Neil Serven

Karen Russell, from the New Yorker’s Science Fiction issue (June 4 & 11; subscription only):

In the early nineties, Pizza Hut sponsors Book It!, to promote reading. For every ten books you read, you get a certificate for a free, one-topping pizza. At the end of each month, you come home from Mrs. Sicius’s fifth-grade class and slam down the Book It! certificate in front of your parents like a hunter dropping a deer carcass on the kitchen table. Book that, Family! We are eating tonight!

It turns out that there is no greater pleasure than reading for pizza. No longer do you feel guilty about eschewing the “real” world for these fantasy zones. Now you have an unassailable, American motivation; you’re a breadwinner. Literally. It’s November. Since September, you’ve earned forty dollars’ worth of garlic bread for the family.

…

At Pizza Hut, your younger siblings drink fountain soda from red cups, bite into cartoon-yellow mozzarella. Sit back with your arms folded. “Get a refill, Dad!” you encourage, like some magnanimous king. Everything is going aces until the waitress, who, like a raccoon, combines indifference and nosiness, flips through the Book It! certificate.

1. “The Sword of Shanarra.”
2. “The Wishsong of Shanarra.”
3. “The Elfstones of Shanarra.”

“Last month, she read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ you mom says, then hustles you toward the car.

So it’s at the U.S. 1 Pizza Hut, in Kendall, Florida, under the neon-pink sconces, that you first encounter the adults’ distinction between “literature” and “genre.”

I don’t think I ever got free pizza for reading, but I did often have to read x number of books within a certain period (and, of course, write reports: Title, Author, Summary, Opinion), and instead of reading serial genre novels, my strategy was to read from my stash of reliables multiple years in a row and hope the teachers wouldn’t confer and find out I was double-dipping. Titles off the top of my head: Aldo Applesauce; the ubiquitous Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing (and its sequel, Superfudge); Alvin Fernald, TV Anchorman. And Short Season, about a kid on a Little League team who is left to his own devices when his brother walks off the team. The goofy National Lampoon’s Vacation-inspired Hooples on the Highway. And I remember coming across a weird library-bound edition of something called Sheriff Stonehead and the Teenage Termites, but that was probably over my head and I was never really able to get what it was about. Plus a lot of Hardy Boys (the original editions with actual detective work; not the later rehash where they killed off Chet’s girlfriend in a terrorist car bombing–I mean, Jesus Christ, I’m eleven) and Bobbsey Twins crap.

Russell’s delightful sidebar is one of several notes of nostalgia in the issue, along with Colson Whitehead’s remembrance of spending his after-school hours watching bad horror movies on Betamax with his brother (no subscription required).

P.S.: GalleyCat’s Jason Boog notes that “Pizza Hut still hosts the reading contest with some new media twists.”

At his blog, Tom McAllister writes on the experience of having one’s work rejected and having to be the one who does the rejecting:

So, what’s the right way to tell someone their work isn’t good enough? Is it the euphemism-soaked, everyone-gets-a-trophy keep on truckin style of bland encouragement? Is it a generic, totally impersonal response that betrays nothing beyond the bare facts (you will not be published today, and also here’s how to subscribe to our journal)? Is it something performative that is a little bit potentially mean-spirited but also engages with the text in the way we all say we want people to engage with our writing? Is it a picture of a sad puppy and a bowl of ice cream?

Once I started sending my work out to journals, one thing became apparent quickly: there is a currency to the kinds of rejections you receive. No one is going to tell you why your story works or why it doesn’t, but the rejections that come back with more than just the standard boilerplate send a tacit signal: this sort of interested at least one of us. I still contend that the best rejection I ever got from a market was a preprinted colored slip on which the editor had scrawled in black pen: “This was close, Neil. Try us again soon.” Indeed, that story got accepted a couple of weeks later by a print journal I admired.

In September I sent out a story I in which I had a great deal of confidence to a good number of highly competitive journals, and one by one the rejections have come back, nothing beyond a form rejection, ice cold. I am up to ten, with one “very impressed by your writing,” but even that is a form rejection, and now I’m starting to wish I hadn’t sent it out to as many places as I did. It could say more about my choice of markets or about the quality of the story, but in the end it’s probably a little of both. The fact that it was so easy to write may have meant that it was too easy to write.

McAllister also addresses the part that nobody ever talks about:

There are so many journals out there. There are terrible journals with low standards, journals who will accept eighty percent of the work submitted to them. I could send my stories and essays to those places, could even benefit from being published in those awful journals that nobody reads, because they would become another line on my CV and make me slightly more employable from a University’s perspective. But that would be pitiful and that would be sad, and that would deny my primary reason for submitting, which is the ego.

