Alex Kudera's Blog, page 137

#pdftribute redux

So the highlight of giving the story away at amazon, smashwords, and everywhere else e-books are downloaded has been watching it move as high as #15 in the amazon "coming of age" free-e-book category where it remains at #30. It may not even be "coming of age," but I'll take anything I can get. Within literary fiction, #30 or so was the high, and it's currently #53, just behind a cool-sounding Concrete Underground by one Moxie Mezcal.

There's a chance I'll break out of my rut and publish one all by myself although the usual factors seem to be impeding my march in this direction.

Thoughts?

the poetics of pensions

Dow 14,000 or not, according to plenty of sources, we're in a persistent recession for black Americans, older workers, and more or less, the rest of the country.

With an impending sequester and the promise of a million or more job cuts, things could get even worse before they get better, or possibly, they won't ever get better for most human beings on the planet. So to recap, that'd be worse and then worse again. . . maybe a meandering, a lull between worses upon occasion, but we'll see.

Somehow it all reminded me of this Kevin Varrone poem posted on the homepage of the Pennsylvania Book Center. I'll be sure to hit him up for some cash if I ever run into him in Philly.

market update

Bond-bookie Bill Gross wades into the waters of inflation-protected literature and is decidedly unamused about recent strength in the markets. He resorts to quoting T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men," (and not Yeats!) to insist the center, as in the bond market, cannot hold. After the bang, the whimper, and all that, his blog post's first rather pedestrian suggestion is to purchase TIPs if you're among the many who can't purchase land in New Zealand. Later in his list of suggestions, he does offer meatier bits such as, "Be cognizant of property rights and confiscatory policies in all governments."

And yet, despite Gross's glooming over the monetary system and unemployment inching higher (enough other positive indicators to send the curious off the couch and back into the job market), the Dow Jones Industrial Average appears to have closed above 14,000 for only the ninth time in its history. According to Christina Rexrode in The Huffington Post,

If there's dissent over what Dow 14,000 means, what's undeniable is that it's a rarefied event: The Dow has crossed 14,000 only 15 times in its history, and the last time was more than five years ago, on Oct. 17, 2007.

If the gains hold throughout the day and the Dow closes above 14,000, that would put it in territory even more uncommon. On just nine days has the Dow managed to stay above the 14,000 mark until the end of trading. Friday's gains also mean that the Dow is within striking distance of its all-time record of 14,164.53, which it reached on Oct. 9, 2007.  

Now I'm waffling between quick conclusions:

a) everything will be fine

and

b) let's enjoy our last nine months together

and

c) remember to hedge your bets

and

d) oh, yeah, i get it; Eliot worked in a bank

and

e) several of these above

Anon.

first they quit?

It is of course absurd, unfair, and unoriginal to describe any recent shenanigans in American higher education to anything related to Nazi Germany, but Paul Fain's piece in Inside Higher Ed reminded me of this poem from my childhood.

Martin Niemöller: "First they came for the Socialists..."

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak for me.

They've already come for so many different kinds of "nonessential" workers on many different campuses, from adjunct instructors to garbage collectors to a guy I knew whose job with a college degree was to do all the laundry for another school's men's basketball team (20K, no benefits as I recall), and, thus, it's not at all surprising that online instructors are being let go. Administrators aren't gassing anyone, it's humane termination, so to speak, and by some criteria the benefits of not working seem to be on the rebound (Affordable Care Act, food stamps, etc.), but it's still a peculiar time we're in, and it's hard to know where it will all end, and what kind of United States will be living in when we get there.

And then again, the market is roaring higher, hundreds of thousands of jobs are going unfilled, and if we discount those falling off the rolls then we've had positive job creation for several years. We'll see what this Friday's jobs numbers say. There's some rosy America out there where angry scientists don't need the classes at Marist, and adjuncts who quit find rejuvenation in some full-time job beyond the groves of academe.

Well, what else?

Fight for Your Long Day.

