Opening paragraph to a new story (maybe)
Jul/110
The Bullet Is The Gun
The families are kept behind glass. Possibly two hundred close relations are cloistered in bleacher box seats, most smiling but some also weeping as the proceedings are noised through a public address speaker. The field is green comfort save for a few mud-cut patches and the array of senior boys. There are twenty-nine, a prime number, an incomplete rectangle. They stand inert but angled into the wind, neckties blown nooselike over skinny shoulders. Facing them is a bracket of thickened men in digital camo, plus one in war formals sitting behind a table. He stands and shouts an oath and the boys shout it back at correct intervals. He says that after the signature they will be soldiers or they will be nothing, and gives them one last chance to leave. Several start crying yet all remain, and with no further hesitation or pomp a name is called: Carlson, Benjamin. A hard-jawed boy in front approaches the table and accepts a pen. He stabs it down, makes big trembling loops, and when he lifts it from the line there is a windless moment just before he detonates. Stifled cries range from the bleachers, the sounds of a split nucleus. The remaining boys swallow large as camouflaged men collect Benjamin Carlson from the surrounding area, then cover the slurry of him with a flag. He is thanked for his service and immediately the next name is called: Dansik, Eric.
Behind the Camera
Nov/100
Here are the opening paragraphs of a new story.
Behind the Camera
We first meet Serj Malakian at a party thrown by our mutual friends, the cable news networks. When we see his pixelated self from across our kitchens and living rooms and break areas, we are instantly smitten. He is enveloped by a smile of microphones at the foot of the Ninth Circuit building in Los Angeles, where he is holding court on these diverse topics: why he refused counsel, who designed his dapper, prison-orange sport coat and pants, whether he will still be able to film during trial. His exploded black nest of hair and vaguely ethnic features threaten and arouse us, but he speaks with the soothing, forceful cadence of an emancipator. He strikes us as a movie star playing a politician, minus twenty years. Beneath his name we read the words Malakian Pleads Innocent to Pandering, and a bar graph in the corner shows real-time results of our collective judgment; eighty-one percent say he should walk free, while thirty-three percent demand he rot in hell. We do not question the math. We only want to approach him, somehow, through our screens.
After the big party, after their guest has been shuttled away by a team of handlers, our television friends go into klatsch mode. They fawn over Serj’s good looks, his attire, his delivery. The orange suit is the subject of much discussion. It reminds someone of that guy, you know the guy she’s talking about, the guy from the seventies. It is the closest they come to actual analysis. One of them, a Peabody winner, uses the word “adorable” twice. Nobody attempts Serj’s last name. They ask us to join them after this short break, and we do, because it is a grand old time.
When they return, they are linked via satellite to a law professor from Georgetown. He is not attractive or glib, which is a buzz kill. Our friends stop with the playful banter, because this man clearly does not banter, only spars. We think we detect on him the faint smell of old books. This is impossible, of course, but sometimes television does that, makes us feel like people are with us. Now he is giving a dour overview of the facts of the case and something called a millertest, and our TV friends are nodding like you would to a police officer holding a ticket pad, and the professor’s face is totally serious but not totally symmetrical and we reach for the remote. We already know enough facts, thanks to the caption earlier. This case is about pandering, which we are pretty sure has something to do with politics and is a serious deal, otherwise our friends would not be talking to us so much about it. We click.
On a competing station we find ads, which unlike professors have the thrust of commerce, so we let them bombard away. When the program resumes, we are greeted by this network’s signature ominous crime music and Serj’s yearbook photo. It is black and white and blown up so large that it is not immediately recognizable as a face. For a moment it looks like a grainy satellite shot of missile silos, a not-uncommon thing on this particular channel. It is our favorite channel, because it features the most infographics and shouting. Above Serj’s weaponized face, in shiny gold three-dimensional letters, reads this alliterative gem: Pornographer Perpetrates Pandering, Prostitution? The question mark is so they can make a statement without making a statement? We realize now that this Serj fellow must be quite the dog, getting involved in such sexy mischief. Still, we are unsure where the pandering fits in. Is he the mayor of Los Angeles? The one who used to be an adult film star and has a foreign name? That sounds right to us. Anything is possible on the Left Coast.
