Advent 2021, Dec 25, Jenny Spinner: The Death of the Moth-er

After Virginia Woolf’s The Death of the Moth

Carpet moths are properly called carpet moths. They eat carpets, and they are moths. They also eat sweaters and blankets and that old black wool dress coat you wore to the funeral of every person you ever loved who died during the cold, particularly your father and your best friend. Your mother turns eighty next year, and if she were to die during the winter—though she really is more of a summer person—you would wear it to her funeral, too. Or maybe to graveside services for your younger brother who refuses to get a covid vaccine. Your mother, vaccinated and boosted, will not likely die this winter, though one cannot be sure. After all, the mid-December day is still pleasant enough. Although the grass stopped growing for the season, somebody is mowing his lawn, perhaps for Christmas guests, and yesterday morning the car window looked like a pair of small, dark-eyed juncos had left behind their dance moves in the fine frost. But this coat is another story. The carpet moths have eaten an entire patch along the top three buttons and the edges of the sleeves, and while the bare spots are now disguised in black Sharpie ink, the coat still looks eaten. How embarrassing to show up to a funeral alive yet so thoroughly devoured. One must aim for less surrender and more wayside triumph in the face of antagonism.

The same energy that drove you to identify yourself with a tattoo during a South African teaching trip in 2019 may have inspired a Swedish entomologist named Arvid David Hummel. In 1823, Hummel published a book titled, Essais Entomologiques, in which he classified the carpet moth for the first time as Tineola bisselliella, or webbing clothes moth. Just above your bottom left ankle bone is also the word essai, shaped in your own script. Little is known about Hummel, such as whether or not his spouse, if he even married, also expressed extreme displeasure that Arvid David Hummel took it upon himself to mark his world as he saw it without saying something first. Not just that but your dead father’s name was David. Your oldest son’s middle name is David. Your oldest nephew’s middle name is David. And one of your middle sons took David as his confirmation name just last month. In the sixth century, Bishop David of Wales, now St. David, prayed that God would send a sign to his people to let them know when a parishioner was about to die. The mysterious lights that God offered in answer—canwyll corph or corpse candles—appeared at homes where death was imminent. St. David hoped these ghosts of light would bring people peace in knowing what lay ahead. Nevertheless the lights did not indicate whether extraordinary efforts were made against the oncoming doom or if people just turned over and faced the wall.

The carpet moth is small, so simple a form, not much more than a centimeter long. The larvae are the color of pale wood and tipped with the eye-less, reddish-brown head of a match before it bursts into flame. They wrap themselves in animal fibers as they eat, rolling themselves up in a tube made of silk, feces, and your possessions. No matter that everyone in your immediate family is a vegetarian, you are still an animal; the hair and skin that turn to dust in your house are part of the feast. If you range from marginally successful to dismal at balancing your full-time job, four children, spouse, and happy homemaker house, you may be hosting a smorgasbord of dust. The tiny, camouflaged caterpillars are easily mistaken for pilling or cracker crumbs or other beige life detritus that is not vacuumed in a timely fashion. The meal can last for years. As the adults emerge from their cocoons, it must be advised not to assist them with a pencil unless you fully plan to stab them dead. Golden brown, their bodies fringed with long hairs like Davy Crocket pioneers in leather jackets, the men take flight. The women walk or run. That moth vigorously dive bombing your head at night: man. The specimen creeping along the bathroom counter: woman. The older they get, the slower they get. And they do not last long, maybe a month. Several days into adulthood, they mate, the female laying its eggs back into your carpets where, in a couple of weeks, a new generation of moths will enter the successful, long-running family business.

After a time, you realize that you have been living with these carpet moths for years. When the first bald patches began appearing on the rugs in the boys’ room more than a decade ago, you thought you had just bought cheap rugs. Because you could not bear the thought of their tiny knees knocking around on the cold, hard floors, you outfitted several rooms with something soft to absorb their play. It should be noted that the boys’ father is not bothered by hard floors and would not have bought rugs. The boys paid no mind to the disappearing threads, so you eventually turned back to the countless tasks at hand. The peculiar white sand that began to appear under the rugs—frass you know now, moth excrement—was simply the remnants of the happy childhood you had willingly sacrificed yourself to give them: the sand box under the jungle gym in the backyard, the giant holes in the garden where they played war, or Jesus. But then the rug in the sunroom began to disintegrate as well. On the edge near the radiator, tufts of wool disappeared from the latticed scalp underneath, as if the rug had been stricken with alopecia. You placed some of the boys’ toys over the spot when company came over, and, when it got really bad, you flipped the rug around, hiding the emptiness under the couch. You even accused the broken dog. By the time you noticed the moths flying over your sons’ heads at night or startled them into flight when you turned on the light in the kitchen, you were dealing with a full-blown infestation. Ideas can be an infestation. And feelings. And insects that, in large numbers, cause damage or disease. The carpet moth is all about the damage. There is no lovely metaphor in the destruction.

Legs agitated once more, you kick the sheets into a roll at the end of the bed. You try to read, but one of the men keeps flying toward you. Your swat and bat and even try to close him between the covers of your book, but he is too quick. Either he is not one of the old ones, or you yourself are. The internet reveals stark choices: One, bring a poison into the house and risk harming the bodies you do not wish to harm. Two, throw out all of the rugs, the cheap ones you bought, the ones you accepted from the bankrupt neighbors when they fled their house, the ones you took from your dead friend’s house, and then just live as your spouse prefers. Three, seal six peoples’ worth of clothes in plastic bags and live for months in other casings. The thought of it all makes you so tired. Everything about this world, this life, makes you tired right now. Would it be so bad just to leave things as they are? To let the moths have what they want? To flick them away when they get too close? To pretend they are not there? Sometimes, in the middle of the night, you lie so still and quiet beneath the water of sleep that even the moths cannot touch you. Is that why she did it? O yes, she seemed to say, death is stronger than I am. No. To be little or nothing but life, that takes strength. That is the act of superb protest. You know that you must get up one day and deal with these moths, if not for your sake, then for the sake of the children. You know, in your heart, after a long pause of exhaustion, that is exactly what you will do.

*

Jenny Spinner is a professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia where she teaches creative nonfiction and journalism. She received her MA and PhD in English from the University of Connecticut and her MFA in Nonfiction Writing from Penn State University. She is the author of Of Women and the Essay: An Anthology from 1600 to 2000 (U of Georgia P, 2018).

Advent 2021, Dec 24, David Griffith: On Slaughterhouse-Five

After Chapter 1 of Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

The cattle are lowing
The Baby awakes.
But the little Lord Jesus
No crying He makes.

All this happened, more or less. The MFA parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew in the program who had been in the Army, used to get drunk and then blubber, like actually despondently cry, because his girlfriend wouldn’t have anal sex with him. Another guy I knew, a fiction writer from Milwaukee, used to practice his bondage knots on couch cushions. And so on. I've changed all the names.

I really did go back to Decatur after I lost my job at the lakeside arts resort because an old college friend on the school board got me a gig teaching a one-off creative writing workshop at my rival high school–my own high school has been converted into a middle school. Decatur looked a lot like it used to when I was growing up there in the 90s except now there are a lot more Chinese restaurants and dollar stores. There must be tons of Atrazine in the ground water.

I went back there by myself and stayed with my old high school buddy Kostaki’s mother who is a widow who sells Norwex and lives in a beautiful apartment overlooking a park on the edge of which is a Frank Lloyd Wright home. She was generous to let me stay in her guest room, which was filled with Kostaki’s childhood furniture. She introduced me to her neighbor, a young concert pianist from the old Eastern Bloc who teaches music at Millikin University. His name was Gerhard, or something. He offered us a drink and we sat on his leather couch and he told us about what life was like for him as a single man/music professor from Eastern Europe in Decatur, the SoyBean Capital of the world. He didn’t mention anything about living under Communism. He had a pleasant little apartment with a very large TV and a baby grand Steinway in the living room. So it goes.

***

I would hate to tell you what this lousy little essay cost me in money and anxiety and time.

After I left Decatur for good in 1998, I thought it would be easy for me to write about it since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that eventually I would write a masterpiece–I never thought I would make a lot of money, since it’s, well, a book of essays about growing up in Decatur, but in the end not many words about Decatur came from my mind, not enough of them to make a book, anyway, though I did write an essay about playing in the high school band during Gulf War I and playing a symphony inspired by the firebombing of Dresden. So it goes. More words are coming now, but I have become a middle-aged, ex-smoker, Assistant Professor with one book and two children 16 and 11.

I think of how useless the Decatur-part of my memory has been, and yet how tempting Decatur has been to write about, and I am reminded of Isaac Asimov’s famous limerick:

There was a sweet girl of Decatur
Who went to sea on a freighter.
She was screwed by the master
-An utter disaster-
But the crew all made up for it later.

And I'm reminded, too, of the song that goes:

If you'll be my bodyguard
I can be your long lost pal
I can call you Betty
And Betty, when you call me, you can call me Al

And so on to infinity.

Over the years, people I've met have often asked me what I'm working on, and I've usually replied that the main thing was a book about the role of the artist in American culture. I said that to Kostaki one time, and he raised his eyebrows and asked, ‘Do you want to write a screenplay?’

***

When I was somewhat younger, and had first started working on my infamous role of the artist in American culture book, I called up an old college buddy named Bryce. He was an attorney in Texas. I was a writer in Michigan. We had been would-be writers together in college. We had never expected to make any money–at least I hadn’t, but we were both doing ok, him better than me, since he was not only an attorney but an attorney for an oil company.

