In the Mail Today

In my mail today: the last two Burning Deck titles: Elke Erb's The Up and Down of Feet  and Paol Keineg's Triste Tristan, and a letter hand-signed by Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop explaining that even the nonpareil thing must come to an end.

"Begun in 1961, Burning Deck has had a long and, at least to us, interesting life. Now after 56 years, our own  high-end birthdays and illnesses make us end the press."

I think one could easily make a strong argument that Burning Deck was the most important American publisher of avant-garde poetry in the half century it operated, and it certainly built strong bridges between the European (particularly, the French and German) and American vanguards. 

Here's a by-no-means-comprehensive list of notable titles the press published (from Burning Deck's Wiki article):

99: The New Meaning, by Walter Abish

A Geometry by Anne-Marie Albiach

Why Write? by Paul Auster

The Heat Bird, by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Utterances, by William Bronk

The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell), by Robert Coover

Striking Resemblance by Tina Darragh

Species of Intoxication: Extracts from the Leaves of the Doctor Ordinaire by Michael Gizzi

Artificial Heart, by Peter Gizzi

The Countess from Minneapolis, by Barbara Guest

Innocence in extremis by John Hawkes

My Life, by Lyn Hejinian

A Test of Solitude by Emmanuel Hocquard

Some Other Kind of Mission by Lisa Jarnot

Trial Impressions by Harry Mathews

i.e. by Claude Royet-Journoud

Numen, by Cole Swensen

The Windows Flew Open, by Marjorie Welish

Turneresque, by Elizabeth Willis

The Heat Bird is just a fantastic book. It's impossible not to see how that book influenced Rosmarie Waldrop's own evolution as a poet. I would recommend readers enjoy the Berssenbrugge title alongside Rosmarie's equally stellar The Reproduction of Profiles (New Directions). Both of these books hold up wonderfully.

There are so many more titles worth recommending in their back catalog. For example, the authors of the two final books published by the press have both been published by Burning Deck before, and I would recommend both of those earlier books. (I reviewed Keineg's earlier title for the American Book Review, back in the old papery, pre-internet days.)

I hope this means Keith and Rosmarie will be able to concentrate on their own poetry without distraction now. They've more than earned that. And I also have this (perhaps quixotic?) hope and wish that the powers-that-be might grant either deserving poet a MacArthur so we can set a new record, age-wise. I have no doubt the funds would not go to waste. And both poets are "fully empowered" now, to speak in the Nerudesque idiom. Age be damned.

Library Amnesty Day

One rainy spring afternoon in Baltimore, a young man walked into one of the city’s smaller libraries. He drew a little attention to himself since he was wearing a burnouse. It was Library Amnesty Day, which meant that patrons could return overdue library books and have the fines for those books waived. He explained that he wanted to take advantage of this amnesty. “This book is wonderful and everything in it is true. I am living proof of that,” he half whispered and smiled. “But I think I have been wrong to keep the book so very long.” The librarian asked him for his library card . He replied, “I have none.” She tried to get more information but he fled. He was in and out of the library in under three minutes. The librarian tried to place his accent but she couldn’t. At first, she thought it must be a prank since he left no book. He did leave a plastic tube on the counter of the librarian’s station. This tube was discovered to contain an ancient papyrus. Obviously, this had not been borrowed from the small library in Baltimore. It was forwarded to one local university and thence onward to several others. Eventually, it was determined that the origin of the papyrus scroll was the Library at Alexandria, burned when Caesar himself strategically set fire to his own ships during the siege of that city. The fire spread from the ships to the docks and then reached the vaunted library and consumed much of it, Plutarch informs us. Other historians insist the fire (or multiple fires) happened earlier or later. But all agree that the library and its precious volumes perished by fire. Had the Library at Alexandria ever collected such penalties, the overdue fee the mystery man was seeking to have discharged would have been astronomical. Even a modern robber baron would have difficulty paying such a fine. The scroll the mysterious man dropped off contained text in ancient Greek and hieroglyphics. The title of the work, when translated, was revealed to be How to Live Forever.

(science fiction)

A NEW BLITZKRIEG



American Airlines’ Flight AA2497 departed Atlanta in the early evening, just after six, bound for Dallas-Forth Worth. It took off into a warm July sky. No storms waited in its flight path. The passengers felt mostly relaxed. It had been expected to touch down on earth again at 8:33 pm. local time. But it didn’t happen.

