Today’s mail brought copies of the Elkhorn, Wisconsin Popcorn Press anthology, The Hungry Dead, edited by Popcorn’s founder, Lester Smith. The delightfully disgusting cover was designed by Smith’s daughter, Katheryn. The collection is cool from several perspectives (aside from the fact that my poem “The Last Supper” is included). First, Lester solicited submissions during October via social networking platforms like Twitter and Facebook, as well as a sharp website, and then announced the chosen selections on Halloween with a mockup of the book ready for printing. Planning, executing, and printing a book this quickly is a crazy challenge, but the proof is in the blood pudding, as they say. The Hungry Dead is a classy production: sixty-five works of poetry and fiction from eighteen authors, including several well-versed Wisconsinites familiar to us such as John Lehman, Sarah Busse, Michael Kriesel, and Dead editor Lester Smith. The Hungry Dead is available from Popcorn Press and Amazon (you can peek at the contents with Amazon’s Look Inside the Book feature).
My short story collection, Caffeine & Other Stories, is now available as a Kindle download for $2.99. It’s a newly expanded edition that includes four bonus stories not found in the $12.95 paperback.
Blurbs from the 1997 edition:
“We see stimulants from caffeine to cocaine, alcohol and marijuana to nicotine. His characters glean intelligence (however wacky, artificial, or genius) and courage from their personal favorite highs. In a rather dark interpretation, I often felt as though many of his characters were on a bumpy ride to suicide. Yet, just when we are shaking our heads at them, Wake surprised me with his unfaltering wit and I laughed my fears away. After all, this is the human spirit he is so masterfully portraying …” —Tracy Walczak, BookLovers.
“Caffeine is a book of constant surprises. In this collection of linked stories set in south-central Wisconsin, Wake sets before us the confusions of life in yuppie heaven. And he does so with tough love, and a wit which will have you laughing wickedly along. Bob Wake has a great sense of where he lives, Madison, Wisconsin, postmodern America. I, for one, look forward to continuing words from this bright writer.” —Jim Stevens, editor of The Journey Home: The Literature of Wisconsin Through Four Centuries.
“The range shown by Bob Wake in creating this series of interconnected, readable stories that stand well on their own is a considerable accomplishment. Reading Caffeine & Other Stories is like being a kid again and reaching into a grab bag at a rich friend’s birthday party: you can’t know what you are going to get, but you can be sure it’s going to be damn good.” —Chris Lott, Eclectica.
“Bob Wake writes likes Ralph Steadman draws: a few choice words and boom! there’s a real, living, breathing character … Caffeine & Other Stories kicks ass, rocks hard, and leaves you wanting more.” —Marie Mundaca, Erupture.
“Mr. Wake writes with confidence and polished prose, and obviously knows well how to craft a short story.” —J. Allen Kirsch, author of Madlands, and God’s Little Isthmus.
“Wake is a first class teller of tales and spinner of stories.” —Midwest Book Review.
Horror writer Jack Lehman stopped by the Coffee Spew crawlspace studio last night and videotaped what is either a chilling Edgar Allan Poe-inspired short story or else a deeply disturbing autobiographical confession.
“Tell-Tale Camera” by Jack Lehman
“We need one to keep a record of things. My garden, the cats…they are all changing and we don’t have photographs of them.”
“Yes,” I said, fumbling with the compact digital camera no larger than an old-fashioned metal cigarette case. The last camera we’d owned, I’d dropped in a shopping center parking lot. It had slipped right out of my pocket as I swung my sport coat out from the back seat of the car. Now I tend to keep a camera in my front shirt pocket. What are the chances of it falling out from there unless I really bend over? Anyway, I’d brought the broken camera to several places and they told me it would cost over a hundred dollars to repair, “You might as well get a new one for that amount.”
I hadn’t. But mother took the big step. Oh, it was to be a present for my birthday, but I knew better. This would be our camera. I would figure out how to use it and she would take all the pictures. But until I pressed the “on” button, I hadn’t realized, it talked.
I was struck by its soothing female voice. And as someone who was, or would soon be, a 55 year old man still living at home, I didn’t often hear soothing female voices, at least not young, sexy ones.
“You are in the narrow focus zone.” This was still better to hear than what Cynthia, owner of Cynthia’s bar down the street, said to me later that day, when she stopped her car as I was walking my dog.
