Fountain of the Peeing Boy in Footie Pajamas: An Introduction to Logic

Logic has never been my forte, so it shocked me and everyone I knew when I got an A in my Intro to Logic course in college. There’s a valid explanation for this, though. Homework in this particular class was optional, so if we didn’t do the assignment, there were no consequences; if we got an A on the homework, the professor would give us extra credit; and if we got all the problems wrong, we knew it wouldn’t impact our grade. Plus, the professor would always encourage us to go over our errors with her or her TAs at office hours. “Learning happens by trial and error” was her motto.

Our grades were based solely on midterm and final exam scores. Having nothing better to do first thing in the morning, I would actually go to class and even do the assigned homework. I never answered a single homework problem correctly, but after getting a big fat F each time, I’d go to office hours and the professor or one of her TAs would patiently walk me through each problem until I got it right. By the time midterms and finals rolled around, I could do all the deductive syllogisms necessary to pull an A.

What I’m trying to illustrate is that logic has never been second nature to me. Yet, to my amazement, I’ve managed to get through 35 years of life and counting, even though I grew up with a mind undiluted by rational thinking.

To offer another example of my imperfect left brain and hyper-developed right brain: at the same time I was taking Introduction to Logic, I was working as a clerk for a claims management office. For my first couple years there, I was unacquainted with the office computers. Mostly all I did was file medical and workers comp records all day, every day, which was fine by me since it gave my mind a chance to go off on its perennial pleasure cruises while my body followed a simple, Zen regimen of stuffing carbon copies of personal injury forms into manila folders. But every so often, as I went about my office chores, gonglike booms would sound from either side of the filing cabinets. After hearing these several times, I surmised that I was having paranormal experiences, that the Universe was communicating with me—and only me—through spooky, magical crescendos. For months on the job, I attempted to decode these communications. Was I being chosen for some epic destiny? Why else would I be hearing these dramatic surges? I later discovered that what I was hearing was the sound of my supervisors turning on their Mac PCs.

These examples are part of a longstanding pattern of absentmindedness and harebrained conclusions that started way back in my childhood. They even preceded the night that our dentist’s son, Johnny Markewicz, slept over at our house in the spring of 1979. I was five years old and my brother Kent was nine. Johnny was a year ahead of Kent in school and Kent wanted to get in good with an upperclassmen, so he begged our Mom to ban his embarrassing little brother (that would be me) from joining in the good times he and Johnny were planning on having together, playing with G.I. Joe action figures and Matchbox cars. Never one to suffer silently, I howled and screamed worse than any werewolf or werewolf’s victim until our Mom handed down the verdict that it was only fair that I should be able to be wherever I wanted in the house.

Kent gnashed his teeth and called me, “Brat!,” as usual. It was an insult, sure, but it wasn’t a swear word so he could get away with it. Still, it hurt every time he said it, especially since I didn’t want Kent feeling annoyed by me. His steady stream of jokes were so uproarious, I felt I just had to follow him everywhere he’d go, including to the bathroom—the one place where he could yell for Mom to finally shake me off his trail. Who could blame me, though? Kent was the one who taught me such humdingers as:

“So, the doctor said, ‘Here’s my thermometer, now where did I put my pen?’”

And:

“Doctor, Doctor! I think I’m a goat!”

“How long have you felt like this?”

“Since I was a kid!”

After punching out these staples of his comedic repertoire, I would doubled-over, blinded by tears of laughter, only to straighten up and find that Kent had made a break for it. I’d sometimes have to spend hours sleuthing out where he went but most of the time I managed to find and pester him until he told me more jokes.

At first, every time these early shoots of Kent’s comic genius broke through, I’d end up wetting my pants. To put an end to this putrid habit, my parents imposed a new house rule stating that, whenever Kent made me laugh to the point of urination, I’d have to go straight to the bathroom and wash my hands after flushing. On paper, this all looks reasonable enough, but my trips to the bathroom ended up quadrupling as a result of their new ordinance. Not only that, but my time away from Kent meant that I was missing out on a good three-fourths of his inspired knee-slappers. I also failed to understand why one had to pee in the bathroom, of all places. Why not pee on the sidewalk, the grass, or against a brick wall? It only seemed logical that, wherever one spent a penny, a whirlpool would appear to flush the urine away with a whoosh.

