Little Voice of the City

Last night, stepping out from our friends' apartment into a cool, calm spring evening, my almost-four-year-old daughter had a concerned look on her face.

"I can hear the birds singing," she said.

"I know," I replied. "It's nice, huh?"

"But I can't hear anyone talking." Here she grew even more pensive, and stopped walking. "It needs to be NOISY."

Good lord, we've raised a city kid.

The Importance of Commas

I've recently been engaged on multiple fronts in a far-too-common discourse for me: comma usage.​ For one, there's the continual struggle with my students over the ever-more-ubiquitous comma splice (e.g., "I went to the store, the bread smelled good"), which I fear is on its way to such common usage that it's no longer even considered bad grammar.

But before I seem like too much of a snob let me just say that, to my mind at least, the comma's primary function is still what it was since its inception: a time marker. Recently while critiquing my friend Cheryl Wright-Watkins's work, I found myself frequently commenting that she should remove a comma here, or add a comma there. After awhile, I felt the need to explain:

My reasoning is that the comma cues the reader to make a slight pause, sometimes because something is important, sometimes to separate words or thoughts that might get jumbled, sometimes because grammar/mechanics dictate it. I think you’re perhaps overusing the comma because you think certain points need to be held for a second, or perhaps made explicit to the reader. But you have to remember that the flipside of this is that every comma disrupts the flow of the writing, so you have to decide (in my opinion, at least) with each comma whether it’s more important to belabor a point or to keep the reader moving. This is of course a somewhat instinctive thing, and I’ll say here that I’m simply marking while reading when I feel like 1) you’re telling me to pause when I don’t want to, or 2) your pause isn’t long enough, thus the ultimate endgame: the period. (Sorry if I got a little dramatic there.)

My friend Richard Slade, a talented tenor with a wonderfully caustic sense of humor, wrote the following haiku to his Facebook page yesterday:

Purring cat on lap/twenty minutes til gym time/sorry cat must go

To which I couldn't help replying, with a bit of Eats, Shoots & Leaves humor:

Did you mean, "Sorry cat, must go" or "Sorry, cat must go"?

​And then today, Cheryl emailed me the link to a list essay (perhaps my favorite form of nonfiction) published today on McSweeney's, "The Comma from Which My Heart Hangs," an ostensible grammar lesson on comma usage that doubles as a breakup song. To wit:

4. Commas, in coordination with a conjunction, are also essential when making comparisons and contradictions. For instance:

“I’d call you cold hearted, but you’re clearly heartless,” Benjamin said.

or

“You might call yourself an academic, but you’re the only one who cares what you think,” she said.

​This is all to say - well, not much. But just try reading that last sentence without the comma. Or - god forbid - without the dash. Did I mention how important dashes are?

Happy Easter!

I imagine these two will have a lot to talk about after this busy weekend.​

And the next two - well, there seems to be a communication breakdown.​

The Hunger Mountain Archives: The James Baldwin Project

Few writers can do what James Baldwin does to me - that is, to simultaneously make me feel like both a better and a worse person. To wit, from "This Nettle, Danger...":

"We all attempt to live on the surface, where we assume we will be less lonely, whereas experience is of the depths and is dictated by what we really fear and hate and love as distinguished from what we think we ought​ ​to fear and hate and love."

​Just yesterday Baldwin, a childless homosexual, gave me some firm, sage wisdom on parenting in his essay "Nothing Personal":

​"...nothing is more vivid in American life than the fact that we have no respect for our children, nor have our children any respect for us. By being what we have become, by placing things above people, we broke their hearts early, and drove them away.

...​

"Children can survive without money or security or safety or things: but they are lost if they cannot find a loving example, for only this example can give them a touchstone for their lives. Thus far and no further​: this is what the father must say to the child. If the child is not told where the limits are, he will spend the rest of his life trying to discover them. For the child who is not told where the limits are knows, though he may not know he knows it, that no one cares enough about him to prepare him for the journey."​

​I read this yesterday, right before I read a post on Facebook by an old childhood friend who was remembering a mentor who'd died in 2011. I learned from this post that this friend of mine been in and out of the court system from junior high through high school. My remembrance of him was of a fun-loving kid with whom I rode bikes around North Lawrence, comparing the cockroaches in our respective homes and the fish we caught at the sand pit and Lone Star Lake. Like many of my friends, I shared with him a gaping hole where a father should be and a mother attempting to fill that hole by housing with a guy ill-equipped to fill it.