“Robert, you must keep your mother away from karaoke nights at my place. She’s an embarrassment and actually driving away customers.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” was my sheepish reply. But I could do nothing. That, I thought, was why she bought a camera. She wanted pictures of herself on the bar’s deck, swaying with the microphone, a 300 pound woman in a miniskirt, with her hair piled on top of her head and sparkle around her eyes. She wouldn’t let me attend. Not that I wanted to. She would invite highway construction workers, UPS delivery men, even the guy who drove the big green garbage truck. She didn’t want them to know she had a son. Not that it mattered, I knew as I listened to the music from Cynthia’s Place down the street. These men never came anyway.
So what am I to do, I wondered. My Internet gift business was just getting started, I need a home and my computer. She owns this place outright, and will live forever. Plus she gets $400 each month in Social Security disability payments. I couldn’t live without that. I knew I could deposit the SSI checks in our joint account. I’d done this before. The bank didn’t care; after all I was the one who paid the bills. They didn’t want to deal with my mother any more than anyone else did.
She would steal the camera from my room and take it to Cynthia’s. The bartender reluctantly took photos of her. She forced him to somehow. Sometimes I clicked through the pictures. How disgusting. I could hear her toneless voice singing along to the recorded karaoke music. It was a bad Bob Dylan imitation: “But lately I see her ribbons and her bows have fall-en from her curls. She takes just like a wom-an, yes, she does. She makes love just like a wom-an, yes, she does. And she aches just like a wom-an. But she breaks like a little girl.”
To which my camera might add: “Low battery power.”
And then someone knocked at the front door. It was a miracle disguised as a man. He wore the orange vest of a highway worker. They had been widening County Hwy B, that went in front of our house, all summer. It was the main thoroughfare through the little village. In order to make the most of this the town board had allowed the state department of transportation not only to add curbs and gutters but also a sidewalk to the West side of the road. This cut into my mother’s hillside property by fifteen feet, but the result, I knew, would increase its value in the long run.
“My name is Ralph Switchgrass, I’m an engineer with DOT.” I stared at this strange little man. He looked like pictures I’d seen of the American author Edgar Allan Poe.
“How can I help you?” I asked.
“Well,” Switchgrass replied, “I’m afraid we’ve made a little discovery in bulldozing part of your hill today. It’s near where we are going to put some new steps down to the street.”
“Discovery?”
“Yes, we’ve uncovered an abandoned well. As I said, close to the place the stairway will go. It’s quite interesting, actually. You can come out and see the top circle of yellow stones. There was a makeshift wooden cover, but…”
“But what?”
“I’m afraid it doesn’t meet legal requirements. You will have to get it sealed off and inspected by a license plumber before we can go any further.”
“Listen,” I replied angrily, pushing past the man and walking quickly twenty feet toward the excavation, “this construction wasn’t our idea. We’re not paying for anything. You want it sealed off and some plumber to certify that, then you’re the ones who are going to arrange it.”
Switchgrass caught up to me and stood by my side.
I mellowed a bit looking at the hole. “Why would they close up this well and drill another right by the house. Does that makes sense?” I asked.
Ralph Switchgrass simply took an apple-sized rock and dropped it down the old well. It made a clunk thirty or forty feet below, but not a splash.
“Let me see what we can do,” the engineer said, blinking over at me.
But I was already lost in the world of possibility. The hole was round enough and deep enough for my mother.
“What do you want?” she asked impatiently, early that evening. She was wearing her karaoke outfit ready for another night out. “Why do we have to go out there and look at this now!”
I will never hear that grating, whining, peevish voice again, I thought as I looked quickly both ways and then— twe were standing on the edge of the old well— swung the baby sledge hammer I’d been holding behind my back, and wacked mom on the top of the head. For a moment, nothing happened. She just stood there. And then as her knees started to buckle I dropped the sledge and gently guided her body so that she collapsed not to the ground but into the gaping black hole before us. It was ugly, I have to admit. How her head had smacked against the outer rim before gravity sucked her huge body into the abyss. And the sound of her hitting bottom was grotesque.
But I couldn’t think about that now. I had work to do before dark. I got the rusty wheelbarrow from around back, dumped the water that was sitting in it and with a spade went down the rear road to a spot where the highway crew had dumped some of the earth they’d scraped up from the expansion. I filled one load, wheeled back to the old well and dropped it down the hole. Then I did this four more times. It wouldn’t do much in terms of filling the well, but it would hide any sight of mother’s body. The highway people would cap this, put the appropriate ground cover on top and that would be that.
