Matt Posner's Blog: You've Been Schooled, page 2
August 14, 2013
A Sample of Simon Myth
This is from Chapter Thirteen. Mr. Tinker (Goldberry's father) is a guest teacher.
“You’re to learn advanced concealment,” said Mr. Tinker. “Should have been taught to you second year, but..." He paused. He knew a criticism would not be well-received. “Well, then. Advanced concealment differs from our general concealment magic mainly in its force. Advanced concealment hides you from the notice of even fellow magicians unless they are searching for concealed individuals or are extremely alert by nature. There is only one student present in this building who I expect to become able to hide from me or the Dean, and no one has ever been able to evade the attention of Maestro Morgan. As for Rabbi Horn, he has a set of magic cuff links.”
I assumed Mr. Tinker meant Rocco when he named the superior student. Rocco was and always had been expert in going unnoticed, and had developed a spell for total invisibility, although it had an unacceptable side effect.
“A simple tactic was used in my day to intensify focus on concealment as required. To become and stay concealed under the conditions created by the tactic, you will in some way, particular to you, break through to a deeper level of presence of mind. I need a volunteer.”
Rocco raised his hand.
“Good. Leave your hand up. Spread your fingers wide.” Mr. Tinker seized the upraised right hand. “Between each finger is a web of skin of varying size. Grasp the web between ring and index finger, so.” He clamped his fierce fingers in that spot on Rocco’s hand. “Now pull vigorously.”
Rocco winced, yelped, then settled into the pain.
“Now, turn on power of concealment,” said Mr. Tinker.
“I can’t hide while you’re holding onto me,” Rocco protested.
“Make me forget that I am holding onto you.”
“Can I make you let go of me first?”
“That’s not the goal.”
Rocco gritted his teeth. “Maybe I need to practice first.”
Mr. Tinker lifted his hand still higher. “When Cornelius Archer did this to me, I lost feeling in my hand for a month. I’m being gentle, boy. Turn on power of concealment.” He then began to tell us a story about breaking a man’s kneecap on the rugby field and then throwing the man’s sister into the River Mersey after the game. “Proved to me that cows don’t float.”
Then he went to the front of the room and discussed a spell to make mold grow in a butter dish. Then he rubbed his hands together. “Turn it off!” he announced.
“Turn what off?” asked Rocco, who was standing next to him at the podium.
I hadn’t seen him follow Mr. Tinker to the front of the room. My classmates conferred and we concluded no one had noticed when Rocco became concealed, nor had we seen him during the off-color rugby story.
Rocco returned to his seat and was rubbing the sore spot where Mr. Tinker had been pinching him.
“You have one week to master this,” Mr. Tinker declared. “Practice with your partners. When the class assembles next Tuesday, enter concealed. I’ll have a guest in the room. Anyone who is spotted by my guest will get six hours of scrubbing the floor of Conjuration Room C without knee pads. Go away and practice. Rocco.”
“Yes, boss?”
“If Goldberry can’t do this in three days, I’ll go and tell the cabala school seniors you’re a Palestinian.”
“You sodding well will not,” said Goldberry.
“It’s okay,” Rocco said. “We got it covered.”
It was true that Goldberry and I weren’t getting along well, but we could still work together on school work. What did he mean, assigning Rocco to work with her instead of me? I stayed after class to confront Mr. Tinker.
“Goldberry doesn’t need Rocco’s help,” I told him. “I’ll do it with her. Don’t you think I can learn to do this?”
“Of course you can.”
“Then why did you assign Rocco to help her? Am I not good enough for her all of a sudden?”
Mr. Tinker turned his back to me.
“Don’t play games with me,” I said.
That was a mistake.
He came around suddenly. “Or what, boy? Or you’ll thrash me? Or go whining to the Dean that I hurt your feelings? Or curse me into the shape of a hobby-horse? Just what will you do?”
If you liked this, please go and buy all my novels. I guarantee they are all full of adventure, romance, tragedy, and beauty.
“You’re to learn advanced concealment,” said Mr. Tinker. “Should have been taught to you second year, but..." He paused. He knew a criticism would not be well-received. “Well, then. Advanced concealment differs from our general concealment magic mainly in its force. Advanced concealment hides you from the notice of even fellow magicians unless they are searching for concealed individuals or are extremely alert by nature. There is only one student present in this building who I expect to become able to hide from me or the Dean, and no one has ever been able to evade the attention of Maestro Morgan. As for Rabbi Horn, he has a set of magic cuff links.”
I assumed Mr. Tinker meant Rocco when he named the superior student. Rocco was and always had been expert in going unnoticed, and had developed a spell for total invisibility, although it had an unacceptable side effect.
“A simple tactic was used in my day to intensify focus on concealment as required. To become and stay concealed under the conditions created by the tactic, you will in some way, particular to you, break through to a deeper level of presence of mind. I need a volunteer.”
Rocco raised his hand.
“Good. Leave your hand up. Spread your fingers wide.” Mr. Tinker seized the upraised right hand. “Between each finger is a web of skin of varying size. Grasp the web between ring and index finger, so.” He clamped his fierce fingers in that spot on Rocco’s hand. “Now pull vigorously.”
Rocco winced, yelped, then settled into the pain.
“Now, turn on power of concealment,” said Mr. Tinker.
“I can’t hide while you’re holding onto me,” Rocco protested.
“Make me forget that I am holding onto you.”
“Can I make you let go of me first?”
“That’s not the goal.”
Rocco gritted his teeth. “Maybe I need to practice first.”
Mr. Tinker lifted his hand still higher. “When Cornelius Archer did this to me, I lost feeling in my hand for a month. I’m being gentle, boy. Turn on power of concealment.” He then began to tell us a story about breaking a man’s kneecap on the rugby field and then throwing the man’s sister into the River Mersey after the game. “Proved to me that cows don’t float.”
Then he went to the front of the room and discussed a spell to make mold grow in a butter dish. Then he rubbed his hands together. “Turn it off!” he announced.
“Turn what off?” asked Rocco, who was standing next to him at the podium.
I hadn’t seen him follow Mr. Tinker to the front of the room. My classmates conferred and we concluded no one had noticed when Rocco became concealed, nor had we seen him during the off-color rugby story.
Rocco returned to his seat and was rubbing the sore spot where Mr. Tinker had been pinching him.
“You have one week to master this,” Mr. Tinker declared. “Practice with your partners. When the class assembles next Tuesday, enter concealed. I’ll have a guest in the room. Anyone who is spotted by my guest will get six hours of scrubbing the floor of Conjuration Room C without knee pads. Go away and practice. Rocco.”
“Yes, boss?”
“If Goldberry can’t do this in three days, I’ll go and tell the cabala school seniors you’re a Palestinian.”
“You sodding well will not,” said Goldberry.
“It’s okay,” Rocco said. “We got it covered.”
It was true that Goldberry and I weren’t getting along well, but we could still work together on school work. What did he mean, assigning Rocco to work with her instead of me? I stayed after class to confront Mr. Tinker.
“Goldberry doesn’t need Rocco’s help,” I told him. “I’ll do it with her. Don’t you think I can learn to do this?”
“Of course you can.”
“Then why did you assign Rocco to help her? Am I not good enough for her all of a sudden?”
Mr. Tinker turned his back to me.
“Don’t play games with me,” I said.
That was a mistake.
He came around suddenly. “Or what, boy? Or you’ll thrash me? Or go whining to the Dean that I hurt your feelings? Or curse me into the shape of a hobby-horse? Just what will you do?”
If you liked this, please go and buy all my novels. I guarantee they are all full of adventure, romance, tragedy, and beauty.
March 11, 2013
Simon Myth Progress Update
Simon Myth update. Today I had some time to work. Here's what I did...
I typed up the end of Chapter 32, which was already drafted in my notebook. A few improvements.
I finished a first draft of Chapter 39. I don't like what I wrote, but I may change my mind when I get some distance.
I cancelled Chapter 40. The book's too long and my ideas for it are too vague. I can always do a short story another time with that material.
I added some material to Chapter 41 (all the chapter numbers will be redone).
I cut half of Chapter 26 and pasted it into Chapter 43, which gives me half of chapter 43 but I need to fill in the gap in Chapter 26.
This is really a lot of noise but not much production. However, it means something to me because I am getting rid of nagging problems. I'd been sitting on an unfinished Ch. 39 for something like six months. Plus, cutting Ch. 40 was momentous since I did a lot of research for it. You know how it is when you have to work on something a lot in order to realize it's no good. There's a certain satisfaction that comes from getting rid of something you are attached to. It makes you (or me anyway) feel virtuous. But overall, I just want this book finished. I have never been so "over" a book as I am "over" this one. I feel like it's the hardest book I ever wrote. And I haven't even started cutting the opening section, which is in a mess. And still a lot of the end part isn't written yet. ARgh.
I typed up the end of Chapter 32, which was already drafted in my notebook. A few improvements.
I finished a first draft of Chapter 39. I don't like what I wrote, but I may change my mind when I get some distance.
I cancelled Chapter 40. The book's too long and my ideas for it are too vague. I can always do a short story another time with that material.
I added some material to Chapter 41 (all the chapter numbers will be redone).
I cut half of Chapter 26 and pasted it into Chapter 43, which gives me half of chapter 43 but I need to fill in the gap in Chapter 26.
This is really a lot of noise but not much production. However, it means something to me because I am getting rid of nagging problems. I'd been sitting on an unfinished Ch. 39 for something like six months. Plus, cutting Ch. 40 was momentous since I did a lot of research for it. You know how it is when you have to work on something a lot in order to realize it's no good. There's a certain satisfaction that comes from getting rid of something you are attached to. It makes you (or me anyway) feel virtuous. But overall, I just want this book finished. I have never been so "over" a book as I am "over" this one. I feel like it's the hardest book I ever wrote. And I haven't even started cutting the opening section, which is in a mess. And still a lot of the end part isn't written yet. ARgh.
February 20, 2013
A Sample from School of the Ages 4: Simon Myth
Pleased to present a draft sample from School of the Ages 4: Simon Myth. This is from a chapter near the end. Simon is speaking, and his team is assembled in his grandmother's house in Mumbai (Bombay).
It was hours later when the doorbell rank. The naukar* admitted a small man in a tattered gray suit with a wilted flower in his boutonniere. He was about fifty and had wet brown eyes and pouty lips and was holding a cane made of rosewood with a bronze cap.
“That is him,” said Devi. “Bakshi, this useless excuse for a jaadugar*.”
“Useless?” Bakshi countered. “Madame, I protest. Things are difficult. They take time. With patience, we will be able to…”
“A refund,” my father said. “The full amount, minus one month’s fee as a courtesy. Write a check.”
“Absolutely not,” said Bholenath Bakshi. He wrung the ends of his stick. “There are no refunds from jaadu*. I have been paid for ceaseless efforts to…”
“To what?” Goldberry interrupted.
“My dear,” said Bakshi, lifting his cane which he shook like a wagging finger. “You must leave this matter to the…” He mouthed ‘experts’ but then he looked at her with broader recognition. “Oh, well,” he recovered, “I see I must acknowledge you as a junior colleague.”
“Oh, you see that, do you?” she pressed. “What else do you see?”
“I see that when you mature, young woman, you will understand better the true nature of…”
“Rubbish.”
Bakshi gripped his stick tightly. “In time, you will know the…”
“She knows the ten rimzas, the secret seals of the planets,” I said.
“All well and good,” Bakshi said, noticing with a glance that Rocco and Balaram were now standing behind him. “The ten rimza seals are useful in some conditions, but…”
“There’s only nine of them,” Rocco said into his ear.
“Keep your distance, boy!” Bakshi blurted. He raised his cane in a warning pose.
“Thanks,” Rocco said, and snatched it from his hand.
“Give her a refund,” I told Bakshi. “We offered you one month as a courtesy, even though you don’t deserve it.”
“You fake,” Balaram added.
Bakshi made a grab for his stick. Rocco, taller and sprier, easily evaded him.
“You have one more chance to accept these conditions,” I continued.
“There are no refunds for jaadu,” Bakshi insisted.
“You didn’t do any jaadu, yaar*,” Balaram said. “Right. You just took the money and spent it on what? Liquor? Gambling?”
“Give me that!” Bakshi snarled as he grabbed for his stick. “Do not test me, for I am Mahamayakar*, Mahaabhyosi*. I am Sarvajna, all-knowing! If you challenge me, you shall…”
“All-knowing,” said Rocco. “Okay. What’s my name?”
Bakshi thought about it. “Cretin,” he answered.
“Yep,” said Rocco. “He’s good. Mr. Moore, can I kick his ass?”
* naukar (Hindi): a house servant. pronounced like "knocker"
jaadugar (Hindi): magician, wizard.
jaadu (Hindi): magic
Mahamayakar (Sanskrit): A great wizard
Mahaabhyosi (Sanskrit): A great spiritual aspirant. Clumsily used, indicating what a phony he is.
It was hours later when the doorbell rank. The naukar* admitted a small man in a tattered gray suit with a wilted flower in his boutonniere. He was about fifty and had wet brown eyes and pouty lips and was holding a cane made of rosewood with a bronze cap.
“That is him,” said Devi. “Bakshi, this useless excuse for a jaadugar*.”
“Useless?” Bakshi countered. “Madame, I protest. Things are difficult. They take time. With patience, we will be able to…”
“A refund,” my father said. “The full amount, minus one month’s fee as a courtesy. Write a check.”
“Absolutely not,” said Bholenath Bakshi. He wrung the ends of his stick. “There are no refunds from jaadu*. I have been paid for ceaseless efforts to…”
“To what?” Goldberry interrupted.
“My dear,” said Bakshi, lifting his cane which he shook like a wagging finger. “You must leave this matter to the…” He mouthed ‘experts’ but then he looked at her with broader recognition. “Oh, well,” he recovered, “I see I must acknowledge you as a junior colleague.”
“Oh, you see that, do you?” she pressed. “What else do you see?”
“I see that when you mature, young woman, you will understand better the true nature of…”
“Rubbish.”
Bakshi gripped his stick tightly. “In time, you will know the…”
“She knows the ten rimzas, the secret seals of the planets,” I said.
“All well and good,” Bakshi said, noticing with a glance that Rocco and Balaram were now standing behind him. “The ten rimza seals are useful in some conditions, but…”
“There’s only nine of them,” Rocco said into his ear.
“Keep your distance, boy!” Bakshi blurted. He raised his cane in a warning pose.
“Thanks,” Rocco said, and snatched it from his hand.
“Give her a refund,” I told Bakshi. “We offered you one month as a courtesy, even though you don’t deserve it.”
“You fake,” Balaram added.
Bakshi made a grab for his stick. Rocco, taller and sprier, easily evaded him.
“You have one more chance to accept these conditions,” I continued.
“There are no refunds for jaadu,” Bakshi insisted.
“You didn’t do any jaadu, yaar*,” Balaram said. “Right. You just took the money and spent it on what? Liquor? Gambling?”
“Give me that!” Bakshi snarled as he grabbed for his stick. “Do not test me, for I am Mahamayakar*, Mahaabhyosi*. I am Sarvajna, all-knowing! If you challenge me, you shall…”
“All-knowing,” said Rocco. “Okay. What’s my name?”
Bakshi thought about it. “Cretin,” he answered.
“Yep,” said Rocco. “He’s good. Mr. Moore, can I kick his ass?”
