Exhibit 6.8

I don't know when I took on my dad's love of having unused lights turned off, but it's undeniable now that this trait has been passed down (I have also acquired very concrete ideas about how tire pressure should be constantly monitored).

I want to say that my father and I have different reasons for wanting the lights off. Rather than the fear of a vaguely higher electric bill, I'm trying to protect the environment by making sure the resources of a 1-bedroom apartment in Lincoln, Nebraska, are most optimally being utilized. I don't want to melt ice caps or take the tops off mountains in order for us to use our large television as a nightlight. When we leave our computers on all night because the dogs like the pretty colors of the screensavers, when we buy more lamps because they look nice, when we turn on all these new lamps because they look even nicer, well, these things make me sad.

I want to say these things, but it's hard to explain this when I'm yelling at you to off the lights when you leave a room.

Exhibit 6.7

Samedi the Deafness

Jesse Ball's book concerns a mnemonist, James Sim, who stumbles upon a man dying from a wound in his chest who tells Sim about a conspiracy that threatens to undo the fabric of society. The same day a man kills himself in front of the White House bearing an oblique but threatening message from someone calling himself Samedi. Sim's efforts to discover the nature of the conspiracy leads him to a hospital for chronic liars who, naturally, obfuscate the true nature of the conspiracy (if there is one at all).

But that's just the setup. Once the book settles in, it's far less of a thriller than might be imagined. The fate of the nation rests in the balance, but no one, including our hero, really seems that concerned about it. If anything, Sim is more concerned with determining whether or not he can live among the conspirators than stopping them. In addition to his prodigious memory, Ball provides Sim with a surprising amount of insecurity. He's the sort of narrator capable of acting decisively on every impulse but then analyzes every action until he determines he should have done the opposite.

It slows the speed in an effective way, making the action something separate from the plot. Surrounded by diagnosed liars, Sim has to pick through their mistruths in order to solve his mystery yet the conspirators are the liars. Whatever their motives might be, whatever the nature of the conspiracy is, Sim is forever unable to reconcile the incongruous pieces of the puzzle or think beyond the last thing he's told.

(If only there was a word for books where intricate, absurd organizations confuse and frustrate an overmatched protagonist. It's sort of like something that guy one guy wrote. You know, the guy with books about trials and whatnot. Grisham or whatever.)

It's a brilliant world Ball has here, familiar only in its disappointments. But it's an elusive book, and even when I finished the final page I wasn't quite sure if Ball's meditative anti-thriller really wanted to say something about the nature of truth, conspiracy, and deafness or if those elements were just something the author discovered as he discovered the characters' names (Ball says he took from tombstones). The potential for making a political statement here is impossible to ignore since Samedi's aim is to humble and reconstruct America, yet somehow Ball and his hero don't touch on whether or not it's a good thing. Frankly, I was glad.

The point seems to be that in a world of mistruths, Sim is incapable of moral outrage. Right and wrong have become as intertwined as true and false. Until he can get answers, he's impotent and since no answer seems forthcoming, he will remain that way. That this makes him complicit never quite occurs to the character though it's hard to avoid as a reader.

It's such a strange and captivating read that it's impossible to lament the somewhat unconcerned narrator. The reader, like Sim, is too driven to find the truth to bother with the fact that there's no time to consider what the truth might mean.

Exhibit 6.6

We are now on our fifth couch in two years. I don't even remember them any more. There was a green one, a yellow one, a gold one, and then a red one.

This is the reason why we keep getting new couches:

The new one is brown.

Exhibit 6.5

This is a story I am ready to tell.

Heather and I went to her mother's place in California before Christmas. We went to Disneyland. We went to the LACMA and MOMA and In-N-Out Burger. This is not the story.

Before we left we turned off the heat in the apartment with the vague plan of driving out the mice that we hadn't been otherwise able to displace. Like undergraduates returning home between at the semester break, the mice always show up in this apartment around the beginning of December, each year a little wiser and stranger than the previous year's mice. This year, they'd proven surprisingly resilient and we thought a cold apartment might drive them away.

We also let our landlord know that we were going to be gone in case he wanted to do any apartment repairs while the dogs were away. We did this, drove to the airport, and I forgot about the mice and the apartment and the landlord sometime around when I was spinning on the teacups with my face covered in churro sugar. I may have also forgotten about the very idea of a Nebraska.