It was early summer before I had to start teaching at the unicorn farm, which is what others called my job teaching exceptional young artists–I never called it that out of self-respect. He is short and I am tall. We were Kerouac and Ginsberg in college but weren’t attracted to one another. He was up. He was reading or listening to music or drinking wine or something. 'Listen,' I said, 'I'm miserable.’ You should come down, and we could drink and talk and remember.' He was unenthusiastic, but still I believed he was serious. I told him that I think the climax of my book was when my mom died. The irony is so great. She dies, and she is the only one in my family who was an artist. 'Don't you think? Yes, he said, but he was more worried about me; I had been drinking; it was a Wednesday night.

***

I had outlined the book many times. The best outline I ever made was just this table of contents that I typed-up on 8.5 x 11 paper and thumbtacked to the bookcase in my office so that when people walked in they would see it. For some reason, people found this impressive. The climax of the book is when my mother, laying in a hospital bed in the Cleveland Clinic pre-op, says to me, “When you were little I always thought that someday you would be the President of the United States.” So it goes.

That was ten years ago. She lived just long enough to see my second child born. He thinks he’s grown up now, because he has his own room and an Xbox and a big gaming desk with lots of soda cans and empty chip bags everywhere, and I’m middle aged sitting with these memories, writing a book proposal, and craving a cigarette.

If you'll be my bodyguard
I can be your long lost pal
I can call you Betty
And Betty, when you call me, you can call me Al

I used to look up old girlfriends on Facebook late at night, the cat sitting across my legs, shedding white fur all over my navy corduroys. Sooner or later I would go to bed and think about my education.

I went to the University of Notre Dame in the mid to late 90s. I was a student in the Department of English. At that time, they were requiring that you take American Literature, Brit Lit I and Brit Lit II, but that was it. After that you could do whatever you wanted, so I took European Film Masters, which was a course on Fellini and Bergman, taught by a guy who knew Fellini and hung out with him. He’s still alive and lives in a retirement village across the street from campus but he’s since gone blind. So it goes.

I also took a class team-taught by a bearded Birkenstock-wearing Stanley Cavell expert and a Maltese Marxist who also happened to be the head of the International Gramsci Society and the father of a precocious eleven year old named Pete, who would later become mayor of South Bend. The course was simply titled “The Avant-Garde.”

I learned that you could make music out of silence, and that you could tell stories by cutting up the pages of your manuscript, throwing them up in the air and reassembling them in random order.

Shortly before my mother died, she said to me, 'You know, you went to school and majored in writing and you never wrote me letters. You’re a writer and you never wrote your mother letters.’’ My mother also said to me, you know, there’s a difference between Theology and Faith.

I told her that I knew that; that that was one of the things I learned at Notre Dame.

***

While I was studying to be a teacher of writing, which is what it turns out I was studying to be majoring in English, I was also writing a humor column for the student newspaper, but the editor who hired me graduated and the new editor didn’t think I was funny, so they switched me to writing news. The first story I was assigned was to cover the Late Night Olympics, a charity event that raised money for the Special Olympics. On the night of the event, I showed up with handheld tape recorder in hand to interview participants but couldn’t get many useable quotes because everyone was drunk. I said as much in my story and filed it. The next week I was fired–don’t call us, we’ll call you.

***

During the breaks, I waited tables at a place named after a mediocre cheese, like Colby’s or Pepper Jack’s. The very toughest waiters were single mothers who complained to me about their jobless baby daddys while we married ketchup bottles and polished silverware. Even then I was supposedly writing a book about Decatur. It wasn't infamous yet–the movie version of the book about the ADM price-fixing scandal starring Matt Damon hadn’t been made yet. Not many Americans knew how important Decatur was to global trade, or how much worse Dresden had been than Hiroshima, but I did because between the ages of eleven and thirteen I delivered the newspaper to the VP of Archer Daniels Midland and used to encounter secret service agents in his driveway, and in high school I had played a symphony about the firebombing of Dresden.

I happened to tell a Cambridge-educated Art History professor at a cocktail party about the book I would write. He supplemented his income during the summer by giving lectures aboard cruise ships bound for the Mediterranean.

He told me, “You know, maybe you should consider writing about all the myths about being an artist that are necessary for people to keep believing that being an artist is a noble profession?” All l could do was drink my drink and say, 'I know, I know. I know.'

***

The Recession had made it very tough for everybody. This was at a very small college in Virginia that was in such bad financial straits that I didn’t get so much as a cost of living raise for five years. I supplemented my income by teaching in a summer arts program for gifted high schoolers. When the recession hit and the Governor of Pennsylvania closed that down, I created another one. My department chair was one of the most gregarious, glad-handing guys I ever hope to meet. He had gone to Johns Hopkins and been a reporter in Baltimore before he became a novelist. We used to play racquetball together. Both he and his wife came from money, so confiding in him about my concerns felt like confessing to an old priest. There had never been a Black tenure track faculty member in the one-hundred year history of the college, which had once been a plantation. I once observed students performing in black face in the dining hall. A year after I left, the college temporarily closed due to financial exigency. So it goes. That must have been in 2014 or so–whatever the last year was for the Polar Vortex. Dissolve frīgus, ligna super focō/ largē repōnēns atque benignius/ dēprōme quadrīmum Sabīnā. You can call Al. There was a sweet girl of Decatur.

Before leaving Virginia, my best friend John took me and my kids up into the Blue Ridge. The kids were small and had never really been out of the foothills where we lived. It was July and it was hot, so John took us to wade in a cold mountain stream. A footbridge passed overhead and thru-hikers on the Appalachian Trail looked down at us as we soaked. The kids had never seen water this clear. There were trout in there and we saw them. “Like a turd in a bowl of milk,” John said the fisherman say. Farther up, we saw a waterfall, too. There were signs posted all over warning you to stay off the rocks. Apparently, people climbed out onto the rocks all the time for pictures and slipped and fell and died. So it goes. At the top, there was a general store where thru-hikers could buy supplies and a pay pond stocked with fish. At the end of the day, back down in the valley, we had burgers and hotdogs and root beer at a roadside stand. That was one of the best days of my life.

***

John didn’t drink, but I had friends who did. I was a family man, but the stress of working for a college that had one foot in the proverbial grave and hadn’t given me a raise in five years drove me to drink. We often drank at my house on the sun porch, but sometimes we went to Adam’s–he was the Chaplain of the college. His wife, Angela, didn’t like it when we drank over there. She was lovely, but would disappear when we were there drinking PBR and moonshine in the kitchen. My kids were still young, so nights when we wanted to get into it late-night, he would say, “Let me check with Ange.” That was kind of him, but I always felt guilty. We told a lot of academic war stories, me and Adam and K-Honey, the philosopher from Georgia who worked on Machiavelli, and sometimes Jeff, an Education professor who had played D-lineman at Middlebury. They told me I could write a novel about all this mess, but it wasn't much to write a book about. We remembered stories about our students: Two of mine had figured out which room the guest writer we had brought to campus from Bulgaria was staying in. So it goes.

Many nights we gave up on remembering and talked about other things; things we were teaching; things we were researching; things we were writing about. Adam became curious about Machiavelli’s attitude toward Christianity and K-Honey would quote long passages from memory:

Just as the observance of divine worship is the cause of the greatness of republics, so the disregard of divine worship is the cause of their ruin, because where fear of God is lacking, that kingdom must either come to ruin or be sustained through fear of a prince who makes up for the shortcomings in its religion.

One summer afternoon while playing with my daughter at the playground in Lynchburg, I met a woman named Ashley and her son who was the same age as my daughter. She was a photographer and video artist. I told her about my book and how in high school I had played a symphony about the firebombing of Dresden. She was fascinated and said she wanted to make a video about it.

Months later, she did, and it debuted in an art show in an old firehall just down the street from the playground where our children had played together. It’s made up of found video of freestyle wrestlers and military footage of smart bombs blowing up buildings in Iraq, and clips of the symphony about Dresden. You can find it online someplace. When I watch it, I think about all the terrible things that had to happen in order for it to exist in the world. So it goes.

***

I taught creative writing at the famous Interlochen Center for the Arts for four years after that. I taught in the afternoons. In the mornings I tried to write. I was working on my infamous book about the role of the artist in American culture. My mother had been dead three years by that point. I knew it was the climax of the book and that the book was now done, except for the writing. Somewhere along the way, some morning in deepest darkest February, during the Polar Vortex, when it was -25 degrees for six straight days, walking across a snowy field to my beautiful office in the beautiful Writing House with a gas fireplace that I personally had the pleasure of turning on before anyone else arrived, my skin stinging from exposure, I understood that there is nothing intelligent to say about your mother dying. Everybody dies. Everything is supposed to be quiet after your mother passes, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a mother dying, things like 'Poo-teeweet?'

I have since told my son that he is not under any circumstances to disrespect his mother or take part in massacres, and that the news of the massacre of enemies is not to fill him with satisfaction or glee. I tell him this while he is sitting at his gaming desk playing Call of Duty on his Xbox. He has been sniped and is screaming at his teammates to revive him. So it goes.

***

Recently, Ashley called me from Lynchburg because her son wants to be a filmmaker and is interested in going to the unicorn farm–I have not spoken to her in thirteen years.

‘Our children are now in high school–isn’t that wild?’ she says to me. It was very good for me, because I got to say to her something I had been wanting to say for some time, and that is that while you can get a good education at the unicorn farm the tuition is unconscionable.

