wag (n): 1. ‘Any one ludicrously mischievous; a merry droll’; a habitual joker. 2. A web-based literary magazine (from portmanteau of “web mag” or “web magazine”). revue (n): 1. An elaborate musical show consisting of numerous unrelated scenes; also, the genre of such entertainments. Times of London 4 Apr 1899: “a specimen of this class of piece has to be called a revue and announced as an ‘entirely new form’. ”

Issue 1 Spring 2009 FROM THE EDITORS

Image courtesy of Julia McKinley http://jtmckinleyphoto.blogspot.com/ MANIFESTO Think of the internet as a literal place, a newly-conquered frontier. It’s a familiar comparison: the pioneering switch-circuit supernerds of ARPANET; the trailblazing explorers of Usenet and Mosaic; the waves of immigrants, establishing Geocities, getting to know their AOL postman by his ubiquitous catchphrase. Now Google’s twelve- lane freeways roar across the Web, Facebook and YouTube are visible from space. Unfortunately, as with most frontiers, the development of the Web has brought with it the swift and ruthless execution of native populations. The old empires of printed media are undergoing a greater crisis than ever before, one from which they will never fully recover. They have succumbed to the pox of internet expansion.

These wrongs must be redressed, not by retrenching ourselves in � the printed medium, but by salvaging what its best citizens stood for. We cannot mistake the decline of the printed form for the death of quality writing and content. The need for literature and letters to be reliably and intelligently disseminated exists now as it always has. Go back and read how scribes decried the printing press. This is just another medium change—from bleached plant matter to glowing liquid crystal. The reason many people worry that the written form is dying, and the reason most writers consider online publication second-rate, is that no journal has yet succeeded in marrying the editorial rigors of print to the freedoms of the internet. A high-quality print magazine—a Harper’s, a Partisan Review, an n+1—is a micron filter of minds applied to the endless wellspring of human creation, allowing only the finest trickle to pass through. As it stands now, the internet is the opposite: an unbridled and infinite purveyor of information—creation unbound—and it has all the delicate subtlety of a tidal wave. The countless blogs and Web-based literary reviews are brimming with unexceptional content. With endless gigabytes of storage space, editors of the online corpus sacrifice stringent controls and adopt a wag’s revue 3 shotgun approach, publishing mediocrity en masse, obscuring the rare gem. Readers end up with entire cows’ asses on their plates, rather than the succulent, butterflied filets they were hoping for. Even the bastardized online cousins of prominent print magazines and literary reviews—which often keep their best content dead-bolted behind subscription fees—are visually unappealing and cluttered with unwanted content. That print titans can’t get the Web right either shouldn’t be surprising: the best carriage makers didn’t make the best cars.

We at Wag’s Revue are� intent on revolutionizing online literature. We wish to create something entirely of the internet, never printed and never meant to be printed, but with all the editorial and aesthetic controls that entice people to read and trust the finest printed media. We will insist on strong editorial oversight, from first draft to final copy. We will re-conceptualize the printed page online, and we will explore its space, cultivate its aesthetics. Presentation will be sleek, clean, and controlled. We will find and foster the new and great writers of the online generation. Alongside interviews with the waggish luminaries of our time, we will publish poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction. We will allow and encourage authors to exploit the internet for the new creative territory it provides: contortions of page, mixed media, electronic writing, interactive narrative. We will publish complete, polished issues, quarterly—no constant dribble of blogging and unwanted content. And there will never be subscription fees; all content will be free to the public, greatly expanding the readership authors can reach. We are planting our flag in this, our little corner of the internet, establishing a true Web-based magazine (a “wag,” if you will)—a magazine that brings the rigors of print publication over to the online medium, to flourish under the vast new freedoms it allows. —The Editors, Wag’s Revue

4 manifesto INTERVIEWS

Painting courtesy of Maureen Halligan • http://www.maureenhalligan.com/ DAVEWag’s EGGERS Revue Dave Eggers is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated author and founder of both McSweeney’s, an independent publishing house in San Francisco, and the 826 Valencia volunteer centers nationwide. He collaborated with Valentino Achak Deng of Sudan on the book What is the What; much of his recent work has focused on the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, which provides educational opportunities for Sudanese refugees.

He corresponded with the editors of Wag’s Revue via email.

Will Litton, Wag’s Revue: Can you tell us something about the lengthy and ongoing adventure of writing What is the What? What was it like to transform Valentino’s narratives into a novel, and then transform that work of literature into a development project? How do you think this project speaks to the ‘potential of literature’ in our generation? Also, any anecdotes about your most recent trip to Valentino’s hometown of Marial Bai?

Dave Eggers: I guess I’ve always kept myself open to fairly radical departures from whatever course I’ve been on. I’m not so interested in mining the same territory for too long. For a few years I’d been working on my own fiction, stories based on people sort of like myself in one way or another—Americans from a certain generation—and then one day I got a letter in the mail from Mary Williams, who had started the Lost Boys Foundation. She had been working with a young man, Valentino Deng, who wanted the story of the civil war in Sudan told by means of his biography. She offered me the job of biographer, and because I come from a journalism background, I was intrigued and thought I should at least look into the project. Valentino and I met in Atlanta and got along really well from the first day. Soon after that, we made a pact to get his story written, but had no idea that it would be quite the thing it turned out to be. That it would turn into a four-year project and would bring wag’s revue 6 me to Sudan many times, and would give rise to an educational complex in Valentino’sWag’s hometown… Revue Well, it was beyond our imagining.

At the same time, Valentino and I did plan to dedicate the proceeds to his hometown within the first few months of our working relationship. We hoped we’d bring about a wider recognition of what happened in Sudan, and we also hoped for something tangible to come of the book. I’ve gotten pretty hooked on the idea of concrete byproducts of whatever art we can make. I don’t think books need to be decorative; they can be instrumental in actual results. 826 National has benefited from a bunch of books, too — edited by everyone from Zadie Smith to Michael Lewis. They’ve created books that have paid the rent on all seven 826 centers. So there can be real, three- dimensional good that can come out of a literary endeavor. Believing otherwise, that writers and books are outside the flow of life and the progress of a society, is proven wrong every day.

WL: With Valentino at the helm, how is your project unique? How would you describe the foundation’s approach to development issues, how are community members being integrated into the process, and what are your long-term goals?

DE: Valentino is the Executive Director, the Educational Director (until he hires one), the contractor, the transportation director, the supreme being. During one of our trips to Sudan, back in 2006, we sat with dozens of elders and community leaders in Marial Bai, and let them know of the general plan — that Val’s foundation would be building a school in town and would be paying teachers well, equipping the school in every way to be a model school for the region. At the same time, Valentino was very sure to be open to community input. So the elders said, “Sure, a school sounds good. But we have enough primary schools. What

7 interviews we really need is a secondary school.” So the plan changed right there. So we said, “Okay,Wag’s we’ll build Revue a secondary school.” And then they said, “A secondary school will be great, but we also need a way to train teachers to teach secondary school.” The region has very few people qualified to teach secondary school. So a teacher-training college became part of the plan, too.

In a dozen ways the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation operates differently than most development projects. It wasn’t drawn up by well-intentioned NGO workers in the U.S. It’s run entirely by Sudanese, starting with Valentino, who has a unique ability to serve as bridge between U.S. donors, local parents and educators, builders, and the government of southern Sudan. Everyone knows and respects Valentino. So it’s the Sudanese helping the Sudanese, with expertise provided by Valentino, a Sudanese-American. It’s been a powerful model so far. And all I do is help make people aware of Valentino’s project, and help fundraise here in the U.S. Otherwise it’s an entirely local project.

Sandra Allen, Wag’s Revue: A lot of your work has striven to use your literary sensibilities and fame to do good, obviously with What is the What and the foundation, but also with the 826 volunteer centers, or the Voice of Witness series, which are novels created from interviews with human rights victims. Did all of these projects originate independently? What forces have influenced this shift in your work?

DE: I guess each project originated independently. Usually there’s some problem or issue that presents itself, and it’s natural to look at our little organization and wonder if we can address it. For example, McSweeney’s had been publishing books for about seven years when I got interested in oral history. My first time in Sudan, in 2003, Valentino and I interviewed three women

wag’s revue 8 who had been abducted and enslaved during the war. We left the interviews thinkingWag’s we needed Revue to get their stories out into the world. And of course McSweeney’s already publishes books, so it was natural and not-so-difficult to then create some kind of imprint that specialized in oral histories. And then there are just lucky coincidences — given that when I got back from Sudan, I was asked to introduce Studs Terkel, the father of modern oral history, at an event at Berkeley. He got me thinking more about oral history, and then, in the lobby after the event, I met Lola Vollen, a physician working with exonerated prisoners here in the U.S. She said, “These people need to be heard.” I said, “Well, we have a publishing company. Let’s do a book.” So all these things aligned. That’s how a lot of the projects happen—we stay open to new work, and keep ourselves nimble. And given we operate everthing on a tiny scale—usually one staff member for any given project—it makes it all plausible. People don’t always realize how little you need to start up any given project.

Will Guzzardi, Wag’s Revue: I know a few people who know McSweeney’s as ‘that website with the funny lists,’ who are astonished to find that it’s also this beautifully printed, aesthetic marvel of a lit-mag. The Quarterly and the Internet Tendency are pretty different: one is an expertly crafted, painstakingly published magazine that publishes quite ‘serious’ literature; the other is a collection of jokes, loosely gathered on website. Why do these two share the McSweeney’s name? Does the internet have built-in limitations as a medium that restrict it to frivolity?

DE: The internet site started just a few weeks before the journal, back in 1998. I’m not a huge web reader, so I extrapolated a bit and figured that most people wouldn’t read long works of fiction on the website. So I decided that the website would be sort of a teaser, a window into the larger world of our books and

9 interviews journals. But at this point we’re becoming aware that people make assumptions aboutWag’s all our Revue publishing via the humor site, which as you’re indicating is very different — given we publish very little humor in the journal itself. So we’re thinking about clarifying that distinction in some way.

SA: You published Salvador Plascencia’s People of Paper and Robert Coover’s A Child Again, both of which experiment with the boundaries of a printed text—leaving holes in pages, printing pages sideways, printing stories on playing cards meant to be shuffled. The Quarterly also does this a lot, like Issue 17 (made to look like a bundle of mail). What is the role of such physical experimentation with the printed text? Is there a point at which such experimentation will exhaust ‘The critical itself? What possibilities do you see consensus with the internet and experimental has gotten a writing? collective case of amnesia’ DE: Well, people have been experimenting with literary form since the Greeks, or probably earlier. Don Quixote is very experimental, of course, as are thousands of centuries-old texts. It’s really a painful moment in American literature, right now, where the critical consensus has gotten a collective case of amnesia, forgetting or discounting Cervantes, Borges, Barthelme, Nabokov, and dozens of other highly experimental writers who were doing it long before any contemporary writers. We’re pluralists at McSweeney’s. We publish anything of great quality, whether that’s experimental or very traditional or somewhere in between. There is and should always be room for all approaches to writing, and whenever anyone closes the door on one — by saying, for example, that experimentation might someday “exhaust itself” (not to put you on the hotseat), it’s very saddening. And of course it ignores the entire history of

wag’s revue 10 all art in every form, which is a history of constant innovation, experimentation and evolution.Wag’s TheRevue person who says “Enough innovation, let’s stick with what we have and never change” is pretty much the sworn enemy of all art. Not to overstate it, of course.

SA: During the momentary optimism which followed Obama’s election, I found myself returning to a story from How We Are Hungry titled, “Your Mother and I.” It’s a long monologue written from a father to his son which recalls the incredible feats that he and his wife have achieved over the years, from permanently ending genocide, to converting all power to wind and sun, to redistricting school districts so that property taxes aren’t tied to school systems. He also recalls some of their funnier accomplishments, like covering Cleveland in Ivy or making penises better looking (“more streamlined, better color”). Would you call this story an optimistic one? Is it meant to inspire optimism?

DE: It is an optimistic story, but it’s also a sad one, in a way. I’m always frustrated with the gap between what we know should happen to make the world a better place, and what we’re capable of personally and as a society. Right now, for example, in California, all sane beings know that gays and lesbians should have a right to marry. It’s so stupid and exasperating that it’s even being discussed, let alone fought about. And all sane beings also know that sooner or later they will be given the right to marry. But living in this in-between-time is frustrating. We know that public opinion eventually gets around to sanity, but the time when we’re waiting for that glacier to inch along is maddening. So “Your Mother and I” is a bit of fantasy wherein things are changed on the exact timetable they should be—which is to say, the speed of rational thought.

11 interviews WL: You’re featured on the final track of Beck’s album The Information. Your voiceWag’s comes in Revue at the end, and I think you’re attempting to describe what the perfect album would be like. (Is it you or Spike Jonze who insists it must be capable of space travel?) Though you probably haven’t encountered perfection yet, which albums do you think come closest to being perfect, and by expansion, which works of literature?

DE: I don’t remember who says what on that song. I’m too horrified by my own voice to listen to it. But you know, I can’t think of perfect albums. There are a lot of great albums out there, but there are always songs on them I skip over. Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde is near-perfect. The Beatles’ White Album is close. Lauren Hill’s first album might be perfect. The Flaming LipsSoft Bulletin is near-perfect. The Replacements’ Tim. The Smiths’ first album, and REM’s. Elvis Costello’s Imperial Bedroom. That one, actually, might be perfect. XTC’s Skylarking. Dr. Dog’s Easy Beat. Fiona Apple’s Extraordinary Machine. John Legend’s Get Lifted. I’m just thinking off the top of my head. I could go on all day. In terms of books, it’s easier, I think, to make a perfect book, given it’s a form that absorbs mistakes better. It’s such a big thick soup that a bit extra of this or that is forgiven. Lolita is perfect, I think. Saul Bellow’s Herzog is perfect. Ellison’s Invisible Man is perfect even in its all-over- the-place-ness. I read a book recently by James Salter called Last Night which seemed flawless. Recently, Edward P. Jones wrote a perfect book, I think, in The Known World.

WG: A ‘wag’ is a rascally, droll, witty individual. Who is your favorite wag and why? It could be a historical figure, a fictional character, or just a friend of yours.

DE: Christopher Hitchens, whatever you think of his politics, is probably the smartest, drollest guy you’ll ever hear at a cocktail

wag’s revue 12 party. Daniel Handler is definitely a wag; he comes up with great bon mots withoutWag’s any effort. Revue Sarah Vowell is like that, too. The best wag of all, probably, was Gore Vidal. I never knew him, but saw him speak a few times. And when he was at his best, he was astounding. Everything out of his mouth was quotable.

13 interviews MARKWag’s GREIFRevue Mark Greif holds a Ph. D. in American Studies from Yale University. He is an essayist, an assistant professor at the Eugene Lang College of the New School of Liberal Arts, and the founding editor of n+1 magazine. He sat down with Sandra Allen and Will Guzzardi at an empty Mexican restaurant in Tribeca to discuss the little magazine and the internet.

Sandra Allen, Wag’s Revue: In 2005 A.O. Scott wrote a story about n+1 and The Believer, which more or less said, ‘Look! There are two magazines that are printed even though the internet exists!’ In it, he says, “A magazine is created as a bunch of ambitious like-minded friends get together to assemble pictures and words into a sensibility, a voice, an attitude, that they hope will resonate beyond their immediate circle.” I wonder if you find that to be, in your own experience, true, or a little bit simplistic? And if you wouldn’t mind, for our readers, delving a little bit into the n+1 creation myth, however briefly you want to.

Mark Greif: I was thinking before I came to see you what advice I was given before we started n+1. One of the key pieces of advice is there’s no reasonable way to start a magazine except by publishing people you’re friends with. I was told by a poet I had grown up admiring in Boston, a guy named Bill Corbett, that it was folly to believe you could become editors and that magic would happen, people would arrive with things you wanted to read, and they would have things they needed to say and all the rest. That really you have to be thwarted and stifled and frustrated already and that you probably have to do a lot of the writing yourself. And I believe that that’s true. We wrote most of the first issue ourselves. We wrote most of the second issue ourselves. We continue to write most of the magazine ourselves. And we’ve never regretted it. As for there being vibrations from

wag’s revue 14 that material that somehow go out into the larger environment, it’s hard to know. TheWag’s degree to Revue which people have imagined that n+1 was a serious magazine when we had no phone, no office, no staff, no salary was always shocking. It turns outif you put out writing that’s good, and if the design standards are ‘We wrote minimally decent—I mean, no most of the first one has ever denied that n+1 is, issue ourselves. to many aesthetically-minded We continue to people, ugly—people will treat it write most of like any other magazine. the magazine ourselves. And Will Guzzardi, Wag’s Revue: One of we’ve never the pieces that really put n+1 on regretted it. ’ the map, in Issue One, was “The Regressive Avant-Garde,” a vicious critique of what you call the Eggersard, the writing-circle whose nucleus is McSweeney’s. It describes the editorial writing of that magazine as “wide- eyed, juvenile, faux-naif,” and the writers as “thoroughgoing, even prissy, moralists.” It ends up with a biting critique of The Believer, wraps up with the line, “its overt criterion for inclusion is not expertise, but enthusiasm.” The Believer itself, as you mention in the article, was started as a response to criticism, or “snarkiness,” to criticism. So I wonder where you see the line between criticism and snark? And is there value in wide-eyed, unrepentant creation, this unmitigated belief?

MG: I see no value whatsoever in wide-eyed unrepentant belief, simply because it’s so much on offer everywhere. I think that the idea that reading is in danger, reading is jeopardized—eh, I’m suspicious of this. The idea that it could be countered or helped by cheerleading for books could be misplaced. I do think The Believer has changed a lot since that early critique, partly because they’ve just published so many issues.

15 interviews I do like The Believer a lot. I liked the fact that it exists and is so prolific. It’s no longerWag’s a particularly Revue well-focused magazine. And insofar as there were characteristic slots in the early issues where they would do a profile of a philosopher, a child and a tool, those things seem to be gone. It certainly owned-up to its status as a book review and that they now include these very short book reviews, which are nice. And then they sort of run middling pieces that would go into The Atlantic or The New Yorker. Precisely what it is that defines the current Believer would be interesting to say, and you’d have to be a much more devoted reader of it than I am to know.

I still do think that the snark business was somewhat misunderstood. What people took away from that early Heidi Julavitz essay, which was the programmatic essay of the first issue [of The Beleiver], was that she was against snark. Snark was something like cruelty in criticism, and that it would be the brief of The Believer to be the opposite of cruel—kind, I suppose. Even kindly, amicable.

If you actually read through the essay to the end it seemed that Julavitz was not, for good intellectual reasons, able to keep up the conceit that there was this thing snark, which is cruelty in criticism, and it could be healed by mere kindness. In fact, once she gets into actual historical cases of critics whom she believed were significant, great, role-models, worth reading in the present day, etc., she lands on people like Edmond Wilson, Mary McCarthy—people who were and are in fact famous for being unbelievably cruel critics.

The point which she winds up having to make in that essay, somewhat against her initial conceit, is that the great mistake is to be critical and unexpert. Critical and know-nothing. That is to say, the mistake is to be cruel without knowing what you’re

wag’s revue 16 talking about, or to pretend to be superior, when in fact you’re not superior to the peopleWag’s you’re Revue dealing with.

And there’s something to this. I mean, you know, to have a reviewer in The New York Times writing on the history of India, history of modern India, on the basis that they’ve once visited India on vacation, and then to attack or criticize the scholarly author of such a thing, this does make you mad, about The New York Times.

As I read [the Julavitz] essay, I thought ‘Great. She’s calling for a more knowledgeable and more intelligent criticism that won’t pull its punches when it has something genuine to say in denunciation or attack. But also that I hope won’t go around making nicey-nice for the sake of niceness.’ And I actually don’t think The Believer has done this as it moved on. It has problems. But probably the major problem has turned out to be just a kind of watery niceness.

WG: Magazines seem to undergo tremendous changes from what they promise to be at first to what they end up actually being. So given that we’ve just kind of made our promise, I wonder what you think influences those changes. Where is it acceptable to make changes and where are you violating your credo?

MG: Yeah, I think they do change and they don’t change. This is just on the basis of reading various magazines against their original manifestos. There are major changes in magazines when the editorial staff changes, right? Commentary when Norman Podhoretz edits it is a different magazine from when Eliot R. Cohen edited it. I do think if you go back and read the opening essays that editors proffer when they take over a magazine, no matter how much the magazine changes—I mean even after very dramatic changes—you know, if it started out as a Catholic

17 interviews magazine and becomes like an S&M magazine by the end of its run—nevertheless if youWag’s read that Revue basic Catholic manifesto, you will find that basic DNA of whatever else that editor does,or that editorial team does.

Now your manifesto is pretty short, so in a sense you’ve left yourself lots of room. The longer your manifesto is, the more you’re going to reveal yourselves. People don’t really change that much in their core approach to things. It tends to be more of the case that the thematic concerns of the journal alter. I don’t know that the basic approach really does. And a lot of the journals, historically, that you wind up liking the best, if you read a lot of these things, are the ones that when they no longer do what they originally did, stop or die.

There’s a separate category of these kinds of general interest magazines—The Atlantic—that survive for a hundred and fifty years. You say, ‘What is The Atlantic?’ and you say, ‘I really have no idea.’ Right? It’s a little package of a certain length that has had interesting thing in it over time. But not that interesting, right? Whereas even The New Yorker seems always in peril whenever they switch editors.

SA: The young magazine has a potential to do something like you did when you came on the scene and denounced ‘Eggers, Boy Wonder’. Was that ability—to be fiery or to be really critical and even cruel—something that necessarily has to wane? Has this been true with n+1, that things get less impassioned with time?

MG: I think the great enemy of honesty, even when honesty sometimes wears the clothes of cruelty, is getting to know people. In a way my greatest regret about n+1 was that we got to know people who were writers and editors and critics and

wag’s revue 18 so forth. And the more you get to know people the less you can be honest about them.Wag’s It was very Revue exciting in the early days and then it came to creep me out how it was possible for people who seemed distant and famous, like stars in the sky, suddenly to be emailing you. So suddenly someone whose work you didn’t really like, like Michael Chabon, would be in your email inbox. And you’d be like ‘Oh my god Michael Chabon emails the likes of us. And he’s, gosh, I guess he’s probably a really nice person. And really, he’s very thoughtful.’ Right? That doesn’t mean that you don’t still hate his work. And I think that we’ve been compromised by that over time.

I would encourage anyone starting a magazine who really had the, I don’t know, the balls to do so, not to get to know anybody. The ideal magazine would be one that stayed far, far away, somewhere in the center of the country or Latin America. And never spoke to anybody and didn’t try to get blurbs and didn’t email and all the rest. Because it is compromising to engage in the system of publicity.

I think the paradigm of generational overthrow turns out to be very fruitful in all kinds of writing. And one thing I really appreciated about your short manifesto as I read it was that by paragraph two I really felt quite obsolete. Like a dinosaur. And every time I read manifestos from people who are two, three, four, five, sometimes even ten years younger than I am, I think my god, what an advantage they have to be a few years younger. We live in an era of micro-generations. It seems that if just the length of any MTV series defines a distinction, an important distinction between generations—like Daria? Are you familiar with this person Daria?

WG: Yeah, this is when we were very young.

19 interviews MG: I had never heard of this person. And it became clear that I had never seen DariaWag’s and in fact, Revue you know, I’m irrevocably divided as if by a giant fissure in the earth from all the people who saw Daria. You know what I mean? And it’s precisely the people who have Daria and whatever else goes along with Daria as a set of common cultural compass points who now have the opportunity to say ‘We must destroy the old. Anyone over thirty is not to be trusted.’