At 8:33 p.m. the flight was still circling, refused permission to land or continue on to any other airport. The United States Air Force had scrambled an E-3 Sentry alongside two F-22s. These interceptors waited to see what word would come down from on high. They were fully prepared to destroy civilian aircraft and snuff out American lives.

This is because Flight AA2497 had become two Flights AA2497. As the flight approached DFW, it had morphed into a set of mirror image twins. Both flights contained the exact same crew and passengers. And both craft were in a panic, as visual contact had been made between the two planes in mid-air. That is, passengers had seen their doppelgangers looking out the windows of the plane flying next to them. Transmissions from the pilots and co-pilots of these dual cockpits were nearly identical. Nobody was sure which plane was the “real McCoy” or whether such logic could even be applied to what had happened. The air traffic controllers were bewitched into stunned silence when they heard the same pilot transmitting from two different planes, his voice overlapping his voice.

The secretary of defense and the president were conferring. Since a state of war existed between the United States of America and that nameless species which had lately announced its existence as interdimensional beings living with us, able to travel right through us, interpenetrating us like photons, the decision was not an easy matter. They had already attacked our infrastructure and information technologies. There had been human casualties. Nobody really knew what “they” were. We had found ways to block them, we had used the best code we could finesse. But increasingly they made new incursions. They were able to interfere with the natural progression of time. They were able to use backdoors in space. We were at war. And yet nobody had ever even seen the enemy.

Everyone knew this anomaly of Flight AA2497 had been caused by them. But nobody knew the meaning of it. The President and the Secretary had to make the judgment call. The flight was running out of fuel and refueling mid-air was not an option. It was ultimately decided to let both planes land. The military was evacuating the airport of civilians and all other flights were diverted elsewhere.

The planes taxied down separate runways only moments apart. The passengers and crews on both airplanes were told they could not deboard. They were to be quarantined for an indeterminate amount of time — until the matter could be resolved. This was depressing news, but the passengers on both aircraft were genuinely relieved that they had managed to finally touch down, reach the ground alive. They had seen the armed interceptors tailing their planes. They knew they had survived a close call.

The president breathed a huge sigh of relief when he was apprised that no earth-shattering disaster had occurred when the planes landed.

“We just have no idea what to do with all the extra humans,” one general joked. “And which ones are the originals and who are the copies?”

They were still laughing about this when the call came through from the military brass on the ground at DFW. It was a panicked voice that relayed the information: “Sir, it’s the worst possible scenario. Nuclear option tenable. We no longer have two identical planes. We had two….then we had four identicals..then eight…sixteen…you get the picture. They’re just materializing and destroying the airport. It appears to be some sort of virus…some sort of spatial virus! There are hundreds of them if not thousands already. I have to evacuate because….”

There was a huge crashing sound of twisting metal and a scream. Many screams. Then silence.

And the mitosis of planes went on through the landscape, that warm summer night in Texas. Flight AA2497 went on duplicating, horizontally, city to city, and vertically, jets piled atop jets up into the clouds, even to the asscrack of doom.

And the passengers wondered and wondered and wondered as they watched and sometimes caught a glimpse of themselves through the wreckage, looking back at themselves in terror and hoping, hoping to get off the plane as soon as possible.

Fiction, Fiction, Fiction

An editor with "a startup seeking to bring short fiction to modern readers" contacted me about one of the short stories I'd published on Medium. He wanted that for his new journal. So that will be appearing in that new mag and I'll share more info when it debuts.

Here's one from tonight.

HELPING HANDS DAYCARE


I can’t remember Jake. I mean I can, but I won’t. Because Em and I have two other children now. And we want them to have a normal life. They don’t even know they might have an older brother somewhere. But since you asked, I’ll tell you. I can’t talk at length about this, so I’m going to be very brief. Just the basic facts. We don’t know any more than those few “basic facts.” Probably we never will.

I told Em from very nearly the beginning there was something different about that daycare. Helping Hands Daycare. Well, you know it’s gone now. The building burnt to the ground. There’s a Goodwill store in that lot. You’d never guess there had been anything else there. There’s no trace of it left.

When we first encountered it? Well, sure, it looked fine if you took a quick glance. Fingerpaintings hung proudly on the walls. There was up-to-date and safe playground equipment and stringent supervision at boisterous playtime. A current license. Healthy food. A strict sick-child policy to protect everyone. The staff was friendly and, most importantly, they interacted beautifully with the kids. Perhaps too beautifully. I just felt something was off with “Miss Marsha.” It was her business. You know they never found her. That was some other woman’s body in the fire. They said there had been an attempt to make it appear that it was Miss Marsha’s body. Well, DNA testing put that to rest.

