'The Palm-Wine Drinkard' by Amos Tutuola

In The Palm-Wine Drinkard (first published by Faber and Faber in 1952), Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola explores the sobering effects invading colonial powers have on indigenous populations, imposing 'civilization' through violence. Based on traditional Yoruban folktales, the narrative ironically depicts these sobering effects through the hallucinatory imagery of a waking nightmare.

These effects are immediate, as the death of the narrator’s tapster at the beginning of the novel is the very moment when he is unable to find sustenance from the traditions of his native culture, and must journey into an unknown world in search of an identity culled from aspects of both primitive and civilized life.

Tutuola criticizes this shift, the inevitable migration from his own cultural traditions toward modernity, while still retaining an optimism which will allow him to incorporate the remaining fragments of his culture into that new, unknown world.

The narrator’s journey is in essence a nightmare caused by his tapster’s death, sobering him to the reality of his cultural situation. He is, due to circumstances he can’t control, forced to embark on this journey. But using his juju to change into so many animals and objects reflects the narrator’s own (however reluctant) adaptability to these changing conditions.

By using an old cultural mysticism—his juju—he is able to manifest a new physical and spiritual being. In this sense, Tutuola hints at the ephemeral nature of existence and the inevitability of change—the need to adapt to altering circumstances.

Another Nigerian writer, Wole Soyinka, however, doesn’t subscribe to a “clash of cultures” argument. In the introduction to his play, Death and the King’s Horseman, he deems this “a prejudicial label,” that it “presupposes a potential equality in every given situation of the alien culture and the indigenous, on the actual soil of the latter.”

From the alien—here, British—point of view, though, the cultures are not clashing, as they are the ones imposing their own beliefs and social structure on native populations without adopting even a hint of the natives’ culture. But as this merging is forced upon the indigenous population it is, from their point of view, a clash, as it is they who must suffer from it.

There are a few parallels between these two texts. In The Palm-Wine Drinkard, the narrator and his wife sell their death and rent out their fear, and in Death and the King’s Horseman, Elesin states that “[e]ven those we call immortal should fear to die” (13). This may be why Elesin fails in his suicide attempt, despite his culture’s traditional demands that he carry it out.

Whatever Elesin’s true intentions, he is still tempted both by earthly pleasures and by fulfilling his cultural obligations (though choosing the former undermines the latter), which implies the land of the living promotes the acceptance of change while the realm of the dead obliges one’s culture, carries forth the memory of ancestor and tradition.

That The Palm-Wine Drinkard's narrator and his wife sell their death but merely rent their fear signifies, according to Richard K. Prieb, that “violence fails to lead to a permanent state—it is merely temporary and curative” (Prieb, 50). This reflects the irony of existence relying on consciousness to perceive it, that if consciousness exists in all things then all living beings are, in essence, immortal (as energy can neither be created nor destroyed).

Tutuola depicts the fear all living beings feel despite the fact that none of them really die, that ultimately the source of all fear is the ego’s ultimate fear of death, recalling again the ephemeral nature of existence and the inevitability of change—the need to adapt to altering circumstances.

Many allegorical elements emerge from The Palm-Wine Drinkard, such as the “Red-Town” with its “Red-People,” calling to mind the imperial British in their red coats, or even the initial Native American hospitality toward European explorers arriving on West Indian and North American shores. Native American war tactics also emerge in the previous scene of “Unreturnable-Heaven’s Town,” when the narrator and his wife are scalped. Here the narrator and his wife are the invading power, but roles quickly reverse when they become the victims of that brazen venture into another’s territory.

Tutuola draws strange situational parallels regarding the difference between temptation and choice, as seen with “The Complete Gentleman,” who represents the emerging European culture, the enticing nature of modernity luring the narrator’s wife into the forest. And though “The Complete Gentleman” warns her not to follow him, and though she’s aware of the risk, she’s irresistibly drawn to him. This loss of control again occurs while the narrator and his wife journey to “Unreturnable-Heaven’s Town” when, despite their efforts to resist, they are lured as if on a conveyor belt toward the town’s gate.

Here Tutuola’s narrator fulfills a wish to be in the colonizer’s position, as he becomes the invader, concluding his visit (after being victimized for being the invader) by murdering all the town’s natives. Tutuola hints at the fragile nature of all revolutions which come to power by ousting an oppressive regime only to adopt that very role in order to preserve its own power.