* naukar (Hindi): a house servant. pronounced like "knocker"
jaadugar (Hindi): magician, wizard.
jaadu (Hindi): magic
Mahamayakar (Sanskrit): A great wizard
Mahaabhyosi (Sanskrit): A great spiritual aspirant. Clumsily used, indicating what a phony he is.
February 15, 2013
Book Link Interview
In January, I did an interview for Book Link, an Indian publishing trade journal. When I originally replied to the great questions, I overshot the required length by double or more, so I cut it down. However, here is the full text of my original response.
Q. Some book names you have written in the US.
A. In the U.S., my School of the Ages series has three novels of a planned five, plus two short story books. The novels are The Ghost in the Crystal, Level Three’s Dream, and The War Against Love (which Vitasta will publish in the spring), and the short story books are Tales of Christmas Magic (mostly comic or warm stories about School of the Ages with a holiday feel) and Sara Ghost (which is a fifty-page story featuring School of the Ages characters confronting a mature social problem).
Also in the U.S., I have a book I co-authored with Jess C. Scott called Teen Guide to Sex and Relationships. This is a book for teenagers, not for children. This book does not have an Indian publisher. I would like to find one someday, though. If E.L. James’ ridiculous book Fifty Shades of Grey, which offers a nonsensical, offensively stupid view of sexuality, can be a big success in the Indian market, then why not a book which tells the truth about sex and romance?
Q. Age/any personal info--if you have children---because you are writing children's/young adult books.
a.I was born in 1969, shortly before the moon landing, so I am now 43 years old. I do not have children of my own, but I am a teacher, so I have a lot of young people in my life and I get a chance alternately to help and care for them, or to make their lives miserable with homework.
Q. Any hobbies?
A. I have hobbies, yes: too many, in fact. You will probably find me on my iPad with games a lot of the time. Reading obviously is a high priority. At other times I focus on the hobbies I can share with my wife, which are foreign travel, photography, and watching movies.
Q: Even before the Harry Potter series, magic has been something the world (adult writers and young adult readers) is obsessed with. Lewis Carroll’s book ... Some of Tolkien characters show extraordinary powers .Even before that Grimm’s and Anderson’s tales.... mention magic powers...what made you zero in on another Magic School book?
A. I have always been interested in reading and writing about magic. You mention Lewis Carroll, knowing, I am sure, that I am a huge fan, as shown by the fact that in Level Three’s Dream, my teen magic students go into Lewis Carroll’s worlds, and meet the characters from the Alice books. Tolkien likewise is a childhood love of mine and is usually the first author I mention as an influence. These are two of the writers who have most made me want to write about magic. I grew up reading books of this kind. The 1980s was a boom period for heroic fantasy. Long before Harry Potter, I had read Leguin’s Earthsea books, one of which features a magic school, and I had read books about apprentice wizards, such as the Belgariad by David Eddings. Bringing my interest in magic to a school was a natural decision for me, since I’m a teacher. I started Ghost in the Crystal while the Harry Potter series was still being written.
Q: How will you counter arguments that adult writers are filling children's heads with magic---hocus pocus fiction instead of rational/scientific logical thinking by such books?
A. No one has asked me that before! I think I am aiming at building a complex world view that does not exclude science or rationality. My magic students take science lessons. In Ghost in the Crystal, one of the magic school teachers talks to my protagonist Simon about atomic theory and cosmology. The fact is that the scientific world is now finally finding ways to incorporate the paranormal into its discourse.
I think there is another counter to the argument you mentioned. That counter is that components of dream and imagination are necessary for proper development of young minds. You can’t be scientific and rational all the time or you will not be a well-balanced person. Reading about magic didn’t stop me from earning top marks in my high school and college, and literature that is about magic, even Potter, is still literature, and as literature, still teaches values such as friendship and responsibility. The huge success of the movie 3 Idiots shows that I am not alone in feeling that a strict focus on rationality and achievement can have devastating consequences.
The West has been engaged since the Middle Ages in the battle between reason and emotion, with the intellectual pendulum swinging between, say, Scholasticism and Humanism; the Enlightenment and Romanticism; and so on. I don’t feel the need to occupy one position in the debate. I’m on both sides.
Q: J.K. Rowling is British. Your character can be called an American Harry Potter. What made you come to an Indian publisher? Will the two magic school books be accepted by the American reader?
A. Simon, my protagonist, isn’t Harry Potter. He’s not a chosen one, nor is he a hard-scrabbling orphan. He’s a young person with unusual abilities, certainly, but his struggles are personal and have to do with being young, growing up, and dealing with loss and responsibility as all kids have to. I have never read about any other magical youths like this. They always have a destiny or a great mission, as does Harry Potter or does Simon’s closest equivalent, who is not Harry, but Luke Skywalker. (This will be more obvious to readers who have been through Book III.) Simon has adventures with his friends, but he is just a kid growing up.
Will the magic school books be accepted by the American reader? Marketing in the U.S. is very hard. But I have NO bad reviews, which is rare for an independent self-publisher like me.
I came to an Indian publisher because of my feelings of affinity for India and my sense of untapped business potential. In the former situation, my wife is from India and I have many friends there as well as relations by marriage. I grew up reading Amar Chitra Katha and admiring Ram and Hanuman, and my father is a follower of Vedanta. So there are emotional and intellectual connections for me. In practical terms, I have pursued opportunities in India because I feel it is a growing market for English-language books that has not been foregrounded by American authors as it should be. Most English-language books in India by foreign authors are part of the distribution network of multinational publishers, but why should it be that way? The world’s largest democracy is a business environment in which a writer like me, who is not affiliated with the Big Six publishers, can partner with Indian-owned publishers like Vitasta to carve out a lucrative market share.
Q: Houdini--Hungary...Bohemia...Egypt...India are countries associated with snake charmers and vanishing tricks. Isn't it time a school of magic is situated in the orient and the central character an oriental...why don't authors think of such interesting placements for books on magic ...even if written in English? ( India being 3rd biggest English publishing industry).
My protagonist, Simon, is one-quarter Indian. His father has an Indian mother. My books are set in New York because I live in New York, but the school has several Indian teachers and students and includes meditation. In Ghost in the Crystal a scene is set during a Vasant Panchami Puja. Simon will be visiting India in book IV as he meets his large extended family there (his grandmother, five uncles, and countless cousins) and confronts Indian villains, all in Mumbai.
I don’t use the term Orient myself, but if you mean to ask whether a magic school belongs in India, sure, I’m up for reading that. Maybe, inspired by your remarks, I will include the famous “rope trick” in an upcoming scene. As for the other names you mentioned... Houdini was my third cousin, I think, on my father’s mother’s side. I have characters from Hungary in the third School of the Ages book, and I visited that country this past April. Finally, I would love to use Egypt in the future, but I haven’t visited and it isn’t too safe to visit because of all the political upheaval there these days.
4: As a writer of children's fiction....how do you know your story will sell? Who do you run the stories with first? How long did it take you to write the two books with Vitasta?
A. I don’t know what will sell. That’s a matter of marketing. If you put my books on display in a bookstore, they will sell out. Both young people and adults like to read about magic.
I don’t really run the books by anyone. My wife reads them, and whomever else I can ask, but overall, an author has to trust himself these days. Professional editors are expensive and don’t always understand what’s best for a text. Ghost in the Crystal was begun in early 2002 and took seven years to write because of long gaps in the composition. The other books in the series take two to three years each, but they are overlapping, by which I mean that I have written more than one book at a time. Presently I am a good part of the way through book IV, and book V, which I will start next year, will be unique in that I will be writing it without any other in the series also in process.
Q, what was the most difficult part of it?
To write, I need a large block of time so that I can, so to speak, expand into the task, by clearing my mind of distractions and devote myself fully to the creative process. I can’t write when I have calls to make or papers to grade or tiresome personal obligations hanging over my head. So the most difficult part isn’t a technical issue, but a practical one. When can I clear the time to focus properly?
5:How do you compare children's reading habits in the US with that of India.
A. Kids in the United States are reading more than ever before by volume, but paradoxically, as a teacher I am still struggling to get them to read. If you find something American kids will read, the reading-oriented portion of American youths will devour what they like, ranging from Rowling to Rick Riordan to Stephenie Meyer to Diary of a Wimpy Kid. However, a lot of American kids don’t touch books because electronic devices occupy them utterly.
I believe kids in India like to read the same things American kids like to read, but I am hoping the fixation upon electronic devices is less pronounced in the subcontinent. I am hoping that. I don’t know.
6. Any ideas on translating your two magic school books into Mandarin? Any Indian language?
I don’t have the skill to translate but I would be glad to work with a translator if the opportunity arose. I am disinclined to publish in China because of the unrestrained piracy there. I would welcome translation of my work into Hindi, Tamil, and Telegu.
7: What is going to be your next/forthcoming project?
Vitasta is publishing School of the Ages #3, The War Against Love, early next year. And I am still writing School of the Ages #4, Simon Myth.
Q. Some book names you have written in the US.
A. In the U.S., my School of the Ages series has three novels of a planned five, plus two short story books. The novels are The Ghost in the Crystal, Level Three’s Dream, and The War Against Love (which Vitasta will publish in the spring), and the short story books are Tales of Christmas Magic (mostly comic or warm stories about School of the Ages with a holiday feel) and Sara Ghost (which is a fifty-page story featuring School of the Ages characters confronting a mature social problem).
Also in the U.S., I have a book I co-authored with Jess C. Scott called Teen Guide to Sex and Relationships. This is a book for teenagers, not for children. This book does not have an Indian publisher. I would like to find one someday, though. If E.L. James’ ridiculous book Fifty Shades of Grey, which offers a nonsensical, offensively stupid view of sexuality, can be a big success in the Indian market, then why not a book which tells the truth about sex and romance?
Q. Age/any personal info--if you have children---because you are writing children's/young adult books.
a.I was born in 1969, shortly before the moon landing, so I am now 43 years old. I do not have children of my own, but I am a teacher, so I have a lot of young people in my life and I get a chance alternately to help and care for them, or to make their lives miserable with homework.
Q. Any hobbies?
A. I have hobbies, yes: too many, in fact. You will probably find me on my iPad with games a lot of the time. Reading obviously is a high priority. At other times I focus on the hobbies I can share with my wife, which are foreign travel, photography, and watching movies.
Q: Even before the Harry Potter series, magic has been something the world (adult writers and young adult readers) is obsessed with. Lewis Carroll’s book ... Some of Tolkien characters show extraordinary powers .Even before that Grimm’s and Anderson’s tales.... mention magic powers...what made you zero in on another Magic School book?
A. I have always been interested in reading and writing about magic. You mention Lewis Carroll, knowing, I am sure, that I am a huge fan, as shown by the fact that in Level Three’s Dream, my teen magic students go into Lewis Carroll’s worlds, and meet the characters from the Alice books. Tolkien likewise is a childhood love of mine and is usually the first author I mention as an influence. These are two of the writers who have most made me want to write about magic. I grew up reading books of this kind. The 1980s was a boom period for heroic fantasy. Long before Harry Potter, I had read Leguin’s Earthsea books, one of which features a magic school, and I had read books about apprentice wizards, such as the Belgariad by David Eddings. Bringing my interest in magic to a school was a natural decision for me, since I’m a teacher. I started Ghost in the Crystal while the Harry Potter series was still being written.
Q: How will you counter arguments that adult writers are filling children's heads with magic---hocus pocus fiction instead of rational/scientific logical thinking by such books?
A. No one has asked me that before! I think I am aiming at building a complex world view that does not exclude science or rationality. My magic students take science lessons. In Ghost in the Crystal, one of the magic school teachers talks to my protagonist Simon about atomic theory and cosmology. The fact is that the scientific world is now finally finding ways to incorporate the paranormal into its discourse.
I think there is another counter to the argument you mentioned. That counter is that components of dream and imagination are necessary for proper development of young minds. You can’t be scientific and rational all the time or you will not be a well-balanced person. Reading about magic didn’t stop me from earning top marks in my high school and college, and literature that is about magic, even Potter, is still literature, and as literature, still teaches values such as friendship and responsibility. The huge success of the movie 3 Idiots shows that I am not alone in feeling that a strict focus on rationality and achievement can have devastating consequences.
The West has been engaged since the Middle Ages in the battle between reason and emotion, with the intellectual pendulum swinging between, say, Scholasticism and Humanism; the Enlightenment and Romanticism; and so on. I don’t feel the need to occupy one position in the debate. I’m on both sides.
Q: J.K. Rowling is British. Your character can be called an American Harry Potter. What made you come to an Indian publisher? Will the two magic school books be accepted by the American reader?
A. Simon, my protagonist, isn’t Harry Potter. He’s not a chosen one, nor is he a hard-scrabbling orphan. He’s a young person with unusual abilities, certainly, but his struggles are personal and have to do with being young, growing up, and dealing with loss and responsibility as all kids have to. I have never read about any other magical youths like this. They always have a destiny or a great mission, as does Harry Potter or does Simon’s closest equivalent, who is not Harry, but Luke Skywalker. (This will be more obvious to readers who have been through Book III.) Simon has adventures with his friends, but he is just a kid growing up.
Will the magic school books be accepted by the American reader? Marketing in the U.S. is very hard. But I have NO bad reviews, which is rare for an independent self-publisher like me.
I came to an Indian publisher because of my feelings of affinity for India and my sense of untapped business potential. In the former situation, my wife is from India and I have many friends there as well as relations by marriage. I grew up reading Amar Chitra Katha and admiring Ram and Hanuman, and my father is a follower of Vedanta. So there are emotional and intellectual connections for me. In practical terms, I have pursued opportunities in India because I feel it is a growing market for English-language books that has not been foregrounded by American authors as it should be. Most English-language books in India by foreign authors are part of the distribution network of multinational publishers, but why should it be that way? The world’s largest democracy is a business environment in which a writer like me, who is not affiliated with the Big Six publishers, can partner with Indian-owned publishers like Vitasta to carve out a lucrative market share.
Q: Houdini--Hungary...Bohemia...Egypt...India are countries associated with snake charmers and vanishing tricks. Isn't it time a school of magic is situated in the orient and the central character an oriental...why don't authors think of such interesting placements for books on magic ...even if written in English? ( India being 3rd biggest English publishing industry).
My protagonist, Simon, is one-quarter Indian. His father has an Indian mother. My books are set in New York because I live in New York, but the school has several Indian teachers and students and includes meditation. In Ghost in the Crystal a scene is set during a Vasant Panchami Puja. Simon will be visiting India in book IV as he meets his large extended family there (his grandmother, five uncles, and countless cousins) and confronts Indian villains, all in Mumbai.
I don’t use the term Orient myself, but if you mean to ask whether a magic school belongs in India, sure, I’m up for reading that. Maybe, inspired by your remarks, I will include the famous “rope trick” in an upcoming scene. As for the other names you mentioned... Houdini was my third cousin, I think, on my father’s mother’s side. I have characters from Hungary in the third School of the Ages book, and I visited that country this past April. Finally, I would love to use Egypt in the future, but I haven’t visited and it isn’t too safe to visit because of all the political upheaval there these days.
4: As a writer of children's fiction....how do you know your story will sell? Who do you run the stories with first? How long did it take you to write the two books with Vitasta?
A. I don’t know what will sell. That’s a matter of marketing. If you put my books on display in a bookstore, they will sell out. Both young people and adults like to read about magic.
