Alan Good's Blog, page 2

Too Big to Ignore: On Bill McKibben's "Radio Free Vermont"

I think you should read this book. I think you should buy this book. But do keep in mind that if you order it from Amazon you will definitely go to Hell. Go to your local bookstore (or order from IndieBound or something like that; there's a link at the end of this essay).

Radio Free Vermont: A Fable of Resistance
Bill McKibben
Reviewed by Alan Good

In 1980, Edward Abbey wrote an essay called “Down the River with Henry Thoreau” that’s always bugged me—always since I first read it, that is. It’s a fine essay describing a trip down the Green River, a trip I’m eager to make. The thing that bugs me is the timing: “Here we are, slipping away in the early morning of another Election Day. A couple of us did vote this morning but we are not, really, good citizens. Voting for the lesser evil on the grounds that otherwise we’d be stuck with the greater evil. Poor grounds for choice, certainly. Losing grounds.”

God damn it, Ed. As much as I love Abbey, this is the mentality, this both-parties-are-the-same-ism, that stuck us with Reagan, that stuck us with Bush, that has stuck us with Trump. The Democrats have serious flaws, but at least they don’t think The Handmaid’s Tale and “Politics and the English Language” are fucking how-to manuals. “We will not see other humans or learn of the election results for ten days to come,” says Abbey, sheltered in a magical place with some friends and an old copy of Walden. “And so we prefer it. We like it that way. What could be older than the news? We shall treasure the bliss of our ignorance for as long as we can. ‘The man who goes each day to the village to hear the latest news has not heard from himself in a long time.’ Who said that? Henry, naturally. The arrogant, insolent village crank. I think of another bumper sticker, one I’ve seen several times in several places this year: NOBODY FOR PRESIDENT. Amen.” 

Five years after publishing The Monkey Wrench Gang, a book about taking action, about giving a shit, Abbey was sharing the gospel of nihilism. It’s not that I think Abbey was a hypocrite or that he gave up on activism or stopped believing in the importance of engagement, but that “Nobody for president” shit is appealing, you can let yourself off the hook by believing that both sides are equally terrible, and even though I know Abbey was susceptible to bumper sticker philosophy, I’m still irked when I see him promote it. Contrast Abbey’s deliberate ignorance with the reluctant engagement of Vern Barclay, one of the main characters of Radio Free Vermont, as he walks in the Vermont woods in what should be deep winter:

That too-warm breeze pulled Vern out of his contentment. He saw a sloppy pile of bear scat on the ground next to his foot, and he shook his head—bears were not supposed to be out in the woods in January, not in Vermont. They should be in their dens. Vermont might be a place outside the world’s rush, but the world’s rush was doing it in—winter was vanishing, a fact that he connected to that Walmart, and to that larger globe it in turn was linked to. You couldn’t just ignore the world, that was the problem, because now it pressed on you, without regard for borders. Most presidents in his lifetime you could forget for weeks at a time, but not this one, with the endless twittering. Too much somewhere else became too much here.

There was probably a time when Vern would have felt the draw of that asinine bumper sticker; I want to hope there are real Verns out there, people who didn’t pay attention before but are pissed off now and ready (to steal the NRA’s catchphrase*) to stand and fight. (Don’t get the impression that I’m an activist; I’m lazy and asocial and busy like everyone else. I took my son to the March for Science in Denver this year, the closest—aside from signing petitions and writing emails to Senator Cory Gardner, you disingenuous fucker—I’ve been to activism in years.) The thing the people who think both parties are the same never seem to get is that’s exactly what the motherfuckers want you to think. They don’t want you to vote. They don’t want you to protest. They don’t want you to give a shit. They want you to float down the goddamn Green River on Election Day. Makes it a lot easier for them make their bad deals, to start wars, to fuck up our air and water.

Radio Free Vermont, the first novel by Bill McKibben, a writer, environmentalist, and founder of 350.org, is a safe book, much safer than The Monkey Wrench Gang, the book to which it is most likely to be compared. There are a couple of clunky descriptions of female characters, one of whom looks “radiant” in a prison jumpsuit, but McKibben probably won’t face the charges of sexism that are, often deservedly, leveled at Edward Abbey. McKibben has been targeted by right-wing fanatics who video and take photos him on the street and at the store, but Radio Free Vermont probably won’t make him interesting to the feds, or any more interesting than he is already. The Monkey Wrench Gang is suffused with anger, most notably in the character of George Washington Hayduke, a Vietnam vet who comes home from the war to find his home under siege by the forces of bigness that drive the main characters of Radio Free Vermont—Vern Barclay, Sylvia Granger, Perry Alterson, and Trance Harper—to lead a movement for Vermont to secede from the Union. McKibben’s novel is less raw, less angry, less offensive. It doesn’t have the same energy as Abbey’s masterpiece, but it’s worth a read.

Vern Barclay is a proud Vermonter and radio guy who turns into an outlaw podcaster after an incident at a Wal-Mart. Here he describes his political awakening after his station gets bought by some corporate assholes from Oklahoma: after an interview with Bernie Sanders, Vern’s new boss tells him he he’s not allowed to talk about “‘a new rule that would have let the big media companies own even more radio and TV stations.’” Vern is not used to being micro-managed or censored: “‘I’d spent my whole career thinking of myself as my own man . . . . But I found I didn’t like being told what to talk about, and I found that it was enough to make me think in a political way for the first time in my life.’” He intends to end his radio career with a mild shenanigan during a broadcast from the opening of a much-protested but unstoppable Wal-Mart. He plants a few malcontent interviewees who talk about the cheapness of the products for sale. But Perry Alterson, a young computer whiz with dreads, has planned his own stunt—reversing the sewer system underneath the big box store so that the brand-new floor of the brand-new Wal-Mart will be flooded with sewer water. The two pranksters escape in stolen hip waders and go underground together. They hide out in the home of Sylvia Granger, who runs a business teaching transplants how to live in Vermont, and start a podcast called Radio Free Vermont. The podcast gets a lot of attention, and it leads to the call for secession, and soon his crew is joined by Trance Harper, a gold-winning biathlete whom Vern had once trained.

