Neil Serven

Stymie Magazine announces that it will cease publishing new content.

The magazine has seen itself featured in places like ESPN The Magazine, The Writer, The Classical and others. We published a trading card series. Stymie tried to break new ground or at least introduce people to the notion that literature and sports could intersect in a serious way.

Sports and literature go hand in hand in many ways—the loneliness of mission, the need for completion, the impact of moments—and Stymie did a lot of innovative things in the name of stretching the subject of the sporting life and creating literature out of it. I’m sorry to see it go, but I feel fortunate I was able to get my own small contribution in just under the wire.

[As promised, I’ve been working through the Rabbit books again alongside the Begley biography, which I just finished. I am halfway through Rabbit Is Rich. A separate post devoted exclusively to that project will be coming later.-N.]

Freight, Mel Bosworth. I’ve gotten to know the author a little bit since coming across his writing in fwriction : review and other places. Freight, published in 2007, comes with a bit of a twist: submitted in pieces, the novel is designed to be read either in usual linear fashion or by skipping around according to the directions shown in the sidebar (e.g., “>>>PG 158 She pretended to sleep…”), a multi-pathed approach likened to a kind of leaping across text platforms via hyperlinks.

Since this was my first time reading the book, I opted to adhere to the linear format. It is about a young, nameless man who carries a lot of emotional baggage, as implied by the title. We learn early on about a young woman with whom our hero feel an obvious attachment, but who has slipped from his grasp. We hear anecdotes and reflections about bad behavior and regret colored by a yearning for connection. The musings of the lonely protagonist are patient and even, like those of a man who has spent a lot of time thinking about what to say before he writes it down:

All those years I put down a lot of alcohol a lot happened. A lot of friends grew sick. Some died. Others collapsed into themselves like dying stars that weren’t quite dead. And dying stars have a lot of gravity when they collapse because they grow dense. They pull us close. Sometimes it’s hard to get away from them. And even if we do get away from them, the gravitational pull messes up our lives. It messes up my life. Because they’re still in it. Because I’m carrying them even though I put them down. I think nothing ever goes away and nothing ever dies.

Because everything we carry touches everything we touch. Every word and every glance has weight. It’s all part of our gravity. It’s all part of our freight.

The False Inspector Dew, Peter Lovesey. As written about here, I had a flashback to my childhood when I saw this book lying on the bargain table at my local bookshop. I don’t read many mysteries anymore, so I was, perhaps, a little more cautious with this one than I would any other novel, knowing that a reveal was on the way, a mental antenna raised to the logic and evidential details.

The novel, set in 1921, begins with a love triangle: the young Alma Webster, her dentist Walter Baranov, and Walter’s wife, Lydia, who is about to leave him to pursue a career in Hollywood (she believes she has an in with Charlie Chaplin). They plot to murder Lydia while she is sailing across the Atlantic on the Cunard vessel Mauretania. To do so, Walter takes on a false identity, that of the Scotland Yard police inspector Walter Dew, who earned renown for cracking an earlier case relating to the sinking of another Cunard vessel, the Lusitania. (This choice of persona seems the biggest stretch of the book—wouldn’t someone seeking to commit a murder prefer to lay low?)

While on board, a real murder—not the one Walter planned—takes place, and a woman’s body is seen being tossed overboard. Since the legendary detective Walter Dew, now retired, just happens to be among the passengers, he is brought in to investigate and restore order.

Cruise ships, I suppose, make ideal settings for murder mysteries since the contained space places a cap on the number of possible suspects. And, in theory, those suspects—here a cast of card sharps and newlyweds—can’t get away. The False Inspector Dew doesn’t waste time on false leads and trickery. The brisk, comic narrative is less about bringing a killer to justice and more about the farce of Walter keeping up his charade. Toward that end, it wasn’t a bad read.

Incidentally, the Mauretania was a real ship, retired from service in 1934 and scrapped the following year. In addition to Dew, it was also the setting for Clive Cussler’s The Thief.

Fun Camp, Gabe Durham. A book that almost never happened, Fun Camp was originally to be published by MudLuscious Press before that press folded in 2012. Thankfully, Publishing Genius, out of Baltimore, swooped in and grabbed the rights of this fun and quirky book. I read it in one afternoon on Memorial Day weekend.