#pdftribute

The Betrayal of Times of Peace and Prosperity may not be a peer-reviewed scholarly article, but in a way, this fiction fits the issues at hand, and so to acknowledge the open-access movement, it can be read online for free or downloaded to most electronic reading devices.

philly's fergie

Jason Fagone's recent story about Fergie Carey in Philadelphia Magazine caught my eye, and reminded me of my own adventures in and around his pub.

Almost all of my early stories were written in Philly, the city of brotherly beer. At Doobie's at 22nd and Lombard, I'd sit and scrawl, and I probably looked like a lunatic if anyone noticed at all. Later, maybe the next day, I'd type my stories on an old Apple IIc computer. I stared at its nine-inch monochrome green screen from the mid-eighties until the late nineties, when a dirt-cheap computer deal, with an agreement to purchase a few years of internet connectivity, finally freed me from old-machine captivity.

Back to the early nineties, at some point Fergie's Pub opened up and that became another place to go drinking and writing, writing and talking, and more writing. I was in these bars a lot, Tangier Cafe and McGlinchey's, too, but wouldn't say I was too much of a drinker. The food menu at Fergie's was part of the attraction for me.

It was a late afternoon or early evening, and only a few of us were at his new pub, and Fergie was tending to the place on his own. I was sitting at the bar, most likely drinking a Yuengling Lager or Lord Chesterfield Ale, and I had a typed story out. It was "Over Fifty Billion Kafkas Served," one of my favorites from that period, and this led to that, and Fergie asked if he could read it, or I offered, and so he was behind the bar reading my story. After a minute or two, I told him it felt weird to see someone reading my story, and so with alacrity, he moved from behind the bar and continued reading behind my back. Literally. I'm not sure if this was just Fergie being the generous guy we all knew him as, knowing our names, pouring our pitchers, etc., or the story was engaging enough, but he took another 10 minutes, and then popped back to the bar and told me with certainty that someone would publish it. That made my afternoon although it wasn't until nearly 20 years later that I found a home for the story.

The last time I saw Fergie, I think, was in the new Borders Bookshop on a winter holiday break between semesters. I was up from South Carolina, staying at my Mom's, and this was possibly Christmas Eve or close to it. Perhaps it would be a more poetic memory if this was at the old Borders at 1727 Walnut Street where I got my start in scribbling on my days off or mornings before the 1 to 10 p.m. shift. But this was the Borders location after they got chased off Rittenhouse Square by Barnes and Noble and opened up at Broad and Chestnut, the one they were in when the whole chain finally went kaput. Anyway, I was headed from the second to third floor, and Fergie was coming down the escalator, and I said, "Hey Fergie," and he said, barely missing a beat, "Hey Alex." I don't think I'd seen him for years, and it was impressive that someone with such an amazing inventory of names in his brain could still remember a customer from so long ago.

So there you have it.

To Fergie.

Cheers.

fergie and his pubs

This recent story about Fergie Carey in Philadelphia Magazine caught my eye, and reminded me of my own adventures in and around his pub.

A lot of my early stories were written at Doobie's at 22nd and Lombard; I'd sit and scrawl and I probably looked like a lunatic if anyone noticed at all, and then later, maybe the next day, I'd type my stories on an old Apple IIc computer, what I used from the mid-eighties until the late nineties, when a dirt-cheap computer deal, with an agreement to purchase a few years of internet connectivity, finally freed me from old-machine captivity.

This was all in the early nineties, and at some point Fergie's Pub opened up and that became another place to go drinking and writing, writing and talking, and more writing. I was in these bars a lot, Tangier Cafe and McGlinchey's, too, but wouldn't say I was too much of a drinker. The food menu at Fergie's was part of the attraction for me.