So, with official permission to participate in the fun and frolics of Kent and Johnny’s sleepover, I suited up into my sunny yellow footie pajamas, which had white padded feet and white rings at the cuffs. Kent wore his orange and blue Chicago Bears PJs while Johnny’s pajamas had a white background where assorted Superheroes—Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Aquaman—showed off their various feats of power and dexterity. Johnny’s jammies alone showed how much cooler he was than us. I wanted to be around him even more than Kent. This whole affair was nothing short of thrilling for me, even though they both cold-shouldered me the whole time, hoarding their Hotwheels cars and barricading the two-tiered Mattel highway system with their bigger bodies. The best I could do was assume the sidelines. Still, I was so excited to be with the big boys, I hardly noticed their ostracism.

As we all hunkered down with toys on our bedroom’s shaggy red carpet, Johnny caught sight of the Tigger knockoff that I got for Christmas the year before. This particular orange plush-toy tiger was squat, whiskery and stationary where the real Tigger is lithe, bouncy and has only a few strands of whiskers shooting from both ends of his upper lip. Still, it was clearly a tiger, which is why the observation that Johnny made next struck me as not only bizarre but stupid. He turned to Kent and said, “I like your lion.” A lion? I sneered as I turned to Kent, awaiting his response. Kent picked up the knockoff Tigger, shook it around in front of his face and said in a gruff cartoony voice, “Tiger. I ain’t lyin’!”

Johnny merely giggled but I stood up, held my belly and gasped with laughter, gobbling gulps of oxygen like a fish. I laughed and laughed and laughed until I could feel my bladder growing heavy as an Acme Anvil. Then I laughed harder, harder than I’d ever laughed before. Flouting what I saw as a nonsensical convention, I refused to go to the toilet to relieve myself. Instead, in a fit of hilarity, I climbed on top of my mattress and stood above Kent and Johnny’s heads, catching my breath before unzipping my footie pajamas, lowering my Underoos crotch and chuckling myself pink as I hosed down our shaggy red carpet with a pipeline full of pee.

Kent and Johnny Markewicz could not help but pay attention to me now. But why weren’t they laughing? They both looked at me like I was a bank robber, who’d shot the teller pointblank before turning the gun on them. To my equal dismay, though, as the last few urine drops fell, I noticed that no vortex of water had arisen, as planned, to drain the offending liquid from the carpet threads.

Hot tears streamed down Johnny Markewicz’s eyes as he screamed that he wanted to go home. He refused sleep on any of our beds and he wouldn’t even accept an offer to sleep in a sleeping bag on our basement floor. After all, our basement was carpeted and God knows what I might have done on it during a funny moment on The Banana Splits. After Mr. Markewicz picked Johnny up to bring him home, Kent glowered at Mom for allowing me to come along and ruin his every shot at primary-grade popularity. As Mom knelt beside a bucket of soap on my bedroom’s shaggy red carpet, scrubbing away and remonstrating me for this senseless act, I stood in my now zipped-up footie pajamas, scratching my chin and wondering why the hell the whirlpool never showed up on my bedroom carpet the way it always did in our toilets.

Slowing Down Time with a French Movie

Julius woke up at 3:15 this Monday morning. This is how it’s going to be from now on. His new job at BP is in Houston. He comes back weekends and I stay here in New York, managing the estate, slogging through freelance articles and new story ideas, and eking an agent and a publisher for 85A. Before he even got to LaGuardia, he sent me three texts on my cell phone. Maybe I’ll hear from him another time after he lands and then we’ll have our nightly Skype session. These are all great approximations of being together in person, but approximations are only approximations.

Last week, we went down to Houston. The sidewalks look positively post-armageddon. Nobody but nobody walks down them. The city’s too freakin’ hot to step outside for any longer than it takes to rush to your car, which is probably why the architecture – besides the scattering of Chicago-esque skyscrapers downtown – doesn’t go far beyond strip-mall chic. Not even the tannest construction-working hunk can put in the amount of time and energy necessary to cobble together a metropolitan marvel in that sun. On the upside, since Houstonians don’t like wandering outside too much, the high-rises are stocked to the roof with amenities – workout rooms, cyber cafes, conference rooms, and rec rooms. Such buildings are also quite cosmopolitan, what with so many multinational corporations down there importing so much overseas talent. We got Julius an apartment in one such place, as well as a Lexus minivan for his twenty minute commute to work via the gargantuan freeway, where America’s dependence on oil is on full display.

