Sellers: A Warning / Triggered

A Warning
Author: Anonymous
Publisher: Twelve Books
272p

Triggered
Author: Donald Trump Jr.
Publisher: Center Street
304p

1. Two Books

These two books sit at #1 and #2 as we start the last month of 2019 and that feels exactly right.

We have an innate desire to know what goes on behind closed doors. Especially the closed doors of the "important" and "famous". Look at the popularity of celebrity Instagrams. Of Jennifer Garner's pretend Facebook cooking show.

We want to not only see what these people are doing, we want to know the details of how.

This goes double when it comes to how our country is being run.

Even if you are "not political" you probably find the possibility of knowing more about the behind-the-scenes interesting. I don't know how else to explain the success of entertainment like Jack Ryan or 24. I don't know how else to explain the bumper stickers.

I don't know how else to explain these two books.

America is supposedly divided. Very divided. I don't buy it. I think that media is divided. Manipulative. Is actually currently creating multiple realities. We can debate the reality of "truth" but there are things that are real and things that are unreal.

One of these books is about a more real real than the other.

Sidenote: How the fuck are you not political because all things are politics and your very existence depends on the politics of where and who you are.


2. Public v. Private

That there is even a discussion about whether the person who sits in America's White House at the moment is actually fit for the job is perhaps a shocking thing. That this person won an election at all is perhaps shocking.

If you haven't been paying attention to the growing divide in media representation in America over the last 30 years, you would naturally be shocked. Naturally.

That one of these books sits at #2 mainly because political money was used to bulk purchase it feels even more 2019.

That in private Republicans actually seem to have morals that they refuse to express in public...is actually the more shocking thing to me. See, I assume that all of this is a con to gain power money power clout legacy money etc. But I also assume that to be that bald in your ambitions, you would have to be a pretty terrible person.

But a person still.

There are divides. And then there are fences walls purpose built. These two books represent the latter.


Sellers is my attempt to examine what books are topping the best-seller list and why. To talk about and understand the trends in popular writing.

The Everything

Months ago a computer was on its last legs. And its hard drive held Everything. And I moved that Everything on to the old external drive that I've used since 2007. A new drive was bought. The plan was made to transfer the Everything from the old drive to the new drive. To have it doubled.

Double the Everything.

Friday a confirmation came. That drive. With the Everything. It no longer held anything. Something about partitions.

Partition.

From the Latin.

Noun or verb.

To divide, subdivide, separate, split.

To screen, hide, a barrier, to wall off.

In computing a partition is essentially creating a room within the drive where something can exist.

The Everything was all of the writing that I has done since I was 18, since 1999, since what feels like forever. 20 years is a long time.

My 20th high school reunion was scheduled for this September. I normally do not care about these kinds of things, reunions. I only lived in central Pennsylvania for the 4 years of high school. I didn't have lifelong ties to the place, the people. I barely remember most of those 4 years. I do not really talk to anyone from that time in any real way.

This isn't because I don't like the people. Or the place.

It just isn't the room where my memories live.

I decided that I would go to the reunion.

I figured that if I were to ever care about what happened to the people there, now would be that time. Before we all got old. Before we started to die and still somewhat looked like ourselves.

While I had a job I was proud to talk about. Had recent published books to talk about.

It was cancelled. Because no one wanted to come. It says something about modern life. The high school reunion was/is/? an important part of American culture. Or at least it seemed that way. The events seem to be dying off. Blame social media. People can connect, keep contact with, the people they want to. Why get together when your current job is listen on your profile?

It makes sense.

The death of the drive. And the sudden vanishing of the Everything is a mixed emotion. Who was the 18 year old that really only still existed in some dust files on a drive that I barely used?

We all partition ourselves daily. The way we interact, the way we dress, the things we engage with. And over time. We become a series of hallways connecting rooms where parts of ourselves are kept.

Today I opened my Facebook. Thought about deleting it for good for the 100th time since I first signed up for it over a decade ago. I logged in to my Livejournal. I reread those things. I began to scour email and Submittable to find files I could salvage.

There are shadows of things everywhere. I still have the handwritten roughs of everything that I actually hand wrote. On various websites, this one included, are versions of myself. Versions of Everything. I spoke to my mother about a work trip. About my 90-year-old grandfather. About how the rooms we build are never really that stable.

In the most recent episode of Prodigal Son -- another TV murder/cop show, but with Lou Diamond Phillips -- the main character, son of a serial killer haunted by his potential knowledge/involvement in the crimes, tears a wall open to answer a long forgotten phone.

The voice on the other end says it's been a long time. Our protagonist doesn't remember the voice, phone, room even.

