Nonfiction Archives • Page 19 of 23 • Eckleburg

August 9, 2013July 19, 2017

Beckett Bingo

Why Beckett? Why Bingo? Because such is life. Because THE BASTARD! HE DOESN’T EXIST! Because habit is a great deadener. Because if I had the use of my body, I would throw it out the window. Because in the language of extinction, precision is next to godliness. Because we wait — we are bored. Because there is nothing to be done. Because we have time to grow old. Because you can play and lose and have done with losing.

Let’s go. Yes, let’s go. (They do not move.)

Steven D Stark is the author of several books of non-fiction and his fiction and poetry have recently been published in Frigg, 3 am, Litn’Image, Mudlark, McSweeney’s, The Cafe Review, HOOT, Otoliths, OccuPoetry, Eclectica, Mobius, fleeting, and, among others, Clapboard House, where he won the short story prize.

July 30, 2013July 19, 2017

Six Degrees of Desperation

Welcome to English Comp for compulsory. This is the first semester of your freshman year at George A Custer Community College. In this class, it is understood that English has already lost the race for your attention. Aside from the usual cynicism, a history of failure may streak through your files like a comet in August. School, after all, is just another piece of the conundrum we call daily life with its jobs, cars, bills, parents, girlfriends, and girlfriends’ parents. English Comp — not comp for competence, but comp for complimentary: There’s no way you’re going to pass this class except by the grace of this institution, or my mental breakdown.

A few of you may be taking English Comp for the second time. That’s because the last teacher — nowhere to be found — gave you an Incomplete.

Life for the Custer student can feel like a losing battle. The artful excuse — this new adjunct professor is only just learning — seems built into the curriculum. If you tell her your hard drive just died, the CD you copied your essay onto is incompatible with all known computers, you nearly got killed on the way to school in a car accident, from which you emerged, to the wonderment of all, intact though limping, she may just believe you. Good acting, after all shows spirit. If you cover your face with your hands or your eyes fill with tears or you rock from side to side, or threaten to walk out of the final exam while explaining your recent hardships and disasters, this usually earns points.

Life at Custer begins with perfecting the distraught voice. Remember to write down all such near-death experiences for the personal essay. For this assignment (see Essay I on page 2 of the syllabus), a sense of drama, timing, and specificity will enhance the narrative. After that we will move on to description, then process and causation, analysis by taking apart, and finally, synthesis; that is, putting it all back together for the argument paper. All this and more in thirty-four meetings, during which I will exhort you to read, read anything at all, while your eyelids droop in the sunlight streaming through the windows of the classroom that doubles as a chemistry lab, and you nod your head or sprawl, embracing your desk like an octopus, as if suffering the sorrows of all humanity.

Like your mother, I want to shake you awake, but I’m deathly afraid of the Oxycontin that will come tumbling out of your pockets.

By now most of you have lost a dear friend to drugs, alcohol, or road accident. Likewise, you realize that your parents’ divorce was inevitable and hardly your fault, and that selling steak knives door-to-door in the inner city reeks of failure in the first degree. Many have dropped out of high school or spent time in rehab. About a tenth of you will withdraw before the end of the first month, and throughout the semester don’t be surprised if one by one your classmates disappear like oxygen on Mars, like dissidents in a third-world country. We will therefore dispense with taking attendance. In fact, all obligations to fulfill requirements for this course will be met during class time only.

Community college deploys certain deceptions or smoke screens a few of you have blown through already. For instance, it is, as some have written in their comparison essays, “no different from high school, only you don’t have to come to class.”

A few words of advice: Success at Custer means keeping your head down. Far better to tread water than make a splash.

Over-achievement: To appear outstanding will only raise the professor’s expectations, tantamount to leaving a polished apple on her desk. Take Jed — the guy is doing well in class; he has handed in most assignments, albeit late. His writing radiates poise and courage. He appears to listen even though he rests his head on the table. All signs point to a shameful secret — the potential for success. Noting this, one day the professor suggests Jed might like to move into Honors English next semester. He looks horrified, as if she has proposed marriage, and disappears for the rest of term. Like Buddha he leaves no traces

Absences: Take care to skip more than one class in a row, particularly if you have a new instructor. To miss every other only makes you conspicuous; an irritant, an undecided; to miss two or even three weeks running leads your instructor to forget you exist. A new teacher lets the absences pile up; she is at first above such petty record keeping, and then one day, it’s too late.

Listening: To talk to your neighbor over the instructor so she occasionally has to whisper Shhh preserves her sense of purpose.

Assignments: Play hard to get; turn in your papers with a fine disregard for deadlines.

Finally, understand this: A student never fails at Custer. The teacher fails. The student earns an incomplete.

Welcome to English Comp for compromise. Drop in now and then.