It was also good for me because talking to her reminded me of the many ideas for essays that the unicorn farm has provided. One of them will be “Edibles in the Dune Lands,” and another will be “Go with the Frog,” another will be “Double IPAs like Hand Soap,” and another will be “If Only You Were Actually an Orphan,” and so on. And so on.

***

I got off that phone call with Ashley, and it was as though somebody was playing with the clocks. As an Earthling and a professor, I have to believe whatever clocks and calendars say: It is several days before Christmas 2021–grades are due in two days. I am sitting outside Chipotle waiting for my mobile order. I have two books with me, which I have been carrying around in my bag all semester. One was Seeds of Destruction by Thomas Merton, and this is what I found in there:

Doubtless the mercy and truth of God, the victory of Christ, are being manifested in our current history, but I am not able to see how they are being manifested by us.

My other book is Henry A. Giroux’s The Violence of Organized Forgetting, which begins with an epigraph from James Baldwin:

People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence.

Giroux argues that “America…has become amnesiac…” and that the only way to reverse this condition is to learn to remember again, which means “merging a critique of the way things are with a sense of realistic hope…and transforming individual memories and struggles into collective narratives and larger social movements.” Resistance is futile if we do not insist on telling stories about the people and lives that the culture of forgetting seeks to erase.

Mr. Giroux’s is a bleak book but he reminded me of Baldwin’s sardonic and profound essay “Equal in Paris,” in which he recounts being arrested for stealing a bed sheet from a Paris hotel and spending Christmas in a French jail. Specifically I remembered the scene in which a Frenchman who he befriended while in lock-up returns, as promised, to help him. The Frenchman gives him a carton of Lucky Strikes, and tells him that unfortunately there is nothing to be done to hasten his trial, but he has contacted a lawyer who will defend him on the 27th. He tells Baldwin, as consolation, that he will personally see to it that he would get a “fine Christmas dinner” when he was freed. At this, Baldwin begins to laugh:

And this, somehow, seemed very funny. I remember being astonished at the discovery that I was actually laughing. I was, too, I imagine, also rather disappointed that my hair had not turned white, that my face was clearly not going to bear any marks of tragedy, disappointed at bottom, no doubt, to realize, facing him in that room, that far worse things had happened to most people and that, indeed, to paraphrase my mother, if this was the worst thing that ever happened to me I could consider myself among the luckiest people ever to be born.

***

I like this because it reminds me of something my mother would say. She wasn’t Catholic, so she actually grew up reading the Bible. Because of her I always look to make sure there’s a Gideon Bible in my motel room. My mother was not a petty or vindictive person–she truly loved her neighbor as herself, but she had a fixation with Lot’s wife.

She would sometimes out of nowhere say, “You know what happened to Lot’s wife?”

So it goes.

I could never understand what the people of Sodom and Gommorrah did that was offensive to God. I mean, to me they might as well be Ann Arbor and Columbus. Can you imagine a stunningly beautiful angel of the Lord lasting thirty minutes in one of those places on a Friday night during the fall?

***

Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was what an essayist would do. She was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes. Maybe my mom was trying to tell me not to look back; that that is the key to happiness. I'm certainly going to keep doing it. What choice do I have?

I've basically finished my artist in American culture book now–it only took me fifteen years. The next one I write is going to be fun. It begins like this:

Twas the night before Christmas…

It ends like this:

And to all a good night.

*

Dave Griffith is the author of A Good War is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America (Soft Skull). He lives in South Bend, Indiana.

Advent 2021, Dec 23, Will Slattery: Merry Christmas from Engels' Right Honorable Hedgehog

 

After Anne Carson's "Merry Christmas from Hegel"

It was another pandemic year when I found myself again bitter over healthcare housing climate and all manner of woes & catastrophes for which I am frankly too dour-minded and numerically illiterate to fantasize or conceive human solutions. I lived down south in the lower desert but drove alone up to Pinetop high in the White Mountains. Although alone I thought of many distant friends, all of whom I am terrible at keeping up with and all of whom insist they do not mind how terrible I am at keeping up. I hit my 30s, grew a mustache, and mostly lost my ability to maintain regular correspondence with anyone or anything. Third day of Fall Break I was sitting amid new and early snow on a cabin’s deck, reading a number of things by or about Marx. You will forgive me if you are someone who knows a lot of Marxian theory or understands it, I do not and will paraphrase badly, but I understood him to be saying that human nature and human activity, alongside all the wild customs and conventions they produce, are not pre-determined grooves we all slot into but rather very malleable things which change, mutate, evolve, diverge, converge, recombine, and tease themselves out dynamically in relation to social conditions. New social conditions produce new ways of being in the world, a thing most of the arcane, grouchy types who describe themselves as Marxian refer to as “historical materialism”. I was comforted by this notion that our human conditions are malleable in large part because I experience a great deal of regular dread about & discomfort with my own condition in the world. I put on big boots and coat and went out to try and walk through the snow. Snow walking poses  difficulty for me, a Texan-turned-Arizonan who has spent fewer than 3 total weeks of his life in or around the stuff, and I nearly fell down several times, but I soon found a rhythm and left the row of cabins behind, marching deeper into the vast swathe of Forest Service land in which I seemed to be the only one out. Gnarled gray-green poles of pine stretched up and up while distant flashes of pencil-skinny aspen blew about in the cold with such force I thought the thin white columns might snap apart and fling themselves down into the still deepening carpet of snow underfoot. I tried to think about historical materialism & my lonesome relation to it but instead all my mind gave up was a brief biographical anecdote, the jocular fact of Engels’ pet hedgehog. The hedgehog, a recurring character in Engels’ correspondence with his dear friend Marx, was referred to with loving pomp by the latter as Right Honorable Hedgehog. Engels himself took great pleasure in occasionally getting Right Honorable Hedgehog drunk on small amounts of alcohol whenever he threw a party, and while I cannot endorse this line of behavior I understand the impulse, find it amusing, and would almost certainly have attempted it were I too a 19th Century hedgehog owner. I recalled also the fact of a dear friend’s energetic but foolish cat, named Corduroy, on whom the friend and I once bestowed the title Lieutenant. After that we updated Lt. Corduroy’s rank upwards or downwards in accordance with how amusing or annoying we found him at any given time. As I walked through the snow Lt. Corduroy and Right Honorable Hedgehog jostled together in my mind, and I realized that Marx and Engels can be thought of straightforwardly, amiably, as bros, as bros with banter and shenanigans, as not that different from my friend and I, though perhaps a little better at keeping in touch, and this amusing insight changed my entire orientation towards the day spilling out around me. I no longer saw myself as a lonesome Texan trudging alone through whistle-cold pines, and I saw instead, with joy, the edge of the Colorado Plateau I traipsed along as a giant cake decked out in white icing and tall green candles. All of this has rather little to do with historical materialism, but if I had not read Marxian theory so moodily in the first place that day I might never have worked myself up into marching out into the snow. Merry Christmas from Marx, Engels, and Right Honorable Hedgehog.

*

Will Slattery helps curate things here at Essay Daily. He tweets on occasion: @wjaslattery.

Advent 2021, Dec 22: Ander Monson: 150 Random Things About Me Too

   

After Matias Viegener's 2500 Random Things About Me Too 

*

          I

1. I should say up front I wrote this while my daughter was at karate.
2. I dislike writing longhand but it was all I had so I went for it.
3. I’m already uncomfortable about how I feature prominently in this story about my life, as I always seem to.
4. I’ve been feeling lately like my introduction to Renee Gladman was the wrong one, or perhaps just at the wrong time.
5. All of a sudden Gladman is popping up in everything good I’m reading which usually means I need to reencounter her.
6. The issue with longhand at night in the car during karate is that I’m writing into shadow, the car light being blocked out by my hand as I write toward the right margin.
7. I don’t like not being able to see what I’m writing. It’s a control thing I suppose.
8. I’m worried about _________.
9. Really I’m worried about _________.
10. But really my worry is about myself.
11. There's a lot I'm not going to tell you about my family situation.
12. At least not publicly.
13. You can read my other essays for more of that. Or other writers for even more. I'm not your go-to for that kind of material, at least not at this point in the essay!
14. Let me say I have a lot of voicemails saved on my phone from _________, so many that I keep getting notifications that my voicemail box is nearly full. They're pretty wild.
15. I mean isn't it weird that a voicemail box can be full in this era of unlimited cloud storage?
16. When I had a digital answering machine in college and after, people often left me messages there.
17. They’ve now been deleted for years, but I wish I still had them. 
18. It’s amazing how permanent an answering machine message seemed then, but, the digital one especially, if it lost power for a moment it erased. 
19. Didn’t it?
20. I mean, it must have had a battery backup I'm pretty sure, but when the battery ran down it would just die out, and all those messages would die with it. 
21. It made it tricky to move the machine. I don't remember how many hours you had of battery power, but if it didn't get connected again to power, it would erase.
22. Actually maybe it'd be better if everything did this so we didn't have to be bound to them.
23. I don’t like beginning with _________ especially when they've made demands that I don't write about them.
24. This is a demand _________ cannot of course make.
25. Also demanding that I not write about _________ only makes me want to write about _________ more.
    