I don’t really run the books by anyone. My wife reads them, and whomever else I can ask, but overall, an author has to trust himself these days. Professional editors are expensive and don’t always understand what’s best for a text. Ghost in the Crystal was begun in early 2002 and took seven years to write because of long gaps in the composition. The other books in the series take two to three years each, but they are overlapping, by which I mean that I have written more than one book at a time. Presently I am a good part of the way through book IV, and book V, which I will start next year, will be unique in that I will be writing it without any other in the series also in process.
Q, what was the most difficult part of it?
To write, I need a large block of time so that I can, so to speak, expand into the task, by clearing my mind of distractions and devote myself fully to the creative process. I can’t write when I have calls to make or papers to grade or tiresome personal obligations hanging over my head. So the most difficult part isn’t a technical issue, but a practical one. When can I clear the time to focus properly?
5:How do you compare children's reading habits in the US with that of India.
A. Kids in the United States are reading more than ever before by volume, but paradoxically, as a teacher I am still struggling to get them to read. If you find something American kids will read, the reading-oriented portion of American youths will devour what they like, ranging from Rowling to Rick Riordan to Stephenie Meyer to Diary of a Wimpy Kid. However, a lot of American kids don’t touch books because electronic devices occupy them utterly.
I believe kids in India like to read the same things American kids like to read, but I am hoping the fixation upon electronic devices is less pronounced in the subcontinent. I am hoping that. I don’t know.
6. Any ideas on translating your two magic school books into Mandarin? Any Indian language?
I don’t have the skill to translate but I would be glad to work with a translator if the opportunity arose. I am disinclined to publish in China because of the unrestrained piracy there. I would welcome translation of my work into Hindi, Tamil, and Telegu.
7: What is going to be your next/forthcoming project?
Vitasta is publishing School of the Ages #3, The War Against Love, early next year. And I am still writing School of the Ages #4, Simon Myth.
December 24, 2012
Holiday Gift -- My Short Story _Courage_ from 1994
Season's Greetings, y'all. I used to write academic fiction, and here's one of my short stories set on Christmas Eve in Athens, GA in the early 1990s. It was written for fiction workshop at University of Alabama around 1994. Note: contains adult themes.
Courage
by Matt Posner
It’s the day before Christmas. Survive it with me if you can. I’m Clyde Carswell, Jr., slumpshouldered pillowgutted frecklearmed rawthroated Clyde Carswell, Jr. Add a buzz haircut, gold wire-rimmed glasses, soft puffy flesh, little beady squinty eyes. I look kind of like a cracker and kind of like the crazy guy the family keeps locked in the attic. They said that in college, when I was studying the trumpet. My sister Annie was in art school, but she crapped out. So much for the salvation of our family. Daddy was a telephone lineman and a beersligging sonofabastard and Mother was a homemaker and they lived in Athens, Georgia. Annie and I were born there, and both our parents died, and Annie moved away. I still live there. I’m twenty-eight.
Annie is twenty-two. The guy she’s marrying, you should see him. Hell, if you don’t know him, you know someone else just as bad. Life’s like swimming in a bowl of rotting food. It’s putrid and you struggle and sooner or later you have to hit the end of the damn bowl and you figure you’ll pull yourself over the rim and smell some clean air. Sure you will.
I play second-chair trumpet in a small-town orchestra for a career, but for a living I’m a miserable pet store clerk. You’d think it would be just wonderful, being with animals all the time. That’s not how it really is. Just like people, animals take a bite out of you any chance they get. The jobs I had to get through college were worse. I dug ditches, I drove a cab. Worst job was, I was a salad bar attendant at a family restaurant in Marietta. Six days a week of wilted lettuce.
I’ve had a headache ever since I got out of college. I have a headache when I go to sleep and I wake up with it like some people wake up with morning breath. Why did I set myself up for this? Because it was time to quit being a cracker. Mother and Daddy wanted it that way. Get culture, they said. So I gave up all my cracker ways to blow into a horn that laughs at me if I hit the right notes, because no notes I blow are sweet, and farts at me if I blow wrong. Go on, laugh at me. I’m an ugly deerhearted sourfaced sonofabitch. When you get through laughing, I’ll tell you about Annie and Dwayne.
Christmas Eve, Annie and Dwayne were driving up from Mobile. I knew why. She called and told me. Since I’m head of the family now, Dwayne has to ask me for official permission to marry her, Annie said. She said, “Just say yes and shake his hand.” I said, “Do I have to say yes?”
Annie said, “Shut up, Clyde.” She said it in a sweet little whisper, like she was telling a sleeping baby about rock candy and chocolates, not like she was telling her brother he was a loudmouth piss-ant.
I said, “I don’t like Dwayne.”
Annie said, “We’ll be there tomorrow.”
When we were children Annie was supposed to play piano and I was supposed to play fiddle. Mother said we had to turn out different, different from Annie being barefoot and pregnant like she was, and me being a suntanned drunk like Daddy. But Annie didn’t like piano and I didn’t like fiddle. I took up the trumpet, but Annie started painting. When she was a girl she had a summer job in a flower shop and brought home old flowers they threw away and arranged them in a vase on the patio and painted still-lifes of them. Oil painting costs a lot of money, but Mother and Daddy came up with it somehow. We ate a lot of lettuce some months, why is why I hate goddamn lettuce like I was saying before.
After Annie got tired of flowers she got a fishbowl, and when the fish all died she painted everyone in the family and all her friends and most of the neighbors, the ones Daddy didn’t hate, that is. After that, she went out and painted in the park or at the public pool. She tried painting a little league game once, but a foul ball knocked her easel over. She went to an art school, but they all wore their hair funny, so she got tired of that pretty fast and moved to Mobile where some school friend of hers was, and about a year later she met Dwayne Taylor.
Dwayne was a Gulf War veteran. He was the gunner in a tank that fought Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard. He came back from Saudi Arabia dusty and horny and he went into the insurance office where Annie worked and about a month of dating they were in love. Whatever the hell being in love is. Another month after that they were engaged.
I didn’t trust Dwayne Taylor before I met him. I don’t think I can ever trust anyone who wants to lay my sister. Annie’s skinny like one of those trees you plant in your backyard that doesn’t take, so it stays three feet tall for five or six years and then it dies and you pull it up and throw it in the dumpster. Annie is so skinny she can still buy clothes from the store racks for teenage girls. When she walks you can almost see her hip bones moving inside her jeans. Now, I’m not saying she’s sick. It runs in my family for women to be so skinny. Mother couldn’t get over a hundred pounds till after she gave birth to her slobbering son. Annie’s not sick, but she does look kind of sick: a little pinched mouth, almost no cheeks, no backside, no chest. I guess I always figured any guy who thought she was sexy would have some kind of emotional problem. Either that, or he would be able to see through her being so bony to love her for having the soul of a painter. Maybe painters have souls. After two years playing in an orchestra, I know damn sure that musicians don’t.
I met Dwayne Taylor and I said to myself, “He not only can’t see through to her soul, he can’t see through a glass of water.” He was small and hard as a fire hydrant. He had black eyes and needed a shave and his every word twanged like a banjo and he was wearing pink and blue shorts and a T-shirt that read, “God, Guns, and Glory.” Everything about him said, “Cracker and proud of it.” I hate people who live their lives as stereotypes because it never occurred to them there was any other way to be. There is another way to be, goddamn it. The other way’s a puddle of shit too but at least you know it and the guy who knows he’s in the shit is better than the guy who breathes it like a mudskipper.
The occasion that time was going camping, because Dwayne liked sitting on a river bank killing fish and he figured I liked it too. Annie knew better but she didn’t say anything. She said, “I can swim a little. I never get to do that much, Clyde.” I said, “I don’t want to kill any fish.” She said, “I know you. You won’t catch any.”
So we went out to some campground with an Indian name and Annie had one swim and spent the rest of the time cooking or sleeping. Meanwhile Dwayne put a fishing rod in my hand and sat me down on the bank and we got acquainted, which means Dwayne told me his dumbshit opinions. “This country’s going down the toilet,” he said, banjo-voiced, “that’s what it is. The country has lost its morality. This used to be a Christian country. Now all these, whatyoucall, other faiths are moving in.”
I said, “Uh huh.” The river bank was rocky; my backside hurt.
“Like, you take the Arabs.” He pronounced it ay-rabs. “These boys figure, all the money they got, they just buy whatever chunk of the country they want.” He finished a beer and got another out of his cooler. “Back at home, they have all these rigid morals, like the women wear veils, and everyone kneels and prays ten goddamn times a day. Then they come over here, buy some big house, surround it with security guards, and send out for rich foods, and whores, and they laugh at us. They laugh at this country.”
I said, “Uh huh.” I’d never seen an Arab in Athens. I figured they lived in Dwayne’s imagination.
“Want a beer?”
“Maybe later.” I didn’t trust myself to get drunk with Dwayne. I might say what I thought and then he’d punch the shit out of me. Or some of the shit, anyway. I don’t run out.
“And the Japanese,” Dwayne twanged on. “They’re just the same way. They want to buy this country up, just like they buy all those other countries. I studied it. I know all about it. Like Malaysia. They bought it all. It’s called, whatyoucall, economic imperialism. Yeah, that’s what it is.”
“Uh huh.” Like the Japanese or any other group of people were packs of evil clones.
“Sure you don’t want a beer? I got enough for the whole weekend.”
“My stomach hurts,” I said.
Dwayne grinned at me like he knew me inside and out. “I’ll tell you why that is,” he said. “Why your stomach hurts. It’s the goddamn trumpet, is what it is.”
I said, “I don’t think so.” I tried moving the fishing rod around, so I’d have an excuse to look at the water instead of at him.
“You shouldn’t play an instrument, Clyde,” Dwayne said. “You can see it don’t agree with you. A man like you and me needs to admit what he is. We’re the same kind, Clyde. You know I’m right.”
“I’m sick to my stomach,” I said. “Let me have a beer.”
That was my first long conversation with Dwayne Turner. The others were pretty much the same way. The worst part of the trip wasn’t Dwayne’s halfassed opinions, though. It was late at night. They were in their tent, and I was in mine, and I was supposed to be asleep, and instead I had to listen to them screwing in the tent. Muffled voices, mostly Dwayne saying, “There now, yes now, there now, yes now,” over and over, like someone who can’t remember the rest of a song, and Annie squeaking like a doorhinge, as if she liked getting it from that Gulf War prick, or as if she wanted him to think so. It had to be hurting her; he was making grunting sounds too, unk, unk, unk, into those little hips of hers. I was damn near ready to puke. I thought, “I’ve got to get you away from him, Annie. I’ve got to get you away.”
*
So now, the day before Christmas. All day I knew they were on their way in and would get there right about when I got home from work. All day, starting from 7 AM, I was in the pet store with my splitting headache, and also with a nagging cough from my perennial trumpeter’s throat infection. By 5 PM my head was ringing like a rusty cowbell, and my throat itched like mad because I hadn’t gotten a lunch hour to go pick up my antibiotics to get rid of it. There was no time to do that before Annie and Dwayne were supposed to show up, and there was no time to go for groceries either, which I was planning to do, so I went straight home to meet them. I had about two minutes to lie on my couch, right by the door, with no light but the last of the Athens sun through the twisted blinds and my fat arm over my face to block that out, then there was a bashing sound on the door, had to be Dwayne. I rolled off the couch and opened the door and Dwayne came in holding a six-pack and grabbed my hand and squeezed it into a bleeding marshmallow and sat on the couch and opened a beer and handed me one. My throat itched. I stood there looking at the beer can in my hand like it was a giant insect. He didn’t notice, but looked out the door and shouted, “Hey, Annie, you going for food?”
Annie came to the door loaded down with luggage: two suitcases, an athletic bag, a sack of road-trip garbage with crushed beer cans in it. I took the suitcases and carried them into my bedroom, where they were going to sleep. I left the beer on the nightstand. I came out and looked at Annie. There was no color in her face at all; she was standing by the door, holding the bag and the garbage, like she was so close to dead she had no idea where she was or where to go. I took the bag and the garbage and put them where they belonged while Dwayne turned on the TV. I heard the sound of static. My TV wasn’t much more than furniture without a cable hookup, but if Dwayne wanted to mess with it, fine for him.
I came back out. Annie was still standing in place. “You look tired, “ I said to her.
“Goddamn right I’m tired,” Dwayne said. He was twisting my TV antenna, trying to get a picture on any channel. “Hungry, too. You got any steaks in this place, Clyde?”
"I don’t even have any Fruit Loops,” I said. My head throbbed. I went to Annie and tried to hug her. She lifted her arms a little, but that was about it. Her coat was more solid than her bones. I knew why; Annie always got carsick on long trips. She probably hadn’t eaten all day, and had puked up water at the rest stops.
“I could use a big steak,” Dwayne said. “What do you think, Annie? Want to go get Clyde and me some, whatyoucall, filet mignon?”
“I’ll go,” I said. “I can cook dinner.”
Dwayne looked away from the static for a moment, looked at me. “Damn, Clyde,” he said, “your TV’s a real piece of shit, ain’t it?”
His pouchy red face, his pained, innocent eyes, his unconscious combat-ready stance, all just about made me sick. Not carsick, like Annie; just Dwaynesick. My head throbbed, and my throat itched, like they both had all day, but worse.
“I’ll take Annie, and we’ll go shopping,” I said. “You just rest up from the drive.”
“You sure?”
“We’ll be fine. Right, Annie?”
“Sure, Clyde,” Annie said in a weak, droning voice. Not Annie’s voice like it was supposed to be, like it was when she was a girl, grinning shithappy about what was on her easel. A voice like a groan, like the sound you make when you find a hundred leeches hanging off your belly and you figure they were there a long time. I had to get her away from Dwayne. He was breaking her. I took her hand – bones light as a bat’s – and led her like a child. “Come on, Annie. Let’s hit the store.”
I got her into my car – she still walking soft and limp as a scarecrow – and pulled out into traffic.
My car was a brown Escort with a wrinkled driver-side door. It always took a few pulls to get that door to latch shut, ever since a tourist from Ontario sideswiped me a year before. The window on the passenger side was stuck open a half-inch. The air-conditioning vents blew foam. Starting and stopping, the car wheezed like a lung cancer victim. Riding in it was like flirting with lung cancer, anyway, since before and after every orchestra practice, I played chauffeur to a flautist named Wanda Tracy who chain-smoked menthol cigarettes. With all its defects, though, I drove my Escort at the highest possible speed. I passed every slow-moving pickup, delivery van, or geriatric Lincoln I could possibly pass.
So today I plunged my groaning Escort into the Christmas Eve traffic and stopped dead. The traffic was going nowhere. Up ahead, the light had been green for at least a minute. It seemed as if no one had noticed. I looked at Annie. I said, “This is good practice for being parked.”
Annie closed her eyes and put her seat back. She was as white as a snowman, lying like a corpse in a coffin.
I have to go to the drugstore first,” I said. “I need to refill my lithium so I can make it through Christmas.”
She didn’t laugh – no surprise to me.
The traffic moved a few inches. “Hey, Annie,” I said, “help, quick! Is this pedal the brake or the clutch?”
She didn’t laugh at that one, either. We lurched forward a few yards. The light turned red.
“Annie,” I said, “you’re worrying me.”
She opened her eyes and looked at me, but didn’t raise her head. “I’m okay, Clyde. I’m just tired is all. I’ll perk up.”
“I’ll take you to the drive-through window at Hardee’s, get you a hot snack. It’s on the way. Just up the street. Should only take about two hours.”