Vern and the gang pull off a few entertaining stunts, hacking into the radio feed of a Starbucks to play some real fucking music, hijacking a Coors truck to replace the watery Colorado beer with local brew, hacking into the JumboTron at the opening of a giant event center whose big feature is a retractable roof, but there’s nothing really dangerous or antisocial. This book is intended to be taken seriously, not literally, unlike Trump, who is not to be taken either seriously or literally. As McKibben points out in an afterword, the moral of the novel is “not ‘We should all secede.’ Instead, it’s that when confronted by small men doing big and stupid things, we need to resist with all the creativity and wit we can muster, and if we can do so without losing the civility that makes life enjoyable, then so much the better.”

Just to be clear, when McKibben says “civility” he is talking about (locally brewed) beer.

Don’t secede, is what this novel is saying, but do get active, do something, start local, start small. Here’s Trance, the socially awkward, sharp-shooting athlete and veteran, upstaging the self-important governor at the opening ceremony of the big event center with the retractable roof and JumboTron, named in the governor’s honor, where the big deal is that Nickelback will be the first big band to play. Trance has been roped into the ceremony, in her role as a local hero, in order to kiss the governor's ass, but, like those annoying celebrities who annoy you with their political opinions, who refuse to stay in their lane, she uses her platform to spread the truth. It's a small thing with a big impact: 

“I learned a small sport, where tiny details make all the difference, and I won the Olympic medal by the smallest of margins. And then I went away, like so many thousands of other Vermonters, to very big wars in a very big world. I do not regret my service, and I’m not ashamed of it; I’m proud of my brothers and sisters in the military. But I didn’t feel as if I was protecting Vermont. I felt like I was protecting bigness—big oil and big companies who made big money running those wars. And when I got home, I saw more clearly that bigness coming to my state: not just big box stores, but big box houses built by people who’d made big money in big banks in big cities. And who drove very big vehicles, usually quite badly. Big dairies putting all the small farms I knew out of business. And the big problems it’s all causing, not least of which is that we never have big snows anymore, which is big trouble if you’re a skier.’”

It’s not just bigness that’s ruining this country and this planet, not just Trump and Trumpism (or if you’re a Republican, you might consider that it’s not just “the Left” fucking everything up for you), it’s also sameness. Same songs. Same menus. Same décor in every chain store. We should all—conservatives, liberals, anarchists, socialists, even the goddamn libertarians—be able to agree that Starbucks needs to fuck off. Corporations are destroying individuality, uniqueness, and local economies. Fuck Starbucks. Fuck Coors. Fuck Wal-Mart. You see the pattern.

Which brings us back to Abbey, back to that essay. This is Abbey writing, but it could easily be Vern or Sylvia or Trance or Perry: 

We gave up the free, spacious, egalitarian, adventurous life of the hunting-gathering societies . . . . We submitted to the organization required by the first great social machines, machines that were made . . . not of metal but of flesh, human blood and bone, of living men and women—and children. An army, for example, is a machine with men for its component parts, each part subordinated to the working of the whole. The same is true for a royal household, the pyramid construction gangs, the field hands of plantation or manorial estate . . . . 

Robin Hood, not King Arthur, is the real hero of English legend. Robin Hood and his merry rebels were free men, hunters, woodsmen, and thus—necessarily in their lifetime—outlaws.

In 2016, nearly one hundred million registered voters did not vote, according to Christopher Ingram of The Washington Post. Trump received about sixty million votes. Hillary Clinton, who lost the election even while winning the popular vote, received about half a million more votes than her opponent. They both lost in a landslide. Nobody won the election. That’s what makes this book worthwhile. We need more Verns. We need more Trances. We need more outlaws. (We also need more voters to vote so stop with your "Nobody for President," "Both parties are the same" shit.) Radio Free Vermont is not high literature, I wouldn’t say that it’s an Important Book, but if reading it makes you feel better or inspires you to fight back or at least switch from Coors to your local brewer, it actually is important.

*Speaking as the owner of several guns, fuck the NRA.

Radio Free Vermont: A Fable of Resistance
Bill McKibben
Blue Rider Press-Penguin
ISBN: 978-0735219861
$22

Note: if you purchase Radio Free Vermont via the link below, Malarkey Books will receive a small fee through the IndieBound affiliate program. 

Broken Country: On Reading "I Can't Breathe" by Matt Taibbi

The cover is by Greg Mollica. There's a link way down below to buy the book, which you should do.

“Police business is a hell of a problem. It’s a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there’s nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what we get.”

— Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

“And when they turned him over
They were surprised there was no gun
I mean he must have done something
Or else why would he have run
And they’ll spin it for the anchors
On the television screen
So we can shrug and let it happen
Without asking what it means”

— Drive-By Truckers, "What It Means"*

“Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.”

