Stereotypes Are Questioned, Dreams Are Broken

There are three things I like about Sightings, BJ Hollars’s debut short story collection: it’s simple, funny, and insightful.

Sightings aptly begins with a quote from Ray Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree:

“It was a small town by a small river and a small lake in a small northern part of a Midwest state. There wasn’t so much wilderness around you couldn’t see the town. But on the other hand there wasn’t so much town you couldn’t see and feel and touch and smell the wilderness.”

Like Bradbury, Hollars manages to invoke the sights, sounds, and smells of small town America through the eyes of his teenage heroes — and with as much ease. A small town. A small river. A small lake. Bradbury’s writing seems too easy, too simple. But it works so well. As it does in Hollars’s work.

Here’s an example. “Loose Lips Sink Ships,” one of ten stories in Sightings, introduces us to a mother with a wooden leg, and a father who is an expert leg-maker. The mother has a problem with her leg. The father bends to fix it. The son tells us, “From where I stood, it looked sort of stupid, like he was trying to shine a baseball bat or polish a rifle. But after a while it started looking less stupid, like maybe he was just trying to push a little life into a dead thing.” Here we are handed a child’s take on life, one that skims the surface, and then leaves us with a splash. Sightings is a collection of coming-of-age stories where naïve language comes out complicated, where moments of purity intersperse the comedy of pre-pubescent boys.

Here’s what I mean about the comedy of prepubescent boys. “Indian Village,” my favorite story in the collection — and the first — sets up the landscape as follows:

“Ever since school let out, we’d fallen into a routine of baseball in the mornings and pool in the afternoons, a schedule that allowed us ample opportunity to show off the scraped knees we’d earned from our heroics on the field. For several sweltering afternoons, we took turns parading past Georgia Ambler’s peripheral vision (our farmer tans in full bloom), waiting patiently for her to acknowledge our existence.”

We find in this passage the Bradbury-esque, Indiana charm of a young boy’s playing field, but also a suggestion of the somewhat un-charming fascinations of boys that trickle in and out of Hollars’ stories. A more blatant example of this would be the opening sentence to “Loose Lips Sink Ships”:

“I asked the Eskimo if he’d ever seen a vagina before.”

Or there’s Couch Housen’s huddle-up speech in “Line of Scrimmage”:

“Okay, all together, now. Whip dicks on three. . . .”

And the comedy doesn’t stop with boyhood erection discoveries; it seeps into the characters’ very makeup — there’s an Oregon Trail fanatic father, a prom-date-ready Sasquatch, and a twentieth-century Confederate whose wife can time travel. Hollars’s writing sets you up for a nice bike ride around the neighborhood, and before you know it, you’ve tipped over in the grass laughing out loud — then you wonder if you should be.

Here’s what I mean by that. Remember the wooden leg that the father was shining like a baseball bat? Polishing like a rifle? Then, suddenly, the whole scene changed? The thing about Hollars’s writing is that you’re running along, full-throttle, enjoying the scenery, chuckling here and there — and then you get to the end of a sentence and realize what just happened. There’s a sadness at the end of Hollars’s stories. Sasquatch may look ridiculous in a suit and bowtie, and it’s funny all the different ways Hollars manages to both humanize and make fun of him, but at the end, you’re sad that the big monster’s become an alcoholic. You’re sad the clowns can’t find a job. You’re sad because a father is no longer loony for Oregon Trail. And it’s not only that. There are bigger issues at play. A father deserts his child, a child dies, stereotypes are questioned, dreams are broken.

These small splashes create a lasting rippling effect, which will make you go back and read the stories all over again.

Squarely in the Realm of the Transgressive, Where True Desire Abides

First published in France in 1938 and introduced to me by the wonderful Rikki Ducornet, the stories in Marguerite Yourcenar’s Oriental Tales do more than just confront the power of desire, they promote it to immense and terrifying dimensions.