So we returned 10 days later to a freezing apartment, quickly left for an après ski-themed holiday party, and didn't think anything was unusual until Heather received an email from our landlord that said something to the effect of:

Hey, I don't mind some ritual sacrifice, but I don't think it's safe to leave a pile of matches on the stove. I threw them away.

This confused us. When we wrote back asking for clarification, he stated very matter-of-factly that when he was in our apartment he found a bed of spent matchsticks on top of our stove and, resting ominously in the middle, a mouse head.

This confused us. This frightened us. We hadn't left any matchsticks or mouse heads around, but, sure enough, sitting in the center of our stove were the remnants of some matchsticks. I felt sick, sure that someone had broken into our house. Then Heather called me at work to say that a pound of coffee was also missing, only increasing our hysteria.

Naturally, we assumed coffee-loving satanists had broken into our house.

I immediately started looking at apartments on craigslist. Heather was afraid to be home alone. At home, I checked the television (which the leisurely coffee loving satanist oddly hadn't stolen), and it was on the Food Network when I was pretty sure an episode of The Simpsons had been the last thing we'd watched. Good god, I thought, these coffee-loving gourmet satanists sat on our couch watching Rachel Ray. If they could have, they probably would have taken Rachel Ray's smiling head and left it on our coffee table. As I turned from rechecking the chain lock on our front door, I could almost see her little chipmunk face waiting for me there to remind me that it was possible to make a yummy meal quickly (and that satanists had sat where I watch The Simpsons).

So we called a locksmith before any other animal or celebrity heads appeared in our apartment. He told us that junkies had probably squatted in our apartment while we were gone. This sounded reasonable. He said it happens all the time. This sounded reasonable.

As we prepared to spend one last night in the apartment before we gave it over to the junkie, mouse-sacrificing satanists, our landlord emailed again and said that--on second thought--he thought it was probably just a nest the mice were making since it was above the pilot light and would have been the warmest spot in an otherwise cold house. What about the coffee? I asked Heather. Maybe I was wrong, Heather said. Yeah, maybe.

Me: So you don't think junkies were squatting in the apartment?
Landlord: Who thinks that?
Me: The locksmith told us it happens all the time.
Landlord: Does it?
Me:
Landlord: I'm sorry I thought you guys were people who would make a shrine to a dead mouse in your kitchen.

That conversation happened. Except for the apology at the end. On the plus side, at least we know if we--or any of our junkie satanists gourmet coffee aficionado friends--had done it, he'd be cool with it as long as it wasn't a fire hazard. That's good to know.

Exhibit 6.4

On Editing a Novel #2

RENAMING CHARACTERS. You've undoubtedly named all of your characters after your former spouse and his or her family. This is what you were supposed to do. Good work. You can move on to step #3.

If you've never been married, you borrowed the first names of your favorite childhood television characters and used the college you went to as a last name, or, if you never went to college, used the first name of a '80s-era world leader and taken the last name from the company that makes your favorite commercials. So you've name your characters things like Optimus Clemson and Muammar Pepsi. These are fine names, too, but they are names for boys or girls with progressive economics professors for parents. Yours is a classy book set in the 1800s so you might need girls names in case you add a ball scene in this draft (see step #24 'THE ADDING OF A BALL SCENE').

Girls names are even easier. If you are a girl, simply use your own name and call the book autobiography. Do not go on to step #3 or any further steps.

Otherwise, you'll need a blindfold. Without peeking, taste everything in your kitchen (even if it smells bad or is obviously a cleaning product). Then try to guess what the item might be called in Spanish. These guesses are girls' names.

Blindfolded, you won't be able to write down these names so you'll probably need a personal assistant to do it for you. If the personal assistant you hire is a girl, you can also ask her what her name is and use that.

If her name is Optimus Clemson because her parents are progressive economics professors, you probably won't be able to have girls in your novel.

Exhibit 6.3

Three new journals that I have work in:

Indiana Review.

I have a story titled "The Way Back" in this issue. This story is notable for being:

1) The only story I have ever written that takes place in Kansas despite my having been born and graduated high school in The Sunflower State.

2) The only story I have that takes place in 1996. Bizarrely, it doesn't even mention Weezer.

3) The longest story I have ever published at somewhere north of 9.5k words.

The issue is fantastic (much better than my sad story), and you should be sure to check it out. I've always thought IR had some of the best design of any of the standard format journals, and now I'm convinced. I can vouch firsthand for how hard they work to make sure everything is perfect. They really care. It's pretty cool.