— Franz Kafka, The Trial, translated by Breon MitchellI Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street
Matt Taibbi
Reviewed by Alan GoodBefore the Law, Part I

When Michael Bloomberg, then mayor of New York, hiked taxes on cigarettes, he opened space for a black market. Eric Garner entered that space, establishing an illegitimate business selling untaxed cigarettes (more precisely, less-taxed, since he would buy them in Virginia and bring them back to New York). When police officers tried to arrest him, for the umpteenth time, for selling loosies, they fucking killed him. If Eric Garner had been white he would have been a hero to conservatives, a working man just trying to get by and support his family, an outlaw standing up to Big Government bureaucracy and run-amok taxes, but Garner was black and not rich and not famous and not a fucking GOP toady, so white conservatives didn't—and still don't—give a fuck about his death.

Illusion of Innocence

It is possible to criticize the police without demonizing them; it is possible to respect the police without getting your nose brown. Matt Taibbi seems to be one of the few people capable of achieving either feat. American police deserve respect, and they deserve much criticism, and not enough people are capable of, or interested in, seeing how both of those statements can be true. I hate to make generalizations, but I'm going to do it right now anyway: we have a culture that seeks binaries and ignores duality. We want things to be clean and tidy, eithor/or. We can't see, for instance, how Philip Roth can be one of our greatest writers while also being frustratingly sexist. I chose Roth as an example because so much of his work is concerned with duality, with layers, with the many-facedness of humanity. The binary thinkers—either Roth is great or he's a pig, either cops are heroes or they're Fascist pigs—can't see (don't want to see?) how police can be good, do good work, be brave, genuinely strive to protect their communities, and also be criminals and abusers of power and cowards. The police are both protectors and oppressors (even in their authoritarian form, however, they're not so much oppressors as they are the foot soldiers of the oppressors).

Taibbi, a journalist and the author of several books, recognizes the dual nature of the police. Adherents of the religion of phony objectivity would criticize him for clearly favoring Eric Garner, whose final words, "I can't breathe," should be familiar to anyone who's been half-sentient in the last four years, and the Garner family over the police of Staten Island. The term is advocacy journalism, but if you're a journalist and you're not advocating for something in your work, what the fuck are you doing? There are two sides to every story, the objectivity cultists would say—and they are right; sometimes the truth is complex, layered, but sometimes when there are only two sides to a story it's because there is a right side and a wrong side. I guess you can san say Taibbi is biased, but you can't say he's unfair. He provides a more objective picture of the Eric Garner case than you're likely to get from more supposedly unbiased journalists. Anyone not suffering from headsofarupyourassyouthinkyourfartssmellliketictacsitis would recognize, without even reading I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street, that the cops were in the wrong in every aspect of the Eric Garner case—from the policies that led to his targeting, to his fatal encounter with police, to the coverups, grandstanding, and stonewalling that followed his killing. You should still read the book. Taibbi, sympathetic to Garner, obviously convinced that his killing was an injustice, does not hide Garner's flaws or try to paint him as a hero or a martyr. Nor does he portray police as monsters. They're just cogs in a machine designed to generate statistics and keep affluent white people happy. Until cell phones got cameras, the machine worked pretty well. 

Videos of police brutality have forced white Americans to confront, or be confronted with while denying, the reality of segregation, discrimination, and injustice. Taibbi lays it all out clearly in this long passage: 

When the murder of Eric Garner hit the headlines, it at first seemed to lift the veil on the ongoing violence of racism and discrimination. There was debate, controversy, furor, disgust, and a great deal of finger-pointing, even from the majority segment of white America, over what to do abut the "unacceptable" problem.

But after a period of days or weeks, national media audiences exiled these red-hot stories to remote chambers of their memories. From there they become provincial tales, "black" controversies, troublesome things that happened once in a corner of society that still doesn't really concern most white Americans.

Huge portions of the country then wash their hands of the matter and leave others to deal with the things that sometimes happen in the places they don't think about. Baltimore. Ferguson. Staten Island.

This forgetting process is what police are for.

Aggressive policing maintains the reality of segregation in part by policing the borders separating poor black neighborhoods from affluent white ones.

But more important, it maintains the illusion of integration by allowing police officers to take the fall for policies driven by the white taxpayers on the other side of the blue wall.

Follow almost any of these police brutality cases to their logical conclusion and you will eventually work your way back to a monstrous truth. Most of this country is invested in perpetuating the nervous cease-fire of de facto segregation, with its "garrison state" of occupied ghettos that are carefully kept out of sight and mind.

Thanks to the ubiquity of cell technology and the instantaneous nature of modern media, those divisions became uglier and more visible after Eric Garner's death.

Here is where white people could have said stop. Of course, many white people spoke out, but many white people also donated money to support the legal defense of Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who killed Eric Garner, the officer who had no reason to use violence or force when confronting Eric Garner, the officer who probably had no reason to confront Eric Garner on the day he killed him. While it's known that Garner sold loose cigarettes, while he was clearly targeted for selling loose cigarettes, "no official," Taibbi notes, "has ever said that Garner was actually selling cigarettes at that moment, except for the two police in the video, who at one point try lamely to argue that they saw Garner selling a cigarette—to Twin, who was in the middle of a fight the entire time."

Americans don't want to talk about segregation anymore. We don't want to believe that it still exists, but it does, as Taibbi reminds us: 

The civil rights movement, legislation, and milestone court decisions of the 1950s and '60s produced remarkable changes and ended or ramped down centuries of explicit, statutory discrimination. But real integration was not one of the accomplishments.