As I downloaded the fragments of things and did laundry, I also read Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier -- another kind of Everything being lost but felt.

I have a numbness about the loss of Everything. I do not know how to feel that 20 years of final edits, drafts, manuscripts, school papers, my thesis, letters, photos, music, literal history -- is now a shadow in my brain.

Early in Rebecca, du Maurier's unnamed protagonist, the second Mrs. M. de Winter, sits at a writing desk in her new home and explores the various surfaces and drawers. She finds things in the unmistakable "scrawling pointed hand" of her predecessor. 

We process things oddly. That Everything, was it even mine? I opened a few of the downloaded files from Submittable. Thankfully, that site saves your files you've uploaded. Did I even write these?

Things always end with a fire in these types of novels. The history, the Everything, must burn off like the alcohol in cooking, leaving only whatever flavor you were searching for.

What does it look like to imagine yourself back into 20 years. To think about the fragments that can be found there and reconstruct the sound of the rain against those windows. Some Pompeii made out of the sludge of a brain at 38.9 years.

I imagine the Everything, now an ash of code, 1s and 0s in a gray pile. A locked in body somewhere beneath the surface just waiting to be found. Language is dumb in the face of technology.

A room somewhere attempts to assemble itself. The carpet is threading itself from fibers made out of thin air and the shed scales of a butterfly. The walls will attempt themselves out of paper or reeds or the breath of trees. In the house that forms, will live the Everything. And it will stay there, as the building, the room, the carpet itself, forgot to even imagine the idea of a door that could open into it all.

On the Eve of No Longer Being a Teacher

Lately I've been thinking a lot about self.

This was my last year teaching. For the better part of 4 1/2 years this defined me in multiple ways. I was a teacher, but also an adjunct. I was paid little better than minimum wage. Making less than $2000 a month. I had other jobs. In the years I taught I also packaged items for online sale, made coffee, worked at a pizza place, wrote food reviews, worked at Publisher's Weekly on book reviews, and freelance edited. I still made less than $40k a year.

As a result my identity was one of not having. More importantly, of over-working only to not have.

I grew up ok. Not poor. My father was in the US Air Force. The buffer of not paying rent hides a lot of the discomfort of low wages for our military. Ultimately, I had a comfortably lower-middle class childhood. I never went hungry. We went on vacation. I had a Nintendo. My childhood identity was one of not thinking about identity and class.

I am now 37.

My adult life has sat firmly in the lower class. I only recently crossed the $30k marker. And I often think about how my identity, while not tied to income, is definitely tied to my relationship to $$$. Mostly, this comes out as a comfort in not ever having it. In spending it when I do.

This feels like a common response in the lower rungs of America in 2018. You use what you have when you have it. Because tomorrow you will have nothing.

For the time I was a teacher I spent most of my hours working at one of the various jobs I listed above. My identity shifting slightly with each. But in the background I was still a teacher. A writer. A person doing "good" work.

One year ago the school I worked at until this passed week announced its closure. It wasn't really a surprise, but it was a blow to both the city I live in and to myself personally.

I have never felt like the kind of person who would move for a job. And the idea of finding a teaching gig out of New Mexico actively made me anxious.

Without the background umbrella of "teacher", who was I. Was I ready to go back to being coffee shop employee, or waiter, or anything else.

It was a blow to my self.

The school officially closes June 1 but my job there is over May 16th when grades are due. At that moment I will no longer be a teacher.

Part of this shift has been trying to find a new job.

I spent 6 months last year applying to academic jobs across New Mexico and the country. Most were low-paying or only part time. Many of the out of state jobs were offering less than I was already making. The concept of moving across the country for $2000 a month is ridiculous. But I know people who took those offers. This breaks my heart. I decided I couldn't do this. That teaching, despite it being what I did, couldn't be this huge of a thing in my life that I would take a wage that couldn't even support me.

Shedding identities is not easy.

I spent most of 2017 in a literal haze. Auto pilot became pretty normal. As this final school year started I looked up for the first time in a long time and realized I had lost myself in the grind to feed myself.

I always told myself I was a writer first. Everything else was meant to be paychecks.

Somewhere along the way I convinced myself that it was ok to erode the identity of writer to the point where it became hard to say that in response to "what do you do".

How does one reclaim land washed away?

I suppose the answer has something to do with throwing the garbage in the water until you can build on top of it.

The more honest one, the healthier one, is that you don't reclaim it. You move. You build somewhere else. You don't repeat the mistakes you made. You don't allow the river in.

A new self will find purchase on the new rock.

