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PLOTTO: THE MASTER CONTEST OF ALL PLOTS, Week 4
“FIRST AID TO TROUBLED WRITERS,” the Boston Globe announced in September 1928—“GRINDS OUT PLOTS WITHOUT ANY FALSE START.”
Calling all writers who are obsessed with plot and obsessives who can write a mean story. We want you!
THE RULES:
Every Wednesday we will post a prompt from William Wallace Cook’s classic how to manual Plotto: The Mater Book of All Plots. Simply use the prompt below to write your own original 500 word story.
In the book, {A}= a male protagonist. {B}= a female protagonist but for our purposes, feel free to write from the point of view of any gender.
Mini-Plottos, 500 words or fewer must be submitted by the following Monday at noon PST. Send to: openbar@tinhouse.com with PLOTTO CONTEST as the subject line. Please include a brief bio.
The Week’s Prompt:
{A}, a pugilist, believes that a friend whom he killed by a chance blow in a practice bout, is present in the ring every time he has battle.
THE RICHES:
Winners will be announced each Wednesday and will receive a hardcover copy of Plotto, online publication on the Tin House Blog and be entered in the Final Master Plot Challenge.
Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots
A classic how-to manual, William Wallace Cook’s Plotto is one writer’s personal method, painstakingly diagrammed for the benefit of others. The theory itself may be simple—“Purpose, opposed by Obstacle, yields Conflict”—but Cook takes his “Plottoist” through hundreds of situations and scenarios, guiding the reader’s hand through a dizzying array of “purposes” and “obstacles.”
Read a posthumous conversation with “the man who deforested Canada” William Wallace Cook here.
Posted in General
Comments: 3
Master Plotto Week Three Winner: Yasuko Thanh
A martial arts instructor. A parachuting pornographer. A cowboy Minotaur. Turns out there are plenty of professions out there that can be a hindrance to a healthy (and safe!) relationship.
Congratulations goes out to Yasuko Thanh, this week’s contest winner, whose cautionary tale about dating a Matador reminded us of something you might encounter during the midnight screening of a foreign film festival.
Be sure to check back later today for this week’s prompt.
Last week’s prompt: {A’s} profession is a hazardous one—aviator, automobile racing driver, steeple jack, “human fly”—and {B} considers this fact an obstacle to their marriage.
The Matador Mystery
At dinner, Sandwina gave her husband, The Matador Mystery, an ultimatum. He would retire after the Chicago show or she would leave him. It must be understood that, for Sandwina, Matador’s performances were simply excuses to show girls the intricate beadwork on his costume, and then invite them to his caravan for a display of more.
He had a hale chest and eyes the colour of water stains on a wooden table. He swallowed rubies and shot them out of his mouth into a spittoon placed across the room. He would swallow three fishbowls of water and eject a fountain that would hit the ceiling before flowing into a small waiting basin. In his best act, he set a metal castle on fire with kerosene he had swallowed and then put it out with water he had consumed first.
Matador got drunk and stayed awake all night.
When they heard cursing behind his wagon—the giant, the crone, the fat lady, the midget, the three-legged boy, the armless wonder and the thin man—all anticipated a good show because Hector, if nothing else, was always a charismatic performer. Even if it was unheard of for him to practice his act before breakfast.
Everyone knew that after Matador set up his metal castle in the field, he would swallow the kerosene, put on his protective lenses, take off his sombrero with the flammable fringe, and light the little candle inside the bell tower.
The men cheered Matador on, mistaking his exuberant swallowing for enthusiasm, his clumsiness with the bottle of kerosene for excitement after a night of gin, and no one noticed his tears. The children couldn’t make up their minds whether to watch his wide mouth overflow with kerosene, or to watch the tattoo of a phoenix on the back of Matador’s hand that moved its wings when Matador moved his fingers. Sandwina suddenly tapped him on the back.
Wearing a peignoir, she was as rested in appearance as Matador was dishevelled. Sandwina had come out holding a cup of chicory coffee in her right hand. Her head cocked to one side, her shoulder shrugged, she said, “Matador. Go to bed.”
A breeze caused her peignoir to open before she’d had a chance to button it. Matador lit the candle.
“Say something kind,” the Fat Lady said, touching Sandwina’s shoulder.
But Sandwina succeeded only in creating waves of tension with her admonitions, where before there had merely been some cheering men, whispering women, and children watching the phoenix on the back of Hector’s hand.
The crowd gasped as the Matador vomited kerosene onto the candle, lost his balance and fell into the explosion he’d created. Frantic, he beat at the flames that were consuming him. People came shouting and running from the caravans with buckets of water. But before they could arrive, Matador looked wildly into Sandwina’s eyes, and vomited again. Flames engulfed him.
Yasuko Thanh lives in Victoria, BC, Canada, with her husband and two daughters. Her first book of short stories, Floating Like the Dead, comes out this April with McClelland & Stewart. She also sings and plays guitar in an all-girl rockabilly band.
Posted in General
Comments: 1
Wisdom Coupon: David Foster Wallace (requiescat in pace)
“It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip–and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will no give or take anything, wear any masks, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. 
We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete. Sentiment equals naivete on this continent (at least since the Reconfiguration). One of the things sophisticated viewers have always liked about J.O. Incandenza’s The American Century as Seen Through a Brick is its unsubtle thesis that naivete is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America. And since sin is the sort of thing that can be talked about only figuratively, it’s natural that Himself’s dark little cartridge was mostly about a myth, viz. that queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naivete are mutually exclusive. Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.” — David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Posted in Wisdom Coupon
Comments: 0
Web Extra: A Field Guide to AWP
Going to AWP? If so, stop by booth 813 and say hi to Tin House. Besides offering up tremendous deals on books & magazine subscriptions, members of our staff will also be freestyle rapping. You name the literary subject, we’ll drop the rhyme.
In the interim, Courtney Maum provides the necessary guide to help you identify all the strange creatures that will be flocking to Chicago next week.
Writers are an entertaining and an educational species to observe. In North America, there is no better location to watch writers “socializing” than at the AWP conference, where once a year in February, writers of all ages and backgrounds migrate to a city with an intemperate climate to banter, dance and mate with one another—a rare phenomenon!
One need not be a professional naturalist to identify writers. Our Field Guide to AWP will provide you with an overview of the more prominent species and phenomena associated with their annual migration. Happy hunting!
Memoirists: With very few exceptions, memoirists are women. They favor fleece outerwear and they often carry snacks. Memoirists usually travel in odd-numbered groups of other memoirists. They are very friendly when approached, but prove difficult to get rid of in social situations. It is recommended to observe them from afar.