SA: Do you really feel gutted by this sense of impending youth about to overthrow some establishment? Or do you think that’s just the course of things? I mean, the magazine always needs to feel undercut somehow…

MG: Yes, well, what has become very difficult for us, especially in writing those Intellectual Scene pieces at the beginning of the magazine is that to really denounce a subject properly requires more and more and more research now. I do think in the first however many years it was—we’re closing in on five years?—we burned out many of the things which most annoyed us, which we knew annoyed and knew like the back of our hands or the inside of our minds—the things that we talked about and argued about and were furious about day in and day out. And many of them had to do with the popular culture. And those are the things unfortunately about which we all have encyclopedic knowledge.

In the past couple of issues I’ve been working on this piece about evolutionary psychology. It takes a lot more reading. That is to say, in my off-time I can’t turn on VH1 and get my material. Some people would call this a process of maturation. Ideally, yeah, I imagine our subjects for denunciation would be slightly different. But certainly in a world like this one there’s no reason to not continue to be angry about many, many things and to try to articulate precisely what it is about them that’s detestable.

wag’s revue 20 SA: You’re a sometime Wag’s‘I Revueimagined you scholar of the would just sit above little magazine. me in long back robes I wondered if like a scary, scary you could briefly bunch of inquisitors. articulate a general theory of the little And you would simply magazine, as you say the two words: understand it. “Why print?” ’

MG: Well, we believe that as long as intellectual life and artistic life has been organized by little groupings and schools, which seek to make something new and to overthrow their immediate predecessors insofar as intellectual and artistic life have a belief in progress, this is a modernist story. They’ve often tried to accomplish that progress by creating some little organ, a journal, belonging to them, which would allow them to say who their enemies are, and those to be overthrown, describe their new program, and offer examples of it, right? And if you believe that this modern story starts in the 1850s or the 1860s then you see it from there forward and you care about things like the transcendentalist journal The Dial that Emerson and Fuller ran for only about three years. Or you care about the surrealist magazines of the twenties, so forth and so on.

The theory is that you don’t actually need very many issues. And you don’t need much money. And you don’t need a lot of personnel or even a very wide initial readership, really, to force some kind of decisive change in terms of how people think of some progressive story of art or intellect, painting or dance or theatre or politics or writing etc. That’s it.

SA: In A.O. Scott’s article he’s basically presenting yourself, n+1,

21 interviews and The Believer, to the readership of The New York Times Magazine. And he juxtaposesWag’s the Revue blog with the little magazine, saying that with the little magazine you have this team of editors that have such faith in the perfect publication that they’re going to put together, these bound pages and they’re going to put some money on the printing press. What I mean is, his definition of the little magazine is inextricably tied to the printed form.

MG: Yes.

SA: And in our case, what we’re thinking about is how to take the stricture, the scruples of printed publishing and bring it to the internet, and you know it’s a lot cheaper there, a lot easier to disseminate. I wondered if you could speak to why n+1 is printed, what is your philosophy behind that, why your website has such a, you know, little cousin relationship with the real publication?

MG: Yes. This was the question I expected you to ask me. I imagined you would just sit above me in long back robes like a scary, scary bunch of inquisitors. And you would simply say the two words: ‘Why print?’

Well, I’ve become much less dogmatic about the necessity of print because I find that I feel more able to read books and pdfs online than I had anticipated. And the more blogs I read, and the more I see truly magnificent blogs. Blogs that seem to have some kind of naturalness within the form. Blogs written by the people who are correctly called digital natives, that is to say, people who have grown up online.

What I find is that I still don’t read things that are formatted like web pages at any length—that online literature is not long

wag’s revue 22 literature. That’s the fundamental difference. Ask yourself what can be accomplished Wag’s in a thousand Revue words or two thousand words. I think mcsweeneys.net is just a humor website because there exists forms of a thousand words, two thousand words, that people are used to and deal well with, right? People are not really used to writing works of fiction that have any kind of emotional outcome at a thousand words or two thousand words. It’s not believed that you can make someone cry in two thousand words. It is believed that you can make someone laugh in two thousand words. Actually a lot less. And insofar as n+1 has this strong distinction between the print and the web components, the distinction is really just one of length. The reason we started n+1 was to be able to publish long essays and very long articles. It wasn’t for purposes of vanity. It was because there are certain kinds of effects you can get, and certain kinds of arguments that can only be run at great length.

SA: Then one question I have in discussing the issue of print versus internet is size of audience versus impact. Considering how small they are, what constitutes a successful little magazine? How do you know when there has been an impact made?

MG: Yeah. I think successful little magazines go into libraries. And I think the ability of little magazines to change people’s minds, to change the way people write, etc., requires a long extension in time. What’s striking about the web is that it’s possible to have immediate, vast, kind of spatial extension, it feels, over an audience. Something can be read by many people in a short space of time. I think probably you would have to weigh these two phenomena against each other. You have a kind of instantaneous expansion in time potentially over a wide audience, reading quickly and reading many things, and with the small magazine, this long slow process of, in the ideal case, getting the writing into libraries, where it will be discovered

23 interviews slowly, successively, by generations of people. At the moment, I still feel like people don’tWag’s return toRevue things on the web in the way that they do return to things in the library. But it may again be that the things on the web are not yet things you return to.

WG: I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about your essay “On Food” in the Fall 2008 issue. In this essay, you talk about, among other things, Michael Pollan’s books. You describe Pollan as “anti-progressive”, as “little-c conservative.” I wonder, what does a progressive food community look like? You mention in that article this idea of the non-dogmatic vegetarian. I wonder, is that the progressive foodster? Is vegetarianism—does it have to be vegetarianism? Is that progressive eating, or are there other ways to be progressive that don’t go that route?

MG: Let me just say first what was meant by “little-c conservatism” with Pollan. I actually admire Pollan a lot. Little-c conservatism certainly takes up a large part of the left politically, and a large part of the democratic party. Little-c conservatism just means to place value upon whatever has already existed or existed for a long time, regardless of its particular consequences, etc., etc. Little-c conservatism believes that things which evolved are superior to things which are invented. It believes that practices longstanding in any community involving many people are superior to practices put together by a few, etc.

Progressive food practice, as described in that essay, “On Food,” is meant to be one that would not particularly mind invention, not mind technology, and might put together a very ugly hybrid of things that are familiar with things that are unfamiliar in order to produce certain consequences, to get some kind of outcomes. And presumably those outcomes would be most of the same ones that Pollan would like, right? A less polluting

wag’s revue 24 food culture, a less grotesque food culture, a less expensive food culture, a more egalitarianWag’s food supply. Revue Now the vegetarian issue is tough, because I am not a vegetarian, and feel very strongly that I should be. And I suppose the non-dogmatic vegetarian, as I imagine him or her, would be the person who figured, well, it would really be best to stop eating animals, and whatever will make that easy, and widespread, is the best thing to pursue.

If it’s gonna help for me to have weird-shaped tofu snacks, I like weird-shaped tofu snacks. Not everything has to be the same thing that was eaten by my forbears on the African savannah tens of thousands of years ago.

WG: I guess that brings me to my other question about this same article, which is this question of health. There’s this really kind of wonderful moment at the end of this essay, this kind of meditation about health. Yes, in the last paragraph of this essay, you write that “Health is our model of all things invisible and unfelt.” And reading that, I wondered if it was a coincidence that now kind of when someone is on his deathbed, we don’t bring in a priest, you know, more often we bring in this kind of like end-of-life specialist.

MG: Sinister phrase.

WG: So has health, I wonder, snuck in as kind of the new transcendental model of our time? Is health replacing religion? And isn’t this kind of the ultimate telos of the enlightenment project of putting man in the place of God, and that human life is really kind of the transcendental goal? I don’t know, this is disturbing, and this question comes up in the end of your essay, it’s a disturbing question. I wonder what you think about it.

MG: In a word, yes. What you’ve just described is basically what I

25 interviews believe. I think the complicated feature is that if you think of the telos of the enlightenmentWag’s project, Revue right, and what it has to do with the human, or the kind of project of humanism which we associate with enlightenment, it had seemed likely that that sort of end point and goal was something like reason—the right application of human reason, and the transformation of the world through reason. Obviously the 20th century brought about all sorts of suspicion about what the real consequence of enlightened reason, instrumental reason of that kind, would be. What seems funny now is that I believe utopians of the past, looking forward to our present, with all the benefits that we have, all the technologies that we have, all the luxuries that we have, would have imagined that we would be living in a world where reason would have led us to philosophy, a different and better kind of political organization, leisure, music, thought— we would be sitting around playing our lyres on floating clouds, right?

And instead, it seems that a possible best use of reason for us, at this moment of total luxury, an end of necessity, etc., is grooming. Grooming not so far different from what monkeys do when they pick nits out of each other’s fur and eat them. Care of our individual bodies, maximization of the possibilities of our individual bodies which we will never use, maximization of potential, which is not potential for anything particular, and a goal of immortality not as a single thing to be won by the discovery of some fountain of youth, but immortality just by a creeping pushing back of the term of life.

So you say, “I know I’m mortal, I know I have to die, but I certainly don’t have to die now. Maybe I could just get one more year.” And somehow this oddity of never having to die at any particular time, I think has led us into a form of life in which all we really do is think about grooming. What we eat, and what

wag’s revue 26 we’re going to eat later. How much we should exercise, and how our muscles are.Wag’s And then Revue these very chancy, recondite, invisible facts about what sorts of substances might be in our body, whether our calcium will go better into our bones if we’re having Vitamin C at the same time, but whether the Vitamin C will inhibit our iron, right? None of which have any very direct consequence, I think, in how long we actually do or don’t live.

WG: The utopia you were just describing in some ways isn’t that far from the world we inhabit now. I think it’s interesting that at least the material circumstances of the things that you were just talking about—I mean, you know, plucking our lyres on floating clouds isn’t all that different from sitting on a 767 with our iPod in. I mean, that in some ways, we have achieved the material objectives of these utopias. And you talk about this in the article too, that the idea was an end of need, in terms of food, that scarcity would be over. And scarcity, at least in our culture, is over. We’ve gotten there in a lot of ways. But somehow it’s no longer meaningful or desirable to be there.

MG: Yes. In actually experiencing it, if that’s right, if being on the 747 with your iPod is in fact like riding the clouds of heaven with your lyre, which I think may well be true. And if in fact this very basic grooming turns out really to be the real logical consequence of the end of necessity. It’s very odd, because we would then be experiencing the end state of man, and none of it feels particularly transcendent.

WG: It’s kind of miserable at times actually.

MG: You’ve picked out the two sides of my project, and why they link up. Because there’s this one large project about the consequences of the end of necessity, and how health comes back in as this process of creating norms and requirements and

27 interviews anxiety etc., when in fact we could just let go. We’re done! Wag’s Revue And on the other side, the problem of aestheticism. What do you do when all the time that you don’t spend in grooming yourself is devoted to this world in which all things—all things real, all things behavioral, all tables and streets and the sky and everything—have become like art objects, somehow rendered up for our pleasure, framed and taken care of. What does that feel like? So yes. These are the two tracks I hope to pursue in the future.

SA: After you write a piece like “On Exercise” or “On Food,” what do you do? Do you stop exercising?

MG: What are the consequences? What are the personal consequences? I don’t know. I really don’t know. Since writing that essay [“On Exercise”], there have been periods in which I tried to exercise again. I didn’t really succeed. I can’t argue in favor of the life lived entirely in accord with your principles or the things you believe you’ve discovered through the movements of critique. I don’t know what you would do! You’d just lock yourself in your room under such conditions. You wouldn’t be able to function or deal with anyone.

Nor do I believe, however, in a strong distinction between what you think or write about and what you actually do every day. I can’t imagine how you would separate that. So I suppose the consequence of writing these things, when they really work, I have the feeling that I’ve figured something out. Usually I’m able to put into words something that really bothered me anyway, made life very unpleasant. And somehow the unpleasant feeling is managed better. But it doesn’t really solve practical issues of daily living.

wag’s revue 28 SA: You have two recent articles, one that came out right after Obama was elected, andWag’s another writtenRevue after his inauguration, online in Dissent. In terms of Mark Greif writing, they’re totally happy. They’re kind of exultant. And it was really funny to read them and be like, “Wow, Mark’s stoked about something!”

MG: I am. Truly stoked.

SA: I wanted to ask about the availability of criticism in this “Obamanation” moment, you know? If, perhaps, n+1 for example, was started in 2003. That’s the real, you know, ‘Oh crap what did we do?’ moment with Bush —

MG: Very true.

SA: And right now, if you turn on The Daily Show, they’re—a lot of the satirists are losing some of their footing, without having such a wonderful thing to throw shoes at. Do you think the political situation affects the amount of rabble-raising that something like n+1 or yourself as an intellectual can do?

MG: I’m laughing first of all because I’m so happy that shoe-throwing has become the preferred figure for all forms of criticism. It used to be rock, or brick-throwing at one point. Iraqi culture has at last penetrated American culture.

WG: Well it’s sabotage finally come back to its literal roots.

MG: Yeah—is that what sabotage is? It’s actually like a sabot?

WG: Sabots, like the wooden shoes, yeah. People would throw their sabots in protest.

MG: I didn’t know that. I laughed again because I do think this is

29 interviews a great moment for writing because at least potentially, at last, there’s the opportunityWag’s to write allRevue of the defenses and encomia and paeans, however you say that word, which you had always wanted to, but which would have just seemed too preposterous. For example, an Ode to the Progressive Income Tax. I’ve always felt that, you know, really, if I would just get down to what mattered, I would just write a long piece in n+1 about how great the income tax is. One of the great achievements of American democracy, the progressive income tax. And you know, the other day, apparently Chris Dodd managed to get this thing into the stimulus bill that will limit bonuses from financiers to, what, like a percentage of their already several-million dollars riting is a lot like a year salaries? What a ‘W great day this is! But there breathing or walk- actually still would be ing. People just do great value, considering it, and if necessary, the way discourse goes they’ll nail theses at like the Wall Street to doors.’ Journal and even most major newspapers, to really cheering for the capping of bonuses. Because if you read the newspapers there are these ludicrous ideas, like the possibility that it would somehow be a bad thing if there were a brain-drain from finance, of very bright people so insanely greedy that they would no longer work in finance if they could no longer have their billions of dollars. But in fact that would be the best possible thing that could happen for society, right? We really should be, as much as possible, draining the brightest people away from finance and into things like teaching, and sewage allocation, or whatever one does.

WG: Whatever one does.

MG: Whatever one does.

wag’s revue 30 SA: I teach, and the rest, IWag’s don’t know, Revue you move around poop?

MG: How are you going to allocate your sewage? Will it go to this community or that community? [Laughs.] I see no reason that we shouldn’t be sitting down and writing those articles. And there are all forms of, longstanding literary forms, which are not satire, which come, you know, spring from the same sorts of roots, which have great value. And I think this may be a time for the ode.

And I’m also very glad that America has not forgotten about black people. Because it really seemed for a while as if the country had, as if we had genuinely adopted this preposterous ethnic model in which everybody would get a hyphenated last name, and it was no more significant to be black in America than to be Korean-American or Jewish-American or anything else, right? And I always thought there was great value, in, like the middle of the 20th century, to the story that there was something essential about being a black American as being the one true creator and inheritor of America. These weird Europeans showed up, they murdered a lot Indians and so forth, they had imported these slaves who had created most of the only unique and great American cultures. In entertainment and the arts, in the building of cities and all the rest, and somehow that story had been lost. And I feel like Obama, once again, we are back to a properly black-and-white world, and I feel grateful for that.

SA: When is print gonna die?

MG: I think the New York Times may no longer print paper except for luxury readers or on weekends pretty soon, that’s what I’m hearing. I don’t see the book going anywhere in print.

31 interviews SA: And what does that mean for the writer? You have a fairly astute historical understatingWag’s Revue of writers in America and where they can go. Do you think it changes the situation of the writer, or this is kind of always the deal, the writer always doesn’t really have a place to properly be heard, now that the mega-giants of newspapers are losing their grasp?

MG: I would not be worried about people not being heard, or not having a place to publish writing, a place to present writing. Writing is a lot like breathing or walking. People just do it, and if necessary, they’ll nail theses to doors, right? The worry is about how people will get paid, in that the structure of payment for your writing has always varied in all sorts of different ways. At certain times the issue has not been being paid for your writing but being paid to do something else, like educate the children of noblemen, while you do your writing for free. We seem to be at another moment where the ways in which people can try to make a living while writing, for writing, are becoming radically unsettled—happens to coincide at the moment with a seeming depression in which all sorts of people’s wages will be temporarily unsettled. So I think it’s very hard to predict.

WG: Puns on your name: do you get “grief” puns a lot?

MG: Always.

WG: Yeah? How so? Give a couple of examples.

MG: Well, grief was always the standard mispronunciation and misspelling, more common than Greif obviously. I was called by a grade-school teacher “Charlie Brown” by some long associative track that involved “Greif—grief—good wag’s revue 32 grief, Charlie Brown—Charlie Brown.” I never liked this. Wag’s Revue

The most interesting thing that used to happen was that when I would order Chinese food, the only place I felt really happy and at ease with mispronunciation, because the last name was always taken to be Rice over the telephone.

WG: Your last name was Rice?

MG: No it was Greif, but to them—I would be like, “For Greif.” And they would be like, “Rice?” I would say “No, Greif.” “Rice?”

WG: Who is your favorite wag? Wag—I’m sure you’re familiar with the word—it’s a lively joker, a jestful figure.

MG: This is an answer I never could have or would have given before, and will never give again. I saw Pineapple Express last night, and I was very taken with the character of Red. Un-fucking-believable. I mean, that is one of the great comic performances I’ve ever seen. And a way of talking which I—it was odd. I knew it, but I still can’t say what it is or where it’s from. Just amazing.

33 interviews WELLSWag’s TOWER Revue Wells Tower is a writer living in New York Ctiy. His first collection of short stories, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned was released by FSG on March 17th. Will Guzzardi and Will Litton spoke with Tower at a little Greek joint in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Will Guzzardi, Wag’s Revue: It’s possible that some of our readers aren’t familiar with your name, so the first question will also be kind of a mini bio of you.

Wells Tower: Sure.

WG: So according to my cursory internet research, you were published in the Paris Review, in November of 2001. Was that your first—

WT: Yeah, that was my first fiction publication.

WG: And that was your story “Down to the Valley.” You were an MFA student at Columbia at the time. Since then you’ve been published all over the place—travel writing in The New York Times, in Outside Magazine; nonfiction in Harper’s, The Washington Post; fiction in The New Yorker and McSweeney’s. You even had a hardware review in The Believer, if I’m not mistaken.

WT: Yeah, yeah, I did—the stud finder. I remember it well.

WG: My question is: do you feel like you’ve made it as a writer at this point? And if so, was there a moment, one moment of these laurels in particular that made you feel like, ‘Man, I’ve really made it now’?

wag’s revue 34 WT: No, I think this—the idea of ‘making it’—I think that only happens when you’reWag’s just getting Revue started. The Paris Review publication was kind of incredible for me. When I was first going to Columbia, the first two short stories I wrote—which were basically the first two fully-fledged pieces of short fiction that I’d ever put the final period on—I just sent into the Paris Review’s slush pile.

Actually, I’d had an agent. I’d done a piece—my first piece of serious nonfiction—for the Washington Post Magazine, where I’d went and got a job at a traveling carnival, traveled around as a carnie for a week, and wrote a piece of nonfiction about it. After that some New York agent got in touch with me, and that felt awfully special—that I had this agent and everything. That happened really early on. I sent her my first two stories from the Columbia fiction workshop and she basically said, ‘I’m not interested in sending these out.’

So I sent them to the Paris Review myself, and they picked them out of the slush pile. I don’t think I quite knew what a weird deal that was. Just the other day I was looking at their website and they were talking about how they get fifteen to twenty thousand unsolicited manuscripts a year. It’s just this huge sea of manila envelopes. Anyway, they took the first two stories. When they called me to tell me they’d accepted them, they put me right on the phone to George Plimpton, who’d always been a huge hero of mine, and I thought, ‘I can’t believe this. This is absolutely amazing. I’ve made it.’ I made five hundred bucks or something for selling the story.

But then, everything, the rest of the career stuff happened so slowly. I had a contract with the Washington Post Sunday Magazine for years, where I would do three cover stories a year for them. The first time I did a cover for them I thought, ‘Wow,

35 interviews I’ve made it.’ But then I realized, ‘You didn’t make it, you just made it to another notWag’s extremely Revue important tier of the ziggurat of getting your work out there.’ And so it—I don’t know—it all happened so slowly. I’ve got this book coming out, but it’s literally nine years of short stories. It’s this crazy grab bag of pieces of fiction I’ve worked on over the years.

For me ‘making it,’ I guess, would be getting to a place where I feel like I’m consistently writing things that I feel really, really happy about. And I don’t think that’s ever going to happen. It certainly hasn’t happened yet. The moments of joy in writing are so fleeting. You might write a sentence you’re pleased with or a scene you’re happy about and you feel happy for the rest of the afternoon, and then when you sit down the next morning to work on it, you’re like, ‘This is just cold pudding. It’s just terrible.’ I don’t know what making it would be. I think if I were a lot better and a lot smarter and were writing things that constantly were astounding me, that would feel like making it. But it’s work, it’s just work. It’s always just work.

Will Litton, Wag’s Revue: You mentioned your stint as a carnie. My first encounter with your fiction was theHarper’s piece “On the Show”—a terrific short ‘You might write story about a twenty-one a sentence you year old guy who runs off like, and the next to work at the fair. Was morning you’re that inspired by the— like,“This is just WT: Yeah, that was directly cold pudding. inspired by that. It’s just terrible.” Essentially, I spent a week ’ doing this crazy thing at the carnival. It was funny, I’d pitched this story—well, let me back up to some bio stuff to preface all this. I grew up in Chapel Hill. Then I went to college at Wesleyan.

wag’s revue 36 After that I moved to the West Coast, to Portland, Oregon, where I had a bunch of awfulWag’s right-out-of-college Revue sort of jobs.

I had a data entry gig, which was so unbelievably dehumanizing. I just had huge stacks of invoices with obscure numbers that corresponded to obscure electronics parts. Even if they’d describe the electronics parts with actual language instead of numbers, I still would have had no idea what I was keying into the computer. It was me and my boss, who was this kind of satanic woman with oversized sweaters and stirrup pants. She was just constantly cracking the whip on me. I could never enter enough invoices to make her happy. It was terrible.

So anyway, I was doing that, then I had some warehouse gigs, and then I moved back to North Carolina when I was twenty- two or twenty-three, and I started doing a little pick-up work for the independent weekly. Whatever I could write, whatever assignments they were willing to give me, I would do. I was doing restaurant stuff and just anything.

The only real game in town at the point was Doubletake magazine. So I went over there and just said, ‘whatever job you’re willing to give me I will take that job.’ And that job was basically the night watchman job. I would go over there at six o’clock and hang around and wait until everybody left the building and then lock up and set the alarm and that was my deal there. Then I managed to start writing some press releases for them, and somehow got a gig running their website.

Then, when the magazine fell apart, my boss there went and got a job at Washington Post Magazine. So I pitched him this story to go travel with the carnival. And the pitch was that, you know, carnies were this misunderstood class, that everybody thought that they were these lawless gypsies, crackheads, murderers

37 interviews and that sort of thing. And I was going to do this undercover thing where I would getWag’s a job in the Revue carnival and penetrate all of those stereotypes.

