Puck

Richard Powers is a master of sleight-of-hand. He writes novels full of science but escapes being called a science fiction writer. In Generosity: An Enhancement, the latest novel by the MacArthur “genius” grant and National Book Award winner (for The Echo Maker), Powers feints and flourishes in order to — presto-magico — pull together two seemingly unrelated themes: genetic engineering and creative nonfiction.

In Powers’ hands, the relation between the two themes is laid bare: they both are concerned with the nature, manipulation, and enhancement of reality. In recent years, we’ve seen the formerly innocuous genre of memoir mutate into the high-stakes blockbuster industry of creative nonfiction. And woe unto he who fudges the truth in his memoir, who tells a lie, however small. What used to be par for the course in memoir is now a cardinal sin: remember James Frey and A Million Little Pieces? Read the rest of this entry »

Un-spun by DJ Skrotekkki

[Note: In "The Harrowing Highway," part one of the DJ's odyssey, he tries to ride the bus from Pullman to Spokane without being molested.]

I stumbled around the city of screams, determined to spend the two-hour layover somewhere other than the bus station. Riverfront Park looked inviting enough, so I explored it for a while and was solicited yet again – alas, only for spare change this time. Thank goodness. I called a friend who lived nearby, and worked even nearer. He agreed to meet up before going to work.

“Excellent,” I said, “I have a crazy story to tell you.”

That all went according to plan. He agreed that the tale I related was indeed unusual. We caught up until it was time to go our separate ways.

By this time, I figured, someone with a four-and-a-half-hour layover would have gotten the hell out of the bus station. And with only about twenty minutes left before my bus was supposed to arrive, I was sure I could return for the short wait without much chance of running into my new “friend.” I was partially right.

But what luck! We just so happened to cross paths again. Fortunately, she was just leaving the station. “I got hungry” she explained. Then she expressed her surprise at seeing me again. “I thought this was your stop and you’d be long gone.” I could only wish. Read the rest of this entry »

Un-spun by DJ Skrotekkki

I boarded the bus in a slight hangover haze and sleep-deprivation daze, looking forward to snoring my way through the ride that awaited me. As soon as I settled into a seat next to the window, however, those hopes were lost. Between the seat’s build and my own, it was impossible to get comfortable enough to nod off. In retrospect, I should have given it a try and at least pretended I was sleeping, because by the end of the trip I would find out just how uncomfortable that particular seat could be.

I gazed out the window through the enormous sunglasses that were hiding more than my eyes until I couldn’t stand it any longer. The young man who had gotten on the bus at the last stop was half my age, but even so I was attracted and couldn’t help but entertain carnal fantasies about him. I decided to break the ice. “There’s no need to remain silent.” Read the rest of this entry »

Fortune Telling 000

The arrangement and interpretations of the I Ching’s hexagrams can be attributed to the astute analysis of human nature in many contexts by many contributors over many years. It’s much more difficult to account for the uncanny accuracy, reasonableness, and wisdom of the I Ching’s answers to one’s questions. That, at least, has been my experience.

The I Ching is the ancient Chinese book that accreted around a series of 64 hexagrams. A hexagram, in turn, is an arrangement of six lines. Each line is either solid or broken. Here are the first two hexagrams, the Creative and the Receptive:

Hexagrams are formed by chance action (e.g., the rolling of three coins, and taking combinations of heads and tails for either a solid or broken line) from the bottom up. The lines are taken to represent a temporal sequence, the unfolding of change over time.

Lines themselves can change, and a changing line is indicated by chance action, as in the roll of three heads (a changing broken or yin line) or three tails (a changing solid or yang line). In the above example, if one tossed a set of three coins six times—once for each line in the Creative—and each roll came up three tails, each line would change into its opposite. The result would be two hexagrams: hexagram one, the Creative, would change to hexagram two, the Receptive.

The odds against a six-in-a-row coin toss are astronomical. But, then, what are the odds in favor of receiving a response that strikes one as both wise and a propos to the question?

Questions. Where do they come from? You, me, worrying the hems of our lives; John Cage, wondering what it really means to compose; and anybody, really, who engages in the act of breasting change with a story of self in mind. To put the previous question another way, What are the odds of a story emerging from apparently unconnected facts, experiences or observations?