My sister managed a small grin. She kept her eyes closed. I didn’t think it was heartfelt; I thought she was trying to appease me. Like you appease an angry God; give him a sacrifice, even if it’s just a smile. Smile and he leaves you alone. But this wasn’t right. It couldn’t be right. Dwayne had her trained to this appeasement bullshit.
Traffic moved somewhat. Winter air trickled through the stuck window, across Annie’s face and coat and down the back of my pants. We went through the Hardee’s drive-through. Annie got a small fries and a small Diet Coke. She ate one or two fries, sipped the Coke, and sat there chewing the straw, or maybe just tonguing it.
I stopped at the filling station. Annie was rubbing the straw across her lips, while my headache was erupting like Mt. St. Helens. Mt. St. Carswell. Mt. St. Carswell, Jr. I got into a dispute with the kid inside about whether the pump I’d pre-paid for was functioning.
“You can go out and try it,” I said. “I swear to you it’s not on. You may think you turned it on, but it is not putting out gas.”
“Try again,” said the kid.
While I was pumping the gas I had a coughing fit, and some bile burned up into my throat. I needed the damn antibiotic. When I got into the car, Annie had eaten a few more fries and was trying to pull open a ketchup packet with her bone-thin fingers. I had a sip of the Coke to ease my throat, pulled into traffic, and stopped at another green light.
“If you think this traffic’s bad,” I said, “you should see it at 3 a.m.”
Annie chewed her straw.
“How was the trip?” I asked.
“It was okay,” Annie said.
“Did you get this kind of traffic?”
“Not this bad.”
“You made good time.”
“Uh huh.”
“E equals M.C. squared.”
“Very funny, Clyde.”
After the next brief lurch forward, I said, “You don’t want to talk much, do you?”
Annie sat up. “I’m too tired.”
“I’m never too tired to get pissed off. It keeps my blood moving.” I pointed. “See that Aries up there? Trying to make a left turn out of the right lane. Blocking traffic in both directions.”
“Oh, who cares, Clyde?”
“I care. You have to call a jackass a jackass when you see him, or else you’re going to be him. Know the ways of fools, Annie, and act otherwise.”
Annie looked at me with deep disgusted weariness. “Whatever you say, Clyde. Your wisdom is too much for me.”
There was no more talk for a while. My head and throat were both hurting me so much that I hit some kind of fugue state where I didn’t notice much of anything practical but was thinking about an old fantasy I had more than ten years before. When I was seventeen and going off to college I thought while I was there I’d meet some girl who was damn fool enough to marry me. I knew how it would happen, too. I’d be in some studio or apartment somewhere tooting away at a Handel concerto, crisp and clean as everything, maybe not the best performance ever, but just good enough that you could hear it and know I was for real, good enough that you would know I meant what I was doing. Good enough that you would know Clyde Carswell, Jr. had enough heart and enough guts to go anywhere and do anything that had the word “trumpet” in it. The word “man” in it. So I’d be there playing, and there’d be a knock at the door, and I’d let her in, and she’d say, “I heard you playing, and I just had to see who it was.” And then lunch and dinner and another lunch and another dinner and playing duets and writing sonatas and touring the country together, Clyde Carswell, Jr. and wife. We’d be on the stage, and out in the audience they’d say, gee, Carswell sure is ugly but they say she really loves him, you can hear how they love each other by how they play.
I was lost in this, and then a honking horn and the smell of menthol cigarettes and a succession of my own coughs brought me back to my new location, the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly, waiting behind ten other cars because someone ahead might be pulling out of a space, and next to me my fading sister Annie. Nothing more was said, and ages later we got a space and I got out of the car and headed for the drugstore. Annie followed me; probably she had had it with sitting in cars. I didn’t say much while we were waiting for my prescription, and Annie didn’t say anything. She wandered off while I was in line to pay. I popped an antibiotic soon as I owned it.
Annie was in line at the front counter with an Almond Joy and a copy of Modern Bride. There were eight people in front of her and six people behind. Most of them were buying bows and wrapping paper. The line wasn’t moving. No goddamn line was moving anywhere in Athens, maybe anywhere in Georgia. Waiting in line on Christmas Eve is like waiting for a landfill to rot.
I touched Annie on the shoulder; after a little jump and peep, like a surprised cat, she gave me a weak loveless smile and looked away. I stood beside her, trying not to cough up my pill. I began to hear the drugstore Muzak. We waited thirty minutes. I heard “The Little Drummer Boy.” Then “Jingle Bell Rock.” Then “O Come All Ye Faithful.” “Jingle Bells.” “The Little Drummer Boy.” “Jingle Bell Rock.” Meanwhile I stood there looking at the green streamers hanging over the cash register, at a display of Casper the Ghost and Yogi Bear cartoon videos for sale on the counter next to me, reduced to $9.99, and when I threw my head back in frustration at the wait, at a cardboard scene overhead, featuring Santa Claus and Mrs. Claus, arm in arm, supervising a rosy-cheeked girl-elf with a green pointed hat and little pointed green shoes sitting at a workbench with a hammer. I coughed worse and worse and my head pulsed more and more and the clock ticked on while Annie and I didn’t talk about how she was going to chain herself to Dwayne, and I could feel how the people behind us hated us for being ahead of them just like I hated everyone in line ahead of us for the same reason, and I found I couldn’t take it anymore, and I began to sing.
“Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell Rock!” I sang. The stout, middle-aged woman in front of us looked back in rabid contempt. I have no singing voice, but I have a trumpeter’s wind, and I am very loud. “Come on, Annie!” I shouted. “Jingle Bell Rhyme, in Jingle Bell Time! Sing along with me!”
“I don’t feel like singing, Clyde,” Annie said.
“Ringling Tingling, that’s the Jingle Bell…”
“Stop, please.”
“That’s the Jingle Bell Ro-ock!” I stopped singing. “Oh, boy!” I said to the woman in front of us. “I sure do love Christmas music. Don’t you?”
The woman wouldn’t look at me.
“I’m sorry you don’t feel well, Clyde,” Annie said. “”Let’s just get through this if we can, okay?”
I said, “Jingle Bell Rock is my life.”
The crowd wasn’t so bad in the Piggly Wiggly. We got three filet mignons, a bottle of steak sauce, and salad fixings. My throat was cracking. We got to salad dressings, I grabbed a bottle of bleu cheese, Annie’s favorite. She said, “No.” I said, “That’s your favorite.” She said, “Not any more. Get ranch.” I said, “I hate ranch. You hate ranch.” “I don’t hate ranch,” she said, “and Dwayne always eats it.” I said, “Well, I guess that settles it.”
Same thing in the produce section, almost word for word, when Annie put radishes in the buggy. This time she gave me a don’t-mess-with-me-look. “Radishes it is then,” I said, “but I’m going to pick mine out and put them on your plate.”
The Muzak overhead changed to “Twelve Days of Christmas.” More like sixty days of Christmas, with time off for good behavior.
It was unbearable. I left Annie in line and split to the bathroom. There, in mid-defecation, rubbing my forehead and gulping saliva, I tried to clear my head. I had to do or say some goddamn thing before we left that store, to keep Annie from Dwayneing her life away. I needed an idea. Dropping and dribbling, rubbing and gulping, I got as close to an idea as I could get. Or I should say, if getting an idea were like getting shot in the head, this would only be a flesh wound.
When I got back, Annie was next in line. In front of us was a young mother, a few years younger than me, heavy in the hips, with a rag tied round her head, a pink face, gray sweat pants, a black Falcons sweatshirt, and two howling children. She had about $200 in picnic groceries. I could see on her face that her day had been too long, and she wasn’t up to handling her brats. Too bad. Shouldn’t have brought them. Shouldn’t have birthed them.
The older boy, wearing ridiculous white overalls, threw a candy bar amid the groceries. It landed between the Diet Mountain Dew and the cut-rate hamburger. She said, “Peter, please put it back.” Meanwhile, the younger boy, age three or four, wearing a sailor blouse and a diaper, began to pull on her pants leg.
I gave Annie a look of disgust. She pretended not to see it.
Peter ignored his mother. She repeated, ‘Peter, please put it back.” The boy couldn’t reach, not that he was trying. The younger boy began pulling on her shirt.
“Please wait, Kevin,” she said.
The child sat down, white diaper on unclean Piggly Wiggly floor, and began to cry.
“What is it, Kevin? Peter, please put the candy back.”
The crying became caterwauling. The girl at the checkout seemed entirely oblivious, and was trying to get something coated with ice to ring through on the laser scanner.
I looked at Annie. She did not look back. I said, “I’ve had enough.” I stopped and looked eye to eye at the little bastard in the white overalls.
“Peter,” I said, “if you don’t put the candy bar back, I’m going to knock your goddamn head off. You got me?”
Peter ran behind his mother. The other child cried more loudly. The mother looked down at me with her mouth open.
“Ma’am,” I said, grinning up at her, “it’s my considered opinion that you should not be burdened with these children.”
The checkout girl didn’t say anything, but she put down the icy package and leaned over the counter to stare at me, like a few tired and frustrated eyeballs could shut me up.
“It just so happens,” I said to the mother, “that I know just what you should do. Take the little one home and put some pants on him. He’s going to freeze his little dinky off before Santa comes. Give the bigger one to me and I’ll show him where to put his candy.”
The mother reddened and heaved, as if struggling with an unhappy stomach, but by and by she came out with a scream: “How dare you?”
“Just a concerned citizen, ma’am.”
Annie grabbed me by the arm and tugged with all the might in her bony little body. It wasn’t enough to move me, low and fat as I am, except I was so eager to go. The unbought groceries, the puling child, the hysterical mother, the long-eyeballed clerk were all left behind and Annie dragged me out to the Escort and pushed me against the dented driver-side door. I was wearing my biggest shit-eating cracker grin, but even so, even while my flesh-wound of an idea was working, I felt odd about it. I’d started out the trip trying to get Annie away from a thoughtless bastard, and now here I was trying to get a rise out of her. Something was off about that.
“Don’t act like I did anything,” Annie shouted, “because I didn’t do a goddamn thing! What’s wrong with you? Why’d you make a scene in there?”
“Because I wanted to see you alive for a change. All you’ve been is a goddamn zombie. Dwayne says this. Dwayne likes that. What about what you say, and what you like?”
“I’m tired, Clyde!”
“Well, I’m tired too. We’re all goddamn tired. Living is hard, Annie. So what?”
“Well, why the hell are you making it harder for me?”
“Because your fiancee is a damn jackass, that’s all,” I said. “I just don’t get you. What are you thinking, wanting to marry that loudmouth? You want to be his damn maid for the rest of your life?”
A pause. That took a lot of breath. My throat hurt worse, but my head was a little better.
Finally Annie said, “Are you saying you won’t give us your approval?”
“No, I’m not saying that at all. You know and I know my approval isn’t worth spit anyway. But I know what Daddy would have said.”
Annie looked away.
“Uh huh.” I pressed her. “You know, too. He’d say, ‘Annie, don’t go and marry another cracker out of the box.’ That’s what he’d say. He’d say, ‘What happened to your painting, Annie?’ Wouldn’t he?”
“I don’t know what he’d say.”
“That’s what he’d say, Annie. That’s why I can’t figure you.”
“Well, maybe I don’t want to be a painter anymore,” Annie snapped. “Maybe I’m not good enough for that. What difference does it make?”
“Because Dwayne’s a damn jackass,” I said, “and in his little pin head he can’t see you doing a goddamn thing but cleaning his house and birthing a lot of fat barefoot kids whose idea of a good time will be going out in the woods and blowing hell out of deer and squirrels with goddamn automatic rifles. Don’t you see that? If you don’t see that, what the hell do you see when you look at the son of a bitch?”
“He’s good,” Annie said, “and he’s strong, and he won’t leave me. He acts different with me than he does around you. He’s not really like that.”
“Oh, I’m sure he isn’t. I bet he’s twice as bad, isn’t he?”
“He loves me.” Annie pounded the car with her white fist. “I’m not strong like you are, Clyde. I need someone to love me. I’m afraid to be alone.”
I couldn’t look at her after that. I never knew Annie thought I was strong any way at all, especially not that way. I stood there a minute, and the Christmas Eve air froze in my throat. I could hear Annie’s whistling breaths as she tried to calm down. Finally I dug in my pocket. “Here’s my money,” I said. My hand shook while I gave it to her. “Go buy the food. I’ll wait here.”
“What are you going to say to Dwayne?”
“Oh, hell, I don’t know. What do I know about anything? If you want to marry him, you will. Just… keep in touch with me in case you get into trouble.”
She took the money. I reached out for her hand, her shoulder, but she was already headed back for the Piggly Wiggly and I’d never seen her skin and bones look so proud and lovely in all her twenty-two years. Imagine Annie thinking I was the brave one in the family. God damn.
When she was out of sight, I took a deep breath and walked around the car. I got in on the passenger side and let the seat way back and looked through the front windshield at the gray sky, put up my hands and played a little trumpet solo in the cold air. Just my tired throat, a couple of stiff fingers, the twilight, and the still, cold air. As silent as I could, as silent as it had to be.
Courage
by Matt Posner
It’s the day before Christmas. Survive it with me if you can. I’m Clyde Carswell, Jr., slumpshouldered pillowgutted frecklearmed rawthroated Clyde Carswell, Jr. Add a buzz haircut, gold wire-rimmed glasses, soft puffy flesh, little beady squinty eyes. I look kind of like a cracker and kind of like the crazy guy the family keeps locked in the attic. They said that in college, when I was studying the trumpet. My sister Annie was in art school, but she crapped out. So much for the salvation of our family. Daddy was a telephone lineman and a beersligging sonofabastard and Mother was a homemaker and they lived in Athens, Georgia. Annie and I were born there, and both our parents died, and Annie moved away. I still live there. I’m twenty-eight.
Annie is twenty-two. The guy she’s marrying, you should see him. Hell, if you don’t know him, you know someone else just as bad. Life’s like swimming in a bowl of rotting food. It’s putrid and you struggle and sooner or later you have to hit the end of the damn bowl and you figure you’ll pull yourself over the rim and smell some clean air. Sure you will.
I play second-chair trumpet in a small-town orchestra for a career, but for a living I’m a miserable pet store clerk. You’d think it would be just wonderful, being with animals all the time. That’s not how it really is. Just like people, animals take a bite out of you any chance they get. The jobs I had to get through college were worse. I dug ditches, I drove a cab. Worst job was, I was a salad bar attendant at a family restaurant in Marietta. Six days a week of wilted lettuce.
I’ve had a headache ever since I got out of college. I have a headache when I go to sleep and I wake up with it like some people wake up with morning breath. Why did I set myself up for this? Because it was time to quit being a cracker. Mother and Daddy wanted it that way. Get culture, they said. So I gave up all my cracker ways to blow into a horn that laughs at me if I hit the right notes, because no notes I blow are sweet, and farts at me if I blow wrong. Go on, laugh at me. I’m an ugly deerhearted sourfaced sonofabitch. When you get through laughing, I’ll tell you about Annie and Dwayne.
Christmas Eve, Annie and Dwayne were driving up from Mobile. I knew why. She called and told me. Since I’m head of the family now, Dwayne has to ask me for official permission to marry her, Annie said. She said, “Just say yes and shake his hand.” I said, “Do I have to say yes?”
Annie said, “Shut up, Clyde.” She said it in a sweet little whisper, like she was telling a sleeping baby about rock candy and chocolates, not like she was telling her brother he was a loudmouth piss-ant.
I said, “I don’t like Dwayne.”