Kathryn Liebowitz’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry has appeared variously in Harvard Review, Boston Review, The Boston Globe, Poetry Porch, and Wild Apples, among others; her creative nonfiction “Departure and Arrival” is forthcoming in Shadowbox Magazine. She received a Best Fiction Award for work published in Harvard Review, and a Pushcart Prize nomination for an essay in Wild Apples. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and lives in Groton, Massachusetts.

November 6, 2012July 19, 2017

The Love of a Good Christian Voter on Facebook

Hi C___,

I can see you are trying to be a friend, in your way, and that is good. Thank you for your efforts of friendliness and love. On that point, one of the most important aspects of building friendships is for each party to communicate preferences and boundaries.

On the points of theology, we simply don’t agree, but more than that, we are so very far apart that discussions regarding theology would not only be futile but also quite possibly offensive both ways. I do not want to feed that. I will try to address a few areas in the spirit of building communications and a shared sense of respect and boundaries. On the topic of my rape as political platform, I will get there, but first…

SO WE CAN PUT AWAY ANY ASSUMPTION THAT I NEED TO BE EDUCATED ON THE BIBLE

All caps not meant as yelling, simply a title to the section. I grew up in a mixed Nazarene/Baptist family. Church every Sunday and in between and all that. Bible Camp, which I enjoyed mostly. I’ve read and studied the Bible and have sat in more Bible classes than I’d like to admit. I do believe the Bible to be an artful, for its time, set of parables. When I was a child, I believed the parables as fact and creation. I now believe the Bible provides a standard of social expectations that in many ways, not all ways, served and still serves the best needs of society. Unfortunately, some people do not self-discipline. Some people respond to the threat of hellfire and the carrot of heaven. This distresses me, the need of threat and carrot to help some people understand and lead a life of secular morality and recognize when they are not. The place of hellfire in our culture is a barometer of our time and culture. It is a mirror of man, not a basis for creation. I hope, one day, the threats are no longer needed or not needed as much, but I am a realist.

Point being, you can rest assured that my theological study is full and intact for me and mine. I do not require reeducation by a white, male, right wing, conservative Christian. I don’t say that to be mean. I’m simply pointing out the widespread differences between us. I have spiritual models and relationships I turn to for discourse, as you have your own. The two of us trying to save each other isn’t a friendship. So let’s not risk losing a friendship over it, as we all can use as many friendships as we are able to make. If you’d like to talk about art and literature, please, let’s do that.

May I redirect for a moment? I recently visited the Hirsshorn Museum. Took the kids. It was truly amazing. Weiwei’s exhibit was life-changing. What I like in particular is the multiple media incorporated into the single exhibit: photographs of industrial progress and buildings, a sculpture of bundled wood torn down from Buddhist temples, a light display as big as a room, video footage of Beijing traffic… A clean open space, where the viewer can simply ponder the sensory data around him or her. Regardless of spiritual, political, educational… background, the viewer can lose him or herself in the artistic experience and apply the sensoria and media in individual and meaningful ways. Something of a meditation. That is why art is my religion. You and I could sit side by side on a bench and feel as one in experience and place while having completely different connections to the art around us. No one would need to tell us what is good or wrong in the world or in us for us to perceive these individually and safely within our minds, sharing only what we felt comfortable sharing, while still having the company of friendship between us in that moment. Art as religion. Art on a bench. Religion on a bench. Big open spaces. Quiet reflection. Sound familiar? If we one day are able to do this, brother, I will not mind if you pray silently beside me. I will meditate silently and be happy for you that you are praying silently beside me. We can do our respective “thing” side by side and feel good and complete, each of us in our own spaces, shared.

Back to it… Essentially, as I see it, we are coming from very different backgrounds, fields of study, mindsets… We share a few early childhood theologies and high school experiences that I treasure. You have always been an absolute sweetheart. Someone I considered to be a good person, trustworthy, well-meaning, smart and wanting to help people. I guess I didn’t realize how much we were friends then. Now, I see that more. We also got into a little trouble, all of us, what you would call sin, beer parties and such, what I don’t see as sin so much as natural symptoms of growing up and this makes me think of my children. I hope my children make good choices, and in some ways, better choices than I have made, as all parents do. I would be very happy if they followed my paths, too. In some ways they already seem to be doing that, but not in all ways. I am thankful they are independents. I hope and work, every day, to be worthy of them, and I let them guide me. My children are the closest to a thing called God. Children, their innocence and clarity, make us all into our better selves if we have the courage to let it happen.

I’LL NOT GO INTO EVOLUTION

I don’t think those discussions are worth our time and would likely frustrate us both without the opportunity to really truly learn anything of use. I will assume you’ve heard and read the same data and research as I have.

