Exhibit 25.22

Billboard

I forgot to mention that my favorite billboard on the interstate was one for HaysHasJobs.com, a sort of desperate plea for people to move to Hays, Kansas. It's as if they fear the Cheyenne have been waiting for the population to dwindle before storming the old fort outside visiting hours. It's as if the Hays City Council gets their marketing ideas from Sarah, Plain and Tall. I love my old town as much as the next former resident, but I'm not sure if one billboard right over the Kansas border is going to turn the tide on this one.

Also not helping is the rotation of images in the top banner which are either supposed to illustrate jobs (dirt track minicar driver, sunflower) or local entertainment (lightning, hallways). Most confusing though is this one which seems to offer both:


Plenty of openings for posse members, apparently. As I had 15 minutes to spend getting that screen capture, I should probably think about applying for something, something like Part-Time Combat Lifesaving Instructor.

Exhibit 25.21

"No one is asking anyone to change.”


Catalpa
This Is Not True


by Amanda Goldblatt
Now Available


1 tape-bound volume
Book Design by William Todd Seabrook
Cover Image by Amanda Goldblatt

$15/year subscription, $5/individual

The Cupboard is pleased to announce the release of Catalpa: This Is Not True by Amanda Goldblatt—an essay, redacted.


*ABOUT THE VOLUME*
We can not know what presence is until we know how to punctuate it. We cannot know how to punctuate it until we admit the truth. We cannot admit the truth until we know what words we need to hide. Catalpa is an essay on scrims and landscapes. It's a poem, a redaction, a confession, at least once a recipe. Here one wants to know: what if animals die and it might not mean anything? Here one is given: an essay that builds sandcastles on the floor. It’s the best kind of nonfiction: the kind that isn’t true.

Read excerpts here.


*ABOUT THE AUTHOR*
Amanda Goldblatt was born in Washington D.C. in 1982. She now lives in St. Louis, Missouri, where she teaches creative nonfiction and fiction at Washington University. Her stories have been published in Redivider, Sonora Review, The Collagist, Diagram, and elsewhere. She edits the online journal Super Arrow.


*SUBSCRIBE*
The Cupboard publishes a new volume every three months. A year’s subscription is $15. Subscribe here.

Individual volumes, including past volumes from Louis Streittmatter, Mathias Svalina, Caia Hagel, Michael Stewart, and Joshua Cohen, are available for $5.


*PAST AUTHORS*
Mathias Svalina’s book, Destruction Myth, is now available from Cleveland State University Press.

Joshua Cohen’s highly anticipated novel Witz is out from Dalkey Archive Press and was reviewed in the New York Times here.

Both Jesse Ball and Joshua Cohen made The Millions’s list of 20 More Writers under 40.


*OUR NEXT VOLUME*
Explanations by Andrew Borgstrom will be the next volume of The Cupboard. Look for it later this summer.

Exhibit 25.20

Lost Man

During my 12-hour drive up to Kansas City, I noticed a lot more billboards than I normally do, especially in Dallas which must be the most billboarded city in the country. Say what you will about Houston, but for the most part they keep the outdoor advertising reasonable along the freeway. Dallas is another matter. Their signs ranged from standard--100.3FM It's Free!--to obscure--Frank's Valves [phone number]. I also learned from signeage that Dallas and the area around it has a chain interstate-side adult video store. I saw at least four in north Texas, and I'm pretty sure I made it all the way to Oklahoma City by wondering what kind of corporate training seminars and team building exercises the employees would have to tolerate. Would there be a yearly picnic? With potato sack races? Yes, I decided. Yes.