It was a late afternoon or early evening, and only a few of us were at his new pub, and Fergie was tending to the place on his own. I was sitting at the bar, most likely drinking a Yuengling Lager or Lord Chesterfield Ale, and I had a typed story out. It was "Over Fifty Billion Kafkas Served," one of my favorites from that period, and this led to that, and Fergie asked if he could read it, or I offered, and so he was behind the bar reading my story. After a minute or two, I told him it felt weird to see someone reading my story, and so with alacrity, he moved from behind the bar and continued reading behind my back. Literally. I'm not sure if this was just Fergie being the generous guy we all knew him as, knowing our names, pouring our pitchers, etc., or the story was engaging enough, but he took another 10 minutes, and then popped back to the bar and told me with certainty that someone would publish it. That made my afternoon although it wasn't until nearly 20 years later that I found a home for the story.

The last time I saw Fergie, I think, was in the new Borders Bookshop on a winter holiday break between semesters. I was up from South Carolina, staying at my Mom's, and this was possibly Christmas Eve or close to it. Perhaps it would be a more poetic memory if this was at the old Borders at 1727 Walnut Street where I got my start in scribbling on my days off or mornings before the 1 to 10 p.m. shift. But this was the Borders location after they got chased off Rittenhouse Square by Barnes and Noble and opened up at Broad and Chestnut, the one they were in when the whole chain finally went kaput. Anyway, I was headed from the second to third floor, and Fergie was coming down the escalator, and I said, "Hey Fergie," and he said, barely missing a beat, "Hey Alex." I don't think I'd seen him for years, and it was impressive that someone with such an amazing inventory of names in his brain could still remember a customer from so long ago.

So there you have it.

To Fergie.

Cheers.

working and older working writers

Over at cnn.com, this American life befits the times, or at least the headlines.

In a way, it reminds me of this, possibly paraphrased, Paul Auster quotation about his father:

"work was the country he lived in, and he was his greatest patriot."

Of course, Auster's quotation implies that his father may have believed in work, or even worshipped it, and in his memoir "Portrait of an Invisible Man" we read about an older father clinging to his work, its habits (he quotes Beckett, too, on habit as "the great deadener"), and what seemed to be his entire life even as his real estate holdings were slowly decaying, depreciating, and disappearing.

And in other news, of other writers, America's greatest comic critic of our "Puritan work ethic," Thomas Pynchon, has another novel coming out. It will be interesting to see if The Bleeding Edge is another late long one, a la Mason & Dixon and Against the Day; more or less standard-novel size, a la Vineland and Inherent Vice; or if Pynchon finally succumbs to the short-novel disease that seems to have afflicted more than one novelist late in his years. Roth and Delillo come to mind first for me, and it's amazing that Pynchon, so late in his career, could actually be approaching those two prolific geniuses when it comes to quantity of published pages of fiction. Probably the biggest bullshit measure of a writer one could come up with it, but slightly interesting nonetheless. . .  Roth and Delillo have so many more titles, but I don't quite see that either of them has a Gravity's Rainbow kind of book. At the same time, it seems strange that Delillo hasn't won more awards although he has won some big ones, and my hunch is he appears on more college syllabi than the other writers mentioned in this post.

In my own reading news, the good tweeters at New Directions and Melville House recommended Mating by Norman Rush for something somewhat Bolano-like, and so far, this National Book Award winner has not disappointed. Sixty pages in, and I feel like I'm reading a great novel. . . comedy, politics, detail, Africa, everything. . .

I'll add some links, italicize here and there, correct the typos, and maybe add an interesting sentence or two at some later moment.

Have a reading weekend.

A Poor Man's Christmas

Christmas was coming and my father was between positions again. It was the late seventies and well after his temporary gig driving the van delivering flowers in downtown Philly. It must have been between computer-programming jobs, possibly Textronix in Blue Bell and Arthur's Travel in Center City, the job that would launch him to California and alter the trajectory of his life.