But yesterday we went to see Oliver Assayas’ L’Heure D’Ete at Lincoln Plaza Cinema, here in New York. The film centers on how three siblings divvy up the estate of their widowed mother, an estimable painter and antique collector, after she passes away. The Musee D’Orsay takes an interest in her collection and, since none of the siblings is available to take occupancy of the estate, they sell the mother’s house and most of her assets. At one point, one of the siblings and his spouse follow an English-language tour through the Musee D’Orsay, which stops for a cursory glance at the mother’s antiques before moving briskly on to other points of interest. The son sees his mother’s vases – which for him are brimming with sentimental value – perched in an antiseptic glass case, stripped of the comforts of home.

I’ll admit that, though the cinematography was splendiferous, I found the movie to be pretty slow-going. When the credits rolled, Julius asked me what I thought about L’Heure D’Ete and, after taking a moment to ponder, I could only say, “Very French.” I didn’t know how else to put it. For better or for worse, French cinema builds its narratives far more subtly and patiently than American cinema – to the point where I wonder, after seeing certain French films, if anything even happened in the two hours I spent wearing out my buttocks in the chair.

But Julius set me straight. He pointed out how L’Heure D’Ete’s nuances were consonant with those of our own life in Brooklyn. He said, “After we both die, nobody will ever know how much life took place in our house. They’ll never know what we both thought and what we both felt and the value that we ascribed to our keepsakes, which are worth far more than any price tag could ever say.” Tears were starting to pool in his eyes like they do at the opera or like they did the first time I showed him Susan Boyle on Youtube.

I was considerably more stoic, “Well, that’s true. Nobody can live within our own subjective experience.”

“Yes,” he said, “But that’s what’s so sad. A century from now, nobody will ever care that Marquez used to sleep on top of the couch with his back paw dangling off the side. But to me…it means a lot…”

Dammit, he had to play the cat card! He got my eyes watering too. And leave it to the French to drive home the point of existential loneliness on a day when the music’s pumping and the horns are blaring from the Puerto Rican Day Parade on Fifth Avenue.

We walked over to Fiorelli’s for pizza afterwards and ordered a bottle of wine. It was about seven at night and I was still a little hungover from the triple bon-voyage dinner party that we hosted on Saturday night. Our friend Rolando is moving back to Paraguay, our friend Ian is moving to Pittsburgh, and Julius had already started his job in Houston. Yesterday morning, we heard that Kim Jong-il is threatening a nuclear attack on the United States, which some say that we can easily thwart while others are far more wary. Then there’s the unactionable meme in the blogosphere that the Mayans predicted that the world will end on December 21, 2012. (Scholars of the Mayan Civilization overwhelmingly refute this claim but many bloggers love the sense of importance that fear-mongering gives them.) None of that mattered much to me as we sat at Fiorelli’s, watching New York carry on in all its dynamism. If the apocalypse ever were to hit (and how many times has it failed to hit despite how many Jeremiahs throughout history have hailed its advent?), there’s nothing I can do about it. I can just remember how lovely life was while it was here, how adorable Marquez’s paw was draped over the couch as he took his twentieth nap of the day.

Julius called again while I was in the middle of writing this blog post. He says he misses me. We’ve barely been apart five hours and already we miss each other.

I have enough work to do to offset an overwhelm of loneliness. As for social life, I still see Mike Levine once or twice a week; Rachael still emails with more word from London almost every day; Johnjon is right down the street. I found a new Buddhist community right here in Brooklyn, where I feel a true sense of sangha and belonging and which also functions as somewhat of a support group for those experiencing impermanence. And, hey, at least I know the value of my own subjective experience.  Like the courtesan Garance said in Les Enfants Du Paradis (”Children of Paradise”): “I like my little life.”

85A: The Cover

85A Front Cover (Joe Flood, Illustrator)

Yes, I’ve been away from the blog for a long time. I was busy finishing the pre-publisher/agent draft of 85A. Now I’m preparing the proposal.

The highly instructive book Your Novel Proposal: From Creation to Contract by Blythe Cameson and Marshall J. Cook suggests that we take a kitchen-sink approach to proposal submissions,  incorporating everything from marketing ideas to possible cover designs.

Now seemed as good a time as any to tap my eminently talented illustrator friend Joe Flood to do the cover design. I am out of superlatives to describe the expertise with which he executed the illustration above.