Essayists: The essayist signals his difference from the memoirist by the appropriation of a blazer. This blazer can be seen on essayists of both sexes. Essayists are self-deprecating but thrive on preparation—if you need a ride somewhere, you should ask them. They probably have a car.
The Vicariouso: These writers can be identified by the presence of a wedding ring and the absence of their spouse. They have come to AWP to remember what it is like to be single so that they can write short stories and novels credibly from a single person’s point of view.
Posted in General
Comments: 2
Plotto on NPR!
In case you missed it, Paul Collins was on Weekend All Things Considered this weekend, talking about Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots. You can listen to the whole segment here.
Some of the plots are just plain wacky. In plot 227, “B is unable to marry A because her father, F-B, in using B for his subject in a scientific experiment, has instilled a poison into her blood.”
But, says Collins, as off-the-wall as Plotto can be, it was actually quite influential in its day — and not just to aspiring novelists. A young Alfred Hitchcock, just getting started as a silent film director in Britain, sent away for a copy.
“It’s had a particularly strong afterlife, I think, among screenwriters,” Collins says. “A lot of this whole idea of formulaic plotting, especially in its early versions, like Plotto, actually was associated with movies, as much as with novels.”
Collins says that while pulp novels like the ones Cook wrote may be mostly gone, Cook’s carefully cross-referenced plots can actually teach aspiring writers a great deal about which plot elements go together best.
“You really do get a strong sense of how plot works,” he says. “Erle Stanley Gardner, who wrote the Perry Mason books, said that he basically learned about plotting from Plotto.”
Posted in General
Comments: 0
Lost & Found: Jesse Nathan
Jesse Nathan sings to us of American fast food and Scandinavian longing in this Lost & Found on J. P. Jacobsen’s Mogens and Other Stories.
My life intersected with J. P. Jacobsen’s in a McDonald’s parking lot. I hate many things about Ronald McDonald but his famous potatoes have had me in their MSG-soaked thrall since childhood. Which is why I found myself off to the side of the drive-through, waiting on an order of large fries one late July. Naturally, I pulled out a book and flipped it open.
Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet is not what I’m writing about here. But it was what I was consuming outside McDonald’s. In it, Rilke doles out advice like this: “Of all my books just a few are indispensable to me, and two even are always among my things, wherever I am: the Bible, and the books of the great Danish writer, Jens Peter Jacobsen.” I read on, intensely curious (the Bible and —who?). Read Jacobsen, continues Rilke, and “a world will come over you, the happiness, the abundance, the incomprehensible immensity of a world.” One letter later, I was sold, ready to track down the books of this Jacobsen—specifically a collection called Mogens and Other Stories. And just as I committed myself to finding it there came a knock at my window. A man with a white paper bag stood outside. “Sorry ’bout the wait, sir.” I blinked as he handed over my precious fries.
Two weeks later, it was Mogens I was devouring.
I must have made an odd sight to that McDonald’s attendant, hunched over the steering wheel as I was, furiously underlining. Quivering, maybe. Perhaps I even resembled a Jacobsen character: “Quite obviously he had just been reading a book,” writes the author in Mogens, “one could tell that from the expression in his eyes, from his hair, from the abstracted way in which he managed his hands.” Jacobsen, a man familiar with a diverse array of books and knowledge sets himself, would know: he was a scientist first (biology, botany) and a fiction writer only later in his short life. Born in Jutland in 1847 and educated in the 1860s at the University of Copenhagen, Jacobsen took top honors for his dissertation on seaweeds. A few years later, he’d translated Darwin into Danish. In 1872 he got tuberculosis and, bedridden, started writing for a living. His strikingly small oeuvre—he published one novel and just seven stories—influenced, among others, Rilke, Lawrence, Freud, Hesse, Ibsen, and Schoenberg. Working my way through Mogens, it wasn’t hard to see why. Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Comments: 0
Flash Fridays: Watching Sandra Be Loved By God, by Frances Lefkowitz
My manager is waist-deep in God, which is where I want to be. She barely blinks, smiles as if drugged or half-asleep—who wouldn’t want such lassitude, especially among these aisles of plastic “goods” made in China for our little girls. The store is the kind of shrill over-lit ugly that makes you depressed if you do not believe in God or if you don’t know if you believe in God. To employ me to stock shelves and run a cash register took a leap of faith on Sandra’s part, as my mouth falls most naturally into the unwelcoming neutral position. No matter how hard I try to curve them, my lips end up sinking, as if weighted. In this economy, it would be presumptive to say that I am overqualified for selling hair decorations in various shades of pink, lavender, and whatever is the new black. Many of the girls who come here with allowances used to sit at desks facing me and my trying-to smile. “Mrs. Hertz,” they say, not just surprised but impressed with my new position, surrounded as I am by ribbons and sparkle. Their moms know better, try to look away. When jobs get scarce, eye contact suffers. Merciful Sandra intervenes, tells me to take lunch by asking me if I want to take it. A pair of hot dogs is enough to satisfy my slim hunger, and I come back early because the best thing in my life right now is watching Sandra be loved by God. “How did you two first meet,” I ask her, as I re-pin my chest with my name, my first name only, store policy. She shows me lizard eyes that cry only for good reasons. “I was walking across Broad Street and I just felt him by my side,” she says. That night, after selling my last barrette, I go down to Broad, look both ways. I’m wary, but the goal is to buck my own trends, to pool the resources I lack, to find a really good reason to carry on. I will cross this street all night if I have to.
Frances Lefkowitz is the author of To Have Not, as well as hundreds of articles, essays and stories in national literary and consumer magazines, from GlimmerTrain, Fiction, Blip, and The Sun, to Good Housekeeping, Whole Living, and National Geographic’s Green Guide. Her essays have received special mention twice for the Pushcart Prize and once for Best American Essays.
Posted in Flash Fridays
Comments: 1
Book Clubbing: Last Word Books
The 1990’s were an awful time for independent bookstores. I open with that statement because it’s the first thing I think about, when I think about the bookstores I frequented as a teenager, in the 1990’s, in Seattle. They disappeared, one after another, throughout the latter part of the decade, in the wake of the Barnes & Noble and Borders expansions.
I never understood the popularity of the chains. Sure, a building full of books is a building full of books–its contents naturally confer sublimeness. But the chains were all the same: they had the same neutral flooring, the same polished woodgrain, the same computer-generated signage with the same bland fonts. And then there was the national chain bookstore smell: like a hotel lobby during continental breakfast service.
The bookstores I frequented on Capital Hill, in the University District, Ballard, and downtown, were grungy, just like the popular music of the era. They usually had a cart of cheap used books out front, a store cat or six, and shelf labels made of masking tape.