Anyway, sometime between junior high and high school, after my friend had been to court roughly twenty times, he was to be sent to a juvenile detention center. That was when his friend's dad bought him a suit, asked the judge at my friend's hearing if he could assume custody, and taught my friend how to clean carpets, the man's business. Now, after the man's death, my friend owns that business.​

I'm pretty sure I could read a James Baldwin essay every day for the rest of my life, and find at least five applications for it in that given day.​

With that in mind, I've been in a project I started last September of reading all of Baldwin's published essays in chronological order, just a few each month so I could savor them, let them sit with me, let Baldwin seep into my own sensibility. It's been intensely rewarding; I'm now in 1964.

Another reason for my Baldwin project was more mercenary, or at least job-related. Last December, I edited for Hunger Mountain a celebration of of Baldwin's life and work on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death with Jennifer Bowen Hicks, a born-and-bred Baldwinite both in terms of her commitment to her craft and her intense empathy and commitment to social service (besides writing, she runs a writing program for prisoners in the state of Minnesota).

If editing the project taught me anything, it was the deep and abiding love of Baldwin many writers share with me.​ With that I'd like to present each of the pieces in Hunger Mountain's James Baldwin Project:

​"James Baldwin: A Conversational Review," by Marita Golden, Baron Wormser, and Liz Blood, with an introduction by me

​"Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone: A Letter to James Baldwin on the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of His Passing," by Kim Dana Kupperman

​"Another Country: James Baldwin at 'Home' and Abroad," by Sion Dayson

​"James Baldwin, Flannery O'Connor, and the Ethics of Anguish," by Carole K. Harris

​"Baldwin in Omaha," by Robert Vivian

Enjoy, friends.​

Mr. T vs. Hockey Puck! Prediction: PAIN.

My favorite moment in all of the Rocky movies is when, before his second fight with Rocky, when the announcer asks Clubber Lang (Mr T) for a prediction, he says simply, "PAIN." Well, an older Mr T just fared about the same with a hockey puck - one win, one loss. He of course makes the same prediction at the 1:40 mark.

I PITY THE FOOL! Original Airdate: Tuesday March 26, 2013 EXTRA TAGS: Sidney Crosby Alexander Ovechkin Patrick Kane Jonathan Toews Anaheim Ducks Chicago Blackhawks Boston Bruins Carolina Hurricanes Calgary Flames Columbus Blue Jackets Buffalo Sabres New Jersey Devils Colorado Avalanche Dallas Stars Florida Panthers New York Islanders Edmonton Oilers Detroit Red Wings Montreal Canadiens New York Rangers Los Angeles Kings Minnesota Wild Ottawa Senators Philadelphia Flyers Phoenix Coyotes Nashville Predators Tampa Bay Lightning Pittsburgh Penguins San Jose Sharks St.

I Was Young When I Left Home in Defunct Magazine, with my own commentary

I hope this doesn't come off the wrong way, but "I Was Young When I Left Home" is my favorite piece I've ever written. Here are some things I like about it:

• It's short. I can read it in less than 5 minutes easily, and I'm a slow reader.​ You can probably read it twice in 5 minutes, and I invite you to try.
• ​Yes, I read it to myself, quite a lot actually. I rarely read my published work in its entirety after it's published (not having to read a piece I've spent hours - even days - editing and revising is one of the rewards of being published), but this one breaks my damn heart every time I read it. In fact, I once read it while listening to Whiskeytown's "Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart," and I felt a lot like the guy who's dancing along with Ryan Adams in this live footage.
  
• Its brief, concise (9 paragraphs, all five lines or less) structure allows me to do a great shtick while reading it, in which I tell everyone in the audience I'd like to read my entire life's memoirs in nine chapters. I begin after the stifled groans have died down, and after the first chapter ends in roughly 20 seconds I listen for the first laughs. The crowd is mine from there.​​
• It was published in Robin Hemley's magisterial Defunct Magazine​, edited by the wonderful Amy Butcher, and illustrated hauntingly by ​Margaret Kimball.
  