The cover depicts a dream that my 15-year-old protagonist, Seamus, has after waking up in the hospital after a suicide attempt and hearing from the doctor that it was a miracle that he survived (naturally, if you steal any of the following text, I’ll sic my lawyers on you):

“Dr. Lang left the room. I closed my eyes. There was an IV in my arm but I was so beat, I hardly noticed. I dropped right off to sleep and dreamed I was back in the station wagon in our garage. Only this time, the garage was open. A wind whipped in and washed out all the exhaust. I got out of the car, walked out of the garage past Frank Seaberg, who was standing with one foot inside and one foot outside the garage, and down our driveway to the sidewalk. I walked down Ponchitrain Street to the corner of Lehigh. It was dark as the night before, the night I planned to make my last, and the streetlights were glowing. I looked far off into the distance across the railroad tracks and saw the Chicago skyline like I always do on a clear day. I watched it for a little while. But, all of a sudden, all the lights went off on all the skyscrapers and new lights started rising up. I saw London Bridges and Big Ben. London was in sight beyond the railroad tracks, where the Sears Tower, John Hancock and all the other downtown buildings used to be. I could feel my heart opening wider and wider. The Chicago skyline lights came back on soon after, but the London lights stayed on too. And between Chicago and London, more bridges and skyscrapers started coming up on the horizon, ones that I didn’t recognize at first. I recognized the Empire State Building from old movies, though, so something in me knew I was looking at New York. Looking out from the bus stop, I saw Chicago, New York and London standing together, not as three different places, but as one continuous city. I turned my head north toward Touhy Avenue and saw the 85A coming my way, opening its doors before it could even make a full stop. I looked at the driver. It was Oscar Wilde in his curls, a frock coat and a lavender silk scarf. I saw there was only one passenger on the bus. It was none other than Johnny Rotten, sitting toward the front with his legs draped over the seat next to him. He was wearing a black overcoat, square shades and a sneer. He was drinking a can of Guiness and wiping dribble off his chin. I remember thinking, I didn’t get to do Earnest, but I didn’t miss the bus either. There’s still life on the horizon.”

Check out Joe Flood’s work on his website, www.kneedeeppress.com.

Must-Watch: Keith Olbermann on Proposition 8

Shell sent this to me. It’s Keith Olbermann addressing the passage of Proposition 8 in California. His segment is utterly heartrending – and he’s not even gay!

Anyone who voted Yes on 8 should be ashamed of themselves. Truly a low water mark in a time that presages so much hope.

In case you have trouble playing the video, here is the Full Text:

FULL TEXT of Keith Olbermann on MSNBC – Monday, November 10, 2008

As promised, a Special Comment on the passage, last week, of Proposition Eight in California, which rescinded the right of same-sex couples to marry, and tilted the balance on this issue, from coast to coast.

Some parameters, as preface. This isn’t about yelling, and this isn’t about politics, and this isn’t really just about Prop-8. And I don’t have a personal investment in this: I’m not gay, I had to strain to think of one member of even my very extended family who is, I have no personal stories of close friends or colleagues fighting the prejudice that still pervades their lives.

And yet to me this vote is horrible. Horrible. Because this isn’t about yelling, and this isn’t about politics.

This is about the… human heart, and if that sounds corny, so be it.

If you voted for this Proposition or support those who did or the sentiment they expressed, I have some questions, because, truly, I do not… understand. Why does this matter to you? What is it to you? In a time of impermanence and fly-by-night relationships, these people over here want the same chance at permanence and happiness that is your option. They don’t want to deny you yours. They don’t want to take anything away from you. They want what you want — a chance to be a little less alone in the world.

Only now you are saying to them — no. You can’t have it on these terms. Maybe something similar. If they behave. If they don’t cause too much trouble. You’ll even give them all the same legal rights — even as you’re taking away the legal right, which they already had. A world around them, still anchored in love and marriage, and you are saying, no, you can’t marry. What if somebody passed a law that said you couldn’t marry?

I keep hearing this term “re-defining” marriage.

If this country hadn’t re-defined marriage, black people still couldn’t marry white people. Sixteen states had laws on the books which made that illegal… in 1967. 1967.

The parents of the President-Elect of the United States couldn’t have married in nearly one third of the states of the country their son grew up to lead. But it’s worse than that. If this country had not “re-defined” marriage, some black people still couldn’t marry…black people. It is one of the most overlooked and cruelest parts of our sad story of slavery. Marriages were not legally recognized, if the people were slaves. Since slaves were property, they could not legally be husband and wife, or mother and child. Their marriage vows were different: not “Until Death, Do You Part,” but “Until Death or Distance, Do You Part.” Marriages among slaves were not legally recognized.

