Jamie Iredell's Blog, page 16

I start teaching at Savannah College of Art and Design ne...

I start teaching at Savannah College of Art and Design next week. I'm very excited about this. I'm still teaching one class Georgia Perimeter College. I am so excited about SCAD because I'm hoping my students will be "different." At Perimeter, I have at least two students who regularly misspell their own last names.

Sometimes I think about turning this into a cooking blog,...

Sometimes I think about turning this into a cooking blog, but I never do it. In fact, I hardly ever blog anymore. I don't really know why that is, except to say that it's become easier to post updates on facebook or twitter, simply for the verbal efficiency. That all said, I like cooking Mexican and Italian food the most. What about you?



Lately, these are the cuisines that have filled our dinner plates. Tonight we had a kind of Italian-inspired stew. I can't say that it was any kind of Italian recipe. Really, it was kind of a leftover clusterfuck. Right before my daughter was born I'd marinated some bone-in chicken breasts in spices (oregano, cinnamon, chili powder, garlic, salt and pepper). I barbecued that chicken and with it we ate tacos, but I saved the bones and some of the chicken clinging to them (we cut it off, as opposed to gnawing it, just FYI) to make chicken stock. After my baby came her grandparents hooked us up with a bunch of food. But as they are wont to do, they bought a bunch of shit and did not use it. So I found in my kitchen 1/2 a head of cabbage, a poke of red potatoes, three yellow squash, and a few links of Italian sausage. With a little sauteed garlic and onion, I tossed these ingredients into my thawed chicken stock and let it simmer till the cabbage got soft. I froze that whole batch up. Today I defrosted part of it. I didn't want to have a really soupy dish (which was how this looked). So I cooked up some bacon and tossed minced onion into the rendered fat. Then I made with that bacon-grease-and-onion a roux. After sieving the stock from my soup, I tossed it in with my roux making of it a gravy which I then poured over the reheated veggie and sausage and (now) bacon medley and voilà: stew. I had a few leaves of leftover basil in the fridge which I sliced and used as a garnish.



This was pretty damn tasty, if not a summery meal. It's perfect Fall fare, and I think I'll defrost the rest of it for that when October comes around. For lunch we'd had my version of chicken pibil tacos, so altogether it was a pretty festive eating day. Fuck other kinds of writing, for now.

Composition Textbooks

For a few years now I've been going bookless in English Comp I courses--the equivalent to English 101, freshman composition. The reason: perhaps the worst books I've ever read have been composition textbooks. It seems like comp professors--or those who pen comp/rhet texts--have the worst eyes and ears for what makes good writing. Or they might know what makes good writing, but they cannot do it themselves. I don't want to read those books, and I can't imagine any 17-25 year old college student wants to read them either. These texts are so dry, boring, formal, and disparaging of creativity. In lieu of a textbook I've been culling essays from websites or making photocopies or scanning into PDFs for reading, having class sessions where we play grammar games, etc., and running the class--essentially--as a creative nonfiction workshop. But I'm giving some thought to returning to a textbook. I'm so out of date, though (literally, I haven't used a textbook in about 5 years), that I don't know what might make good options.

Here are some examples of crappy composition textbooks: Wyrick's Steps to Writing Well, Rosa and Eschholz's Models for Writers, Lunsford's Everything's an Argument and The Everyday Writer. There are more that I've used and hated, but I don't feel like listing them all. A couple books (from one author, Bruce Ballenger) that I used to like using were The Curious Writer and The Curious Researcher. He seemed to have a more accessible style. But after 2 semesters or so he wore off on me also. This came about especially as a result of students not finding the writing engaging.

I will still use handbooks such as the Bedford, but don't always require that students buy them.

Anyway, anyone have any suggestions? I'm willing to try a textbook again. Textbooks make for less work on my end. Then again, it's not like it's problematic for me to keep reading contemporary lit, finding essays that I like in lit journals, and assigning those as readings for my comp students. Maybe the model I've been using for the last few years actually works.

About Becoming a Dad, if You're Me

At the exact moment I began to type this I was sitting at a bar in Midtown Atlanta. My first child was due to expunge herself from my wife's womb on Monday, June 27th. I figured it was as good a time as any to get a few hours in at a bar.

