Gabe Durham's Blog, page 6
April 19, 2013
My Plotless Snarky Faux-Shocking Crumbs Are Hurting Adam Peterson’s Career
FUN CAMP comes out May 31, and in it is a short chapter/speech called “All You First-Timers with Deadbeat Dads,” which was originally published online by American Short Fiction.
Today, I got an email from the writer Adam Peterson asking if I’d seen this post from a site called How Publishing is Rigged: http://howpublishingisrigged.com/crumbs/#more-711 “People ask me if I’ve seen this all the time, like in cautious voices as if I’m going to be really hurt,” Adam wrote. “Apparently it’s a really high search result for my name or something.”
I followed the link and, sandwiched between a critique of Steve Edwards and Lydia Davis, was a critique of my FUN CAMP short, misattributing it to Adam.
I’ve pasted the (anonymous) critique below, which also includes my short in its entirety. Bolds mine:
This guy put a bunch of his Crumbs together to make a book. Well, that’s not really accurate—it was a chapbook. (A chapbook is a limited-production book, usually fewer than 100 pages, and often made by hand, like on someone’s dining room table.) But who might go out and buy his book? His friends might. Might. And maybe some MFA-holders who happen to be enamored of the very short story format. Or aspiring writers who want to be published in The Cupboard and are trying to kiss Peterson’s ass. But beyond that, there’s nobody in the real world who wants to read a single page of this garbage, let alone a full book of these things. But let’s look at the Crumb that Peterson wrote that made it into a recent issue of American Short Fiction. This Crumb is over before the thing even gets started. Not that a Crumb ever does get started.
“All You First-Timers with Deadbeat Dads” (American Short Fiction, August 2010)
The returners can tell you that camp is catnip to those bastards. Too perfect an opportunity for him not to pop back into your life, take you for a drunk backcountry cruise, and defend his absence away from the castrating gaze of you-know-who. When yours shows, you’ll offer a firm handshake and say, “Father, it is good to see you. I appreciate that you’ve driven some miles to visit me, your kin, to whom you wish to demonstrate your love. I cannot, however, accompany you to your truck for a harmless joyride, as each minute of my day at camp is accounted for, and I am under no circumstances permitted to leave camp boundaries at any time. Out of concern for your immediate safety, I plead you’ll depart expediently. Chef Grogg has no doubt been alerted to your presence, and he is one dumb deadly animal.” It’s a mouthful, so I had the speech printed up on little cards to keep on you at all times. Show of hands, who needs one? Come on, hands up. Nothing to be shy about. You all’ve got a leg up on the pussies from unbroken homes. While they mosey into adulthood expectant in their dumb grins, you’ll have already learned just how hard you can bite without drawing blood.
Where is the story here? Where is the plot? Alas, there is no story, and alas, no plot. There’s nothing at all to do with a story like this. In fact, this is not a story in any sense of the word as there is no narrative. The first sentence is a terrible metaphor too. My family had cats when I was a kid, and when cats go for catnip, they cannot be deterred from their pursuit of the catnip. There’s no “popping back in” for catnip, as though it were a casual pursuit. Once discovered, there’s continuous constant pursuit of that catnip; the cats are going to get to that nip and will not be deterred. For camp to “be catnip” to a deadbeat dad, camp is something that deadbeat wants as much as a cat wants catnip. But that’s not what the author is actually trying to say, is it? He’s trying to say that camp draws deadbeat dads for quick visits to camp. The author was trying to not use a cliché and instead of coming up with something original and thoughtful, Peterson used a metaphor that is confusing and inaccurate.
This “story” is also attempting to be funny—and fails. The overly formal language causes this piece to fall victim to the problem of most “humor” pieces written (and enjoyed) by the Lit Biz crowd. These people think that irony and “snarkiness” makes something funny. In the mind of the Lit Biz person, a child who (1) speaks with an adult’s vocabulary and who (2) has an affected way of talking is funny. And I’m not saying that a child can’t speak with a fully developed vocabulary or that a character in a story can’t have an affected way of talking and be funny, but that character had better have the context to show the humor that is present due to their unique manner of speaking. The context doesn’t exist here, where all on its own, it’s supposed to be funny that this camp kid talks like an English major with a stick up his ass. The author also throws a shocking word into the mix (oh! pussies!) to show that he—and his character—can be daring. That word is completely out of place with the rest of the character and the author has thrown it into this piece to try to be cool. And that word “pussies” is pushing the limits of crass language to this guy, never mind that you could hear a Pop Warner football coach using calling his 14-year-olds “pussies” without drawing so much as a surprised glance from any of them. Peterson, on the other hand, is probably still blushing.