Annie said, “We’ll be there tomorrow.”
When we were children Annie was supposed to play piano and I was supposed to play fiddle. Mother said we had to turn out different, different from Annie being barefoot and pregnant like she was, and me being a suntanned drunk like Daddy. But Annie didn’t like piano and I didn’t like fiddle. I took up the trumpet, but Annie started painting. When she was a girl she had a summer job in a flower shop and brought home old flowers they threw away and arranged them in a vase on the patio and painted still-lifes of them. Oil painting costs a lot of money, but Mother and Daddy came up with it somehow. We ate a lot of lettuce some months, why is why I hate goddamn lettuce like I was saying before.
After Annie got tired of flowers she got a fishbowl, and when the fish all died she painted everyone in the family and all her friends and most of the neighbors, the ones Daddy didn’t hate, that is. After that, she went out and painted in the park or at the public pool. She tried painting a little league game once, but a foul ball knocked her easel over. She went to an art school, but they all wore their hair funny, so she got tired of that pretty fast and moved to Mobile where some school friend of hers was, and about a year later she met Dwayne Taylor.
Dwayne was a Gulf War veteran. He was the gunner in a tank that fought Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard. He came back from Saudi Arabia dusty and horny and he went into the insurance office where Annie worked and about a month of dating they were in love. Whatever the hell being in love is. Another month after that they were engaged.
I didn’t trust Dwayne Taylor before I met him. I don’t think I can ever trust anyone who wants to lay my sister. Annie’s skinny like one of those trees you plant in your backyard that doesn’t take, so it stays three feet tall for five or six years and then it dies and you pull it up and throw it in the dumpster. Annie is so skinny she can still buy clothes from the store racks for teenage girls. When she walks you can almost see her hip bones moving inside her jeans. Now, I’m not saying she’s sick. It runs in my family for women to be so skinny. Mother couldn’t get over a hundred pounds till after she gave birth to her slobbering son. Annie’s not sick, but she does look kind of sick: a little pinched mouth, almost no cheeks, no backside, no chest. I guess I always figured any guy who thought she was sexy would have some kind of emotional problem. Either that, or he would be able to see through her being so bony to love her for having the soul of a painter. Maybe painters have souls. After two years playing in an orchestra, I know damn sure that musicians don’t.
I met Dwayne Taylor and I said to myself, “He not only can’t see through to her soul, he can’t see through a glass of water.” He was small and hard as a fire hydrant. He had black eyes and needed a shave and his every word twanged like a banjo and he was wearing pink and blue shorts and a T-shirt that read, “God, Guns, and Glory.” Everything about him said, “Cracker and proud of it.” I hate people who live their lives as stereotypes because it never occurred to them there was any other way to be. There is another way to be, goddamn it. The other way’s a puddle of shit too but at least you know it and the guy who knows he’s in the shit is better than the guy who breathes it like a mudskipper.
The occasion that time was going camping, because Dwayne liked sitting on a river bank killing fish and he figured I liked it too. Annie knew better but she didn’t say anything. She said, “I can swim a little. I never get to do that much, Clyde.” I said, “I don’t want to kill any fish.” She said, “I know you. You won’t catch any.”
So we went out to some campground with an Indian name and Annie had one swim and spent the rest of the time cooking or sleeping. Meanwhile Dwayne put a fishing rod in my hand and sat me down on the bank and we got acquainted, which means Dwayne told me his dumbshit opinions. “This country’s going down the toilet,” he said, banjo-voiced, “that’s what it is. The country has lost its morality. This used to be a Christian country. Now all these, whatyoucall, other faiths are moving in.”
I said, “Uh huh.” The river bank was rocky; my backside hurt.
“Like, you take the Arabs.” He pronounced it ay-rabs. “These boys figure, all the money they got, they just buy whatever chunk of the country they want.” He finished a beer and got another out of his cooler. “Back at home, they have all these rigid morals, like the women wear veils, and everyone kneels and prays ten goddamn times a day. Then they come over here, buy some big house, surround it with security guards, and send out for rich foods, and whores, and they laugh at us. They laugh at this country.”
I said, “Uh huh.” I’d never seen an Arab in Athens. I figured they lived in Dwayne’s imagination.
“Want a beer?”
“Maybe later.” I didn’t trust myself to get drunk with Dwayne. I might say what I thought and then he’d punch the shit out of me. Or some of the shit, anyway. I don’t run out.
“And the Japanese,” Dwayne twanged on. “They’re just the same way. They want to buy this country up, just like they buy all those other countries. I studied it. I know all about it. Like Malaysia. They bought it all. It’s called, whatyoucall, economic imperialism. Yeah, that’s what it is.”
“Uh huh.” Like the Japanese or any other group of people were packs of evil clones.
“Sure you don’t want a beer? I got enough for the whole weekend.”
“My stomach hurts,” I said.
Dwayne grinned at me like he knew me inside and out. “I’ll tell you why that is,” he said. “Why your stomach hurts. It’s the goddamn trumpet, is what it is.”
I said, “I don’t think so.” I tried moving the fishing rod around, so I’d have an excuse to look at the water instead of at him.
“You shouldn’t play an instrument, Clyde,” Dwayne said. “You can see it don’t agree with you. A man like you and me needs to admit what he is. We’re the same kind, Clyde. You know I’m right.”
“I’m sick to my stomach,” I said. “Let me have a beer.”
That was my first long conversation with Dwayne Turner. The others were pretty much the same way. The worst part of the trip wasn’t Dwayne’s halfassed opinions, though. It was late at night. They were in their tent, and I was in mine, and I was supposed to be asleep, and instead I had to listen to them screwing in the tent. Muffled voices, mostly Dwayne saying, “There now, yes now, there now, yes now,” over and over, like someone who can’t remember the rest of a song, and Annie squeaking like a doorhinge, as if she liked getting it from that Gulf War prick, or as if she wanted him to think so. It had to be hurting her; he was making grunting sounds too, unk, unk, unk, into those little hips of hers. I was damn near ready to puke. I thought, “I’ve got to get you away from him, Annie. I’ve got to get you away.”
*
So now, the day before Christmas. All day I knew they were on their way in and would get there right about when I got home from work. All day, starting from 7 AM, I was in the pet store with my splitting headache, and also with a nagging cough from my perennial trumpeter’s throat infection. By 5 PM my head was ringing like a rusty cowbell, and my throat itched like mad because I hadn’t gotten a lunch hour to go pick up my antibiotics to get rid of it. There was no time to do that before Annie and Dwayne were supposed to show up, and there was no time to go for groceries either, which I was planning to do, so I went straight home to meet them. I had about two minutes to lie on my couch, right by the door, with no light but the last of the Athens sun through the twisted blinds and my fat arm over my face to block that out, then there was a bashing sound on the door, had to be Dwayne. I rolled off the couch and opened the door and Dwayne came in holding a six-pack and grabbed my hand and squeezed it into a bleeding marshmallow and sat on the couch and opened a beer and handed me one. My throat itched. I stood there looking at the beer can in my hand like it was a giant insect. He didn’t notice, but looked out the door and shouted, “Hey, Annie, you going for food?”
Annie came to the door loaded down with luggage: two suitcases, an athletic bag, a sack of road-trip garbage with crushed beer cans in it. I took the suitcases and carried them into my bedroom, where they were going to sleep. I left the beer on the nightstand. I came out and looked at Annie. There was no color in her face at all; she was standing by the door, holding the bag and the garbage, like she was so close to dead she had no idea where she was or where to go. I took the bag and the garbage and put them where they belonged while Dwayne turned on the TV. I heard the sound of static. My TV wasn’t much more than furniture without a cable hookup, but if Dwayne wanted to mess with it, fine for him.
I came back out. Annie was still standing in place. “You look tired, “ I said to her.
“Goddamn right I’m tired,” Dwayne said. He was twisting my TV antenna, trying to get a picture on any channel. “Hungry, too. You got any steaks in this place, Clyde?”
"I don’t even have any Fruit Loops,” I said. My head throbbed. I went to Annie and tried to hug her. She lifted her arms a little, but that was about it. Her coat was more solid than her bones. I knew why; Annie always got carsick on long trips. She probably hadn’t eaten all day, and had puked up water at the rest stops.
“I could use a big steak,” Dwayne said. “What do you think, Annie? Want to go get Clyde and me some, whatyoucall, filet mignon?”
“I’ll go,” I said. “I can cook dinner.”
Dwayne looked away from the static for a moment, looked at me. “Damn, Clyde,” he said, “your TV’s a real piece of shit, ain’t it?”
His pouchy red face, his pained, innocent eyes, his unconscious combat-ready stance, all just about made me sick. Not carsick, like Annie; just Dwaynesick. My head throbbed, and my throat itched, like they both had all day, but worse.
“I’ll take Annie, and we’ll go shopping,” I said. “You just rest up from the drive.”
“You sure?”
“We’ll be fine. Right, Annie?”
“Sure, Clyde,” Annie said in a weak, droning voice. Not Annie’s voice like it was supposed to be, like it was when she was a girl, grinning shithappy about what was on her easel. A voice like a groan, like the sound you make when you find a hundred leeches hanging off your belly and you figure they were there a long time. I had to get her away from Dwayne. He was breaking her. I took her hand – bones light as a bat’s – and led her like a child. “Come on, Annie. Let’s hit the store.”
I got her into my car – she still walking soft and limp as a scarecrow – and pulled out into traffic.
My car was a brown Escort with a wrinkled driver-side door. It always took a few pulls to get that door to latch shut, ever since a tourist from Ontario sideswiped me a year before. The window on the passenger side was stuck open a half-inch. The air-conditioning vents blew foam. Starting and stopping, the car wheezed like a lung cancer victim. Riding in it was like flirting with lung cancer, anyway, since before and after every orchestra practice, I played chauffeur to a flautist named Wanda Tracy who chain-smoked menthol cigarettes. With all its defects, though, I drove my Escort at the highest possible speed. I passed every slow-moving pickup, delivery van, or geriatric Lincoln I could possibly pass.
So today I plunged my groaning Escort into the Christmas Eve traffic and stopped dead. The traffic was going nowhere. Up ahead, the light had been green for at least a minute. It seemed as if no one had noticed. I looked at Annie. I said, “This is good practice for being parked.”
Annie closed her eyes and put her seat back. She was as white as a snowman, lying like a corpse in a coffin.
I have to go to the drugstore first,” I said. “I need to refill my lithium so I can make it through Christmas.”
She didn’t laugh – no surprise to me.
The traffic moved a few inches. “Hey, Annie,” I said, “help, quick! Is this pedal the brake or the clutch?”
She didn’t laugh at that one, either. We lurched forward a few yards. The light turned red.
“Annie,” I said, “you’re worrying me.”
She opened her eyes and looked at me, but didn’t raise her head. “I’m okay, Clyde. I’m just tired is all. I’ll perk up.”
“I’ll take you to the drive-through window at Hardee’s, get you a hot snack. It’s on the way. Just up the street. Should only take about two hours.”
My sister managed a small grin. She kept her eyes closed. I didn’t think it was heartfelt; I thought she was trying to appease me. Like you appease an angry God; give him a sacrifice, even if it’s just a smile. Smile and he leaves you alone. But this wasn’t right. It couldn’t be right. Dwayne had her trained to this appeasement bullshit.
Traffic moved somewhat. Winter air trickled through the stuck window, across Annie’s face and coat and down the back of my pants. We went through the Hardee’s drive-through. Annie got a small fries and a small Diet Coke. She ate one or two fries, sipped the Coke, and sat there chewing the straw, or maybe just tonguing it.
I stopped at the filling station. Annie was rubbing the straw across her lips, while my headache was erupting like Mt. St. Helens. Mt. St. Carswell. Mt. St. Carswell, Jr. I got into a dispute with the kid inside about whether the pump I’d pre-paid for was functioning.
“You can go out and try it,” I said. “I swear to you it’s not on. You may think you turned it on, but it is not putting out gas.”
“Try again,” said the kid.
While I was pumping the gas I had a coughing fit, and some bile burned up into my throat. I needed the damn antibiotic. When I got into the car, Annie had eaten a few more fries and was trying to pull open a ketchup packet with her bone-thin fingers. I had a sip of the Coke to ease my throat, pulled into traffic, and stopped at another green light.
“If you think this traffic’s bad,” I said, “you should see it at 3 a.m.”
Annie chewed her straw.
“How was the trip?” I asked.
“It was okay,” Annie said.
“Did you get this kind of traffic?”
“Not this bad.”
“You made good time.”
“Uh huh.”
“E equals M.C. squared.”
“Very funny, Clyde.”
After the next brief lurch forward, I said, “You don’t want to talk much, do you?”
Annie sat up. “I’m too tired.”
“I’m never too tired to get pissed off. It keeps my blood moving.” I pointed. “See that Aries up there? Trying to make a left turn out of the right lane. Blocking traffic in both directions.”
“Oh, who cares, Clyde?”
“I care. You have to call a jackass a jackass when you see him, or else you’re going to be him. Know the ways of fools, Annie, and act otherwise.”
Annie looked at me with deep disgusted weariness. “Whatever you say, Clyde. Your wisdom is too much for me.”
There was no more talk for a while. My head and throat were both hurting me so much that I hit some kind of fugue state where I didn’t notice much of anything practical but was thinking about an old fantasy I had more than ten years before. When I was seventeen and going off to college I thought while I was there I’d meet some girl who was damn fool enough to marry me. I knew how it would happen, too. I’d be in some studio or apartment somewhere tooting away at a Handel concerto, crisp and clean as everything, maybe not the best performance ever, but just good enough that you could hear it and know I was for real, good enough that you would know I meant what I was doing. Good enough that you would know Clyde Carswell, Jr. had enough heart and enough guts to go anywhere and do anything that had the word “trumpet” in it. The word “man” in it. So I’d be there playing, and there’d be a knock at the door, and I’d let her in, and she’d say, “I heard you playing, and I just had to see who it was.” And then lunch and dinner and another lunch and another dinner and playing duets and writing sonatas and touring the country together, Clyde Carswell, Jr. and wife. We’d be on the stage, and out in the audience they’d say, gee, Carswell sure is ugly but they say she really loves him, you can hear how they love each other by how they play.
I was lost in this, and then a honking horn and the smell of menthol cigarettes and a succession of my own coughs brought me back to my new location, the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly, waiting behind ten other cars because someone ahead might be pulling out of a space, and next to me my fading sister Annie. Nothing more was said, and ages later we got a space and I got out of the car and headed for the drugstore. Annie followed me; probably she had had it with sitting in cars. I didn’t say much while we were waiting for my prescription, and Annie didn’t say anything. She wandered off while I was in line to pay. I popped an antibiotic soon as I owned it.
Annie was in line at the front counter with an Almond Joy and a copy of Modern Bride. There were eight people in front of her and six people behind. Most of them were buying bows and wrapping paper. The line wasn’t moving. No goddamn line was moving anywhere in Athens, maybe anywhere in Georgia. Waiting in line on Christmas Eve is like waiting for a landfill to rot.