This is Me Spreading the Gospel
Oct/102
So, I haven’t been updating this thing because I’ve been spending all of my time writing a new story. In lieu of a blog post, I thought I’d share the first third of the story for the small number (5?) of folks who actually read this. So here it is.
This Is Me Spreading The Gospel
by Josh LaBau
Hey, so heaven’s real. I was there, shit you not. Cloud fortresses, fig-bearing virgins, flying cars. The whole metaphysical enchilada, all at once. I know – I hate to lay it out so nonchalant, what with its ruining the beautiful terror of the mystery and all. It’s just hard to get jazzed about being bound again to this mortal coil after, you know, touching the face of infinity. Sigh of sighs. But don’t worry, I couldn’t spoil the best parts even if I wanted to. I mean, language is too poor a conduit to express the truly divine, am I right? And anyway, heaven’s got its problems, too. It’s not perfection, believe you me.
The Cleveland Plain Fucking Dealer, that’s where this started. It was a quarter-page ad in the travel section: “Want to Work in Paradise and Earn Collage [sic] Credit? If Yes, Apply Within.” Straight away the typo and lack of contact info tipped me off that something was askew, but paradise was sounding pretty okay relative to the sogged-out sepia shitscape that constitutes winter in Ohio, so it was game on. I called The Dealer, because of course they’d be stoked to put me in touch with a paying sponsor. Six transfers and twenty minutes of panflute medley later, I got to Hank in ad sales. Hank in ad sales instantly started to lay in with words like confidentiality and privilege and sacred trust, at which point I kindly informed him that he wasn’t a goddamn lawyer so it didn’t count. But Hank wasn’t having it, not a drop, leaving me no choice but to say that people like him were the real reason print is dying, and could I please speak to his supervisor.
I could not.
Three months without smokes had turned me into a bit of a prick – more of a prick than is normal or healthy even – and I went fairly molten at this point. A cartoon bubble appeared in which I was pinning Hank with my knees, flailing away at his self-satisfied little mug and taking deep, rhythmic pulls from a half dozen unfiltered Camels. I was entirely ready to sprint to Circle K for a fresh carton and a fist-roll of quarters when, at the least opportune time, I thought of Gran. Gran lying dumb in that fetid duplex-turned-hospice. The oxygen tanks and the wheezing and the sick sallow vascularity of her arms. The promise I made and intended to break once she passed, but haven’t been able to after the fact. I gotta say, it was hard to maintain a good and consistent fury while meditating on the ultimate frailty of human life. As I breathed in, Hank-hate sapped out, and I resolved to make a more restrained and rational call to The Dealer the next day.
That night, as my roommate uncovertly took it to some bar-skank in the bottom bunk, I imagined myself in a better place, the place in the ad. What did it mean to work in paradise for collage credit? Any number of things, I supposed, and all of them better than being there, in that moment, listening to Jay drunkenly fumble and belch his way through a co-ed’s dignity. I was ready for morning to come so I took a few extra Ambien, and in minutes the night became this weird fluid montage of all the tenses: future me teaching English on the shore of an anonymous island principality, Gran icing my eye with a steak that time Jessie Caldwell almost brained me with an aluminum bat, every memory and vision overlaid with simian grunts and snortles from below.
Things got dark, and then they got light.
***
When I was a kid, back when my parentals were heavy into the stuff and before Gran took me on, I’d spend exorbitant hours sleeping. You’d think with daily ass whoopings and verbal incendiaries and general domestic unrest I’d be prone to night terrors, but it was quite pleasantly the opposite. The identity-dissociative property of dreaming was maybe the one thing that kept me from going clinical in my early teens. Asleep I dipped into these other existences, nameless and timeless, just floating along without access to my true, bullshit-ridden personal narrative. Of course I’d have to wake up, right, and there’d be my father glowering and tottering above me, going Get up you lazy little and smelling like an ethanol refinery. And for some reason it always kinda shocked me how I could mistake a dream for waking life but not the other way around, how a salvo of dad’s belt cracks adhered to what you might call a tighter and more vivid top-level logic, one that left approximately zero doubt that this was real life, this was my real life.
When I found myself in the sweet by-and-by it was pretty much the same as waking up. I mean, yeah, it was rapturous and everything, but more than that it was just all hyperlucid and familiar, like going sane after twenty years of fevered hallucination. A bunch of gauzy memories from earthbound life darted in fits at the border of my über-consciousness, stray pixels of name and face and place that refused to coalesce. I couldn’t remember anything from before, but it didn’t much matter because I had the distinct sense that I was home.