Tutuola personifies many abstract concepts, such as “Dance, Sing and Drum,” but the personification of laughter is most intriguing. When Laugh laughs, everyone laughs with it, including the narrator and his wife, almost despite themselves, as if against their will (again paralleling the question of temptation and choice).

The laughter is infectious, and what emerges is the concept of a colonial Stockholm syndrome, wherein the captives (indigenous peoples) begin to identify with their captors (colonial forces)—adopting their customs and attitudes after a process of repressive followed by ideological acculturation.

There also emerge conflicting concepts such as mono- versus polytheism. Though the narrator refers to himself as “Father of all gods…” he frequently remarks on how good God is. It’s also strange how, as “Father of gods…,” he continually forgets then remembers his own powers, alluding to the immediate loss of identity in the chaos of cultural shift while simultaneously realizing he still retains fragments of his older traditions.

Such cognitive dissonance serves to reinforce a seemingly impossible sanity of inverted solipsism. As Steven M. Tobias states:

In The Palm-Wine Drinkard a monstrously distorted, nonsense view of the world becomes the norm. As a result, when an artifact of otherwise privileged English culture appears in the book, it in turn becomes something of an oddity. In this way Tutuola turns the colonial power structure on its ear in an attempt to reclaim the center for himself and his culture. (70-71)

Tutuola uses these textual conflicts, the monotheism of the colonial power versus his own culture’s polytheism and the supposed sanity and enlightenment of British civilization and technology, to somehow reconcile the tension felt by those crushed under the weight of colonialism.

Tutuola’s work seeks to find a bridge between change and conservation, between life and death. Where he aims to critique colonial conquest he also digs deep for a well of optimism, a sustenance he can use to accept the inevitabilities of life—not only welcoming them but venturing out into the unknown in search of them, producing a society capable of enduring itself and so never dying a collective death.

If, in fact, Tutuola is implying his culture and traditions will never die, despite their inevitable erasure during this cultural exchange, perhaps the fear of losing them is unfounded once the culture’s practitioners learn to adapt.

But what’s lost in this cultural exchange between the tradition and modernity? What does a culture relinquish for the sake of civilization? To paraphrase a Freudian ideal, primitive/primal instinct/desire is repressed when confined by civilization. Writers like Amos Tutuola see what lies outside that prison, and are willing to reach their arms out through the bars of the cage to touch it.


Works Cited

Prieb, Richard K. “Literature, Community and Violence: Reading African Literature in the West, Post-9/11.” Research in African Literatures. 36.2 (2005): 46-58.

Soyinka, Wole. Death and the King’s Horseman. London: Methuen, 1975.

Tobias, Steven M. “Amos Tutuola and the Colonial Carnival.” Research in African Literatures. 30.2 (1999): 67-74.

Tutuola, Amos. The Palm-Wine Drinkard. New York: Grove Press, 1993.

Essay on Star Trek @ The Nervous Breakdown

I have an essay called "Healing Frequencies Open" up at The Nervous Breakdown. It's about Star Trek and Columbus Day, and maybe some other things. Here are tags: capitalism, Christopher Columbus, civilization, Colonialism, Columbus Day, Disney Land, Gutenberg, Heisenberg, Heisenberg Compensator, imperialism, nuclear weapons, Printing Press, racism, sexism, Star Trek, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Enterprise, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: Voyager, Starfleet, The Industrial Revolution, Time Warner, totalitarianism, War, X-Box Kinect...

Review of 'BOOK' by Ken Sparling

Ken Sparling’s fifth novel, BOOK, is a postmodern work of metafiction (if one feels metafiction is indeed postmodern) in which Ken Sparling is a character in the book, writing the book. This intentional inclusion of 'the self' calls into question the notion of what it means to narrate—or to write, for that matter. The first-person point of view often seems to (seems to) shift from Ken Sparling to other characters, endowing the text with a provocative poly-vocality that allows Sparling licence to explore all his other 'selves'.