You know, just like marriages today in California are not legally recognized, if the people are… gay.

And uncountable in our history are the number of men and women, forced by society into marrying the opposite sex, in sham marriages, or marriages of convenience, or just marriages of not knowing — centuries of men and women who have lived their lives in shame and unhappiness, and who have, through a lie to themselves or others, broken countless other lives, of spouses and children… All because we said a man couldn’t marry another man, or a woman couldn’t marry another woman. The sanctity of marriage. How many marriages like that have there been and how on earth do they increase the “sanctity” of marriage rather than render the term, meaningless?

What is this, to you? Nobody is asking you to embrace their expression of love. But don’t you, as human beings, have to embrace… that love? The world is barren enough.

It is stacked against love, and against hope, and against those very few and precious emotions that enable us to go forward. Your marriage only stands a 50-50 chance of lasting, no matter how much you feel and how hard you work.

And here are people overjoyed at the prospect of just that chance, and that work, just for the hope of having that feeling. With so much hate in the world, with so much meaningless division, and people pitted against people for no good reason, this is what your religion tells you to do? With your experience of life and this world and all its sadnesses, this is what your conscience tells you to do?

With your knowledge that life, with endless vigor, seems to tilt the playing field on which we all live, in favor of unhappiness and hate… this is what your heart tells you to do? You want to sanctify marriage? You want to honor your God and the universal love you believe he represents? Then Spread happiness — this tiny, symbolic, semantical grain of happiness — share it with all those who seek it. Quote me anything from your religious leader or book of choice telling you to stand against this. And then tell me how you can believe both that statement and another statement, another one which reads only “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

—

You are asked now, by your country, and perhaps by your creator, to stand on one side or another. You are asked now to stand, not on a question of politics, not on a question of religion, not on a question of gay or straight. You are asked now to stand, on a question of…love. All you need do is stand, and let the tiny ember of love meet its own fate. You don’t have to help it, you don’t have it applaud it, you don’t have to fight for it. Just don’t put it out. Just don’t extinguish it. Because while it may at first look like that love is between two people you don’t know and you don’t understand and maybe you don’t even want to know…It is, in fact, the ember of your love, for your fellow **person…

Just because this is the only world we have. And the other guy counts, too.

This is the second time in ten days I find myself concluding by turning to, of all things, the closing plea for mercy by Clarence Darrow in a murder trial.

But what he said, fits what is really at the heart of this:

“I was reading last night of the aspiration of the old Persian poet, Omar-Khayyam,” he told the judge.

“It appealed to me as the highest that I can vision. I wish it was in my heart, and I wish it was in the hearts of all:

“So I be written in the Book of Love;

“I do not care about that Book above.

“Erase my name, or write it as you will,

“So I be written in the Book of Love.”

—

Good night, and good luck.

A Review of OPIUM: DIARY OF A MADWOMAN

This is my review of Opium: Diary of a Madwoman, which will be published tomorrow in Edge Magazine.

In 2002, I was at the Foreign Theater in San Francisco for the American premiere of Jean Pierre Denis’ Murderous Maids. Denis’ superb film about incest and cold-blooded murder was so disturbing and fraught with treachery and suspense that, by the time Christine started banging her head against her prison-cell wall, I forgot where I was and blurted out to the absent director, “Could you give us a break here!” If you take something like that one head-banging clip – minus any intrigue or suspense – and stretch it out to 109 minutes, you basically got Janos Szasz’s Opium: Diary of a Madwoman.

This Hungarian film scatters its jabs so consistently that it becomes a pointless melee rather than a commentary on the history of mental institutions or a meditation on the connection between genius and insanity. The year is 1913 and Gizella (Kirsti Stubo), a mental patient who believes that the forces of evil have hijacked her brain and body, is subjected to every draconian treatment that a pre-World War I insane asylum could devise. Dr. Josef Brenner (Ulrich Thomsen) is a morphine addict, an aspiring man of letters and sexual deviant whom the asylum welcomes with open arms. Upon entering the gates for the first time, Brenner witnesses the head surgeon performing one of the institution’s many lobotomies in a graphic and gruesome scene involving a mallet and a needle. Later the same day, he meets Gizella for the first time when he finds her in the basement, masturbating and screaming about the Evil One. Brenner cannot help but feel he’s found his true love. Better yet, Gizella is also a writer, one who transcribes every word the Evil One dictates, be it on paper, the floor or the walls, depending on whether she has another of her many shriek-fest fights with the fascist nuns who confiscate her pens. Brenner continuously remarks on how he admires Gizella’s genius but the film gives few examples of the lunatic’s written ravings. We mostly just see her screaming, masturbating or getting strapped to many and sundry racks.