Summer camp stories were a staple of my reading as a kid, particularly Joel Schwartz’s Upchuck Summer (written by a psychiatrist) and Gordon Korman’s I Want to Go Home! (which I recall making me laugh out loud; incidentally, it is strange that the unhappy protagonist in Korman’s book has the same name, Rudy, as the loner kid opposite Bill Murray in Meatballs). The worst I had to do was a YMCA-affiliated day camp for two weeks when I was nine. We spent part of it raising money for the camp, earning pledges for how many laps we could swim, even though it was something our parents were already paying for. I came away with no idea still how to swim.

Camp stories makes for good narrative because they’re a setting where young people are left to figure out their own rules, how they fit in, and work out their own terms for happiness. But Fun Camp is not just about children; its vignettish format jumps around to include Head Counsellors Dave and Holly, letter-writer Billy, Chefs Grogg and Puddy and Marimba, and skeevy Tad Gunnick. With only glancing allusions and insider correspondences, Durham is able to draw a full picture of this community of individuals abiding by their own governance.

Booth #6. Purchased to read my friend Daniel Hales’s superb novel excerpt Run Story, already previewed here. This issue picks up where number 5 left off, doubling down on Booth’s apparent preference for emotionally damaged characters coping with their limitations in the face of uncooperative scenarios. Ian Golding’s “In the Essence of the Gourd” imagines Charlie Brown and Linus from Peanuts as older men living in poverty, busking in the streets by means of performances drawing from their once-thriving TV special careers. It’s a story loaded with ironic tricks, not because of the cynicism of these once-precious, optimistic characters (from the Great Pumpkin to Lucy’s football to the kite-eating tree, Peanuts is full of lessons regarding cynicism in the face of adversity), but because the of the new, strident level of desperation at which Golding has placed them, removed from the security of backyards and schoolrooms:

Linus stared at his army fatigues and shook his head in disappointment. He’d always hated You’re Not the Only Charlie, Charlie Brown.

“Now, for the last time, we’re Vietnam vets and the Man let us down. I saw kids getting sprayed in machine-gun fire. Kids, man. Kids.”

“What about me?” Linus said, his blanket dragging on the sidewalk, his stomach growling. It was the first time he’d left the Great Pumpkin and Boot Face alone. It was weird.

“You breathed in enough Agent Orange to shrivel your voice box, and now you can’t say a peep about pumpkins,” Charlie said, ruffling up his hair. “But show some emotion.”

The issue also includes “How I Came to Work at Wendy’s,” a sweetly somber graphic fiction by Nick St. John, and the prize-winning “Real Family” by Lenore Myka.

On this Bloomsday I’m happy to have a new story, “Hurry Someday,” up at Stymie Magazine. It is the third in a series of stories I’ve written about a group of Little Leaguers-turned-high schoolers in the 1990s, following “Where the Sun Don’t Shine” at Atticus Review and “Duster” at Cobalt Review. Many thanks to editor Erik Smetana and fiction editor Jeanie Chung.

I was in the second grade when Reading Rainbow premiered. I want to say that the first episode had the magician Harry Blackstone as a guest, but I’m not certain about that and the Internet doesn’t know.

My third-grade teacher, Mrs. Lemme, was not only into reading, she was into rainbows, so naturally she was a champion of the show. I remember when Bill Cosby did the reading for Arthur’s Eyes, which was the first book featured on the show that I had already read. (It’s required when you have glasses at age seven.)

Now LeVar Burton wants to bring Reading Rainbow back, and the host has launched a Kickstarter toward that end.

Because Generation X loves projecting its childhood staples on millennials, lest every awesome thing be lost to history, it took a mere 12 hours for Reading Rainbow to reach its million-dollar goal. It is now trying to reach $5 million within thirty-five days. “With the additional money,” says Alex Knapp at Forbes, “the company [RRKidz] aims to get not only on the web, but also to Android, game consoles, smartphones, and other streaming devices.”