I touched Annie on the shoulder; after a little jump and peep, like a surprised cat, she gave me a weak loveless smile and looked away. I stood beside her, trying not to cough up my pill. I began to hear the drugstore Muzak. We waited thirty minutes. I heard “The Little Drummer Boy.” Then “Jingle Bell Rock.” Then “O Come All Ye Faithful.” “Jingle Bells.” “The Little Drummer Boy.” “Jingle Bell Rock.” Meanwhile I stood there looking at the green streamers hanging over the cash register, at a display of Casper the Ghost and Yogi Bear cartoon videos for sale on the counter next to me, reduced to $9.99, and when I threw my head back in frustration at the wait, at a cardboard scene overhead, featuring Santa Claus and Mrs. Claus, arm in arm, supervising a rosy-cheeked girl-elf with a green pointed hat and little pointed green shoes sitting at a workbench with a hammer. I coughed worse and worse and my head pulsed more and more and the clock ticked on while Annie and I didn’t talk about how she was going to chain herself to Dwayne, and I could feel how the people behind us hated us for being ahead of them just like I hated everyone in line ahead of us for the same reason, and I found I couldn’t take it anymore, and I began to sing.
“Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell Rock!” I sang. The stout, middle-aged woman in front of us looked back in rabid contempt. I have no singing voice, but I have a trumpeter’s wind, and I am very loud. “Come on, Annie!” I shouted. “Jingle Bell Rhyme, in Jingle Bell Time! Sing along with me!”
“I don’t feel like singing, Clyde,” Annie said.
“Ringling Tingling, that’s the Jingle Bell…”
“Stop, please.”
“That’s the Jingle Bell Ro-ock!” I stopped singing. “Oh, boy!” I said to the woman in front of us. “I sure do love Christmas music. Don’t you?”
The woman wouldn’t look at me.
“I’m sorry you don’t feel well, Clyde,” Annie said. “”Let’s just get through this if we can, okay?”
I said, “Jingle Bell Rock is my life.”
The crowd wasn’t so bad in the Piggly Wiggly. We got three filet mignons, a bottle of steak sauce, and salad fixings. My throat was cracking. We got to salad dressings, I grabbed a bottle of bleu cheese, Annie’s favorite. She said, “No.” I said, “That’s your favorite.” She said, “Not any more. Get ranch.” I said, “I hate ranch. You hate ranch.” “I don’t hate ranch,” she said, “and Dwayne always eats it.” I said, “Well, I guess that settles it.”
Same thing in the produce section, almost word for word, when Annie put radishes in the buggy. This time she gave me a don’t-mess-with-me-look. “Radishes it is then,” I said, “but I’m going to pick mine out and put them on your plate.”
The Muzak overhead changed to “Twelve Days of Christmas.” More like sixty days of Christmas, with time off for good behavior.
It was unbearable. I left Annie in line and split to the bathroom. There, in mid-defecation, rubbing my forehead and gulping saliva, I tried to clear my head. I had to do or say some goddamn thing before we left that store, to keep Annie from Dwayneing her life away. I needed an idea. Dropping and dribbling, rubbing and gulping, I got as close to an idea as I could get. Or I should say, if getting an idea were like getting shot in the head, this would only be a flesh wound.
When I got back, Annie was next in line. In front of us was a young mother, a few years younger than me, heavy in the hips, with a rag tied round her head, a pink face, gray sweat pants, a black Falcons sweatshirt, and two howling children. She had about $200 in picnic groceries. I could see on her face that her day had been too long, and she wasn’t up to handling her brats. Too bad. Shouldn’t have brought them. Shouldn’t have birthed them.
The older boy, wearing ridiculous white overalls, threw a candy bar amid the groceries. It landed between the Diet Mountain Dew and the cut-rate hamburger. She said, “Peter, please put it back.” Meanwhile, the younger boy, age three or four, wearing a sailor blouse and a diaper, began to pull on her pants leg.
I gave Annie a look of disgust. She pretended not to see it.
Peter ignored his mother. She repeated, ‘Peter, please put it back.” The boy couldn’t reach, not that he was trying. The younger boy began pulling on her shirt.
“Please wait, Kevin,” she said.
The child sat down, white diaper on unclean Piggly Wiggly floor, and began to cry.
“What is it, Kevin? Peter, please put the candy back.”
The crying became caterwauling. The girl at the checkout seemed entirely oblivious, and was trying to get something coated with ice to ring through on the laser scanner.
I looked at Annie. She did not look back. I said, “I’ve had enough.” I stopped and looked eye to eye at the little bastard in the white overalls.
“Peter,” I said, “if you don’t put the candy bar back, I’m going to knock your goddamn head off. You got me?”
Peter ran behind his mother. The other child cried more loudly. The mother looked down at me with her mouth open.
“Ma’am,” I said, grinning up at her, “it’s my considered opinion that you should not be burdened with these children.”
The checkout girl didn’t say anything, but she put down the icy package and leaned over the counter to stare at me, like a few tired and frustrated eyeballs could shut me up.
“It just so happens,” I said to the mother, “that I know just what you should do. Take the little one home and put some pants on him. He’s going to freeze his little dinky off before Santa comes. Give the bigger one to me and I’ll show him where to put his candy.”
The mother reddened and heaved, as if struggling with an unhappy stomach, but by and by she came out with a scream: “How dare you?”
“Just a concerned citizen, ma’am.”
Annie grabbed me by the arm and tugged with all the might in her bony little body. It wasn’t enough to move me, low and fat as I am, except I was so eager to go. The unbought groceries, the puling child, the hysterical mother, the long-eyeballed clerk were all left behind and Annie dragged me out to the Escort and pushed me against the dented driver-side door. I was wearing my biggest shit-eating cracker grin, but even so, even while my flesh-wound of an idea was working, I felt odd about it. I’d started out the trip trying to get Annie away from a thoughtless bastard, and now here I was trying to get a rise out of her. Something was off about that.
“Don’t act like I did anything,” Annie shouted, “because I didn’t do a goddamn thing! What’s wrong with you? Why’d you make a scene in there?”
“Because I wanted to see you alive for a change. All you’ve been is a goddamn zombie. Dwayne says this. Dwayne likes that. What about what you say, and what you like?”
“I’m tired, Clyde!”
“Well, I’m tired too. We’re all goddamn tired. Living is hard, Annie. So what?”
“Well, why the hell are you making it harder for me?”
“Because your fiancee is a damn jackass, that’s all,” I said. “I just don’t get you. What are you thinking, wanting to marry that loudmouth? You want to be his damn maid for the rest of your life?”
A pause. That took a lot of breath. My throat hurt worse, but my head was a little better.
Finally Annie said, “Are you saying you won’t give us your approval?”
“No, I’m not saying that at all. You know and I know my approval isn’t worth spit anyway. But I know what Daddy would have said.”
Annie looked away.
“Uh huh.” I pressed her. “You know, too. He’d say, ‘Annie, don’t go and marry another cracker out of the box.’ That’s what he’d say. He’d say, ‘What happened to your painting, Annie?’ Wouldn’t he?”
“I don’t know what he’d say.”
“That’s what he’d say, Annie. That’s why I can’t figure you.”
“Well, maybe I don’t want to be a painter anymore,” Annie snapped. “Maybe I’m not good enough for that. What difference does it make?”
“Because Dwayne’s a damn jackass,” I said, “and in his little pin head he can’t see you doing a goddamn thing but cleaning his house and birthing a lot of fat barefoot kids whose idea of a good time will be going out in the woods and blowing hell out of deer and squirrels with goddamn automatic rifles. Don’t you see that? If you don’t see that, what the hell do you see when you look at the son of a bitch?”
“He’s good,” Annie said, “and he’s strong, and he won’t leave me. He acts different with me than he does around you. He’s not really like that.”
“Oh, I’m sure he isn’t. I bet he’s twice as bad, isn’t he?”
“He loves me.” Annie pounded the car with her white fist. “I’m not strong like you are, Clyde. I need someone to love me. I’m afraid to be alone.”
I couldn’t look at her after that. I never knew Annie thought I was strong any way at all, especially not that way. I stood there a minute, and the Christmas Eve air froze in my throat. I could hear Annie’s whistling breaths as she tried to calm down. Finally I dug in my pocket. “Here’s my money,” I said. My hand shook while I gave it to her. “Go buy the food. I’ll wait here.”
“What are you going to say to Dwayne?”
“Oh, hell, I don’t know. What do I know about anything? If you want to marry him, you will. Just… keep in touch with me in case you get into trouble.”
She took the money. I reached out for her hand, her shoulder, but she was already headed back for the Piggly Wiggly and I’d never seen her skin and bones look so proud and lovely in all her twenty-two years. Imagine Annie thinking I was the brave one in the family. God damn.
When she was out of sight, I took a deep breath and walked around the car. I got in on the passenger side and let the seat way back and looked through the front windshield at the gray sky, put up my hands and played a little trumpet solo in the cold air. Just my tired throat, a couple of stiff fingers, the twilight, and the still, cold air. As silent as I could, as silent as it had to be.
July 10, 2012
Open Letter to Agent Jeff Herman
Dear Mr. Herman,
I enjoyed reading your letter in New Yorker. Ken Auletta's article, to which you replied, was sorely lacking because of its heavy degree of sympathy for the Big Six and its disinterest in the situation of self-published authors. Auletta, who is conventionally published like your clients, is clearly invested in the idea that authors who have achieved Big Six publication are innately superior to those who have not, and accordingly does not bother to speak to, or even think about, self-published authors as intelligent, creative people in their own right who are making proper use of a business opportunity which should have been theirs all along. While you did not say any of that -- I am the one saying it -- you did say "We should celebrate anything that enables independent publishing to stay alive." For this, I salute you, and further, I encourage you to seek a leadership role in AAR, whose current leaders (Lipskar, Hochman) are now openly in league with the Big Six and do not have authors' interest in mind.
Let me note, since this letter will be appearing publicly in venues that I control, that you do not represent the kind of material I write, and that accordingly, there is no basis for interpreting it as way to curry favor with you so that you will represent me. I am proudly self-published in North America since 2010 (now with a publisher in India since early 2012) and not seeking an agent in the United States.
Best wishes to you, and thanks for setting the record straight on the issues where Auletta erred.
Regards,
Matt Posner
http://schooloftheages.webs.com
I enjoyed reading your letter in New Yorker. Ken Auletta's article, to which you replied, was sorely lacking because of its heavy degree of sympathy for the Big Six and its disinterest in the situation of self-published authors. Auletta, who is conventionally published like your clients, is clearly invested in the idea that authors who have achieved Big Six publication are innately superior to those who have not, and accordingly does not bother to speak to, or even think about, self-published authors as intelligent, creative people in their own right who are making proper use of a business opportunity which should have been theirs all along. While you did not say any of that -- I am the one saying it -- you did say "We should celebrate anything that enables independent publishing to stay alive." For this, I salute you, and further, I encourage you to seek a leadership role in AAR, whose current leaders (Lipskar, Hochman) are now openly in league with the Big Six and do not have authors' interest in mind.
Let me note, since this letter will be appearing publicly in venues that I control, that you do not represent the kind of material I write, and that accordingly, there is no basis for interpreting it as way to curry favor with you so that you will represent me. I am proudly self-published in North America since 2010 (now with a publisher in India since early 2012) and not seeking an agent in the United States.
Best wishes to you, and thanks for setting the record straight on the issues where Auletta erred.
Regards,
Matt Posner
http://schooloftheages.webs.com
June 26, 2012
Too Much to Do
I wonder why I assign myself too much to do as a writer. Here's my publishing schedule as per me.
1) Sara Ghost -- a novelette with some promo material added. Should be any time now. I completely formatted it, but then I didn't like how the formatting looked and just stalled out.
2) The War Against Love -- School of the Ages #3. Scheduled for August. I need to edit it. This book is so long that I can't use beta readers and the editing is in my hands alone. It's also long overdue as I finished a 99% draft back in 2010. There was a missing chapter,but I finished it two weeks ago.
3) How to Write Dialogue -- September. A technical book about how to write dialogue for fiction. It features introductory material and samples from eight to ten other self-published authors.
4) Zombies Zombies Zombies Zombies -- four zombie short stories. October, for Halloween season. I finished one of these stories. I need a few hours work on the second. The third is outlined but not one word is written. The fourth has changed concept twice and I don't know what I will wind up including.
5) The Indie Writer Murders -- my next collaboration with Jess C. Scott, set for early next year. Jess and I outlined this novella, but I have asked that we not begin drafting till probably October.
6) School of the Ages #4: it is scheduled for next year and I have only drafted half of it.
...and I have more ideas.
Why am I like this? I have always had more ideas than I could execute. To be honest, if I were writing full-time, I would do four times as many projects. The above is my schedule on top of teaching full-time. How much do I write every day? Averages to less than a page.
I guess I am ambitious to expand my market share in a business setting in which market shares go overwhelmingly to a few Big-Six-anointed authors, and we indies are dividing up our tiny portion more and more. More books = more chance to be seen. More genres = more market penetration. This is why I added nonfiction (Teen Guide) and why I am adding how-to (dialogue) and horror (Zombies x4) and mystery (with Jess).
I started out in fiction as a teenage genre writer. After earning my bachelor's, I spent five years in the academic fiction world, writing academic fiction that was always passed over in favor of the work of mediocrities. Here's a novel by a fourth-rate classmate:
Willy Slater's Lane: A Novel
My colleagues in academe have gone on to a variety of enterprises. Nearly all my professors have stopped publishing fiction. Here's a great book by the one whom I know still to be active, the lovely and kind Sheila Ortiz Taylor:
Imaginary Parents
My classmates have gone one of three ways. Some are academic professionals; some have edited and written for magazines and websites; most have dropped out of the writing game so far as I can tell. Here is a book by the best of my classmates, the immensely talented Cathy Day:
The Circus in Winter
I remember reading early drafts of fiction from this collection. One of her stories at that time won the Playboy College Fiction contest. I always did and still do respect and admire this colleague. But academic fiction is a dead end for all but a few. I am back to genre fiction now, and it will be the bulk of my work, I daresay, from now till doomsday, and the more of it I can produce without sacrificing quality, the better.
So why do I assign myself too much to do as a writer? It's partly my market strategy, as described above. It's very much a desire to reach an audience and become known. Yet I think it's mostly the fact that I am driven by a strong creative impulse. When I have an idea, I damn well want to write it and put it out there. It takes too long to get these projects done. Were I writing full-time, I'd be banging them out left and right, but as it is, I left everything for a summer which must be productive, or else...
Thanks for reading. I look forward to your comments.
1) Sara Ghost -- a novelette with some promo material added. Should be any time now. I completely formatted it, but then I didn't like how the formatting looked and just stalled out.
2) The War Against Love -- School of the Ages #3. Scheduled for August. I need to edit it. This book is so long that I can't use beta readers and the editing is in my hands alone. It's also long overdue as I finished a 99% draft back in 2010. There was a missing chapter,but I finished it two weeks ago.
3) How to Write Dialogue -- September. A technical book about how to write dialogue for fiction. It features introductory material and samples from eight to ten other self-published authors.
4) Zombies Zombies Zombies Zombies -- four zombie short stories. October, for Halloween season. I finished one of these stories. I need a few hours work on the second. The third is outlined but not one word is written. The fourth has changed concept twice and I don't know what I will wind up including.
5) The Indie Writer Murders -- my next collaboration with Jess C. Scott, set for early next year. Jess and I outlined this novella, but I have asked that we not begin drafting till probably October.
6) School of the Ages #4: it is scheduled for next year and I have only drafted half of it.
...and I have more ideas.
Why am I like this? I have always had more ideas than I could execute. To be honest, if I were writing full-time, I would do four times as many projects. The above is my schedule on top of teaching full-time. How much do I write every day? Averages to less than a page.
