Shortly before I died, Or possibly after, I moved to a small village by the sea.
You’ll recognize it, as did I, because I’ve written About this village before. The rocky sliver of land, the little houses where the fishermen once lived—
We had everything we needed: a couple of rooms Overlooking the harbor, A small collection of books, Paperbacks, the pages Brittle with age.
How, if I’d never seen The village, had I pictured it so accurately? How did I know we’d be happy there, Happier than ever before?
The books reminded me of what, In our youth, We called literature.
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I’ve always been fascinated by gators—there’s something seductively simple about a life of natural law and rote response, all dead eyes and sinew and death rolls levied upon unsuspecting wildebeest. I consume gator documentaries, have spent hours scouring YouTube for videos of their visceral, primordial force. And I never understood a thing about them until my wife and I, visiting New Orleans for our first real vacation together, decided to take a gator tour.
We drove forty-five minutes west, weaving through the swamplands besieging the city until we reached a rundown shanty that served as the global headquarters of Airboat Adventures, LLC. Stepping out into a wet, gauzy heat, we immediately scurried for the office, passing a middle-aged couple in matching I ♥ Oak Alley Plantation t-shirts; another family, obviously midwestern, extricated themselves from a rented minivan. We creaked open the screen door and entered, air conditioning conspicuously absent.
The office was all gift shop, its shelves sagging with the larval forms of yard sale. People trickled in behind us, making awkward, gator-adjacent small talk until a perky protomillennial slammed inside and herded us all down to the pier, tickets clutched in our sweaty little fists. We grouped up in front of a flat-top, shallow-draft boat, a creature of sheet metal and simple geometry—clearly, I thought, the result of a productive day shopping at Home Depot.
One by one, we twisted gingerly aboard, the boat dipping threateningly whenever our weight shifted, which was approximately always, until the guide had us balanced out like cargo on an airplane and we puttered away from the dock through a mat of flowering lilypads, curving out to join the main channel beyond. Cypress bent to the water’s edge, caterpillars of Spanish moss glowing in spectral catenary curves, palmetto and sawgrass alongshore yielding to a moist, green density beyond.
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One of them grants you the ability to forecast the future; another wrenches your tongue from your mouth, changes you into a bird precisely because you have been given this gift. The gods are generous
in this way. I learned to avoid danger, avoid fear, avoid excitement, these the very triggers that prompt my wings from their resting place deep inside. And so, I avoided fights, avoided everything really. In the locker room, I avoided other boys,
all the while intently studying that space between their shoulder blades, patiently looking for the tell-tale signs, looking to find even one other boy like me, the wings buried but there nonetheless. I studied them from a distance.
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This or That: Simultaneity in John O’Hara’s BUTTERFIELD 8
When I wrote in third person, it was in third-person close. The concerns of simultaneity didn’t occupy much of my attention. There may be a flaw in my thinking here, but my reasoning was that because the world was seen by a focalizing character, other characters were subservient to the primary consciousness. We understand through inference that other characters are perceiving at the same time, other things are happening, but we are only privy to the perceptions of the one. Those other consciousnesses could only be suggested through the direct discourse of dialogue or through an action (or reaction). I didn’t think I had to evoke simultaneity, it sort of happened. That was until I began to move away from third-person close and used narrators that were more omniscient.
When the omniscience changes, becomes more editorial, the need to deal with the mechanics of stage-managing more than one character suddenly leaps out as a concern. Reading Butterfield 8, I started thinking about simultaneity and how language, by definition sequential, somehow evokes things happening at the same time. How is the effect managed? The novel showed me several kinds of simultaneity and/or the sequential which are worth looking at.
John O’Hara’s novel opens this way: “On this Sunday morning in May, this girl who later was to be the cause of a sensation in New York, awoke much too early for her night before.” The opening establishes a time marker and we meet one of the principals, Gloria. We follow her as she rounds up what’s left of her clothing, steals a mink coat then takes a cab where the section finishes a few pages later: “At the corner of Madison the driver almost struck a man and girl, and the man yelled and the driver yelled back. ‘Go on, spit in their eye,’ called Gloria.” Then after a space break, we get: “in the same neighborhood another girl was sitting at one end of a rather long refectory table.” I first thought that one incident had occurred and concluded, and another was beginning—pure sequence. But only a few pages later we have:
At Madison Avenue they were almost struck by a huge Paramount taxi, and when Jimmy swore at the driver, the driver said, “Go on, I’ll spit in your eye.” And both Isabel and Jimmy distinctly heard the lone passenger, a girl in a fur coat, call to the driver: “Go on, spit in their eye.” The cab beat the light and sped south in Madison.