For more than half my life I've spent a significant amount of time in watering holes. I bartended a couple years in college, but mostly sat myself on the opposite side, diligently working through pints and shots, the occasional pool game, sometimes, in Nevada, even plunking quarters into the meaty hole of a video poker machine. Take what puns you'd like from all of that.

I used to smoke. I've often said that the hardest thing I've ever had to do was stop smoking. That shit ain't true. The hardest thing besides living is living without a bar. I love the bar. You decide if I'm an alcoholic.

It's not the booze that keeps me coming back. There's some quality of light in a dimly-lit bar. There's something about the daylight patronage. Since I quit smoking I cannot stand to be in bars that allow that vice. Call me a pussy. But still the bar ebbs at me, gravity sucking me towards the tinted windows looking out on a gray sky, the hush of conversation. See, I like bars. I don't like clubs. I don't like busy bars. In fact, a crowded bar is the last place you'll find me. I don't like a bar at happy hour. I don't like bars on weekends. I like the weekday bar, the dive without a band. The dives, even, at such times include minimal smokers.

I work in bars. I take my computer and my books, papers to grade. I don't talk, usually, to the other patrons, though I often listen to their conversations. When the crowd piles up, I pay my tab. I'd rather not be there with family or friends, or any of all those after-work people. I'm busy.

Speaking of fathers, mine just had a stroke. This stroke occurred after he'd checked himself into the emergency room (on the day we brought our baby home form the hospital, no less) for what he thought was a lingering cold he feared was mutating into pneumonia. Turns out he had congestive heart failure. My pop is not a bar person, but he likes his beer and wine. In fact, it's not uncommon for him and and my mom to share a bottle of wine over dinner, and that's after dad's had four beers. I know what this says and what a doctor would think. But I've seen my dad only a little buzzed maybe two or three times in my life. Like me, beer and wine just doesn't phase him. And yet, I learn on Wikipedia that a contributing factor to congestive heart failure could be a thickened ventricle due to prolonged alcohol abuse.

I knew that upon my baby's arrival I would not be able to spend as much time in bars. Beer makes me tired. I don't want to be tired while my little one's an infant; I need to be alert. And I ain't about to try to calm her, to swaddle and swing her on one arm to shush her to calming, after I've had a few beers. I ain't fucking with that shit. So that day was my last hurrah, as they say, my so long. I kiss you, bar, goodbye. In eighteen years, I shall see you, old and weathered though I'll be, and, bar, most likely some corporation will make you look the same, so that I feel at home. Perhaps at that time they'll pipe in an organic, healthy odor of cigarette smoke.

Selling Signed Freaks + Prose

Since I'm embarking on this dad venture, I won't be off on book tours or even doing any local readings for a few months at least. That leaves me with a box mixed with fresh copies of The Book of Freaks and Prose. Poems. a Novel. that I'd like to sell to you, special people. The prices here are cheaper than you'll find at Amazon or elsewhere. Basically, you'd get a signed book shipped your way without having to pay for all that shipping.

I am going to be someone's dad. I've been learning lots o...

I am going to be someone's dad. I've been learning lots of new dad stuff. Today I learned that the fire department is good for some things and shitty for others. What the fire department does best is make light and noise, and some fire fighters are good drivers. I say "fire fighters," but they're more like "fire maintainers." At least, in Atlanta, I haven't seen too many fires get put out. Mostly these public employees keep the fire from spreading and let whatever's already burning burn the fuck down. Perhaps more than anything, they instill a sense of relief in people experiencing emergency scenarios. The real help shows up later in the form of a doctor, at a hospital. But doctors work in another line of incompetence that I'll get to at some other time. Fire fighters and the departments they represent suck at the following:

answering the phone
being around their fire station
caring about helping you
being knowledgeable in their supposed areas of expertise

In particular, my local fire station and the firepeople therein purport to maintain a carseat inspection center. But here are the problems: First, you can't call the fire station, because no one answers the phone. So I jogged down there and walked all over the station, looking in the fire trucks and everything, and finally some guy in uniform on his cell phone, looking very bothered that he had to stop his conversation to talk to me, said that he would inspect the carseat right then. I said, okay, but I had to jog back home to get the car.