    
    II
    
    
26. I should tell you up front I borrowed this form.
27. I mean what form isn't borrowed, but this one's directly borrowed from Matias Viegener's 2500 Random Things About Me Too.
28. I think about his book often.
29. Viegener borrowed his form too.
30. It's a book made from a Facebook meme (list 25 random things about you and tag x # of friends) repeated to exhaustion.
31. He did that once, then did it again, then 98 more times, and boom he had a book.
32. It's more complicated than that, though, obviously.
33. But the iterative process starts to pull things out of you that you wouldn't otherwise have written about.
34. Like _________
35. Like how _________ is not a benign presence in my life. 
36. Like don't tell me to not write about you. Like once _________ told me to write about _________, but didn't like the way I wrote about them.
37. Obviously.
38. Like if you don’t want a writer to write about you being an asshole, don’t be an asshole is what I want to tell _________, but I also don’t want to talk to _________ at all.
39. After I switched pens writing this got easier.
40. It’s because my other pen was dying that I really was having to push hard to make a mark.
41. I really dislike when a pen seems to still have ink—you can see it in the cartridge or whatever you call it—it’s definitely not empty—but stops writing, or takes a painful amount of pressure to get anything down.
42. [Joke about erectile dysfunction]
43. [Very Thalia Field from her newest book]
44. Pump bottles of lotion where you can’t get the last 20% out drive me NUTS for the same reason.
45. Every bottle feels like I’m being had by the capitalist machine—just a little bit, I know, but it hurts.
46. This is not a metaphor for _________, but due to their proximity in this essay they become at least a little bit intertwined.
47. I write too much about thaumatropes, which I’m now obliged to explain.
48. A thaumatrope is a two-sided disc or card on a string or stick, with two separate images on each side, and when spun, they appear superimposed.
49. Spun, a bird and an empty cage become a bird in a cage.
50. It’s amazing how easily our minds can be tricked, or perform this trick.
    
    
    III
    
    
51. You see anything can be superimposed with anything by proximity and repetition.
52. The car door next to me just opened and out poured a cloud of cigarette smoke. 
53. It’s awful. 
54. I hate smoke.
55. Does anyone like smoke? Do smokers?
56. But I love fire. So I mean I hate cigarette smoke. Smoking them and the smoke it produces.
57. I’m choking on it some as I write.
58. The other car on my right is rattling off a combination of facts—personal and not: Aaron Rodgers got Covid; another NFL guy whose name I missed drove drunk and hit and killed a girl and also her dog. And so on.
59. One function of writing these like this is that some of the interesting facts come in from the world unbidden. 
60. You can’t even keep them out, or at least I’m not trying to.
61. It’s like that other Thalia Field essay.
62. I think about it a lot but I haven’t reread it recently.
63. I do love a steno book.
64. I particularly love this brand in particular; it reads on the front STENO and then it reads NOTES.
65. Do they know that these two words are anagrams? I hope so.
66. As a result I keep buying more. 
67. They are otherwise unfancy steno pads. 
68. The woman in the car on the right is listening to something very derivative of Prince.
69. Possibly it is Prince; I just can’t hear it well enough to tell.
70. Prince rules. This is not a surprising fact.
71. There’s too much noise to make out the signal clearly. 
72. But man, the karate parents are a piece of work. 
73. I like to think of these hours of downtime as opportunities for encounter or intimacy, but fuck, sometimes I really don’t want to encounter much of the world.
74. They are happy to encounter me, however. Last time I heard this woman just screaming at her 7-year-old.
75. That was brutal, not just the screaming, but the not caring that anybody could hear. I was just sitting in my car listening, unsure what, if anything to do.
    
    
    IV
    
    
76. I guess I put it in here is what I did. It was a fact. It is a fact. It remains a fact.
77. That’s doing something.
78. All parents are pieces of work. We just don’t say it too loudly.
79. We shouldn’t say it too loudly. It’s hard work being a parent.
80. I used to find it tedious when people wrote about their kids. Why?
81. I think it was just a pose; me flexing on something to myself for reasons.
82. I remember a panel at AWP some years back discussing this very issue. I felt some unease when a poet acknowledged that her young kids couldn’t consent to showing up in her work. 
83. I mean, I wouldn’t particularly like—I don’t think—showing up in someone else’s work.
84. Some people like any kind of attention.
85. Evelyn Waugh said you could do what you wanted writing real people in stories. His secret was to represent them however he wanted; he just also added that they were great in bed. They never complained, he says.
86. This doesn’t work so well when it comes to one’s family.
87. I took a lot of notes earlier listening to Lucy Corin talk this morning in MFA Colloquium and want to include some here. 
88. This is not really a random fact. 
89. This is the lie of the title. 
90. What's random, really? We want a little of the illusion of randomness but not the real thing. 
91. The mind couldn't come up with a truly random fact even if it wanted to.
92. Same for Viegener. What makes the book work is how his mind starts developing these different threads.
93. And those build narratively.
94. Content warning: sad stuff about the death of his dog.
95. And then a lot of good stuff about Kathy Acker too.
96. That's what also makes the book good: it has real meat.
97. Maybe unlike this one.
98. Here's a random fact though: around the time I first watched Tron (which is still great) as a kid, I came up with a name for the act of digitally scanning an item (or a person) and then recomposing that scan as a material body, which they kind of do in the movie: omnigrating.
99. I still think it’s a good name.
100. The movie I think just calls it digitizing. The central difference is that now of course digitizing just means rendering analog data as digital. Not effectively disintegrating and then reintegrating something digitally (and then potentially back to analog).
     
     
     V
     
     
101. Tron was a Disney movie. It’s easy to forget how many really intense and cool movies Disney made before they got Disneyfied. I’d also recommend The Black Hole which is really dark and weird, with the exception of the dumb robots. 
102. It’s got a really batshit ending, which was batshit then and is definitely batshit now.
103. I’ve spent so much of my life with digital media I forget sometimes that it’s really not possible to get everything analog in digital form. That you’re always stripping something out when you encode or digitize it.
104. I’m not a big dork for lossless compression on my music; that’s for people with a lot more means and/or better ears than me.
105. But a digital text is not the same. An mp3 just isn’t the same as a track on a vinyl record or even the unloved medium of the CD.
106. The reason our voices still sound weird on phones is because phones strip out most of the high and low frequencies—which aren’t that important, I guess, for understandability—to make the resulting data much smaller.
107. So those voicemails that got left are at best a diminished record of what was really said by a human body.
108. As humans we’re so centered on our own limitations—the frequencies we can hear and the wavelengths we can see—it took elephant researchers hundreds of years to figure out that elephants actually communicate with each other across large distances with very low frequency sounds. We just can’t hear them, so we assume they don’t matter or exist.
109. Lucy Corin: “I collected things from the world…I’d try to collect them and keep the good things and bring them into the book.”
110. Some of those good things are sentences. Good sentences are maybe among the very best things I can think of.
111. Kate Bernheimer: “Part of the process of writing a novel is figuring out how the disparate parts go together.”
112. One of the things I loved about Lucy Corin’s talk was how much it collided with my thinking about collections and how they inform or come together into books (or essays).
113. This kind of list project is self-evidently granular: a collection.
114. It’s not easy to decide what constitutes a discrete item on these lists; I think I’m probably overflowing from one random thing into the next a lot more often than I think I am.
115. I mean, when I shift directions, from the personal to the aesthetic, they feel somewhat more disparate, but because they’re scavenged from interior and exterior by the same I we still end up following it down to the same root.
116. I’m going to try to do one of these lists that’s more random, or at least swerves more between the items.
117. I do think writing is essentially collection. I actually wrote a whole chapter on this for a forthcoming guide to writing that I think is being published first in Australia. 
118. Really I should have put my money where my mouth was and had that whole chapter be collaged.
119. Walk the walk, motherfucker!
120. Like Jonathan Lethem’s essay “The Anxiety of Influence” or David Shields’ bumper sticker essay.
121. All these boys all doing their fine-ass literary tricks!
122. Maybe there's something to just doing someone else's literary tricks.
123. Give up the anxiety of influence: just let the influence influence, dude.
124. That's what influences are supposed to do.
125. Go buy Viegener's book then while we're talking about it.
     