• I wrote it as part an in-group contest while editing for Douglas Glover's Numero Cinq Magazine​, a time of many formal breakthroughs for me as a writer. Like many other contests I've entered in my life, I finished second.​
• A lot of people seemed to like it, which is gratifying. Perhaps my favorite compliment it received was when friend and fellow writer Meg Harris called it "brilliant, infinity-like."
  
• It gave me a chance to use my favorite photo of me with my oldest daughter, who figures prominently into the final chapter.​

Original Defunct Headshot

The 2-year anniversary, er, biversary of 3eanuts!

I discovered 3eanuts, perhaps the greatest use anyone's yet found for Tumblr, when it was roughly three months old, and have been following it since. ​The concept is simple: as put by its founder Daniel Leonard:

Charles Schulz's Peanuts comics often conceal the existential despair of their world with a closing joke at the characters' expense. With the last panel omitted, despair pervades all.

​I found today's "biversary" (is that really a word?) especially serendipitous since I reference the site on my essay "How to Tell a Good Joke," which will be published on DIAGRAM in April. So get yourself addicted to Schulz-Minus-One in the meantime, if you're not already.

Tatiana Ryckman, on Five Things: The Husbands of Elizabeth Taylor

I have a new thing to listen to whenever it comes out (seems like every other month or so) - Five Things, out of Austin, TX! The banter is wonderful, and this month's edition, on Liz Taylor's husbands, features as the third guest my friend Tatiana Ryckman, as her normal, abnormal self. Notice all the uncontrollable laughs while she reads.

David Cameron's Grand New Yorker Experiment

I have to admit I'm somewhat heartened by David Cameron's recent piece in The Review Review in which he conducts an experiment, taking a story published in The New Yorker, changing the name, and ​blanket-submitting it to "a slew of literary journals." Not one of the journals to which he submitted accepted the story, including The New Yorker itself.

​I'm heartened not necessarily (OK, maybe a little bit) by what this ostensibly says about The New Yorker, but rather what it says about the reliability of first reads in determining literary worth and publishability. It hurts to be rejected in any sphere, much more in those spheres we consider ours, and it's easy to take those rejections personally. I've had a pretty good year of publications, which means I've only gotten an average of six rejections for every acceptance. And every rejection hurts, perhaps even more so when it seems like the reader didn't even read my piece past the first page.

But, having been an editor at Hunger Mountain Journal of the Arts for a couple years now, I know that many editorial decisions are made not necessarily or entirely on the merits of the worth, but on how the piece fits within the edition and/or aesthetic I'm currently working on, and I'm also aware of (and thankful for!) the fact that any piece I'm looking at has been vetted by one of our small army of slush-pile readers, each of whom has his or her own viewpoints and predilections on what makes a piece of writing publishable.

This is all to say that, yes, Cameron's piece is funny, because yes, it's true.​

Eric Hague's "Your Personal March Madness Preview" in NYer

In case you need a reality check on your March Madness dreams, Eric Hague has a wonderful piece up on The New Yorker. He consulted me on a couple of particulars, so you know who to blame if you don't think Kansas is the favorite.

Resident Dad: My Mom vs. Clemenza over Red Sauce!

New Resident Dad post up on A Child Grows in Brooklyn! This one chronicles the evolution of my homemade spaghetti sauce, from my apprenticeship with my mom to my obsession with The Godfather to growing my own tomatoes. Enjoy!

Adventures with Food: Homemade Pasta Sauce

Two conversations...

...I had today with my 3-year-old daughter, who is home with pink eye:

Conversation #1 - Of toys and crabs

​HER: "...And toys that hurt you are not toys."
ME: "No, they're not."
HER: "And crabs that pinch you are not toys."
ME: "No, those are real crabs."

Conversation #2 - As I was trying to slip out the door to get some work done while her mother watched her

ME: "I'll be back by dinnertime."
HER: <running into the room> "I didn't hear you."
ME: "What?"
HER: "I didn't hear you say you'll be back by dinner."
ME: "How'd you know I said it then?"
HER: <singing, while running out of the room> "Your name is dinnertiiiiiiime..."

Of keystrokes and carousels

Funny how by now I've written so much that the keystrokes of pretty much every word come naturally - then a word comes along that I don't type much AND most of its letters are on opposing sides of the keyboard, so I spell it wrong each and every time I use it. That word for me right now is "carousel."