The civil rights movement ended in a kind of negotiated compromise. Black Americans were granted legal equality, while white America was allowed to nurture and maintain an illusion of innocence, even as it continued to live in almost complete separation.

Part of our segregation is visible in the way police treat white people vs. how they treat black people. "There are huge racial disparities in how US police use force," according to Vox. "Black people," according to the Vox analysis of FBI data, "are much more likely to be shot by police than their white peers." Black people are thirteen percent of the U.S. population, yet, according to Vox, thirty-one percent of the people killed by police in 2012 were black. Michael Brown. Philando Castile. Walter Scott. Stephon Clark. It just keeps happening. Black men get shot for holding cell phones, while white men who commit mass murder get picked up without violence. If they're lucky they get to stop at the drive-thru on the way to jail. You see this argument all the time on Twitter, every time a white man shoots up a school or a church or a concert and gets picked up by the police without getting shot full of holes. Just this week, in Canada, a motherfucker drove a van onto a sidewalk, killing ten people. When police showed up he told them to shoot him in the head. He told them he had a gun, to which one of the officers responded, "I don't care." They arrested him without murdering him. That's Canada, though. Maybe they have different policing. Here in America, where we value freedom and justice and faith, police arrested Dylann Roof, a racist white terrorist who killed nine black people as they worshiped in their church in South Carolina, without murdering him. Police arrested Robert Lewis Dear Jr., who killed three people in an attack at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs, without murdering him. Police arrested the goddamn Aurora movie theater shooter without murdering him. But a black kid playing with a toy gun is shot dead. A black man with a cell phone is shot dead. Eric Garner gets choked to death for selling cigarettes. The circumstances and police tactics in these scenarios are different, of course, but you can see how it looks.

To add to the frustration, even though white people murder more police officers than any other demographic group**, the image in the public mind of a cop killer is of a black man. It was no accident that the playing up of a purported War on Cops coincided with the rise of Black Lives Matter.

The people who don't want be mad about the unjust killing of Eric Garner blame Garner for his own death. If he didn't want to die, they say, he shouldn't have broken the law, he should have complied, he shouldn't (I wish I was making this up; if you don't believe me read the comments on any article or prominent tweet about the Eric Garner case) have been so fat. No one ever explicitly states the logical conclusion, but reflexive defenders of the police use the same argument every time a cop kills an unarmed black man: if Person Y didn't want to get killed, he shouldn't have been a criminal. Ignoring, for now, the assumption of criminality, the argument suggests that police have a right to kill criminals without trial. I suspect some police would welcome such an ability; I hope that most would be repulsed at the idea. One could blame Hollywood for this mentality, but the blame really belongs to the people who can't distinguish fiction from reality: I enjoyed some of the Dirty Harry movies, but too many people who watch them see them as examples for how cops should actually behave and the sort of leeway cops should have in order to exact justice, at least against hippies and black people. 

Garner committed crimes, but he was hardly a dangerous criminal. Taibbi writes that Garner "had dealt with police at the street level only. He was killed in the end by a small group of line officers, the police equivalent of infantry. It was those men, not the generals above them, who became the villains in the headlines about Eric Garner's death. In police brutality cases the bad guy is always the individual cop, never the system behind him." Whenever a police officer does something bad, and there's no way to spin the officer as the real victim, he is described as a bad apple. Maybe the police union should change its name to The Fraternal Order of Bad Apples. That's sort of a cheap shot, and I'll be happy to delete when more good-apple police officers start speaking out against the bad apples. Police need better training, they need a culture that values accountability, de-escalation, and community, but no amount of training or technology is going to turn police into what we try to make them be: protectors/social workers/politicans/enforcers. The system is broken, the country is broken; police need to be better, citizens have a right to be angry when officers abuse their power, but our anger shouldn't be focused on front-line officers. We need to hold the motherfuckers above them accountable.

Taibbi is fair to the much-criticized Broken Windows theory, providing a brief history of the theory, as well as the man behind it. "Over the course of many conversations with George [Kelling]," Taibbi writes in the acknowledgments,

I came to believe that he was a misunderstood figure who may be unfairly maligned by history for having made a simple but brilliant observation about human behavior. I sense that Kelling himself feels that Broken Windows is a concept that evolved in directions he never foresaw, and that he's torn about its applications. On the one hand, he clearly believes in the efficacy of the concept as a policing tactic. But the mechanical or indiscriminate use of Broken Windows—what turned into "zero tolerance" policing—was to Kelling a bastardization of his ideas.

In application, Broken Windows has been a disaster, leading to infringements of people's Fourth Amendment rights. Call me biased, but I care more about civil liberties than low-level crime, and the system not only opens the door to abuse of authority and police law-breaking, it incentives that sort of bad behavior. Thanks to testilying and flash fiction police reports, much of the low-level crime that aggressive, statistics-based policing is supposed to combat doesn't even exist. Police have a quota and feel pressure from above to fill it. The consequences—police being too aggressive, officers inventing reasons to search people or lying about evidence in order to justify an arrest—of such a system should not be surprising. Taibbi also describes how, thanks largely to continued segregation, most of the people whose rights have been violated in the name of prioritizing so-called quality-of-life crimes have been people of color.

In the end, "Garner was caught in the crossfire of a thousand narratives that had little or nothing to do with him personally. Everything from a police commissioner's mania for statistics to the opportunistic avarice of real estate developers [which led to more police attention around the area where Garner sold cigarettes] had brought him in contact with police that day. So he was fighting one man who rode his back, but also history." 