In Kali Beheaded, the gorgeous virgin goddess Kali is massacred by jealous fellow gods, who re-attach her head to the body of a whore, and she roams the world in furious confusion, seducing and destroying everyone she encounters with vengeful innocence — a unity Yourcenar may have invented — the slave of her own craving to connect with other beings. Yourcenar writes, “. . . the liquefied fortunes of men clung to her hands like strands of honey.” For Kali, now goddess of sex and death, desire and destruction are the same, and she is just as much a prisoner of this binary as everyone else.

In Our-Lady-of-the-Swallows, a priest becomes convinced that nymphs are living in a cave and seducing his parishioners, so he blocks the cave’s small mouth and tries to starve them. But as he celebrates their death-song, the reader learns the nymphs are really swallows, who, indeed, are really starving.

In Aphrodissia, the Widow, the widow of a minister in what probably is Greece — a Greece abandoned by the gods, but not the passion that made them necessary—mourns the death of her illicit lover Kostis, a thief who terrorized a village full of hypocrites and cowards. Aphrodissia’s love for Kostis is both skeptical of love as social custom, and deeply, almost violently tender, and places love itself outside convention and squarely in the realm of the transgressive, where true desire abides in Yourcenar’s work.

Yourcenar sees the social realm as stifling and criminally banal; her characters are desperate for a vehement divorce from their communities and a union with the rage of their emotion. Aphrodissia rescues her lover’s head from the top of a spear and tries to run away with it, but she is chased, and, in a scene that is unbelievably moving, she slips into a canyon, where she dies.

*

If Oriental Tales has a flaw — beyond the way it uses an exoticized and mythical Far East as an environment for stories that transcend the banal, in an “everyone is crazy over there” kind of way — it’s the way her stories veer too easily into the fabulous. Wealthy servants give away their fortunes to benefit their masters, murder victims come back from the dead, imprisoned artists paint a flood and then a lifeboat to escape with, and all that from just one story: How Wang-Fo Was Saved, which Yourcenar adapted from an ancient Taoist fable.

Literary fairy tales have to find a way to navigate the pitfalls of facile magic. Italo Calvino does it by writing prose that slyly critiques the reader; Angela Carter does it by violently exploring latent assumptions about gender. When Yourcenar fails, her stories seem too formulaic or have no sense of the hassle of reality. Their endings read like punch lines.

In a way, Yourcenar is one of her own characters: a zealot on a fool’s quest to embody, in a story, that which cannot be contained. At her best, she’s like a physicist who briefly but revealingly controls the ineffable unseen before the operation blows up her collider. She writes as if she knows the edict from Blanchot that says that to toil with the elements in the only true realism.

Most of us grow out of the idea that life is either death by boredom or immolation in desire, but every now and then, as we look drearily out the window, we remember all our deepest loves and hates, all of the desires we’ve left unacted. Oriental Tales is for these moments, when the loss we keep repressed comes rupturing unbearably through our lives.

Materializing the Promise of Change: A Review of Toni Jensen's From the Hilltop

In From the Hilltop, Toni Jensen’s first short story collection, Jensen shapes worlds where grief births silence and mourning accompanies shifts in weather and landscape, making land a character, one who can feel and act humans do. Rainfall accompanies a teacher/student relation in “Learning How to Drown”; a cornfield moves from place to place, arriving near the twelve-room Blanco Canyon Hotel, right after the death of the owner’s wife in “At the Powwow Hotel.” The land is as hot and dry as a choked throat in the beginning of “Flight,” where a teenage girl goes to live with relatives in South Dakota.

Jensen’s characters are aware of these weather patterns to some degree, their awareness strongest in “Sight and Other Hazards,” where a woman deals with her dying mother while overseeing an apartment building that used to be the Holcomb hotel. Hotels are also a character in From the Hilltop — whether abandoned or lived in as much as a hotel can allow others to “live” in it, materializing the promise of change present in all these characters’ lives.