My favorite, just a block from my high school, was Red & Black Books, an old-school anarchist collective where I bought my “Keep Your Laws Off My Body” button and “Act Up” stickers, and picked up copies of the free weeklies and The Rocket. It closed in 1999, just months before the WTO protests that shut down the city and briefly radicalized Seattle’s otherwise blithely progressive population.
When I travel, the itinerary usually contains a stop at the local grocery co-op, a thrift shop, and at least one bookstore. It’s so easy to fall in love with a city by way of its indie bookshops. Sometimes it’s an unassuming shop in a tiny strip mall, like Eugene’s Black Sun Books, or a hidden affair up a side staircase, over the worker’s collective cafe, like Montpelier’s Black Sheep Books. Other times, it’s a classy corner in an upscale shopping district, like Richmond’s Black Swan Books, or the two-story nook of book stacks that is Bellingham’s Eclipse Books.
Most recently, I fell for Olympia’s (WA) Last Word Books , a store that so resembled the bookstores of my youth that I knew I would have to make regular stops en route between Portland and Seattle.
Posted in Book Clubbing
Comments: 0
Free Verse: Long Distance Poems
I love long distance runners.
I love them because they do something I couldn’t imagine doing. They’re beautiful. They not only endure but also say something in the act of their run, something about the possibilities of the human body.
And it’s this sense of possibility, of an ecstatic vision, that draws me to long poems. And by long poems I mean over twenty pages and up to a whole book. In these United States we have some incredible (and famous) examples. Thomas McGrath’s Letter To an Imaginary Friend and Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You are two Jazz Odyssey Up-All-Night illustrations. Though it’s much, much, shorter than those two tombs (coming in at just under sixty-three pages), the emotional weight and heartbreaking beauty of Alex Phillips’s Crash Dome (Factory Hollow Press, 2010) can certainly mingle at the same poetry party:
“The machines, the get warmer,
you start glowing, they keep humming,
just humming, whatever happens
to your soul up there happens,
the soul, the little adventurer in us,
our contents, expiration date,
no robotic arms or levers,
they hum and warm you into existence,
out of existence, like a remarkable caffeine
buzz, like the sound of lawnmowers,
but they don’t drive you crazy,
they make you happy.”
And so the strange, expanding other-universe of Crash Dome begins. There are no stanza breaks in this stunning work. That is to say there is no rest for the soul of the reader, that little adventurer, nor will you want one. Crash Dome is a weird exciting scary world because in so many ways it is also our world.
Alex Phillips’s book length poem is a gorgeous long distance runner. Everyone should pick up a copy of this book, have over a group of friends, open a bottle of wine, and go on a journey. I promise, you will not be the same when you come home.
Posted in Free Verse
Comments: 4
PLOTTO: THE MASTER CONTEST OF ALL PLOTS, Week 3
“FIRST AID TO TROUBLED WRITERS,” the Boston Globe announced in September 1928—“GRINDS OUT PLOTS WITHOUT ANY FALSE START.”
Calling all writers who are obsessed with plot and obsessives who can write a mean story. We want you!
THE RULES:
Every Wednesday we will post a prompt from William Wallace Cook’s classic how to manual Plotto: The Mater Book of All Plots. Simply use the prompt below to write your own original 500 word (or less) story.
In the book, {A}= a male protagonist. {B}= a female protagonist but for our purposes, feel free to write from the point of view of any gender.
Mini-Plottos, 500 words or fewer, must be submitted by the following Monday at 5:00 PST. Send to: theopenbar@tinhouse.com with PLOTTO CONTEST as the subject line.
The Week’s Prompt:
{A’s} profession is a hazardous one—aviator, automobile racing driver, steeple jack, “human fly”—and {B} considers this fact an obstacle to their marriage.
THE RICHES:
Winners will be announced each Wednesday and will receive a hardcover copy of Plotto, online publication on the Tin House Blog and be entered in the Final Master Plot Challenge.
Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots
A classic how-to manual, William Wallace Cook’s Plotto is one writer’s personal method, painstakingly diagrammed for the benefit of others. The theory itself may be simple—“Purpose, opposed by Obstacle, yields Conflict”—but Cook takes his “Plottoist” through hundreds of situations and scenarios, guiding the reader’s hand through a dizzying array of “purposes” and “obstacles.”
Read a posthumous conversation with “the man who deforested Canada” William Wallace Cook here.
Posted in General
Comments: 2
Master Plotto Week Two Winner: Richard Osgood
It was another tough Plotto battle this week, with many of you providing extremely interesting (and sometimes comically frightening) ways for people to get locked in (and out) of a hotel room. Congratulations go out to Richard Osgood, whose wild take on the situation had us thinking of Becker, David Lynch, and highway obstructionists.
Be sure to check back later today for this week’s prompt.
Last week’s prompt: {B} finds that the knob and lock on the door of a hotel bedroom are in disrepair; the lock apparently locks itself, and the knob will not turn.
Somewhere between Normal and Decatur I drove my 1974 Mercury Comet into the side of the Spangler Falls Motor Lodge. It was late and I didn’t know how long I’d been asleep at the wheel. A Romanian woman in Room 119, whose bed I pushed against the door, said I reminded her of Ted Danson, which she followed with an emphatic “Norm!” I told her Norm wasn’t played by Ted Danson, to which she puttered her lips, rolled over and went back to sleep. An orange-vested crew from the Department of Transportation came up behind me and paved a detour into Room 121. They said the link between Point A and Point B was never a straight line because of obstructionists like me. I suspected the undersides of hardhats were not conducive to hair growth and they were just jealous of my pompadour. They said I should not have treated Diane like shit and laughed as they climbed back into the orange dump truck and headed south through Room 121.
I waved my arms at passing traffic but the speed limit in these parts was seventy-five miles per hour. Only small children and dogs acknowledged my existence. I felt like an outdated roadside attraction, like the world’s largest ball of dental floss or the world’s smallest mime trapped inside an invisible hamster ball. A State Trooper pulled his cruiser in beside my Comet. He leaned against his open driver’s side door and pointed a radar gun toward northbound traffic. I asked if he could radio in for a tow truck but he said he had a quota, and plus, he said, a wrecker was bound to pass by at some point. No other road between Normal and Decatur but this one, he said. The Romanian woman sang in her sleep. I recognized the tune but not the words. She harmonized the melody with the pitch of passing traffic at eighty miles per hour. The State Trooper didn’t pull anyone over. He said they weren’t breaking the law if he didn’t write any tickets.