Well, I got the job and immediately discovered that all of those stereotypes were totally, one hundred percent spot-on. I didn’t meet anyone who hadn’t done extensive prison time. It was kind of a scary experience. So I got out of there. It was a good journalistic boot camp, though, just because it really trained me how to observe things. Your powers of observation are much keener and more finely tuned when you’re scared for your own hide. I couldn’t actually take notes in front of the guys I was working with, so I’d do these little mnemonics. Something would happen and I’d think of how I’d want to describe it and I’d concoct this paragraph in my mind and just repeat it to myself enough so that I could jot it down when I’d get on break. Then I’d go running off to the port-a-john and try to write the thing down.

Anyway, I got out of that thing with 20,000 words of notes. And most of my notes were in a more polished and linear form than my nonfiction notes tend to be these days. I really wrote the notes as a story. It was easier to do because it was basically memoir. I basically just charted the arc of my experience that week. The Post piece ran at 5,000 words so I had all of this extra stuff, all of these sorts of cutting room floor goodies, that I had really wanted to put to better use. So the carnie fiction story was basically just a way to use those things that were very dear to me as nonfiction leavings.

I’m not nearly so precious about it now. Since that was my first story it was really painful to have stuff cut. I wasn’t used to having things cut. But now when I sit down to do a piece of nonfiction I can pretty much assume straight off the top that the

wag’s revue 38 things I love most will be the first things to fall under the axe. Wag’s Revue WL: Several moments of dialogue in “On the Show” are just absolutely hilarious. Here’s my favorite line right here: “Would you?” Ellis asks me, nodding at the woman. “Yes,” I say. “God if I wouldn’t,” says Ellis. “I’d eat her whole damn child just to taste the thing he squeezed out of.”

WT: Oh right, that line. That I did not hear while I was doing that job. I heard that from a friend who worked on a fishing boat. But the line—if you’ll pardon me—that he heard from one of his coworkers was, ‘I’d drink a gallon of her piss just to see where it ran out of,’ or something like that.

But yeah, I think that those sorts of dialogue tics and things like that—maybe people from all over the country get excited about that sort of thing—but I think that might be one kind of enthusiasm that comes from growing up in the South. You know, having those terrible summer jobs, laying brick or carrying concrete, and you’re working with these guys from the outer counties who probably dropped out of school in sixth grade, but have this incredible raconteurial style and great, great natural poetics.

WG: I wanted to go to nonfiction for a quick second. One of the pieces that, as far as I could tell, really helped put you on the map was “Bird-Dogging the Bush Vote” in Harpers. That was published in 2005 but it’s about your time, undercover again, volunteering with the Bush campaign in Florida in 2004. So, I have a couple of questions about it. First of all, you express some guilt in the essay about winning votes for the other team. Have you done anything to expurgate yourself?

39 interviews WT: To atone for that? Well, to be totally honest—I don’t know if this should be off the recordWag’s or not—IRevue think I did more harm to the campaign than good when I was down there. I was actually sort of scuttling their phone lists and things like that. I was having to do a lot of phone banking and they’d give me a huge stack of numbers and I’d basically pretend to call 80% of them. What have I done? I don’t think I really have. I did a fair amount of volunteering for Barack in this last year.

WG: You were writing it at a time when it really seemed like the energy, the political momentum, was with the conservative movement in this country. And it seemed like we the liberals were kind of lost in the trees, and the future of America was on the right. And it’s the same feeling you have in “The Kids Are Far Right” where you go to the national conservative student conference in 2006. It’s fascinating to me how much that narrative has flipped in these three or four years since that. Do you think this is a real change afoot in the American political climate, or is it just Obama? What’s going to happen to all those kids who you met?

WT: Those two pieces actually capture pretty different political moments. With the “Bird-Dogging” piece, it was actually kind of incredible to me that it got the attention that it did, and even that it got published, seeing as the emotional core of the story was really one of horror and disgust and personal terror. It was similar to the carnie story in that way. I guess it was a portrait of the Boschian landscape of Florida in 2004 and just how crazily polarized we all were.

Going to the John Kerry rally with Bush hecklers was amazing, because the left was just as horrific and just as vile as we’d like to think the Republicans are. We were spit on and cussed at, and there was this outpouring of hatred and invective. We had no

wag’s revue 40 greater claims to grace than the right did, barring the fact that we hadn’t been in powerWag’s and actively Revue destroying the country for four years at that point.

The thing that was incredible about that moment was that people didn’t seem to be able to articulate why they liked George Bush. Somehow at all of these rallies that I went to, the dominant rhetorical attack with Bush, with all of Bush’s acolytes—I think I saw him appear a couple of times during the reporting of that story—the dominant rhetorical strategy was, ‘John Kerry and Osama bin Laden are the same person and they both want to kill as many of your children as possible.’

And we were still under the spell of 9/11. Nobody who I was spending time with really made a case for why Bush was a good president or why he was going to run the country well. It was that terrorist mumbo-jumbo and the nonsense about gay marriage and abortion—which were these empty vessels that nobody cared about—that they could pour their sympathies with the Right and their culture war animosities into.

Then in 2006 I went and spent a week with these young Republicans at the Young Americas Foundation conference in Washington. And the thing that was really intriguing there was that, at that point, the Bush administration was in flames. It was pretty clear that the historical verdict on Bush’s presidency was that it had been a certified disaster. So the thing that was really intriguing was that I couldn’t find a single kid—or maybe one out of five, six hundred kids—who’d admit to being a Republican. They’d all admit to being conservatives. They really wanted to get back to the Goldwater-style conservatism that Bush had basically run rough-shod over. George Bush destroyed the Republican brand, and for them to come back it’s going to take a whole lot of work to reinvent themselves. And the thing that was

41 interviews stunning about John McCain’s campaign was that he tried to do the same old garbage,Wag’s you know: Revue ‘Obama’s a terrorist, he’s got this thing with Bill Ayers, they’re terrorists.’ And it just didn’t really work. You just can’t pull that same stupid hustle forever.

WG: You mentioned 9/11 just then, in terms of the spell that it had cast on us at that time. You mentioned it also briefly in passing in “Bird-Dogging.” It’s a real—it’s a kind of a harrowing moment in that story. You describe being here in downtown Manhattan on September 11th. After you got out of school when you finished at Columbia, from what I can gather, you lived all over the country. What brought you back to New York and how do you carry that experience?

WT: The 9/11 thing? It’s a very, very strange kind of memory for anybody who was here on that day. I was living in the West Village on Carmine Street and 7th Avenue, so my window gave o even say, “Oh, onto the towers. And I ‘T was just coming back I was in New York from the coffee shop on 9/11,” it’s as if on my street and I saw you’re bragging that the first plane had about having seen hit, and I guess we all the Beatles’ last thought it was a news show. copter or something. I ’ called a friend of mine who was a photographer who lived right around the corner and said, ‘Hey this thing happened, maybe we should go check it out,’ not knowing what had gone on.

We got pretty far south. I think we got down a little bit past, or right around Battery Park City, and it was slowly dawning. At some point the second plane had hit and then it seemed clear that it was a terrorist attack. And then we, you know, we were

wag’s revue 42 close enough to see people jumping out of the towers. It was this moment where, I meanWag’s there’s nothing Revue like that kind of horror, that you’re a witness to mass murder. There’s nothing in our, in my lifetime, as a middle-class American, that can approximate the experience of seeing that.

And so we both, actually it was interesting, we both burst into tears, this friend and I, and we hugged each other and then almost immediately—because this is a guy that I don’t have a very huggy relationship with—almost immediately the awkwardness of the embrace trumped the hideousness of the moment.

Then, right at the moment the first tower fell, it was really scary because we got that sort of parallax thing, where it would look like there was only one tower when there were actually two. So we didn’t think it was the tower falling, we thought it was some other building just because there was dust all over the place, there was noise, and we started running. It was just this terrible, terrible day. We were both in hysterics all day, like most people, and it was an experience of profound personal horror.

The thing that was interesting was how quickly the personal quality of being there got subsumed by the generic sensation of “being part of history.” It just became this thing that you say, ‘Oh yeah I was in New York on 9/11,’ like, ‘Oh, I was at Woodstock.’ And whatever 9/11 meant in a personal sense quickly became an emblem of this pivot point in history that is kind of hard to have any personal purchase on. I mean, to even say ‘Oh, I was in New York on 9/11’—there’s something that feels really kind of gross and stupid about that. As if you’re bragging about having seen the Beatles’ last show.

WG: You also have a personal connection to the other great domestic tragedy of my lifetime, which is Hurricane Katrina,

43 interviews of course. You lived in New Orleans for a couple years before the storm, and you goWag’s back regularly Revue to write about it. You called it once, “The most intoxicatingly vital, intriguing place I’ve ever been.” What drew you to New Orleans in the first place? And what do you see there when you go back now?

WT: A good friend of mine from Chapel Hill had moved down to New Orleans, and I thought that it be an interesting place to go and to live pretty cheaply and to work. And it wound up being this incredible experience living there for a couple of years.

There’s no city that’s as troubled and fascinating as New Orleans. From its really, really complicated racial politics, to the food and the culture—just the bizarre quality of life there. I remember right when I showed up there were two hurricanes in a week and I was terrified. So I went and got plywood and was boarding up the windows and everything. And I looked up the block and everybody else was really busy too, but they were just carting in cases of liquor and oysters. Clearly the way to deal with a hurricane there is to just stay drunk the whole time.

And, yeah, I left six months or so before Katrina. I was doing a teaching residency down at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, which is an arts magnet school. I’ve been back I think at least a couple of times every year since. It’s still in pretty rough shape.

But at the same time the thing that is really encouraging about it is that it’s really local people that are rebuilding the cities, and volunteer college kids with Habitat who are flocking there and who are going house to house and gutting these ruined properties and putting people in habitable places again. It’s not the Feds, it’s not the local government, it’s not the state, it’s really this incredible grassroots movement of black and white

wag’s revue 44 people, rich and poor people, who are making that city work again. Wag’s Revue

The city was really so bound up in race hatred and class animosity, but there’s really a wonderful kind of spirit in the city right now. I mean, it’s really a shame that Katrina had to happen to foster what feels like a really generous time in New Orleans’ history now. I think there’s a possibility the city could wind up better for it, I don’t know.

WL: Let’s turn back to the fiction side of this. The title story of your forthcoming book, “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned,” is the unlikely account of sentimental Vikings marauding a foreign adversary but upset with the senseless violence that surrounds them. You mentioned earlier the intent of your carnie piece was sort of penetrating stereotypes. I have a question kind of regarding your process in writing. Did you sit down to write “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned” really intent on exploding the Viking caricature with genuine emotion and depth, or did all the sentiment and pathos sort of emerge from an exploratory process?

WT: It was much more of the second thing you said. The genesis for the story, the blood eagle scene—if people haven’t read it, there’s this really gross thing that this guy does where he butchers this poor priest in this grueling way: he cuts open the guys back and then hauls his lungs out while the guy’s still alive, so he’s still breathing, and the lungs are kind of expanding and contracting, and it sort of looks like he has these gory wings coming out of his back. It’s called a blood eagle.

Anyway, that is a real thing that the Vikings did, or at least it’s something that me and a friend came across and were intrigued by. And we were saying, ‘Do you think there were moments with

45 interviews the Vikings where they’d beaten somebody into submission and somebody was thinking,Wag’s “Well, Revue I guess we should do a blood eagle on this guy,” and somebody else is like, “Blah, God, a blood eagle really? I got to beat it back the ship, man. I really don’t want to do that.”’ It just seemed like such a baroque torture technique.

But anyway, I was thinking about the slacker Vikings who wouldn’t be all that keen on a blood eagle. So I decided to write this story with these guys that would be like Raymond Carver characters. You know, they’re approaching middle age, and they’re kind of ground- ‘When I sit down to down by the world, and revise, I approach it they’re not getting as from a place of really much satisfaction out sincere self-hatred.’ of the job anymore. And the idea was that it was going to be this funny story where I’d use this as a gag. It was going to be a Carver parody with Vikings.

And the thing that happened with that one was it accrued this really emotional core to it, and it ended up in this sincere, super sentimental place. The ending’s very sentimental. It’s the kind of sentimentality that I would really like to try to find my way back to. When I went for that it felt really genuine. I felt like there had been enough blood and gore and sorrow in the story that I could get away with a nice moment at the end.

That was an early story, and I think I made myself available to it in a way that I have a harder time doing now. I think now I’m more cautious and calculating and careful. I keep trying ways to stop being careful but it’s sort of tough. Once you start, once you get into a place where you’re published enough that even if you write something that’s kind of crappy you can probably find

wag’s revue 46 some sad magazine that will take it— Wag’s Revue WL: That’s us!

WT: [Laughs.] It’s hard to kind of get back to that place where you think I’m going to write this for me and no one else is ever going to see it. I’m going to make all the mistakes I’m afraid to make. No, you get more and more cautious. Anyway, it’s nice to have one of those moments on record where there’s a soaring sentimentality in the story. I’m glad it’s there.

WL: Which goes directly into my next question: I think part of what you’re good at in your fiction is blending hilarity and melancholy, and getting us to laugh at things that are vile, such as the sort of comically violent encounter between the narrator and the stepfather in “On the Show”, where the stepfather’s like biting him and he’s bleeding everywhere and it’s just kind of over-the-top, but in a way that’s believable and funny at the same time. And also the blood eagle that we just talked about. How do you conceive of the relationship between humor and sorrow, the hilarious and the terrible, in fiction?

WT: It’s a good question. I think that in terms of fiction at least, my work is always born out of acting on totally contradictory kinds of faith and conviction about how a short story should be written. It seems like every time I sit down to write, or work myself into a headspace where I feel capable of writing, it’s always with some new really sincere faith that I’ve finally figured out how to write a short story.

It’s like, ‘Oh okay, a short story is about being really sincere about human feeling, really trying to write a story about sincere human feeling, with as much depth and honesty as possible. No smart ass tricks. I’m going to write a really important short

47 interviews story right now.’ And you kind of crack your knuckles and go at it. But it ends up sucking.Wag’s Revue

So I’ll go, alright, that’s bullshit, I’m not going to write like that. I can write a funny story, and I know I can describe some things in some funny ways. So I’m going to write a story where I make people laugh and it’ll be a good, fun read and that’s all I’m going to try to do. And then I do that, and I’ll think, ‘This is terrible. It’s this stupid kind of hat and cane routine where I’m just trying to get readers to laugh.’

But I think with stories if you go through enough cycles of those contradictory impulses and you’re trying to layer humor and sincerity and sorrow, each with a new draft, that you’re layering that stuff like shellac, hopefully, hopefully, you end up in a place where the story works. For me I think the key is not having too much faith in one technique, but at the same time being really suspicious and really enthusiastic about all techniques. Yeah, as you can see I haven’t really figured out how to write a short story yet.

But most of the stories in the collection have gone through these total slash and burn revisions, where it might take, I don’t know, four or five or six months to come up with the final draft of a piece. It’s really, really about going through and being really suspicious about the motives of each writerly impulse and trying to correct it and trying to salvage what felt right and good. I guess that’s where that tension comes from.

WL: Longer question: Your most recent piece of fiction inThe New Yorker, “Leopard,” is a story about a loserish young boy who feigns illness to avoid school. In it, you use the second person present, a pretty rare narrative technique. The narrator occupies a strange space, opening the piece with, “Good

wag’s revue 48 morning. You have not slept well,” as if it were a lieutenant of the inner monologue, Wag’sbeginning Revuea brief. It slips into moments, rendered as commands, that read like echoes of the boy’s own thoughts: “Don’t go to school today. Play sick.” But it also offers occasional insights that would seem impossible for a child to have, and so resonate from a source entirely distinct from the psyche of the main character: “You are eleven years old, the age that our essences begin revealing themselves, irremediably, to us and to the world.” Why did you choose to use the second person in this piece? What did it help you accomplish that a standard first or third person perhaps could not have? Why do you think so many authors shy away from the second person?

WT: The second person is really chancy. When you’re writing in the second person, you’re telling a reader what to think, and I think it’s very easy for readers to kind of say, ‘Fuck you, you can’t tell me how to read this story, it’s not me.’

But with that story I tried it both I think with the first person and the third person. And with first person, it was feeling as though it was getting easier, a kind of sentimentality was coming in the story. I decided I was going to try earnestly to capture the headspace of a kid. But the narrator was treasuring the story too much, because it was his story, and it felt kind of icky.

And then with the third person—the third person is nice because you can move your characters around like chess pieces and you’re in control and you’ve got this distance where, you can make fun of them and not take them totally seriously and you get to determine the resonances of the story with a bit more control in the third person. But then the third person felt too snarky. I mean, I felt like I was taking on this kid too much. And I felt like I had too much remove and that I had gotten away

49 interviews from my mission with the story, which was really to get inside this kid’s head and to tryWag’s to approximate Revue the sensation and the emotional space of being eleven-years-old and not very happy.

Somehow the second person just seemed like the perfect middle ground. That it was a perfect way to convey the details of the story without caring for the narrator too much or caring for him too little. That it seemed like a way to simply lay these details out, and to lay out the meat of the story. Somehow it just felt right. Neither too sentimental nor too ‘a writer being cruel to his character.’

But if you read somebody like Flannery O’Connor, she always writes in the third person and she always beats the living shit out of her characters. [Laughs.] It’s much easier to look down on them from a throne of a smart-ass God.

But yeah, that was a weird choice. It was really strange to me that The New Yorker took that story, too, because that’s sort of the least clever story I’ve ever written. And that came after I was revising my collection. I’d sort of been going through and adding jokes and slickness to different stories. And I thought, ‘What would happen if I just try to write a story that was totally sincere? Where I didn’t rely on my standard bag of tricks? You know, of having people say funny things, of coming up with really complicated descriptions of stuff.’ So it was really a kind of emotionally naked story and it sort of blew me away that they thought it was worth publishing.

WG: On the subject of revisions, tell us a little bit about some of the stories in the upcoming collection. For instance, ‘Retreat,’ it appeared in McSweeney’s recently. Have you revised it at all for the book?

wag’s revue 50 WT: That one actually had sort of a good post-publication life. It, along with a couple of Wag’sother stories Revue from McSweeney’s, got into the final rounds for the National Magazine Awards for fiction. We lost out to Harper’s. But it got a Pushcart Prize too. But by that time, I’d rewritten the story from the point of view of the older brother. It just felt like the first way was too smart-assed. We ultimately decided to go with the revision, and now I think in the next McSweeneey’s they’re publishing both versions of the story, the younger brother and the older brother, and then I’ve got a little essay about the process of revision.

But probably a good three, four, maybe more other stories in the collection, I did the same sort of insane revision, which kind of freaked out my editor, just because after she gave me the initial notes on the book, the draft I sent back to her was substantially different from the book that they’d bought. So that was strange. I don’t know what the best way to revise is. I tend to be really, really crazy about it, you know, that when I sit down to revise, I approach it from a place of really sincere self-hatred.

WL: [Laughs.]

WT: Kind of too much, often. But I’ll go through, and I’ll say, “there’s just one thing that’s good in this story.” Like, this one description is the only thing that’s at all good in this story, and I’ll keep that, but I’m going to totally rewrite this story into the story it really ought to be.

I would like to see somebody get into publishing writers’ radical revisions, just as a teaching tool. And actually, FSG published a little chapbook with both versions of ‘Retreat’, with the essay in there. But then when McSweeney’s decided to publish the thing, I’ve then since decided to revise the revisions. But yeah, I think it would be a really good thing for young writers to look at.

51 interviews WL: I told my friend IWag’s was interviewing Revue Wells Tower, and he said, “What is that, like a brokerage firm?” You do have a fairly odd name.

WT: It’s ridiculous.

WL: Is it a real name? A pen-name?

WT: No, no, no, it’s really my actual absurd name. Yeah, I’ve gotten this question from a few people lately, how did I come up with this name that seems like it should be either, right, a brokerage firm or a porn star or a soap opera character or something. I think it’s just happenstance. My mom came up with it. And I was named after a friend of the family. But, yeah, I was talking to her the other day and I said, ‘Were you trying to do something deliberately grandiose with this name?’ And she said, ‘I don’t know, I thought it would work.’

WL: Any badass nicknames? Like Tower of Power?

WT: Tower of Power, no, no. My mother calls me Wellsy, that’s pretty much it.

WG: That’s badass.

WT: Yeah, it’s pretty—when I join the Hell’s Angels, that’s what I’ll get, in the little spikes, over the kidney.

WL: A wag is a droll rascally wit. Who is your favorite wag and why? It could be a historical figure, a fictional character…

WT: My favorite wag. I think it’s probably Bertie Wooster from the P.G. Wodehouse novels. I think he was a bit of a wag. wag’s revue 52 Did you guys read the Wodehouse novels at all? They all Wag’s Revue follow the same kind of template: that Bertie Wooster, this sort of well-to-do bachelor in the 1920s or so gets into some kind of scrape where the daughter of some earl is trying to marry him and he has to get his genius butler to get him out of the situation. But there’s something that’s just incredibly entertaining and compelling about those novels. I think that—was it Kinglsey Amis who just had the book out about drinking? Maybe. Don’t quote me on that. I think it might have been. But his reading P.G. Wodehouse, the Jeeves novels, I think is one of his stand-bys for a bad hangover day. It’s just going to immediately make you feel right about the world. I think Wooster qualifies as a wag. He’d probably be my pick.

53 interviews POETRY

Image courtesy of Ray Sumser http://raysumser.blogspot.com/ Wag’s Revue GENT-SINTAlexa Dilworth-PIETERS

I see two lovers on top of a high mound by a lake. A mound so high, so peaked, it is a mountain. And the lovers dots, though highly visible dots I have identified as lovers. There is a town staggered around the lake. A panorama that from the train and through the glasses I seldom wear looks like a 3-D postcard or a collapsible, not very convincing movie set. From the train it is obvious that the lovers are exchanging recipes or swapping insects from their collections. When they stop, they will turn to see a line that is a train pass in the distance, the sun flashing off windows in broken rhythm, and add to their view of the staggering town and the very blue lake an observation that, after all, they are not lovers, but simply dots.

55 poetry Wag’s Revue THREEErnst Jandl, VISUAL translated by Rosmarie LIP POEMS Waldrop

these poems are dedicated to: the moustache of daniel jones, the great english phoneticist

the visual lip poem is the reverse of the visual paper poem. the speaker is the paper of the visual lip poem. the visual lip poem is spoken without tone. it is written on air by lips. inexperienced readers had best rehearse the visual lip poem in front of a mirror. with experienced readers the motion of the mouth is sufficient to create the visual impression of the poem. he who knows visual lip poems by heart will never go blind. the visual lip poem cures deafness, muteness and deaf- muteness. only a person born blind cannot experience it.

1. 2. 3.

öiua m a öiua w ba öiua m a ö w ba i—i m f u w i a o ba a m bi a ab

wag’s revue 56 Wag’s Revue ENIGMATravis MACHINE Smith

for Genevieve

Your first inheritance was the name of whatever hurricane spun like a roulette wheel in the sea when you were born. You just missed “Ferdinand.”

And when your grandfather died around Christmastime, he willed you his Enigma Machine, the last one not in museums. Lunatic typewriter, gobbledygook black box.

I asked you to write me as you vacation in Italy, but what do you do, Genevieve, Genevieve? You are as cruel as fate. I will always write you back, though your each letter comes to me spy-proof, a crypto mess, mysterious as the one white hair on the nape of your neck.

57 poetry Wag’s Revue storiesBLUE by Pauline Masurel,HYACINTH coded by Jim Andrews

wag’s revue 58 JUST UNDERWag’s Revue A SECOND in which THE AUTHOR, on a plane, experiences the full arc of the Classical Romantic Tragedy. Winston Daniels

All three of us, it turns out, have ordered orange juice.