How it began? Jake began coming home with dirt under his fingernails. I would ask him to explain and he used to shrug me off. He’d get that nervous look. I told him it was okay, tried to turn it into a joke. So eventually he said that disturbing thing, he just came out and said, “We have to feed them.”

My wife thought it was nothing at first. She said it was typical fantasy, a story sprung up between Jake and his playmates at Helping Hands. When he told us that the things lived under the daycare, in a sort of tunnel, that Miss Marsha would take them down there and they would feed these creatures, she laughed. She just snorted and whinnied and told her friends. She thought it was hilarious. “The monsters that live under Helping Hands Daycare.” I heard her mother and her laughing on the phone about it. I distinctly remember that. They hooted.

Em actually liked to hear Jake tell the stories. She’d encourage him. Even at the dinner table. Then she would correct him, but oh so nicely. She would say that she liked to hear him tell stories, that it was good he had an imagination.That someday he could write books and tell others these stories and they would enjoy them as much as his mother did. She said imagination was something about which Jake should be proud. He would nod at her and finish combining his mashed potatoes and peas. But I saw in his eyes that he thought she was crazy.

It all happened very quickly after that. The fire at the daycare. Miss Marsha presumed dead. Everyone wondered at the time why she would have been at the daycare in the middle of the night anyway, which is when the fire broke out. They still haven’t identified that young woman whose body was found in the fire. Maybe they never will. They did determine she died by a gunshot to the head and not from the fire itself.

Obviously, no children perished in that middle of the night blaze. But four of the children, the oldest enrollees, did disappear shortly after that fire.

“Abducted” is what the media report. In a sense, that’s true. But in another sense it isn’t.

I began waking suddenly at night in the period immediately after the fire. I’d often find Jake awake and creeping around the house. At three or four in the morning. Often, I’d catch him at the windows peering out into the night. My wife thought he had become a sleepwalker because of the trauma from the fire. We didn’t enroll him in a new daycare. It was all too disturbing and we wanted to keep him close to us. Em’s sister would watch him in the daytime. In our house.

I’d always ask Jake what he was doing up and what he was looking for out the window. He told me he missed his “special friend.” I was terrified there might have been sexual abuse going on and that Jake was turning it all into some sort of surreal fantasy narrative. I really only thought this after the fire. That’s what made me think the conflagration was used as a cover-up for some serious shit at Helping Hands. But, thinking back, I remember the strange fur we would find on his clothes. We knew animals, even pets, were not allowed in the daycare. We’d drop him off there and pick him up. He didn’t go anywhere else. So where was he getting that? And what sort of animal was it? My God, when I think back at how I just shook off so many anomalies, I want to go back in time and shake the shit out of myself, and that “normalcy narrative” to which I kept clinging.

Anyway, you know the end of the story. Or what I told the police. There is no real end to the story. I say I don’t remember, but I do. In the middle of the night, when I’m lying in bed, I think of Jake. And I listen. I leave the windows open in spring, summer, even late into autumn. I listen for the sound of that…beast. If it came once, it might come again. Jake might ride it back here. The way I saw him riding it that night.

My only consolation is knowing this: that beast would not harm Jake. Even with its incredible size (where does a creature like that even hide on earth? under the earth, of course, they must be under the earth!) and even with its monstrous tusks and that barbed tail, I could see it was tame to him. I saw him run to it in the backyard. It had been patiently waiting for him. I saw the beast lay its head to the earth, in submission. I watched as Jake scrambled up its back and took its reins in hand. And then the thing let out a weird guttural cry and they were off. I chased it. I chased them in my bare feet, in my underwear. But they were swallowed up by the forest behind our house. I heard Jake calling out commands to the thing.

The police didn’t know what to make of the tracks. They said I had been hallucinating. Ambien is known to have that effect. And I had been taking that drug at the time. I won’t deny that. The wouldn’t even put that in the police report. About the tracks. The only way it got in later was when I accused the police of covering it up, of trying to make me look crazier and more like a suspect.

But then, in their hearts, the cops knew I hadn’t done anything to harm Jake. Because he was one fourth of the “Ravenswood Four,” the kids who disappeared that night. All Jake’s age. And all former enrollees of Helping Hands daycare.

Who knows who Miss Marsha really was. And who knows where those four kids are now. I think Jake still has his mount. And I think he’s still riding that beast even as he becomes a young man. If I tell you I think he’s down there, under our feet, you’ll think I’m crazy. Far, far under our feet. But I know it’s true.