Who would ask about her? Neighbors might notice she wasn’t riding her old balloon-tired bike toward town anymore, but they would assume it had fallen apart, or that she was sick, or maybe she’d gone to visit a relative in Florida and never returned. Even the most polite of them would not hazard asking me, her son, about her. Better to imagine the best. Let sleeping dogs, or in her case, let a dead, overweight, obnoxious cat, lie.
That night I took a warm bath. I opened a bottle of cheap Australian red wine and even found an old leather-bound copy of Poe to read in the tub. Afterwards, for the first time in years, I slept peacefully. Not even dreaming of “Annabel Lee” in her “sepulcher there by the sea, in her tomb by the sounding sea.”
Late the next afternoon Ralph Switchgrass was back at my door. This time. with him he had a plumber, Jim Lean, and Switchgrass’s boss, Rich Benson. DOT would take care of the well. Take care of everything. Cementing it closed, getting the signed legal documents, finishing the steps and seeding that part of the hill they had excavated to make way for the steps. This of course they had to point out to him on the property, by the old well.
“It’s a shame to cover an antique well like this,” Benson felt compelled to say to the group, “but who knows, in another hundred years there might be reason to unearth it once again.”
“What was that?” Jim Lean asked.
None of the rest of us standing there in the late-August twilight heard anything.
“It was a woman’s voice,” he insisted. “Listen.”
There was the slight ruffling of leaves, some distant earth-moving equipment from farther down the road, and then… A soothing female voice. Young, sexy and damning, echoed up from deep within the old well.
“You are in the narrow focus zone.”
“We’ve got to go down there and find out what that voice is,” Benson demanded.
In the distance, the sound of karaoke music began.
God, Seed: Poetry & Art About the Natural World
Rebecca Foust and Lorna Stevens
Tebot Bach 2010
Reviewed by Bob Wake
Lavish is the word that comes to mind when beholding God, Seed: Poetry & Art About the Natural World (Tebot Bach, 2010) by poet Rebecca Foust and artist Lorna Stevens. Well established in their respective mediums, Foust and Stevens’ collaboration in God, Seed is one of those felicitous combustions of text (forty-three poems) and illustration (thirty full-color images) that result in a brilliant hothouse hybrid.
Readers should prepare themselves for sensory overload if not an outright short-circuit when experiencing a two-page spread of, say, Stevens’ lush eye-popping watercolor of a parsimmon opposite Foust’s sensual accompanying poem, “Parsimmons” (“ … rich river pudding, plush and pulp, / soft-slide swallow delight / and sweet, sweet”).
Conversely, later on, we are chilled to the bone by Stevens’ austere black brushwork depicting galloping bison that mimics the timeless mysteries of a prehistoric cave drawing. Foust’s chastising poem is “Last Bison Gone” (“We love what we love / in the scientific way, efficient, empiric, / vicious, too much …). Thus are the contrasting poles of God, Seed established: rapturous pleasure in nature’s bounty on the one hand, while, on the other, rapacious misuse and abuse of all that humanity surveys.
Rebecca Foust’s poetry has always struck at the heart of hard truths. Her first two tough-minded chapbooks (consecutive winners of the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize in 2007 and 2008) were reviewed favorably in our online pages. Dark Card, Foust’s debut, shook a righteous fist at doctors and gods alike for the plight of her son, diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. Mom’s Canoe, the follow-up, bracingly recaptured the poet’s own childhood growing up in the depressed strip-mining region of western Pennsylvania.
Although ostensibly casting a wider impersonal net in God, Seed, it is a testament to Foust’s raw unflinching truth-telling that a poem like “Frog”—about genetically mutated amphibians in a PCB-poisoned pond—spirals instead toward the son whom we remember from Dark Card:
Still, sleeping,
I dreamt of my son,
his genes expressed
not as autism, but as
four thumbs on two
extra hands
and I want to blame
someone. I want
to drain that pond.
God, Seed respects and encourages full immersion in the world—politically and personally—an attainable if too often lost connection to our surroundings. The poem “Now,” for instance, erases all borders between our bodies and nature’s enraptured seasonal rebirth: “… places in the body’s uncharted waters, new worlds / lying green and deep off winter’s bow // and now, spring. Bone-ache thaw, wind sough / through snow-scoured woods, bud swell …”
And yet, lest we fall prey to the ecstasy of hubris, the final poem in Foust and Stevens’ God, Seed, “Perennial,” gives nature the last word by writing us out of the picture altogether: “When you’re gone, it won’t matter to the musk rose / twining the old trellis over the eaves. Willow / will continue to pour her yellow-green waterfall // next to forsythia, one half-tone better on the scale / of bright …”
Enterprising Wisconsin micropublisher Popcorn Press is once again sponsoring an ambitious October literary contest. Last year, press owner and editor Lester Smith accepted vampire-themed poetry and fiction submissions during the month for an anthology, Vampyr Verse, readied by Halloween and, within a matter of days, delivered to the public in a quality printed edition. This year’s theme is “the hungry dead,” which doesn’t preclude vampires, but widens the cemetery gate to include zombies, ghosts, and, in the words of the contest website, “other dead things that want to eat you.” Find all the details and contest rules, as well as an easy-to-use online submission page, at hungrydead.com.