BOOK reads as though it is being written in the moment, and so does not conform to traditional narrative in any sense. Sparling writes about life, about existence, and BOOK explores all its complexities and nuances by showing psychological processes at work rather than their causes and/or effects on the novel’s several characters or its plot. Rather than a single, sequential plot driven by linear narrative, BOOK consists of numerous disjointed subplots which claim no hierarchy over one another. In a calculated chaos, both its macrocosmic structure and microcosmic descriptions rely heavily on the non-sequitor to reflect not only the randomness of nature and existence but the thought processes operating within (and as a result of) that randomness:

She worries that the buildings aren’t where they should be. That we aren’t where we should be. That I’m not where I should be. That we are maybe where the buildings should be and the buildings are where we should be. Think of it this way, she says. The buildings are over there. And there. And look. Look over there. Now look here. We’re here. You see? John saw a building made of little stones. He thought of things you could put in a lunch bag. He thought of a side of beef. He thought of things he saw on TV. If you listen hard enough, you’ll hear the spaces in your life. (79)

And:

I was born somewhere and ever since then I’ve been growing up and things have been happening. The breeze has been picking up, like swarms of bees growing angrier at me, until it’s a full-fledged wind blowing, scattering bedding, roof tiles, pig troughs, patio stones and some small animals. A woman has touched her cornstraw hair, saying to the men who stop to talk to her, Think of it as the sun. My parents are no longer living together, which, on the one hand, was a six-year-old’s dream. To be able to make a distinct differentiation between the one parent and the other. The Chinese man is holding his cigarette with his thumb and forefinger, the way you see men in movies hold their cigarettes. He’s looking at me through the smoke from his cigarette. I decide to take a shortcut through the store, instead of going around the outside. The quietness of the vacuum cleaner was not its major selling point. It was not a quiet vacuum cleaner. She touches her cornstraw hair, thick as it is with the sun, ropey marionettes hung from the clouds by wind. The wind picks up like a swarm of bees bending the yellow flowers. The woman bends with it. Don’t worry, she tells the men who visit her. But it isn’t me who worries. She wants to take the pink flower, but I’ll take you instead since Dad will like you better and Grandma and all the penitents will give you water. (89)

BOOK consists of several astonishing passages such as these. Such juxtapositions create a dense atmosphere of thought and experience. The effect is often disorientating, each sentence containing an entire novel of its own. In this sense, Sparling intentionally doesn’t dwell on ideas or incidents for very long—any longer than is necessary. There are, however, moments when he feels an idea is too important to let the narrative wander off, when the very nature of existence and meaning must be thoroughly considered amid all the distractions existence and meaning provide:

A man searches for reason. For terror. He feels it in the most mundane of activities. He seeks to name it. To give it form. He seeks to capture what is lost. A guy takes a walk through his life. He is bewildered. He recognizes the simplest moments. His parents’ divorce. The day the pole beside the dining room table came lose. The day he lost his toy soldiers in a hedge. The guy robs these moments for his own purposes. Uses them like fuel. The guy exists today in the mundane world of day-to-day domestic life, from the skewed perspective of an underling, undermining the simplest emotions, crippled, but at the same time capable. (67)

Bursting with profound moments like this, BOOK’s humor (another effect of the non-sequitor) is at once tender and tragic, illuminating the crippling loneliness felt by all things that exist—including such recurring symbols in the novel as hair and trees. Sparling also explains (and questions) his intentions regarding the use of the non-sequitor technique, as well as the technique's relation to the tenets of traditional narrative:

There are things we have to do in between the things we don’t have to do. The things we don’t have to do are the things that keep us hungry. Don’t ever confuse the things we don’t have to do with the things we do have to do. Don’t ever confuse our terrible hunger with our need for food. Success has to do with the space in between. How the space in between can buffer the non sequitor. Is the non sequitor a kind of failure in a world where sequence is everything? Where story is used insidiously, insistently, to redefine the moment? Is the space a place among non sequitors where you can breathe? A place where you can re-breathe the idea of success as it stands in the non sequitor moment, waiting for us to decide how to make of it something more than what it appears in the moment to be? (78)

Sparling examines not only the role of the author in literature, as the creator of a text, but also the author’s role in his/her own life. BOOK is ultimately a life-affirming work of metafiction. The book itself is the plot—the life of the book, the characters’ lives. The act of writing it, of questioning what does or does not comprise a story even while composing that story, defines the act of being alive—of existing within one's own life as it mirrors art:

The writer, in the act of writing, is reanimating himself in his concession to the absence of animation. The writer experiences an awakening from the sensuous accompaniment of death in the act of writing. This is what makes the writer suffer. But what is this compulsion to write if it draws the writer out of his one project—to die? (212)