The Romanian woman woke at daybreak as rush-hour commuters turned the route into a parking lot. I smelled French toast and maple syrup through the door and realized I’d neglected the obvious. Does that door open in or out? I asked because her bed and my Comet still blocked it from the inside. If the door opened out we could go to the front desk for help. She reached for the knob but it wouldn’t turn. She said ever since she came here from the old country, doors locked themselves for no apparent reason. I told her a lot of doors in this country locked themselves without cause or reason, but we just created detours and went around them. We hitched a ride back to Normal in a bread truck and had breakfast in a roadside diner. It was the kind of place where everyone seemed to know each other’s name.
Richard Osgood lives in a city on a river where the north meets the south. He works in a place called the Flash Factory where talented writers compress the essence of fiction from bloated prose.
Posted in General
Comments: 7
Happy Valentine’s Day!
This Valentine’s Day, psychoanalyst Anouchka Grose, author of Why Do Fools Fall in Love: A Realist’s Guide to Romance is here to help with all your love questions.
Dear Ms. Grose,
I don’t know if I’m even a Valentine this year…I have recently become sexually involved with a guy who is in a relationship with another woman. What is my responsibility to her?
Thank you,
Guilty
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Hi Guilty,
Without knowing the details of your situation, it’s very difficult to answer. But even with all the details I don’t think it’d necessarily be any easier. Your responsibility to the other woman is something only you can gauge. It would seem to depend on a number of variables. Like how inclined are you to feel guilty? How likely is she to find out? Do you want the guy to leave her? Do they have an arrangement where that sort of thing is allowed? Do you feel sorry for her/envy her/hate her? Sometimes when people have affairs they go back to their partners with renewed respect and passion. In those cases you might even want to claim that the third party had done the couple a service. Having said all that, it would of course be civilised to use condoms.
One person you certainly have a responsibility to is yourself. It’s as well to know, as far as you can, what you want from the situation. Will you be devastated if he stays in his relationship? Or do you like the fact that you don’t have to put up with him full-time? It may be wise to try to keep tabs on how competitive and/or destructive you feel about it. If you’re in it just because you happen to like him, that’s one thing. But if you spend the whole time obsessing about the other woman, or about their relationship, then it may be that you’re getting a kick (either pleasant or unpleasant) out of the triangular situation itself. If this is the case it’s probably time to worry. You may, out of pure, rivalrous mischief, persuade him to dismantle his entire life, only to discover that having him to yourself is actually a bit boring. Or you may find it terrifying to be with a person who is plainly capable of ditching his partner when a better offer comes along.
Only you know how much suffering you can take – and how much you can bear to inflict. Or perhaps this can be one of those special instances where everything turns out well…
I hope so!
Anouchka
Hi Anouchka,
The last two relationships I’ve been in have seemed liked mirror opposites. With the first guy, we had great sex, but were not emotionally compatible. The next guy I dated felt like my intellectual and emotional equal, but the sex was unfulfilling. All this has gotten me thinking—how much, if any, can a relationship grow sexually or emotionally. Or, do you just have to pick one and make the best of it?
Hopefully,
Jean
-
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Hello Jean,
I love your question. It’s like asking how to play roulette better. It all seems to depend on how much you’re prepared to win and lose. Because you can’t know where the ball is going to land, the only reliable tactic you can apply is to how much money you are prepared to toss down the drain. Seasoned gamblers suggest you set a winning limit, not just a losing limit, so that you are obliged leave the casino as soon as you rack up a certain amount. This means you won’t be tempted to keep aiming higher, thereby losing everything you gained.
These exact same rules can surely be applied to love and sex. You just need to have some idea of how miserable you’re prepared to be, and also how cheerful you can hope to be. Then if you reach either limit you’ll know exactly what to do. This is of course a bit too logical, and one day you may find yourself betting your house, your children, and your friends on a new relationship — only to find it’s a total loser. Or you may accidentally find yourself far better off than you had ever imagined possible. Perhaps it would be fair to say that if your winning and losing limits are too narrow and safe, you’ll probably never get a huge thrill out of playing. But if they’re wildly extreme then you risk finding the highs and lows addictive. (In either case it’s probably a good idea to study Jane Austen’s ‘Sense and Sensibility’…)
Another very sensible gambling tip is never to bet against a piece of software. Real-world roulette wheels let you win sometimes, virtual ones don’t. So…er…only risk your heart with real people?
I hope you find someone who seems like a good bet.
Happy Valentine’s Day,
Anouchka
Posted in General
Comments: 0
Web Extra: Ausubel on Ausubel
We first had the pleasure of meeting Ramona Ausubel when she attended our Writer’s Workshop in 2010. After receiving a scholarship from us, Ramona has published in The New Yorker, sold both a novel and short story collection, and had a baby. We will gladly take credit for two of the three (not that we aren’t ready to settle down).
Ramona was kind enough to take time from her busy tour schedule ( For those of you lucky enough to call Portland home, Ramona will be reading at Powell’s tomorrow night) to answer a few questions from her longtime friend and colleague, Ramona Ausubel.
Q: Hello! It’s a pleasure to finally meet you!
A: I know, I’ve been hearing about you my whole life!
Q: Can you tell me a little bit about your novel, NO ONE IS HERE EXCEPT ALL OF US?
A: In 1939, realizing that they have very little chance of surviving the war, the residents of a small Jewish village decide to start the world over. No history, no past, just nine families on a tiny spit of land. The story follows a young girl as she grows up and has a family, all under the protection—or so it seems—of the safe place the villagers have imagined for themselves. Soon, the real world begins to encroach, and the girl must figure out how to protect her children in a place she does not recognize or understand.
Q: NO ONE IS HERE EXCEPT ALL OF US is set in Romania. Have you ever been? Was it like that Jonathan Safran Foer novel, Everything Is Illuminated?
A: I have been there, although the borders have changed, and now it’s in southern Ukraine. My husband and I arrived in the same city that Safran-Foer did, and hired a guide. We were expecting the stereotypical high-waisted jeans Russian guy. Instead, we were picked up by a man with normal pants who spoke perfect English and did not try to feed us constant sausages. He had not read the book, but he had seen the movie and he took some offense. To be fair, there were representative eastern bloc moments.
Q: Like what?
A: In one tiny village, we stopped to buy some bread and cheese for lunch and the old woman in her kerchief and stooped shoulders added up our bill on an abacus. We also stayed in more than one hotel bedecked in all, or mostly all, leopard print. And though our guide did not wear those high-waisted jeans, plenty of other guys did.
Q: I’ve heard that some of the novel comes from family stories? Are the characters based on your relatives?
A: I had heard amazing stories from my grandmother all my life and I really wanted to know those ancestors myself. Since they were no longer alive, I had to imagine my way to them. The main character is based on my great-grandmother, and even though I never met her, she now feels like a part of my real life.