But the best thing I saw was that Dallas was using its traffic warning signs to mention that an elderly gentleman was lost. For 50 miles, all the signs were flashing the man's name (Buck) and that he was a white guy from Atlanta, Texas. This was sad. I mean, it didn't say how old the guy was, but he must have been really lost for someone to have gotten the okay to use the road signs. But after passing a sign at almost every exit, it became a little surreal. I wanted to pull off the road, find a white guy, and have this conversation:

Me: Hey, is your name Buck?
White Guy: Yes.
Me: [getting hopeful] Are you from Atlanta?
White Guy: Why, yes.
Me: [super excited] Are you lost?
White Guy: Boy howdy, I am. Thank you, stranger. I don't know how I'll get back to Georgia.
Me: [punches white guy]

I mean, I really hope they found Buck. Maybe he went back to Atlanta (which, I now know, isn't even close to Dallas) or maybe he stumbled into one of those adult video stores. Maybe he became the manager. Maybe every two weeks his regional supervisor comes by and gives him a hard time about upselling. Yes. That.

Exhibit 25.19

Run by Kim Gek Lin Short



I didn't know anything about this chapbook when I picked it up at AWP except that Jeremiah said I should buy it and offered a toy horse to close the deal. He'd come so far as a salesman since we shared a table at the last AWP. But he was right. About the chapbook. About the horse. About everything.

It's easy in the world of letterpressed and hand-sewn chapbooks to get caught up in the beauty of the physical object and let it overshadow the writing inside, but Run would be just as satisfying if it were xeroxed and stapled at Kinko's. It is a beautiful book, of course, but the story told through this series of prose poems is a shocking one of kidnapping and abuse and country music. It can do this:

Hand it over, it says, the knife in her purse. Her mother tells the police she knows where La La is: it is not a better place. She slices the sharp searches for the life the heat the wet they do not see. She slices a gash and sharps over it over it over it. Where is your daughter, they ask, naked with glasses on. They're visual. She can't show them because they're visual.

Yep. It's full of moments like this. Violence and dreams and capture and escape.

Pick it up here. O, and then there's this. Hmm...

Exhibit 25.18

Conference Realignment

If you'll allow me to talk about college athletics for a moment...

...I've got mixed feelings about how Nebraska broke college football. Not that college football got broken, but that it had to be Nebraska doing it. It's not exactly the situation, of course, and Colorado's move into the Pac-10 takes some of the heat off the Big Red, but at least in Texas the sentiment seems to be that it's Nebraska driving a stake into the heart of the Big XII (and not, you know, a flawed revenue sharing arrangement or conference championship game that's not going to played north of Dallas anytime soon).

Nebraska is doing what's right for Nebraska, but it's unfortunate that there are likely going to be some pretty dire consequences for some surrounding schools. I'm mostly sad for Kansas in all of this which has to be looking around and panicking that their basketball team is going to end up playing Boise St. and Wyoming twice a year. The Texas schools will always be okay, and Oklahoma seems likely to land on its feet one way or the other, but the Plains schools are going to be in an awkward position if things continue on their current course. Its a course that means 16 team super conferences and--eventually--a host of lawsuits and possible congressional action.

It's not going to be pretty, and, while I agree with the decision--am crazily excited about it actually--it's Nebraska's responsibility. Apparently, like Han Solo, Nebraska shoots first. It's shocking such an old-guard administration was able to weigh the school's future against tradition and determine the money was worth the criticism. And this is about money. Nebraska wanted more, and so they were bold instead of loyal. They were determined not to be left behind, and how it came to be Nebraska joining the Big 10 and not Missouri is a story that I hope comes out at some point. Somehow a university from one of the country's smallest states came to be the key player in a national revolution driven by the acquisition of television ratings. Tom Osborne must have made one incredible PowerPoint presentation.

So now the university will position itself to build its academic reputation around its Big 10 membership. Good, they should be so ambitious. The state seems to think there are ways this could lead to jobs and population growth (we'll see. Frankly, I'd be afraid if college football is actually that important). The athletic department is going to try to sell everyone on the idea that Iowa is rival, and soon it probably will be. And of course the only reason that matters: the financial windfall. The end.