While some of Jensen’s characters share her Métis background, (a mixed Native American and European ancestry from the Northern U.S. and Canada), many of her characters are men. Not only does Jensen craft both male and female voices realistically, she lets them sing, creating a sharply grounded view of life “off the rez.” This sharpness comes from her use of details — a pony-like dog near a canyon, fruit-bearing trees rooted unnaturally on the high plains of West Texas. The experimental, loop-like structure in “From the Hilltop” shares qualities with the shifts in time and clustering/threading of detail present in Stephen Graham Jones’ work, whom Jensen thanks in the acknowledgement section of her book. Like the fluxuation of weather (present in the book), the language cycles as the narrator’s mind cycles, each section of the story beginning with a different lead in, such as “If,” “Because,” and “Given.”

Jensen’s stories open with impact and close in a wonderfully subtle way, putting a tiny weight in your lungs — one forgets to breathe for a moment, and then realizes these characters will be alright, life continues for them. You will learn from “Still” how to cradle infertility, how to nurture it with silence. From “Butter” one learns about statistics and beauty and butter-headed replicas of local Dairy Queens. In “From the Hilltop,” one learns about the highest point in West Texas and, at the same time, through the honest voice of a man, how to lose a brother when you’re just a rebel kid, how to grow old with a story, telling a story again and again, hoping one day to get it just right. And you will feel as the character already has.

Imagination and Language Combine to Make Spirits in the Head: On Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried

The First Gulf War began in 1990, and I was worried about being drafted. Thinking about such a thing in reference to this war seems ridiculous now but, at the time, with the ghosts of Vietnam swirling around us, I was worried. I watched the news and wondered if Iraq would be Generation X’s war. I wondered if I would experience waves of heat or if I would feel sand beneath my boots. Would the government push an M16 into my hands?

As the Allies mobilized against Saddam Hussein, my friends and I drank cases of beer and asked each other if we’d go. This wasn’t an academic exercise, you understand. We thought about the 5,000 Kurds that had been murdered by chemical attacks in Halabja. And didn’t Hussein say this would be the “Mother of All Wars”? Let’s not forget that Iran and Iraq had just finished a very bloody war with each other, a war that had snuffed out the lives of over 500,000 men.

So, yeah, I was worried.

Amid this jumble of fear and unstoppable world events I picked up a copy of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. He was from Minnesota like me and his latest book was getting rave reviews all across the nation. I’d read a lot of war literature before (All Quiet on the Western Front, Slaughterhouse Five, Catch-22) but nothing prepared me for how inviting, how visceral, and how immediate O’Brien was. Here was a writer from my neck of the woods and he said things I’d always felt deep in my ribcage, but I just didn’t know how to articulate them. I read The Things They Carried in one sitting. It mesmerized me. It captivated me. And when I closed the book, I sat back and looked out the window for a long time. A very long time.

This book shifts between war and peace so effortlessly, so brutally, that we quickly learn what it might be like to go to war and, perhaps more importantly, what it means to come home from war. I was especially hooked when I read a chapter called “On the Rainy River”. In these pages, a fictional Tim O’Brien is drafted by the government and he spends his remaining days over the summer working in an abattoir. That metaphor is perfect enough, but as the date for his induction into the US Army draws closer and closer, he drives north to the Canadian border. In beautiful prose, this fictional O’Brien sits in a boat and decides if he will flee his country (Canada is so close, just twenty yards away) or if he will turn back and go to Vietnam.

Rarely does a book speak so directly to your life. I mean, here I’m reading about a fellow Minnesotan sitting in a boat and he’s trying to decide if he will fight for his country. All of these societal expectations are swirling around him and, as I read about a fictional Tim O’Brien making up his mind, suddenly Vietnam and Iraq and American manhood and growing up in a small town all get collapsed together. As I continued to read, that was me sitting in that boat. That was me looking out at Canada. Would I go? Should I go?

O’Brien finally decides to go to Vietnam but not for any heroic or noble reason. He allows himself to be drafted because he couldn’t stand the idea of disappointing anyone in his small farming town. As he says towards the end of this chapter, “I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to.”

I’d never thought of it this way before. I’d never considered how embarrassment and shame can factor into what appears to be a selfless act.