Q: This being your debut, did you find it difficult to map out the story? How about the revision process?
A: Writing a novel is about one degree away from impossible, or at least that’s how it felt to me. I gave up many times, but eventually (sometimes days, sometimes months, or, in one case, years later) a tiny door would open up and I’d find a way forward. It took seventeen drafts over eight years to get from a gigantic mess to something coherent.
Posted in General
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The Art of the Sentence: Lincoln Michel
“But now your friend hasn’t been betrayed at all,” cried the father—his forefinger, waving back and forth, emphasized the point. “I’ve been his on-the-spot representative here.”
—Franz Kafka, “The Judgment”
This passage from Franz Kafka’s “The Judgment” doesn’t contain any gorgeous imagery or inventive metaphors. It isn’t particularly beautiful or interestingly crafted. While the phrase “on-the-spot representative” is quietly hilarious, the passage by itself is perhaps not very notable at all. Nevertheless, since I first read it two decades ago, this passage has stayed lodged in my brain.
What has transfixed me is the startling effect the passage has in the context of the story. It is a sinkhole suddenly opening in the ground of the story. We fall through and find ourselves in an odd new place.
“The Judgment” opens almost banally. Georg Bendemann sits at his desk and gazes out the window at a nearby river. He has just finished composing a letter to a friend who has moved abroad. He had debated whether to tell this friend of his engagement, apparently wishing not to make his friend, who lives a lonely existence, jealous. Finishing the letter, he visits his father’s room. Up to here the story seems fairly straight forward. But the floor of the story begins to totter when the father, out of the blue, begs Georg not to deceive him. “Do you really have this friend in St. Petersburg?” he asks. Georg attempts to change the subject, but the father declares he doesn’t have a friend: “I simply can’t believe that.” The friend, so important before, has become a figment. A lesser writer might run with this as a twist, but Kafka bends the reality again—and again through dialogue—as the father declares that the friend, who he previously doubted existed, is in fact in league with the father in opposition to Georg!
“But now your friend hasn’t been betrayed at all,” cried the father—his forefinger, waving back and forth, emphasized the point. “I’ve been his on-the-spot representative here.”
We have left the realm of realism and entered a psychic struggle between father and son. “The Judgment”, like many of Kafka’s works, holds the power of dream logic without seeming like a dream. In a dream, your shoe might turn into pile of hissing snakes. It isn’t that the shoe was always snakes, but that the truth of the dream has shifted. In “The Judgment”, there is no single consistent truth about the friend in this story. The friend’s status, I believe, changes. It isn’t a “twist” in the classic sense of important information being hidden from the reader by the author—Ah! Didn’t you realize the whole story was narrated by the pet turtle?—but a shifting truth. A truth that changes not according to facts, but according to emotional logic. It is not a matter of what the absolute truth of the friend is, but of what power the father and son derive from the friend’s status in different moments.
And the friend’s status is not the only thing that changes. A parallel series of changes happens with the father’s physical body. At first, we are told the father is “a giant.” But as Georg controls the conversation the father shrinks to the point that he is carried in Georg’s arms like a small child. He can’t even stand up by his own power. Then, when the father reasserts his power verbally, announcing his secret partnership with the friend, he physically grows and stands “completely unsupported” kicking his legs at Georg. Having regained, in a very short span of time, his physical and mental powers, the father sentences Georg “now to death by drowning!” Georg feels himself “hounded from the room” by unseen forces and leaps into the very river he had gazed upon at the story’s start.
Most readers seem to expect fiction to have a single, stable truth. If it is a realist story, it must of course be “realistic” and have a certain objective truth. If it is a fantasy or science fiction story, readers expect a coherent world and consistent rules. Part of the genius of Kafka is his willingness to ignore those concerns. His stories are not worried about logical consistency or world-building, but in emotional and psychic power. They are peppered with moments, such as this passage, where the reality of the story crumbles around it and rebuilds itself with unexpected logic into something new.
Lincoln Michel was born in Virginia and lives in NYC. He is a founding editor of Gigantic magazine and the books editor of The Faster Times. His writing appears in Tin House, NOON, The Believer, BOMB, Oxford American, The Rumpus, Mississippi Review, McSweeneys.net, and elsewhere.
Posted in The Art of the Sentence
Comments: 3
The Open Bar Guest DJ Series: Cheston Knapp
Everyone knows that mothers give their children three things (they are nothing if not generous!). In addition to life and hypochondria, mothers give their children a sense of nostalgia. I learned this years ago, when I was in college and I started listening to Van Morrison. I had to admit then that some part of my enjoyment of Astral Weeks was wrapped up in all the Sunday mornings mom put on her copy of The Best of and danced while cleaning the house. Nostalgia gave way to a fresh appreciation, in other words, even though, back then, in college, I wanted everything to be mine alone, and if I did, I only admitted this begrudgingly.
Time has gone by, though, and this same thing has happened with the six artists on this playlist. Some things hold up better than others, as you’ll see. James Taylor, for instance: of all the songs mom loves (and there are plenty–she even plays his Christmas album over and over every holiday season), “Copperline” is pretty much the only song that’s made it through to me — and much of this has to do with the fact that Reynolds Price, a relative of ours, wrote it. (I recently went back and listened to a lot of his stuff after seeing him in Two-Lane Blacktop, Monte Hellman’s incredible, must-see movie from ’71.) Paul Simon seems obvious, and I could have included so, so many more songs. There are a couple songs from Bonnie Raitt. And then a couple from Tom Waits’s early albums.
But the most-represented artist on this list is also the one that has been the biggest surprise for me. Randy Newman. Most people, they see Randy Newman and they think, “Oh, yeah, Toy Story guy,” and that’s that. If you are one of those people, I’m here to tell you that you’ve been living in the dark, friend. You have to hear the early stuff, before he started whoring himself out to Hollywood. Listen to the subtle wit, of both the orchestration and the lyrics, that is everywhere present on albums like “Good Ol’ Boys” and “Sail Away,” the not-so-subtle humor of songs like “Short People” (my karaoke stand-by) and “Political Science,” the confessional mood of songs like “Harps and Angels,” and then the gorgeous historical lyricism of songs like “Dayton, Ohio 1903″ and “Louisiana 1927,” which, after Katrina, seems downright prescient. I could have filled this list up with Randy Newman and still have left stuff out. I have tried here to stick with songs that mom would approve of as representative. What do you think, mom? Did I miss anything?
Also, P.S.: If anyone out there has a sure fire way to determine whether what I’m experiencing is heartburn or a heart-attack, please write in. And soon. Mom and I would really appreciate it.
Stuff My Mom Likes
Posted in Guest DJ
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Why Do Fools Fall in Love?