It's a win, but it's a momentary one. By the time Nebraska joins in 2011, all of the other pieces will have fallen into place and it might not look like such a smart move to have cast off the past. If things go the way they seem to be going, this is going to be a reset button in college athletics (though, notably, not the one we'd all like to hit which would bring some much needed reforms to spread the wealth to student-athletes). Nebraska is hardly guaranteed their relevancy, and there are obvious pitfalls in moving north rather than south. O well. They broke it, they bought it. Thankfully, it shouldn't be a problem paying for it.

Exhibit 25.17

Apologies

This recent gap in posts may be the longest in this blog's history, and it's all because of Boldface, the fantastic undergraduate writing conference I've been teaching at for the past week. I'm tired and full of sandwiches, but it's been great. My students are embarrassing me with their talent. I'm teaching them how to introduce business lingo into workshops. Cost-benefit-analysis! Best practices! Synergy!

I've only said some of those things.

Exhibit 25.16

Umpire Jim Joyce vs. Novelist James Joyce


FACIAL HAIR



vs.



Winner: Jim Joyce


HEAD ACCESSORIES



vs.



Winner: Tie.


SMOKING JACKET WEARING ABILITY



vs.



Winner: James Joyce by default


VISION



vs.



Winner: No one.

Exhibit 25.15

Sometimes I Don't Know What to Post...

...so I check the Bulletin and hope they'll conveniently feature two embarrassing stories atop each other so I can take a screenshot and go about my day.


I hope this all makes us stop and take a moment to consider the precariousness of our frontier towns as they grapple with these coordinated attacks. Who will save this bustling city from nature's uprising?

My guess: Denny Mogis.

And before noon I've posted something on this blog and made a joke about a former area car dealer. I think I've earned myself a cup of coffee.

Exhibit 25.14

A Canonical Poem Adapted into a Control Scheme
for a ColecoVision Game

Edgar Allan Poe
"The Bells"

1: Bells
2: Bells
3: Bells
4: Bells
5: Bells
6: Bells
7: Bells
8: Bells
9: Bells
*: Bells
0: Bells
#: Bells
Left: Bells
Right: Bells
Joystick: They are Ghouls

Exhibit 25.13

(as spoiler free as possible but still not something you are going to want to read if you haven't finished the show)




Well, it's also probably not something you're going to want to read if you have any respect for me. I realized midway through writing a comment on my friend Chris's post here--a comment in which I referenced midichlorians for god's sake--that I might as well fully geek out a little about Lost. I don't feel good about what I'm doing either. We should all just pretend it's not happening.

I thought the finale was ideal. And I don't mean ideal in that it answered all of the questions that had been raised by the show (or most of the questions [or really any of the questions]), but it was an episode that could naturally return us to the show's past, resurrect old characters, and conclude on a note that was both ending and beginning. That, to me, is a pretty impressive capstone. It was touching, exciting, and, most importantly, fit coherently within the ongoing arch of the show. This wasn't Seinfeld's finale which attempted a similar of cohesion but had to violate the basic tenants of its world in order to do so. This was an ending that made sense. This was an ending.

Now, there are issues. Serious ones. As much as I admired the finale as 2.5-hours of television doing something wonderful with an impossible task, Lost's six seasons are hardly as ideal when taken as a whole. I completely understand anyone frustrated or bothered by last night's episode when there's so much left unsaid about the island's magic, the Dharma initiative, the numbers, etc. At least for me, it was clear we weren't going to be getting any of those answers for weeks and so my expectations might have been a bit different. Lost, correctly, went in the direction of concluding its characters' stories rather than its setting's. I think that's a choice the show made a long time ago, and while some of those central mysteries remained unanswered if not problematically confused at this point, I think we should have been aware that we were always watching a show about characters confronting those mysteries not the mysteries themselves.