“Hey Hicks,” one of my friends asked after I finished the novel. “If our asses get drafted, what’re you going to do?”

A good question. I had visions of driving an ambulance like in M*A*S*H or maybe becoming a medic that ran from one wounded soldier to another. Carrying a gun though? I just couldn’t see myself doing that.

Flash forward a bit. The First Gulf War ended quickly and with limited loss of life, at least as far as America was concerned. My friends and I laughed at how frothed up we got about the whole thing.

“To think we were worried! Jesus, what a bunch of wimps. What on earth were we thinking?”

It’s true The Things They Carried made me re-examine my understanding of individualism, community, patriotism, and the nature of truth, but let me tell you something I’ve never told anyone else before: To my growing astonishment, I began to resent that my government could draft me into a war that I might find morally reprehensible. The more I thought about this, the more I wanted an escape clause, so I became an Irish citizen. When my purple passport arrived in the mail it felt like a magic door to elsewhere had opened up. It allowed me to live in Europe for six years and it allowed me to meet people I’d never meet otherwise.

Looking back on it now, becoming an Irish citizen fundamentally knocked me on a different road. Would I have become a dual-citizen without the hard questions that Tim O’Brien raised in his slender book? Who knows, but his book did spark my imagination to think of myself beyond the shores of America. Since my mother was born in Northern Ireland, I also started to care more about her national history around this time of my life. Some people might have a problem with my decision to become a dual-citizen but, as I’ve said elsewhere in my writing, I hold the treasonous belief that we can love more than one country. Just because I was born in the U.S. is no reason to set up a border patrol around my heart. As a rule though, countries don’t like such split allegiances. I can call myself Irish-American but it’s the American part that matters most…at least as far as Uncle Sam is concerned.

But, back to the book. Although The Things They Carried raised thorny questions of patriotism and community for me, it is, at its heart, a novel about writing. It’s very easy to miss this on your first reading. Yet O’Brien reminds us that words connect us across time, words can raise the dead, and words can help explain the incomprehensible. Sometimes it feels as if Tim O’Brien is deliberately frustrating us. In a chapter called “Good Form” he forces us to grapple with the differences between “story truth” and “happening truth”. In one of the more famous sentences in the book, O’Brien says, “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story truth is truer sometimes than happening truth.” Telling a war story or, for that matter, any story, means bumping up against the problems of perception and memory.

We may get annoyed with The Things They Carried because we don’t know what the truth is but we also get carried away by his prose. Even today, it’s hard for me to read just one sentence and put this book down. Forget about “story truth” and “happening truth” for a minute. I’m going to tell you the god’s truth: writing this review took much longer than it really should have because whenever I stopped to consult the book, whenever I flipped through my battered beloved copy, I got lost in his prose and read pages beyond what I needed to.

So here’s another truth for you: To read Tim O’Brien is to realize that you’re in the hands of a master. Don’t believe me? Okay, let’s read a few passages from “How to Tell a True War Story”:

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.”

Or this:

“In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. If you believe it, be skeptical. It’s a question of credibility. Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t, because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible craziness.”

Or lastly:

“You can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it. And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It’s about sunlight. It’s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.”

Even though I’ve read this chapter many times, I want to re-read it again. And again. And again. But that’s not the half of it because there are also chapters like “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”, “The Man I Killed”, “Speaking of Courage”, “The Ghost Soldiers” and the final chapter, “The Lives of the Dead.” This ending gently reminds us that stories can save us. Stories allow us to commune with the dead. Stories give us a place to be with our loved ones even when they are no longer among the living. As O’Brien so beautifully states, “The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head.”

Spirits in the head. That of course is the essence of good writing.

This book is almost 25 years old but it hangs in my imagination and haunts my understanding of war, returning from war, and the passage of time. When I first read this book as a young man it made me question my relationship to my country and my own sense of bravery. Now, as I creep into middle-age, this book challenges me to become a better writer and it asks some hard questions about the nature of storytelling. More and more, I realize this is an excellent book on the craft of writing. I’m confident it will be read one hundred years from now. Why? Because it’s not just about war. It’s about how we tell stories to each other. It’s about reaching out. It’s about understanding the vital power of words.