The writer suffers because of this inherent contradiction: The author seeks immortality through literature by ultimately euthanizing him/herself to create said work of literature. The author is, despite him/herself, attempting to survive his/her own death—to live beyond life. Finally, Sparling seeks to explain the intoxicating lure of literature, its gravitational pull and how that pull effects/affects the reader:

Sometimes, the right book drifts up and finds itself in your path. You pick it up. You open it to the right page. Your eye falls upon the right word. You follow the flow of the sentences truly, the way driftwood follows the surface of the sea. And then, finally, you close the book at the right moment. You look up. You see. (118)

BOOK is now available from Pedlar Press. Ken Sparling is also the author of Dad Says He Saw You At The Mall (Knopf, 1996), [A Novel by Ken Sparling] (Pedlar Press, 2003), For Those Whom God Has Blessed With Fingers (Pedlar Press, 2007) and Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt (Artistically Declined Press, 2010).

Three Quick Things

1 / A poem from Of Creatures (Gold Wake Press, 2010), “The Feather, an Optical Sorrow,” gets featured @ Verse Daily…

2 / A poem from Of Creatures (Gold Wake Press, 2010), “Sometimes the Vast, the Noisy Clock,” resurfaces @ The Planet Formerly Known as Earth. It was originally published in ditch…

3 / J.A. Tyler reviews Snowing Fireflies (Folded Word Press, 2010) over @ Red Fez…

Review of 'Explanations' by Andrew Borgstrom

Andrew Borgstrom’s chapbook, Explanations, is a collection of 36 first-person stories, each a character study in alienation, anxiety and unfulfilled desire. Each is titled with a description of the relevant character’s personality or profession, followed by what they are going to explain in the piece, most often a certain aspect of their lives.

These titles are often humorous: “An Etymologist Explains Baby Names at the Park,” “A Rock-Climber Explains Marriage,” “A Brother Explains Fingering to His Brother” and “A Stalker Explains Weigh Loss.”

Though this is a collection of poetic prose, Explanations reads and/or feels like a small (post)modernist novel. Borgstrom’s explicit use of poly-vocality reflects a (post)modernist focus on the periphery as opposed to a narrative monopolized by a single character.

Borgstrom’s transitions are impeccable. Each piece leads, as if by heredity, into the next through a series of thematic remnants. The pieces in Explanations are at once, humorous, tender, parodic, and excruciatingly detailed in their minimalist emotional depictions.

In “A Philosopher Explains Dreams,” Borgstrom’s humor bursts through:

There remain two perfect dreams. In the first, you blurt “ate toe broto” in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and instead of just being four acts early and the wrong actor, you wind up opening the Necronomicon and killing all the babies. You are responsible for the death of all the babies and you are a shitty stage actor. But it was only a dream and thank God and life is perfect, no matter how shitty and babyless. In the second dream, you forget everything upon waking. But it was only a dream and life is perfect, no matter how shitty and godless.

Underlying this humor, there is a strong sense of illusion and futility. Here “babyless” and “godless” are equated, and existence is both “a dream” and “shitty.” That the philosopher thanks [g]od for his godless life is reminiscent of this oxymoronic sentiments of Robert Browning’s poem “Bishop Blougram's Apology”:

Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things.
The honest thief, the tender murderer,
The superstitious atheist.

There are many religious undertones in this collection, and even specific references. In “An Inmate Explains Where He’s Been on the Walls of His Cell,” the numbers 40 and 144,000 are invoked:

I have been there. […] I have been wearing the same pants for 40 days. […] I have been high on everything. I have been found worthy. I have been seen naked by 144,000 people. […] I have been a blessing in disguise. I have been many things in disguise. I have been here.

The number 40 is significant in both the Hebrew bible (Old Testament), in which the Jews wandered the desert for 40 years, and the Greek bible (New Testament), in which Jesus spent 40 days and 40 nights in the desert. The number 144,000 is also significant in both these books, as, apparently, only 144,000 people will be chosen to go to heaven. These references seem at odds with one another, as do Hebrew and Christian theologies. The tension created is reflected in the moral conflict of the prisoner's character.

Borgstrom here, as well as in pieces like “A Mormon Missionary Explains the Conversion Process,” “An Adam Explains Where He Met a Steve” and “A Sinner Explains His Penance,” questions both religious ideology and its enforcement through ritual and tradition.