This is the same near-collision from another angle of refraction. What I thought was sequence turns out to be (also) simultaneity. It’s like two trajectories whose paths cross in an X. The moment with the girl at the refectory table turns out not to be happening afterward but happening at the same time. O’Hara makes us figure this out rather than signal with some transitional device like “meanwhile” or “at the same time.” The effect is to disrupt our sense of conventional time.
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When they started me at last on combination therapy, they warned about a body and its immune system free again to fix itself with an overwhelming response: my mouth blistered with ulcers as my body rushed to catch up with all its infections. I went looking for the opposite of explosion and not implosion, not another kind of destruction. In my mind I saw time-lapse films that show slow growth at record speed.
It used to be Herb Lily had my number but now that I have his when local lobstermen call 442-8531 looking for alewives at five in the morning, it takes me three or four rings to answer no, I’m not married, you’ve dialed the wrong number what time is it this isn’t the water department.
“Good Food,” an essay by 2016 fiction graduate Boyce Upholt, was recently featured in Guernica. Read an excerpt below:
Good Food
I am a food writer—or at least a writer who sometimes delves into food—and, like most food writers, I began as an eater. As a seven-year-old I fell in love with fresh-caught seafood, whole fish grilled beachside in Costa Rica. Later, it was fresh churros dipped in thick hot chocolate in Andalucía. My family kept giant tubs of Vermont-fresh maple syrup in our basement for Saturday pancakes.
Food was an adventure, a quick dip into other ways of living. I was particularly attracted to what I saw as authenticity. At some point in my pre-teen years, I discovered a cowboy-themed barbecue warehouse near our home in suburban Connecticut called W.B. Cody’s. It became my consistent choice for birthdays and other formal occasions After a platter of smoked pork ribs, I always ordered its signature dessert, a lump of ice cream dusted in a layer of cinnamon so thick it looked like a baked potato. Soon, under the tutelage of my travel-loving father, I embarked on my first food quest, sampling all the state’s best-reviewed barbecue restaurants.
I dredged up this memory as proof of my blue-collar taste in food, and as a hedge against my white-collar privilege. Then, trying to factcheck my memories of W.B. Cody’s, I came across a twenty-five-year-old interview with its owners. “This is no yippy-ki-yay cowboy,” one said. “It’s meant to be for the Easterner.” Barbecue ribs in suburban Connecticut? The only person I was fooling was myself. What I was really learning was the thrill of the chase.
TQ: You have been, in one way or another, working on this material for decades. How did the poem itself, as we have it, cohere?
ETG: I began the poems in the fall of 2013. I have notes from early 2014 that suggest an arc or purpose, but by early 2015 I had lost my way. No map or spell worked: The Missing couldn’t be found or summoned. What the soldiers went through was no longer accessible to us, or to our imagination—at least if the “we” is civilian. And nothing, absolutely nothing, could ensure one’s safety on that ground.
At that bleak, aimless, and disoriented moment I had a single, stark, important dream and spoke with John Peck about it. He drew an analogy to Jung’s conversations with the Dead at the end of The Red Book (which, as you might imagine, scared the living daylights out of me). The most important thing he said was that, whatever it was that connected me with The Missing, that connection had been forty years in the making, and I could not walk away from them. “So what am I to do?” I asked. “Keep reading, keep writing, keep walking the ground. It will come to you,” he said.
He was correct. In April 2017, after two weeks in Flanders, I woke one morning in Paris and realized that even though (a) The Missing could not be found or summoned, and (b) no words (e.g., a manual or amulet) could keep them safe, I knew that while the poem(s) were happening in language, while The Missing were spoken of in the moment of space-time that lyric creates, The Missing were both present and safe.
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