To be published in a journal, particularly the spatial confines of a print journal, is to be admitted to a club of limited occupancy, one to which many others have been denied entry. The rejection slip is the stubborn bouncer at the door who won’t listen to your appeals—dude, I know the owner, I’m on the list. The more challenging the market—the more elite the club, essentially—the more such an inclusion feels like an accomplishment. You made it in with the in crowd. We don’t just want to see our stories published in journals. We want them to belong there.

Still working on Harper’ses and New Yorkers from June, back when the election was still talked about in abstractions and the weather was getting warmer. I particularly don’t expect much out of Harper’s these days, especially in the fiction department, so Karl Taro Greenfeld’s “Fun Won,” from the June issue, was a pleasant surprise:

You should see who my friends married in the Nineties. It wasn’t like now, when girls are marrying, like, handsome, mixed-race guys with good hair who ride bicycles. Do you know what men were like in New York in the Nineties? White and boring. They had real jobs—lawyers, architects, doctors. And they were dull. I had girlfriends I used to get stoned with every night and do blow with at Limelight and who would even suck some guy with dreadlocks at Robots, but who ended up marrying, like, an IT guy from Boston. Pretty girls who would go from dating an English junkie to a Long Island accountant. Those seemed like the only choices back then. Now you have these hybrids. I don’t know what guys do anymore, but it seems like when I meet a man in his twenties or thirties, he does something in online advertising or marketing but is more defined by his hobby of riding fixed-gear bicycles or some intense and very particular food enthusiasm.

Greenfeld gives a convincing first-person voice to a young female narrator living at a time “when you could still dream of being a writer, when writing for magazines and then writing books and all of that added up to a good life.” The time, of course, is the Nineties, and she’s a Conde Nast Senior Editor with a taste for the herb, a brother with an ample supply, a co-worker who knows a good deal of famous people (Jean-Paul Gaultier, Naomi Campbell, Giuseppe Cipriani), and a wealthy sort-of-boyfriend who converts old buildings into condominiums. The bubble of Everything Going Right allows the characters to bounce and careen without consequence through the evening, which includes a written-off dinner at Cipriani’s restaurant (a perfect opportunity to use the passive voice, as one just happens to be on the receiving end of things one cannot control):

Six plates of egg-noodle pasta with a light sauce of cream and caviar were brought over, and Giuseppe shaved generous slices of truffle onto each of our plates. Two bottles of Barbaresco appeared, and then another two, and once we had eaten, whatever anxiety or incipient paranoia I had felt seemed miraculously lifted.

The story reminded me of much of what I liked about A Visit to the Goon Squad (which, I am ashamed to admit, I remember very little about other than that I loved it). “Fun Won” is apparently an excerpt from Greenfeld’s novel Triburbia, which was released in August and is now on my Amazon Wish List.

…Long live the end of the jart

Long live the end of childhood

Long live the culture of protection

…

Long live air bubble and hemorrhage

of left temporal region with surrounding

edema as shown on CT scan…

At Defunct, Ander Monson’s beautiful (horizontally scrolling) ode to Jarts, a/k/a Lawn Darts. My badass mother still has a set in her garage, which I believe is a Class B felony.

With word that Newsweek will be ceasing its print publication at the end of the year (more a loss for Americana, in my opinion, than America, given that lately it has been a newsmagazine in name only), a small detail from a scene in my first published story becomes problematic. The story is set in the immediate future, and there’s a description of a cover of the magazine that’s in the E.R. waiting room: it features the astronauts that take part in the mission to Mars that’s the backdrop to the story.

I had a hunch something like this would happen when I wrote it. It also has Anderson Cooper and Keith Olbermann both hosting cable news shows (on different channels), and John Glenn still alive and giving commentary. Glenn is 91 now, and if, as I’m told by my friends who follow such things, we’re looking at another 30 years before boots on Martian soil, then apparently we’re supposed to believe that other amazing technological breakthroughs have taken place on the geriatric medicine front.

Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote, edited by Gerald Clarke. The letters range from the early years of Capote’s career to the end of his life, and because he parked himself in a lot of remote places (Paris, Naples, Tangiers, Sicily, Spain, Switzerland), he used them as prime means of correspondence with such folks as Newton Arvin (literary critic and Smith College professor, with whom Capote had a two-year affair), Mary Louise Aswell (fiction editor at Harper’s Bazaar), Jack Dunphy (Capote’s longtime lover, post-Arvin), Robert Linscott (Capote’s editor at Random House), Bennett Cerf (Random House founder and publisher), Leo Lerman (his friend since childhood), Gloria Vanderbilt, William Styron, and later, when he obsesses over the fibers of research needed to complete In Cold Blood, the investigator in charge of the Clutter murders, Alvin Dewey, and Dewey’s wife and son, an aspiring writer. These letters, in particular, are borderline incestuous in how inappropriately far they go beyond the intent of the relationship, especially as the repeated postponements of Dick Hickok’s and Perry Smith’s executions become a dark inconvenience to the writer’s impatient self-interest.