In “A Mormon Missionary Explains the Conversion Process,” the first piece in this collection, Borgstrom immediately begins to criticize the hypocritical components of religion, such as race relations perpetrated by dogmas that claim all are equal in [g]od’s eyes. Here is the piece in its entirety:

No matter what we do, one third of our audience will hate it, one third will love it, and one third won’t care. In the beginning, Satan’s “tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven.” Leaving two thirds in heaven, awaiting fleshy bodies. On third of these would be born with dark skin as a curse for not caring enough, for fence sitting. This is why dark-skinned Mormons could not hold the priesthood until 1978. This and the practice of plural marriage are the toughest concerns for us to resolve, yet one third will still convert. No matter what we do. Sacred underwear.

The concept of "one third" here is also recalls the [h]oly [t]rinity. In “An Etymologist Explains Baby Names at the Park,” Borgstrom also invokes Greek mythology in comparison to Christianity (interestingly, as the Christian bible, the New Testament, is also known to as the Greek bible as it was originally written in Greek):

A mother called her daughter Persephone but refused to acknowledge the connection to mythology[.] […] Like this one year old was the first Persephone. Like she didn’t owe her name to anyone. Like it was just a sound her mother made and father agreed upon. Like there was something wrong with being named after a fictional character. Like we were all proud of the child on the swing named Jesus.

Here Borgstrom critiques a generationally self-imposed amnesia, how we tend to erase history and take credit for the ideas of our ancestors—as if they had preemptively plagiarized us. Borgstrom implies this flaw is inherent, or at least hereditary, passed down through the ages—our willingness to forget acting in opposition to any potential dialectical progress in tandem with religious ideology to suppress creative expression. As Louis Althusser says: "Ideology has no history."

There are also poignant descriptions of life, of how we hope to live it in parallel to its inevitabilities, as in these lines from “A Retiree Explains Perpetual Travel”:

We never even see the turns, right or left, but this doesn’t stop us from consistently taking four lefts in a row, from Haven’t we been here? To Why did we come here? The postcards we’ll keep buying look nothing like this. Everything’s like this.

This collection doesn’t end with the characters Borgstrom has written. He humorously makes himself into a character as well in “Andrew Borgstrom Explains the Author Bio”:

The first person writes the bio in the third person (i.e. Andrew Borgstrom wrote a chapbook you can read for free at Pear Noir! And a much shorter one at Gold Wake. And one forthcoming at Publishing Genius. And he also wrote this bio you paid for.). The second person reads the third person bio of the first person and feels changed. The first person becomes the third person for the second person, and the second person becomes the first person for the third person. The third person tries getting to second base with the first person but makes it to fourth base because the first person writes the bio in third person.

Andrew Borgstrom is an associate editor for Mud Luscious Press. Explanations is available now from The Cupboard. Here is Andrew Borgstrom’s blog.

Review of 'Cloud and Other Stories' by Jason Jordan

Jason Jordan’s second collection, Cloud and Other Stories, is an inventive exploration of narrative structure, surrealism and existential crises. It’s separated into two geographically-titled sections ('Louisville' and 'Pittsburgh', each meant to catalogue where these stories were written [not only geographically, but perhaps, ultimately, where in Jordan’s life]).

These stories utilize absurd, often grotesque Barthelme (whom Jordan references in “My Better Half”) -esque humor to both parody and genuinely portray relationships of all dynamics, including with the self, and his use of symbolism veils various social, political and existential themes.

In “Surviving,” a man discovers he has a brain tumor after suffering bloody noses and bouts of fainting. It's separated into seven sections, each with one-letter headings which together spell out “I AM DYING.” The final section, 'G', is absent.

After moving in with his mother, the narrator’s brother, whom he hasn’t seen in a long time, comes to visit. They sit on a dock with their feet dangling in the water, talking about the past. Here, during a discussion of September 11th, Jordan slips in, as the narrator contemplates his own mortality, some existential political commentary:

People die every fuckin day. What’s the difference? This is more shocking and hits closer to home than kids starving to death in Africa, I thought, but people are gonna die one way or another. Are we making too big a deal of this?

So many people dying in one day in a terrorist attack is, as Jordan accurately points out, no different from the number of people who die every day from natural causes, because they are refused medical care due to lack of health insurance, or how many people have died at the hands of British and American colonialism/imperialism.