To keep his film from degenerating into gratuitous balderdash, Szasz dresses his sets and cast up in elaborate period décor and costumes. But, to quote Barack Obama, “You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.” Opium: Diary of a Madwoman does not give us The Snakepit or Suddenly Last Summer’s searing expose of abuses in the mental-health industry. It doesn’t give us the Marquis de Sade’s trenchant writing and revenge in Quills. It gives nothing on the order of Salieri’s cathartic confession in the loony bin in Amadeus. Scene by scene, it just gives us more reasons to avert our eyes.

The First Family

My wonderful friend and former boss, Aurie Pennick, President of the Field Foundation, sent me this picture with the email caption, “It Just Looks Right.” Her message contained another pithy aphorism, “As It Should Be.”

It is indeed a remarkable image and a welcome and long overdue moment in our history.

To follow up on my last blog post regarding Proposition 8: after Aurie sent me this, I emailed her back, thanking her and saying that I look forward to the day that a gay president will be in this picture with his or her spouse and children.

Many people lost hope that they’d ever see a first family like the one above. Likewise, this picture should give hope to those of us who oppose Proposition 8 and long to see gay spouses and their family in the highest, elected office.

Proposition 8 Passed: Bummer Bigotry on Obama’s Big Day

So, amid my bliss over Obama’s election, I read the news a few minutes ago that California voters passed Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage. Can’t I ever just get an all-around Good News Day????

Says Frank Schubert, co-manager of the Yes on 8 campaign: “People believe in the institution of marriage. It’s one institution that crosses ethnic divides, that crosses partisan divides…People have stood up because they care about marriage and they care a great deal.”

Nice try at making marriage sound like an inclusive, ecumenical institution – “crosses ethnic divides…crosses partisan divides” – but it doesn’t cross divides in sexual orientation, does it? I guess it’s not supposed to. People on our side of the divide are dirty and deviant, aren’t we?

Oh, and “crosses ethnic divides”: clever, au courant way of inviting minorities to come on board and hate us as much as you and your kind once hated them.

Naturally, the Schubert camp will invoke the Bible, which condones all manner of bigotry.

Oh, yes, the Yes voters “care about marriage…they care a great deal”: and that’s why their divorce rates are over 50%.

Why is the (supposedly) straight majority so bent on claiming marriage as their own? How does commitment within homosexual relationships detract from commitment within heterosexual relationships? Why are some willing to go so far as to “concede” the right to civil unions to us (like we should even have to ask) but not marriage, as though we have no purchase on the sanctified term? John Edwards was one. Look how much respect he showed for the very institution that he said he would refuse to extend to gays – and he was cheating the whole time he was taking this moral high-ground, while his wife was battling cancer.

Meanwhile as Proposition 8 revved up in California, Arkansas voters approved a ban on unmarried couples from serving as adoptive or foster parents. Supporters did not hide that gays and lesbians were their chief target.

So, even with the hope that an Obama tomorrow brings, it does not herald an end to inequities.

Greeted as Liberators! (And, This Time, Rightly So…)

I’ll never forget where I was. It was 8 pm here in Brooklyn. Julius and I locked ourselves in place in our library. Julius was wearing his Obama t-shirt and Obama buttons. (And he says he’s not superstitious!) I supplicated myself before all the benevolent forces in the ethers. We both had our laptops out and CNN blaring.

First, CNN announced that Obama won Pennsylvania. I was hugging our cats and cheering, “We won!” Julius warned not to speak too soon. But then we won Ohio! Not even Julius could crab that. Still, it wasn’t official. A landslide of electoral votes poured into the Obama column. And then…Virginia! It was all over! For once, I can say that with relief!

Still, CNN was about to go on counting polls and I thought we’d have to wait until 1 am to get the official word. But, at about 11 pm, Wolf Blitzer stopped in midsentence to announce late-breaking news. A new screen broke in with Barack’s image. “Barack Obama has been elected President of the United States!”

