Man Fiction Weekly

The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock.

Dude number 2 here.  This isn’t a review because I haven’t finished the book yet, but I wanted to talk about Donald Ray and how his fiction should strike fear in the heart of the “Quirky.”  I was talking to Dude #1 recently, mostly about how Man Fiction might be on an uptick, when I looked down to an area of carpet around my side of the bed that was covered in books I bought from the Borders good-bye and good-luck sale.  There were a couple classics that I haven’t got around to reading like Confederacy of Dunces and White Noise, but the large majority of the stack of books included newer hardcovers that I’d heard about one way or another.  I’m not ashamed to say I bought two old McSweeney’s quarterlies, the newspaper one, and the Caren Beilin one.  Then there was The Devil All the Time sitting there looking at me so mean and intense.  Its cover has an orange bloodstain dripping off a golden retriever sitting on hanging logs surrounded by crude hovering crosses.  Not that I judge books by their covers, but fuck me this is a beautiful book.  It doesn’t take long to realize that what this book is doing hasn’t been done in an honest way since Flannery O’Connor.  The only difference is that Pollock isn’t attempting some posh new form of Southern Gothic; rather, he is writing about what he knows—the land and people of rural Ohio.  Call it Middle Gothic—he will be the godfather.  He follows Knockemstiff, a collection of stories, with The Devil, this even grittier novel.  I’m halfway through it, and I couldn’t wait to write on it.  Where I grew up in South Georgia, we had Rattlesnake Baptists, Dude #3 can speak to this; however, in Ohio there are spider eating revivalists!  Need I say more?  Drop the shape-shifter chronicles, and pick up something that will put hair on your chest.            

The Kyler

From time to time I will have subs made at this grocery store deli by my house, usually when I’m tired from work or do not feel like rearranging my garage to access my grill.  There’s a mish-mosh of workers that man the deli/meat counter at the grocery store, but every time I go there lately, I only seem to get one guy that waits on me.  His name his Kyle R.  His friends and coworkers lovingly call him Kyler as in “Yo Kyler, makin a sub?” or “Kyler, wazzzup?”  He is taller than me and much younger, high school I think, and he’s working on a nearly complete mustache.  He’s got this cold stare that ruminates from two beady black eyes and skin that’s pale and populated with red and white pimples.  He is fat—not pretty.  From an outside view of Kyler, I like him.  I understand his awkward pain and his subtle rage towards the customer—the whole world even!  At first, the little things he does at the sandwich counter make me laugh.  For instance, he once ran his hands through his floppy hair and without gloves made a Club Sub.  Once, he dropped a whole loaf of bread on the ground and put it back on the cooling rack.  He shot me a smile, like yeah…I do that sometimes.  Things have been falling off lately though.  He’ll cough in his hands and continue crafting sandwiches.  When I asked for banana peppers last week, he looked down at the empty container that was filled with neon green juice, made a stop-gap cup out of his hand, filled his hand with the juice, and then dripped the juice over the top of my sub.  When I said “Really,” he looked at me and shrugged.  Hand to God he shrugged!  Yesterday though, everything changed.  This is what happened:

 I asked for two subs on white bread. “What kind of bread?” he said.  I said "white," again.  “On both?” he asked.  I said yes.  A manager-type lady was filling the chicken salad display to my left.  “What kind of cheese?” he said.  Provolone with extra provolone, I said.  “I have to charge you for the extra cheese,” he said.  The manager-type lady looks up and said “Kyler, we don’t charge for extra cheese here.”  He put the extra cheese on.  He finished my wife’s sub, and handed it to me, pushing it at me and dropping it before I could grab it—it fell into my basket.  When he was working on mine, I noticed the bread had seeds on the outside.  This is when things got dicey.  I asked what kind of bread he was using.  “Wheat,” he said.  I asked what kind of bread he used for the other sub.  “Wheat,” he said again.  “I ordered the subs on white bread,” I said.  It didn’t compute for Kyler.  “Did you hear me?” I asked.  “You said wheat,” he said.  I was horrified, but not totally surprised.  “I said white bread,” I repeated.  Now there was a short line forming behind me.  People were watching, I felt them.  Kyler rolled the sub up in the brown wax paper, not in the fresh sandwich wrapping paper, and he hands it to me nicely.  “You said wheat,” he said finally and moved to the next customer.  What happened next goes against everything I stand for, and I am not proud of my actions.  I walked up to customer service and I had a sit-down with the store manager.  I thought she would say, “oh, he’s on the school/work program” or “Kyler’s slow,” but the lady looked into my eyes and said horribly, “I’ll take care of it.”  As I was walking out with my groceries, I looked over and Kyler was laughing, he looked so happy.

Other things that are not Awesome

"Being a writer", for the past year or so, has not been awesome. "Being a writer," has involved a lot of waiting. "Being a writer," has involved holding down a lot of menial, slightly embarrassing jobs, in order to earn a very meager living (walking other people's dogs, selling beer at football games, sorting through emails, attending construction prebids at Red Lobsters and Wendy's). "Being a writer"might as well be called "being a slightly incompetent and very slow editor of one's own work."

This is a word map of my past year: Finish book, query, query, walk dogs, query, walk dogs, sell beer, walk dogs, query, wait, wait wait, send sample pages, wait, send full MS, wait, walk dogs, walk dogs, do more embarrassing shit for money, wait, wait, wait, sink into a depression you don't know if you'll ever come out of, important phone conversation, revise, revise, walk dogs, walk dogs, revise, wait, wait, wait, get married, wait, more queries, walk dogs, more full requests, offers of representation, walk dogs, sign contract with agent, revise, revise, wait, walk dogs, wait, sink further into a depression that you thought couldn't get deeper, wait, revise, revise, walk dogs, revise, wait, wait, walk dogs, wait, out on submission, walk dogs, wait, buy house, wait, hear about book going on second reads, wait, wait, walk dogs, do other embarrassing shit for money, walk dogs, wait, rejection, rejection, rejection, rejection, rejection, rejection, rejection, revise, walk dogs, walk dogs, revise, the pit of depression is apparently bottomless, revise, revise, wait, walk dogs, walk dogs, wait, wait, wait, sign contract for new play commission, wait, wait, walk dogs, wait, wait wait.

Fine, one actual substantive reason that Seth Abramson is bullshit is that he ranked the Wisconsin MFA program, at which he is a student, second in the country. That, my dudes, is not objectivity. That is bullshit.

Montana is Awesome, Seth Abramson is not

I created this blog because I lacked an appropriate venue to tell world that this guy is a little bitch. We will see what it grows into from there.

Why is he a bitch? Let me count the ways. Only a little bitch would have a picture of Keanu Reeves on his blog instead of himself. Only a little bitch would wear this scarf.

But this guy, more specifically, is a bitch because of this, in which Montana, the best MFA program in the country, is ranked 21.

I could now go on and on with "data" and "methodology", but that would make me a bit of a bitch, which I am not.

So there you go. Post number one.

There are three of us (although only two of us are actually officially existing here at this point). We are buds. No bitches here.  That's enough info for the time being because I (dude #1) have some serious shit to talk about a wide range of topics, and I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. Except for Seth Abramson. Who is a bitch.