There wasn’t exactly a ton to do when I got there, so I chilled out in the vast weightless expanse of lambent mist and considered my supernatural self. It was me, only naked and semi- transparent and giving off a lovely silver glow. I was just kicking it and admiring the ethereal sheen of my meta-physique for a while when I got the creepiest damn feeling. It was like if you stare at the ticking second hand on a clock, okay, and during that moment when it’s stopped you think how there are like three billion ticks in a hundred years and how holy hell: Life. Is. Really. Long. Just like that, except in this instance the clock is me and the hundred years is eternity. I might have completely lost my shit in an existential meltdown had I not heard a woman’s voice, accompanied by the faint taste of something sweet.
“It happens quick, yeah?”
“What?”
“Feeling of time stop. It’s a horror.”
“Where am I?”
“You answered call.”
“Call? Where are you?”
She didn’t arrive or appear so much as make herself noticed. Hell, I may have been staring at her since I woke up, like one of those stupid 3D picture puzzles. She was even less opaque than me, but I could still tell from her flowy liquid silhouette that she cut quite the celestial bombshell. Her speech was off, actively choosing every word and still screwing it up, but who cares about words when confronted with crystalline beauty? Not this guy.
“Your training, it starts soon.”
“Wait, what’s your name?”
“No names here.”
“That taste, when you talk. Is that butterscotch?”
“Come, we must to boogie.”
***
There was this time when I drove though Nebraska with Gran, we were looking for the sod-house farmstead where she grew up. It was a painfully flat stretch of interstate, Gran was slouched asleep, and in the monotony I just kind of zoned out with the cruise set to seventy. Her Buick drove like a floating couch to begin with (you could probably plow an armadillo with minimal disturbance), and without acceleration or road noise it felt for a few moments that we were stationary while the earth sped beneath us. I tilted the wheel gently left, and a blur of corn and asphalt canted inward on us, like I was steering the whole damn planet.
That was the first mortal memory that came together up there. Butterscotch had put her ghosty hand through mine and said We are go and I expected to feel some kind of liftoff. But there was no thrust, no wind-in-the-hair jolt, nothing. Things just approached, arrow fast. Massless walls of glowing cloudstuff sheared past and parted into a shimmering nimbus valley, and then all of a sudden the spectral terrain was dashing and sputtering around us like arcs of electric river or something, which was pretty rad. But just as the cosmic sphere was beginning to reveal its full glory, another image seeped up: swaying green stalks and an old woman’s nodding, tucked-up head. I couldn’t place her or what we were doing, but I felt that she was part of me. Butterscotch gave an update.
“We almost here, yeah.”
“Where?”
“Staging area. Looks.”
In the distance I saw a thin reflective band stretching indefinitely up (or what was ‘up’ from that viewpoint – it all got a bit screwy direction-wise). As it closed in I made out bright points and subtle movement on its surface, and just before impact it slowed and swept ninety degrees beneath us and then we were on it. The light spots revealed themselves as other spirit-folk of varying hue and translucence, slothing about the mirrored structure in muted disarray. A small platinum boy with floppy hair passed his arm through someone’s midsection and said What’s my name? Who am I? His voice smelled like Easter lilies and brought orange triangles to the edge of my vision. The whole mixed senses ordeal was starting to unnerve me.
“So what’s up with me smelling that kid’s voice?”
“All will reveal with patient. Must being patience.”
I was sick of being patience, and the awful feeling of static foreverness poked at my psyche, so I busied myself with examining the levitant herd. A young woman with wide-set hips and a jade complexion spun circles with her eyes closed; three mostly-clear types conspired at the perimeter; the Easter lily boy was being consoled by a slightly older girl, who stroked in vain at his immaterial face; the remaining ten stared down at their reflections and let out these eerie purple lowing sounds that pin-prickled my back. We waited. And waited. Then the sky exploded.