Seems Like We're All Fucked

I Can't Breathe is about Eric Garner, a man who should have never been famous. It's about a system of policing that values statistics over humanity, community, or the law. It's about a country that is broken and divided. Toward the end of the book, Taibbi describes a march led by Garner's daughter, Erica, who died a few months after this book was published. There was tension among the marchers, some of whom "saw themselves as being much more grassroots and street oriented than other groups," a feeling that was reinforced when some members of a group called Justice League "arrived in Staten Island in a brand-new Lincoln Navigator." The march gets going. Erica leads chants and lies down in front of traffic. The marchers are segregated according to their group allegiance. The police are there with big-ass trucks and big-ass guns.

Tensions between the different groups of demonstrators finally boiled over and they were mostly all now standing there, split into two sides, pointing fingers and engaged in a ludicrous argument. The fighting-words moment had come when someone had accused someone else of being a fake, invoking the image of the Navigator car.

In response, one of the Justice Leaguers shouted back that having money didn't mean you weren't real. After all, the young man said, "Harry Belafonte led a revolution from a mansion!"

There was an outbreak of guffawing at this. A young woman shouted in response, "You did not just say that!"

While all this was going on, Erica quietly wandered around the corner to walk up Victory and have a look at the gathered police force.

Here is a metaphor for America: Dan Donovan, the prosecutor who threw the fight in the prosecution against Eric Garner's killer, leveraged his new celebrity from the case into a political victory, winning election, as a Republican, to the New York House of Representatives. Meanwhile the people who actually want justice for Garner fight amongst themselves.

(Here's an update on the Garner case, courtesy of The New York Times: "Federal civil rights prosecutors have recommended charges against a New York police officer in the 2014 death of Eric Garner, three current and former officials said, but top Justice Department officials have expressed strong reservations about whether to move forward with a case they say may not be winnable." The Times can't say this because it has certain standards, but "top Justice Department officials have expressed strong reservations" is code for "top Justice Department officials don't give a fuck.") 

While conservatives pule about political correctness—while Democrats argue about who's a real Democrat—Eric Garner rots, and his killer collects a paycheck from the state. A fight for justice has been co-opted, sucked up into an asinine culture war about respecting the national goddamn anthem.

Before the Law, Part II

Anyone who has lost a loved one to police violence and had to deal with the bureaucracy of justice will probably relate to this excerpt of "Before the Law," a parable contained in Franz Kafka's The Trial:

"Before the Law stands a doorkeeper. A man from the country comes to this doorkeeper and requests admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he can't grant him admittance now. The man thinks it over and then asks if he'll be allowed to enter later. 'It's possible,' says the doorkeeper, 'but not now.' Since the gate to the Law stands open as always, and the doorkeeper steps aside, the man bends down to look through the gate into the interior. When the doorkeeper sees this he laughs and says: 'If you're so drawn to it, go ahead and try to enter, even though I've forbidden it. But bear this in mind: I'm powerful. And I'm only the lowest doorkeeper. From hall to hall, however, stand doorkeepers each more powerful than the one before. The mere sight of the third is more than even I can bear.' The man from the country has not anticipated such difficulties; the Law should be accessible to anyone at any time, he thinks, but as he now examines the doorkeeper in his fur coat more closely, his large, sharply pointed nose, his long, thin, black tartar's beard, he decides he would prefer to wait until he receives permission to enter. The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down at the side of the door. He sits there for days and years. He asks time and again to be admitted and wearies the doorkeeper with his entreaties. The doorkeeper often conducts brief interrogations, but he asks such questions indifferently, as great men do, and in the end he always tells him he still can't admit him."

Some people read Kafka and think, "What a nightmare." Some people read Kafka and think, "Yes, let's do that." America is a never-ending Kafka novel. 

I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street
Matt Taibbi
Spiegel & Grau-Random House
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8884-0
$28

Note: if you order the book via the link in the image below, Malarkey Books will receive a small fee as part of the IndieBound Affiliate program. The paperback comes out in September.

Notes

*I'd have liked to quote every line of "White It Means," by the Drive-By Truckers, but that would have eaten up a lot of space and pushed the limits of copyright. Patterson Hood, the group's singer, told The Guardian that "There needs to be more middle-aged southern dudes saying that black lives matter."

**In 2016, according to FBI data, sixty-six police officers were killed in "felonious incidents." Of the fifty-nine assailants identified in these killings, fifty-five of whom were male (the gender of the other four was not reported), at least thirty-two were white. The ethnicity of eleven of the assailants was unreported. The data shows that fifteen assailants were black, so it's possible that twenty-six of the people who feloniously killed police officers in 2016 were black; it's equally possible that forty-three of those assailants were white. It's possible, probably more likely, that the eleven unknowns, if we knew more about them, would be split among different groups. The point is the same, though: the poster boy for the so-called War on Cops is a black man when it should be a white man. It's all here: https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2016/officers-feloniously-killed/felonious_topic_page_-2016.

Everything So Vulnerable: A Review of Claire Hopple's "Too Much of the Wrong Thing"

Published by Truth Serum Press, Too Much of the Wrong Thing is only $12. That cover was designed by Matt Potter. Speaking of the cover, if you click on it you'll go to a place where you can buy the book.