Verse Wisconsin co-editors Sarah Busse and Wendy Vardaman joined six other poets—Karl Elder, Fabu, Susan Firer, Max Garland, Derrick Harriell, and John Koethe—for a stellar Book Festival reading at Avol’s Bookstore in downtown Madison on Thursday, September 30th. Below is a video of the closing poem of the evening, a new work, John Koethe’s elegiac meditation on the 1960s, “ROTC Kills.” Wendy Vardaman’s interview with Koethe in the latest issue of Verse Wisconsin can be found online at the VW website.
Athens, Georgia-based indie music stalwarts Elf Power have released a strong new CD—their tenth studio album—and are touring. The band’s ethereal psych pop and mystical lyricism remain strikingly original as ever, like some sylvan hybrid of William Butler Yeats and early R.E.M. filtered through The Notorious Byrd Brothers. That’s the good news. The bad, sad news is how sparsely attended their High Noon Saloon show was last Monday night in Madison. A generous estimate would place the “crowd” at around 30 people. But let’s face it: woe unto any Wisconsin public event scheduled the same night as a televised Green Bay Packers-Chicago Bears football game.
Given the desultory circumstances, Elf Power’s current five-member lineup (lead singer/songwriter Andrew Rieger, bassist Derek Almstead, guitarist Jimmy Hughes, keyboardist Laura Carter, and drummer Eric Harris) gave an engaging, and, at times, inspired performance. Bassist Almstead’s harmonizing vocals didn’t find their sweet spot until a couple of numbers in, but audience sympathy was on his side as he was hobbling to and from stage on crutches from an apparent injury or sprain.
Highlights included four standout songs from the new album: “The Taking Under,” “Stranger in the Window,” “Like a Cannonball,” and “Goldmine in the Sun.” And a seemingly out of character but very fun cover of “Junkie Nurse” by Royal Trux. Opening for Elf Power were reverb-drenched Madisonians Icarus Himself, whose Fine Young Cannibals falsetto flourishes from lead Nick Whetro were a rousing rebuke to a shamefully underpopulated night at the High Noon Saloon.
Jimmy Hughes and Andrew Rieger of Elf Power performing at the High Noon Saloon, Madison, Wisconsin, Sept. 27, 2010. Photo: Augie McGinnity-Wake.
Freedom
Jonathan Franzen
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2010
Reviewed by Bob Wake
Jonathan Franzen’s zeitgeist-straddling Freedom has arrived with such outsized fanfare—most notably the Time magazine “Great American Novelist” cover—that backlash was inevitable. The binge and purge cycle of praise and resentment went several rounds before Freedom was even available in bookstores. NPR’s Alan Cheuse declared that the novel was “quite unappealing.” The New York Timestrumpeted it as “a masterpiece.” I think I’ll go with compulsively readable, deeply felt, and often very, very funny. Like The Corrections before it, Freedom mines the psychology and behavior of an American family with the kind of acute detailing that elicits continual shocks of recognition. The characters are so intricately three-dimensional that they have the fullness and richness of close-up film acting, as if we’re witnessing dazzling Oscar-worthy performances.
Franzen is fifty-one years old, roughly the respective ages of his psychically bruised married couple, Walter and Patty Berglund, at novel’s end. By which point—page 562 (a mere six pages shorter than The Corrections)—we feel deliriously and somewhat exhaustively connected not only to them but to their lovers, siblings, children, parents, neighbors and co-workers. The Berglunds meet while students at the University of Minnesota, Patty privileged from New York on a basketball scholarship, Walter of in-state modest background with political and policy wonk aspirations. Their college years are beautifully evoked, as is the secondary verging on primary character of Richard Katz, Walter’s roommate in school, and a charismatic rock musician whose life will stay entwined with Walter and Patty’s for decades to come.