The letters gush with the steam pressure of effusive Capote—everyone is “beloved” or “darling” or “dearheart.” As with most collections, the parts that are most interesting correspond with the years when he is writing and producing. For some reason, Clarke has found it necessary to [sic] the collection into submission, noting every instance in which Capote (who never finished high school) misspells maneuver or mille tendresses. The distraction is unnecessary. They are letters. The whole volume is a [sic].

Third Coast, Spring 2012. I ordered this issue mainly to check out Aubrey Hirsch’s “Other Aubreys I Have Known,” which at first glance I couldn’t tell was fiction or nonfiction. The other Aubreys, I soon realized as I read, are not actual Aubreys (at least, I don’t think they are), but people to whom the author has been assigned (much like the way we are assigned our names and birthdays) some kind of unlikely, under-the-skin connection, such as the near-identical twin for whom she gets mistaken during her first week at college, or the dive-bar waitress whose swollen thyroid gives away as having Grave’s Disease, which the author also has. Nothing wrong with the premise at all, and Hirsch is a solid writer (my familiarity with her work is why I wanted to read this essay), but something about the piece twisted me the wrong way—I want to say, perhaps unfairly, that it was the self-centeredness of it, the way we are supposed to grant the author this unique position that we as readers are not expected to relate to. Because if the situation weren’t unique, as nonfiction particularly, why would it be worth writing about?

The issue, though poorly copyedited, was enjoyable throughout. (Someone at Western Michigan University could use a tutorial on the plural possessive.) Stephanie Marker’s “Waiting” is a clever modern re-telling of Waiting for Godot, set outside a club in the freezing cold, where two friends wait into the wee hours to be let in by the bouncer. Josh Denslow’s “Too Late For a Lot of Things” is a funny portrait of an angry Christmas theme-park elf that manages to avoid cliché by forcing the protagonist to make a decision of moral decency. My favorite story came at the end: Claire Burgess’s “Upper Middle Class Houses,” in which a 14-year-old babysitter from a stifled, religious family, on the brink of her own sexual awakening, pries deeply into the intimate lives of her adult clients. Once again, the second person immerses us in the action, teasing our consciences:

It started a year ago and innocently, the slow advance into the bedrooms of the parents you babysit for. At first you would just stand in every room and observe the furniture, the layout, the knickknacks and photographs, interested and excited by the knowledge of these places you weren’t supposed to go. You liked passing a house on the way to school and knowing that inside the cabinet to the left of the sink, there was a stack of blue bowls. You enjoyed seeing one window lit up at night and knowing it was the study, which had a sagging futon and a reprinted painting of a Rocky Mountain vista and the entire series of Cheers on home-recorded VHS. And then you started pushing deeper, hesitantly opening jewelry boxes and dresser drawers. You never took anything—just looked. You started discovering more things, secret things. You knew a bottle of gin was hidden behind the linens in the Parkers’ hall closet. You knew Mrs. Stadler had a cache of romance novels in a file box behind her shoes. You knew the Monroes had one more birth certificate on file than they did children. You knew Mr. Aronson had a desk drawer filled with framed pictures of a woman, all of them turned face down. All these things just when your appetite. And then you started to find the sex things.

Hobart #10, 2009. The relaunch of the Hobart web site made me think about the print journal, so I decided to re-read the issue I had in my stash. On the back were a number of names I would not have recognized the first time I read it, but do now, including Mike Young (whose story “Susan White and the Summer of the Game Show” was a blast to read at Atticus Review) and Claire Vaye Watkins, profiled in the current Poets & Writers.  

Watkins’ “Graceland” establishes its theme of naturalistic cruelty and human smallness right off the bat:

All the great land mammals are dying. There were once birds the size of sheep. Pinnipeds used to be huge; walruses had tusks six feet long. Jackrabbits had feet like two-by-fours. Armadillos were as big as minivans.

The P & W profile depicted Watkins as a writer who evokes place, particularly her native Nevada, and this is very evident in “Graceland.” The protagonist, Cate, is a Las Vegas-born woman who left that city at 18 and has to share a plane with tourists when she goes back to visit her pregnant sister. Their mother has recently died. In “Graceland,” though (the title refers to the Paul Simon album), Watkins’ location of interest is the Sutro Baths, a private swimming complex on San Francisco Bay whose structures were destroyed by fire in the 1960s. The ruins are still there to visit, and Cate fears the rising sea levels will wash them away.