Would I have preferred a show more concerned with its own mythology? I don't know. Like most of the people I know who love(d) Lost, that mythology is what I found captivating and kept me going through early stumbles (or anything involving Kate). And, yeah, I have a lot of unanswered questions and a bit of bitterness that some things I think should have been answered weren't (specifically, I think if the creators were serious in having mapped out the ending so far in advance, they should have used the time with the Dharma folk to say far more about what the Hanso Foundation knew and the "rules" between Ben and Widmore when the creators "knew" they weren't coming back to those things). And I have a great deal more bitterness about the things that were a waste of time or simply confusing (specifically, everything about this season's temple).

Mostly, I think the show probably did itself a disservice by making the Dharma stuff too captivating in the early seasons and then more or less hoping the audience would be satisfied by rolling it haphazardly into the Jacob/MiB storyline. This season, we learned the show we were watching was really one about a mystical ancient conflict with the very fate of the world at stake. I can see why they must have thought something this grand would make us forget all the pettier mysteries, but I don't think many of us were capable of letting go. As much as I enjoyed all this talk about "the light," I still think questions like how Charlie knew the song to type into the keypad are more interesting for being smaller (and for coming naturally out of the characters we'd been with from the beginning). But I can appreciate the ambition behind it all, and I'm willing to chock up these disappointments to the nature of producing an open-ended television series.

(O man, I just replied to a comment on my comment. I'm really hitting some new lows today. If only I weren't enjoying this so much...)

Basically, there were a lot of false starts and loose ends, and I think that's fine. Sometimes the rules changed halfway through the story. Sometimes things we spent a long time thinking were important weren't important. Sometimes the show cheated. It wasn't perfect, but perfect wasn't and shouldn't be the goal. Being surprising and entertaining and emotionally moving is the goal, and if you can manage to do that more often then not when producing over 100 hours of programming, you've succeeded. You'd have to be some kind of monster not to have been moved by Sawyer and Juliet's reunion last night, yet that's a relationship that's less than two seasons old. So we could look at that relationship and lament that it's so disconnected from where the show began and acknowledge that it's clearly something they just threw together on the fly or we can enjoy how everything we saw before changed those characters until the relationship not only made sense but seemed inevitable. That it somehow became the emotional linchpin of the finale is great and surprising and is exactly what Lost has been able to do that most shows can't. It made me care. I might have started caring because of the polar bears and the four-toed statue, but the show convinced me that was only background to what was really important. A complicated mythology isn't enough on its own, and if the cost of making a compelling show is making one that leaves things unanswered, then I'm fine with that. Answers are overrated.

I guess I don't know what else to say except that it was a great show and it ended well.

Exhibit 25.12

Netherland


I wrote about this Zadie Smith essay some time back wherein I acknowledged an ambivalence in seeking out well-wrought, realist fiction when my interests as a writer lie elsewhere. I've never known what to add to that conversation when so many books--over such a long period of time--can reasonably be said to have approached becoming the apotheosis. Smith had similar issues, writing, "to read [Netherland] is to feel a powerful, somewhat dispiriting sense of recognition. It seems perfectly done—in a sense that’s the problem."

My thinking has changed somewhat since I first read Smith's essay, not about writing what Smith calls "lyric Realism," but about reading it. For a variety of reasons, I've encountered more of it in the last year, and while a lot of it still reads like skilled writers practicing a style they've learned by rote--that is to say lifeless and terrible with an abundance of characters named Pa and an underlying, unacknowledged conservatism that would scandalized its authors--occasionally something like Netherland comes along which manages to extract a lot of power out of the contradiction of using old ways to understand and describe a modern world. As a reader, I think it's a great book. As a writer, I think it's a great book, too, a reminder that whatever construction of fiction I might prefer cannot ignore books like this if it wants to claim openness as a value.