Falling in love is a complicated, messy, mad endeavor…and staying in love is even worse. But don’t despair, psychoanalyst Anouchka Grose, author of Why Do Fools Fall in Love: A Realist’s Guide to Romance is here to help with all your love questions.
Hi there, Tin House,
My question for Anouchka is this: I’ve been pretty much in love with my best friend since Clinton was in office, and I’m wondering if and how to make my feelings known. Does the fact that I’m even asking this question mean the battle is already lost and his heart lies elsewhere? Or is it possible that he’s feeling the same thing, and the danger of royally fucking things up in our friendship that’s kept me silent is also what’s keeping him mum? I honestly can’t get a read on what’s going on in his head at this point. Is it worth the risk here to make some kind of bold but non-creepy Statement of Feelings? If this were a rom-com, I’d make my move and two weeks later a dog would be ring bearer at our wedding; I’m less sure how this gets played out in real life.
Thanks,
Anonymous
Hi,
I love the idea of a ‘bold but non-creepy Statement of Feelings’. That pretty much sums up the whole problem; people who declare their love risk becoming frightening to the object of their affection. But why?
It’s interesting that love is so often characterised as a soft subject, represented by pinky, fluffy, harmless things. But everyone knows that people regularly kill themselves and each other over it. It’s as if there’s a desperate cultural drive – particularly in evidence on Valentine’s day – to tame love by indoctrinating everyone into the idea that it’s purely good and nice. Of course being in love can be intensely enjoyable, but it can also make you want to stick your hand into a bonfire. Love relationships generally invoke greater extremes of feeling than friendships – greater excitement, greater fear, greater dependency. By declaring love to a friend you are inviting them to risk experimenting with the more difficult limits of their feelings – and to submit themselves to being on the receiving end of yours. It’s natural that you’d want to think carefully about whether they, and you, can take it.
Our earliest experiences of love are usually at the hands of our primary carers. (And if they didn’t love you, that’s something else again.) As babies we are totally at the mercy of the people who feed, clean and cuddle us, but who also ignore, leave and even punish us (or totally overwhelm us by showering love on us without a break). Our first love experiences really are a matter of life and death – if our carers stop loving us, then they may stop feeding and cleaning us, and even start ignoring and punishing us, and that’s the end of that. So ensuring our own lovability is essential for survival. Of course as adults we learn how to clean and feed ourselves, and to say things like, ‘I’m not sure I’m ready for a relationship right now’. But any experience of love is still liable to trigger echoes of our original, less cool, experience of loving and being loved. It may make us feel needy and desperate, or smothered and claustrophobic, or any number of unpleasant feelings in between. It may also make us feel ecstatically happy, but even that’s risky because it gives us something to lose…
In our friendships we tend to maintain a safer distance from the other person than we do in our romantic relationships (although there are still inevitably sexual undercurrents at play in friendship). By declaring love to a friend you risk collapsing the distance. Still, if you’ve managed to keep up a close friendship throughout such drastic fluctuations in presidency you must be getting something right. Perhaps an elliptical hint or two might be a better starting point than an outright declaration. Then if the signs are bad you can get on with your excellent-sounding friendship.
I hope that doesn’t sound too gothically gloomy. Love is great.
Very good luck,
Anouchka
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Lost & Found: Irina Reyn
Irina Reyn helps us kick off Valentine’s Day week with this L&F on Anastasya Verbitskaya’s Keys To Happiness, an early iteration of the romance novel for academics from those otherwise-dark days before The English Patient.
Like many a bookish teenager who thrills equally to both classic and “lowbrow” literature, I used to gulp down not only Dickens and Pushkin but also the oeuvre of the bodice-ripping, best-selling author Beatrice Small, whose spirited young protagonists spent much of the novel folded over a man’s body like a crepe. But many years later, when I enrolled in a PhD program in Russian literature, I decided to remain focused and serious, immersing myself in Tolstoy and Gogol and Babel, getting better acquainted with Russian writers I might have already studied had I never emigrated from Moscow at the age of seven. Imagine my guilty pleasure, then, at discovering, among the Dostoyevskys and Bulgakovs, an author who spearheaded the modern Russian best seller, the Judith Krantz of fin de siècle Russia—Anastasya Verbitskaya.
I rushed through assigned novels like What Is to Be Done? and Poor Liza in order to slip more quickly into Keys to Happiness, eager to return to the adventures of a woman who believes art comes before love or familial and social responsibility, who refuses to marry but enjoys guilt-free sex with multiple partners and proudly raises an illegitimate child. I was tired of female characters who were self-sacrificing wives or socialists, doomed adulterers or martyred prostitutes. Anna Karenina as a New Woman? I loved it.
Keys to Happiness was originally a six-volume, fourteen-hundred-page tome published in serial form between 1909 and 1913 (now helpfully translated and abridged by scholars Beth Holmgren and Helena Goscilo). The book was received so enthusiastically that the 1913 silent-movie adaptation (a two-parter that required two separate tickets!) is commonly regarded as one of the earliest spectacular successes of Russian cinema.
The novel depicts the coming-of-age of one Manya Yeltsova, a budding dancer and free spirit. Saddled with a mad mother and an impoverished upbrining, Manya grows up to be a tempestuous young woman who realizes that marriage, for turn-of-the-century women at least, is a pretty raw deal. After Yan, her first anarchist love, dies while saving a child from drowning, Manya, like any good potboiler heroine, finds herself torn between her passion for two men: Steinbach, the wealthy Jewish businessman, and Nelidov, a conservative nobleman. Breathlessly, Manya alternates between them, unable to resist carnal temptation when she is in their presence. She is honest with each one about sleeping with the other, and when one disappoints her, his rival tends to be waiting in the wings. “Men…don’t marry women like you,” Nelidov remarks, but he proposes to her anyway. Manya rejects his offer of marriage (she is to be a famous dancer, after all, not a subjugated wife!) but suggests they consider a future in the bedroom, inviting Nelidov, instead, for a secret rendezvous: “We’ll forget about conventions and be like gods!” No wonder the book and the movie were blockbuster hits in prerevolutionary Russia.
To enjoy Keys to Happiness, the reader must first overlook a relentless tone of heightened emotion, several overt instances of anti-Semitism, and a meandering plot. But it is this very lack of narrative arc that keeps us reading. Who will Manya love next? The resolution to this question winds up being all the plot we need. And as might be expected, Verbitskaya’s novel is far from mindless; it engages with the intellectual ideas of the day—her characters, all well-read in Russian and European literature, debate socialist politics, philosophy, and the role of art—but puts the importance of utopia strictly behind that of passion and instinct and individual freedom. By dancing in the improvisatory style of Isadora Duncan and loving like a man, Manya is true to her body, revolution and socialism be damned! Continue reading
Posted in Lost & Found
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From the Vault: Etgar Keret
By request, the vault brings you a story by Etgar Keret, from issue 30. We’ve featured this issue quite a few times on the blog. With work from Stuart Dybek, Jim Shepard, Ron Carlson, Justin Torres, Charlie Smith, Jillian Weise and Anthony Doerr (just to name a few) can you blame us?