The story itself seems to drown in all of the character’s speculation of protracted ecological disaster; other than the dead mother, I’m not sure what the plot really is. It feels more like a springboard than a story.

Much like “Susan White and the Summer of the Game Show,” Mike Young’s “Stay Awhile If You Can” has a jumpy energy that demands a second reading. The protagonist is a muralist who learned the trade from his uncle, who now can’t seem to leave it; the elder has taken to painting on surfaces he was never authorized to paint and that the city must raise money to clean with a sandblaster. The younger man could use a change of scenery, but he is the only one who can relate the legend that casts the shadow from which he needs to escape:

But people around here don’t get ashamed. They don’t. They just grow beards and hope for a thicker rain.

…

It’s not like we need the murals anymore. Blueberries are the new fad, good for memory, with marionberries right behind. So “people” from California have begun to move here, opening fusion restaurants and comfortable sweater outlets. But when the town first hired my uncle, times were dry.

Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day, Ben Loory, 2011. I met Loory back in June at the Fictionaut Bash at the KGB Bar, then by coincidence came across this book in the basement of the Strand the next day. (I was looking for Ben Lerner’s book.)

Stories for Nighttime is a collection of contemporary fables told in the classical style, featuring nameless humans (and animals that talk like humans) operating in a kind of moral isolation. The clean sentences, in which the nouns do just about all of the work, offer a cold lesson in narrative structure:

“A man finds something in his throat. He reaches in and pulls it out.

It’s a snake.

What are you doing in my throat? the man says.

Nothing, says the snake. Just hanging out.

The man stares at it.

There’s something you’re not telling me, isn’t there? he says.

But all the snake does is look away.

(from “The Snake in the Throat”)

It is easy to rush through these stories, as the simple paragraphs leave a lot of blank space on the page. Their basicness, however, is the attribute that allows the reader to reset his focus on the weight of the episodes. The stories were originally published in a wide range of journals, from Wigleaf to The Antioch Review; the last story, “The TV,” appeared in the The New Yorker.

Post Road #22, 2012. This issue includes Julie Innis’s story “Little Marvels,” which is also found in her just-released collection Three Squares a Day With Occasional Torture. I like that the magazine interlaces little two-page “Recommendation” essays on books new and old with its fiction.

Two stories in the issue confront the topic of fatherhood and responsibility, both rather condescendingly.  In Ann Hood’s “Man’s Best Friend,” a man resists against impending fatherhood by pursuing an affair (never consummated) with a dance teacher. The title refers to the dog that the protagonist’s wife has insisted they adopt because “[s]he actually believed that getting a dog would ‘make him excited to do the next best thing.’”

But he had told her he wasn’t excited about the next thing, at least not yet. Maybe he shouldn’t have relented about the dog. Maybe it gave her the wrong idea. One night six weeks ago they’d smooshed their bodies together, and next thing he knew she was waving a pregnancy test at him as if he’d won something big, like Power Ball or the Pulitzer Prize.

The author seems to project an unrealistic motivation on her male character, giving him only a black and white moral choice (staying versus going). The wife’s character is drawn so flatly—the nagging spouse yanking her man by the ear toward respectability—that I read the story rooting against him going back to her.

In Jason Ockert’s “Sailor Man,” a man whose parents are recently deceased accidentally locks his toddler son in his wife’s car, then slightly injures the boy when he smashes the window to get to him. That episode overshadows the backstory, in which the deceased father had been a boxer and operated a vending machine that people still try to use, resulting in angry calls to the father’s house by people who get nothing for their money.

All signed up, hotel room booked. This will be my first year attending. Seeing as I only live about two hours from the convention site, I really had no excuse.

I was honored to be asked last month to contribute to the September edition of Meg Tuite’s Exquisite Quartet. The full story, “Living Off the Man,” is up now at Used Furniture Review. A hearty thanks to Meg and our co-Exquisitors, Misti Rainwater-Lites and Aleathia Drehmer, as well as UFR Editor Dave Cotrone.

So the end of October came and went and Violet had not mailed a check. No one else in the building had, either, like they had all agreed. Oglethorpe would have to leave his perch down in Florida or Bermuda or wherever he was and come up and find them.

Today is Take 2 for the Greenfield Arts Eclective and Small Press Fair, running from 2-9 PM at the Energy Park in Greenfield, Mass. I go on right around prime mosquito hour at 6:00 PM, but the whole event–showcasing acts of poetry, fiction, music, and drama, as well as a Bob Dylan song circle–is worth turning out for. The full, revised schedule can be found on the event’s Facebook page.

Hobart relaunches with a new publishing schedule, featuring daily web content. Such as: this sweet and enlightening interview with novelist Kyle Beachy (The Slide) on The Art of Skateboarding.