Freedom is stylistically elevated with a brilliant strategy that turns one of Franzen’s “Ten Rules for Writing Fiction” advice on its head. That is, rule number four: “Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself.” Nearly 200 pages of Freedom purport to be a manuscript written by Patty Berglund—at the behest of her therapist, whom we never meet—about herself … in the third person. A first-person voice, in other words, masquerading as a third-person voice: “It’s not so fun to be on a road trip with a driver who considers you, and perhaps all women, a pain in the ass, but Patty didn’t know this until she’d tried it. The trouble started with the departure date, which had to be moved up for her.”
On the one hand, we come to recognize this as a dissociative mechanism on Patty’s part, the result of a high school sexual assault. But it’s also a means for Patty to step outside of her character and try to recast her experiences and relationships as pure narrative. Storytelling to pinpoint and separate objective causality from subjective dysfunction. Which, after all, is Franzen’s job here as well. It’s a fairly high-stakes literary gambit, a spritz of postmodern intertextuality. It also brings Patty Berglund spectacularly alive on the page. (At least one reviewer, Charles Baxter in The New York Review of Books, doesn’t buy it, claiming that Patty “hardly seems capable of writing the Franzenian sentences with which her autobiography is speckled…”)
Franzen had to perform a lot of twisty pretzel logic to make the metaphoric locutions on the theme of “corrections” work throughout the earlier novel. Lots of authorial heavy lifting for little payoff, since it was hard to take much from the metaphor other than something ultimately really reductive, i.e., that death is the final “correction” to life. The theme of freedom, however, is infinitely malleable and wondrously adaptive to situations both personal and political, the borders of which are porous. As individuals, we, like Richard Katz, may invariably meet a moment of despondency when we contemplate suicide, a freedom allotted us as sentient beings. (“He was pretty sure that nobody would miss him much when he was dead. He could free Patty and Walter of the bother of him, free himself of the bother of being a bother.”) But just as Katz rejects the notion of suicide in favor of life in all its messiness and conflict, we feel that Franzen’s literary heart is moving in a similar direction, away from the chic dead-end despair of The Corrections, toward something enduring and good in the human spirit.
So I read a top-notch Hemingway short story this evening, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” Even with the big game hunting claptrap, it’s sharp nasty fun on the topic of gender politics. (“How should a woman act when she discovers her husband is a bloody coward? She’s damn cruel but they’re all cruel. They govern, of course, and to govern one has to be cruel sometimes. Still, I’ve seen enough of their damn terrorism.”) I’m deeply bummed to find out a 1947 film based on the story isn’t available in any form on video or DVD. The poster for The Macomber Affair says: “GREGORY PECK makes that Hemingway kind of love to JOAN BENNETT.” Gotta find this movie …
Published in June by Duluth-based Holy Cow! Press, Amy Lou Jenkins’s Every Natural Fact: Five Seasons of Open-Air Parenting has a blurb from me on the inside front cover. One of the book’s chapters was a runnerup in Rosebud‘s X. J. Kennedy Award for creative nonfiction in 2007, which I co-judged with editor Rod Clark. Here’s the blurb: “Her vivid imagery mixes a naturalist’s precision with a spiritual seeker’s poetry”—Robert Wake, author and editor of Cambridge Book Review Press and co-judge for the X. J. Kennedy Award for Nonfiction. And here’s my complete write-up on Jenkins’s piece, titled “Close to Home,” from 2007:
In “Close to Home,” writer Amy Jenkins uses the occasion of a Wisconsin nature walk with her 11-year-old son DJ to weave a meditation on the topic of death. “It is July second,” she informs us, “the date of a full moon in the month that Buddhists believe the dead return to visit the living.” Mother and son together catch sight of a majestic buck moving through the forest. (“His coat was caramel with cream trim, and scratched from shoulder to rear as if keyed by an angry hoodlum.”) They discover the remains of a decaying fox carcass. “Everything dies,” DJ remarks. Jenkins struggles to find the proper parental response: “Right here is the place where I’m supposed to have the answers, I thought.” We are deep in the woods now and Jenkins movingly shares with us that her stepfather died from prostate cancer two years previous. She and DJ nursed the old man in his final days. Suddenly the essay deepens as a testament to loss and remembrance. “The entire forest,” Jenkins writes, “is a composition of bits of organic matter that came from life feeding on death.” Her vivid imagery mixes a naturalist’s precision with a spiritual seeker’s poetry. “The woods felt so busy today,” says DJ, “like we were not alone.”
Coffee Spew 