses to portray violence are outside the desensitizing vernacular of popular media. As Wallace notes in his essay: “Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching someone’s ear get cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.” In Blue Velvet, when Lynch zooms in on a severed human ear that is resting in a neatly manicured lawn, he is taking everything out of the shot but the thing itself. The viewer’s attention has nowhere else to go; it needs to lock onto the severed ear. As one of Wallace’s own characters was fond of saying, “Never underestimate the power of objects.”

In a scene from “Part 10” (Lynch referred to them as “parts” rather than “episodes”), Richard Horne attacks Miriam, but Lynch obscures the violence from the audience. The scene begins with Richard Horne arriving at Miriam’s trailer. While Richard is standing in her yard, Miriam shouts through her locked glass door that she has told the police that Richard ran over the young child. Richard cracks his neck by tilting his head toward each ear, then charges the trailer, breaks the glass door with his knee, and goes inside.  For twenty-five seconds, the only thing the viewer sees is the outside of the trailer from a considerable distance away. What the viewer hears is Miriam screaming until she stops, presumably because Richard has killed her. Lynch never shows Richard hurting Miriam at all.

Wallace argues that Lynch’s violence finds a way to refer to something other than itself because “Lynch’s violence always tries to mean something.” Audiences ask for violence.  They ask to see the act itself out of morbid curiosity, something the entertainment industry has exploited in numbing volumes. When Lynch gives his viewers nothing more than screams, he makes the scene visceral, taps into a universal expression of pain while escaping the visual clichés that make its consumption less painful.

Because of Lynch, I can feel for Miriam when she locks herself inside the trailer, and because of Wallace, I understand why. I can’t help but watch and wonder what Wallace would have thought of the newest season of Twin Peaks . As violent as Lynch’s movies are, Twin Peaks: The Return is like watching Lynch’s dissertation on the depiction of violence. And he transfers raw emotion better than he ever has.

Re-beginning

by Ashley Bales

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A funny thing about beginnings: they’re always false.  They share this with endings, but while writers often talk about false endings, beginnings simply don’t start at the right time.  ‘Begin as near to the end as possible’ is an idea about containment and a good lesson in why life and literature differ, or we can hope.  A blog has a life and will begin as lives do at whatever moment an individual is born to it and will experience many more beginnings than the first.  So, hello again.  I give you the re-beginning of the Assignment blog.

I was once a paleontologist and finding beginnings was my job.  Never the first beginning, only a committed search for prior beginnings.  When a new species appears—something like this blog, reappearing, not reborn—it can always be traced earlier, though its life is no less significant for it.  Needless to say, a blog for a literary magazine for an MFA program functions on hyperbolically compressed timescales relative to the life of a species.  It adheres to the rhythms of application, acceptance, concentration, graduation, with new voices added and lost in 6 month cycles.  It’s agglutinative, stratigraphic, an exercise in context.

Criticism is also an exercise in context: the successes of literary criticism (and the lit blogs that practice it) are not bound to facile judgement, but the ability to contextualize.  This incarnation of the Assignment blog is re-begun within the context of me, my Mountainview cohort, the Fall 2017 entering to graduating classes, the year 2017, Trump’s America, all of our Americas, the blogosphere, a publishing landscape stuck continually re-beginning in a world where blogospheres exist (unless they don’t anymore), and a deep continuity of literary practice and practitioners reaching back without beginning to our earliest humanity. 

My point being, an education in context aggrandizes the whole, as it humbles each individual start. Let's begin.

Last Week: Nabokov, Hardwick, and Emojis

For all the discussion of engagement flying around these days it’s hard not to want to ostrich-up once in a while.  A new collection of interviews with Nabokov demonstrates his stubborn disengagement. He “… [didn’t] give a damn for the group, the community, the masses, and so forth…” limiting his political opinions to: "Portraits of the head of the government should not exceed a postage stamp in size."  What would he have thought of this morsel?

In this inspiring profile of Elizabeth Hardwick, Sarah Nicole Prickett describes her as a "domestic writer," acknowledging the weight of applying that term to a woman. Prickett seems unsure how to discuss this unarguably feminist icon in the context of Hardwick's skepticism of feminism.  Like Nabokov her concerns were literary and in so far as she did actively engage in and even help shape feminist literary criticism, she refused to be drawn beneath its homogenizing banner. 

As citizens, that ideal unification we strive for turns us into the homogenized masses, which, as Auden so eloquently argues in his classic essay "The Poet and the City," has no place in literature. At least not as long as literature is still at its most powerful when presenting individual experience.  

But a little engagement is unavoidable: Emoji poetry has made it into The Paris Review (blog), The New Yorker came out with it's first ever television issue mere days after Game of Thrones set it's narrative priorities airborne, but at least Curb Your Enthusiasm is coming back?

I'd rather go back to reading about Nabokov apologizing for cliched butterflies.

Ashley Bales is a current student of Southern New Hampshire University's MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.  She holds a Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology, teaches in the Math and Science Department at Pratt Institute and is web editor for Assignment Magazine.