I suppose if I’d had retinas they’d have detached or ignited or been flat-out vaporized by the miniature fucking supernova doing its thing right above us. It was bright. She raged pretty hard for a bit but petered out to a less obnoxious intensity before descending on our plaintive little throng, now lit from the glow like bumbling fiber-optic tips. As the tiny star cooled and shrank a human shape emerged, a man with close cropped hair and the sinewy limbs of a dancer. His skin was actual skin, dull and flawed, and the sight of it evoked more memories, this time of a blond woman cowering, then a bottle hitting dented drywall, then a dark body looming over me. Before I could get too sentimental, the stellar guy spoke.
“I know you’re all confused, and I promise everything will make sense soon. First, big hand to our escorts for getting the newly-departeds here in one piece. Service, service, service. You guys rock. Next, welcome and thanks to our recruits. Each of you was selected because of your desire to better yourselves and your worlds. Prophesying is the most important work you can down there, so give yourselves a pat on the back. Do well in your field tests and you may even get some time to commune with the Big Guy.
“Okay, the other instructors are all cued up on campus. Escorts, assemble your teams and report to stations. We have a lot of work to do before they’re dead for good, so let’s hustle.”
With that he jetted, and Butterscotch drew me to her along with Jade Lady and Easter Lilies. My team. We greeted each other with nods of mutual trepidation. Butterscotch said To stations yeah, and the silver band and the world around it were zipping past again. But this time it felt a little less exhilarating and a little more workmanlike, just a sensible way to get about the cosmos. On the horizon grew a puffy white palace, spires roiling in misty swirls.
Groff, Toews, Adler and Paddleford
Sep/101
No, that’s not the name of a law firm. It’s the last names of the people who show up in Google Suggest™ when searching the word “Jonathan.”
Noticeably absent from that list is the Jonathan that is absolutely everywhere right now, Jonathan Franzen:
It's like Blue Steel, but for smugness.
For chrissake, the man was on the cover of TIME FUCKING MAGAZINE and he can’t beat out the misspelling of a riverboat’s name?1 I’m no champion of Franzen, but it saddens me to think that the most talked-about novelist in a decade ranks so low.
Let’s look at it another way. Here’s Jonathan Franzen’s Google Trends™ graph:
Not bad. As we can see, his hotness quotient has risen sharply in the last few months. But this doesn’t tell us anything about how he stacks up to other cultural forces. Let’s take a look at how he compares to a few other search terms.
Here’s Franzen (blue) in relation to Pabst Blue Ribbon beer (red):
As we can see, only recently did Franzen overtake the hipster’s drink of choice. Sadly, Google wouldn’t let me control for demographic indicators such as “wears horn-rimmed glasses and too-tight Cookie Monster shirts,” but if it did, I’d bet dollars to donuts the results would be inverted.
Now let’s take a look at JF versus another author, someone of similar literary talent. Stephenie Meyer, author of the Twilight series.
Oh, snap.
So it seems that even on his best day, Jonathan Franzen is trumped by a writer who used the phrase “cold and beautiful” 200+ times in a single paragraph. Ouch.
Here’s Jonathan Franzen vis-a-vis Nascar. You have too look pretty hard to see the little blue smudge at the bottom right of the graph. That’s Franzen.
I think this graph pretty much sums up our entire shared cultural experience.
But let’s dig a little deeper still. Here’s a look at the cities that had the greatest
Nascar : Franzen ratio.
The jokes are just too easy, people.
Again, you have to look carefully to see the tiny blue specks of Franzen-search at the top left of each red bar. How must it feel to be the one person searching for books in Livingston, New Jersey? My guess is that some guido is a closet lit snob, squeezing in some DFW2 between his GTL.3
Fuckin' books and shit!
So there you have it. An author who’s all the rage and still completely irrelevant. Time to get back to work on that novel.
- Check out the Jonathan Padelford in St. Paul here: http://www.riverrides.com/
- David Foster Wallace
- Gym, Tan, Laundry – the holy sacrament of New Jersey Italian Catholicism
The Book is Better
Sep/104
So, I had an idea for a website/organization/panacea the other day, and I think it could be pretty cool.
Here’s the background. I’ve been increasingly worried about the state of reading in the U.S. People aren’t reading as much as they used to, especially fiction, and that’s bad for a number of reasons. Selfishly, I want people to read so that there will be a market for my yet-nascent novel. But more than that, I think reading long-format text genuinely makes you smarter. It requires you to tune out the rest of the world and absorb yourself in ideas and imagination, to actually think. Movies and music and the visual arts can convey complex, thought-provoking ideas, sure. But words are our basic form of communication, the things we’re best equipped for. I could go on and on about why reading is important, but that alone wouldn’t accomplish much.