THE AUTHOR (seat 19D) lifts his plastic glass and shoots a grin, collegial silliness, to THE BEAUTIFUL YOUNG ARGENTINE (loose inference—dark complexion, accent, the plane’s ultimate destination is Buenos Aires).

YOUNG ARGENTINE (19F) smiles back (coyly?), then looks to the window. But THE FATHER, A STERN CATHOLIC (crossed himself repeatedly during takeoff), intercedes by dint of his position (19E).

59 poetry Wag’s Revue SENTJessica FILMLaser

wag’s revue 60 Wag’s Revue WORDTina PROBLEM Celona

When Twiggy Twigglefly showed up in the stairwell you lost no time in alerting me (I am not making this up). You had just made me a Campari-and-soda and I was trying to enjoy it. I had always enjoyed the vibrant red color of Campari though on one occasion it had been the only drink I had ever had to have replaced at a bar. Although my memory often fails me, I remember it was in New York City and that it occurred during the time when I was alone, after I had left my husband, who is no longer my husband anymore. But my memory is notoriously unreliable and so it is possible that my husband was with me and that he actually was the one who sent the drink back, but I am almost positive that this was not the case, that I was alone and waiting for my sister and her future husband to show up, but how could I have been at such a nice Italian restaurant alone? I could not have been alone, but since I was not with my husband, who was I with? On further reflection it seems that I was with my husband, and that it was the occasion on which he (and I) met my sister’s future husband for the first time, or if not for the first time, then early in their relationship. We did not find a seat at that restaurant, where we were waiting (I making an effort to drink a Campari-and-soda, and my husband sending it back). It seems that at some point after returning the drink we crossed the street and ate vegetarian food at a restaurant across the street, where one of us (myself or my husband, if it were he and not someone else) ate a purée of fava beans. I remember this puree of fava beans distinctly as it was disappointing and accompanied by purées of other vegetables, and perhaps some french fries. My husband, who is actually my ex-husband, now that we are divorced, would remember this better than I, but since he no longer speaks to me it is unlikely that the question will ever be settled. It is even doubtful whether I will remember, when you and I have parted ways, how we laughed at Twiggy Twigglefly’s efforts to disguise himself in the stairwell, or how I said I preferred brightly-colored insects to ones that looked like dead leaves. It was good, on such a night, to be alive. There was still much to see and do, and half a glass of Campari-and-soda to drink, if one did not want to appear gauche, or ungrateful.

61 poetry NONFICTION

Image courtesy of Brandon Chinn Wag’s Revue ON DOUCHEBAGS Robert Moor

“Now that we’ve infiltrated the mainstream, we have ample opportunity to mess with people… So far, we’ve done it in a classy way—we made music we like that’s weird, but it also got picked up on the radio…. There are so many clichés we can fall into. An ultimate goal [of ours] is not to become a douche bag.” —Andrew VanWyngarden of MGMT, SPIN Magazine, Nov. 2008

I was 22 years old and about as stable as a three-legged chair—sleep-deprived, underfed, plagued by night terrors from the malaria medication—when I first learned that whiplashy sting you feel when your self-image is radically altered in a blink. Pierre and I were standing tenuously on the back bumper of a motor-rickshaw as we tore down a dirt road studded with skeletal cows, and Pierre said what he said, and I felt the funny feeling. My head did not feel like it was spinning so much as structurally reconfiguring itself from the inside out, recklessly, with great speed and considerable damage, as it must feel to undergo an Ovidian transformation. This happens to people every day. The corporate employee of 42 years finds out that he has become obsolete; the fashion model presses an index to the corner of her eye, gingerly flattening her first crow’s foot and wishing she’d finished high school. A soldier finds out the war is over, a prisoner is released, a former president leaves office; all three stare out a window and realize, with a growing sense of dread, that they are no longer equipped for life back home. In my case, I learned that I came off as a douchebag. The smoldering, wasted landscape of Bihar rolled by. Pierre blinked a few times, perhaps registering my wince with a feeling of regret. Manifold connotations clicked through my head: a rubber bulb with a hose attached; a guy I knew in high school wag’s revue 63 who nicknamed himself “The Hammer” and got laid off from Bear Stearns; a summer’sWag’s breeze Revue through feathered, shoulder- length brown hair, and the words “Sometimes I just don’t feel fresh, even after a shower”; snickering in sixth grade French class; oddly, a tea bag soaked in vinegar; Jägermeister; toothy smiles; Jimmy Fallon. I performed a quick lexical dissection. Douchebag? Douche-bag? Douche bag? Sort of a douchebag. A real douchebag. That fucking douchebag. The word began to disintegrate. The closer I looked at it, the harder it was to discern exactly what it meant. At the time, Pierre and I were living in a monastery in northeast India. Each year (the now-defunct) Antioch University took 20 students to the home of the Bodhi Tree to live amongst a handful of Burmese monks, to study the Dharma, and to adhere to the five precepts of a Buddhist pilgrim: no sexual acts, no intoxicants, no lying, no stealing, and no killing living creatures. There were no televisions or computers or even radios allowed in the monastery (in fact, only rarely was there electricity), so when we weren’t writing candlelit exegeses about the metaphysical implications of Pratityasamutpada or eating or meditating or sleeping, we resorted to other, increasingly outdated forms of human entertainment: we played chess, we traded books, we speculated about the sex lives of our professors, we crawled out onto the ledge where we weren’t supposed to sit and dangled our legs over the swampy vegetable patch, and most of all, we talked. A favorite topic of conversations was to recount our first impressions as we first appeared to one another in the London airport. But it quickly became clear that this was not always a pleasant topic of discussion. In the hermetic environment of the monastery, where there was so much talk of deconstructing identity and fostering an understanding of no-self, old layers of social identity had a tendency to flake and shed. With a shaved head and more or less identical clothes, it was easy to forget who

64 nonfiction you had been back home. Digging up those old social identities too often felt like unearthingWag’s a Revue shoebox full of embarrassing middle school photographs. It was clear that these first impressions were tricky things, often false, but they could also be terrifically revealing. As a cognitive process, snap judgments appear to be a primal function of our lizard brains, an instantaneous sorting method by which we weed out friend from foe. If we could look through the human brain as if through a Terminator’s red-tinted gaze at the exact moment it first encounters someone new, we might see the mind’s eye highlight and zoom in on a number of visual cues (anatomical, sartorial, behavioral), flit through a computation as quick as neural lightning, and then display, in glowing boxy letters, a pre-defined category into which the person should be filed, and by which his future actions will be predicted. Apparently, upon first laying eyes upon me, Pierre’s brain flashed: DOUCHEBAG (var.: FRATTY DOUCHEBAG) This is what stung. “Fratty” was not a word I would normally use to define myself. Back at home and at college, among my friends, if anything I tottered toward the opposite end of the spectrum: I was bookish, left-leaning, a pacifist. My friends and I were not in fraternities. In fact we made fun of frat boys. And as for “douchebag,” to my mind that just sounded like a slur. And yet, to Pierre, a fair-minded person and a fellow liberal arts student, as I materialized in the airport wearing a button-down shirt and a (non-Castro, non-trucker, non-porkpie) hat, with short- cropped hair and unexamined Midwestern sensibilities, the visual calculus of my appearance equaled ‘fratty douchebag.’ Something did not fit. We had stumbled into a linguistic gap, a divergence in perception, one signifier with split signifieds, a symptom of what I will call the Chasm.

wag’s revue 65 Wag’s Revue

It is no secret that the structure� of colloquial speech is far less rigorous than that of the academe. Meanings of slang terms fluctuate according to geographic locality and personal preference, and only rarely does even a rough consensus form around the definition of a given term. One needs only glance inside the Urban Dictionary to find the myriad, haphazard and often conflicting definitions we give to young words. However, once every decade—due to some underlying social need for a new way to name, differentiate, or disparage—a given term suddenly jumps into sharp focus and is readable by all. Thus we receive the Beatnik, the Hippie, the Punk. What was once a put-down is sharpened into a full-bore social identity, and sometimes—as in the case of the aforementioned—adopted and celebrated by the once disparaged. I suspect this same process of sharpening (if not the reclamation) is happening right now with the word “douchebag” in our nation’s urban centers. I can see it taking shape in smoke-filled mouths, rolling around on tongues. The last flecks are being shaved from the mold; itis readying itself for re-release. The perplexing thing about the word “douchebag” is that it refers to something specific that most of us know and can point out when seen, and yet we have trouble making explicit. (“You know one when you see one,” runs the tagline of Obvious Douchebag, one of the many new douchebag-focused blogs on the internet.) Our inability to form a working definition is perplexing precisely because the word is so widely used. Once you start listening for it, you will hear the word everywhere, spoken with increasing frequency and ferocity. It has been exploited of late to elicit cheap laughs—most notably by comedy shows like The Daily Show and 30 Rock, those middle- aged miners of youth slang—to the point where it now risks

66 nonfiction collapse from hyperinflation. This phenomenon appears to be systematic. As a particularWag’s epithet Revue (“bitch,” “punk,” “idiot” and to a more obvious degree, “fag” or the vague adjectival usage of “gay”) gains social relevance by targeting and disparaging a certain demographic, it is inevitably adopted into the popular lexicon as a blanket insult. The epithet’s pointedness, precisely the reason for its ascent, then becomes blunted through sloppy or overzealous usage, and eventually the word grows stale, loses favor, and fades into the background. Once irrelevant, the word persists, fixed but distant, in the ever-growing catacombs of the English language, to be excavated by future generations as the need arises, but only rarely as it was originally intended.

We all know where the epithet� originates, and in part why it was once so devastating; it refers to a soiled object, a private shame. ‘Shithead,’ ‘motherfucker,’ ‘piss ant’; all appeal to us, initially, on the literal level of their imagery. Perhaps just as importantly, ‘douchebag’ is fun to say. It rolls lushly off the tongue like a rush of water, with a big plosive burst at the end. It is nigh onomatopoeic, near pornographic. Pronouncing it feels like a release, with all the hearty thud of a kick in the ribs. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “douche bag” was first used to refer to something other than a female cleaning implement some time in the 1960’s, when it was used to describe “an unattractive co-ed, or by extension, any individual whom the speaker desires to deprecate.” Other sources imply that the term originally indicated a woman of “loose moral repute.” In Mary McCarthy’s The Group, set in 1933, the douche is considered an effective contraceptive instrument, and so by extension any woman who was found using one was thought to be promiscuous. Knowing the way that social mores were structured in that era, it is not so far of a leap from “loose” to wag’s revue 67 “unattractive.” Where the term took a leap across the gender gap from describing unattractiveWag’s women Revue to describing contemptible men remains unknown. Already we find the word slipping, morphing, its pleasant mouth feel and nasty connotations tempting it into sentences where it doesn’t belong. In the 1980s, the term suddenly became popular among teens as a blanket insult—used for example to disparage a teacher that one does not like—though it lacked any attached cultural codes. (Unlike, say, the word “nerd”; there was never a film called Revenge of the Douchebags, and could not have been, for exactly this reason). It is perhaps out of a sense of 80s-inspired nostalgia that the term was resurrected in the early 2000s, along with various other appurtenances from that bygone era. In reviewing the earliest literature on douchebags from the early 21st century, it becomes clear that the word was for a long time used to describe a certain kind of man—gelled hair, fitted baseball cap, multiple pastel polo shirts with popped collars layered one atop another—who is stereotypically thought to have originated in or around New Jersey, but who, sometime around 2002, suddenly began popping up everywhere (perhaps not coincidentally) just as the nation became familiar with the notion of “metrosexuality.” At the time, there was a cultural need to name and disparage these people, this aesthetic, and for a period the word “douchebag” filled that void. The words “tool” and the racial epithet “guido” now seem to have superseded “douchebag” to describe a person this mien, at least in New York, though that is not always true for all speakers. More importantly, even though we lack a unanimously agreed-upon name for them, their particular aesthetic has been ridiculed to the point where it has faded from the public dialogue. (See: “My New Haircut,” YouTube: June, 2007.) The result is that few slang-savvy people today would describe a douchebag as a greasy, Italianate, overtanned, testosterone-rich gym rat. We

68 nonfiction know that kind of guy; he’s not a douchebag; he’s “something else.” Wag’s Revue Perhaps in an unconscious response of this shift in meaning, there has been a rash of hip publications declaring the word “dead,” among them Esquire, SF Weekly, and Gawker.com (twice). Wrote one reader to the Gawker editors,

[the word “douchebag” has] been completely played out. the number of times i hear it now applied to any circumstance other than what i believe to have been its true intention is getting annoying. furthermore, i feel the douche’s themselves have co-opted the word and use it against hipsters and the like. people who aren’t particularly witty, or even funny, have begun throwing around the word douche (in my opinion denigrating the original beauty of what it represented).

Yet, despite all the ([sic]-riddled) clamoring about its demise, the term persists, though often with increasingly bizarre applications. In a September ’08 Radar magazine article also titled “On Douchebags,” Lynn Harris made a valiant effort to widen the term’s definition beyond the confines of guido-style, but in implicating such figures as Roy Cohn, Henry VIII, and Jacob (son of Isaac), she effectively exploded the term beyond any usable proportions. So the question remains: What is a douchebag? What in its “original beauty” so enamored us to its use?

The answer to our question� lies in the thicket of popular culture—specifically, in the structure within which the mainstream culture and the era’s predominant counterculture are formed and interact. More specifically, we must examine the wag’s revue 69 peculiar way that these two spheres of social influence always seem to arise in a slightlyWag’s staggered Revue opposition to one another. It would seem reasonable that in any given decade, there is a mainstream culture and a predominant counterculture that rise and fall concomitantly. But this isn’t how it seems to work. Indeed, the rise of a new counterculture does tend to give birth to a new kind of mainstream (a mainstream which either incorporates or repudiates the defining ethos and aesthetic of the counterculture), but the irony is that by the time that mainstream is more or less fully formed, the counterculture to which it is a response has already been gutted and replaced by a new one (which is itself a reaction to the new mainstream). In this way, we as a society define ourselves in overlapping waves, always through opposition, but all too often those we’ve set our sight on have already disappeared over the horizon. America has always branded its outcasts: Greasers, beatniks, anarchists. Mountain men. Cowpunchers. Witches. However, it isn’t until the culture wars that began in the 1940’s, incubated throughout the repressed ‘Like it or McCarthy era, and finally not, we have exploded during the Vietnam entered the Age War that we see a particular of the Hipster counterculture rise to a Mainstream.’ position of power and vocality from which it was able to spin around the looking glass and brand the mainstream. In the 1940’s, these were the original “hipsters”—fiery bohemians and blacks who were “hip” to jazz. The buttoned-up mainstream, in this era, was branded as “square.” The counterculture was able to sharpen its identity by explicitly opposing the mainstream, and in being forced to craft a response to this assault, the mainstream redefined its own mores. This (at once mutualistic and antagonistic) form of cultural symbiosis was most pronounced in the years that followed Vietnam: first the

70 nonfiction hipsters (and later, the hippies) had their squares, then the punks their preppies, Wag’sthe slackers Revue their yuppies, and recently the emo kids their fratboys. In this dynamic structure, where the friction between the two opposing camps produces much of the creative energy that drives our trends, I believe that the hipster now finds his antipode in the douchebag. I am confident this is true because I keep hearing the word “douchebag” used by hipsters—in all the little farflung boho corners of New York City: Williamsburg, Bushwick, Astoria—to describe people who are unassumingly rooted in the realm of the mainstream. Since returning from India, I myself have been called a douchebag no less than six times by hipsters. (Once, in print.) On one occasion I pressed for further explanation. I asked a 19 year-old RISD student if I was acting like a douchebag. “No, you’re nice enough,” she said. “But you’re wearing a collared shirt, and loose jeans, and that’s what douchebags wear.” Everyone knows this. “I bet you even have abs,” she said, with a smirk. This, then, is the new douchebag: collared shirt of any kind (besides flannel), pants that don’t cling, physically fit. Asthe prevailing style and ethos (post-modernism, hyperactive trend- following, esotericism) of the hipsters gains visibility and begins to shape the mainstream through fashion and advertising (just as that of the hippies and punks and grunge rockers before them), this particular image of the douchebag—an after-image of the previous, now diminishing mainstream style—will develop alongside. In point of fact, this process has already officially begun. It occurred at roughly around 6 p.m. on September the 6th, 2008, when Kanye West hung up his preppy gear and chose instead to don a starched white dress shirt, top-button buttoned, a David Byrne-esque gray flannel suit and oversized sunglasses to perform songs off his newest album for the MTV Music Video Awards. So goes Kanye, so goes the nation. Like it or not, we have entered the Age of the Hipster Mainstream. wag’s revue 71 And so our primary task in this essay becomes, paradoxically, the simple aim of definingWag’s Revuewhat exactly a hipster is and what mainstream cultural image he is resisting. This task is surprisingly difficult, and not (as it might at first appear) simply because the term “douchebag” is inchoate and half-formed, or an empty mask. After all, you know one when you see one. (You just can’t describe what you’re seeing.) This issue—the difficulty of constructing clear definitions and delineations—is at the very heart of the problem, both in the way that the douchebag defines himself and in the way that he is defined by his namers. Like the hipster, he bristles at the mention of his name. Unlike a square or a preppy, he finds no solace in shared identity, no strength in numbers. And this is problematic. We are becoming afraid, all of us, hipsters and douchebags alike, to peak around the easel of cultural taxonomy and examine our caricatures.

The douchebag can most succinctly� be described as a posture rather than a style. I say “posture” because it is deeper and more functional than “style,” which connotes superficiality, and yet is not purely behavioral or psychological, either. A posture is an attitude made physical, and can be read in a glance, before the subject even opens his mouth. Though television is chockablock with douchebags and people calling each other douchebags, and thus is a ripe hunting ground for examples, the douchebag posture is for me perhaps best typified by Andy Bernard (as played by Ed Helms) from the NBC version of The Office. You can read him from his smirk—that a unique mixture of unflinching entitlement, measured success, and undue sense of self-worth. When he opens his mouth, his words only confirm what his posture telegraphed. “I went to Cornell. Ever heard of it? Yeah, I graduated in four years…” But that’s just me. Someone else might say that Ryan is the

72 nonfiction biggest douchebag on The Office, while someone else might say it’s Michael. (The Wag’sshow, it turns Revue out, is positively rife with douches.) Part of what makes the show so successful is that each character represents a different facet (indeed, archetype) of the mainstream—the preppy mediocrity, the arrogant 20-something, the desperate corporate clown—which correlate to figures in our lives. As to which of those people you perceive as a douchebag, well, that depends on who you are. A true hipster might look at The Office and declare that they are all douchebags, none more than Jim, because he alone had the potential to be something else. In other words, “douchebag” is purely a subject-variable designation, but I hold that it always retains a similar (if not identical) relationship to each subject. Like shadows—all douchebags look different, but the relationship between douchebag and the perceiving subject they reflect is always the same. In India, Pierre thought I was a douchebag because of my hat. James, a rather insecure pseudo-hipster himself, at first glance thought I was a hipster, because I was wearing a t-shirt from American Apparel. You think I am a douchebag for writing this. I think it actually looks kind of pretentious (ergo, hipsterish). This is how the Chasm begins to form.

Last weekend I was walking� down Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, what was once and to some degree still remains a sort of Haight-Ashbury for hipsters, when a friend from out of town started pointing at people and asking if they were hipsters. “What about that guy?” he whispered. “Oh, what about her, with the glasses?” My roommates Jordan and Spiel patiently answered that yes, the guy in the lumberjack print jacket was a hipster, and definitely wag’s revue 73 that guy on the fixed-gear bike in the 20 degree weather, and no, well, it’s a little harderWag’s with girls, Revue but she was probably just a trendy Upper East Side high school girl slumming it for the day. The out-of-towner, perplexed, finally broke down and asked, “So what the fuck is a hipster, exactly?” Jordan and I, pensive as ever, balked. Spiel, who was wearing a Wake Forest hoodie and baggie jeans and who knows how to fix dirt bikes and has absolutely no fucking clue who Nico is, and therefore by virtue of distance sees these things a bit more clearly than the rest of us, answered without hesitation: “Skinny jeans, dude.” While it seems simplistic, that is perhaps the clearest and most elegant taxonomy that has ever been devised for identifying a male hipster. (Identifying female hipsters, as was mentioned, tends to be a bit more problematic, for various reasons that we don’t need to go into here.) Every other physical characteristic that we might elect as a telltale for the hipster male —the thick- rimmed glasses, the faux-blue collar attire, the mustaches and beards and shaggy hair, the eclectic musical tastes, the vintage bikes—can be shed or altered as the need arises. (The adoption of the fixed-gear bike as a hipper alternative to the traditional racing bike a few years back is a great example of this.) The skinny jeans, however, persist through the incarnations, but only because a viable alternative does not yet exist. On this front, the hipsters have unwittingly painted themselves into a corner; anything looser than skin-tight is deemed mainstream, unhip, douchey. What else is left for them to wear to cover their asses in the wintertime? Parachute pants? The only other alternative, the one they seem to have chosen, is to simply grow slimmer, more rail-like legs, to allow a yet further slimming down of the jeans, until, presumably, they wither to stems and altogether disappear… The problem, as you no doubt have noted, arises when non- hipsters start wearing skinny jeans. In say three years, once

74 nonfiction more or less everyone (save the diehard fratboy, who will be left frozen in time like a curioWag’s in our Revuecollective cabinet of wonders, along with the zoot and the disco fan and the head-banger) starts wearing slimmer-cut jeans, how will we parse out the hipsters from the rest of us? More importantly, how will the hipsters parse themselves out? To put it another way, our problem is that as the mainstream slowly assimilates and consumes the hipster aesthetic, we necessarily lose sight of what a hipster really is. As is evidenced by the above two paragraphs, a hipster is, by design, easy to mock, easier to loathe, and yet very hard to pin down. Because, unlike the hippies or the punks, the hipsters lack a central storyline (a defining manifesto, a set of shared moral values, a historical narrative), which we can seize upon and use as a pigeonhole. This lack of storyline leads many to mistakenly assert that the hipsters have no ethos, no guiding light. This is wrong. But it’s exceedingly tricky to explain why it’s wrong. In order to pinpoint a hardier defining characteristic than “skinny jeans,” we must wade into some pretty murky, mercurial depths; we must define that which willfully resists definition.