     
     VI
     
     
126. I figured out this week that one of my advanced fiction workshop students clearly did not write the story she turned in for workshop.
127. Why, for instance, was a white 24 year old in Arizona setting her folk tale, clearly indebted to a tradition of African folk tales, in Rwanda, a place that she almost certainly had never been and probably—I’m guessing here—could not identify on a map?
128. You know, I should ask her to do that in person and see what happens.
129. I was trying to figure out how to talk about the story in class—at the least we’d have to get into some shit about cultural appropriation which is complicated to discuss with UGs, who just want RULES about what’s allowed and what’s not.
130. There are of course no hard rules to anything in art. It’s what you can make work. It’s what you can get away with. You’re always in conversation with the readers of your time. 
131. It can be frustrating to have to be in conversation with the readers of our time.
132. Twitter accelerates this process quite a bit.
133. (I do like Twitter, but it makes me tired.)
134. Why put that in parentheses? In a random list, aren’t all of these kind of in parentheses, each seemingly inflecting the previous item? Aren’t they all delivered sotto voce?
135. But the more I thought about it the less it made sense my student wrote the story at all. It didn’t sound anything like her other work. 
136. It was probably plagiarized, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. So I asked Kate Bernheimer, since fairy and folk tales are her territory, and I thought maybe it had been composed for one of her classes? That might explain things a bit.
137. She couldn’t find it anywhere either, and had never had the student in class, but was also increasingly convinced there was no way my student wrote this story. 
138. I mean, it’s not that a white girl from Arizona can’t write into and out of an African folk tale tradition, but it’s pretty unlikely, especially considering her other work.
139. The story in question is at least on the surface level in the tradition of African folk tales about Ogres, is set in Kigali, and is really committed to its African names, but at no point is it obvious why it’s set in Rwanda.
140. A lot of the names don’t really make sense, as Kate pointed out: they’re African, but not Rwandan, and not routinely anything, really: kind of a mishmash of African and kinda African names. The story also fell apart the more we read it. 
141. I think Kate and I both enjoyed playing detective. (Detective is definitely fun to play.)
142. I asked my student what was the germination of this story, asked her for some more context around its composition or idea, if just to better be able to angle the workshop conversation so that it would be useful to her (and not just her getting torched for cultural appropriation and general bad writing by students she’d already pissed off).
143. She wrote me a note back saying some blah blah blah and right below the note she wrote was another note, evidently pasted in from another email from obviously the original author of the story, someone who presumably essay-milled this story out, probably, if I had to guess, someone of African descent, telling her “here’s what you tell your professor,” colon, then telling me what my student had just told me above.
144. I mean my student kept that note in the email she sent me by way of explanation. 
145. How dumb can you be? The answer is pretty dumb. Perhaps not unrelated, this student is also “one of those Covid skeptics” and someone who announced to my class she’d had a positive Covid test and then in the same class took her mask off to sneeze. This went over poorly with my students. 
146. I haven’t decided what to do about this student yet. 
147. Up next week my students are writing cover stories already, so we’ll be talking about originality and appropriation either way.
148. It’s academic dishonesty for sure, and pretty much a slam dunk if I want to bother to pursue it. (Do I want to bother? I’m not sure how much it’s worth my time.) She missed class today for reasons that I also have no reason to believe are real, but wants to be there for her workshop of this story next week. 
149. I think I’m going to invite her to workshop it, but only if her collaborator, the actual author, can also be present (if just on zoom) as the artistic force behind the story to answer questions and get feedback on it, and if both of them allow me to record the workshop conversation, and if Kate can also be present as an Appropriation Expert (which she is, and also part of the forensic team investigating this matter), and if both she and her collaborator allow Kate and I to collaboratively write an essay about appropriation and composition in fiction using them and their really bad story “written” for my workshop as a primary source. 
150. We’ll offer them full credit as coauthors if they want to do it, but I think we all know what the answer to this question will be.

*

I'm not sure if a borrowed form (like The Malcontent, I don't love the term hermit crab for this kind of writing) is a cover or not. 

In many ways I don't think it is. But when the form, like Viegener's, is so procedural and essential to how the project thinks and works I think using it gets pretty close to a cover, even if the product ends up being quite a bit different. 

I assigned some of 2500 Random Things About Me Too to my grad workshop this semester, and of course we practiced doing the thing. One or two of us, myself included, found it really useful and oddly freeing to use. So we kept on writing them. Or I did anyhow. I'm over 500 at this point. The more I kept writing them the more I started to feel indebted. To Viegener yes, but also to whoever came up with this Facebook meme. I've never been on Facebook so it's still a novel form to me. And to Joe Brainard, whose iterative work feeds into Viegener's. 

Even though my life is way different from Viegener's, the activity of doing the same thing over and over and over gave me a good sense of its freedoms and limitations. Each list has to have some of its own energy and integrity. Each needs to throw a ball or two in the air that gets caught by the end of that 25. Then each list also needs to throw some balls in the air that get caught in a subsequent list. Each list can also pick up some of the balls previously thrown and still hanging somewhere int he air. This is how the mind works, after all. Viegener's book ends up being more narrative, more thoughtful, and more powerful than mine is so far, but then again I'm only a fifth as deep as he was. 

I wrote these lists above a few weeks back (you'll see some news items from November in there) and reproduced them without too much editing. I did make some redactions and delete a few items, trim others, adding more, riffing longer on Viegener for you, the Essay Daily reader. But I tried to keep as much as possible of the original movement of the mind that appeared here so that the improvisatory action of the drafting felt alive. That felt true to Viegener's book, which he claims was not revised very much at all. That may be a lie. I feel like it has to be, but then if you give a really thoughtful and lively mind a toy like this meme thing to do, it's already doing a lot of work before he writes each item on the list, so maybe not. Maybe that's the key takeaway: that the toy (really it's a tool: I don't want to denigrate what we're up to here) is as good as the mind that uses it. The only way to find out is to try it. So give it a go in 2022 and see if it opens things up for you?

*

Ander Monson's next book is Predator: a Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession. Graywolf will publish it in September 2022.

Advent 2021, Dec 21 Patrick Madden: On a Pleasing Encounter without a Pickpocket

after Louise Imogen Guiney's "On a Pleasing Encounter with a Pickpocket"

"It struck me that the sweet symmetry of the thing ought not to be spoiled; that I was serving a new use and approximating a new experience; that it would be a stroke of genius, in short, almost equal to the king pickpocket's own, to make love to the inevitable."

This essay is a cover in the prewriting primarily, in the doing more than in the reporting. In other words, I may not talk the talk, but I did walk the walk. (Yes, I am happy with this slight inversion of the cliched phrase, but not proud. I'm sure this particular reversal has been done before ["Woo hoo hoo!" sing the Barenaked Ladies in their song attesting to this truth, and I always imagine them performing on Jay Leno's Tonight Show, with David Duchovny accompanying on a shaker-egg (more or less) in time and singing along]. But perhaps a pilgrimage to that "lonely street corner [still] not adorned by a gas-lamp" is a thing unique in the footnotes of the annals of literary history.

An explanation is in order. I was attending the AWP Conference (weren't we all?) in Boston in March of 2013 (a month before the Marathon bombings, as it turned out, and in the same vicinity). The Hynes Convention Center where it was held was only a few blocks away from the corner immortalized in Louise Imogen Guiney's lamentably unknown essay "On a Pleasing Encounter with a Pickpocket." I knew this not from the essay itself, which is appropriately vague about its exact location, but from a letter the author wrote the day after the fateful titular event (which, felicitously, occurred exactly 129 years before today, on December 21, 1892). There, writing to her friend Sonny Day, whom she owed money (which she could no longer repay, now that she'd been robbed), she pinpoints the location as "Berkeley St at the corner of Chandler St, between the grain elevator and the vacant lots."

I was off, in the keen winter air, toward who knew what, but with a fire of enthusiasm for the comewhatmay. Not a block from the center, striding confidently off a curb, I stepped in a mound of what I thought was snow, and found myself shin-deep in slush, liquid freeze slurping over the edge of my boot and sliding in, soaking my sock. "Propitious!" I thought, and kept on marching toward destiny.

Twenty-odd minutes of purposeful striding, with appropriate pauses for automobiles and zigs and zags for subsequent mounds, and I had arrived. Five-story buildings met the sidewalk on each corner, to my right a smattering of street-level shops, to my left nondescript walls of stone and glass. No granary, no vacant lots, no "coal-sheds and broken tins" anywhere in sight. Nor any people. Nonetheless, I strategically placed a dollar in my left jacket pocket. I crossed on the WALK light. Wandered around, waiting for someone, anyone. There was no one. It was too cold. Perhaps too early. I would not be pickpocketed today.

Unless...I tugged at the dollar (yes, it occurred to me that I was being far too cheap in my experiment, but the budget for essays had recently been cut), pulling it half out of my pocket. If no "tiger-lily of the genus 'tough'" were available to help me fulfil my mission, perhaps the whipping wind would. I peeked out from the shelter of a windward edifice and stepped into the gusts.

Really!? I'm subjecting myself to this suffering so I can say that the wind took my dollar? And of course, it didn't, either. The bill remained firmly in the pocket, delicately stirring but unremoved by the buffetings. I want to say that I was always self-aware enough to laugh at the ridiculousness of my quest, but especially once, in the absence of the possibility of a "real" pickpocketing, I turned mystical. I mean, how would I have written that? And what was this whole enterprise, anyway? Homage to a beloved essayist? Essayistic thrill-seeking? A record of my contemporaneous sensations? I had begun the day expecting something to work out, as it always does, creditable or the reverse, and if "nothing had happened" as yet, perhaps it would. Or it wouldn't. I suspected that the answer to this dilemma lay not so much in the external world, but in my openness to it, my perceptiveness and willingness to understand and to connect. I might trust, still, that something would become clear, or that I would make things clear. That things would work out. That the universe would provide.

To the vacant air I sang out my silliness, then decided to return the way I had come.

All the way I walked (squish, step, squish, step; my left foot still wet and cold) with the abstracted Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, whom I knew only in the vaguest sense, but whom I expected might have some wisdom for me were I to consult him. I have done so now, at long last, with the help of an interpreter, George Long:

"To be vexed at anything which happens is a separation of ourselves from nature." (II.16)

"Do the things external which fall upon thee distract thee? Give thyself time to learn something new and good, and cease to be whirled around." (II.7)

"Of human life the time is a point, and the substance is in a flux, and the perception dull, and the composition of the whole body subject to putrefaction, and the soul a whirl, and fortune hard to divine, and fame a thing devoid of judgment." (II.17)

"Either it is a well-arranged universe or a chaos huddled together, but still a universe." (IV.27)

That afternoon, I attended conference panels asserting the importance of essays that essay, celebrating essays that flash (into, out of, around existence), that think on themselves self-referentially. Other than my still-soaked sock and shriveled toes, there was no record, were no lasting effects from my excursion. The thousands of people milling about me were completely unaffected by my pilgrimage. No matter.