Healthy Start
by Etgar Keret
Translated by Miriam Shlesinger
Every night, after she had finally left him, he’d fall asleep in a different spot: on the sofa, in an armchair in the living room, on the mat on the balcony like some homeless bum. Every morning, he made a point of going out for breakfast. Even prisoners get a daily walk in the yard, don’t they? At the café they always gave him a table set for two, and sat him across from an empty chair. Always. Even when the waiter specifically asked him whether he was alone. Other people would be sitting there in twos or threes, laughing or tasting each other’s food, or fighting over the bill, while Avichai sat by himself eating his Healthy Start—orange juice, muesli with honey, decaf double espresso with warm low-fat milk on the side. Of course it would have been nicer if someone had sat down across from him and laughed with him, if there had been someone to argue with over the bill and he’d have to struggle, to hand the money to the waitress saying, “Don’t take it from him! Mickey, stop. Just stop! This one’s on me.” But he didn’t really have anyone to do that with, and breakfast alone was ten times better than staying home.
Avichai spent a lot of time watching the people at the other tables. He’d eavesdrop on conversations, read the sports supplement or inspect the ups and downs of the Israeli shares on Wall Street with an air of detached concern. Sometimes someone would come over and ask for a section of the paper he’d finished reading, and he would nod and try to smile. Once, when a sexy young mother with a baby in a stroller walked over to him, he even said to her, as he gave up the front page with the banner headline about a gang rape in the suburbs: “What a crazy world we’re bringing our children into.” He thought it sounded like the kind of statement that brings people closer together, pointing as it did to their common fate, but the sexy mom just glared at him with a half-angry stare and took the Healthy Living supplement too without asking.
Posted in From The Vault
Comments: 1
Carry Me, by Joseph Riippi
In the Apennines, he said. In the war, our patrol. A man of our unit took a shot to the gut. Get down! I shouted, and we each of us fell to the ground as he’d done, but of our own will we did it. The shooter was invisible save for his work, where the man of our unit lay face up and shot clean through but not dead yet. His chest heaved pendulumically, blood pumping out his back to pool and melt the snow about him. I’m not dying! he yelled between oscillations. Don’t you worry ‘bout me boys, I ain’t fucking dying! The man of our unit coughed a sound we’d heard before and all of us, lying there still in the snow the way we were trained to, imagined our own selves out there alone in the open and making that sound. Our training: Don’t give the shooter a target; be still and observe; await your orders. Except the man who gave us our orders was the man left there heaving, and so all we could do now was wait. Somewhere up the other side of those trees was another man, but not of our unit, not of our side, watching the man with our orders through a scope and waiting for one of us to try and save him. We awaited our orders still. I’m not dying! the man yelled again. I’m not dying! The blood just kept pumping out in beats, the periods lengthening. I could smell it by the look of it. I listened for birds but heard none, just behind me some other man of our unit crying. And then, from behind me again, Sir, yes sir! You’re not dying, sir! Our training was to stay silent, but perhaps these indeed had been his orders. I’m not dying! the shot man of our unit echoed, quieter now, faintly, the pump losing power. I’m not dying, I’m not dying, I’m not dying. Sir, yes sir! You’re not dying, sir! No you’re not motherfucking dying! shouted another. The shot man of our unit was shivering now, what warmth he had having drained into snow like spilt oil. You’re not dying! another voice joined. You’re not dying, I blubbered into the snow. No fucking way! shouted another. Shouts and Nots and No-Fucking-Ways. Not dying, you’re not, you’re not dying. Fast as it had happened there was a full chorus of us, a perfect machine of warfare following orders as on the parade ground, echoing this man of our unit until just such a time had passed that what sun there’d been that day disappeared, and it was too cold and too dark for any shooting. Only then did we carry ourselves and our man out of that place in silence.
Joseph Riippi is author of A Cloth House, forthcoming spring 2012 from Housefire Books. His other books include The Orange Suitcase, Do Something! Do Something! Do Something!, and TREESISTERS.
Posted in Flash Fridays
Comments: 1
Carte du Jour: Hungry Planet
Today for lunch I had some chickpea stew with collard greens and Middle Eastern-style meatballs, plus a slice of some unsuccessful but still quite edible lemon yogurt cake, and an orange. I ate this at my desk, flipping through various web sites as I did. It won’t surprise anyone to hear that no one photographed me as I ate, but what I was doing was worthy of being immortalized.
Say I’d been photographed today by Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio, authors of books Hungry Planet: What the World Eats and What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets ), or by photographer Miho Aikawa for the series Dinner in NY. Hungry Planet displays households surrounded by a week’s worth of food, while What I Eat gathers up one person’s diet for one day and arranges the portraits in order of calorie consumption, from the most austere to the most boggling. And Dinner in NY is precisely what it sounds like, from solo diners to parents and infants to extended families, sitting on beds and couches and at desks and minuscule tables and large ones, in living rooms and dining rooms and bedrooms.
There is some very deep draw to all of these images, not only for the voyeuristic pleasures of seeing behind closed doors and getting the intimate glimpses of how people satisfy their appetites, but because the subjects feel so unguarded. I don’t mean that they don’t know they are being photographed, for they all do, but that many of the images, in which families pose proudly before their great piles of meats and chips and sodas or baskets of lentils and produce, feel as if they’re pleased to display their lives. And some—I am thinking of one young Asian man, a gamer in China I believe, who staked out a place in an internet café for days at a time and had the same few dishes delivered around the clock—seem less pleased to share and more blasé, as if to shrug, Well, you asked.
Would my lunch today, a thoroughly typical one, come across as lonely and workaholic? That’s a point that seems to be embedded in some photos of subjects looking at their iPhones or at their computers or TVs as they eat. Or would it seem decadent and American—that brimming bowl of soup, the yellow slice of cake with its indigo layer of blueberries and unworried use of eggs, the orange flown in from God knows where—compared to the images of families eating meals of great austerity, like porridge and a cup of tea? Probably both, depending on the viewer and how I was presented.