South Dakota Review.

So, they don't actually put covers of the issues up on their website, but I figured the state seal of South Dakota would get the idea across. More great stuff here, some Midwestern themed, some not. It features Lincolnite Cody Lumpkin with a poem about squirrel metaphysics and my poet doppelgänger Allan Peterson. I hope Mr. Peterson doesn't get confused with me all the time like I do him.

You: Are you the poet Allan Peterson?
Me: I'm the fiction writer Adam Peterson?
You: Are you not sure which one you are?
Me: No?

My story is titled "Miss Nebraska" and is notable for:

1) Having had, by some great margin, the shortest length of time between when I wrote the story, when it was accepted, and when it was actually published and in my hands. I'm actually not even sure I've finished it yet.

2) Taking place in North Platte, Nebraska, the town where I lived between the ages of 6 and 15. Although all place names (I think) are made up, the essence of the town is not.

3) Being the only story of mine where someone is entered into a beauty pageant. Let's just hope this doesn't send me off on a Sufjan Stevens-like quest to document how all 50 states select their Miss America representative.

Also notable is that the state motto of South Dakota is apparently "Under God the People Rule" which strikes me as having a 'when the cat's away the mice will play' sort of logic to it. This will be explored further in my story "Miss South Dakota" which should be out circa 2034.

Ninth Letter.

There's not much I can say to demonstrate Ninth Letter's thorough awesomeness. It's a fusion of design and text unlike anything else out there, and I feel lucky to be in it at all.

When the first issue came out I was opening mail for a journal and wasn't sure what it was when I opened the copy they sent us. Flipping through it, it became clear they were doing something completely different than anyone else. Now on their 8th issue, they are still making an exciting and beautiful journal. That I am just as in awe when I see Ninth Letter as I was the first time makes me really happy.

My piece is another My Untimely Death which you can see my previous post about here or just order by specifying the title and sending $10 to this address:

Subito Press

Department of English

University of Colorado at Boulder
Hellems 101226 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0226

Notable things about my shameless self promotion:

1) I feel bad about it.

2) I wish I could give you a copy if I haven't already.

3) It only benefits the good folks at Subito Press.

Exhibit 6.2

If I don't post for a few days, you should come look for me around the 13th floor of the building where I work. I'm either dead or I've become involved some kind of Murakami-esque world of danger and intrigue. I'm hoping for the latter.

The one good thing about walking the stairs every morning is that on the 5th floor of our building a life insurance company has decided to pump their waiting room music into the stairwell. As no one ever--ever--uses the stairs this is a puzzling decision. It's usually set to a local pop station, but every so often it's godless contemporary country or (godful?) classic rock. Sometimes I hit the floor when there's a commercial on and I have to spend the remaining 10 floors pondering whether or not I really am happy with my last oil change or if I should start going to Jiffy Lube.

This morning I heard the faintest sounds of Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride" as I hit the 4th floor and was able to ride the rock momentum. Suddenly revitalized, I ran all the way to the 6th floor until the song, like the band itself, faded away and I realized, like the band itself, I might not survive the year.

Needless to say, the rest of the white, rock-less floors were profoundly disappointing after that.

Exhibit 6.1

Absurdistan

Well, you should be reading Gary Shteyngart's second novel now instead of wasting your time here. It's exactly the sort of hysterical, profane satire that doesn't come up a lot any more. Or, if it does, it usually targets celebrity or media or something small and fleeting and American. Shteyngart's book targets those things to--at least in a way--but his obese, America-loving Russian oligarch stumbles into a bigger story of oil and politics in a crumbling former Soviet state named Absurdistan.

Misha, the oligarch, is an insatiable glutton for anything that comes his way--food, affection, conflict, etc.--and his beloved adopted country of America holds the largest excess of his vices. Struggling to obtain a visa to return to New York, he gets stuck in a staged civil war between Absurdistan's two not-at-all distinct religious factions who are after the country's rich oil reserves and the wealthy Halliburton contracts they'll bring. An empathetic child in a fat man's body, Misha's money allows him to avoid recognizing the actors that create the world's problems which he believes hurt him deeply. He thinks he understands hunger but he's nearly orgasmic when feasting. He thinks he understands diaspora but only sees it in his own displacement from America.