As with most fortune telling systems, the odds favor making sense—if you can accept enigmatic replies as sense. For me, the difference between the I Ching and, say, the tarot (which has much sexier images), is perceptual: the I Ching responds in poetry, the tarot in cliché. One enlightens me, the other makes me vomit. It’s not the tarot’s fault; it’s cultural chance. The Romany, vectors of prognostication by chance action of card dealing, eschewed written language until relatively recent times (and then a palette of languages pattern Romany texts, rather than a national language); the Chinese, just as ancient, famously co-pioneered written language. The Romany poetry of the tarot is, at best, confined to a small group of disrespected people while the written texts of the Chinese have become venerated for their wisdom and verisimilitude. Read the rest of this entry »

story by Robin H. Pugh Yi

“Sweetie, you can’t climb in there,” I call. I catch my three-year-old daughter by the waist just before she hoists herself over the low wall between us and the Smithsonian’s Neanderthal burial exhibit.
“Why?” Rachel’s favorite question.
“Honey, there are some very delicate and rare things in there. We need to leave them alone so everyone has a chance to see them.”
She accepts this.
“Mommy, how close can we get?” she asks, never taking her eyes off the Neanderthal child mannequin bent over the grave.
“This is close enough,” I whisper, sliding next to her on the wall.
A nine- or ten-year-old girl leans against the wall, declaring, “Freaky,” before moving on to the next display. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mistress of the Knavish Sprites and I are on the road again, this time in Cannon Beach, a lovely, well kept, flower-laden town filled with cottages that has had to become a tourist trap to survive. Ah, the nipping jaws of capitalism. The MKS says she finds it remarkable that the shopkeepers have not become jaded, even after what must be a long season for them. I reluctantly agree, even while noting all the “help wanted” notices which emphasize that the potential candidates for these low-paying service positions must be cheerful in the face of all retail tourism adversity. Not just capitalism, but new age capitalism is at work in this lovely town.

Plus, there’s the Haystack, a monolithic sea stack that makes this place an icon of the Pacific Northwest coast. (That said, this coast is loaded with sea stacks, conical protuberances that begin to glaze together into a single snapshot memory.) And after the furnace of the Palouse, it’s cool without testing one’s capacity for wardrobe. Then, too, the LBBs (little brown birds) are seemingly tame and all dogs that come here find themselves in a heaven of scent and surf.

But you’ve got to wonder about a town that names its main drag Hemlock. Is there a Socrates hidden in Cannon Beach’s closet?

Hemlock is lined with shops–far too many kitchy galleries–and motels. We’re staying at the Inn at the Village Centre, but it should be more properly called the Room at the Village Centre, as there’s only one. The Centre is one of those malls that stretches back into the lot, like a strip mall turned on its ear, and with maze-like obstructions thrown in for adventurous shopping fun. It’s always a hunt for hidden treasure here in Cannon Beach. Jennifer, the manager of the Inn, is a kindly, cheerful young woman with a couple kids she said we should “smack” if they get too loud. That hasn’t been necessary, though, as her children are like the birds, tame and cooing with the bliss of the good life. It’s summer, after all.
On the steps up into the new books bookstore (as opposed to Jupiter Books, which sells used, and is pretty cool, featuring a proprietor with a Carolinas lilt) we overheard a young woman on her cellphone.

Hi, Mom! It’s me! I’m in Cannon Beach. The air is so fresh.”

Earlier in the day I walked into Jupiter Books and the Carolina lilt of the bearded owner chortled, “That might be him now.” I did a double take, not really sure the remark was directed at me, even though the heads of the owner and his customers all turned and stared at me.

Freak! Old insecurities die hard.

“Just kidding,” he said. “I was telling them that I heard Terry Bishop had a place in town.”

“I am not he,” I said, to clear things up as quickly as possible. I wanted to browse on books like a manatee in the library of the sea.

Then I found, way in the back, precisely where you’d expect to find the poetry, some old copies of Talus and Scree, a lit zine that once published a poem of mine (in number 3). I’d been used as a conversational ploy, temporarily confused with a famous science fiction writer, and here was the proof of my obscurity in the who-knows-how-many-times-turned-over inventory of literary America.

fiction by Brian Charles Clark

“Go,” I told you, “and make yourself available.”