Too Much of the Wrong Thing
Claire Hopple
Reviewed by Alan Good

Contrary to popular perception, Twitter is not just a public chatroom for Nazis and a forum for misogynists to tell prominent women to get cancer. It is those things, of course, but on the fringes there are brilliant people. If you learn whom to block and what words to mute, you can turn Twitter into a paradise of writers. Some of the writers who use Twitter are either very annoying or use Twitter in annoying ways, but so many of the writers who aren't annoying make the website not only tolerable but interesting and fun and worth using. Twitter deserves all of the criticism it gets, but without that frequently horrible, horrifying website, I probably never would have heard of talented but not (or not yet) famous or well-known writers like Lucie Britsch, Chelsea Hodson, Joey R. Poole, Josh Olsen, Sarah Rose Etter, Kevin Maloney, and Claire Hopple, whose first book, Too Much of the Wrong Thing, published by Truth Serum Press in November of 2017, has gone sinfully unnoticed. (We follow each other on Twitter; Hopple sent me a copy of her book after seeing a tweet in which I said I was looking for writers whose books hadn't gotten enough attention. Apparently, until this review, her book hadn't been officially reviewed, not that any of this is all that official.)

Hopple's writing is spare, precise, often funny. I could plan an entire lesson on similes around this book. "Teryn's makeup was so thickly applied that it had to set up like a key lime pie." "I felt about as necessary as the first 'r' in February." "You felt like a banana on its tremulous journey home in a flimsy grocery bag." "A labeled chart of the eyeball was framed on the wall. It was shaded and color coded and it looked like a newly discovered planet." "Dating is like seeing an object shining in the sun and leaning over to see it's only a penny but you're already leaned too far over to stop."

She seems to specialize in characters who are, or who feel, out of place or who aren't really sure how to live: "Things pretty much go the opposite way I intend constantly," writes a man in a missed connection ad, "and I've grown comfortable with acting as if that's exactly what was planned." In another story, a woman checks her phone and sees her friend has texted her: "Come over stat! Bring some wine!" Turns out he's won the lottery and wants to celebrate (shouldn't he buy the wine?), but the woman, Macie, shows up wineless: "'I apologize,'" she tells her friend, "'it seems as if I'm only cleverly disguised as an adult. I had no wine in the house.'" Many of these awkward, uncertain characters are almost reverse solipsists, people who are pretty sure that other people are real but aren't convinced that they themselves are real. "Humans are too breakable to be real," thinks Ingrid, right before she finds out her grandmother has had a stroke. Ingrid "often thought about circulatory systems, respiratory systems, other bodily systems, breathing that is constant and necessary to sustaining life, everything so vulnerable." This vulnerability, this lack of faith in our own ability to function on a basic biological level, is central to many of the stories in the collection. For another character, a shy student writing a letter to her professor, the mundane act of washing your hands in a public restroom can be enough to cast doubt on her own existence: "none of the automatic faucets or paper towel dispensers would recognize my frantic waving and I thought maybe I could be a ghost."

Keeping with the theme of invisibility or ghostliness, a woman named Gwen describes a tour of her future workplace during a job interview: "Each time I had a question or comment, my [future] supervisor would look at the guy next to me and answer as if he had asked the question, or he would keep moving." Many people would seize on this moment to highlight the disparity between the way men and women are treated, the way that men are frequently taken more seriously. The disparity is real, but it isn't exclusive to a male-female dynamic. Anyone can feel, many people, regardless of gender, feel, invisible, irrelevant, ghostlike—and we don't actually know the gender of the narrator at this point in the story, "Talisman." If asked to guess, most readers, I suspect, would guess that the narrator is a man, based on the first lines of the story: "I followed someone. This person, Claudia, I knew her a long time ago." In the relay race of sort of hapless characters who want to be confident and functional but aren't, Gwen carries the torch of not really knowing what to do with grace: "I get so nervous about being the irresponsible one that I send birthday cards especially early to easy my mind. But then I worry that I send them too early; that it would seem like i didn't know when my family's birthdays actually are, which is somehow much worse." Thoughtfulness and articulateness can be handicapping. 

Too Much of the Wrong Thing shows that writers, rather than adhering to the old maxim of "Write what you know," should write what they want. If someone had come to me and said, "Hey, should I publish a book of short stories in which four of the stories are written in the second-person?" I would have said hell no, but Hopple did it, and it works. She even throws a perspective curveball by starting a story told in the first-person with a generic you: "You make stupid-good money as a Santa Claus. Sure, there are parents who scan you up and down for any trace of child molester and there are kids who spit on you." That's from "Compulsive Truths," one of my favorite pieces in the collection. It's about a man who reinvents himself, after a divorce and a mistaken-identity-based ass-whooping, as a professional Santa. His career change forces lifestyle changes upon him, as well. When you look like Santa, he says, you have to comport yourself in a certain way because "Even if you're dressed in regular clothes, they can spot you. They know. So I've had to quit smoking because i don't want to be responsible for the youths of America keeling over from lung cancer." What does Claire Hopple know about being a bearded, divorced construction worker-turned-Santa Claus? Fuck all, probably, I don't know. But she knows what it is to be human, and that's what her book is about. "I expected life to be shitty," says Lancaster, our Santa, "but I was still curious about what that shittiness would look like." Those words could have been spoken by any of the characters in this book.

This collection contains twenty-four short stories, most of them short enough to be considered flash fiction. They've been published in places like Maudlin House, Foliate Oak, Hermeneutic Chaos, Third Point Press, and Monkeybicycle, among many others. A few of the stories, some of the lists, for instance, I wouldn't have been excited about if I'd come across them on their own, but the standouts—for me, they're "Craigslist Missed Connection," "Projector," "Recovery," "Compulsive Truths," "Talisman," (and I'm probably missing a few others here)—make me eager for more. I've read two excellent stories, published in X-R-A-Y and Jellyfish Review, that Hopple has published since the book came out. I'll read anything that she writes, but after so many brief glimpses into the existences of her characters I'm hoping she's digging into a giant novel.