So I did and when I came back I couldn't find anyone again until I walked inside the building and hunted around till I found some dude watching TV who also seemed very upset that he had to turn the program down to talk to me. When I said another fireman said he'd inspect my carseat, this guy sighed and went to turn off the TV and get up, presumably to reluctantly inspect my carseat himself. But, lucky, at that moment the original guy I talked to walked into the room, still on his cell phone, saw me, and said "I'll be outside in a minute."

He did come out promptly and looked at the carseat and said, "I think you got it in there pretty good." I took the carrier off and explained to him that there was a base that was the actual part that I had to secure.

He looked at it and said I didn't need the shoulder strap lock because our car's shoulder straps locked on impact. He took it off to demonstrate. I smiled and said okay, but I was beyond skeptical; knew that that was not the case. He saw me struggling to tighten the belt that he had just loosened, said "congratualtions," on my forthcoming child, shrugged, then left, and I reinstalled our carseat base the way I had it before this retarded adventure began.

I keep forgetting to update and mention stuff. I'm gonna ...

I keep forgetting to update and mention stuff. I'm gonna be in Virginia next week! Hail to the Union! I mean the Confederacy! Whatever!

Man Martin has a new novel that will be officially released June 6th, or thereabouts. We talked each other into doing readings, and so that's what we're doing. We'll be at Over The Moon Bookstore in Crozet, VA on June 7th @ 6 PM. Come on out yall!

Next we're in Charlottesville, VA, at Writerhouse. That's at 7 PM on the 8th.

By the 9th we'll be in Baltimore, MD, kicking it with pals Adam Robinson, Justin Sirois, Joe Young, and likely a whole gaggle of othe Baltimorean language stuff peeps. I'll be looking out for you, Jen Michalski, and you, Jamie Gaughran-Perez, and you, Lauren Bender. I think Michael Kimball will still be in the dirty dirty deep south, since he's read for us here in Atlanta, at solar anus on Sunday. We're gonna barbecue pig and drink beer and read from books. There might be whiskey. Last time there was.

Steve Himmer's The Bee Loud Glade

April 2011, Atticus Books, $14.95

I picked up an ARC of this book in February, at AWP. Took me a minute to get to it with my unbelievable to-read stack, but I'm glad I finally did. Part of the reason I was excited about this book--I freely admit this--is that Steve Himmer has long been a friend to my own rantings, blog-publishing mentions about enjoying the work in my chapbooks and in Prose. Poems. a Novel., as well as selecting a story of mine to appear on Necessary Fiction, the online lit mag Himmer edits, and, on top of that I can tell he's just generally a good guy. Despite this seeming nepotism (which is really ridiculous anyway, right? I mean if two or more people who do the same sort of thing know each other, that's really surprising to you? It's like being surprised that Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley actually personally know one another and sometimes might even talk on the phone), Steve Himmer and I do not personally know one another. We've exchanged some brief emails, but we've never met personally. Anyway. Another reason I was excited about this book is that Himmer and I share some affinities for what is typically called "nature writing," but we might call it "place-based literature," or "ecocritically-friendly lit," or "Post-Thoreauvian Post-Post-Modern American literature." I just made that last one up. I actually have a Master's degree from the University of Nevada's Literature and Environment Program. So, I'm interested in this stuff. After this long preamble, let me say honestly, that while I have some points of small criticism of this book, it is, in all, a fine and enjoyable read, an edifying book, one that satisfies and leaves the reader thinking about our place on the planet in Western society.



It somehow happened that things I want to talk about with this book I broke up into the following areas:

Language/sentence structure/style

I'm a stickler for a fine sentence. I care about verbs, a lack of passive voice, lyricism. I understand a Gardner-esque point of view, that the sentence shouldn't draw too much attention to itself, that it should be easily readable, so we're not distracted from the "vivid and continuous dream" of the novel. But, I want a little attention paid to the beauty of language, too. This is not to say that Himmer has not done that. In some passages, especially toward the end--"After dinner, while the evening sky bruised as if its body, too, had worked a long day, I walked down to the river for a rare sunset swim."--he nails it. Sometimes I just wanted Himmer to get rid of filters: Finch "sees" things (in the sections when his sight isn't failing him), smells things, feels things, etc. I often simply want the sensory detail to be immediate. Instead of "This morning I stepped out of my cave into a world that still smelled like fresh rain and burnt hair"; I want it to be "This morning I stepped out of my cave into a world reeking of fresh rain and burnt hair." This is symptomatic of the kind of tightness I require, I suppose. but let me qualify this criticism by saying that this is a relatively minor point, considering the elements in this novel that supercede such trivialities. Also, for all I know, many sentence-level issues were taken care of with the final product, as I'm reading an ARC.