The first and most obvious� reason why most people (including many critics of the hipster movement) cannot properly grasp the significance of this counterculture is because they fail to follow its roots to their base—namely, in postmodernism. For the phenomenon of hipsterism is, first and foremost, both a symptom and a cultural iteration of postmodernist developments in theory, literature, fashion, and art. In his much-discussed article entitled “Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization” in the July 2008 issue of Adbusters, Douglas Haddow writes, wag’s revue 75 An artificial appropriation of different styles from different Wag’s eras, the Revue hipster represents the end of Western civilization — a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” —a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

What Haddow’s thesis so plainly fails to take into account is the fact that artificial appropriations, in a post-modern world, are in fact a creation of something new and significant. He—like the magazine for which he writes—too often falls into the trap of pre-postmodern literalism, yearning to find some tangible “meaning” (by which I think he means “philosophy” or “moral agenda”) in the hipster movement, which he can then begin to plug into his own social framework and criticize. But the hipster movement has never really been about meaning. Jacques Lacan laid a finger on the heart of postmodernism when he famously elaborated upon Freud’s findings in psychoanalysis; namely, that “truth manifests itself in the letter rather than the spirit, that is, in the way things are actually said rather than in their intended meaning.” In much the same way, the hipster movement is more about the method and tone of expression than the expressed meaning; as deconstructionists emphasized the surface of language, hipsters celebrate the surface of modern life. “Meaning” (in the way Haddow defines it) has become a cliché, and beside the point. The political causes, liberal social mores, and revolutionary mythos to which previous countercultures subscribed have all been co- opted by the mainstream, printed onto bumper stickers, used to sell Priuses, parodied on South Park. In a perverse twist, capitalism has managed to make personal “depth” appear

76 nonfiction shallow, and “shallowness,” somehow, deep. What hipsters concern themselves withWag’s (in their Revue literature, their music, their fashion) are the ways that past phenomena can be clipped and combined, snipped of their attached “meaning” but not of their engrained aesthetic appeal, and in that way made shiny and flat and cool. Cloud-like, without noumena, the true hipster is immune to attack or parody. So in this sense, Haddow is dead- on, but unwittingly so: hipsters are intentionally shallow; they are intentionally doomed. The definition of a hipster (like that of the douchebag) can best be described as a posture (or, some might say, a pose), which is a contradictory reading of the mainstream at all times and at any moment. As far as I can tell, the most common symptom of this posture is a distinct allergy to repetition and a revulsion for cliché. Indeed, the primary process by which a hipster defines himself is through labeling (and subsequently eschewing) other things as clichéd, old, or played out. And so, the hipster finds him or herself on the cutting edge of fashion, music, literature, and film, precisely because he or she is a fan of all things that resist the mainstream, more or less regardless of quality. If a new movement is to emerge, it will be on the cusp, never in the middle, and thus in the domain of the hipster. The flipside, of course—and this is their curse—is that the moment that a given trend catches on and becomes socially visible, it is assimilated by the mainstream, and becomes unhip. In his 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin foretold how mass production would “emancipate the work of art from its parasitical dependence on [bourgeois] ritual.” While he was prescient in many of his predictions, he failed to envision the rapidity with which capitalism and advertising would rush to fill the void left behind by the loss of “aura” surrounding that antiquated mode of production. These days our most visible and talked-about aesthetic objets have become both symbols and products of wag’s revue 77 mass production, stamped all over with logos: MacBook Airs, Volkswagens, CalphalonWag’s pans, Pepsi Revue cans, Nike kicks, the sleek new interface of Google Chrome. Consequent to this rise in design-capitalism was the co-opting of identities (particularly youth identities) to brand and sell these items. The hipsters— who have read Benjamin, as well as Derrida and Barthes and Foucault and Bakhtin—are sharp to the “withering effects” of mechanical reproduction, of commodification and advertising. Moreover, they were born in the miasma of hyper-consumerism (their first glimpse of life was the silvery glimmer off the logo on their obstetrician’s Armani frames, the snowy cap of the Mont Blanc pen tucked into his shirt pocket, and behind that, a poster for Pfizer), and they grew up in an era that was, by any objective measurement, exponentially more saturated with advertising than any that had ever preceded it in the history of man. They’ve watched closely as each previous counterculture was processed, purchased, caricatured, and made into Halloween costumes— the beat with his beret and bongos, the hippie with her tie-dyes, rose-tinted glasses, and plastic oversized flower. It makes them sick. Corporate powers have already begun trying to capitalize upon the hipster movement, with limited results. One need only look at how long it took them to adopt the hipster’s love of irony (an early, failed attempt at cultural resistance) and deploy it for its own purposes: in the production of Burger King advertisements, retro lunch boxes, trucker caps, and graphic tees; or to surf the flashy new hipster-targeted website of Colt 45 malt liquor, which invites burgeoning artists to “ink” the design of their new can; or watch the online ads featuring Paul “the Original Dollar Menunaire,” McDonald’s ironically mustachioed, exceedingly flat-intoned cartoon spokesperson; or walk inside an Urban Outfitters, just once, and really look around. It will make you sick as well. Hipsterism is in this sense a pure, almost enlightened

78 nonfiction kind of rebellion. They know that the game is rigged, that the counterculture alwaysWag’s gets swallowed. Revue So, in the only way they know how, they turn off, tune out, rise above. Of course there are other, less noble factors at play in the recent move towards hipsterism: a thinly veiled vanity, the thrill of keeping a secret or knowing more ‘It may very well be than your neighbor, that hipsters are the a desire to vindicate best-prepared or erase vestiges of group of people in high school or middle America for the school awkwardness, looming economic the sense of . community that apocalypse ’ shared but esoteric interests can foster. But first and foremost, I would argue that hipsterism is a natural and inevitable backlash against the universalizing forces of capitalism and, more specifically, advertising. The work of the market is to widen, to broaden, to debase; to make a product available (and appealing) to as many people as possible. The hipster is the latest iteration of a long intellectual tradition which seeks always to sharpen, to restrict, and to heighten, and which in the process, invariably fetishes the obscure, the enigmatic, and the absurd. The hipster’s allergy to repetition and capitalist co-opting might even be laudable, if it were not so manifestly hypocritical. If, for example, the hipster movement had given birth to a series of cottage industries, the flowering of individual style, and a do-it-yourself philosophy of material production, if it had in other words truly been what it always showed promise to be—a trend without trends—then we might have seen the birth of a sustainable response to the problems that fashion and trend-ism engender. Instead the hipsters took an alternate route; unwilling or unable to achieve an atomization and hyper- wag’s revue 79 personalization of style, they tacked towards the postmodern, creating a sartorial bricolageWag’s of fashionsRevue clipped from the pages of history and trimmed to match. Certain trends—the scarves and the oversized glasses, the infamous skinny jeans—caught on, and in this way the image of the hipster started to develop in the darkroom of our public consciousness. The 21st century hipster, who understands this process on a molecular level and whose hackles raise at the first whiff of it, is then forced to switch up his or her style, to abandon his or her favorite artists, and to denounce and cannibalize those who have yet failed to adapt, labeling them, somewhat cleverly, as “hipsters.” The hipsters are quick, you must give them that. Unfortunately, the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is quicker, better financed, and has been doing this for much, much longer. It will subsume these new trends as quickly as the hipsters can create them, at an ever-increasing rate, as long as the hipsters continue do so in a collectivist manner.

In recent months, a slew� of eulogies have been published declaring the death of the hipster. Some claim that growing media awareness of the hipster aesthetic and lifestyle has ensured its demise. However, as was addressed above, this does not so much portend the death of the hipster movement as it ensures the death of that particular incarnation and aesthetic. Because of their uniquely amorphous and decentralized outlook, hipsters can always shed their skins, to strip off their tattered tights and toss out their non-prescription glasses and slip into some new, less-easily codified disguise. The demise of the hipster will not come at the surface, in the growing staleness of their “look”; it will come in the failing of their modes of operation and their impetus for rebellion. Another, slightly more convincing argument says that the

80 nonfiction ascendance of Obama and the dawning of a new political era will melt away the angstWag’s and cynicism Revue that defined the hipster movement. This might be true. It certainly seems difficult to maintain the same level of hostility towards the mainstream when that mainstream has elected a president who is so clearly aligned with the hipster political ethos (what little of it there is). The problem is that, in order to assuage the hipster’s feeling of unease and cynicism, Obama needs to reform not only all three branches of government, but also the media, the advertising industry and much of the business sector, which are not under his control. In all likelihood the hipster movement will die of its own attacks long before Obama or anyone else in government is able to radically overhaul our current (cynicism-inducing) system of consumption. Finally, with an historic recession already underway and a full-out Depression looming on the horizon, some claim that an economic downturn might take the sexiness out of the hipster lifestyle. Indeed, if one looks across nations and across generations, it is difficult to find an economically hard-pressed community who intentionally tries to look poor. Hippies and backpackers are despised in India, because the locals see them as they appear—dirty, sloppily dressed individuals who take little care with their appearance. To this day it is exceedingly rare to find a rich person in India who intentionally tries to dress poor, much less one among the vast majority of the less privileged. The logic then goes that, as the failing economy drives America into a state of real and lasting destitution, ironic approximations of poverty will suddenly lose their appeal. Of all three major arguments for the demise of the hipster, this seems the most convincing, but it too has its flaws. Because, although hipsters may actually become poor in the years to come, they still hail from a certain socioeconomic and cultural background which in some ways immunizes them from the demoralizing effects of poverty. They still have their college degrees, and wag’s revue 81 their long-cultivated sense of style, and their unique aversion to overt wealth and status.Wag’s In fact, Revue it may very well be that the hipsters are the best-prepared group of people in America for the looming economic apocalypse: as the rest of the country suffers and scrounges and grows depressed, the hipsters will flourish like drought-resistant ferns in the newfound paucity, luxuriating in a truly bohemian and ascetic lifestyle. Having practiced for this day for years, the hipster will finally find him or herself living in his or her long-imagined dream, where simulated pauperism has become real, where hardship is other than self-imposed, where shopping at secondhand stores and drinking cheap beer is a necessity rather than a choice, where artists really starve.

Heretofore, there has been� a certain unspoken conceit to this essay; namely that I, as someone who has been called a douchebag, am somehow more knowledgeable or reliable a source on this subject than say, a hipster. While a first person perspective is necessary to convey the experience of being called a douchebag, it is not necessarily best for conveying the experience of actually being a douchebag. In fact, the great majority of douchebag theory published on the internet has been penned by professed fans of the word, those who apply it liberally and with a certain sense of vindictive joy. The word, like “hipster,” is one that is almost never reflexively applied. It takes something extra, some outside and objective force, to jar one into realizing that he is in fact a douchebag, and just exactly what that term means. “So I started Googling myself, you know,” says John Mayer, to a TMZ cameraman, “And I had to kinda put it all together at once to realize, at the end of it all, I’m kind of a douchebag.” This last clause it not one that you hear very often. But what is

82 nonfiction striking about this confession is not the fact that Mayer admitted he is a douchebag (he Wag’sis, almost definitively),Revue but rather that it was only by viewing his atomized and refracted image via the internet, among his fans and detractors alike, that he came to realize this fact. It took the internet to jar John Mayer into realizing that he is a douchebag, because in some very real sense it was the internet that made him a douchebag in the first place. Without surfing the web (or watching MTV, or flipping through gossip rags), John Mayer to himself is just one man. He is blind to his many two-dimensional avatars running around LA pouting, smoking, simpering, wearing sunglasses, going boogie boarding, carrying the tote bags of his current celebrity girlfriend, eating ice cream, flirting with Ellen, bar-hopping with other quasi- celebrities, tearing down Rodeo Dr. in a vintage Land Rover, glibly collecting speeding tickets. In fact, it is entirely possible that John Mayer, due to the sheltered nature of the Hollywood lifestyle and a natural human aversion to seeing oneself from a hostile third person perspective, was one of the last people on earth to know just how incredibly saturated the world is with John Mayer. One month after staring into our cultural lens and conceding himself a douchebag, Mayer took to his blog to defend himself, not by denying his label, but by disassembling it. (His task, one might argue, is not all that different from that undertaken here.) In his (admittedly, more ham-fisted) analysis, Mayer posits that the epithet is launched out of jealousy, or a sense that fame has been dealt to the undeserving. “Is being a douchebag actually all about having a bigger smile than someone else deems you deserve to in life?” he asks. This question deserves asking, because many of the people on the internet who are most frequently deemed douchebags (Brody Jenner, Dane Cook, Kevin Federline) have accrued a level of fame that far outstrips any real or perceived talent. wag’s revue 83 And indeed, this must be part of the impetus to originally label a person a douchebag.Wag’s Fame is a Revuesocial equivalency to ego, and as has been stated before, unwarranted egotism is a telltale characteristic of a true douchebag. (The reasons for this will be addressed a bit later.) However, I would argue that something else is at work in the labeling of douchebags, because this notion of undeserved fame does not explain the widespread usage of the term to describe thoroughly talented individuals (Sean Penn, Bono, Paul Krugman), who are nevertheless over-exposed. Or what of those other celebrities, who have gained a considerable (but not tabloid-worthy) amount of fame with little-to-no visible talent? Why is Dane Cook considered a douchebag but Larry the Cable Guy merely a hack? And more importantly, why is fame an indicator of douchiness at all? Whose decision is it to make someone an object of public interest, the object, or the public? In his blog post, Mayer launches a spirited defense of Pete Wentz, the bass player for the band Fall Out Boy, who, according to Google (via Mayer), has been called a douchebag over 11,000 times. However, from the start Mayer departs down the wrong track, assuming that Wentz’s perceived shortcomings lie in his music. If he had taken the time to closely read some of those 11,000 blog posts, Mayer would have found that the prevailing criticisms center not around Wentz’s artistry but rather around his hairstyle, his clothing, his wearing of eyeliner, his dating of Ashlee Simpson, even his decision to have a child at such a young age (which was widely regarded as a celebrity stunt, part of a rash of celebrity pregnancies—what will one day be known as the “babies-as-accessories boom” of the late aughts). Note that the very language of these criticisms are structured around and through the filter of gossip news. The central complaint is that Wentz is both too affected and too common. Numerous references are made to his shopping at Hot Topic, a popular teen goth clothing store found in most American shopping malls. What then is Wentz’s crime? It is that he dresses like someone

84 nonfiction that we have met and, probably, disliked. He is both too visible and too vulnerable, andWag’s for whatever Revue reason, this combination invites relentless attack. This brings us to the central question of this essay: If the hipster is in fact a creature who is first and foremost allergic to repetition, what then is the douchebag? Answer: The douchebag is exactly that— a repetition, a living cliché. If the hipster celebrates obscurity and his image is a cultural obfuscation (a fractured scattering of the light thrown off from past styles), the douchebag’s crime is that he is, in a cultural sense, too legible. Since celebrities are both shapers and reflections of the mainstream—shaping, due to their enormous influence and visibility; reflecting, because of stylists and personal shoppers and PR managers and agents and focus group researchers who are paid to maximize their public appeal—it is wholly unsurprising that they are the people most often labeled as douchebags. Celebrities are the most hyper-legible people on the planet. The only ones who manage to escape the label are those who manage to somehow obscure themselves, who shy away from the public eye or surround themselves with mystery. This creates a peculiarly disillusioning effect, where the more one zooms in on the life of a famous person, indeed the more human a celebrity appears, the more he or she diminishes in our eyes. Scarlett Johansson appears on Letterman and reveals herself to be just another jappy girl from Manhattan; it comes out that Vin Diesel is a lifelong fan of Dungeons and Dragons and has a dorky laugh. (This is phenomenon is true of literary celebrities as well; I cannot think of a single author who rose in my estimation after I glanced at his or her dust jacket photo—with the twin exceptions of Joan Didion and Samuel Beckett.) We don’t want our celebrities to be human, to have depth and imperfections, those real, schlubby, pathetic, every day imperfections that every real human being has; rather, we prefer the cool, tragic flaws of the historically beautiful and wag’s revue 85 short-lived. We too want shallowness. We too want doom. While the rise of theWag’s hipsters Revue cannot be blamed for this phenomenon (the real has always disappointed in the face of the imagined and unknown), it is a central tenet and core malady of their lifestyle. Though the attraction to irony faded long ago, its impetus did not; namely, the fact that hipsters find earnestness unattractive. Countless times I have heard hipsters use the word as an insult or a value judgment. (“I respect Conor Oberst, but Christ, he has got to be the most earnest guy alive.”) Earnestness is after all a kind of emotional legibility, a straightforward and unadulterated display of one’s inner workings. It is also an incredibly vulnerable and scary state of being, particularly to one whose chief stance in life is defensive. Perhaps this explains why hipsters are so drawn to illegible fictions, obscure texts. Specifically, why they seem toflock around those great name-droppers of the modern canon— Borges, Rushdie, Murakami, Kundera, Coetzee, Sebald, and, most recently, Bolaño. This name-dropping (which permeates hipsters’ conversations, their music critiques, their blogs) is symptomatic of a curious and perhaps detrimental attraction to the unknown and the exotic, and aversion to the known. A page studded with names that one only vaguely recognizes, obscure poets and philosophers and painters, is illegible but attractive, like a page of Sanskrit script; the known and great, on the other hand, appear stale in comparison, shrug-inducing, the way we react upon seeing Monet’s water lilies or watching the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet. Hipsters are both incredibly competitive and monumentally insecure; theirs is a restless reordering of the pyramid of genius, and a continual reevaluation of where they fit into that architecture. Everyone below is a douchebag, especially if they have happened upon any success; everyone above is a genius, except if they are tarnished by the stigma of being a genius that everyone has read. The legible geniuses all fall beneath these

86 nonfiction conquerors, this withering gaze of the literate hipster. Joyce remains a genius, becauseWag’s he is Revue very hard to read. Pynchon, Faulkner, Beckett, to some degree Wallace—geniuses, all. Hemingway, in contrast, is a douchebag, as is Vonnegut and Salinger and London and Twain and yes, Eggers. Anyone whose prose is plainspoken and earnest and unadorned suffers, for the basic crime of not talking over our heads, and not exasperating (or, they might argue, elevating) us in the process.

The question of legibility,� or rather the phrasing of the douchebag question in those terms, is quite attractive, not just because it fits quite nicely into this essay, but moreover because it can serve as a useful key for cracking the cipher of just exactly why douchebags act the way they do. The douchebag, above all else, seeks a kind of internal legibility, or in simpler terms, normalcy. (And make no mistake, legibility is a kind of textual normalcy; without the normative rules of grammar and spelling, without common idioms and known conceits, without overarching institutions like the OED or the Académie Française to regulate and cement the structures of language, written discourse would very quickly vacillate towards illegibility, wobble towards nonsense, grow to resemble the work of children, or madmen.) If you listen to his judgments of others, the douchebag reveals that, above all else, he strives just to be normal, to not be “weird”; in fact, to not be labeled at all. Who strives for something so mundane? In a culture where normalcy is as quicksilvery and fleeting as ours, where trends seem to shift at an ever-increasing rate, and norms are demolished and reconstructed yearly—in a culture such as this, achieving a state of normalcy can be a kind of triumph, like remaining atop a spinning log amidst whitewater whirls. The hipster, meanwhile, deftly throws pebbles at the douchebag wag’s revue 87 from atop his own spinning log, slipperier still, while smoking a cigarette and smirkingWag’s at the douche’s Revue pathetic effort. So where the hipster veers away from the mainstream, the douchebag veers toward it; that is just his way. He yearns more than anything for a stable, non-shifting center, where he can comfortably reside without receiving derision or ridicule. When he succeeds in this task, he is free of stigma, not invisible so much as omnipresent. For that moment he is structurally centralized, an every-widening nucleus, invisible to himself but projected everywhere he looks. He fits in. And yet the center shifts, inevitably it shifts, and with it shifts popular taste. The douchebag shifts with it, but glacially, he is too slow, too rigid. Against his best instincts, he goes out and buys a pink polo shirt, because that’s where the mainstream has shifted (as he has divined from television and movies, pop stars in music videos, models on billboards for Ralph Lauren). And, to his amazement, for a short while his pink shirt receives newfound attention from the opposite sex. For that brief moment, he is again well dressed, well adjusted, normal; a figurehead on the bow of the mainstream. But that moment passes, and soon he finds himself being called a douchebag once again. In order to not be labeled, one must now trade in his jeans for new, skinnier jeans, his hats for new, more eccentric hats. But because of the rapid rate at which hipsters adapt and reinvent themselves, these too he will have to change in less than a year’s time, lest he again be called a douchebag. There is no semblance of a stable mainstream. The douchebag, only wanting stable ground upon which to stand, must leap from style to style, playing a game he never wished to play in order to attain a normalcy that never seems to come. The hipster, not wanting the mainstream to catch onto his style, keeps changing, and dragging the mainstream behind at a quickening clip. The cycle is vicious: the douchebag will always be called a douchebag; the hipster, always a hipster.

88 nonfiction The famous douchebag arrogance comes with the false assumption that normalcyWag’s has beenRevue achieved. The douchebag who considers himself “relatively normal” thinks he is speaking from a centralized location, a place of authority. To the outside observer, however, he simply looks mediocre and smug. Although that mediocrity is sometimes genuine and innate, as natural as having a funny nose or crooked teeth, oftentimes it is an act of almost gracious restraint, a self-humbling, a dumbing- down of one’s persona in order to not appear arrogant or pretentious. I should know, I did this for years. The problem is that this act of humbling rarely coincides with actual humility. And indeed, why should the douchebag be humble? He is at the center and apex of all things. The average American douchebag is a model citizen of our society: masculine, unaffected, well- rounded, concerned with his physical health, moral (but not puritanical or prude), virile without being sleazy, funny without being clever or snide; he is at all times a faithful consumer, an eager participant and a contributor to society. He buys what the mainstream tells him to buy; he listens skeptically to the current hits and ‘The Jonas Brothers reverently to the have already started hits of the past. In wearing keffiyehs.’ all respects he is the Hegelian synthesis of the sixties culture war: taking a hit off his bong during the timeouts in the Packers game, he keeps his eyes on a flashing advertisement for the Marines. If he is high (or poor) enough, who knows, he might just enlist. He is everything he has been taught to be; he does everything society asks of him. And for all of this effort, he assumes that he will be granted a slight, unspoken modicum of respect and admiration. This respect—respect predicated upon normalcy rather than superiority—is exactly what the hipster withholds. wag’s revue 89 What’s worse, the mainstream seems to become more elusive each year. Already, weWag’s can see socialRevue norms drifting towards those of the hipster. Just as the stain of twee, glum nerdiness, which spilled over from the emo movement, is slowly leeching out of the hipster aesthetic and being replaced by a hardier, woodsier tone, so too is the spirit of the frat boy fading from the mainstream, and in its place appears the douche in the skinny jeans. Undoubtedly, decades or years or perhaps even mere months from now, these mentions of specific fashions will look painfully outdated, as frivolous as the 19th century concern over the trend towards increasingly outlandish collars, or a conservative bemoaning JFK’s scandalous decision to forego a hat when stepping out of the oval office. But the unspoken philosophical underpinnings behind the fashion shifts will remain relevant and worth discussing. The problem with this fashion shift is that hipsterism was never designed to be a mainstream movement; in fact quite the opposite, it is functionally incompatible with the mainstream and structurally dependent upon that incompatibility. Its integration into the mainstream would, in all likelihood, result in a kind of cultural schizophrenia. Without a postmodern philosophical backing and resistance to capitalism, hipsterism quickly devolves into just what it always appeared to be to the uninitiated: a shallow, meaningless, vain, hyper-consumerist, self-hating and poisonous system of living. The most obvious flaw of the hipster posture has always been a peculiar and nagging sense of inauthenticity, a self- consciousness and insecurity, which draws them like moths to the seemingly solid and unpretentious aesthetics of the blue- collar and urban poor. When the hipster aesthetic infiltrates the mainstream, this duplicity becomes refracted and magnified. For a visual explanation, a ghost of douchebags future as it were, turn on MTV’s The Real World: Brooklyn, get real close to your television, and stare into the blank visage of Chet, the

90 nonfiction Mormon virgin, the aspiring video jockey, he of the Buddy Holly glasses and faux-hawk Wag’sand v-neck Revue t-shirt. Look into those blank, blinking, wide-set eyes and behold the conflict and inconsistency that lies therein, and you will see where we are headed in the years to come.