"Everything harmonizes with me, which is harmonious to thee, O Universe." (IV.23)

Later that evening, on my way to who remembers where, I gave the dollar to a stranger singing in the cold on another street corner, less lonely, quite adorned (still no gas lamp). The next day, upon retrieving a bag of chips from a vending machine and scooping up my change, I discovered four quarters too many. When I returned to my office the next Monday I found, pinned to the cork board outside my door, a crumpled dollar bill.

*

Patrick Madden, author of Disparates (2020), Sublime Physick (2016), and Quotidiana (2010), teaches at Brigham Young University and Vermont College of Fine Arts. He curates the online anthology of classical essays www.quotidiana.org.

Advent 2021, Dec 20, Marcia Aldrich: Men and Marriage and Me

After Sei Shônagon’s The Pillow Book

They take the last ice cube and don’t refill the tray.

Is a run-on sentence;

They leave their glasses, shoes, and belts around the house for the imaginary maid to pick up.

Is a life-long lesson in the definition of terms;

They do not eat leftovers.

Is an ode to ringtones, Freud, and the fullness of safety;

They walk out of the kitchen without turning off the burner.

Is a creation myth;

They do not put napkins in the wash even when they blow their noses with them.

Is someone insistently asking what you are thinking about;

They find houseplants an affront and knock them over as often as possible.

Is a recipe for lingering doubts and insomnia;

They do not read washing instructions. They do not sort. They dry everything on sturdy.

Is a zone of mercy;

They trim their beards over the sink and leave the hair.

Is a flow chart for the end of hope;

They do not empty the trash even when overflowing. They just keep pushing more in.

Is a museum piece with an installed couple sitting behind thick protective glass;

They spill something and rub it with their shoe into the carpet. 

Is walking on a beach littered with broken shells;

They are incapable of closing things they’ve opened—a drawer, a window, an argument.

Is the fruitless search for the unbroken one;

They do not send birthday cards or presents. They do not thank people.

Is a thin sheet of flame folding in upon itself;

They think flowers are weeds.

Is the late sky and the morning air;

They put silverware crusted with food into the dishwasher where it hardens into rust.

Is the thing before and the thing after and the pause in-between;

They wait until the grass is too long and wet to cut, and break the mower.

Is what we talk about when we’re not talking about love;

They break things. Little remains whole in their presence.

Is a horse entering a well-lit room;

They pretend they can’t hear you when asked a simple question.

Is a sestina using these six words: blind, disappear, order, again, tears, once;

When you think of them, words like shovel, wrench, door-stopper, brick come to mind.

Is thinner than the night before;

They act as if they were born from the mouth of a river.

Is the same piece of luggage come around and round on the conveyer belt;

They don’t say what you need to hear.

Is a tiny theater where plays a tragedy that begins and ends the same way each time;

They believe most women are highly sensitive like it is a disease.

Is the stain on silence;

They are like bruises on the back of a woman’s legs.

Is a four- volume meditation on the color beige;

They do not hear what isn’t being said.

Is when you know less than you knew before;

They are poor at waiting and even worse at following.

Is an insistence on we;

They will not know what you want even when you tell them.

Is a person saying I really do not understand;

They threaten to quit you many times, but they never do.

Is the sweet smell of daffodils in the beginning, and the smell of earth at the end. 

*

Marcia Aldrich is the author of the free memoir Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton, and of Companion to an Untold Story, which won the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. She is the editor of Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women, published by the University of Georgia Press. Her website: marciaaldrich.com.

Advent 2021, Dec 19: Scott Dickensheets, This Tub is Full

  

THIS TUB IS FULL

After David Gates' "Log Man" (unavailable online; find it in The Bastard on the Couch)

*

It’s early still; dawn hasn’t yet dumped its groggy light into the back yards of suburban Las Vegas, where I live, although here, in this body, where I live, things are already moving around. I woke up hours ago, once again feeling as though something is subtly askew—like my blood might be flowing backward, or my lymph nodes are synced to different time zones, or my kidney is fretting about the future of democracy. Not a pain, exactly, more a ghostly flitting, tough to pin down. Yet distinct from the normal indignities of reaching middle age so catastrophically out of shape—the mystery aches that gust daily through my limbs and thorax, then dissipate. Those I’m used to, and what do I expect, letting myself go the way I have? As it is, I’m content to skate by on the wisdom of poet Albert Goldbarth: “If the dying is slow enough, we call it living.” Works for me—most of the time. This furtive bodily unease, though, that has me a bit scrambled, which may be why I applied a verb like “dumped” to describe what will surely be a routinely beautiful desert sunrise. I mean, what kind of crank does that?

     Don’t mind the lame cocktail jazz tinkling from my wheezing iMac; it’s just a sonic berm to keep me inside my head. That Goldbarth quote, by the way, comes from a file I call “Cheap Wisdom,” in which I collect random aphorisms, bits of poetry, song lyrics, and nonsense, which I’ll be drawing from as this thing unfurls, so you have that to look forward to. For example, this mission statement from James Parker: “What is writing for if not to fling itself at the unwritable?” I ought to have that tramp-stamped on my spirit animal, or whatever it is the kool kidz are doing over on the TikTok these days.

     Dawn’s arriving now, and for once I don’t hear the neighborhood’s flock of quail speed-wobbling across my fake grass. Sorry, I’m sure this quotidian stuff isn’t the high-end content you dialed in for, even though, in the end, it’s the only stuff, if you follow. I picked up “quotidian” from critic Dave Hickey; it recurs in his writing, usually to indicate the luminous ordinariness of daily life, which almost never makes it onto the page—indeed, writing it only ends up dissolving it (Knausgaard possibly excepted). If you’re an Essay Daily regular, you probably know that Hickey, who died recently, was an essayist and art critic usually described as “contrarian.” He wrote about Vegas often and better than anyone else, and lived here for a memorable span. He once told me—I knew him, just a bit—“As a writer, I don’t organize things. Because all I care about is the flow. All I care about is the music.” Welcome to a paragraph after your own heart, Dave.

     It occurs to me that these strange humors I’m feeling might be psychosomatic, spillover from the fritzing mood centers in my brain as it absorbs the 21st century. Or maybe it’s metaphysical—is there such a thing as spiritual gout? Web MD is of surprisingly little help in these self-diagnoses. Poetry, on the other hand. “It is permeability I am fighting, / it is holes I am full of.” That’s Hilary Vaughn Dobel, from the file.

     Anyway, Hickey: “What I do as a writer, nearly always, is, I just fill up the tub. And then I don’t worry about it. What comes out is what comes out.” I trust he was being a bit glib there; no one writes that well by simply turning on the faucet. Even so, I couldn’t often match his intellectual pace: He liked to visualize his writing as a “black coupe de ville” running without lights on a long straightaway at night, and that’s me, clinging to his tailfin by my fingernails. But I never didn’t enjoy the ride, and, yes, I know that’s a double negative; feel free to speak to my manager. Hickey was the first of two writers I associate with Las Vegas to die within a few days of each other. Whereas his death prompted a flood of obits in the blue-chip media, Chip Mosher’s barely got a couple of social media mentions. He was a local alt-weekly columnist, fierce in his day, which had long passed by the time cancer got him. A high-school teacher and wearer of rumpled bucket hats, he used his column, which he immodestly titled “Socrates in Sodom,” to blister pretty much every piety in town, including the one that paid him—he was an unstinting critic of the local education-industrial complex. “Over the years, I've had several (failed, I'm happy to say) attempts to get me fired,” he wrote in the first of maybe 400 email exchanges we had during the two and a half years I edited him at that alt-weekly, now defunct. “I am, though not necessarily by choice, of the mold of Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, W.C. Fields, et. al. And, oh yes, Socrates and the Greek cynics.” Buried in the metadata of that “oh yes” was his insistence, against all available evidence, that reason, employed with wit and a spirit of well-intentioned confrontation, might make this a better place, and look what that got him.

     They were vastly different guys, Dave and Chip, and very different writers—I can guess what Dave thought of Bukowski—but both were personally generous with their time and intelligence, and they each had a knack for scorning whatever orthodoxies were at hand. (“It’s usually the satire that gets me into the most trouble,” Chip wrote me.) But I’d like to think they really intersected in something Dave once told me about Dickens: “No matter how horrible the story he’s telling you, there’s this little bubble of laughter underneath it that tells you he just loves telling you this story. I would like my writing to rest on that little bubble of laughter, no matter how terrible the subject I’m writing about.” Dave and Chip each nurtured that bubble, that deep gusto for flinging their writing at the unwritable whatever the consequences, which I envied so much.

     Here’s another quote, courtesy of The Mountain Goats: “The ghosts that haunt your building are prepared to take on substance.”

     Okay, so what I’m really getting at here is that my 60th birthday is fast approaching, and now I’m mourning people I knew, and I’ve got these odd sensations wafting through my body like bad jazz. That’s it, that’s the real status update. I know, you’re like, Is that what all this is about, the cold hand of mortality, etc., etc.? Talk about your cheap wisdom! Sure, but, on the other hand, it’s not so quotidian to me. And while I’m not freaking out about it per se, it’s definitely hogging more of my bandwidth—another guy I know, an artist, passed away between the last paragraph and this one, no kidding, it’s right there on Facebook. Another great guy. How much tub’s left to fill is, I suppose, the question, and how to feel about that is another. Am I, in fact, dying slowly enough to call this living? 