Tiny Pearls in a Big World

These people that litter Mary Miller’s stories in Big World are nearly broken and almost just as unlikable. Or that is to say they are living mostly unlikable lives, because Miller’s characters — the predominance of which are young, underachieving women — are not unlikable in the ways, say, Bret Easton Ellis or Jonathan Franzen characters are unlikable. These characters are unlikable in the secret ways we don’t like ourselves, hiding those things we try to hide in a big world: “I’m sort of horrified by the things I tell myself when I’m the only one around to hear them,” one aimless narrator confesses — to herself — in the untidy closing story, “Not All Who Wander Are Lost.” Untidy and aimless, these are apt descriptions. Miller’s characters often resist change and the stories themselves can teeter on plotlessness, like the wheels of a pick-up truck spinning endlessly in the Tennessee mud. One narrator scrubs her addict boyfriend’s camper in reaction to his half-hearted and ultimately unfulfilled promise to bring the thing to the state park. Another narrator attempts an affair with a co-worker in the absence of her alcoholic boyfriend, but that too does not stand to last. Oftentimes, we’re left simply to wait for sunrise.

But Miller is adroit in her storytelling, and where these stories are slight in their action they are larger in scope. The characters share a hopelessness that is often found in Raymond Carver’s characters, a certain grittiness, here removed from Carver’s lush Pacific Northwest and trapped in the honky-tonk and trailer park South where the landscape is pocked with beer bottles and cigarette butts; full of cheating lovers and surrounded by Ruby Tuesdays, Taco Bells, IHOPs and Dairy Queens. The stories of Lorrie Moore, too, come to mind. Miller’s characters make the stupid decisions that have been thrust upon them by all their stupid yesterdays, all of it soaked with death, with divorce, with loss.

Yes, these stories are tiny pearls, each one propelled by Miller’s pinballing language that is lyrical in its sudden turns: “We stayed in a house on the beach and ate seafood and went to the outlet malls, but my father wouldn’t let me go in the water because once I got caught by a riptide and almost drowned and after that I got stung by a jellyfish and after that my mother died.” It is clear Miller loves these characters: for all their misgivings, the author does not condescend to them. For all their hopelessness, Miller lovingly imbues the tiniest grain of hope into each character, and only Miller herself believes in the power of that grain to be polished to pearl. She understands the pressures that weigh down on these characters, how these characters are all, self-referentially, “fucked in the head.”

And not for nothing, but the artifact itself is wondrous too. A beautiful soft cover pocket book with moody watercolor cover art that somehow serves to reinforce the heart of this collection, as if the one thing these characters can hold on to, cradled in small hands, a curious logic of holding such a small book and calling it Big World.

A Zen Koan in Luscious Autumn Shades: Berit Ellingsen's Beneath the Liquid Skin

The 23 stories in Beneath the Liquid Skin offer a balanced mix of longer fiction and flash, with many of the stories weighing in at two or three pages. Berit Ellingsen combines elements of the universe, the self, folk tales, history, nonduality, and classical literature, which work together in alchemical synergy to produce gold. The author’s background as a science writer informs many of the pieces, but none are weighted with jargon. I never know where her stories will take me next, but I’m always pleased with the destination.

Ellingsen shines at packing punch with brevity in her flash pieces. “Hostage Situation,” the shortest story in the book, condenses timeless social commentary with a dash of humour into just a few lines. Prose poem “Sliding” reads like a zen koan in luscious autumn shades.

A personal favourite, “Sovetskoye Shampanskoye” is a spy story-by-numbers. Within the confines of three pages, the author tells the tale of half of a man’s life, framing it within the wider universe in which the man’s smaller story plays out. The tale proceeds at a measured pace like a documentary filmed through a neutral lens. Outdoor environments and indoor architectures all are important details within the man’s experience, but the external and the internal also meld to form a greater whole. Ellingsen’s lens zooms in on the main character and pulls out for long shots. This is perhaps the first spy-story ever told from a nondual perspective.