Shteyngart keeps Misha sympathetic and where most authors might have slowly stripped him of his money and health, Shteyngart makes him complicit in the devastation of the country around him until the wall of his weight and money finally cracks and the world comes in. It's a book about oil and greed and democracy, but mostly it's about the loss of reason and principle in the selfish quest of a country, of a man, for wealth.

Oh, it's also hilarious and remarkably well-written.

Exhibit 5.27

On Editing a Novel #1

HOW TO BEGIN. You take your favorite notebook and you fill it with leaves from trees you need to describe better and hair you've cut from people who look like your characters and soup from meals you think might be served at your novel's climactic banquet scene. You then leave the notebook at a swimming pool.

You never go swimming again.

Exhibit 5.26

It's caucus night tonight and so far this mostly meaningless yet horribly fun spotlight momentarily gracing Iowa is once again delivering exactly what it promises. I say mostly meaningless because what Iowa does--and it's debatable if this is a good thing--is weed out candidates by sucking up their money and time before the real voting starts. In other words, see you, Bill Richardson and Chris Dodd. This isn't goodbye, Bill, it's just so long until the V.P. talk starts.

The other thing Iowa does is provide another little, politely Midwestern land mine for less polished candidates. Who is going to undergo this election's Howard Dean like flameout? It's not my place to guess, but I'm taking a long look at you, Mike Huckabee. That guy has more than a few of Chekhov's guns on the wall. It's still the first act, but that guy says some really bizarre stuff without provocation. Once the attention really shifts to him, look out. I honestly think he is capable of constructing a sentence that somehow manages to offend, confuse, and frighten every single American.

Meaningless prediction: Obama and Huckabee win, a 2nd place showing for Hillary (which she'll claim as a victory because many now expect her to take 3rd), and a slightly stronger than expected showing for Ron Paul and Joe Biden though nothing truly shocking. Realize, those are pretty much everyone's predictions.

Exhibit 5.25

New Year's Resolutions

1. Post more. Dropping under 20 a month is just embarrassing.
2. Take stairs to office. Initially I wrote "Take stares to office." I'll do that one, too.
3. Start reading Ward 6. That doesn't really need an explanation.
4. Make more salads. It's not that I feel like I don't eat enough salad as is, it's just that I feel like I need at least one diet related resolution.
5. Stop spending 6 hours per day thinking about Bill Parcells.
6. Train dog. I'm not sure what to train her to do though. Possibly to eat all the extra salad I'll be making.
7. Use spell check. I'm serious this time.

Exhibit 5.24

Brief Encounters With Che Guevara

This debut collection from Ben Fountain is everywhere. I had just finished reading the back cover--the second or third occasion in which I had read the back cover without making the leap of purchasing the book--when I walked into a clothing store which, for whatever reason, just happened to be selling the book on clearance. I picked it up for the plane ride back to Nebraska and while I certainly wasn't disappointed, I wasn't in love either.

Oddly, I read the entire collection save for the final story on the plane, and when I picked it up at home last week and read the final story it was like I was reading an entirely different book. That story, "Fantasy for Eleven Fingers," is a strange, journalistic tale of an eleven-fingered Pianist playing in pre-WWI Vienna and is easily my favorite story of the collection. It accomplishes one of my favorite tricks of good fiction: I was convinced it was a true story, going so far as to turn to the Internet just to verify it was apocryphal. It's a very good story, exactly the kind of thing you'd hate to teach because its big pleasure is in its telling and not its showing. I'm not sure if there is a single moment you could even call a 'scene' in the entire story, but it's so much better for it.

The prose here is accomplished but straightforward, written mostly in mid-length sentences full of meaning-heavy similes and thoughtful reflection. Fountain does it so well that it would be juvenile to say these are the type of stories that M.F.A. programs typically produce and then want to publish in their literary journals, but during the lesser stories I had a hard time thinking anything differently. What saves them is their engagement with the world--mostly South America and Haiti--because though we've read stories like these, we haven't read these stories.

As the title somewhat inadvertently suggests, most here are 'encounter' stories of an American meets the 3rd world variety. Despite some misgivings, I actually liked the non-encounter story--"Bouki and Cocaine"-- the best of the Latin America stories. The others seemed to expect shock when we learn of the hypocrisy of revolution or awe at the strangeness of a foreign culture, and maybe I'm too cynical or Fountain is too polite but I felt I understood what the stories were trying to tell me long before they finished telling me. It's not the sort of thing I would usually let bother me except that I felt these were very moral stories. Fountain obviously cares deeply for the places he's been and it's that wide, generous view of the world that separates the book from so many others.