This also brings to mind Tobacco company casualties (as corporations are now, under U.S. law, considered 'persons' with free speech 'who' can donate money to political campaigns/PACs, etc.), as Big Tobacco is legally allowed to continually murder people for profit, people they’ve addicted to their product because of the efforts of lobbyists. The same must be said of fast food chains who actively engage in the obesification of children and adults, leading to diabetes, heart disease, etc. Jordan hints at this, too:

You know how I know we won’t survive? I asked my brother.

You mean, like, us? Or humans in general?

Well yeah, but I mean humans in general. One day I was driving home and saw a McDonald’s bag, which looked like it was full of junk, on the side of the road. Obviously someone had thrown it out the window and littered, you know? Well does it really even matter? It ends up in the ground anyway, so what’s it matter if it ends up here or in some garbage dump? We just take what we want out of the ground, and put the stuff we don’t want back into it. Eventually it all goes back into the ground anyway. He pointed to the other side of the lake. Near the shore was a Steak ‘n Shake cup surfing the miniature waves, effortlessly staying afloat.

See? I said, and then we both laughed.

They laugh at the inevitability of death, at the absurdity of Ameriocan culture—almost intuitively. They discuss the ground while looking out over a body of water (from which all life originated). The ground in which we are buried, the lake, the styrofoam cup “effortlessly staying afloat,” all are metonymic representations of life being just as anxious to survive as it is futile to exist at all.

In “Spelunking,” perhaps the shortest and most significant example of tragicomic irony in this collection, a man badly cuts his throat eating “those new buzz saw Doritos®,” and shrinks his roommate Zack to the size of a Gummi Bear to repel down his throat to “deduce how bad the damage [is].” The narrator holds a rope on which Zack dangles holding a lantern in his throat:

I feel Zack walking around. I want to spit or chew or swallow. At once the rope tightens, so I know Zack has begun his descent down my esophagus. I don't have a gag reflex, so it's easy enough. In the mirror I look like a jack-o-lantern without holes. My eyes follow the light down my throat. The light moves slowly. It stops at the halfway point and I wonder if something's wrong.

The narrator’s remark, that he doesn’t have a gag reflex, seems initially innocuous, until the story’s climax when he lets go of the rope and Zack plummets down his throat and into his stomach. In this inadvertent act of cannibalism, he must act quickly, only to end in horror:

The only option: Force myself to vomit. I get on my knees in front of the toilet and stick a couple fingers down my throat like I've seen people do in the movies. I stick them as far down as I can get them, but it's no use.

I have no gag reflex.

In “Duel,” four teenagers invent and decide to film a new version of Jackass: Historical Jackass:

[W]e could base the skits on historical events and stuff. We can include real people and exact dates. I mean, the reason people, or parents I guess, were so against Jackass was that it was gross and didn’t have any value. It was funny, sure, but it didn’t teach anybody anything. This would be educational.

The first historical event they decide to film is the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. They buy costumes for historical accuracy, and the story’s narrator, Alex, agrees to be shot with one of the other kids’ father’s Derringer:

-That would be awesome, man,- I said, genuinely impressed. -Is Aaron actually gonna shoot me?-
-It’d be good for publicity,- said Aaron, the one who would be monopolizing the shooting.

This story shows how susceptible to manipulation we are, how influenced by pop culture and media bombardment, and proposes the idea that, even with the best intentions, situations taken to extremes inevitably ends in tragedy.

Every story in this collection is filled with the same sense of irony. All are energetic, experimental, emotional.

In “in the garden of Death,” a man planting tomatoes is approached by Death to plant six black seeds, one of which will sprout to become Death's replacement. The only letters capitalized in the story are in reference to Death—even the narrator is referred to with a lowercase ‘i’, reflecting biblical references to [g]od.

In “The Pink Light Bulb,” the narrator is an apartment number that hears “SOUNDSSOUNDSSOUNDS” all day from the televisions of everyone on its floor of the apartment building. A vengeful neighbor soon unscrews the number from its door, leaving it on the hallway floor where the number sees the pink light bulb lighting the hall, hearing its “BUZZBUZZBUZZ…”

In “My Better Half” (which references Barthelme), a man has a neighbor cut him in half with a large saw he bought at Wal*mart so he can double his domestic productivity. Presented in academic-essay format, the story instructs the reader to analyze it and ends with instructions to write a 10,000-word essay about the story, providing two pages of blank lines to write on. Apropos of the narrator’s cutting himself in half, the story ends with:

[D]o NOT use complete sentences. Only fragments.