Smith, though obviously fond of the book, reads a little emptiness in Netherland's performance and while I agreed with her intuitively before reading it, afterward I'm not so sure. Or at least I'm not so sure her charge is best directed at this book. Can grand literary language and metaphor serve to turn our world, our persons into the ridiculously sublime at the expense of real tension, real danger, real real? Of course, and it's this as much as anything that's always pushed my tastes away from so much realism of this school. Everything is always so damned beautiful without being beautiful or damned, and the only thing real about any of it is that nothing impossible happens. For me, this wasn't a book that fell into the trap of the unnecessarily exalted if only because it showed an awareness that such a trap exists (and that it really is a trap). Netherland is a book about how we can control how we see ourselves and the world and how we might, even if only in moments, even if there are consequences, choose to see grandly. That felt real to me.

Exhibit 25.11

Hobart

Hobart is the journal I wish I did, but at least I can still read it. Their new issue, 'The Great Outdoors,' is now out and it's a good one. You should not only pick up this issue, you should plant it in the ground when you're done reading it. Then you should water it with a hose twice a day. Wonders will bloom.

I can't say it enough: this journal is amazing from Buffalo to Zoophilia, and you need to read it.

I have three short shorts in it which are notable for being about Boy Scouts, Claire's, and Angelina Jolie, respectively. I realize that, at best, only one of those things occurs naturally, but I worked in enough references to birds to make the others count (i.e. Find-and-Replace 'Earrings' with 'Toucan').

You should also check out the web extras that go up here, especially more of Lucy Corin's apocalypses. There's a lot of other great stuff up there, too, including one of those pie crust recipes that involves ice water. I never trust those recipes, but I do trust Hobart.

I have something up called "My Eagle Scout Project: A Sidewalk: A List" which is, I suppose, a kind of essay about my Eagle Scout project. It's true. Every pathetic word.

Exhibit 25.10

Postcard to Houston



Dear Houston,

It's been awhile but not so long that I've learned a grey day doesn't mean cold.

It means worse hot,

Adam

Exhibit 25.9

Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever


Leaving a writers' conference with a bag full of books can be more than a little disorienting, and choosing the first one to read on the plane home becomes an impossible task. Do you go with a literary journal for a sampling of work? A book by someone you know? Eschew them all and buy whatever book about boy wizards can be found at the airport? After hours spent contemplating this decisions while hotel maids vacuumed over my feet and another family checked into the room, I chose Taylor's debut story collection, and, if I may say, I think I chose well.

Among many other fine qualities, Taylor's book is a writer's book, full of deft language and style. More than anyone else, the stories here remind me of Breece D'J Pancake. There's a similar undercurrent of sadness and sense of powerlessness here, and as with Pancake there's something particularly youthful in that listlessness. With less heart it would be trite or with more anger it would be cynical, but Taylor makes these young lives grand with language and humor.

Consider the beginning of the short short "Finding Myself:"

I keep finding myself in places I don't expect me, such as outside churches, lurking, peering in their dooryards, or inside my own hollow skull, living a life to which the term hardscrabble might be astutely or ironically applied. Luckily, there are no ironists or astuticians around to subject me to application. It's just me in here--I'm not even wearing socks.

The best stories here stay in this vein though I'd be doing the collection a disservice if I made it sound navel-gazing. There's a lot going on in these stories, and Taylor's not a writer afraid of plot. But at least when I finished the book sometime before my plane landed, what I appreciated most were the moments like the one above, when these smart, sensitive narrators weren't passive but weren't quite ready to take charge of the world either. Their author, however, doesn't have such problems as throughout the collection each word seems dropped by a hand that knows exactly where it belongs.

Exhibit 25.8

Not Stock Photography

Say what you will about stock photography--and this blog says nothing about stock photography, not for months--but it does prevent online advertisements like this one I got today:


Am I supposed to be this guy? Or is this guy supposed to be searching me? What's that even mean? Why is he conducting this search in the bathroom anyway? Can I help him pick out a new shower curtain? I'm thinking a nice red floral one, maybe?

As you see, I have questions, questions and one decorating suggestion which will make the best out of an unfortunate bathroom tile situation.

Now if only I knew a way to find him...