I guess I am ambitious to expand my market share in a business setting in which market shares go overwhelmingly to a few Big-Six-anointed authors, and we indies are dividing up our tiny portion more and more. More books = more chance to be seen. More genres = more market penetration. This is why I added nonfiction (Teen Guide) and why I am adding how-to (dialogue) and horror (Zombies x4) and mystery (with Jess).
I started out in fiction as a teenage genre writer. After earning my bachelor's, I spent five years in the academic fiction world, writing academic fiction that was always passed over in favor of the work of mediocrities. Here's a novel by a fourth-rate classmate:
Willy Slater's Lane: A Novel
My colleagues in academe have gone on to a variety of enterprises. Nearly all my professors have stopped publishing fiction. Here's a great book by the one whom I know still to be active, the lovely and kind Sheila Ortiz Taylor:
Imaginary Parents
My classmates have gone one of three ways. Some are academic professionals; some have edited and written for magazines and websites; most have dropped out of the writing game so far as I can tell. Here is a book by the best of my classmates, the immensely talented Cathy Day:
The Circus in Winter
I remember reading early drafts of fiction from this collection. One of her stories at that time won the Playboy College Fiction contest. I always did and still do respect and admire this colleague. But academic fiction is a dead end for all but a few. I am back to genre fiction now, and it will be the bulk of my work, I daresay, from now till doomsday, and the more of it I can produce without sacrificing quality, the better.
So why do I assign myself too much to do as a writer? It's partly my market strategy, as described above. It's very much a desire to reach an audience and become known. Yet I think it's mostly the fact that I am driven by a strong creative impulse. When I have an idea, I damn well want to write it and put it out there. It takes too long to get these projects done. Were I writing full-time, I'd be banging them out left and right, but as it is, I left everything for a summer which must be productive, or else...
Thanks for reading. I look forward to your comments.
June 22, 2012
Guest post by Drake Vaughn: Zombies of the 1950s Still Haunting Us Today
I'd like to introduce zombie author Drake Vaughn. His first book, Zombie Generation, can be found here:
The Zombie Generation
I asked Drake to write an essay for me about why zombie literature is so popular. His response references a lot of the material I grew up with. Right on, Drake -- we are on the same wavelength. This is a guy to watch for. Here's Drake's essay. Tell your friends about it.
1954 was a good year. Elvis Presley wailed his first tune at Sun Records. The polio vaccine was introduced. The Dow Jones surpassed the 1929 high for the first time since the Great Depression. Rationing due to WW2 finally ended in the UK. Color TV was invented. Joe DiMaggio married Marilyn Monroe. A gallon of gas only cost 22 cents. Hardly the time one would expect for the birth of the modern zombie.
Although, 1954 was anything but peaches and roses. Brown v. Board of Education laid the groundwork for the racial upheavals of the following decade. The USSR tested its first nuclear bomb, prompting President Eisenhower to give his “Domino Theory” speech. And one domino fell as the French lost the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, ceding control of North Vietnam to the communists and digging the roots for later US involvement. Cold War paranoia spread out of control as Senator Joseph McCarthy conducted his witch-hunt investigation for secret Reds.
And on the tiny Japanese island of Bikini Atoll, operation Castle Bravo birthed the first hydrogen bomb. Expected to produce a six megaton explosion, it rocked a surprising fifteen megaton punch. A nearby fishing boat had been told they would be clear of the blast, and instead found themselves irradiated. This news zipped through Japan sparking mass panic and fears over a radioactive food supply. And from this chaos, film director Ishiro Honda was inspired to create the atomic breathing icon Godzilla.
And Honda was hardly alone in transforming the era’s anxieties into a creative venture. 1954 was also the year when American author Richard Matheson published I Am Legend, thereby creating the template for the modern post-apocalyptic zombie story. Of course, the monsters in Matheson’s book are vampires, not the flesh guzzling undead, but the archetypes of I Am Legend are far more similar to zombies than the vampires of today.
Up to that point, zombies were associated with voodoo, such as in the classic film White Zombie (1932), where the undead were under the spell of an evil mastermind. For the first time, Matheson introduced a mob of monsters under nobody’s control outside of their own thirst for human blood. Likewise, this new breed of vampires was spawned by a global pandemic, similar to the zombie stories of today. Pop hits such as Twilight and True Blood have more in common with the gothic tradition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula than Matheson’s themes of isolation, survival, guilt-free violence, and post-apocalyptic destruction. And it’s no accident these changes began at the exact moment when Cold War paranoia reached its zenith. Matheson masterfully channeled the apocalyptic fear that with a single nuclear blast, society would crumble, leaving only a few survivors to fend for themselves.
Filmmaker George Romero likewise tapped this apocalyptic zeitgeist while writing the seminal zombie film Night of the Living Dead. And it should come as no surprise that he credited I Am Legend as his inspiration. But unlike the relatively stable 1954, the country was on the brink of massive upheaval when he wrote the screenplay in 1967. Race riots ravished major cities such as Cleveland, Newark, and Detroit. Protests against the Vietnam War splintered the country even further. And tensions grew worse the following year. Only a few months before the film’s October release, both Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. All at once, Night of the Living Dead seemed to embody the breakdown and confusion of that volatile election year. The nihilistic orgy of destruction and aura of impending doom fit perfectly with the turbulent times.
Romero continued to expand on this zombie mythology, incorporating social themes such as vapid consumerism in Dawn of the Dead (1978) and psychological isolation in Day of the Dead (1985). Even so, throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s, mainstream apocalyptic tales tended towards the themes of totalitarian government/corporate power and technological advances run amuck. Societal collapse brought upon by the brainless undead was pushed to the cultish sidelines. This mirrored the major epidemics of the time, such as AIDS, crack, racial animosity, and the rise of divorce. All of which frayed society, but were relegated to a small segment of the population. This was in contrast to the sweeping pandemic and mindless destruction reflected in zombie mythology.
Not to sound cliché, but this instantly changed with the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11th, 2001. Suddenly, a new monster emerged. Hidden right within our mists, this new enemy was irrational and suicidal. And along with this new outside threat, the economy tanked that December as Enron went bankrupt, revealing all sorts of financial shenanigans and corruption. So it should come as no surprise when Cold War anxiety and paranoia over a faceless enemy reemerged, tugging the zombie mythology back to the surface with it.
And this change in cultural zeitgeist was best reflected in Daniel Boyle’s 28 Days Later, released in 2002. Although filmed prior to the attacks, the movie still managed to capture the general anxieties of the time. Instead of lumbering brainless idiots of Romero’s creations, these undead creatures struck at a lightning quick speed. These rapid and mindless attacks seemed to embody this new type of terrorism of suicidal airplanes, anonymous anthrax mailings, and a distant sniper killing random targets.
Although, it wasn’t until another domestic tragedy when the zombie mythology really began to pick up speed. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck, demolishing the city of New Orleans. Not only did home videos capture the destruction for everyone to see in vivid detail, but the bungled recovery effort likewise added to the feeling of helplessness. Scenes of apocalyptic destruction were suddenly no longer relegated to big screen Hollywood fantasies. And out of this rubble, two major zombie novels were released the following year: World War Z by Max Brooks and Cell by Stephen King, the premiere name in horror fiction.
And in 2008, just as the country appeared to be on the path to recovery, the real estate market slammed to its knees. The entire financial industry imploded, collapsing on par with the 1929 stock market crash. And similar to how the Great Depression ushered in a classic age of Hollywood horror: Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), Freaks (1932), and King Kong (1933), this recession brought the highest grossing zombie film of all time: Zombieland (2009), along with TV’s first zombie-centric show, The Walking Dead (2010). The zombies had returned. And in great numbers.
Currently, there seems to be no end in sight for this zombie fever. Hollywood has three undead projects slated for 2013, including a summer blockbuster release of World War Z starring Brad Pitt. Of course, spending millions of dollars on this zombie craze doesn’t guarantee it will resonate with the culture as a whole. However, with the stalled economy forcing even college graduates to move back in with their parents, along with the piles of ever mounting debts, there’s a growing sense things are only getting worse. From Tea Partiers to Occupiers, society is splitting into ever more polarized camps. And each one is convinced the other side is ruining everything, while likewise believing there is no way to stop the collapse. And whenever there’s a fissure in society, the flesh guzzling undead are never too far behind, waiting to chew on the pieces.
Drake Vaughn is the author of “The Zombie Generation” (Dead Orb Press, 2012). He lives in Santa Monica, CA with his wife and a spunky black cat who has returned from the dead on a number of occasions.
The Zombie Generation
I asked Drake to write an essay for me about why zombie literature is so popular. His response references a lot of the material I grew up with. Right on, Drake -- we are on the same wavelength. This is a guy to watch for. Here's Drake's essay. Tell your friends about it.
1954 was a good year. Elvis Presley wailed his first tune at Sun Records. The polio vaccine was introduced. The Dow Jones surpassed the 1929 high for the first time since the Great Depression. Rationing due to WW2 finally ended in the UK. Color TV was invented. Joe DiMaggio married Marilyn Monroe. A gallon of gas only cost 22 cents. Hardly the time one would expect for the birth of the modern zombie.
Although, 1954 was anything but peaches and roses. Brown v. Board of Education laid the groundwork for the racial upheavals of the following decade. The USSR tested its first nuclear bomb, prompting President Eisenhower to give his “Domino Theory” speech. And one domino fell as the French lost the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, ceding control of North Vietnam to the communists and digging the roots for later US involvement. Cold War paranoia spread out of control as Senator Joseph McCarthy conducted his witch-hunt investigation for secret Reds.
And on the tiny Japanese island of Bikini Atoll, operation Castle Bravo birthed the first hydrogen bomb. Expected to produce a six megaton explosion, it rocked a surprising fifteen megaton punch. A nearby fishing boat had been told they would be clear of the blast, and instead found themselves irradiated. This news zipped through Japan sparking mass panic and fears over a radioactive food supply. And from this chaos, film director Ishiro Honda was inspired to create the atomic breathing icon Godzilla.
And Honda was hardly alone in transforming the era’s anxieties into a creative venture. 1954 was also the year when American author Richard Matheson published I Am Legend, thereby creating the template for the modern post-apocalyptic zombie story. Of course, the monsters in Matheson’s book are vampires, not the flesh guzzling undead, but the archetypes of I Am Legend are far more similar to zombies than the vampires of today.
Up to that point, zombies were associated with voodoo, such as in the classic film White Zombie (1932), where the undead were under the spell of an evil mastermind. For the first time, Matheson introduced a mob of monsters under nobody’s control outside of their own thirst for human blood. Likewise, this new breed of vampires was spawned by a global pandemic, similar to the zombie stories of today. Pop hits such as Twilight and True Blood have more in common with the gothic tradition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula than Matheson’s themes of isolation, survival, guilt-free violence, and post-apocalyptic destruction. And it’s no accident these changes began at the exact moment when Cold War paranoia reached its zenith. Matheson masterfully channeled the apocalyptic fear that with a single nuclear blast, society would crumble, leaving only a few survivors to fend for themselves.
Filmmaker George Romero likewise tapped this apocalyptic zeitgeist while writing the seminal zombie film Night of the Living Dead. And it should come as no surprise that he credited I Am Legend as his inspiration. But unlike the relatively stable 1954, the country was on the brink of massive upheaval when he wrote the screenplay in 1967. Race riots ravished major cities such as Cleveland, Newark, and Detroit. Protests against the Vietnam War splintered the country even further. And tensions grew worse the following year. Only a few months before the film’s October release, both Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. All at once, Night of the Living Dead seemed to embody the breakdown and confusion of that volatile election year. The nihilistic orgy of destruction and aura of impending doom fit perfectly with the turbulent times.
Romero continued to expand on this zombie mythology, incorporating social themes such as vapid consumerism in Dawn of the Dead (1978) and psychological isolation in Day of the Dead (1985). Even so, throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s, mainstream apocalyptic tales tended towards the themes of totalitarian government/corporate power and technological advances run amuck. Societal collapse brought upon by the brainless undead was pushed to the cultish sidelines. This mirrored the major epidemics of the time, such as AIDS, crack, racial animosity, and the rise of divorce. All of which frayed society, but were relegated to a small segment of the population. This was in contrast to the sweeping pandemic and mindless destruction reflected in zombie mythology.
Not to sound cliché, but this instantly changed with the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11th, 2001. Suddenly, a new monster emerged. Hidden right within our mists, this new enemy was irrational and suicidal. And along with this new outside threat, the economy tanked that December as Enron went bankrupt, revealing all sorts of financial shenanigans and corruption. So it should come as no surprise when Cold War anxiety and paranoia over a faceless enemy reemerged, tugging the zombie mythology back to the surface with it.
And this change in cultural zeitgeist was best reflected in Daniel Boyle’s 28 Days Later, released in 2002. Although filmed prior to the attacks, the movie still managed to capture the general anxieties of the time. Instead of lumbering brainless idiots of Romero’s creations, these undead creatures struck at a lightning quick speed. These rapid and mindless attacks seemed to embody this new type of terrorism of suicidal airplanes, anonymous anthrax mailings, and a distant sniper killing random targets.
Although, it wasn’t until another domestic tragedy when the zombie mythology really began to pick up speed. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck, demolishing the city of New Orleans. Not only did home videos capture the destruction for everyone to see in vivid detail, but the bungled recovery effort likewise added to the feeling of helplessness. Scenes of apocalyptic destruction were suddenly no longer relegated to big screen Hollywood fantasies. And out of this rubble, two major zombie novels were released the following year: World War Z by Max Brooks and Cell by Stephen King, the premiere name in horror fiction.
And in 2008, just as the country appeared to be on the path to recovery, the real estate market slammed to its knees. The entire financial industry imploded, collapsing on par with the 1929 stock market crash. And similar to how the Great Depression ushered in a classic age of Hollywood horror: Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), Freaks (1932), and King Kong (1933), this recession brought the highest grossing zombie film of all time: Zombieland (2009), along with TV’s first zombie-centric show, The Walking Dead (2010). The zombies had returned. And in great numbers.
Currently, there seems to be no end in sight for this zombie fever. Hollywood has three undead projects slated for 2013, including a summer blockbuster release of World War Z starring Brad Pitt. Of course, spending millions of dollars on this zombie craze doesn’t guarantee it will resonate with the culture as a whole. However, with the stalled economy forcing even college graduates to move back in with their parents, along with the piles of ever mounting debts, there’s a growing sense things are only getting worse. From Tea Partiers to Occupiers, society is splitting into ever more polarized camps. And each one is convinced the other side is ruining everything, while likewise believing there is no way to stop the collapse. And whenever there’s a fissure in society, the flesh guzzling undead are never too far behind, waiting to chew on the pieces.
Drake Vaughn is the author of “The Zombie Generation” (Dead Orb Press, 2012). He lives in Santa Monica, CA with his wife and a spunky black cat who has returned from the dead on a number of occasions.
Guest post by Drake Vaughn: Zombies of the 1950s Still Haunting Us Today
I'd like to introduce zombie author Drake Vaughn. His first book, Zombie Generation, can be found here:
The Zombie Generation
I asked Drake to write an essay for me about why zombie literature is so popular. His response references a lot of the material I grew up with. Right on, Drake -- we are on the same wavelength. This is a guy to watch for. Here's Drake's essay. Tell your friends about it.
1954 was a good year. Elvis Presley wailed his first tune at Sun Records. The polio vaccine was introduced. The Dow Jones surpassed the 1929 high for the first time since the Great Depression. Rationing due to WW2 finally ended in the UK. Color TV was invented. Joe DiMaggio married Marilyn Monroe. A gallon of gas only cost 22 cents. Hardly the time one would expect for the birth of the modern zombie.