Politics

This book has a distinct political agenda. Typically, that's not something that I care to read. Granted, it's arguable that anything, no matter what you write, has an ideology behind it, but in this case it's right there in your face: " . . . I turned up the news. It was about the economy like it always was, interspersed with bits about wars that were either good for or bad for economics depending on who you asked, depending on which network you watched and which side you were on . . ." The rest of the scene in which this passage occurs outlines perhaps the ideology of the entire novel: the narrator becomes more entranced with a nature program about emperor penguins because he's bored with numbers, with the heads squabbling over human endeavors.

I don't disagree with Finch--our protagonist, also named after a bird--that the things of everyday humanity are insufferably boring, that the entrapments of our world keep us from tuning in to the non-human around us and thus it's no wonder that we suffer from global climate change, that, very likely, a good portion of the human population has decades of bad waiting for it due to our industrial negligence. But I don't think the solution is dropping out and tuning in--or whatever the fuck that Hippy said in the 60s.

Plot Device

The narrator (a first person narrator, which sometimes brings with it an obligation to explain the reason for the telling of the story; think Lolita, or Invisible Man, or something) uses a simple, but effective device, revealed to the reader about a hundred pages in, as the Old Man, which is a personification of the narrator's man-made river, and is the narrator's "scribe" to whom he ascribes his memory for, presumably, this telling of his story. Why the narraotr decided to do this in the first place is unclear and never explained, although it seems implied that it is an extension of his internal monologue brought on by his employer-enforced (and later self-imposed) vow of silence. This is tremendously interesting in its ironic implications. Here we're reading a novel--the antithesis of silence--written by a character who consciously chooses not to talk to anyone but himself in the form of his "Scribe," who informs the events of the novel, insuring a kind of unreliable/reliable narrator who we can trust/not trust to tell us this version of truth. At the same time it satisfies--however transparent it might be--the basic need for a reader to have a reason for the story being told in the first place.

Structure

The book moves back and forth: at one time the narrator tells us the story of his here and now, after his former employer has met his downfall and the garden has been relinquished to Finch, only to be infiltrated by a couple of hikers; these chapters alternate with Finch's history leading up to this moment. These latter chapters tell of how Finch ended up in the garden, how Mr. Crane asked him to perform certain endeavors such as Tai Chi, painting, woodcarving, and gardening, along with brief interactions with Crane, his wife, and Smithee the butler. This structure works well in that both moments come to a culmination: Mr. Crane meets his fuzzy downfall (we're not sure what happened but it's implied something illegal has gone on); and Finch ends up embracing his new garden companions who seem to have taken on Finch's own hermit-like qualities of silence and self-reliance. One thing we're never told is why Finch is losing his eyesight. It's implied that this simply has to do with age, but you don't get the sense that Finch has been in the garden an inordinate amount of time. Years, certainly, but enough for him to get old?

Very Cool

The only named characters, Finch and Crane--as has been previously mentioned at least for one of them--are named after birds. Finch, of course, being small, delicate, beautiful; and Crane is larger than life, somewhat stoic, representative of ideas more than an actual person. The symbolism here smacks you. I'm actually surprised more reviews haven't mentioned this.

Ultimately, it's no surprise to me that this book, smart as it is, was not picked up by a large New York house. It's too smart. I don't think they like thinky books. Fortunately, it landed in Atticus Books' hands, where they did a fine job producing this beauty. The book is yet more evidence that what popular culture--that what Finch does not sacrifice, but what he disdains--is useless, and won't carry us through the troubling years ahead. The bees, of course, which suggest our downfall due to their own rapidly shrinking numbers (hence our species' inability to rely upon agriculture, which bees' pollination insures), briefly fill this novel with a resounding blue uncertain stumbling buzz.