The Chasm exists because� our culture is in a state of flux. We are in the process of reevaluating our norms, and as soon as this process is complete, the Chasm will close again and our judgments of other people will firm up. It is not necessarily a bad thing that the same person will appear to be a hipster to one person, a douchebag to another, and something else entirely to himself. It merely means that our definition of “normalcy” is momentarily in question. Like hermit crabs, we are in the process of sloughing off one aesthetic and adopting another. In this case, the mainstream is picking up the style that the hipsters are leaving behind. I imagine a similar thing must have happened in the mid-1970s, when the symbols of the hippies (the shaggy hair and mustaches) began bleeding over into mainstream culture, or in the mid 1990s when the mainstream swallowed the Seattle grunge movement. The inaccuracy of labels at these points of transition highlights how very superficial and unimportant they ultimately are. And yet we still must live in a world where these labels are the basis of snap judgments, and those judgments the preliminary basis of friendship. At this point in an essay, the Greifian move (which is to say the sincere, neo-intellectual move) would be to give some pithy, modest proposal that could conceivably remove us from this mainstream thrust towards superficiality and historical derivativeness, since I fear that they will lead to those other hallmarks of hipsterism—namely, quasi-nihilism and a creeping feeling of inauthenticity. And so I give this humble plea to those wag’s revue 91 of my generation: craft a new kind of mainstream, which is a reaction to rather thanWag’s an imitation Revue of the hipster aesthetic. But somehow this does not seem likely to happen. The wheels are already in motion, the Jonas Brothers have already started wearing keffiyehs, and more and more the people on my television resemble the people I thought were hipsters six months or a year ago. Douchebags have never been good at cultural rebellion anyway, and there is no reason to think they will start now. Perhaps the only solution, then, lies in appealing to the other side. If the hipsters could craft a style that was truly impervious to the co-opting influence of the mainstream, then the well would run dry as it were, and the mainstream would be forced to redefine itself on its own terms. One possible way to achieve this solution has already been suggested, which is to opt for a movement based upon purely personalized expressions of style. The DIY (do-it-yourself) movement is already picking up steam in many parts of the States. Its incarnations are wide-ranging, from DIY fashion websites and one-of-a-kind jewelry to ultra small-scale farming (less pretentiously known as “gardening”) and the newly formed Church of Craft. A movement composed purely of individual styles (with their only defining characteristic being the mode of production), would be equally as resistant to the commodifying effects of capitalism as the hipster’s current bricolage style, and it would be even harder to replicate for economic gain. However, the shift to a purely DIY aesthetic would take an enormous investment of personal time and possibly money, and moreover, it just might not look that good. There’s a reason we allow specialists to manufacture our clothes, because they have devoted their lives to the study of design. That’s what the division of labor is all about: it frees us to live our lives while maximizing the quality of our purchased goods.

92 nonfiction The only other option then—and I propose this purely for the good of the hipster, to Wag’ssave them Revuefrom their feelings of cultural persecution—is a willful laying down of arms. If hipsters truly wish to live a life free of the debasing influence of the mainstream and its pathetic approximations of their meticulously curated style and interests, maybe they will need to try a new tactic: to pick one style and stick with it, to opt for classic timelessness over a kind of protean freshness, and to, in essence, grow stale. (One might also say, grow up.) Just like the hippies and proto- hipsters before them, the hipsters must allow themselves to be swallowed by the mainstream, to stand up in its full light and be passed through its machinations and emerge on the other side, naked and legible to the world, open to ridicule but free from self-consciousness—to in effect, become douche bags. Christ- like, they must sacrifice of themselves so that the rest might find some cultural redemption, and they might find some lasting peace. Indeed, with their beards and long hair and wasted, sunken physiques, many of them already look the part. Now all they must do is raise their arms, hang their heads, and wait for the spear that will set them free. But then again, this would spell death for the hipster movement as we know it. In fact, one might argue that this whole essay has been a trap, baited with promised enlightenment, camouflaged in academic jargon, poisoned with injurious advice. Or, even more precisely, maybe it is a snapshot of that which demands fervently not to be photographed—like the pygmy deep in the jungle suddenly brought to light, given universal visibility in a flash but robbed of its soul. Revenge of the douchebags, indeed.

wag’s revue 93 Wag’s Revue THEEve WEEDSHamilton

Some waiters are serving life sentences. Everyone knows who’s hurting more than they are, everyone knows who’s going to break next. Serving, drinking, serving, drinking. When someone falls off the wagon, they might show up anyway, they might stumble through their side work and hope the manager doesn’t notice their quivering hands. Of course, managers can fall off too. The day I walked from campus looking for a job, George was in his first week as general manager and three days into a bender that didn’t stop to sleep. He lifted his damp cheek from the marble countertop, clutched my résumé but didn’t read it, and hired me even though I’d never waitressed before. My first night, the owner—a calm, giant man with a braid down his back—sent George home to sleep off the booze. One waiter, Billy, made sure I was doing alright because I probably looked as lost as I felt. He recited an autobiographical limerick: “There once was a man from Pawtucket…” and I laughed. Kate lit a menthol in the parking lot behind the restaurant. Exhaling into the late summer air, she scoffed, “Billy? He’s a cokehead and he has a kid. Stay away from that, sweetheart.” When the night’s done and the people are gone, the rules change, the music comes on, uniforms fall off, bottles are momentarily pilfered from behind the bar while the GM is downstairs swearing at the cooks and sliding his fingers down rows of numbers on credit card print outs. One waiter, Steven, passed us all shots of Jack—me, Billy, Chah-lie the Portuguese, bobble-headed baby-faced Jonah and little Max the busser with dark circles under his eyes. We clocked out. We made it to Hot Club down on the water, where it smells like fish and brown liquor. Billy offered me a ride home and I accepted. wag’s revue 94 I awoke and passedWag’s my eyes Revue over his body. His skin was summer-tanned and taut. He had clean features and hair so blonde it was nearly invisible. His eyes were slate blue, mythic, the sort of eyes everyone notices. (“Have you ever looked into his eyes, it was like the first time I heard the Beatles,” Steven joked, quoting Superbad.) Murphy’s Pub down near the Dunkin’ Donuts center right before last call looks like a waitering convention: the Cheesecake Factory crew in all-white, staffs from Federal Hill with black ties, us in white button-downs and jeans. Waiters make good customers: we don’t ask for extra bread, we order another round, we tip 20%. With the waiters, I wore my accent a little differently, laughed along when they complained about how kids from over at the college don’t tip well. We don’t tip well, I realized. Billy kept his hand tight on my thigh. “I hate that, when people say I’m a cokehead,” he said, “I had a phase when I did a lot of drugs, when I didn’t care about anything. But until three months ago, I was going to meetings everyday, working out, taking the EMT course. People talk, but they don’t know what they’re saying.” He said he was going to be a firefighter soon, so I told my cautious, well-brought-up friends that I was dating a firefighter. When he’d pull up to my apartment to pick me up, he’d turn on his emergency lights and lean on the horn. I’d come out and he’d be holding the passenger door ajar for me, yelling “Get in the cah!” He owned a few dozen pairs of Nikes that he kept in their original boxes, only wearing them when we went to dinner or movies and being careful not to scratch them. He insisted on paying, always had a few hundred in twenties folded in his pocket. Once, as we were crossing a puddle-strewn parking lot, he thrust his arm in front me holding me back, and mimed throwing his jacket over the water so I could safely cross. It was

95 nonfiction all a joke: his interests, his Rhody accent, his tenderness. After we made love, he’d shakeWag’s my hand Revue and introduce himself: “Hi, I’m Bill.” But the bouncers and spinners at clubs and pool halls called him “Crypto.” One of the grill chefs at work, (“Matt, call me Splat”) had known Bill since kindergarten and called him Crypto too. It was a nom de plume, a tagger’s alias. Billy drove me into the cuts so I could see his murals. Alleys and lots lined in chainlink, underneath freeways and bridges. He told me how difficult tagging is, being scared, being up high, only getting one try, trying not to get caught. He told me how to steal twelve cans of paint at once. We drove the streets and he pointed out the murals and told me the stories of the street artists who’d been there, telling the histories of control and loss, reading runes of an English dialect people like me don’t read. He showed me his portfolio, polaroids of the letters C-R-Y-P- T-O sprayed twenty-feet tall on the sides of dozens of boxcars and overpasses. The snapshots were ordered chronologically: he grew from a tough adolescent to a handsome twenty-something, then his hairline receded slightly. A photo of his little girl fell out at the end, onto the hardwood floor. I didn’t want to snoop. I put it back in the album. He is an artist, I told myself.

I told Steven everything. He lived a few doors down from me, worked lunch and brunch with me. He’d puff-puff the hollowed filter of a Parliament Light and light it. He was a sweet, self- proclaimed wop with a chinstrap beard. He behaved more like a mayor than a waiter. He spoke in catch-phrases, shook hands, asked folks how they were doing tonight. He was deep into a quarter-life breakdown, had moved back to Providence and taken a waitering job to prove he was worth less than his mechanical engineering degree, which he had decided would never be used. He carried valium on his key-ring, but never took wag’s revue 96 it. He would remove his glasses during a shift when he didn’t want to know how slowly,Wag’s or quickly,Revue time was passing. He called me “doll,” and confirmed that “Bill-boy is a good guy.” I was more comfortable around Steven than Billy. There was a girl in Italy who Steven was in love with. She was going to come back for Christmas, he said, and then he’d tell her how much he loved her.

In Cranston, at 3 A.M., I recorded back-up vocals for one of Tako’s hip-hop tracks. Encased in a padded booth and headphones, I riffed “I just can’t get over you” over and over. Tako was Portuguese, Native American and Puerto Rican, his head of cornrows rocked with religious fervor when he mixed, his fingers flying over knobs. He pulled my voice onto a screen and dissected it, strained it, made it into something I’m not. Singing back into the booth, my voice sounded as if I belonged to that world. Billy sat in the lounge, sketching out the insignia he planned to tag on the studio wall for Tako. They picked a date when he would come over and paint it, plans they had made before and broken. The basement studio was buried in the concrete of what had once been a mill. I sat at a dying upright piano and pressed on the keys. Dust and silverfish stirred in its guts. We climbed from the basement and Billy pulled his low- riding Honda onto I-95. Ninety, one-hundred, one-hundred- ten. I clutched the seatbelt across my torso, and didn’t say a word. I saw oncoming bends of the road like tidal waves, calm at a distance, crushing at approach. We got to my place and he said he should probably just drop me off. I wanted to argue with him, convince him to spend the night with me. He used my bathroom, came out clutching a plastic bag of powder.

97 nonfiction “Brunch is hell,” Steven said, stamping out the first cigarette of the morning. I was stillWag’s up when Revue the birds rose at dawn, lying in bed, yelling at Billy in my mind. I finally fell asleep around six and dreamed him back into the bathroom, dreamed that bag swirling down the toilet. I dreamed him back across the puddle with his jacket thrown across, I dreamed him shaking my hand after making love. I dreamed him into my bed on that first morning, tracing my eyes along his summer-tanned skin. “You in the weeds? You weeded?” the waiters asked. It’s a term that only waiters know and one they don’t use unless they have to. The weeds are when you feel your hands scooping ice into a pitcher but your body has forgotten that it belongs to you and you don’t even know where you’re supposed to walk with the pitcher you’ve just filled because instead you’re remembering that the gorgonzola was supposed to be on the side for 73 and that bald guy wanted a spoon, and as you cross the dining room you can feel the eyes of every person who wants something from you that you cannot possibly give them—to just get some refills for the kids, to tell you the chicken is undercooked, to ask whether the mussel preparation with saffron is gluten free—and just as you are about to put that fifteen person order into the computer a bottle of ketchup explodes red across the tiles and the chef points out that you are retarded and a credit card stripe goes dull and somebody asks if you can break a hundred and your manager circles like a vulture above a rotting corpse and you fantasize about ripping off your fucking apron and walking out the door, perhaps into oncoming traffic, because there is no conceivable way that anyone could save you from the awfulness that is this job. “Like death, the weeds must ultimately be faced alone,” Steven said. I suppose it is like what someone must feel as their mortality swirls inside an erring vehicle, or a body of water sucks them under, or, crouched in a bathroom stall, they wish wag’s revue 98 they could re-locate sobriety. Or when you realize he’s not just a mixer, he’s a dealer. AndWag’s he’s not Revuejust a waiter or an artist he’s—

“What are you doing?” Billy called and asked. “Reading a book.” “You’re wicked smart.”

Billy first took me to his house in the dead of the night. He’d said he had two roommates, but by roommates he meant parents. In the big box windows facing the street his mother had constructed an elaborate scene with miniature trick-or- treaters and papier-mâché jack-o-lanterns that flickered with electric bulbs all night long. He had regular Coca-Cola in the fridge, which he’d bought just for me. He, like most every Rhode Islander I’ve ever known, only drank Diet. And, in the morning he warmed my clothing in the dryer, to protect my skin against the cold air in his childhood room. Nights became this, whispering beneath the drone of his parents’ snores. We’d stop at a Sinclair gas station on the way to Pawtucket the bucket and he’d buy Diet Coke or yellow Vitamin Waters, explaining, “These yellow ones have caffeine, the others don’t.” He’d buy microwavable Tostitos cheese with Doritos, or Cheez-Its. He’d have Lost, Mad Men, The Office, or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia recorded. There were two lace-doily- draped sofas, but we’d share one, pelvis pressed to pelvis, brain dead. We’d watch until five or six. I’d think about how Ihad class at 10:30, but wouldn’t mention it to him, because another episode meant another hour with his body laughing under mine. “My mom made all the curtains,” he told me. They matched the lampshades. She was once almost Miss Rhode Island, but his father had not let her compete. For weeks I didn’t meet his parents, but smelled their menthols and knew the sounds of their sleeping. When we ran out of new episodes, it’d be the Food Network,

99 nonfiction which taught us about mirepoix, the French holy trinity. I told him that cilantro and corianderWag’s are Revue the same, that what they call a burgundy is basically pinot noir. Once, in front of a table of six, he asked me in a quasi-theatrical waiterly-voice, “You’d agree that the Le Grand Pinot Noir would be an acceptable substitute for a burgundy?” It was if he’d explained to the customers that we were sleeping together.

And one night, I was on, working the booths in the back, and Billy walked in with his little girl. Word in the restaurant spread that Billy was there with his daughter, and I watched them walk through and sit in my section. I ran downstairs and outside because I wanted to tell someone that I was terrified. But instead I filled a water pitcher and walked over and said hi to them, wearing a voice that was both waitress and coworker, girlfriend and adult around child. She wore a small pink coat, which he took off tenderly and set on the booth alongside her. He ordered her salad with chicken fingers, cut up her food into small bites, told her to sit up straight. They both colored on the white paper laid across the tablecloth. I watched them from the back, didn’t want to stand next to them and interrupt father- daughter time. They only got three nights a week. He tagged C-R-Y-P-T-O over and over on the table, and she scribbled. “Luna, say hello,” he told her, and I don’t believe she said anything back. She was shy. She was beautiful.

“I’ve been an insta-daddy once too,” Steven told me over a pitcher at Minerva’s (not a great place, but Steven liked to go there to sweetly accost the girl who took phone orders, his attention rousing her customer-less nights. “How’s my favorite Portuguese lady?” he’d ask. She was square-nosed but otherwise not unattractive. She would blush). His tone hinted at the fact that he sympathized with me, but he spoke as if becoming an insta-parent is a phase everyone goes through, and I needed to wag’s revue 100 get over myself. His ex in Georgia hadWag’s two daughters. Revue He referred to her as “the best lay I ever had.” He always gave titles to the girls he’d had: there was “the most beautiful girl in the world,” “the only girl I ever loved,” “the best girl I’ll ever get.” He talked about the girl in Italy every day, referred to her as “the girl I’m gonna marry.” Sometimes I thought about how the girl in Italy maybe didn’t exist. Luna, Billy and I went to Wal-Mart so I could buy white button downs from the little boy’s section, size 16 for $15. White shirts quickly soak up wine, aioli and ink; we all went through them like toilet paper. Luna and I strolled the aisles together, she slipped her tiny hand in mine. One morning I realized that during the night she’d climbed into our bed.

The Minerva’s waitress insisted she was hardly Portuguese; the furthest she’d been away from Rhode Island was Virginia, once. Steven dreamed of Italy. Billy had taken exactly two flights in his life — one to Vegas, for his honeymoon, and one back. Luna had a t-shirt that said Las Vegas. The shirt bothered me. The timeline was never clear to me, but for three months he and his ex-wife had been married. I knew, too, that has wife had been a stripper. It seemed unlikely now that he’d ever take a flight again, “because of the baby.” He always referred to Luna as “the baby,” even though she was almost four. Luna danced with silly rolling eyes to songs in her head. She was proud of her innie belly-button and ran room to room before bath time. She demanded we watch her talent shows, that we play grocery store, that she have one gumball now and one gumball later. She had long mermaid locks and her eyes pooled with tears when he brushed them. “Daddy, excuse me,” she’d scream over and over if he and I tried to hold a conversation while driving. Sometimes he’d reply

101 nonfiction with feigned attention (“Yes, Luna?”), sometimes with sarcasm, (“Oh I’m sorry, Luna, IWag’s forgot you’re Revue the only person in the car”), sometimes there’d be a note of real anger in his voice (“Will you hold on a minute?”). She always wanted the music louder. She didn’t mind his hip-hop, but she preferred her sing-along CD. We drove in his hot little sports car: twenty-seven-year-old father, twenty-year-old girlfriend, and three-year-old daughter, busting the speakers with: Dinah won’t you blow, Dinah won’t you blow, Dinah won’t you blow your horn— For three days Billy’s parents went out of town and I saw his house during daylight. We rose with Luna jumping on the bed, made Folgers and eggs downstairs. When he poured her milk instead of juice she sobbed. She finished her fit and he ironed while she and I watched Curious George. He pulled her little jeans onto her and chided her for getting big. Every time he dropped her at his ex-wife’s mother’s house for the remainder of the week she cried hysterically, grabbed his knees. Sometimes I felt she was jealous of me. Other times I realized that there was no way he would ever love any girl as much as he loved her.

“Cocaine is a marvelous drug,” Steven said, “But I can’t touch the stuff.” It was because of the panic attacks, same reason he never worked nights. I got used to them. Every once in a while we’d be out somewhere when he’d suddenly turn to me and ask if we could get out of here, his face pale and voice low and shaky, the valium in the key ring rattling around. We’d leave together and I was his friend. I came to Steven upset when Billy disappeared. Stopped answering my calls, stopped calling me back. Every minute I would invent another reason to call him, to see if he answered this time. What was the word Rhode Islanders use for submarine sandwich? “What’d you expect?” he tried to sound tough, but I knew he was sympathetic. “You’re young,” he finally said. He called wag’s revue 102 himself “nearly-thirty,” though he was just twenty-five: “I’m staring down thirty likeWag’s it’s a barrel Revue of a gun,” he’d say. He pissed on someone’s stoop. He broke his empty beer bottle against a bus stop. He held my hand and swung it back and forth as we went running to the next bar.

With as little warning as when he’d left, Billy showed up again, mumbling something about his phone battery, a stray wandering out of a wild stint in the woodwork. His eyes were small and dark. He laced up some fresh Nikes, held open the door for me, bought me a nice Chinese dinner at a restaurant in Massachusetts that advertised its fresh sushi on late night TV. He was back but I’d caught worry. Whenever I suspected that he wasn’t calling me back, my thoughts got angry. I’d scrub Luna’s magic marker tattoos from my legs in the shower, take the graffiti picture of my name he’d done off my wall and hide it in my bottom drawer. I’d delete his number, knowing I’d get it back when he called.

His mother’s front windows were lined with pilgrim figurines, turkeys, and cornucopias of ears of corn and squash weaved from raffia. Luna was still talking about Halloween. She didn’t realize it was over, because no one had taken her trick-or- treating. The easiest way to get Luna to go somewhere was to race. Luna always won the races and Billy always got dead last, panting and collapsing in pantomimed face-plants. We put on jackets and raced through the crisp brown leaves at Slater Park Zoo. Fanny the elephant had spent thirty years of her life chained to a barn there. Billy remembered Fanny, remembered boy scouts, remembered his brother-in-law who was fatally stabbed at a bar down the street. The plastic tunnels electrified all of our blonde hair. I wondered if the low-talking thirty-something mothers with state-of-the-art strollers and protective sunglasses thought

103 nonfiction we were a family. Did I look like Luna’s mother or her sister? Did Billy look old enough,Wag’s mature Revue enough to have kids? Because we always exchanged the same stories twice, Steven told me about how he was an insta-daddy in Georgia again in the back of his Turismo. He’d bought the Turismo off this kid Barnabe who parked it in the lot behind the restaurant, paid $700 cash for it, which meant he’d given up medical insurance for the rest of the year. It was low-riding, maroon inside and out. Steven owned four cars, but only drove one of them. The Ford was the everyday car, the Rabbit was for summers, the Camry sat in his grandparent’s driveway on Federal Hill and the Turismo was his point of vanity. A couple of drinks and we’d go out to the Turismo, turn on eighties rock radio, light cigarettes. “I could do anything to this car,” he’d brag, “I could take a dump in it, I could light it on fire. Nobody would care because it’s mine. I’d say to them, ‘do sumfin ‘bout it!’” He could do anything in the Turismo except drive it. It had no plates or insurance; it sat in a lot shielded by bushes. “Apra il libro,” Steven said, as he propped the trunk open with a tree branch. He was taking Italian classes so he could woo the girl he was going to marry, but the only phrase he could ever remember was “Open the book.” Tracks of snow melted across the warming glass. We laid in the back and fantasized about driving to Savannah, to San Francisco, to somewhere. Steven spent most of his time planning escape routes. All the waiters did. Wiping down hundreds of pieces of hot wet silverware they’d discuss how much they owed, how long it was going to take, where they were going to go when they got free. I flew home for Thanksgiving. Billy called me after I’d landed. I was in the car with my father on 580. The City glistened over the Bay’s late autumn mists. “Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco treat…” Billy sang into the phone. At home, I spent a lot of time standing in the bathroom, running bathwater. I went to my wag’s revue 104 hairdresser and had him cut off my hair. My parents asked how the firefighter was. I Wag’ssaid he was Revue fine.

“No hair!” Billy yelled from his window as I stood outside TF Green Airport, breathing into the collar of my thin coat. Billy’s mother had four kinds of store-bought pies congealing in the fridge, and instant mashed potatoes stirred with peppered ground beef. He nuked bowl after bowl as he talked, his eyes were small and dark. He said he’d slept through Thanksgiving. “If somebody wants me to take an eight table section, I will. If I have a bag of blow, I’ll finish it, even if I don’t want it.” He said. “I just get bored, I’m just never content with anything.” We all think such conditions are unique to ourselves, I wanted to say. “I’m gonna go visit Bill and Bob,” he told me, euphemistic AA lingo for climbing back on the wagon. “Hi my name is Billy and I-I-I-m baaaack,” he said chuckling. He stroked my skin, looked at photos of my childhood home, my dog, my family. He paused at the snapshot of an incarnadine sunset over my grandfather’s porch at the lake. I told him about the slopes, the cabin, the water so cold you couldn’t breathe. I said he could fly out for Christmas, if he wanted. I told him I had a free ticket he could use. I pictured explaining to my parents, or to anyone but Steven, what exactly Billy was. I remembered standing outside some dealer’s house at four in the morning while Billy threatened to kill him. I remembered Luna dropping four nickels into a porcelain piggy bank and saying wishes, “For Chuck-e-Cheese, for Daddy to kiss Mommy…” He was going to visit Bill and Bob. He didn’t have a problem with coke, just coke when he was drunk, so he was going to just give up drinking. He was going to just give up brown liquor, because brown liquor made him violent. He was just going out after work, but just for a nightcap. He was going to a sick show this weekend, could I take his Saturday night shift? If he saved an extra two-hundred a month he could get a studio apartment. 105 nonfiction His parents liked having him and Luna there. He was going to have enough moneyWag’s to start tryingRevue to get a firefighting job, maybe June. Maybe next year. He always gained a little weight in winter.