Some of the stories are non-plot-driven vignettes, mindful meditations and ponderings inhabiting a fuzzy borderland between prose and poetry, yet they do have subtle plots, with outcomes, futures and pasts implied. The haunting “Sexual Dimorphism – A Nightmare Transcribed from Sanskrit,” with its references to both Hindu mythology and Japanese film, has a rhythmic feel to its short verses. “Crane Legs” is a light-hearted piece that begins like a review of a TV show, but the painterly language turns it into a prose poem. The sudden ending leaves the reader with both the gut reaction of the (re)viewer and a clear aural and visual image of the show. The more serious “Polaris” takes a chilling look at exploitation, perceived lack, and doing things for all the wrong reasons.

The dream-like elements of some of the pieces conjure Borges or Kafka at times. “The Love Decay Has for the Living,” one of the longer stories, opens like a waking from a nightmare, the line between the dream and real life unclear. The tale shape-shifts between humour and horror, while borrowing lightly from Marguerite Duras’ The Lover. It delves into the balancing act of give-and-take in a relationship, and the need for nourishment on both a physical and philosophical level.

The beautiful folk tale-like “The Tale that Wrote Itself,” the longest story in the book, questions the possibility of altering the course of reality. “Still Life of Hypnos” is rich with references to Greek mythology and a surreal procession of decaying flora and fauna. “The Astronomer and the King,” a speculative fiction vignette, revolves around a real historical figure who served as both astronomer and astrologer to Louis XIV. The tale addresses the age-old search for the reasons for human suffering and for the existence of a god.

With its rich, evocative descriptions, “A June Defection” is one of my favourites. Set in natural surroundings that are at once beautiful and oppressive, this is a story about people doing what they must to escape. The writing in “Down the River” is rich with sensory details, the adrenaline rush of gaming and the need to be the best.  Stendhal Syndrome, a whimsical imagining of a character suffering the strange and disputed tourist disease of the same name, made me laugh out loud.

“In All the Best Places, Lightning Strikes Twice” is a bizarre tale that offers a wry look at some of the unfortunate consequences of monoculture. Not all of Ellingsen’s stories are surreal. The very realistic “Autumn Story” takes a critical look at food safety, questionable production practices and how our business and purchase choices affect the quality of life for ourselves, our livestock and pets. Many of Ellingsen’s stories deal with environmental, economic, ethical and social issues, but she deftly tempers the heavier topics with light or wry humour without softening the punch.

Boyfriend and Shark, a twisty tale tinged with both humour and melancholy, ponders the way we hold onto things, and the way attachment can cause us to hold back or imprison others, be they human or animal.

While the philosophy of nonduality informs many of the stories in the collection indirectly, it comes to the forefront in the final three. Characters and situations from Ellingsen’s first book, The Empty City, return in “From Inside His Sleep.” Reminiscent of a Kundalini awakening, main character Yukihiro struggles with lucid dreams.

Science meets silence in the far north in The White. The most overtly nondual story, it raises questions about the nature of awareness and being. “There is no way to argue with the present. You can only be here,” and “Everywhere is here.”

“Anthropocene” also combines science and nonduality. The last lines of the story and the book leave us with a new beginning and hope in the face of hopelessness. It is in this story that we discover the heart of the book’s title, and in the final lines that Ellingsen puts forth the immutable beauty of the universe, regardless of how ugly the situation may get.

While most of the stories in Beneath the Liquid Skin are very short, they condense whole worlds, some fantastic and some quite plausible, into polished gems. Ellingsen’s writing invites a new way of reading and thinking about fiction, but her style and voice keep the stories from becoming mired in obscurity. Though I had read most of these stories before, (all but three have appeared previously), it was a pleasure to read them again and to have them all in one place. Best of all, I like being able to pick out a story to read according to my mood, like a chocolate truffle from this gourmet box.