This review is being published on the same day that James Comey's book, A Higher Loyalty, which is already a best-seller, for which Comey received a monster advance, is officially being released. I can't tell you how to spend your money, but I can point out that for what you'd pay for the Comey book you could buy two copies (one for yourself, one for your bestest friend) of Too Much of the Wrong Thing and have a couple dollars left over.

Too Much of the Wrong Thing
Claire Hopple
Truth Serum Press
ISBN: 978-1-925536-33-1
$12

If you're on Twitter, you should follow her: @clairehopple.

Even if you don't buy the book, check out some of Claire Hopple's writing, and tell some other people:

"This Is Gonna Be Good," published in X-R-A-Y.

"Flat Earth," published in Jellyfish Review.

You can find many more links to Hopple's work on her website, https://clairehopple.wordpress.com/bio/.

The Great Unagented: A Reviewy-type Essay About Saul Stories by Elizabeth Ellen

Saul Stories, by Elizabeth Ellen, is available in the Hobart Pulp bookstore for $24. You could probably buy it on Amazon, as well, but why would you give those fuckers a cut? The book cover up there is a magic portal to the place where you can, if so inclined, buy the book.

Saul Stories
Elizabeth Ellen
Reviewed by Alan Good

Determining what qualifies as a good book is based on so much subjective criteria, like taste and style and—except agents and editors aren't merely, if at all, even looking for good books. They want salable books. Books with vampires, orgies, and celebrity bunnies. If you ever find yourself feeling overly sympathetic to the plight of the literary agent, Saul Stories is a good book to turn to. It's the first book I've ever encountered that talks shit about literary agents on the dust jacket: "Elizabeth Ellen has been writing and publishing unagented fiction for over a decade. Of the linked stories in Saul Stories, one agent who read them wrote, 'I can't determine the stakes.' (The agent came to Saul Stories after finding one of the stories contained within — 'Teen Culture' — in the Pushcart Prize anthology.)" Fuck stakes. You never heard of Charles Bukowski? People seem to love his poetry; I've never cared about it, but I've read most of his novels and the story collection Hot Water Music. Except for the novel Pulp, the stakes are always the same: an asshole who drinks too much and treats women like shit fucks a lot of women and becomes a famous writer. That's the whole plot and those are the stakes: will Henry Chinaski get his nut off again or will he pass out drunk first? OH THE TENSION IS KILLING ME! Bukowski had shit for stakes, but he had mythology on his side, the legend of Bukowski. Elizabeth Ellen seems to have her own mythology; it just hasn't spread as far yet, and those are the fucking stakes.

To be fair, the agent who sought out and then rejected this book might not be as dense as indicated in the quote on the book jacket. The agent might have just been being polite, looking for a kind way to reject the book after realizing none of the characters was a vampire and none of the teenagers was really precocious enough to entertain a mainstream audience. More likely, the agent caught wind of Ellen's unpopular essay "An Open Letter to the Internet," published in Hobart in October 2014. The essay angered a few people and cost Ellen a spot in an anthology after Black Lawrence Press dropped a novella they'd already accepted. I don't know that the agent who was interested in Saul Stories and then suddenly became uninterested in Saul Stories lost interest because of that essay, but I am reminded of the time Milo Yawnoppoulos's supposedly liberal literary agent defended the infamous Trump toady's book deal. Go fuck yourself, you disingenuous trollmonger. People in the literary and publishing worlds were mad that Milo was getting a book deal because Milo didn't deserve a goddamn book deal. It wasn't because political correctness is silencing conservative voices, or holding conservatives to a double standard (no one holds conservatives to any standard at all, which is a big part of our problem); it was because he is a shitty writer with nothing valuable, original, or insightful to say. You got him a book deal because you know there's a big market for race-baiting, liberal-bashing drivel. Elizabeth Ellen is a very good writer. Maybe if she was also a racist, self-aggrandizing piece of shit that agent would have stuck by her. Or a dude. Fuck it.

Saul Stories is a book about which narcissists will say, "I can't relate to the main character," who is self-absorbed but not really a narcissist. I'm out of patience with the fetish for relatability. Writers don't make books according to the specifications of self-obsessed readers. If you can't relate to a book, that's only because you're not doing it. It's not the job of the author to relate to readers; authors tell the story, create the characters, and readers find ways to relate to them. If you can't relate to the characters in a book, it could be because the book was written by a weak writer, but there's also a good chance you're a sociopath. Of course, I can relate to the main character, whose name we never learn but who is frequently referred to as "Eli's mom." I have a name, but I am frequently referred to as "George's dad." So there's that. The unnamed narrator has trouble relating to people her own age. She enjoys hanging out with her teenage daughter and her friends. My kids are still young, so I'm not smoking weed with them and shit like Eli's mom, but I'm the dad on the playground running around with and being crazy and silly with my kids and the other kids, the dad who doesn't say much to the other parents. I'm just not a people person. I can talk to my students, even the ones who are older than me, but that's it. Most adult humans are mysteries to me that I don't really feel like fucking with. Like the narrator, I know loneliness, boredom, self-sabotage, despair, depression—that's enough relating.