Poem : gonna go

gonna go

          — gonna go for this

— gonna hold the stick

                    — carrot 'til it rots
          hold the end of the branch — the end of the wick
a candle over each eye

snuff the lot —

the instrument of good — pincers
of domain and collapse

                    — thank you for the booming violence —

          — the bull the horn the melting

          — the hangin' swing

     — the thermometer of the clouds
a swirl of bait n switch

Poem : The space - of a letter

I wrote this for a friend who is hurting. It isn't going to help anyone but myself.


The space – of a letter

               The space – of a letter – the –
void within the Q –

               A soft rain – holds itself
rocks itself – this is the thunder – popping the floorboards – rain
trying not to feel – desperate in its lack of color –

Think about letters without voids – ones
          zeroes – the whitespace –
          around an I –

          Someone laughed – it was fireworks –
in your peripheral vision – it was a sudden peel of a Band-Aid –

That you couldn't stand – let alone think of white space –
               well –

               There is an answer to the question –
that answer must unfill – it must –

Dust Jackets : Snowball's Chance

Snowball's Chance (2012 edition)

Designed By: ???

Let's get the weird thing out of the way first. I don't know who designed this cover. Melville House has an in-house design team. As far as I know that team is Kelly Blair and Carol Hayes, but I can't find trace of this cover on either of their personal sites.

Based on the look of this cover I would guess it has more in common with Hayes' other work. But both have a minimalism aesthetic going so...

If anyone has thoughts on this, let me know.

The Neversink Library is Melville House's attempt to "champion books from around the world that have been overlooked, under appreciated, looked askance at, or foolishly ignored" and they all have this silhouette design as the starting point.

I picked this book up because it is a sequel/satire of George Orwell's Animal Farm. Here, John Reed imagines Snowball, the ousted pig from Orwell's book, returning to the farm and introducing US-style capitalism/democracy to the animals. It is really worth a read, if for no other reason than the incredible way Reed has both captured and made light of Orwell's vision. That and the take this book has on post-9/11 America.

But the cover, right?

So I bought the book because of what is inside the cover, but I was immediately taken with the cover. It captures the absurdity of the pigs in both Orwell and Reed's books. The nobility in the stance. The "visionary" quality. This is a pig as Lincoln. As Shepard Fairey's Obama poster. It's PR. And it makes so much sense.

Now, Reed wrote his book in 2002 as a response to the September 11 2001 World Trade Center attacks. So the aping of modern propaganda techniques is interesting. The lead-up to the decade+ response to the attack has been a massive lesson in PR. One that culminated in the Brexit vote and 2016 US election. It is nihilism and cynicism dressed up in logos and advertising dollars.

Fairey's Obama poster is an obvious callback to cold war propaganda. But his entire aesthetic is dependant on that referencing. What is interesting is the clear parallels to Soviet-era posters.

Lenin Lived, Lenin Is Alive, Lenin Will Live!

The 'visionary' stance is an obvious trope of political discourse. It goes back centuries. Think of any statue of someone on a horse. Think Napoleon. That many of the examples that are buried in our cultural memory are also tied to oligarchs and emperors is perhaps something to mull over.

That desire to influence memory is hugely tied to both the plot of Animal Farm and to that of regimes that use propaganda.

And we do it in small ways too.

What else does that cover remind us of?

It immediately recalls the decorative form of cameo carvings. That form, where successive layers of alternating colored stone or glass are carefully carved away to created an effect that recalls block printing or murals, is most famous for the silhouetted faces on Victorian brooches that show up in every period film ever made.

Portland Vase (c.1-25 AD)

That a cameo comes to mind isn't really that strange. The Romans heavily used the form in jewelry and containers. The famous Portland Vase is a beautifully preserved example of a glass cameo.

The form also resonates to any kid who went to a fair and had one of those black paper cutouts made of themselves. An entirely different form of PR. That of idealized childhoods.

It also echos ancient forms of shadow puppetry and the links to allegory and fable-telling that come with that. A form of cultural smoothing to spread information with ease.

And through that we come to the work of Kara Walker, which addresses historic and modern evils through the simplicity of paper cutouts. A form of reverse PR where the work emphasizes the darker things left out of these sorts of images normally.

What I'm saying is that is that this cover evokes a history of public relations. From antiquity to this very moment. And it drags a lot of baggage in its little pig head.




Dust Jacket is a sometime article about the design and art of book covers. The idea is to shine a spotlight on the work of the designer separate from the author. Literally judging a book by its cover.

Poem-A-Day #365 : One Year

One Year

Let the year — crack like an egg
the yew of it drying out your mouth

                    Spit
                    if you can

Amber
if you can

                    — There
is a bird inside you it is
flapping the cage apart