Jason Jordan is the editor of decomP. Cloud and Other Stories is available from Six Gallery Press. He is also the author of Powering the Devil’s Circus: Redux (Six Gallery Press, 2010). Here is Jason Jordan’s blog.

New elimae / 3 Reviews of 'Of Creatures' / Orange Alert Podcast: Episode 43 / 2010: A Year in Review

1/ NEW ELIMAE

The year’s first issue of elimae is up, and it includes two stories of mine called “The End is Getting Younger” and “The Growth” (Thanks again, Brandon and Coop…). Also in this issue are works by Parker Tettleton, Steve Roggenbuck, Troy Urquhart, Howie Good, Mike Topp, Edward Mullany, and others…

2/ 3 REVIEWS OF 'OF CREATURES'

Three reviews of my poetry collection, Of Creatures, surfaced this post week by Nick Ripatrazone, Jessi Graustein and Grady Harp (@Amazon.com). Thanks all, I'm happy you liked it...

3/ ORANGE ALERT PODCAST: EPISODE 43

Also, episode 43 of Orange Alert Podcast premieres this week and features me reading a poem called “Ethnic Cleansing” (Thanks, Jason…). Also reading this week is Shannon Peil, Noel Sloboda and Ben Frost...

4/ 2010: A YEAR IN REVIEW

It’s a new year, which doesn’t mean anything, existing as we do in an arbitrarily determined point in time we use to measure our short, silly little lives. I watched people on television, screaming, waving their hands in the air like they just don't care, hugging, kissing by licking each other's tongues, and I wondered what they were actually celebrating. It's ridiculous. It's funny, though: I criticize this "arbitrarily determined point in time," yet can't believe I'm going to be 30 this month. "The End is Getting Younger," indeed.

Things happened last year, and things didn't happen last year. I published two print collections of stories and poetry in 2010: Snowing Fireflies (Folded Word Press) and Of Creatures (Gold Wake Press), neither of which have sold very well, but I'm extremely grateful for the small group of humans who’ve bought and/or read my books.

I have two things coming out this year: Pseudo-Masochism (Print, Medulla Publishing) and Milk Like a Melted Ghost (e-Book, Thumbscrews Press).

Still, none of my novels (The Immortals Act Their Age, Lepers and Mannequins, Mermaid Sackrace, The Quarantine Ceremony) have been published or accepted for publication. It’s exhausting thinking about this, about what I’m doing wrong. It's probably the writing.

In 2010, I became a contributor to The Nervous Breakdown. I’ve published 3 'controversial' essays so far, and I have ideas for several more.

Three of my stories were nominated for Best of the Net/Best of the Web awards.

I completed my coursework for my Bachelor’s degree in English. I recently got my grades, and, though I was worried, learned I passed all my classes with the lowest grades I've gotten since I've been in college: all B's. So, I will be graduating. I still can’t decide if I’m going to apply to grad school. I probably will—I like school, and don’t know what else to do.

I started reviewing books more. I haven't had much time to read things I want to read, being in school and all, so it feels good to be able to do that.

Some other things happened and didn't happen, probably.

NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS

1/ I’m going to fly to the moon and pulverize it with one punch. I’ll collect all the dust in my spaceship. I’ll return to Earth in the middle of the summer, rub the dust all over my body. I will take off all my clothes and block the sun from my body using the moon’s dust as an eclipse.

2/ I’m going to stop feeling bad about my relationships (or lack thereof) with people who don’t care about me. I’m going to rip my arms off and wrap them around my daughter so she never forgets that I love her more than anything, and she’ll bring my hug with her everywhere she goes.

3/ I’m going to not write very much. I know I won't stick to this. I’ve always wanted to be a ‘good’ writer. If I do break this resolution, I just want to be an ‘okay’ writer (I feel it's all I can hope for). I just want to be ‘okay’. I don’t want to feel anxious or sad anymore, or alone, or jealous, or worthless. Writing—No: trying to get published—makes me feel like that sometimes. I want to feel happy. Not even happy. I just want to feel good. Not even good. I just want to be okay.