Ten Things Ugly Men Say

Maybe we can learn to appreciate “the ugly”? If not appreciate, perhaps respect?  There’s a certain respect, at least, that I have for an ugly thing: that ugly blobfish, Jocelyn Wildenstein (a Swedish woman apparently famous for being ugly), and even Scott Rickard’s TED talk — the talk where he attempted to create “The World’s Ugliest Music.”  And Adam Prince’s collection of short stories, The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men, like the aforementioned uglies, these stories captivate you with their ugly — that straight, honest, can’t-take-your-eyes-off-it-type ugly.

So, in this little top-ten list, I’ll be a little lazy and a little more honest than usual. For the most part, I’ll let Prince’s finely-tuned characters do the talking.

It seems natural that I start with the pick-up lines:

1.  “I’m a man . . . but if I had to, y’know, switch, then I’d want to look just like you” (98).

2.  “If you want me to—I will unloose the primal me” (155).

3.  “There’s something else in my pants too.  You should see, um, what it is” (74).

4.  “Cashiers do it fast and friendly.  Carpenters do it with wood.  Fishermen do it with their flies down. Basketball, baseball, football players or whatever do it with balls . . .” (143).

Here, listen to my buddy Jocko brag a little?:

5.  Jocko says: “I got an offer from this producer buddy of mine, Bill Boyd, to manage the Steppenwolfe reunion tour.  You remember Steppenwolfe? ‘Born to Be Wild’? Hell yeah, I was.  Sober three years and it bore the shit out of me” (16).

6. Then, Jocko says:  “Wait till Crystal gets here. You’ll love her. Smoking body and she’s got this clit ring . . . I haven’t fucked her yet, y’know, because when I’m in a relationship I’m in it, but now, you know, now . . .” (16).

7. Jocko slaps the table, waves around his beer, and says: “did I tell you I’ve got this whole other name? Yeah, I’m really someone else, man.  Kyle Windward.  My real mom’s part Chippewa Indian.  I found out all about her.  I could stalk her or whatever.”

Here, let’s move to some other acquaintances of mine: 

8. Says Keener:  “I’m . . . on a journey. . . . To find my lost artistic. Vision. I. Took a bus” (140).

9. Says Rod:  “I love my wife! I love my jealous, fundamentalist, social-retard wife!” (106).

10. Says Edwin Edward Holt:  “The whole difficulty . . . arose because she refused me fornication excepting when Jay Leno was on.  Neighbor, I attempted compromise. I taped the program.  But I could just lay there with my hard-on sticking into the air as far as what concerned her” (133).

Hey, listen, I’m doing my best here.  See, here’s a bonus:

BONUS

On a particularly hard day, when I was actually considering Rogaine for my male-pattern baldness, I sat down to write a very detailed email to Adam Prince.  I told him that his collection The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men is imbued with that classic ugly, the type of ugly captured by Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find, Raymond Carver’s Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, and David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

Because it is, damn it.  It is.

Then, I pitched him the idea of the Top Ten List, hoping he’d have a quote to share.  And then, he wrote me a nice follow-up email with this to say:

“I don’t know if I have a favorite line of dialogue, exactly. The thing about dialogue is that it’s so contextual, depends so much on the back and forth exchange. So there are some lines I really like in context that out of context would seem sort of flat or empty. But here’s one from “Action Figure” that I like:

“God,” says Kid, “it’s bright in here. Isn’t it bright in here? Probably so the security cameras work better. But you feel like you’re on an operating table. My dad’s a surgeon. He does face transplants. Isn’t that weird? Face transplants? It means you’re one person but you’re actually someone else. My dad has tons of money, but he doesn’t give any to me. No Barbie cars or other cars, either. Hey, let’s go get a Christmas Eve drink.” Kid flashes his money clip to prove how many Christmas Eve drinks he could buy if he wanted to. (54)

I just like the way his mind works here. The shifts that happen from sentence to sentence. They’d seem like leaps to someone more sane, but once you know Kid and how he works, then they all make a kind of sense. And that’s so fun. To create and convey what sense means to someone entirely different from one’s self.”