Although, 1954 was anything but peaches and roses. Brown v. Board of Education laid the groundwork for the racial upheavals of the following decade. The USSR tested its first nuclear bomb, prompting President Eisenhower to give his “Domino Theory” speech. And one domino fell as the French lost the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, ceding control of North Vietnam to the communists and digging the roots for later US involvement. Cold War paranoia spread out of control as Senator Joseph McCarthy conducted his witch-hunt investigation for secret Reds.
And on the tiny Japanese island of Bikini Atoll, operation Castle Bravo birthed the first hydrogen bomb. Expected to produce a six megaton explosion, it rocked a surprising fifteen megaton punch. A nearby fishing boat had been told they would be clear of the blast, and instead found themselves irradiated. This news zipped through Japan sparking mass panic and fears over a radioactive food supply. And from this chaos, film director Ishiro Honda was inspired to create the atomic breathing icon Godzilla.
And Honda was hardly alone in transforming the era’s anxieties into a creative venture. 1954 was also the year when American author Richard Matheson published I Am Legend, thereby creating the template for the modern post-apocalyptic zombie story. Of course, the monsters in Matheson’s book are vampires, not the flesh guzzling undead, but the archetypes of I Am Legend are far more similar to zombies than the vampires of today.
Up to that point, zombies were associated with voodoo, such as in the classic film White Zombie (1932), where the undead were under the spell of an evil mastermind. For the first time, Matheson introduced a mob of monsters under nobody’s control outside of their own thirst for human blood. Likewise, this new breed of vampires was spawned by a global pandemic, similar to the zombie stories of today. Pop hits such as Twilight and True Blood have more in common with the gothic tradition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula than Matheson’s themes of isolation, survival, guilt-free violence, and post-apocalyptic destruction. And it’s no accident these changes began at the exact moment when Cold War paranoia reached its zenith. Matheson masterfully channeled the apocalyptic fear that with a single nuclear blast, society would crumble, leaving only a few survivors to fend for themselves.
Filmmaker George Romero likewise tapped this apocalyptic zeitgeist while writing the seminal zombie film Night of the Living Dead. And it should come as no surprise that he credited I Am Legend as his inspiration. But unlike the relatively stable 1954, the country was on the brink of massive upheaval when he wrote the screenplay in 1967. Race riots ravished major cities such as Cleveland, Newark, and Detroit. Protests against the Vietnam War splintered the country even further. And tensions grew worse the following year. Only a few months before the film’s October release, both Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. All at once, Night of the Living Dead seemed to embody the breakdown and confusion of that volatile election year. The nihilistic orgy of destruction and aura of impending doom fit perfectly with the turbulent times.
Romero continued to expand on this zombie mythology, incorporating social themes such as vapid consumerism in Dawn of the Dead (1978) and psychological isolation in Day of the Dead (1985). Even so, throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s, mainstream apocalyptic tales tended towards the themes of totalitarian government/corporate power and technological advances run amuck. Societal collapse brought upon by the brainless undead was pushed to the cultish sidelines. This mirrored the major epidemics of the time, such as AIDS, crack, racial animosity, and the rise of divorce. All of which frayed society, but were relegated to a small segment of the population. This was in contrast to the sweeping pandemic and mindless destruction reflected in zombie mythology.
Not to sound cliché, but this instantly changed with the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11th, 2001. Suddenly, a new monster emerged. Hidden right within our mists, this new enemy was irrational and suicidal. And along with this new outside threat, the economy tanked that December as Enron went bankrupt, revealing all sorts of financial shenanigans and corruption. So it should come as no surprise when Cold War anxiety and paranoia over a faceless enemy reemerged, tugging the zombie mythology back to the surface with it.
And this change in cultural zeitgeist was best reflected in Daniel Boyle’s 28 Days Later, released in 2002. Although filmed prior to the attacks, the movie still managed to capture the general anxieties of the time. Instead of lumbering brainless idiots of Romero’s creations, these undead creatures struck at a lightning quick speed. These rapid and mindless attacks seemed to embody this new type of terrorism of suicidal airplanes, anonymous anthrax mailings, and a distant sniper killing random targets.
Although, it wasn’t until another domestic tragedy when the zombie mythology really began to pick up speed. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck, demolishing the city of New Orleans. Not only did home videos capture the destruction for everyone to see in vivid detail, but the bungled recovery effort likewise added to the feeling of helplessness. Scenes of apocalyptic destruction were suddenly no longer relegated to big screen Hollywood fantasies. And out of this rubble, two major zombie novels were released the following year: World War Z by Max Brooks and Cell by Stephen King, the premiere name in horror fiction.
And in 2008, just as the country appeared to be on the path to recovery, the real estate market slammed to its knees. The entire financial industry imploded, collapsing on par with the 1929 stock market crash. And similar to how the Great Depression ushered in a classic age of Hollywood horror: Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), Freaks (1932), and King Kong (1933), this recession brought the highest grossing zombie film of all time: Zombieland (2009), along with TV’s first zombie-centric show, The Walking Dead (2010). The zombies had returned. And in great numbers.
Currently, there seems to be no end in sight for this zombie fever. Hollywood has three undead projects slated for 2013, including a summer blockbuster release of World War Z starring Brad Pitt. Of course, spending millions of dollars on this zombie craze doesn’t guarantee it will resonate with the culture as a whole. However, with the stalled economy forcing even college graduates to move back in with their parents, along with the piles of ever mounting debts, there’s a growing sense things are only getting worse. From Tea Partiers to Occupiers, society is splitting into ever more polarized camps. And each one is convinced the other side is ruining everything, while likewise believing there is no way to stop the collapse. And whenever there’s a fissure in society, the flesh guzzling undead are never too far behind, waiting to chew on the pieces.
Drake Vaughn is the author of “The Zombie Generation” (Dead Orb Press, 2012). He lives in Santa Monica, CA with his wife and a spunky black cat who has returned from the dead on a number of occasions.
The Zombie Generation
I asked Drake to write an essay for me about why zombie literature is so popular. His response references a lot of the material I grew up with. Right on, Drake -- we are on the same wavelength. This is a guy to watch for. Here's Drake's essay. Tell your friends about it.
1954 was a good year. Elvis Presley wailed his first tune at Sun Records. The polio vaccine was introduced. The Dow Jones surpassed the 1929 high for the first time since the Great Depression. Rationing due to WW2 finally ended in the UK. Color TV was invented. Joe DiMaggio married Marilyn Monroe. A gallon of gas only cost 22 cents. Hardly the time one would expect for the birth of the modern zombie.
Although, 1954 was anything but peaches and roses. Brown v. Board of Education laid the groundwork for the racial upheavals of the following decade. The USSR tested its first nuclear bomb, prompting President Eisenhower to give his “Domino Theory” speech. And one domino fell as the French lost the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, ceding control of North Vietnam to the communists and digging the roots for later US involvement. Cold War paranoia spread out of control as Senator Joseph McCarthy conducted his witch-hunt investigation for secret Reds.
And on the tiny Japanese island of Bikini Atoll, operation Castle Bravo birthed the first hydrogen bomb. Expected to produce a six megaton explosion, it rocked a surprising fifteen megaton punch. A nearby fishing boat had been told they would be clear of the blast, and instead found themselves irradiated. This news zipped through Japan sparking mass panic and fears over a radioactive food supply. And from this chaos, film director Ishiro Honda was inspired to create the atomic breathing icon Godzilla.
And Honda was hardly alone in transforming the era’s anxieties into a creative venture. 1954 was also the year when American author Richard Matheson published I Am Legend, thereby creating the template for the modern post-apocalyptic zombie story. Of course, the monsters in Matheson’s book are vampires, not the flesh guzzling undead, but the archetypes of I Am Legend are far more similar to zombies than the vampires of today.
Up to that point, zombies were associated with voodoo, such as in the classic film White Zombie (1932), where the undead were under the spell of an evil mastermind. For the first time, Matheson introduced a mob of monsters under nobody’s control outside of their own thirst for human blood. Likewise, this new breed of vampires was spawned by a global pandemic, similar to the zombie stories of today. Pop hits such as Twilight and True Blood have more in common with the gothic tradition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula than Matheson’s themes of isolation, survival, guilt-free violence, and post-apocalyptic destruction. And it’s no accident these changes began at the exact moment when Cold War paranoia reached its zenith. Matheson masterfully channeled the apocalyptic fear that with a single nuclear blast, society would crumble, leaving only a few survivors to fend for themselves.
Filmmaker George Romero likewise tapped this apocalyptic zeitgeist while writing the seminal zombie film Night of the Living Dead. And it should come as no surprise that he credited I Am Legend as his inspiration. But unlike the relatively stable 1954, the country was on the brink of massive upheaval when he wrote the screenplay in 1967. Race riots ravished major cities such as Cleveland, Newark, and Detroit. Protests against the Vietnam War splintered the country even further. And tensions grew worse the following year. Only a few months before the film’s October release, both Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. All at once, Night of the Living Dead seemed to embody the breakdown and confusion of that volatile election year. The nihilistic orgy of destruction and aura of impending doom fit perfectly with the turbulent times.
Romero continued to expand on this zombie mythology, incorporating social themes such as vapid consumerism in Dawn of the Dead (1978) and psychological isolation in Day of the Dead (1985). Even so, throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s, mainstream apocalyptic tales tended towards the themes of totalitarian government/corporate power and technological advances run amuck. Societal collapse brought upon by the brainless undead was pushed to the cultish sidelines. This mirrored the major epidemics of the time, such as AIDS, crack, racial animosity, and the rise of divorce. All of which frayed society, but were relegated to a small segment of the population. This was in contrast to the sweeping pandemic and mindless destruction reflected in zombie mythology.
Not to sound cliché, but this instantly changed with the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11th, 2001. Suddenly, a new monster emerged. Hidden right within our mists, this new enemy was irrational and suicidal. And along with this new outside threat, the economy tanked that December as Enron went bankrupt, revealing all sorts of financial shenanigans and corruption. So it should come as no surprise when Cold War anxiety and paranoia over a faceless enemy reemerged, tugging the zombie mythology back to the surface with it.
And this change in cultural zeitgeist was best reflected in Daniel Boyle’s 28 Days Later, released in 2002. Although filmed prior to the attacks, the movie still managed to capture the general anxieties of the time. Instead of lumbering brainless idiots of Romero’s creations, these undead creatures struck at a lightning quick speed. These rapid and mindless attacks seemed to embody this new type of terrorism of suicidal airplanes, anonymous anthrax mailings, and a distant sniper killing random targets.
Although, it wasn’t until another domestic tragedy when the zombie mythology really began to pick up speed. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck, demolishing the city of New Orleans. Not only did home videos capture the destruction for everyone to see in vivid detail, but the bungled recovery effort likewise added to the feeling of helplessness. Scenes of apocalyptic destruction were suddenly no longer relegated to big screen Hollywood fantasies. And out of this rubble, two major zombie novels were released the following year: World War Z by Max Brooks and Cell by Stephen King, the premiere name in horror fiction.
And in 2008, just as the country appeared to be on the path to recovery, the real estate market slammed to its knees. The entire financial industry imploded, collapsing on par with the 1929 stock market crash. And similar to how the Great Depression ushered in a classic age of Hollywood horror: Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), Freaks (1932), and King Kong (1933), this recession brought the highest grossing zombie film of all time: Zombieland (2009), along with TV’s first zombie-centric show, The Walking Dead (2010). The zombies had returned. And in great numbers.
Currently, there seems to be no end in sight for this zombie fever. Hollywood has three undead projects slated for 2013, including a summer blockbuster release of World War Z starring Brad Pitt. Of course, spending millions of dollars on this zombie craze doesn’t guarantee it will resonate with the culture as a whole. However, with the stalled economy forcing even college graduates to move back in with their parents, along with the piles of ever mounting debts, there’s a growing sense things are only getting worse. From Tea Partiers to Occupiers, society is splitting into ever more polarized camps. And each one is convinced the other side is ruining everything, while likewise believing there is no way to stop the collapse. And whenever there’s a fissure in society, the flesh guzzling undead are never too far behind, waiting to chew on the pieces.
Drake Vaughn is the author of “The Zombie Generation” (Dead Orb Press, 2012). He lives in Santa Monica, CA with his wife and a spunky black cat who has returned from the dead on a number of occasions.
May 9, 2012
Headlines and Fiction
guest post by author Ey Wade
"So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?"—Nora Ephron
The news on any given day really resembles fiction or is it the other way around? Does the world copy what is written in a novel or does the novel imitate life?
The Perfect Solution is a novel written about a child mistakenly given to a stranger by his preschool teacher. Many people believe such a thing couldn’t happen and yet, the headline SEARCH FOR GIRL TAKEN BY IMPOSTER from a U.K. paper shouts a different belief. An 18 month old child was given to a stranger by the police who were in charge of her protection. Both the book and the true life incident reek of poor supervision by the authorities in charge. The Perfect Solution also addresses many other incidents occurring in some child care centers as does articles like these Ohio Daycare Workers Giving Sleepaid to Children and Community Activist selling moonshine in Childcare.
After working in the childcare system for over 35 years, and knowing some of the negligent things I have seen, I wrote a novel The Perfect Solution to depict the inner workings of child care and the needed diligent observance of children from their childcare providers. It received great reviews from CPS, center owners, and childcare providers which can be viewed here and is still receiving great reviews.
For mother’s day I am offering three copies of the book for free on 'Mom Loves 2 Read" Mother's Day Give Away Event. Please check it out. http://lovez2read.blogspot.com/2012/0...
Web: Wade-In Publishing http://wade-inpublishing.blogspot.com
Youtube vid- http://youtu.be/x3HjX1LP3ks
Amazon Us http://amzn.to/Perfectchoice
"So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?"—Nora Ephron
The news on any given day really resembles fiction or is it the other way around? Does the world copy what is written in a novel or does the novel imitate life?
The Perfect Solution is a novel written about a child mistakenly given to a stranger by his preschool teacher. Many people believe such a thing couldn’t happen and yet, the headline SEARCH FOR GIRL TAKEN BY IMPOSTER from a U.K. paper shouts a different belief. An 18 month old child was given to a stranger by the police who were in charge of her protection. Both the book and the true life incident reek of poor supervision by the authorities in charge. The Perfect Solution also addresses many other incidents occurring in some child care centers as does articles like these Ohio Daycare Workers Giving Sleepaid to Children and Community Activist selling moonshine in Childcare.
After working in the childcare system for over 35 years, and knowing some of the negligent things I have seen, I wrote a novel The Perfect Solution to depict the inner workings of child care and the needed diligent observance of children from their childcare providers. It received great reviews from CPS, center owners, and childcare providers which can be viewed here and is still receiving great reviews.
For mother’s day I am offering three copies of the book for free on 'Mom Loves 2 Read" Mother's Day Give Away Event. Please check it out. http://lovez2read.blogspot.com/2012/0...
Web: Wade-In Publishing http://wade-inpublishing.blogspot.com
Youtube vid- http://youtu.be/x3HjX1LP3ks
Amazon Us http://amzn.to/Perfectchoice
You've Been Schooled
I'm Matt Posner, author of the School of the Ages series and more. I'll be using this blog slot to post thoughts, links, advertisements, interviews, and generally whatever I think is interesting and i
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