I’m still trying to take it all in. We watched via satellite as Barack spoke before over 200,000 people in Grant Park in my hometown of Chicago. I became homesick, but Julius and I put our coats on and went to 5th Avenue. What can I say, it was a Par-tay!

Hope at last! Hope at last! Hope at last!

(Oh, yeah…And no more Sarah Palin!)

Kyle Thomas Smith

Brooklyn, NY

A Review of Toni Morrison’s A MERCY

By Kyle Thomas Smith

This is my review of Toni Morrison’s new book A Mercy.

It will appear this week in Edge Magazine.

In 1990, three years before winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Toni Morrison said in an interview with Bill Moyers: “I rewrite and rewrite to make the books look like they were written in a matter of hours.”

That’s one of the things I love most about Morrison whom I hail as one of the world’s greatest living authors. In interviews, she might appear to be all intellect, but her greatest works—Sula, Song of Solomon, Jazz, Beloved—are marked by simple, immediate prose that builds up to a burning tower of mythology, violence, calamity, deprivation and her characters’ tempestuous wills to survive. Over the course of her 38 years as a novelist, Toni Morrison has singlehandedly established a universe in which the black experience stands with one foot on the skids of America and the other in the anarchy of an ancient Greek tragedy. When I am hungry for inspiration, I often devour the fierce, possessive passages in Morrison’s books and find my imagination sated while my body quivers from aftershock.

Unfortunately, I did not experience such rapture upon reading her hotly anticipated new novel, A Mercy. When I first picked up the slim 169-page book, I rustled my backside into the couch, preparing for the ride of my life, but soon found myself turning over for a nap. Although lush and erudite, the narration runs like molasses. Pulling my attention back to the storyline was like wrestling the Good Year Blimp back to the ground with a lasso. Thinking that I might just have been having an off day, I gave the book another try the next day…and the next…and the next…and the following week. For the first time in my experience of Morrison, my attention consistently drifted away from the page and into the stratosphere. Oh, how I yearned for the reprieve of her past perfection! Alas, it did not come. No doubt Morrison deserves an A+ for effort and concept on A Mercy, but it’d take round after round of rewrites to give this book the momentum of her masterworks.

Like her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved, Morrison’s A Mercy tackles the subject of American slavery. Where Beloved studied the catastrophic effects of slavery in the years before and after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, A Mercy is set in the 17th Century when slavery first took root in the Dutch, Scandinavian and English colonies on America’s eastern seaboard. In an August 2008 interview, Morrison told New York magazine that she “wanted to get to a place before slavery was equated with race. Whether [slaves] were black or white was less important than what [slave-masters] owned and what their power was.” Where Morrison’s prior works explored societies of people marginalized on account of their race, A Mercy is more of a historical tale meant to underscore Morrison’s scholarly contention that “there is no civilization that did not rest on unpaid labor—not Athens, not Russia, not England, no one.”

Yet the novel’s young slave Florens subsists under conditions that are idyllic compared to the unrelenting treachery in Seth’s life in Beloved. The book begins with Jacob Vaark, a Dutch trader, travelling on horseback through the wilds of Virginia to Maryland to settle a debt that a Portuguese landowner, Senhor D’Ortega, is incapable of paying. Vaark compromises by accepting D’Ortega’s offer to give him one of his slaves. A slave named minha mae begs Vaark to choose her own nine-year-old daughter Florens. Vaark and D’Ortega agree to the arrangement while Florens crumbles inside at her mother’s betrayal. However, Vaark turns out to be a kind, compassionate master who owns acres of forested land in a Dutch-inhabited colony. He has two indentured servants and a Native American worker named Lina, who gloms on to Florens, conferring on her the love she had for the tribe she lost to a smallpox epidemic. Morrison creates a setting where black, white and red seem to all be treated the same.

But when Jacob Vaark dies, his wife Rebekka goes mad with grief. Rebekka had escaped religious persecution in England and hoped to find happiness by marrying Vaark in the New World. Only, disease was so rampant and conditions were so untested that Rebekka ended up losing child after child on its soil. Vaark’s death proves enough to set Rebekka over the edge. She begins to lose faith in a personal God and exacts the role of plantation termagant: “The pleasure of upbraiding an incompetent servant outweighed any satisfaction of a chore well done and the housewife raged happily at every unswept corner, poorly made fire, imperfectly scrubbed pot, carelessly weeded garden row and badly plucked bird.” Moreover, the novel comes equipped with Sorrow, an orphan servant girl who is the repository for all the foreboding that brews in the back of all minds on the Vaark estate. Like Little Father Time in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Sorrow is the embodiment of a doom foretold in the days after Vaark’s death and in the formation of a nation where slavery will soon flourish in the uttermost cruelty. Yet having known life when Vaark, whom Florens refers to as Sir, was still alive, Florens comes to discover that her mother’s abandonment was, in fact, a mercy.