The bridge across technologies would seem to be an obvious requirement for any media project in the twenty-first century. The new challenge, then, might not be instilling in children a love of storytelling via the written word but how to do so when the modern digital paradigm does all it can to tempt readers away from the confines of straight linear narrative. There is a delay in gratification when you read a book–that’s part of its social contract–and its enjoyment demands an uninterrupted streaming of engagement. And Reading Rainbow, as hard as it tries, cannot be anything other than a passive experience, one that teaches us less to enjoy reading than to enjoy being read to. (Adults have a similar relationship with NPR’s Selected Shorts). What the show cannot do is put books in kids’ hands and turn on the itch to dig deeper to find bliss.

But I’m glad it’s here to try.

Oh my God, I’ve lived a very simple life! You can say, Oh yes, at thirteen this happened to me and at fourteen . . . But those are facts. But the facts can obscure the truth, what it really felt like. Every human being has paid the earth to grow up. Most people don’t grow up. It’s too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That’s the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don’t grow up. Not really. They get older. But to grow up costs the earth, the earth. It means you take responsibility for the time you take up, for the space you occupy. It’s serious business. And you find out what it costs us to love and to lose, to dare and to fail. And maybe even more, to succeed. What it costs, in truth. Not superficial costs—anybody can have that—I mean in truth. That’s what I write. What it really is like. I’m just telling a very simple story.

–Maya Angelou, from The Art of Fiction No. 119

As Short Story Month wraps up, Powell’s celebrates by naming its Short List of Best Short Story Collections of the 21^st Century (So Far), with thirty-one titles making the cut. Among them are veterans like George Saunders, Alice Munro, and Lorrie Moore, alongside rising stars such as Adam Levin (Hot Pink) and Kyle Minor (Praying Drunk).

The idea of a public intellectual belongs to a far-gone era, but the unusual emergence of Thomas Piketty’s treatise Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and the viral celebrity that has been attained by its author, has Sam Tanenhaus placing him alongside so-called rock stars from previous decades: Susan Sontag, Allan Bloom, Christopher Lasch, Francis Fukuyama, Samantha Power. (It is interesting that, even though Piketty is French, hotshot European thinkers like Slavoj Žižek and Bernard-Henri Lévy go unmentioned in the article.)

Sontag embraced the role more willingly than the others:

As Ms. Sontag worked through the long history of outlaw art, she made herself, and her reactions, part of the story. “I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it,” she wrote. “That is why I want to talk about it, and why I can.”

That she talked about it in the pages of Partisan Review, a bastion of somber high seriousness, compounded the allure. So did Ms. Sontag’s dramatic good looks and sleek black-clad figure. Eventually she would impersonate herself in Woody Allen’s “Zelig” and pose for Annie Leibovitz. To this day, no intellectual has so elegantly played the role she actually lived.

The channels for such personalities have been winnowed. Hollywood would never welcome them back, and if it did, they would resist the irony that requires them to play along. We do not have The Dick Cavett Show anymore, are unlikely to see televised feuds in the Mailer-vs.-Vidal vein. Nobody watches C-SPAN2. The Daily Show and its companion programs try to do what they can without spitting into the soup. As we are finding out by this year’s slew of cancelled university commencement speeches, the free market rewards self-congratulation–for which there will never be an attrition of demand–and not the challenging of assumptions.

Likewise, Piketty’s ascent comes at a time when the public has been starving for someone to use their heft to smack around the job-creator myth and send it back to its lair. It is valuable that he has put into words what many laypeople have been thinking, and arming them with new arguments for the kitchen table, but it’s not going to help discourse on any level if that is the only reason people are reading his book.

If Piketty has a rival for celebrity, it might be Evgeny Morozov, whose writing does not eschew discomfort, but rather explores the dark tunnels of human interaction in the age of social media and offers well-intended caution about what the Internet promises versus what it delivers.

In the book Mr. Morozov puts quotation marks around every reference to “the Internet,” and with that tic he makes a larger point: readers should stop and question everything they have been taught about technology, including that the Internet exists.