The windows had angels. The Food Network told us everything there is to know about struffoli, a fried Italian holiday treat neither of us had ever tasted. He molded his body into the sofa, didn’t bother with Luna, let her bother me. For the first time, I mentioned to one of my friends at Brown that I was dating a coke addict with a kid.

Steven wrapped his big hairy body around me. His boa constrictor’s cage lamp lit his room up red. “You know when you’re surfing, and you’re tired, and you just get that one last dinky wave, and ride it all the way to the edge? That’s what you need to do,” he said. Steven was counting down the days until the girl in Italy flew to him. He trimmed his chinstrap beard.

“How’s my favorite Portuguese lady?” Steven said, and the Minerva’s girl blushed, wished us a happy New Year. She grabbed us a pitcher before we could even ask for it. “You are an angel, how do you always know what I want?” Steven said happily and turned to me with a look of blank sadness: “She didn’t come home for Christmas. Or at least I didn’t hear from her. I sent her flowers but she didn’t call.” I told him Ihad thought that might happen all along. He looked at me with the same stupid eyes I’d looked at him with for so many months, and said, “Really?” We finished our drinks and then two more and flick-flicked our Parliament Lights. We were sopped in feeling like victims, of getting what we deserved, of having known better. Outside, Providence spit out whatever kind of weather it wanted, rain or ice, sleet or slush, and the sun gave up and set in the early afternoon. wag’s revue 106 Wag’s Revue

RECEDE

Alison Fairbrother

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Tea Shop Press © 1999 $13.95

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All works cited are copyright of their respective publishers.

wag’s revue 113 FICTION

Image courtesy of Janine Cheng Wag’s Revue BEOWULFMichael Paul Simons

Listen, I tell the girls, I am the whole damn assassination. I’m Oswald perched like a patsy, sixth floor, Texas School Book Depository. I’m Jack Kennedy in the car startled by my own magic bullet reenactment. I’m the CIA, the Russians, the Cubans. I’m every bit of brain on Jackie’s pink coat. I’m Jackie reaching out to comfort myself. The Mob, the Secret Service, the grassy knoll. I’m Jack Ruby waiting out that bright, beautiful Dallas day. I am Cecile B. Zapruder filming the whole fucking thing. So after five days gallivanting not even a caffeine rush can spare you two girls from your crashing. Britney, what goes up must also fall back. Drug use isn’t rocket science, sweetheart— hell, it’s not even riding a rocket. A monkey can do it. They’ve proved a monkey can do it. They’ve proved a monkey can take a capsule into space, come back and pose for Life magazine. What a monkey can’t do—what you can’t do, Montana—is comprehend that payload you’re sitting on: rocket boosters blasting, one after the other. You are merely feather-weight accessories attending my brave journey. Let’s not forget, girls, this is about glory—the boys of bygone days had glory, and by-God, I won’t die without my fair share. This Taco Bell isn’t safe. There’s a freak out there in the shadows, lying in wait. But what do you girls care as long as the soft-drink refills are free? Well, I’m here, and I will stop him. I brought a ball-peen hammer just in case—but I’m not going to need it. I’ll tear him apart bare-handed. Did you know I know the night manager here? Hello, Maggie. Are you operating your Taco Bell effectively? Why are there so many strong-arm robberies around? There’s wag’s revue 115 a patrol car parked outside the Exxon across the street—but do you think the cowboy insideWag’s is going Revue to protect you? Your tacos aren’t safe. Are you listening to me, Maggie? She’s back there. Or maybe she’s not. I’ll defend the Taco Bell if she won’t. I must say I’m disappointed. They don’t teach courage these days. Maggie was my ex-girlfriend—I don’t know where we stand now. I remember sketching out a perpetual motion machine in her sociology notebook. Just so. Perfect. Not just theory. I wonder if she still has it. Britney, fill out an application. Montana has money, but you’re going to need a job soon. Free bean burritos. Free drink refills. Advancement opportunities. So you’re sleepy. So you have a headache. You know that woodpecker outside my bedroom window? He keeps at it— six in the morning. You’ll hear no complaint from me. He’s got a perfectly reasonable reason to be out there knocking his head into the tree. It’s a job. It’s his place. I have curtains and magnanimity. Pay attention to these life lessons, sweetheart. Why do you waste your life away? Apply yourself. Get a job. You have little else to do and nowhere else to go. Factories are shutting down, packing their bags, and moving like missionaries to countries you’ve never heard of. Mexico. China. India. I have job skills, but what do you have? Seventeen-year-old good looks? Britney, love yourself just as you are. You don’t need designer lipstick to look beautiful to me. Your being young and impressionable is enough. Look, at least consider getting a job. Wake up. Turn your head toward the door. SLOWLY. Don’t make them think you’re watching, Montana. See the ruler markings on the door? If you decide to steal something, babygirl, they’re going to know how tall you are. Their cameras are filming us. Should something freaky happen, there’ll be an official recording.

116 fiction Well ladies, in the beginning I boasted that if I wasn’t President of the UnitedWag’s States by Revue age 35, I would jump off the Hurston Bridge. So you see I’m ambitious. At 34, I decided, out of the blue, fuck it. Fried eggs and Nancy Reagan notwithstanding. I had lost heart. Your dumping me all those years ago, Maggie, didn’t help. There is no real future in television repair or satellite installation. Mind you I knew full well going in the dangers, which is more than I can say for these two dummies. They’ll deny they’ve fallen into the well, and they’ll deny the water’s chest deep and rising. Make a wish. These girls like to party and care nothing about my noble experiment. As long as I drive them where they need to be, they are usually good about finding money, or at least Montana is. These girls keep me company, but they don’t even know my real name. I told the girls to call me Beowulf. That’s before I remembered that Grendel was the monster, and by that time we’d already partied several times, so of course it was too late to change monikers. I regret nothing. So you’ll want to know about my transformation. It was beautiful—it was like how everybody knows where they were standing when Kennedy was shot. I demanded my undoing to be symbolic. I said a little prayer. “Ashes to Ashes.” We listened to David Bowie and waited for this guy. I smoked a cigarette. We watched Apollo 13. I smoked another cigarette. We burned candles and read tarot cards. I forget how long we waited or whose house we were at. My first snort—an iron-fisted suckerpunch—and then a flash, apparently official, tore through my bloodstream. At 1:00 pm Central Standard Time I was no longer who I was. There is nothing I want more than to be another thing. In vino veritas. In taco tacitoss. At first the girls called me professor because I knew so much. Anybody who can answer a single Jeopardy! question would impress them. I am twice their age and infinitely smarter. The wag’s revue 117 brighter one—Britney believe it or not—had a lightbulb moment when she realized thatWag’s by adding Revue their ages together you got mine. I breathe life into these two girls. They read Bukowski because of me. Billy Burroughs. Denis Johnson. Britney, Montana, you two and that baby boy you have been fucking don’t know half of the hell you’re up against. You think you have will power. You tested your will power to prove you had it. Well of course you think you do and that’s the beauty of the whole thing. As long as there’s some guy in a house somewhere cooking down Mexican cough syrup there’s always going to be some pretty illusion that you have it under control. It’s a postmodern spin on the teenage trip—you two are gorgeous—that you can pretend to be teenagers when in fact you are nothing of the kind. What I love most about you is how many bean burritos you buy but don’t eat. How many sodas you drink, my pretties, and never ever seem to gain weight. You are fearless and you should have fear. If you are dreaming right now, I sincerely hope your dreams are nightmares. Dear Britney, dear Montana, sooner or later something will happen. The life of each body will be crushed. If I wasn’t loitering at this Taco Bell I would loiter at another. There are so many. Nothing, nothing, nothing out there prevents the slow approach of that maniac. I realize you are not listening, Maggie, but really perhaps you should. To be perfectly honest, I’ve considered robbing this Taco Bell myself. No offense intended. Before we came, we had plans to rob the place. I drafted them myself. Imagine our rushing in as a mob, storming the counter. Yes, we could rob you. But then you’d know as we left how tall we are. You could be more responsible, Maggie. I don’t think you are a good nightshift manager. I don’t think the Taco Bell executives would approve. They ought to see how tall you stand

118 fiction as you walk out the door later tonight. If you walk out tonight… I have the weaponryWag’s and the Revue brute strength to overtake anybody. Also, I have the brain of thirty geniuses. And it’s that guy out there you should be wary of—the one you hear about on the police scanner. He’s rising up out of the thick fen of night. The danger is real, yet I’m the only one with eyes open enough to see. Five days wide awake and now in the plastic booth of the Taco Bell my blondies sleep like sweet potatoes. And where are you? The little girls sleep. They show no concern for desperados or your personal safety. They are peaceful, law-abiding. But where are you? A fog born of showers conceals so you can’t see the Exxon station across the road. Something walks through the fog. Approaching slowly. I am not afraid of this wretched creature. Montana, tell Maggie how the earth is 6,000 years old. That’s what good Christian girls believe, right? Giants once walked the earth. And dinosaurs coexisted with man. What did your father teach you? That God was fucking with us when it came to the dinosaurs, sneaking bones under rocks? The whole story of humankind is one of depravity. We were once nothing. Do you know that? We came into being like a big bang in your mother’s crotch. Then we evolved—you can trace our degraded form right back to Cain. We are still marked. Yet, as a species we can create complex social orders like the Taco Bell. Life must be a miracle! He’s here! I see him—mostly I see my reflection in the window, but he is behind it—he’s walking up the parking lot. Approaching slowly. I am ready. If he steps one foot through that door I will tear him from limb to limb. Wake up. You two should record this for future generations. My only hope for survival is to speak directly to the surveillance camera, hope my message will ride microwaves into the distant reaches, touch every surface of the universe like a gentle breath. wag’s revue 119 All is vanity. All is breath. Fame and immortality. Distant and future generations willWag’s replay my Revue saga. Like the reruns of I Love Lucy. I will be known and live forever. Wait for applause. I choose to use. I choose to use and do the other things—not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because I am the exception that proves the rule. Because my only living peer is John Glenn. We have balls, blasting into orbit strapped inside a suicide capsule—knowing the pipedream chance of making it back to earth. I do not waste my time. I am not afraid of doom. This morning—no, not this morning, but recently—I woke up in a bed. Fresh linens. And that crack of light wedged between the curtains. The woodpecker. I’d like to invite that woodpecker inside. He seems to be a good finder of things. I never liked living here. I never liked living here. I never liked living here. My earliest memory not lost to oblivion: stretching my hand up into the black glove of space. Reaching and reaching. Jumping up. Laughing. Climbing anything I could find. Laughing. Laughing and crying. Crying and screaming. Shouting. Shouting and gasping. Casting a net of blame. Furious. Feverish. A porch light bleaching out my one best shot. Belting out inconsolable anguish. No—there’s no way this metaphor will hold. I’m stuck in this capsule shooting ten thousand miles per hour back to earth and there’s no way this metaphor will hold. The rivets are groaning. There are no reverse rockets. I’m man versus machine versus science itself. I told Maggie that. Why aren’t you listening? There are no more heroes. I am the last. I am John Glenn. My reentry will burn brighter than any ball of fire—it will be the blinding confusion that is God. You will know my name. You will know my name. Already I smell the bright red phosphorous breath of my undoing. Pause. Then silence.

120 fiction I see God. Thrown on my backWag’s and facing Revue the star-ridden void of space, God appears immaculate and glorious and He sings “Stardust.” He sings for Kennedy, He sings for Me. Again silence. The hwaet, hwaet, hwaet of my heart beating. A suggestion: “I’m still here.” Godspeed, John Glenn, and good luck.

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The following three works—“One Last Drive”, “The Assessment” and “Father”—are excerpts from a text/image collaboration between musician and photographer JOHN SELLEKAERS and writer BRIAN EVENSON, with the latter writing short pieces in response to the former’s photographs. It is their third collaboration, the first being a spoken word/music CD (http://www.discogs.com/release/402267) and the second being music with an accompanying story (http://www.discogs.com/release/608482).

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ONE LAST DRIVE Later, when the oil reserves ran out, many of us took one last drive in our vehicles and then abandoned them where they died, slowly walking home or slowly plodding forward in whatever direction the car was pointing. Certain people began to think of themselves as their car’s spirit, straying farther and farther away from the deceased chassis, connected to it by a thin strand of thought, until they separated completely from it to become a sort of ghost. Still others found themselves unwilling to leave their vehicles at all. They remained at the wheel, motionless, staring out the windshield. Over time they passed from the motionlessness of life to the motionlessness of death, and their bodies slowly mummified. We know better than to do anything but simply leave them there, simply let them be.

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THE ASSESSMENT They had formulated, so they claimed, a revolutionary and all- new concept for the open-air urinal. Sergeant Douglas, though on leave, was quick to volunteer for the test run. Standing at a discreet distance, we eagerly awaited his assessment.

wag’s revue � 124 Wag’s Revue

FATHER Nights, we kept father confined to his room by draping the walls with black velvet curtains to hide the door—which in his sleep-addled state he did not entirely remember existed—and by hanging the drawing of the girl on the window. He would get up, not even half awake, grope around in the dark until he found the flashlight, and then make for the window. When he caught sight of the girl’s image, he would give a shriek. Then we would

125 fiction come and turn on the lights to find him tangled in the curtains. We calmed him—sometimesWag’s vodka Revue was enough, sometimes we had to resort to tranquilizers, sometimes there was nothing for it but to beat him with sticks until he lost consciousness. In the morning father was always his old, arrogant self: blunt, cheerfully deranged, in command of even the minute comings and goings of the house, his domain. He ordered us about our tasks and, when dissatisfied, jeered at us or fixed upon us his reproachful and imperious eye or sentenced us to a few hours’ confinement in the darkened cellar. But at night, everything was different for him. How we had had the foresight to draw the girl’s portrait before her disappearance we did not know. But we knew we couldn’t have done without it.

wag’s revue 126 Wag’s Revue PHANTOMRaleigh VIBRATIONS Holliday

After an unbearable night of dreamless half-sleep, interrupted by bouts of nervous vomiting, I awoke with new resolve. First thing in the morning, I left Amy a letter under her door, handwritten, which I never do:

Our prolonged separation has sent me spiraling into a cavernous depression. I think I may be going insane, and it’s very exciting.

Like everything I write, it was a wild exaggeration, and completely honest. She responded later in the day with a text message:

Let’s go to the mall.

We were walking down together, arms locked, when a car swerved by. Some joker in the back seat leaned out the window and yelled at me. I couldn’t tell if he said, “The wild man is about to puke,” or maybe, “That woman is a bag of prunes.” That woman being Amy, I guess. She did not resemble prunes, physically or cosmically. Physically she carried the slim curves of a pear slice, the blush of a mango—very gorgeous—but cosmically I had always pinned her as dragon fruit. “If you were a fruit, what would you be?” I asked her. “Freddie Mercury,” she said. “I’ve always thought of you as dragon fruit.” I said. “Does that mean I strike you as dry-skinned and fire- breathing?” “It’s fruit from cacti. Exotic. Delicious. Only blooms at night. Native Americans call it ‘Queen of the Night.’” “So now I’m a night-walking tramp.” wag’s revue 127 “I meant dragon fruit in the cosmic sense,” I said. “You know, cosmically. It was supposedWag’s to be Revue a compliment?” I shrugged. “I prefer sunlight,” she said.

Later that day, I was meeting� with the guru Mitch in his room. His dorm is set up like an opium den: cheap, bare mattresses rest over dingy white-brown shag carpeting in such a pattern as to cover as many wine stains as possible. The beds are often populated with incapacitated strangers, who Mitch refers to as his ‘dreamscape cosmonauts.’ Tapestries depicting tribal hunts line the walls; wooden beads dangle over the windows and door. Tiny piles of shit pellets pepper the carpet, left by the two camouflaged snow rabbits that roam stealthily about the room. A blue plastic Fischer Price kindergarten work table occupies center stage, supporting a hefty stack of books on hypnosis and lucid dreaming. A lawn chair draped with a rainbow-patterned afghan flanks the table—Mitch’s throne. “The mall?” he asked. “I know,” I said, collapsing onto a mattress. “The belly of the beast. A misanthrope like me should never have gone.” “Embrace it,” Mitch said. “The corporate commons will lift you places not even the most twisted acid trip can.” He settled back into his lawn chair, propped his feet up on the table. He wore a pair of canvas moccasins with fake Nike swooshes stitched on their sides. “I only went so I could spend time with Amy,” I said. “I hadn’t seen her in a month, and I think that might have something to do with my recent illness.” “Indeed,” Mitch said. “She’s a beautiful creature. Curative. You should study her habits closely.” “I would like to get to know her better.” “When my cosmonauts say that, they mean they want to copulate while experimenting with mind-expanding drugs.”

128 fiction “Something like that would be nice,” I said. “But also, you know, something less ephemeral.”Wag’s Revue “Hence the necessity of studiousness,” Mitch said. “Capture her essence in your waking life, and you may reproduce it ad infinitumelsewhere.” Mitch is a squirrelly guy, but some might say handsome— boney in a sleek kind of way. He’s always wearing button-up corduroy shirts, tailored himself, that entirely lack buttons. His chest is pale and hairless. “We should arrange for a preliminary dreamscape encounter,” he said. He plucked a thick, worn paperback from atop his work station—The Lucid Reader—and, with the elongated nail of his right pinky finger, began flipping through the pages. “If you’re trying to concoct a wet dream for me, you heinous dreamland pimp, I’ll have to politely decline,” I said. “I prefer love in the real world.” “What is reality but synapses firing in the brain?” Mitch said. “Dreaming is as real as anything else. And in a lucid dream, anything is possible. You’re in complete control. Coitus is no longer confined by the laws of physics, or the trappings ofa society arrested by prudence.” “Just because you can only find affection in your own little fantasy world—” “Back flip fucking,” Mitch said. “Unicycle sex. Fucking on the moon. Fucking while flying. Fucking while fucking, and fucking that fucking—that’s meta-fucking. Everything in spades. It’s a lifestyle choice,” Mitch said. “A vessel of transcendence. Don’t miss your boat.” “I don’t dream anymore,” I said, “so I suppose I’ll have to find some other ship to the sublime.” “Nonsense. You may not remember your dreams, but you must dream. The brain requires it. You should keep a dream journal. Write in it just as you wake up, that’s when you remember best. It’ll help you keep tabs on your sanity.” wag’s revue 129 “I haven’t dreamt in years,” I said, suppressing a yawn. “I’ve just been living the dream.”Wag’s Revue Mitch reached into a drawer and pulled out a curled-open can of what looked to be albino carrots. He picked one out, snapped it in half, and then dipped it in a jar of snowy goop. I craned my neck and gave him an inquisitive look. “Hearts of palm dipped in marshmallow fluff,” he said. “A bizarre, abrupt shift in diet can sometimes hotwire the mind, lubricate lucidity.” “Hotwire the mind?” “It’s not escapism,” Mitch said. “It’s engage-ism.” “Whatever,” I said. “Throw me a bite.” Mitch tossed me the other half of the heart, dressed in fluff. I chomped it down in a single bite. It tasted as if someone who had just consumed a gallon of vinegar and a pound of powdered sugar was pissing down my throat. The revolting flavor combo jackknifed my brain, turned my stomach on its ass. A severe, latent queasiness awoke inside me—one with which, of late, I had been frequently and inexplicably afflicted. “So, how was it?” I heard Mitch ask. “It’s fucking disgusting” I gagged. “I think I’m going to puke.” I could barely see through the fog of nausea, its noxious body entering my nostrils and striking deep into my guts. Employing a technique Mitch taught me, I closed my eyes, breathed slowly, evacuated my mind—meditating in an attempt to quell the insurgency rising against my throat. “No,” Mitch said with a chasmic echo. “I meant the mall, your romp with Amy. How was it?” His voice was submerged. I focused on the void. My inner monologue flattened into a meadow of snow. The mattress exhaled beneath me. My spine uncurled an inch. And then, with frightening lucidity, I felt the fingers of an impossibly smooth hand caress my cheek—the gesture of a phantom presence. I shot straight up and looked right at Mitch. “It was stranger than even the most twisted acid

130 fiction trip,” I said. Wag’s Revue

Coming from campus, the� first sign of the mall is its giant coliseum of stacked parking spots, plotted like graves. I couldn’t help but imagine being buried alive beneath the cement, chunks of gravel filling my lungs. I felt obscenely at peace with the idea. Amy squeezed my hand. “Isn’t there some children’s story about a group of kids living in a shopping mall for a year?” she asked. I considered the prospect of a year’s internment. My organs started trading places. “Please, not now,” I moaned to myself, groping at my stomach. “What’s that?” Amy asked. As a distraction, I dug deeper into my ruminations on cement entombment, imagining myself waking breathless and sweating in the pitch black. I would be terrified at first, but then I would feel—with my nose, my fingertips, and the knuckles of my toes—all the protective walls of my casket cordoning me from intruders. “Nobody could survive a year in there,” I said. “I would love it,” Amy said. “I could get in good with the Hard Wok Cafe people and live off free samples of orange chicken, nap on those space-aged mattresses in the Better Sleep Store, teach myself to play the piano on that synth in Radio Shack, read junk mags in the Brookstone massage chairs. At night, I could even get a little intimate with one of those handheld vibrating neck massagers.” My nausea mounted. “Would you really want to be surrounded by all those walls?” “Think about all the people I would meet,” Amy said. “I could steal away with one of those handsome Abercrombie employees and make wild, sinful love in a dressing room.” I pictured Amy in a cramped stall straddling some thick- wag’s revue 131 chested, blonde-locked narcissist who cocked his neck to stare at himself in the mirrorWag’s and lick hisRevue teeth clean while Amy went to work on him. The image wrenched me from my concrete womb, stuck my forehead with a syringe of angst. I rubbed my temples and groaned. “Is something wrong?” Amy asked, poking my nose with her pinky finger. “I never know what you’re thinking.” “Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work?” I asked. “I guess,” Amy said. “But you could strive a little harder for clarity of self-expression. Nobody likes mixed-up signals.” “Clarity,” I said. Amy nodded. She took me by the elbow and tugged me along towards the mall’s main entrance. The turbulent throng of shoppers thickened around us—an undifferentiated ocean of human color and noise. The backs of my ears, my palms, and my knee caps began to sweat as foreign bodies passed dangerously close to my own. I looked straight up as we strode towards the towering brass-rimmed doors, and, as an alternative escape, began to imagine the opposite of a live burial. I saw myself roused on mile-high stilts, far above the harassment of human glances, but deep into the grasp of vertigo. The only way I could save myself would be to look straight ahead, walk right into the middle of the ocean, where it would eventually be deep enough for me to dive from my stilts without injury. Then I would assemble a makeshift raft from the wood and endure a hermitic, hardscrabble life, surviving off the tightfisted offerings of the sea. To preserve my sanity, I would use the excess stilt lumber to craft myself a companion—a simple, wooden woman, whose gaze would never implicate me in anything. I understood the impossibility of the scenario. The sheer weight of a mile-long stilt would prevent me from lifting it to take even a single stride. I would have to get someone I could trust to steady the beams as I climbed down—down into a

132 fiction boisterous, salivating crowd—or else resign myself to fits of lightheadedness and theWag’s inevitable Revue fall… “Freeze,” Amy said, jabbing me playfully in the kidney. “What are you thinking about right now?” I looked down abruptly, dizzying myself. Everything seemed distant. “The plummet,” I said, inelegantly loud. The crowd about me swiveled for a beat—a patchwork of single eyes peaking over lapels. Amy’s face, strangely grieved, was locked right onto mine. Barely audible murmurs reached the back of my mind. “You’re as pale as a ghost,” Amy said, her eyes widening. I felt accused of some horrible crime I had yet to commit. My insides did a back flip and I found myself hugging a stair rail, vomiting over its side into a dogwood tree. The liquid was thick like mucus, and spattered loudly onto a crotch of roots. As soon as I was emptied, an incredible sense of complacence steadied my breathing, renewed the world around me. Amy held me by the waist. “Oh, god, I’m sorry,” I said, almost laughing, for some reason, at the sheer volume and force of my heaves. “I really am. I don’t know what happened.” “We should head back,” Amy said, softly touching my cheek. “No, no,” I said. “I’m feeling fine now. I’m great, I’m ready. I was just, you know, seasick or something.”