Peterson’s partner at The Cupboard, Dave Madden, is certainly offended by this “pussies” remark. In an interview conducted by HTMLGIANT, Madden makes the following confession:
Dave: If I get offended by manuscripts that aim solely to shock or disrupt it’s more in terms of my sensibilities than any kind of ethical-political offense. Like that stuff gives me the vapours. And it tends rarely to be genuinely shocking or disruptive.
Doesn’t it sound like Madden is talking like the kind of thing that Peterson did—with the “pussies”—in the above story? And who on earth talks like that—stuff gives him the vapours?? Apparently Dave Madden, publishing giant (that was a little joke; Madden publishes very little), has the delicate constitution of a 94-year-old woman. From 1850. Don’t you love knowing that Dave Madden and guys like him are making decisions about what you get to read? Just because Madden and Peterson’s influence is limited to The Cupboard doesn’t make them any different from editors at large magazines. The editors at the bigger magazines have the same delicate constitutions and sensibilities as Dave Madden. Do you think that emotionally frail guys like Dave Madden can make good guesses as to what you’d like to read?
Sorry, Dave Madden! Looks like the misattribution got you roped in too.
But honestly, I’m not sorry for any of this. It is completely fascinating and the best web surprise since peterbd emailed me.
*
One thing I’ll be curious to hear from non-insane people about is whether anything in FUN CAMP is genuinely offensive.
I did wrestle a little with the speaker’s use of “pussy” when writing the piece. It’s a word I avoid in actual speech, uncomfortably gendered and often used misogynistically. It’s basically hatespeech lite, and I want in life and writing to be a good feminist in every way I can think to. But the speaker here so clearly has a chip on his shoulder, an enormous hostility toward people whose parents haven’t split up. The speech, to me, would be worse without it.
Maybe “pussy” is like a semicolon: You only get one per book.
I can’t think of a better note to end on than that.
April 17, 2013
Big Lucks #5 Print Issue
Andrew Battershill | Lyndsey Cohen | Tim DeMay | Gabe Durham
Erin Fitzgerald | Christine Friedlander | James Gendron | L.E. Hurston | Jac Jemc
Mike Krutel | Michael Landweber | Dorothea Lasky | Molly Lurie-Marino
Nancy Carol Moody | Erika Moya | Carrie Murphy | Adam Robinson | Allison Sparks
Nicolas Sansone | Andrew Sullivan | Mathias Svalina | Corey Wakeling
John Dermot Woods | Kate Wyer | Joshua Young
April 15, 2013
I am reading this Friday at StoriesLA in Silverlake
From the invite:
8 Killer Writers Clocking in at a Savage FIVE Minutes Each.
In town for the LA Times Book Festival? Us too!
As part of TheWeeklings.com’s one year anniversary, we’re celebrating along with our friends at TheGoodMenProject, by organizing this amazing slate of readers:
Jim Greer (Détective, Artificial Light)
Amelia Gray (Threats, Museum of The Weird)
Gabe Durham (Fun Camp)
Sean Beaudoin (The Infects, editor–TheWeeklings.com)
Hank Cherry (genius)
John Tottenham (Antiepithalamia, The Inertia Variations)
Megan Whitmarsh (Revolution is a Circle, Here Comes Purple)
Duke Haney (Banned for Life, Subversia)
Come check it out! No cover! There will be beer! Someone’s milkshake will be drunk!
Stories Bookstore and Café
1716 West Sunset Blvd • Los Angeles • CA
[213] 413-3733
April 8, 2013
Five New Shorts from FUN CAMP in Necessary Fiction
Big thanks to Steve Himmer for publishing these. They could be the last new batch before the book comes out.
Also: Check out the magazine’s book’s available for review section and they will set you up with something to read.
April 3, 2013
April 2, 2013
Deleted Scene from a Forthcoming Interview with Jack Christian
Gabe Durham: We’ve spoken before about the mystery of all that gets written in the overwhelmed rhythm of a full schedule, and I don’t think that “If you want something done, ask a busy person” entirely explains it. What is it about teaching that seems to wind you up to produce?