Still, I couldn't help but feel like every time a story was about to do something really interesting--a woman's soldier husband returns from Haiti practicing Voodoo!--Fountain pulls back--she does nothing about it and learns a lesson about marriage. Only "Fingers" truly punches. The rest are like handshakes from someone whose name you are trying to remember. It usually ends up okay.

Exhibit 5.23

Did you know this is what brussels sprouts look like on the stalk? Um, yeah, I did too.

Exhibit 5.22

I love the idea that whenever the company that made my fortune cookie was thinking up Chinese words and phrases the English speaking public might need to know, they settled on a list of things like Thursday and cat and hello and DON'T!

I know it's not actually presented like that, but I'm going to just pretend it is anyway.

The Chinese: More and more of our citizens are purchasing automobiles.
Me: DON'T!

The Chinese: In 2047, we will gain complete political autonomy over Hong Kong.
Me: DON'T!

The Chinese: I'm thinking about getting a tattoo.
Me: DON'T!

The Chinese: Can I ask out your sister?
Me: DON'T! I mean, sure.

I can only hope tomorrow's fortune cookie will have an even better word. Maybe something like bludgeon or coma or spare me.

And mae yao hesitate to use my lucky numbers. I have a good feeling about 2.

Exhibit 5.21

The Yiddish Policemen's Union

I feel like I may have a hard time writing about this book. Not only did I read it weeks ago, I went into it with unreasonably high expectations which may have clouded my opinion of it slightly. That is not to say I didn't love it--I did--but I felt like I enjoyed it more for its prose and its noir than its statement. That isn't even a critique, it's just a reversal of expectation that's left me somewhat confused as to what place it occupies in Chabon's canon.

The premise, much discussed, is immediately compelling and from the first sentence Chabon instills his broken hero with the desperation and cynicism of his exiled race. The plot moves in Chandler-esque fits and starts punctuated with scenes of our detective isolated, drunk, and unsure of his life and his case. Those, the moments where you can smell the cigarettes, the moments where the premise becomes background rather than what is driving the plot, were my favorite. Let's call this the small plot (which is to say small in scope not importance).

There's so much that's memorable about the world Chabon has created that it almost hurts to say that I was happier when the book was just a murder mystery set in an alternate reality. It's an almost irresistible thing to imagine and it's flawless as a setting. As an actor in the plot, however, I found myself less convinced with how Chabon's Sitka leads to this murder leads to this conspiracy leads to this ending. Let's call this the big plot.

The big plot bothers me though it's hardly the sort of thing to ruin a novel. It bothers me not because it was any more implausible than anything else in the novel (okay, maybe slightly more) but because I think it takes the leap from an ahistorical but potential reality to something that depends fundamentally on counter-intuitive logic. It's one thing to casually mention that there was an extended war with Cuba sometime in the 60s or that Marilyn Monroe was first lady as these are really only dressing to the little plot. But when the big plot relies on motivations that seem counter to our understanding of the world, it feels a bit like a cheat.

The rules that govern the little plot seem appropriate for a world only slightly removed from our own. The rules that govern the big plot seem to suggest a more fundamental difference. It's certainly not an unbridgeable gap, but I'm not sure that it ever gets adequately covered here. Learning the true nature of the big plot, our hero reacts--as we must--incredulously yet he doesn't seemed shocked by the daunting levels of corruption and commitment needed to pull off such a scheme that, at least in any world related to our own, is undertaken with a very shaky motive.

I'd like to think that I'm just over thinking it--and I probably am--but I couldn't help but feel like a brilliant, touching story with an unbeatable premise came to a bad end. The little plot is a perfectly wrought murder mystery written in stunning prose. The big plot is at best an ending that reached a little too far and at worst a small political point scored at the expense of the novel's internal logic and continuity. It's probably a little both, but it was enough to leave me thinking about how much I disliked being pulled out of the world in the last 50 pages after having read through the previous 350 as if they contained some delicious secret.

Even so, it's still a fascinating book and deserving of its place on any year end list it finds itself on.

Last thought:
One of my favorite aspects of Chabon's work is how compelling he can make characters who aren't on the page. Like Grady Tripp's wife in Wonder Boys or Art's father in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, the victim here is a great character though he is, of course, dead.