      “Every hour is an eleventh hour now,” poet Gregory Crosby writes, and while he meant it in a civilizational context, I’m inclined to take it personally. So when I’m done with this, I’m going to drive over to help my mom, who’s tottering into her ninth decade on ruined knees and falls too often. After that, I’ll send a supportive text to my brother, who collapsed on Easter evening, woke up a month later, and has since shuffled through a series of hospital beds in a medicalized limbo administrated by the cruel indifference of Medicaid’s reimbursement procedures. I know, withholding that kind of information until the end is a cheesy move, as David Gates notes in “Log Man,” the essay that prompted this muddled gumbo. Agreed, but that’s just how it came out of the faucet, and it’s too late to do anything about it now: The Essay Daily people are pinging my inbox, wondering where this piece is, okay, okay, while we’re all still alive, here you go—

*

This essay attempts to do in a modest, awkward way what David Gates’ “Log Man” does much more complexly: appear to move in offhand fashion around a mostly, but not entirely, obscured topic. However premeditated his piece may have been, Gates seems to be knitting “Log Man” from whatever he’s thinking, feeling, or observing at the moment of composition, each sentence alert to the nuances and implications of everything around it. As far as I can tell, the essay is not available online; it appears in the anthology The Bastard on the Couch.

*

Scott Dickensheets is the features editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, serves on the literary committee of the Las Vegas Book Festival, and has edited or contributed to eight volumes of the Las Vegas Writes anthology series.

Advent 2021, Dec 18, Lawrence Lenhart: Consider the Bat: dining comments on the eve of a pandemic

After David Foster Wallace's "Consider the Lobster" and M. K. Fisher's "Love and Death Among the Molluscs"

Port Vila, Vanuatu, December 2019

Minutes after placing my order at L’Houstalet Restaurant, chef-owner Clément Martinez visits my tableside. We are in the middle of an open-air courtyard. Its stucco walls are decorated with life-size primitivist paintings, splattered with light cast by a dozen or more red lampshades. L’Houstalet offers provincial Gallic gastronomy with a twist: it’s a farm homestay, but with the delicacies of the Pacific. I suspect Clément is on the verge of apology or congratulations. It’s either, Je suis désolé, we’ve just run out of a necessary ingredient or Félicitations, you are our one millionth customer. I watch for him to whip out a party kazoo, spray me with confetti. Instead, he cross-examines me about my entree selection, civet de roussette. 

On this side of vegetarianism (way lapsed), I’ve ingested bull testicles, tuna eyeballs, pufferfish livers, fried tarantulas, and maybe, one night in Cambodia, dog meat. (Some pranks never quite resolve.) Put another way, a tourist leads a dreadful, but exciting life, opting for a lusty bit of nourishment over items more obviously designed to sate. 

Until now, the only fauna I’ve refused to taste is the turtle. Despite gourmands’ insistence that it’s the sweetest protein you’ll ever press to your palate, I need to believe at least one animal is too sacred to consume. I think I’d sooner eat a filet of human flesh than a spoonful of turtle soup. Tonight, though, I’m beginning to think the same deference should have been applied to Chiroptera before placing my order. 

“Are you certain about the bat?” he asks, hand on his aproned hip. “The waitress said you ordered the bat.” 

It’s as if the documents before me do not amount to a menu, but a multiple-choice exam, and I am on the brink of failure. 

“I think I was certain,” I say. 

Described as a “nuggety, bouncy figure” by one leisure writer, Clément has pitched eyebrows and an abiding smile, even now as he confronts me. Perhaps he’s doubling back for the young Francophone waitress who seemed nonplussed by my attempt at a French accent. My nasally r’s and narrow u’s were likely more caricature than communication. 

“Is there a problem?” I ask. “Are there no bats in the kitchen tonight?” 

It wouldn’t be the first time in recent days I ordered something from a menu, only to watch the chef bound across the street to procure the missing ingredient from a nearby food stall. In the case of the flying fox (Pteropus anetianus), one need only fire into the fronds, fell it to the street, stuff its adorable carcass into a vat of boiling water. Or perhaps Clément procures his bats from a local wet market, the likes of which will become infamous in China in a few months’ time. 

“Non, non. We have the bat,” he says. 

Apparently, L’Houstalet sells a few each evening to boring hedonists like me. I keep trying to read between his lines. 

“Are you certain?” By which, perhaps, he means: Have you fully reckoned with the essence of this animal you intend to eat? The thing is, one person’s meat might be another person’s poison. In the case of the bat, one’s mind must be open wide as their mouth. For it has been called the bird of the Devil, even an incarnation of the Devil itself. Isaiah lists it among unclean birds [sic], a detestable reremouse unfit for supper. In the Bible, the bat roosts in caves among abandoned idols. See the figures of Ba’al forged of gold, silver, bronze, cedar, cypress, oak, and stone, all covered in bat guano. Maligned from antiquity to the present, the bat is in desperate need of a new PR manager. 

“You know it’s gamey,” he says. I provide an assenting nod. “Have you ever had venison?”

I keep on nodding. 

“Civet de roussette is not a quick dish to prepare. You’re okay with the wait?” 

I nod some more. So he’s being preemptive, running diagnostics on my temperament. It seems he’s a chef who, after a spate of harsh reviews on TripAdvisor, is simply doing triage. 

“Very good. And you have read how it’s prepared?”

“Red wine,” I say. “Garlic marinade?”

“Non,” he says, shaking his head, turning the menu over to a reprint of an Australian food critic’s column about the dish. 

Just then, five serveurs bring me linen napkins and silverware, a basket of crostini, carafe of white wine, crock of coconut crab stew, and garlic snails with a set of tongs that resemble a gynecologist’s speculum. 

“Bon appétit,” Clément says, backing away to the kitchen, presumably to prepare my bat. 

“Are you certain?” By which, perhaps, he means: Listen here, you Bourdain wannabe. There are easier ways to get some attention on your holiday. 

“Are you certain?” By which, perhaps, he means: How will you go on living after your first bite of bat? What will you do with the memory of its flavor? What will you do with the knowledge of the jaw-force needed to shred its meat? What if, from now on, when you see small bones accumulating on a plate— chicken wingettes snapped off the drumette, gnawed clean—you can only think of bat? What will it feel like to be driving home from work, passing by all those chain restaurants and drive-thru lanes, only to realize a sudden craving for a dish that can only be gotten in distant Melanesia? 

From the looks of it, L’Houstalet is for lovers. Most tables are set for two with couples scooted close enough to share a menu, lock fingers, spoon-feed each other crème brûlée, whisper everything as if it’s a secret. Their flirtation is beginning to make me feel inexplicably insecure—like we’ve just played a children’s game where, when the music stops, everyone is meant to pair off, and I’m the odd man out. 

The uncollected menu on my table allows me to convince myself my wife will yet sit down beside me. I imagine our conversation turning to one of our earliest dates, c. 2012, when we parked the car, and I led her down a path to a dry river wash adjacent to the fancy gastropub. It was sunset, about the time thousands of bats streamed from the maternity colony clustered on the underside of a Tucson bridge. They erupted from the trusses, beelined for the suburbs where they feasted on a buffet of desert bugs. The shape of their flight against the late desert sun, the pointillism of their silhouettes, created the illusion of collimation; it was enough to dream on for months. 

I turn my attention back to the menu, which touts L’Houstalet’s modest role in facilitating independence in Vanuatu, something about Clément serving up forty bowls of French onion soup at midnight to dignitaries as they drafted the nation’s constitution. Elsewhere in the menu is a reprinted restaurant review by Bob Hart whose attempt at writing the French accent is worse than my attempt at speaking it. To Hart, Clément might as well be Pépé Le Pew. While it may very well be verbatim, the use of the letter zed is downright hyperbolic: “I use zee gertz of zee flying fox. I take zem out, I wash zem, I chop zem up, add zee ‘erbs, and I put zem back. Ees very good, non?” 

I can stomach offal. It calls to mind the sheep pluck and cow tripe I’ve savored in haggis and menudo. But this ostentation—eating a mammal’s organs in situ—might be too boorish even for me. As I gnash the last of the snails, slurp at the aromatic dregs of the coconut crab soup, I sense Clément on the other side of the wall, trussing the bat’s wings, now scrubbing the innards with rock salt, now glazing the carcass in syrupy red wine reduction. 

Before Andie and I left the wash, we crouched over a dead bat, stick-flipped it by its elastin wings. I rolled her few ounces to the edge of the dust. This was the one who didn’t get away. A woman approached us, bandana covering her mouth. She urged us to cover up: “¡Pulmón! ¡Pulmón!” She clutched at her chest dramatically. Beside her boots, a trowel stuck into a pail of guano. It seemed overcautious then to think that one should have to wear a mask due to one wee bat. 

“Are you certain?” Clément had asked. By which he might have meant: Are you not wary of the optics? A tourist towering over a plate of exotic meat when he could have ordered the chicken instead? Is it appropriate or is it appropriation? When Cyclone Pam razed Vanuatu in 2015, destroying the cane-framed and palm-thatched huts, citizens bunkered in concrete schoolhouses and starved. With their crops ruined, men crafted javelins and launched them high into fronds, puncturing the megabats in their dog-like faces, knocking them to soaking earth. For many, the flying fox was a primary source of calories until relief rations arrived. 

A small family seated near the restroom dallies after their meal. An Aussie brother and sister pretend to be bats—screeching as they run in circles round the table, wild displays of double-jointed flapping, and incestuous bloodsucking that ends in electric giggles that embarrass the parents enough to make them empty their wallets and vamoose. 

We dressed our son as a bat for his first Halloween, adorable wings and a cap with ears perked with wire. I carefully grasped him by his calves, upending him as if to roost. I wondered then, as I do know: do bats sometimes poop upside down, like right onto their noses? At his nine-month checkup, the pediatrician watched as he teethed on the head of a large plush bat puppet. “Little Ozzy,” the doctor said as he pressed the diaphragm of the stethoscope to his chest. 