Jack Christian: I am quite busy. Between teaching and paper-grading and various side-projects and visits to the gym so as to avoid new experiences in obesity, I often find myself in the situation of needing and wanting to catch my breath.
To focus on the positive: Within this situation I frequently encounter and re-encounter the joy in writing, in squirreling away a minute or an hour, of spending a Saturday completely ensconced and obsessed. For a long time now, I’ve never sat down to write when I didn’t want to write. So, writing occupies this cherished space, and is positioned often as a break.
What I’m writing now is more humorous, more out-in-the-world, more overtly aware of the need to be entertaining. I have a different set of inputs from when I was in school, so there is this great compelling impetus to try to figure out how to adjust my writing to that. I guess I’ve been increasingly attracted to the idea of the attempt to tackle the most mundane, most subtle little aspects of life — to take the boring, wrestle-around with its boring-ness, and write something exciting and vibrant. For instance, what is there interesting to say about my daily drive to work? Or, what’s the zen of paper-grading?
Here’s a quick example from Nicholson Baker’s A Box of Matches that I read just last night: In a small climax halfway through the fourth or fifth chapter, the character scrounges in the dark for his glasses on his nightstand. He finds them, picks them up, careful not to smudge the lenses. After he gets them arranged on his face, he has this great line about his glasses adjusting everything he can’t see in the dark. Then, he just sits on his bed a moment, still in the dark, during which time he says to himself: “oh yeah, baby.”
Gabe Durham: Yeah, Scrounging in the Dark would be the more descriptive name for that book. I sometimes fantasize about having a career like Baker’s, where readers come to expect not a singular authorial voice but a multitude of modes: the book-length literary obsession essay, the erotic playground book, the novel-in-observations. Like: If you nail it in varied enough ways, you get this wonderfully elastic reader who will just follow you anywhere. Does that interest you too? How animated are you by the allowances and constraints of a particular writing project?
Jack Christian: That interests me hugely. I feel myself in the middle of a pivot toward what you describe in terms of being animated by the constraints of a particular project. I see some danger in becoming too wrapped up in projects, of the attempt to be too chameleon, but I don’t think this applies to Baker. He works in all these modes while also always defining his particular aesthetic.
The poems of Family System were written under the idea of no constraint, at least in their first drafts. The constraint was simply the mandate to try to write a good poem. Making it a book required more constraints to come into play (such as cutting the more whimsical, more talky stuff), especially in terms of the attempt to have the poems arranged in some sort of bouquet.
Now I find myself wanting to move into some different territory of voice and perspective. As I do, I bump against the possibility of a project becoming somehow soulless, or too conceptual, too much of a thought-challenge, but I find this is in tension with the need to make a good, book-size container.
So, while I’d like to know more at the level of concept, the way Baker seems to, if I knew too much I wouldn’t be able to write it. What I was aiming to say though, is, as much as I’m loving Nicholson Baker right now, I’d still always add a good dose of Moby Dick. This is attributable to my taste in music, to the low-fi and Grunge acts that got me through high school and college. Musicians like Daniel Johnston, Dinosaur Jr., Guided by Voices, Pavement, Modest Mouse, Nirvana, the Pixies, and Pearl Jam. These were primary influences in aesthetic messiness, which is a thing I don’t think I can shake. I’m starting to see a joy in having things very controlled and organized, but I’ll always have a first joy in letting things be messy.
March 26, 2013
Billy (11 of 11)
March 20, 2013
Three Parables from FUN CAMP @ The Good Men Project
Who is this Tad Gunnick, we wondered, who offers jokes and withholds the punch lines?
Three new pieces from FUN CAMP are now up on The Good Men Project, all parables about the teachings of most popular camper Tad Gunnick. My thanks to the honorable Matt Salesses for publishing these.
March 19, 2013
March 18, 2013
6 New Pieces from FUN CAMP in Untoward Magazine
May 31 draws ever closer and these kids are FREAKING OUT.
In the meantime, please enjoy these 6 pieces from FUN CAMP in our good friend Untoward Magazine. 3 of them get it done in a quick sentence, 3 just go on forever like your time isn’t valuable. Thanks Matt Rowan for publishing these and putting out a great magazine.