What’s my big idea? Well, I’m not entirely sure just yet, but I think it looks something like this:
The blog is back. I think.
Apr/100
So I took the entire winter away from blogging in favor of doing “real” writing:
Actually, it was pretty successful. I churned out two (two!) short stories between December and April. That might not sound like a lot, but for me, it was huge. I have a tendency to quit things halfway through, so completing two projects in a row is, like, an accomplishment of sorts.
Here is what has happened since the last post:
NaNoWriMo
Aug/091
So it looks like Abby and I are going to do NaNoWriMo. In the past I had refused to participate; my neurosis and perfectionism are worst when trying to write fiction, and I thought I would never come close to the 50,000 word finish line. But Abby made a good point – I don’t have to write something I care about. I can write 50,000 words of horse slop, just as long as it isn’t the same word 50,000 times. And with that kind of output, I’ll be damned if there aren’t at least a few gems that I can polish up and place into something else.
I’m not going to end up with a National Book Award winner, that’s a given. But I do think I’ll benefit from the experience. To wit:
Physics, Poetry and Music?
Aug/092
For some reason I have been thinking about limits recently. More than this, I’ve been thinking about the trade-offs that must come with limits. Sometimes they’re fairly apparent, as with choosing to save or spend; you can do one or the other, and they both have advantages. But you can’t do both, unless you can somehow find a way to spend negative dollars.
Sometimes the trade-off seems intuitive but is actually total bullshit. False tradeoffs are a great place to start if you’re looking to become a professional despot or propagandist.
Video games are not art, but they can be.
Jul/090
A friend of mine recently decided to get a degree in computer science, several years after completing a degree in chemical engineering and pursuing a career in medicine. The reason? He wants to make video games. It’s been a lifelong dream of his, but he never seriously pursued it because he felt it was a less-than-noble profession. After all, who wants to say that they could have become a doctor and saved lives, but instead chose to make video games? A doctor obviously contributes more to society, right?
In the months leading up to his decision, we had a number of conversations about the value of video games in society. I posed a question: What if the choice were not between doctor and game maker, but between doctor and artist? Certainly this is a more complicated judgment to make; doctors save lives, but those we usually consider artists (filmmakers, writers, painters, etc.) make life more worthwhile. All of which begs the question: can video games be considered art?
High-Brow Sci-Fi
Jul/090
I’ve found myself fascinated with the idea of science fiction recently. For me, ‘literary’ science/speculative fiction is the hardest to distinguish from its ‘genre’ counterpart (in the asshole way that journals mean it when they say ‘NO GENRE’). It’s pretty easy to tell a shitty Harlequin Romance from a ‘literary’ book with romantic themes, and there just aren’t many fantasy novels that warrant critical review.
But sci-fi is a different story. There are plenty of Big Important Books that would qualify as sci-fi if they weren’t found in the Literature section of Barnes and Noble: 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, Flowers for Algernon, Fahrenheit 451, H.G. Wells, much of Vonnegut.
Make Sure to Pack your Camera
Jun/090
If you’re a Good Liberal, you probably believe that sex is a civil right: Bob should be able to get it on with Sally or Bill or both, as long as they’re all consenting adults. Same sex marriage? Let ‘em get hitched. Crazy Japanese robo-porn? Domo arigato. Weekly orgies and hor d’ouvres with the neighbors? Put me down for deviled eggs and lube.
Sex in exchange for money? Well, I mean, in theory yeah…but in practice…you know…exploitation…and stuff.
In Defense of Catchiness
Jun/091
Recently, Karin and I have been (over)indulging in mainstream Pop 40 nonsense. It started as a weekend-only affair – after all, who wants to hear some qualude-popping Elliot Smith wannabe on The Current during the Friday drive home? (I do, but only if I intend to drive off a bridge.)
I have long argued that pop music can be absolutely brilliant, earning me the scorn of people who care about such minor matters as vocal range, lyrical insight or a performer’s ability to play an instrument/read music. Pop music is often short on these ingredients, but what it does provide is something often overlooked by music snobs: catchiness.