Book Giveaway

I want to give away some copies of The Book of Freaks.

I'm thinking that the most entertaining way I might achieve this is to have other people write their own entries to The Book of Freaks.

For examples, some of the entries that I wrote can be found

at Hobart

at the2ndhand

at PANK

at Robot Melon (x2)

at Mad Hatter's Review

at Servinghouse

Write your freakish entry. It can be about anything you damn well please. Post your entry in the comments at HTMLGiant or here. Entries will be judged by Roxane Gay and Mike Young. Three winners and a runner-up will be selected to receive a signed copy of the book and some other junk that I decide to send your way.

Kendra Grant Malone's Everything is Quiet

$12/ Scrambler Books

Most of the reviews of this book mention the "sincere" "confessional" "tone" and the "artless" "emotions" that this book reflects upon the reader, "the similarities in style" to "Bukowski," and so on. I'm reminded more of WC Williams's "no ideas but in things." Even the line lengths evoke Williams, to say nothing of the subject matter:

the third cup
i fill
using the same tea
bag is so
worthless that
i just watch it

Or take the book's shortest poem, "Faceless," a total of three lines: "he said he wanted to / destroy my face but / he did me no such favor."

Despite that last period (pun intended) Malone's poems go periodless. Perhaps they are post-period. See the dramatic situations of "Period Sex" and "Period Sex Part II."

In an interview with Noah Cicero on Bookslut, Malone says she wishes she could know where everyone who read her book was when they read it, and what they did afterwards. I lay in bed after having a fantastic dinner with my wife and my mother at this restaurant in Atlanta called Parish. My mom ordered the bottomless glass of wine and got loaded. She pissed me off by the time we got home--because she was complaining that I can't hear anything, after she and my dad spent thousands of dollars on my ears when I was a kid and I should respect my parents by continuing to go to the ENT and having fucking operations all the goddamn time and I said that we were not going to talk about it anymore is that clear? and I drove like a cop till we got to the apartment--and it was only like 9:30, but I went to bed and picked up Everything is Quiet by Kendra Grant Malone. I read the book. I put it down and had calmed considerably. I picked up John D'Agata's Halls of Fame and read an essay there. By then my wife came to bed. I turned off the light and fell asleep. I read the book two more times after that first reading.



Here are the lines/moments in this book where I was moved, sometimes almost to tears:

in "A Kicked Pigeon":

while you were
at work
i accidentally
kicked a pigeon
to death

In "Little Girls Are Women Somehow in Some Way":

i cried it
into my pillow
at age 13
when i understood
that a man once
broke my
mother's ribs
for sport

You have to read "My Father's Friends" to get to the click-closed end: "honestly, i look forward to dying again"

In "Hellfire Amongst Other Things": "yes, my cat's face / i would like it in my mouth"

In "Naked with Trish":

...i floated and looked
at the sky
i saw the big dipper
and the milky way
i once dated a
boy who showed me how
to recognize stars

Some readers/other poets might take issue with what another reviewer called these seemingly "artless" poems. Sure, the poet breaks lines somewhat irregularly, on words like "of" or "a." If you're that kind of reader/poet, well, I don't know. You probably won't allow yourself to like this book. You should try learning to take it easy. However, it would be nice to see the form of each poem work more intuitively with the dramatic situation or the speaker's voice a bit more. The poems are often contemplative, so I might expect long, meandering lines. Perhaps, though, what's happening here is that the short lined poems strike an ironic contrast to the speaker's point of view, underlying the violence of each poem, which is itself understated throughout this book.

I was perhaps most moved by "The Third Day," a poem that so accurately describes alcohol withdrawal (experiences I am all too unfortunately familiar with) that it's one I might continually go back to, something to remind myself of me:

you feel incredibly anxious
there is a
cloudiness
around you
it feels a little
like despair

...your limbs feel lucid
like you are swimming
but are not enjoying it
like someone is forcing you

When I finished with this book, I had a similar feeling as that expressed at the end of "The Third Day": "it's alright, it's okay"

It most certainly is not.