I don’t know how much would have come through in the photo of me and my lunch, an imaginary photo that might seem to lack community and restfulness, but the websites I glanced through are ones I save for lunchtimes and brief breaks, ones that provide beautiful food imagery and discussion, or culture writing or, say, those advice columns like Slate’s “Dear Prudence” that are the most riveting voyeurism I know and should probably be required for all fiction writers. The soup was left over from the night before, so all I did was heat it up, but it had become more fragrant and savory overnight. And the cake is part of a baking extravaganza I embarked on a year ago when I was pregnant and felt I deserved a regular rotation of weekday cakes, and continues now that I have a baby to care for, when I clearly deserve it even more. My lunch was everything it appeared to be and more, I guess: it was solitary and technologically augmented, it was simple and easy to consume and it was also luxurious and privileged, to have that abundance at my disposal and a brief break in which to enjoy it. It was just a meal.
Posted in Carte du Jour
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PLOTTO: THE MASTER CONTEST OF ALL PLOTS, Week 2
“FIRST AID TO TROUBLED WRITERS,” the Boston Globe announced in September 1928—“GRINDS OUT PLOTS WITHOUT ANY FALSE START.”
Calling all writers who are obsessed with plot and obsessives who can write a mean story. We want you!
THE RULES:
Every Wednesday we will post a prompt from William Wallace Cook’s classic how to manual Plotto: The Mater Book of All Plots. Simply use the prompt below to write your own original 500 (or less) word story.
In the book, {A}= a male protagonist. {B}= a female protagonist but for our purposes, feel free to write from the point of view of any gender.
Mini-Plottos, 500 words or fewer, must be submitted by the following Monday at 5:00 pst. Send to: theopenbar@tinhouse.com with PLOTTO CONTEST as the subject line.
The Week’s Prompt:
{B} finds that the knob and lock on the door of a hotel bedroom are in disrepair; the lock apparently locks itself, and the knob will not turn.
THE RICHES:
Winners will be announced each Wednesday and will receive a hardcover copy of Plotto, online publication on the Tin House Blog and be entered in the Final Master Plot Challenge.
Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots
A classic how-to manual, William Wallace Cook’s Plotto is one writer’s personal method, painstakingly diagrammed for the benefit of others. The theory itself may be simple—“Purpose, opposed by Obstacle, yields Conflict”—but Cook takes his “Plottoist” through hundreds of situations and scenarios, guiding the reader’s hand through a dizzying array of “purposes” and “obstacles.”
Read a posthumous conversation with “the man who deforested Canada” William Wallace Cook here.
Posted in General
Comments: 1
Master Plotto Week One Winner: Laura Horley
A big thank you to the over 50 of you who submitted to Week One of the Master Plotto Contest. With stories ranging from nuclear catastrophe to cats on a beach, our editorial board was impressed by the number of divergent paths the prompt inspired.
This week’s crown goes to Laura Horley, who won us over with her tale of misbegotten foreplay.
Be sure to check back later today for this week’s new prompt.
Last Week’s Prompt: {A} a needy person picks up two pairs of cast-off shoes, one pair discarded by a clergyman, and the other pair by a man of reckless nature and “shady” reputation. Page 243
The shoes weren’t my idea. Mary said that after six years of marriage we had to mix things up. I thought booze might inspire some fun. Whiskey was purchased and had in the way we used to have it; in large quantities and all at once.
Looking out the window of our second story apartment, we waited for the drink to let our minds speak. A pair of shoes dangled from a telephone line, and Mary said, I know, let’s throw our shoes over the wires. I’d hoped the evening would take a sexier turn, but the way her muscles tensed when she spoke got me going a little, and I imagined her later, flushed with rebellion, and that seemed alright to me too.
It was decided that we wouldn’t sacrifice our own shoes. I was feeling bold. To the church, I said. Because there was a church two blocks from our house.
Alms, I said. Alms for the shoe-poor. It was almost midnight. No one came to the door. There was a box under the awning. A sort of take-a-penny-leave-a-penny arrangement. In it was a modest pair of black orthopedics. They’d belonged to a clergyman. I took them. Fr. James O’Connor was stitched into the right instep.
I tied the laces together while Mary laughed and poked my bicep. I threw the shoes and missed the wire. Mary squeezed my bicep and I threw them again and they swung once, twice around the wire and settled. Mary hugged me. She smiled and it was almost enough but not quite.
I looked at the shoes and saw the priest who’d worn them—old and alone and looking for fulfillment in ways that only those more pious than myself can understand. Let me help, I told the shoes. Let me find your symbiotic partner.
Mary didn’t like what I did next, but I hope that one day she’ll understand. I needed the shoes of a man who needed a priest. We walked until I saw someone crouched in the doorway of a closed restaurant. His eyes were shut and he clutched an empty forty. That was enough for me.
He came to when I pushed him to the ground. Mary screamed but I held him down and even though I was drunk it wasn’t hard. He was drunk too, and old besides. Take off his shoes, I told Mary, but she was crying. He was flailing. I got frustrated. I accidentally smashed his head into the concrete. It didn’t bleed or anything but it made an unsettling noise. I was scared but he held still after that and I didn’t know what else to do so I ripped the shoes off his feet. A pair of dirty old Reeboks.
Mary ran home, but I walked back to the wire. When I got there, I aimed straight for the priest’s shoes. The laces hit the line, and the right sneaker nestled between the soles of the holy pair. For a moment, I was satisfied.
Laura Horley lives and writes in Tucson, AZ. She is interested in dusty boots, emotionally engaged characters, and shredding on her moped.
Posted in General
Comments: 4
“SEMINAR” TICKET GIVEAWAY!
Subscribe to the magazine or buy any of the Tin House Writers Series books and you will be entered to win two tickets to the smash Broadway play about the trials and tribulations of the writing class. Offer valid until February 15, 5pm PST
– Rob Spillman
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Why Do Fools Fall in Love?
Falling in love is a complicated, messy, mad endeavor…and staying in love is even worse. But don’t despair, psychoanalyst Anouchka Grose, author of Why Do Fools Fall in Love: A Realist’s Guide to Romance is here to help with all your love questions.
Dear Anouchka,
I recently came across the term “asexual” for people who are disinterested in sex or have no sexual orientation. I’m struggling with whether or not this is a valid label, or if it’s just another way to pressure people who don’t want to have meaningless sex, but who aren’t religious, into hooking up. Do you consider “asexual” a sexual orientation in its own right? And do people with no religious or moral qualms about having sex that refrain from any sexual activity between relationships (as in have no physical desire for sex before there’s an emotional connection) fall into this category?
–Curious
Posted in General
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The New Pornography
Big thanks to contributor Sam Stephenson (and photographer Kate Joyce) who spotted us on 11th and 6th (NYC). Definitely a market we have been trying to tap into.
Is that what the kids are calling it these days?
Posted in General
Comments: 1