“I send mixed signals?” I �asked. “You send mixed signals,” Mitch said. He got up from his lawn chair and lowered himself into the lotus position on a mattress next to mine. “In the dreamscape as well as waking life, one must cultivate lucidity.” “What the hell are these signals? Signals about what?” I asked. “About everything,” Mitch said. “This is a bad era for wag’s revue 133 equivocation, man. We post-humans are acutely aware of our semiotic selves. ClarityWag’s is a must.” Revue “Fucking clarity,” I said. “I don’t pretend that things are any more confounding than they really are.” “Everything’s pretend. Everything’s real.” “And I don’t pretend to be anyone other than my sickly self.” “Or maybe you’re very good at pretending to be someone who doesn’t pretend to be anyone other than his sickly self,” Mitch said. “And yet even that notion would presuppose a pure, static ontology of self to appeal to.” “Are you actually trying to make sentences with your words right now?” “We live in a world of signifiers,” Mitch said, stretching his arms above his head. “What do you signify?” I stood up. “And what the goddamn piss hell,” I said, “is that shit even supposed to mean?” “It means you must mean something. It means you’ve got to get the meaning of your signals straight.” I tugged at my cheeks. “Well I never mean to mean much of anything.” “Intentionality has nothing to do with mixed meanings,” Mitch said. “Regardless of whether you mean them to be or not, your meanings are mixed.” “Well fucking shit, man, my mind is mixed! I’m fucking mixed!” “Chex Mix mixed.” “Mixed,” I said, flailing my arms, “in my mind, is where. About everything.” “Pub Mix mixed,” Mitch said. “Pretzels and peanuts.” “You’re not helping,” I said. “Am I supposed to be helping?” Mitch asked. “Yes!” I nearly hollered, collapsing back onto my mattress. “Then shut your face hole for a moment and take a dose.” Mitch sidled towards me across his mattress until our tuck-

134 fiction legged knees were nearly touching. He reached over and grasped my forehead. “Relax yourWag’s thoughts,” Revue he said. “I’m going to mine the depths.” “Christ, Mitch,” I said. “I can’t be hypnotized.” “A dubious claim.” I sighed, shut my eyes. “Fine,” I said. “Just keep an eye on the canary in the colliery.” Mitch began forcefully massaging my brow. “Get settled,” he said. His fingers were freezing cold, fabulously firm and defined. I began my meditation. I felt as if I could, by focusing all my mental capacities, discern every minute groove of Mitch’s fingerprints against my skin, and the infinitesimal gaps between. As the cool, ellipsoidal kneading continued against my temples, the emptiness of each inter-print rimple seemed to expand outward into space, allowing my thoughts to leak along their rivulets and acquire an odd, unsuppressed numbness. And yet, the pressure of Mitch’s digits was increasingly vice-like and tyrannical. “You’re feeling sleepy, serene,” he said. “No, honestly, I’m not.” “Meet me half way, you fuck.” “Fine, I’m feeling sleepy, but certainly not serene. Can’t you ease up on the vice grip, Robocop?” “Let yourself fade away entirely.” “I’ve been trying for years.” “Let’s tap the ores of your unconscious.” His hands tightened further around my head. My skull felt like a tender melon being ruptured and violently evaporated. I squinched my eyes as they began to tear. “What do you want to know?” I winced. “No,” Mitch said. “The question is: what do you want to know?” The vice grip suddenly ceased. I opened my eyes just in time to see, through a blur of saline, Mitch’s open palm, wound fully back, swoop in with a piñata club’s celerity and connect wag’s revue 135 emphatically with my cheek—a brain-boggling slap. “Shit!” I yelped. Wag’s Revue “Quick,” Mitch said. “With authority, ask the first question that comes to mind.” An eerie, dormant numbness stayed my protest. “Where is my phantom woman now,” I asked, “with her sweet wooden ways?”

After spending forty fruitless� minutes in the seven and a half section of Payless, Amy was prodding me to lead the way to the next store. “It’s your turn to shop,” she said. “You can’t come to the mall and not buy anything.” “But that was precisely my plan,” I said, “and I never make plans.” She started pinching my ass. “Giddy up,” she said. “Come on, it’ll be fun.” So I walked next door. It was Gap Kids. “Let’s buy booties,” Amy said excitedly, and went wending into the racks of clothes. She left me alone in front of a giant, terrifying photo-ad. There were two young boys pictured, no older than six or seven. They were dressed identically: sharp blue-striped dress shirts under preppy dark-navy sweater vests, pleated khakis with a stiff ironed crease down each leg, slim leather belts and shining leather loafers. They both wore idiotic smiles, and as a kicker, had croquet mallets propped pompously on their shoulders. I imagined the photo in motion: the first kid pivoted sideways, wound back his croquet mallet, widened his idiotic grin, and then cracked the shit out of the other one’s jaw, knocking it clean off. A trail of shattered teeth smiled skyward. Still grinning maniacally, the pre-school aggressor stepped from his frame, right onto the floor in front of me, and stared straight into my

136 fiction mouth. I was just about to fleeWag’s when RevueAmy broke my daze. She sprang between the boy and me, holding tiny pink booties. She looked at my face, frowned. “Do I dare ask what you’re thinking?” “You really shouldn’t,” I said. She threw the booties to the floor and grasped both of my hands into hers. She stood on her tip toes, leaned in to kiss my nose, then bobbed back. She turned my hands over and began thumbing at my open palms. “I’m going to read your mind,” she said. “I’ll get a direct line to your inner monologue, the ticker tape of your consciousness. So start printing clearly.” “Clarity,” I said. She nodded. She took a long breath through her nose, closed her eyes, and squeezed my hands. I stared at her, looked her up and down. She stood slim, seductive, all of her curves sassily- wrapped and vibrantly accessorized—an outfit with the color and shine of a candy machine. In my mind, with a pair of phantom hands, I began slowly unraveling the fashion from her body: a lavender silk scarf worked loose and fell lightly from her shoulders; the slim straps of a bright yellow tank top were snipped in half and yanked up over her head, spilling her straight black hair from its bun; her bra, red lace, unfastened of its own accord and fluttered away; the zipper of her jeans started the slow descent earthward. Then there was a swelling, somewhere in the back of my brain or the bottom of my gut, and all of the sudden I felt horribly ashamed, and entirely empty. I looked away. I remembered the volumes of fluids I had purged over the staircase. “Listen,” I said. “I realized just now, in my mind, that I’m contracting a merciless case of vacancy. I need to move. I need to eat. I’m famished. I need an entire meal of food.” “Let’s hit the Wok,” Amy said, opening her eyes with renewed alacrity. “I could really do with some beef lo mein to the face right wag’s revue 137 now,” I said. Amy shivered and smiled.Wag’s She Revuelooked around. “Ever feel like a ghost’s walked through you?” “You lost your scarf thingy,” I said, bending down to retrieve it for her.

“Did you capture her hypothetical� nude image?” Mitch asked. “Not exactly,” I said. Mitch slouched in his lawn chair. He looked down his chin as he packed an old polished wooden pipe full of cherry tobacco. His shirt hung wide open, and he dribbled pinches of the leaf onto his chest, dabbing them back up with his ring finger and dropping them gingerly into the bowl. “Let me tell you a story that’s true,” he said. “It’ll cheer you right up.” “I’d rather you fabricate something for me,” I said. Mitch held the pipe in one hand and shoved the other down his pants to scratch himself. “There was this midget trapeze act in a traveling circus,” he said, “and one time they were doing a show in one ring of the circus while there was a hippopotamus act going on in the adjacent ring.” “The truth is always too confusing.” “One of the midgets missed a crucial grab and went sailing into the hippo ring,” Mitch said. “And one of the hippos just happened to be yawning.” “I don’t think ‘midget’ is the proper term,” I said. “Is this supposed to be funny?” “The midget flew right into those savage jaws. A perfect landing.” “Please stop.” “Hippos, as you may know, have a vicious reverse gag reflex. Swallowed the poor little bastard whole. The crowd thought it was part of the act, so they all started cheering.” Mitch pulled

138 fiction his hand out and sniffed it. “That’s the story?” IWag’s asked. Revue “I thought it was hilarious.” “It’s tragic,” I said. “It’s incomplete. We need to know this midget, his plight. We need back story. We need to be invested.” “Investment is not my forte,” Mitch said. He struck a match on the side of his table and lit the pipe. I sat for a while in silence, attempting to banish the image of the little man’s final moments from my mind. But I couldn’t stop thinking: he was slain to the sound of wild applause, swallowed whole so he lived long enough to hear it. The sounds of the dulled crowd seizing with laughter rose all around me; I felt suddenly trapped, writhing and drowning in that putrid sack of hippo digestive juice. I leaned into my lap. “I think I’m going to be sick,” I said. “Get me out of these guts.” “Can you imagine?” Mitch said, bending from his seat to offer me a puff. “Gobbled by a goddamn hippo.” “I shit you not,” I said. “I’m going to ralph.” I drew my hand over my mouth. I felt like someone had reattached my umbilical cord and was pumping my stomach full of ranch dressing. Mitch leapt up, grabbed the bucket that he used to collect his rabbit shit, and shoved it between my legs. He placed his hand on the back of my neck. “Have at,” he said. “Purge those demons.” His hand was still freezing, and impressed its chill onto the green heat of my nausea. The heavy, even, glacial indifference of his grasp—injecting the upper rungs of my spine with ice— rendered my faculties increasingly torpid. I shut my eyes, inhaled deeply. “You’re feeling sleepy, serene,” Mitch said. “Yeah, okay,” I droned, my stomach slowly anesthetized. “You’re going to upchuck right into this bucket, flush out the chaos from thine innards.” “No, slow the roll. I’m just beginning to make contact.” wag’s revue 139 “Squeeze out the sickness. Cleanse yourself into renewed lucidity.” Wag’s Revue “Here she comes,” I said. Mitch took this as a cue to raise the bucket to my chin. But I meant it another way: from the ether, the phantom presence had returned, and now her fingers were tickling around the button of my jeans, teasing at my zipper. The warmth of her touch reanimated my spine, sending me into an episode of nearly imperceptible convulsions. She bit at the nape of my neck, squeezed my inner thigh. “Hey!” I said, opening my eyes. I looked down at my crotch. There was nothing there but the inklings of an erection. “Are you going to get queasy on me or not?” Mitch said. I shook my head, crossed my legs to hide my boner. “I just can’t make sense of this sickness,” I moaned. Mitch took his hand from my neck and sighed. He pulled the bucket away and dropped back into his lawn chair. “You and your mixed signals,” he said. My stomach lurched again. I sprang upright. Chunks of beef lo mein rocketed through my throat, splattering a fresh stain on Mitch’s shag.

After lunch came lingerie.� Amy went sniffing around the store, swiped a few skimpy sets from the racks, red and pink and black. I stood lamely in the middle of the floor, drooling over the massive wall-sized mural photos of pinup princesses posing with pouty faces and perky tits. To my side, there stood a sickly female mannequin that wore the strangled expression of a hophead crashing down from a long dope run. She was stiff, but strangely real—an impoverished soul suffocating beneath sharp wooden cheeks brushed in bronze blush, human misery boiling beneath muted eyes that lay racooned in deep purple liner. I reached out and

140 fiction clenched her by the neck. It was thin and cold and lifeless. I wished, in a moment Wag’s of childish Revue sorrow, to fill this twig with pulsing veins, to birth it into flesh. “Do you need help?” a voice called. “For god’s sake, yes,” I said. The store assistant startled me from behind. I wheeled around and looked into her face: a photocopy of the mannequin’s. For an instant, I thought that in some twisted manner my wish had come true, that I was beholding my own human creation, and I realized I had made a terrible mistake. I tightened my grip on the dummy’s neck. “Can I help you find something?” the mannequin incarnate asked. “Satisfaction,” I said. She smiled meekly. “I’m sorry?” “Listen,” I said. “I’m looking for lift. Which of these provides the most lift?” I let go of the dummy and waved an arm towards a rack of bras. “Well—” “And I do mean lift in the cosmic sense,” I said. “You know, cosmically.” She squinted her glittered eyes with severity. “Cosmically?” she asked. “Yes,” I said. “The cosmos. What here can lift me there?” I pointed up toward the dimmed maroon mood lighting buzzing down from the sheetrock sky. She looked. I took her by the wrist. Her eyes widened as I pulled her carefully towards me. “You must think about the cosmos,” I said. “How else do you stay sane?” She looked right into me. It was not panic, but companionship. “I keep a diary of my dreams,” she said. I touched her waist, ran a finger down the blade of her hip and looped it into the belt strap of her jeans. “I once dreamt, when I was a small child, that my face was printed on an wag’s revue 141 army of giant, floating balloons,” I said. “It’s the last dream I remember having.” SheWag’s stepped closer.Revue We stood and breathed. I could smell her voice before she spoke—a surreal perfume of manufactured romance. “Last night, I dreamt that I was fat,” she said. “I mean really fat. Too fat to move or think.” She leaned in. She whispered onto my cheek. “It was glorious.” “Ah,” I breathed. “I’ve heard of that dream.” We floated for a moment, together, in what I believe a poet might call grace. Then Amy came stomping up and grabbed me from behind. “Come on,” she said, clawing at my collar, “quit talking with dolls. I need a good critic.” She gave me a vicious yank at the neck. I stumbled backwards, reached out in desperation towards my dreaming dummy. She blinked at me through the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen. But Amy had me by the belt, and I was pulled into a labyrinth of frill and lace. She dragged me into a fitting room, tossed her bundle of lingerie onto the floor, and began undressing. I slouched into a chair wedged in the corner and stared at her reflection through a mirror that spanned the entire back wall. She faced the mirror as she stripped. “Did you know, when I was young, I used to not be able to look at myself in the mirror?” Amy said. She threw her scarf and shirt off, unhooked her bra. “Sometimes I would even get these panic attacks where I wouldn’t let any one part of my body touch any other part.” She cupped her breasts and shook them. “Technically, aren’t all parts of your body touching other parts of your body?” I asked. “I guess so,” she said. She tugged her jeans and underwear off, and was now completely naked. “But I just wouldn’t want my knees to touch, my ankles to bump, or anything like that.” She started knocking her legs together. The fullness of her thighs moved in waves.

142 fiction “I wouldn’t mind bumpin’ ankles with you, if you catch my drift,” I said. Wag’s Revue She turned and faced me. She stood, nude. She bent down, reached for one of the sets of lingerie, but stopped, stood again. “We could fuck, right now, here, in the dressing room,” she said. “We could be as loud as we wanted. They would never stop us.” I continued to stare into the mirror, tracing Amy’s profile. All her flesh hung perfectly at rest.

I sat scrubbing my lunch out� of Mitch’s rug, dumping Febreze into the carpet. Suddenly, from the camouflage of the shag fur, one of the snow rabbits pounced into my lap. I jumped and squealed. The rabbit scurried back into the brush, and a tingling lit up my inner thigh. I reached into my pocket to grab my cell, expecting a call from Amy. But my phone was blank. “Shit,” I said. “Do you ever get that thing where you mistakenly think your phone’s vibrating in your pocket?” “You mean phantom vibrations?” Mitch asked. He observed my cleaning progress from his throne, still puffing away at his pipe. “It happens to me all the time,” I said. “I always think I’m getting a call—I feel a buzzing in my pocket—but it’s just my mind playing tricks on me.” “Phantom vibrations are typically indicative of some very serious psychological issues,” Mitch said. “Maybe I yearn for people to communicate with me.” “Or maybe you’re afraid they will.” “I really do enjoy speaking with people, interacting.” “It’s just like any irrational fear,” Mitch said. “For instance, if you’re an arachnophobe, sometimes your mind will conjure images of spiders on a dark sidewalk, even if it’s just a twig or a rock. Or sometimes tall buildings will turn into hulking, mutant arachnids and impale you with their slimy incisors.” wag’s revue 143 “No, I think I just crave human connection.” Mitch blew a series Wag’sof smoke rings.Revue “An unhealthy mind will create what it loathes the most.”

She straddled me, letting� her naked crotch kiss coolly onto my own. Her skin had a fantastic, dreamlike quality—incredibly firm and smooth, as if polished to perfection. “What do you think of this bra?” she asked. I brought my hand up to it, felt its tight black fabric, hugging her breasts high and close, strangely constrained and motionless. “It’s supposed to be the one with the most lift.” “Do you feel lifted?” I asked. “I want to feel lifted,” she said. She pressed herself stiffly against me. Her hips rose and settled rhythmically, light yet unyielding. “I think the reason we call it making love,” I said, faintly swooning, “is because it is literally the process of creating love, not simply expressing it.” She held her arms at odd angles. Her breasts remained static under the bra as she bobbed atop me, awkwardly upright, like a buoy at sea. “I need the support,” she said. “In lingerie as in life.” “Life,” I mused, almost breathlessly. “I stepped into a big pile of it today.” She eyed me with a look of unfaltering certainty. “I mean the cereal,” I said. “Life cereal. Did you ever eat that brand as a kid?” She pressed harder into me. I hiccupped with pleasure, ran my hands across her ass, fit and firm as fiberglass. “Someone had spilled a bunch outside my dorm,” I moaned. “I crunched a big pile of Life under my feet. It was a magnificent feeling.” “I’m so glad you came back for me,” she said. She moved

144 fiction rapidly now, rubbed herself smoothly over me, almost in a fury. I vaulted into a disembodiedWag’s state, Revue waxing transcendent, as if I were making love to the very substance of the love we were creating together—meta-lovemaking. But just as I burst, so did the dressing-room door—wide open—and there was Amy, standing with her shopping bag, looking terribly impatient. She beheld me and my mannequin, dropped her bag, her jaw. “What the hell’s going on?” Amy screamed. The color fled her flesh, leaving her with a ghostly pallor. I looked down at my waning erection and the semen splashed across the mannequin’s crotch. The answer to Amy’s question seemed obvious even to the doll, whose face was locked in an expression that said, ‘I am never puzzled. I am always willing.’ I sat there inert, nude, lathered in my own ejaculate, yet oddly unashamed. I was suddenly sleepy, ready to leave. My phantom inhabitant had fled.

wag’s revue 145 CONTRIBUTORSWag’s Revue

POETRY�

ALEXA DILWORTH (‘Gent-Sint-Pieters’) has a B.A. and an M.A., both in English, from the University of Florida, and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. She is publishing director at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

ERNST JANDL (‘Three Lip Poems’) was an Austrian experimental poet, writer and translator. He translated Gertrude Stein, Robert Creeley and John Cage, and won a number of prestigious literary prizes before his death in June 2000. ROSMARIE WALDROP is a poet and translator living in Providence, RI. Among many other books, she contributed poems to a translation of Jandl’s Reft and Light (Burning Deck Press, 2000).

TRAVIS SMITH (‘Enigma Machine’) lives in Carrboro, North Carolina. He’s been published in Tar River Poetry and currently has a poem up at storySouth.

JESSICA LASER (‘Sent Film’) will graduate from Brown University this spring with a degree in Literary Arts. Contact her at [email protected].

PAULINE MASUREL (‘Blue Hyacinth’) is a writer of short (and sometimes even shorter) stories living in the South West of England. She has an abiding interest in fractured and non- linear fictional forms. Her tiny story ‘Discovering a Comet’ wag’s revue 146 is the title micro-fiction in a recent collection published by Leaf Books, and sheWag’s was shortlisted Revue for the 2008 Asham Award. Details of her writing and collaboration with other writers and artists can be found at her website www. unfurling.net. JIM ANDREWS has been publishing vispo. com, where ‘Blue Hyacinth’ first appeared, since 1996. It is one of the main sites on the Web for new media poetry. Andrews is currently working on dbCinema, a graphic synthesizer he’s writing in Adobe Director. He lives in Victoria, Canada.

WINSTON DANIELS (‘Just Under a Second’) is an award- winning poet and sometime essayist. He currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

TINA CELONA (‘Word Problem’) received an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa, and is currently studying for a doctorate at Denver University. Her collections of poems, Snip Snip! (2006) and The Real Moon of Poetry (2002) were published by Fence Books in New York.

NONFICTION�

ROBERT MOOR (‘On Douchebags’) is a freelance writer, and former editor at Glimpse magazine. He enrolls in New York University’s M.A. program in literary reportage this fall.

EVE HAMILTON (‘The Weeds’) is a writer living in San Francisco, California.

ALISON FAIRBROTHER (‘Recede’) lives in Providence, Rhode Island. She is currently finishing up a play, starting on a

147 contributors screenplay, and has recently completed writing an extensive grocery list. She hopesWag’s for aRevue career in which other people will write bios for her.

FICTION�

MICHAEL PAUL SIMONS (‘Beowulf’) currently lives in Ithaca, New York. He prefers the R. M. Liuzza translation of Beowulf.

BRIAN EVENSON (‘One Last Drive’; ‘The Assessment’; ‘Father’) is the author of eight books of fiction, most recently Last Days (Underland Press). His novel The Open Curtain (Coffee House 2006) was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an IHG Award and was among Time Out New York’s top books of 2006. He lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University’s Literary Arts Program. A new collection of stories, Fugue State, is forthcoming in 2009. Find more at www.brianevenson.com/.

JOHN SELLEKAERS (photography with EVENSON) is a musician, sound engineer, and photographer living in Montreal, Canada. He has released 45 records on various labels and has toured extensively in Europe and North America. Recent projects include albums by Dead Hollywood Stars, The Missing Ensemble, Urawa, and the soundtrack of an ARTE Television documentary.

RALEIGH HOLLIDAY (‘Phantom Vibrations’) lives in Providence, Rhode Island. He confesses to occasionally having impure thoughts about mannequins. wag’s revue 148 Wag’s Revue

ART AND� DESIGN RAYMOND SUMSER (‘Another Sprout’, cover; ‘ ‘Baltimore- Washington International’, poetry; ) graduated with a dual degree B.F.A in FAV (film, animation and video) and Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008. His show People, Places and Things will be at the Santa Cruz Coffee Roasting Co. in Santa Cruz, California until March 31, 2009.

MAUREEN HALLIGAN (‘West Woods’, interviews) is from Denver Colorado. She received a B.F.A. in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2007. Her piece ‘Undressed’ is on display in the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History until April 12 in Santa Cruz, California, where she currently resides.

BRANDON CHINN (‘Ruffuls’, nonfiction) graduates from Brown University in 2009 to become a nomad or a starving artist, but wonders if that’s redundant. He might also have a split personality and instead become a management strategy consultant, using his wealth to win dog shows and take photos of his purebreds. At least that’s his plan so far.

JANINE CHENG (‘Mannequin’, fiction). Born in New York City. Raised in le France. Photographer and pseudo-artist. Enjoys DoubleStuff Oreos and occasionally sleep walks. Rarely writes in full sentences.

JULIA MCKINLEY (‘Thomas on the Porch’, from the editors) was born and raised in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She is currently

149 contributors a Photography and Classics major at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.Wag’s “ThomasRevue on the Porch” is the earliest of her explorations in large format portraiture.

Our sincerest thanks also go out to DAVE EICHLER for his extensive work designing our website. Thanks also to MASON PHILLIPS, ELIANA STEIN, LIBBY KIMZEY, and RACHEL BLATT for design consultation and technical assistance.

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