Without such skepticism, Mr. Morozov and his supporters say, the public easily succumbs to the slick promises and catchwords of online entrepreneurs or TED talks — “open” or “generative” or “transparent” or “participatory.” And those words lead to real beliefs, with real consequences, he argues — for example, that privacy is just an archaic notion, or that information “wants to be free.”

On this Mother’s Day, Nadxieli Nieto’s Tumblr project Literary Mothers collects the testaments of eleven writers on the female authors who inspired them and their work.

Featured in the first batch: Matt Bell on Christine Schutt; Ashley Farmer on Joan Didion; Alexander Chasin on Andrea Dworkin, Audre Lorde, and Monique Wittig; Nadxieli Nieto on Nikki Giovanni; Amber Sparks on Isak Dinesen; Deb Olin Unferth on Gertrude Stein; Scott Cheshire on Kay Ryan; Porochista Khakpour on Can Xue; Lincoln Michel on Flannery O’Connor; Kelly Luce on Lois Lowry; Alissa Nutting on Lynda Barry; Erika Anderson on Cheryl Strayed.

I like Luce’s anecdote of acquiring The Giver through an act of shoplifting, and Farmer’s explanation how, through Didion, she opened herself to the idea of writing to discover what you know:

Didion has also said that writing is an aggressive, hostile thing—that you’re imposing your ideas on another person, that there’s so much “I” in it. But to me, writing to discover what you know is quite the opposite. It’s a call to humility. It’s the promise that writing can make us more human, more aware, more ourselves than we were before.

The project will remain open to new submissions, at least for the moment.

A memory: I’m 9 years old or thereabouts, at a yard sale with my mother. I come across a library-bound hardcover edition of something called The False Inspector Dew, by Peter Lovesey. I decide I have to have it.

My mother accedes. Never mind that the cover shows a man assailing a woman, his hand over her mouth, pearl necklace whipping around her neck. It comes at a time when I’m reading mysteries during idle hours at school—Encyclopedia Brown, Hardy Boys, only I keep skipping to the solutions at the end—and while this is obviously a step up in maturity, maybe the challenge is worth it.

I try the book but never finish it. It gets donated or tossed. But I remember the gaspy, sneering first page, the earliest demonstration I would discover of campy noir:

SS MAURETANIA. 9 SEPT 1921.

REFERENCE SUSPICIOUS DEATH ON BOARD HAVE INVITED CHIEF INSPECTOR DEW OF SCOTLAND YARD TO INVESTIGATE.

A. H. ROSTRON, CAPTAIN.

Chief Inspector Dew. The Commissioner remembered Dew. He was the man who had pulled in Dr Crippen. That was back in 1910. He was damned sure Dew had quit the force the same year.

He picked up a pencil. Under the message he wrote:

What’s this tomfoolery? Comedians are your department.    

Smiling to himself, he addressed it to his deputy.

The Deputy Commissioner was at Waterloo that day with Charlie Chaplin. Two hundred constables with arms linked were standing in support. Chaplin had come back to London after nine years in America. He had gone there as a member of the Karno troupe of music hall comedians. He was returning as one of the world’s most famous men. Thousands had gathered at the station.

When the train steamed in, the Deputy Commissioner and his senior men raced towards the compartment reserved for Chaplin. They seized him like a prisoner and hustled him along the platform. Beyond the barrier where the crowd was waiting, the blue line stood firm. Chaplin was funneled into a waiting limousine. Few people saw him.

Today I scored a Soho Press paperback edition of The False Inspector Dew on the front table of World Eye Bookstore for $3.

Utica was halfway between home and Niagara Falls. A five-day trip shortened to four because funds were drying up. Highway signs and trailers with curtains in the windows and buffalos and cacti painted on the sides, license plates from as far away as Saskatchewan. Your parents were able to get a room for a discount rate at the same Best Western you stayed in on the way there, and the pinball machine still showed you as having the second-place high score even though your brother Jason had hit your hand on purpose when you were toggling in your initials so they came out as SAA.

The May issue of Pithead Chapel is live and I’m pleased to have a new story, “Baby Elephant Walk,” a tale of steak houses and summer vacation and brothers and tourist kitsch.

Thanks to editor Keith Rebec and fiction editor Ashley Strosnider.