We’ve got bats on our linocut prints, in our popup books, on the patterns of our PJs. There’s even one sunk in the frogs’ tank: a rubber figurine knocking against a shoot of bamboo. In the very fabric of our family lore, one can find Chiroptera galore. 

“Are you certain?” Clément had asked. By which, perhaps, he meant: What would your family say? 

When another carafe of wine shows up at my table, I don’t wave it off. Instead, I carry it with me like a goblet, drinking from it directly as I make way for the perimeter of the courtyard toward the paintings, hung in a grid, warmly spotlit. All are originals by the “Picasso of the Pacific,” Aloi Pilioko. Most of his canvases are full of blue sky and chartreuse foliage. Banana leaves stand as tall as the human figures that populate the paintings. The centered subjects are brushed sienna, ochre, and plum, carrying out daily rituals that shape life in Vanuatu. They are inscribed with scenes of worship, kastom, and black magic—chiefs at the nakamal, tribesmen in the bush, untraceable displays of alchemy. There are parrots and pythons, a clowder of anthropomorphized alleycats. Another depicts the well-known feat of Nanggol (land-diving) in which young men cuff their ankles with a vine and freefall twenty-nine meters from a thirty-meter tower, rebounding just before the earth splits open their skulls. 

I am biding my time, not working up an appetite as much as my appetite is beginning to work me up. When the waitstaff next exits the kitchen, I glimpse the door, rocking on its hinges. Clément is stripping leaves from woody sprigs, sprinkling them into the skillet. 

“Are you certain?” By which, perhaps, he meant: Have you really considered the bat? Like Fisher considered the oyster: those wayward spats, androgynous hermaphrodites, with their cold guts, gills, and crinkly fringes? Or like Wallace considered the lobster: how its chitin turns scarlet after the boil melts away all other pigments?  

Have I even once considered the bat’s perplexing immune system, most of which is found in the “gertz”? The way it enjoys immunity, passing viral particulate, bacterial culture, mold spores through its bowels, light as coils of dust, ready to lift off with a mild wind into the lungs of a warm-blooded host? Have I thought once about the deaths of so many South Pacific islanders who were kidnapped by blackbirders, sold to haciendas, and deployed to scrape the caves clean of guano? Death by histoplasmosis, a.k.a. “bat shit lungs.” ¡Pulmón! Have I reminded myself of the bat as a vector of so many other emerging diseases: Ebola and Hanta, Hendra and Nipah, Influenza A and Manangle, rabies and Rift Valley, MERS-CoV and SARS CoV-1? 

What, at the time, felt like a whimsical thing to do, a lame party trick—me responding to nobody’s dare at all: Do you have the gertz to eat a bat?—will soon be a source of ignominy. I can still hear my pinched singsong order: Civet de roussette, s'il vous plaît. 

No. I’d say I haven’t much considered the bat at all. 

I’m most transfixed by a Pilioko painting in the corner. A man grips two bats by their ankles. They dangle at his sides, upside-down as if roosting from his palms. They are drawn to-scale, tall as his torso. Clearly, they will be eaten, but for now their eyes match the man’s navel: bright red dots, flickering sources of life. Their mouths and genitals are red ovoids as well. The couple seated nearest to me has stopped conversing; instead, they study me at the altar of this painting. 

“Are you certain?” By which, perhaps, he meant certain, derived from the Latin verb for “discriminate” (e.g., “of discriminating taste”), whose root krei- means “to sieve,” like the mesh utensil used to separate desired morsels of food from the rest. Bat pulp and bat fibers. Bat collagen and bat follicles. I hope Clément’s sifting is less clumsy than mine. 

The couple has shifted in their seats so as to give me some privacy before the paintings of the bats. It has been years since I sat across from my wife in that way: away from our home continent, children figmented by a generous distance. The couple eyes the wine menu. I want to buy them their next bottle, but I’m fearful they have expensive taste. 

The door swings open again, and I see Clément pouring wine into the skillet, chattering with the sous-chef as my meal simmers and steams. I empty my own carafe into my throat and ditch it on an empty table nearby. 

“Are you certain?” Clément had asked. By which, perhaps, he meant: Are you aware of the bat’s place on the food supply chain? Better than ruminant cows, better than chicken, better than wild-caught fish, farmed fish, even better than nut trees, which produce negative greenhouse gases. A steady diet of bat could turn the Keeling Curve into a parabola by next Earth Day. 

My father—and probably your father too, if you were raised as boy—motivated my carnivorism with the promise of a hairy chest. What if he had instead said, Take this bite and you can change the world: tailspin the economy, forestall the daily commute, cause a record fall in fossil fuel emissions, keep large groups away from precious wildlife habitat?

“Are you certain?” Clément had asked. By which, perhaps, he meant: Has the time finally come to put your bat where your mouth is? You have affected misanthropy for too long, quoting that eco-depth chart ad nauseum like a would-be-eco-serial-killer, posturing yourself as “abysmally deep,” advocating for humans to aim for their own extinction. “Abysmally deep—,” the chart reads, “a quick annihilation is too good for humans. A horrible, fatal illness... is only fair.” 

Tracing the pathogenesis of SARS CoV-2 (a.k.a. Covid-19, a.k.a. the coronavirus) is approximate. It likely began within a week, if not day, if not hour, if not instant I uttered civet de roussette. 

Do I mistake the “abysmally deep” for the superficies of deep thinking? Or do I really believe, like Mephistophales, there’s no good in this endless [pro]creating, that it’s really time we get to the annihilating? 

“Are you certain?” Clément had asked. By which, perhaps, he meant: Would you, if you could, be patient zero? From your sickness, a thousand germs could break forth and grow. Do you fancy yourself a climate martyr? Can I bind you in that contract? From deep-down depths, a spring flows in all directions. Let me prick your thumb, slick the menu with juice of rarest quality. 

Who would say ‘yes’ to such a murderous proposition? A utilitarian might argue that when working on a global scale, trading off one pan- for another, it’s the balance (and not the size) of the numbers that matters. Sure, a pandemic could take a few million lives, but a climate panacea could save a billion. It’s the mass transit of trolley problems. 

My waitress greets me at the painting, ushers me back to my seat. “We are ready to present your meal,” she says.

Bat appétit!  

On the plate, the flying fox resembles slow-roasted rabbit, but with fewer bones. It’s unpleasantly bitter, so between bites, I lash it with my own red wine. The emulsion puddled in the center cavity includes particles of the bat’s once large heart, which used to beat 100-400 times per minute. There are carrots stacked sadly on the edge of the plate, nothing more than a pop of color. An afterthought. 

I sense the serveurs huddle in a corner behind my left shoulder, turning me into spectacle.

Jonathan Swift once plagiarized, “It was a bold man that first ate an oyster.” 

I take each bite with gusto. Let there be no mistake that (I think) I am bold too.

“Are you certain?” Clément had asked. By which, perhaps, he meant: You do know that “delicacy” is a euphemism—that delicacy means delicate, that delicate means vulnerable, that on some Melanesian islands, the flying fox is not just vulnerable but endangered, even critically endangered? You’d think they’d be required to print that on the menu by now, but non, I am here to deliver the news. 

Within weeks, videos will surface online of wet markets and food stalls—bats for sale and bats for dinner. A host of a Chinese travel show visits Palau, dramatically hoists a fruit bat from a bowl of broth to her lipstick. At the intersection of epidemiology and conspiracy, people with no expertise at all declare her patient zero despite the fact it was filmed in 2016. She apologizes, takes down the video. Bat-munching videos viralize. Comments multiply. Xenophobia is one way to simplify the convoluted story of a global pandemic. As the “Wuhan virus” catches on, nobody takes notice when I post my stupid pic of civet de roussette on Instagram. My transgression doesn’t court the Sinophobes.

“Are you certain?” Clément had asked. By which, perhaps, he meant: Do I really have to put on my apron for you, you dime-a-dozen tourist? There’s nobody else in the kitchen tonight permitted to cook this particular protein. Won’t you please spare me? 

I see Clément on my way back to the street. He is seated at a table with stacks of receipts, typing at his calculator. 

“Compliments!” I shout into his hovel.

“Est-tu bon?” he asks.

“Oui, bon,” I say as if I’ve been a brave boy. I linger like a child waits for his pediatrician to cover him with stickers. 

I walk away, not yet stricken with tomorrow’s dreadfully exciting illness, a week-long malady that overcomes me just before I board the flight to Singapore with passengers who, the Scoot stewardess notes, have connections to Kunming, Xi’an, Zhengzhou, Hangzhou, Tianjin, Suzhou, Qingdao, Nanjing, and Wuhan. 

Don’t think me delusional, reader. I’m not claiming to be patient zero, just wondering if I should have been. 

*

Lawrence Lenhart studied writing at the University of Pittsburgh and holds an MFA from the University of Arizona. His essay collections include The Well-Stocked and Gilded Cage (Outpost19) Backvalley Ferrets (University of Georgia), and Of No Ground (West Virginia University). With Will Cordeiro, he is the author of Experimental Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury). His prose appears in Creative Nonfiction, Conjunctions, Fourth Genre, Gulf Coast, Passages North, and Prairie Schooner. He is Associate Chair of English at Northern Arizona University where he teaches fiction, nonfiction, and climate science narratives. Lenhart is reviews editor at DIAGRAM and founding editor of Carbon Copy.