ON “BELIEVING”

I’ve heard the religious rhetoric, as most agnostics/atheists have, and have truly considered for myself what I feel to be fact and fiction. My study leads me to my viewpoints, and I am comfortable with my viewpoints both spiritually and intellectually. I wouldn’t try to convince you of my viewpoints because it would likely read as though I’m talking down to you or denigrating you for your own beliefs, which are just as important to you as mine are to me. I respect your beliefs for you. I will not try to reeducate you. I ask that you do not try to reeducate me. I will say that as an agnostic/atheist, I do not believe anything truly dies. We are all made of energy, and I think we can find similarity of viewpoint there. From a scientific standpoint, all that makes my loved ones will one day transform into other matter, and for that, I am thankful. I imagine my loved ones reconstituted after their deaths into trees, oceans, flowers, birds. This gives me peace regarding my own mortality, too. I do not need a big white man in the sky or a big red man with horns in the earth to tell me my energy is eternal, or what to do with my energy and matter, now, in this life. I honestly feel it is a man’s conceit to need heaven and hell. The inability to believe one’s self can cease to exist in its conscious form. It is egotism. And bullish. Churches of all denominations have used the heaven and hell debate for centuries in order to gather tithes, control populations, gain political power… Keep women where they want them. Don’t get me started on the Catholic church. Christians, Baptists, Nazarenes, Episcopalians… are problematic on a basic level for the same reasons.

ON MY FICTION

Yes, I absolutely understand the use of double entendre in my words. They are intentional, and I hope everyday my daughter will read these words, when she is of age, and the words of many other women writers who write gender-based satire. I hope my daughter grows to be an independent thinking woman who will see the hypocrisies of our modern world, especially regarding gender, women’s bodies, women’s rights, sexual preferences (I am assuming you believe homosexuality to be a sin against God? Some of my best friends are homosexual and this mindset is beyond upsetting. The mindset is rather scary. Awful things have been done to women and LGBT in the name of God.) Again, I won’t seek to explain the moralities and foundations of writing gender-based fiction, or what some would call feminist or postfeminist fiction, I honestly don’t know if you would want to or could understand it because of your religious vehemence. That probably comes off as rude. I don’t want to be rude. Much of the religious rhetoric wielded by conservative Christians is extremely rude to individuals such as myself, but I do not want to feed it, usually. Sometimes I do get fed up and speak my mind, as other women have. Some women apologize for it. I won’t apologize for it. Women have apologized for their bravery and dissents far too long. I could send you to some critically acclaimed works that would have you praying for weeks. But I won’t do that because I know it isn’t your thing, and I don’t feel a need to reeducate you in the name of science, art, gender, tolerance…

AND ON THE “EVIL” THAT WAS DONE

It wasn’t evil. It was a college boy. He had as much evil in him as anyone does. He lacked the discipline and morality to make better choices, and I’m sure I’m not the only girl who suffered him. I can tell you that he was a “believer.” I have worked through the pain of the experience and will continue to work through it as everyone does. We all have our pains. It’s all relative. My pain is not worse or less than another’s pain. Yes, I was raped. But it doesn’t hurt me today as much as my daughter seeing a dried up worm on the sidewalk, when she was very young, and crying because it had died. Relativity. She tried to take it inside and put it in a glass of water so to rehydrate it. Bring it back to life. She was Mary to the worm’s Jesus. I explained the worm couldn’t come back to life in the water, that it was gone. We buried it in the garden and said a few words, and I explained that the worm was now part of the Earth, the Earth was its home. I said, It is home, now, forever, and doesn’t have any worries.

You see? The lessons are everywhere. We make our own parables.

FINALLY, ON MY RAPE AS POLITICAL PLATFORM

I do personally feel a need to speak out when “leaders” of our country talk about “legitimacy” of rape, because I have a daughter and mother and female friends and a son who I want to grow up understanding that the nature of a woman’s body is not for him to determine. I, however, take offense when this issue becomes a sensationalized vehicle as driven by men or women. I can become furious when it is done in the name of God. I have a particular distaste for women who sensationalize crimes against women. They need no sensationalism.

I suppose this has turned into some sort of a self-primer. I didn’t mean for that, but now that I have it, I’ll think on this a bit more in coming years. You’ve given me a prompt for reflection, and I thank you for that. You are indeed a good friend for having given me this gift. For a writer, friendly muses are treasures. Thank you, C___. I’m so glad to have heard from you. And I love you, too, brother. Very much.

Rae

Rae Bryant’s short story collection, The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals, released from Patasola Press, NY, in June 2011. Her stories have appeared or are soon forthcoming in StoryQuarterly, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, BLIP Magazine, Gargoyle Magazine, and Redivider, among other publications and have been nominated for the Pen/Hemingway, Pen Emerging Writers, and Pushcart awards. She writes essays and reviews for such places as New York Journal of Books, Puerto del Sol, The Nervous Breakdown, Portland Book Review and Beatrice.com. She is the 2012 Patasola New York City Summer Writing Resident and has received fellowships from the VCCA and The Johns Hopkins University, where she earned a Masters in Writing, teaches multimedia and creative writing, and is editor in chief of the literary and arts journal, The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review.