Elizabeth Ellen has been publishing for a while. I thought Saul Stories was the first work of hers I'd read, but it turns out we were published in the same issue of Bookslut in June of 2010. I noticed a Bookslut credit while doing some background research and thought, "I bet she wrote that thing about stalking Dave Eggers," and I was right: here's "Stalking Dave Eggers."

Saul Stories can feel creepy. I don't like that word, but it has a lot of cultural significance at the moment. If the stories in this book were written from the perspective of a forty-year-old father who hangs out with his daughter's friends, who smokes cigarettes with them, who buys beer for them, who sleeps in a bed (even with no fucking) with them, who sneaks out of a window to go hang out with them while avoiding the wife he's spent the first half of the book wanting to get back together with, we'd probably be hearing more about it. There would probably be a hashtag.

The narrator sets us up to assume she's fucking Saul, her daughter Eli's friend, who is underage for most of the book, as young as fourteen or fifteen for much of the book. The film references—to the Kubrick Lolita, to Manhattan, American Beauty, and The Graduate—feel thematic, or like foreshadowing. But Eli's mom—sorry for the spoiler—is no Humbert. She goes out of the way, when it seems like she probably is going to tell us she fucked her daughter's friend, to dispel us of that notion. Eli's mom, a writer and photographer of not much renown, writes a novel about Saul, whose name she changes to Evan, and gets a rejection. "I didn't care about the rejection," she says,

but I fixated on something the editor had said that implied she thought Evan and the narrator were having sex. That bothered me. It felt lazy on her part and mine (were it true; it wasn't). I wrote back right away, to say that they weren't, that she was making assumptions based on other novels and films she'd read and seen, not on anything I had put in the story. ("Yes, she wears his t-shirt to sleep, but only because she doesn't have pajamas," I said. "Yes, they are close friends. That doesn't mean they are fucking. Do you fuck all your close friends?") I never heard back from that editor. 

Not to sound prurient—and I really didn't want their relationship to get sexy, was relieved when it didn't—but Eli's mom hints at the possibility, or the desire, for sex. At one point she notes how easy it would be to seduce him. And here she is texting back and forth with him on his eighteenth birthday, and she asks whether he's going to buy cigarettes now that he's old enough: "There was one other thing but I felt uncomfortable mentioning it," she says. "Mentioning it felt like a question or an invitation or something." There's this justification, early in the book, from "Teen Culture," the Pushcart story: 

And I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: what an asshole. You're thinking: how pathetic. You're thinking: maybe if just one time she'd gotten laid in high school . . . And I'm not going to argue you. I'm not going to deny I'm flattered by the attention. I'm not going to pretend anyone at my twenty-year class reunion had a clue who I was. I'm merely going to ask you to take a harder look at your own life, to write down every petty thought, to examine every questionable motivation. Then I'm going to ask you to spend five minutes with a fourteen-year-old of the opposite sex. And not one of the insecure, unattractive losers, but one of the cool ones, one that's cooler than you were in high school, one that knows more about music and cracks jokes and smokes better weed."

Contrast that, Eli's mom says, with a forty-year-old. I can see now, having read the whole book, that she really just likes the attention, she enjoys the company, but on a first reading I think you would be forgiven if you interpret this passage as meaning she wants to fuck a teenager. 

Saul and Eli's mom flirt with boundaries, but they know where the line is and stay just on the safe side of it: "We weren't going to do anything criminal at all. We had too much and nothing at all to lose. I wasn't a revolutionary; I was a chickenshit, goddamnit. I was privileged and Saul was privileged and neither of us was going to fuck our lives up too much even if we both played with fucking our lives up, even if that's what we both thought we wanted."

So what are the stakes? There's loneliness, despair, ennui, parenting anxiety, the conflict between security and autonomy. Plus if she gives in to some of the impulses she hints at she'll ruin her life and probably her relationship with her daughter. The book is more about a mood than stakes or plot, the type of mood where you can't really feel the horror of a devastating tsunami that affects people far away from you, where you sleep in the closet because you have a thing about open spaces, where you send secretive texts to a person who treats you like shit and can only be friends with people whom, according to social norms, you shouldn't really be friends with.

My wife asked me what this book was about, and I said it was about a woman who likes hanging out with her daughter's friends. Saul Stories plays on readers' expectations about age and relationships; in order to make a story, the reader is likely to assume, something has to happen, "something" meaning sex, but it doesn't. It's not lascivious. I'm trying to imagine how you would write a query letter to pitch this book to an agent; I just don't see how you could sell this story in a one-page query letter or an elevator pitch or a goddamn tweet during one of those Twitter hashtag pitch frenzies. You have to experience this book, to sit with it and think about it and be uncomfortable, to really get it, but even then when your wife asks you what it's about you'll say something stupid. There's a gulf between what books are about and what we say they're about. There's a gulf between what a book is and what makes it salable. No one was ever going to rep this book. You have to be the editor of a small press to get this book published. (Ellen is an editor at Short Flight/Long Drive Books, the book publishing imprint of Hobart Pulp, an online literary journal run by her husband, Aaron Burch. Here's some praise for transparency in blurbing: Ellen's best friend is quoted on the dust jacket and identified as her best friend; friends are blurbing for each other all the time, but they seldom point out in the blurbs that they're friends.) If you're reading this, and you're a writer to whom literary agents seem to be allergic, reading this book might make you feel better.

Saul Stories
Elizabeth Ellen
Short Flight/Long Drive Books
ISBN: 978-0-9896950-5-3
$24

Transparency note: I received my copy of Saul Stories for free. Hobart tweeted they were giving away copies, I sent a message, I got a free book.