But in the winter of 1978 or ’79, my Dad had nothing. He was broke. I remember him hinting at this, but I don’t have a great sense of feeling any danger because of it. As best I knew, he could cover his child support and his rent on a decent two-bedroom apartment in a generic development in Lansdale, Pennsylvania. His child-support payments were low, but he almost always had the dough each month. It was over at my mom’s, living in a one-floor three bedroom and eating chicken five times a week that I felt closer to poverty. My dad always lived in houses, whether he rented or owned, and he would spring for vacations and steaks in restaurants when the dough was coming in. But my Mom had her steady job, her teaching, and maybe I just thought I’d go live with her permanently if Dad couldn’t afford to have us visit.

Despite his lack of work, he cobbled up enough cash to take us to a tree farm to pick out a Christmas tree. It was one of those places where you go exploring in the farm’s woods, find one you like, and then cut it down yourself. My father may have thought this would be cheaper than getting a cut and clipped tree from some corner lot in South or West Philly. That year, trees were expensive; a gift of stagflation or for some other reason, I’m not sure.

But we’re at the farm, walking through the snow and slush, and I know Dad is feeling the pinch looking at the prices because he mutters about how much they are. We wind our way through dozens of trees, and then return to where the tree guy waits.

“Say, do you have any cheaper trees? Any discounts?” My father figures it can’t hurt to ask.

The guy takes us to the cheapest ones he has, but even those prices aren’t meeting the family budget.

And then he gets his big idea. “See, I’m kind of short this season. Could you cut us off the top of a tree?”

The man seems to understand now, and he does it. For ten bucks we get the top two feet of a Christmas tree. We take it back to my father’s Lansdale home, a stale beige unit surrounded by similar clones. And Dad puts a sheet over a small table, and sets up our stump in the Christmas tree stand. It fits easily, and looks quite nice perched on the table.

Soon there were small wrapped gifts on the table, too, and in the morning, I’d open mine and find two mass-market Madeleine L’Engle books, including A Wrinkle in Time. I cannot recall the other title but remember the dyed mint green sides of the pages, something we rarely see these days. Although I’m not certain I ever finished either paperback, I remember enjoying the gift giving and the holiday. Whatever I understood as his poverty then only felt like a temporary bump in the road. It was much different from his bottoming out in the early nineties and then the mostly minimum wage work, when he had it, for most of that decade. That downturn seemed like such a permanent place for my father that I was surprised, maybe shocked, when he found lucrative tech work again toward the end of the millennium, just a few years before his passing.
  Note: “A Poor Man's Christmas” is an excerpt from rough draft of The Book of Jay, Alex Kudera's memoir with journal selections from his father, the poet Jay Roberts. Other sections appear online at When Falls the Coliseum (here and here) and Atticus Books (here and here and here). It’s a work in progress that will consist of intertwining memories of each writer’s father. Kudera’s debut work, Fight for Your Long Day , was the first novel published by Atticus Books and won the 2011 Independent Publishers Gold Medal for Best Fiction from the Mid-Atlantic Region. Atticus went on to win four more IPPY Gold Medals in 2012 but remained humble and suffered in silence like any other small press.

Rob Balla

Here's a six-minute Chronicle video featuring Rob Balla's take on the adjunct situation. He's raising a family of four without health benefits, driving a ten-year-old car, and teaching up to eight classes a semester. Sound familiar?

Here and here are some fresh frontpage stories from the major pubs about the adversities his, and our, students can face. You put the whole thing together, and it's not too difficult to recognize the viability of the case that much of contemporary college isn't about education as opportunity and lifting young folks above their socio-economic origins. And here's another one that suggests more STEM majors aren't the answer either. The current president of Penn State seems to be doing okay, though, and I can't help but note that his $85,000 raise is just a bit more than what NPR reported it would cost to implement the NRA's plan for the federal government to bring an armed guard to every school.

In slightly related news, it came to my attention that someone loaded the first five minutes of Fight for Your Long Day  onto youtube. That's part of the first chapter already audible at Iambik, but it appears they retrieved it from this itunes store.

But what, you ask, have we been watching and listening to this holiday season?

Charlie Brown holiday specials of course.