Your scowl doubted me, but I pressed gas money into your hand—a hand already outstretched. Your trembling hand, your bare feet, your salt-encrusted tee-shirt, your heart weighing the wood of the past.

We were at play in the fields of the vertical. The sun shone through the groves of orange magnetism, but it was the smudge pots that attracted us. You were chased by the lion of the maelstrom. My hands were covered with soot. With pockets full of rocks, we went home to the cliff-hanging house where we were erratically rebuffed. You gave yourself ample reason to panic at life’s seemingly deliberate obscurity.

“Available to what?” you scoffed.

“To the chance you seek,” I replied, but I was too tired to be convincing. Gas money, a skull made of stone, bare feet, you stood in the door, hand outstretched. “Open to the possibility,” I tried again.

Smoke from a lung, the cadence of the magic circle, gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and the weak—to these forces add aleatory.

“Go,” I told you. The abyss, so prone to earthquakes, couldn’t hold you anyway. “Make yourself available,” I added, “and it will come.” Here is the very meaning of the word—any word; abduction, for example.

Skull and bones washed up by waves of bleach in the tenantless heat. There is no arrow because time is a puddle. You were bare foot. You opened the door and became available. Upon your lips, the fuel of chance. I held the vial in my hand, poured the greasy ash into the palm of the other.

“Go,” I said, so close I could taste it.

review by Brian Charles Clark

Dharma Punx: A Memoir
by Noah Levine
Publisher: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004

The spiritual rags-to-riches genre is an ancient and venerable one. The earliest example may well be St. Augustine’s Confessions, in which he writes of his misspent youth as a sexually active “pagan” (the Latin word meaning “redneck” or “country bumpkin”), and his conversions, first to the wrong brand of Christianity (Arianism), then, finally, to the correct brand, now known as Roman Catholicism.

Noah Levine’s Dharma Punx is a fascinating, if somewhat repetitive, account of growing up as a punk-rocking drug addict. As the son of Jack Kornfield, the noted Buddhist teacher, Levine was exposed early in life to the “dharma”, the law of Buddhist spirituality and right living. But his early years were also marred by his parents’ divorce, his mother’s multiple and sometimes abusive boyfriends, and the drug use of all these adults. Levine, filled with anger as a boy, stole pot from the adults in his home, traded the pot for harder stuff, and just generally indulged in the “underworld that fill[ed]” his “dreams”. Read the rest of this entry »

review by Brian Charles Clark

The Gatekeeper: A Memoir
Terry Eagleton
St. Martin’s Press, 2002

Terry Eagleton grew up poor and Catholic in working class northern England to become one of the great literary critics of the Western world. His Literary Theory: An Introduction is a classic, and the ideal pedagogical tool for busting literary hubris, as it is unremittingly critical of all theory, even his own Marxism. In his memoir, The Gatekeeper, he is a writer with a fine, biting wit. At age ten, he was the “gatekeeper” at a convent—the last male (besides priests, who, Eagleton insists with a smirk, aren’t men) those 18-21 year-old nuns ever saw. Noted—and too often dismissed in the U.S.—for his socialism, Eagleton was radicalized early: “The Christian gospel invites us to contemplate the reality of human history in the broken body of an executed political criminal.” Eagleton’s humor bites, but his biggest teeth are his moral convictions, which refuse to separate the academic enterprise from the rest of the so-called real world: Read the rest of this entry »

Essay by Brian Charles Clark

I always fall in love with the girl in the book. When I was five, I fell in love with Sal, in Blueberries for Sal. She filled her pail with berries and then ate them all, saving none for later. That’s the sort of self-indulgence I can identify with.

When I was twelve, my biblioamour was Eowin, the warrior princess in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Eowin dressed up like a boy in order to escape the confines of her gender, so that she could go out and fight the good fight. Later it was voices on the radio, like when I was ten and fell hard for Melanie. That was around 1968, and when she belted out a chorus to, “Candles in the Rain,” I understood why people sometimes said, “I’d lay my life on the line”—for her, to protest the War, to ensure that we can each love whom and when we want. At about that same time I came to the realization that love can’t be restricted, at least not the way that, say, grammar can be prescripted. If the culture I was born into seemed to insist that boys fall in love with girls, I was certain, at nine or ten, that this must be some sort of misunderstanding. Read the rest of this entry »