In A Mercy, Morrison tells the stories of more than half a dozen major characters from their own individual points of view. Yet, right up to the last page of the novel, the characters remain surprisingly underdeveloped. Where Morrison once packed her books with allegories that gave ample context to her characters and their strife, A Mercy has a prosaic monotony where precious little folklore and witchcraft lurk. Refreshing as it is that Morrison has presented an historical milieu in which different races coexist without racism—notably, at a time when so many Americans are eagerly waiting to elect Barack Obama—the narrative lacks the poignancy and piquancy that has put her on the pantheon of modern literature. Never did I expect that I would end up writing such criticisms of the beloved Toni Morrison. But what kind of reviewer would I be if I showed A Mercy too much mercy?

Nazi Skinheads, Al Qaeda on the Campaign Trail

When I was growing up, there were Nazi skinheads and anti-Nazi skinheads. To me, as a gay kid on the punk scene, both were equally heinous. The anti-Nazi skinheads’ politics were a little better, except with regards to gays as I mention in 85A. Both camps were bullies and could do a job on you with their steel-toed boots and sometimes broken bottles and knives. The difference between then and now: as far as I know – and I knew the stories – neither camp carried firearms.

Yesterday, I was both shocked and relieved to read the news. The FBI had foiled an elaborate plot that two Nazi skinhead youths – Paul Schlesselman, 18, from Arkansas and Daniel Cowart, 20, from Tennessee – had hatched to decapitate 14 black kids and otherwise kill 74 other black kids before assassinating Barack Obama.

Police had pulled Schlesselman and Cowart over after they’d shot out the window of a Tennessee church. Their car was scrawled with swatstikas, racial epithets, and the numbers 14 and 88, which hold special symoblism in white supremacy and which also signify (a) the number of blacks they planned on beheading (14) and (b) the total number of blacks they planned on killing (88) at an unnamed local high school. Police also seized an unspecified number of unregistered firearms from Schlesselman and Cowart’s car. The two were allegedly on their way to a local gun-dealer whom they were going to rob in an effort to stockpile weapons for their high-school massacre.

After killing 88 blacks, Schlesselman and Cowart planned to don white Tuxedos and top hats and drive off to find and kill Barack Obama. FBI agents doubt that they could have pulled off the Obama assassination. But they might have been able put a dent in their high-school assassination plans.

Schlesselman and Cowart are being held without bond.

This level of hatred, within 8 days of the likely election of America’s first African-American president, makes the Bradley Effect look like miscegenation.

This morning, I had a hard time waking up. That is, until Julius jumped out of the shower and ran into our room, forgetting his towel, to rouse me with the news that Al Qaeda has endorsed McCain. I yawned and said, “Well, why would they do a fool thing like that?”

Nine hours later, I’m still at a loss for answers. Liberals might say that Al Qaeda wants McCain to win so that he’ll get trigger-happy, drain our economy to the dregs, and leave us as sitting ducks for a terrorist arrogation of the United States. Conservatives might say they’re trying to turn Americans off to McCain so that we’ll elect a “weak” leader like Obama, who will let terrorists run roughshod over the nation and the world.

Julius believes that Al Qaeda wants McCain to win so that they can show the world that the Bush administration will essentially continue for a minimum of four more years.

We must recall, though, that Al Qaeda didn’t like Clinton any more than Bush. Their first attempt on the WTC was in 1993 during Clinton’s first year in office. It seems to me that Al Qaeda hates all Americans, Republican or Democrat.

Whatever their rationale, it’s no feather in McCain’s cap that he’s won an Al Qaeda endorsement nor that two Nazis sought to eliminate his opponent.

Before I make my next point, let me qualify that I love Barack Obama, he’s one of my heroes and he has my vote handsdown. I have to come clean and admit, however, that I do have some misgivings about him becoming president. I don’t have any doubt that he’ll do a bang-up job at defending our nation from foreign terrorists. But can he defend himself from domestic terrorists?

This is something we’re going to have to watch as McCain and Palin’s New Red Scare progresses.