Strange Clay

[Originally published for Uncanny Valley Magazine, September 2, 2010] Imagine the Kool-Aid Man as a sort of supervillain--a strung-out, hypermanic party crasher. (It should be pretty easy.) Now imagine him fighting the Incredible Hulk. Who would win? I'm more in the business of cataloguing than arguing, as I don't really want to go down as having a position on this matter. Let's name some traits! Strength #1: The Kool-Aid Man can burst through any barrier at any time. This one is pretty self-evident. The Kool-Aid Man is traditionally bursting through the borders of a domicile: ceilings, fences, basement walls. We can only assume he has the ability to burst through any structure he pleases, as long as those who want Kool-Aid are stationed inside. This is important; unlike the Trix Rabbit, he is not beholden to societal norms of who is and is not permitted to drink Kool-Aid. Though it's children who call for him, everyone from disco-era socialites to the neighborhood cop must admit that "Your friend is cool." Oh, he's not just cool. He's Kool-Aid. Strength #2: The Kool-Aid Man's relationship to his life fluids is ambiguous at best. Is the Kool-Aid Man filled with Kool-Aid? Why not simply tip himself over and pour himself out? It's true that the smaller jug he carries at his side is the primary source of refreshment. But does that mean the substance inside him that appears to be Kool-Aid cannot be spilled? Does its resistance to sloshing during all the Kool-Aid Man's break-ins indicate that the fluid inside is more viscous than regular Kool-Aid, which can be easily poured? Does more viscous mean more vital? A potential rival would have to spend several moments, or waste several tries, discovering whether or not these fluids imbue mortality. And what if the Kool-Aid Man can survive as a jug alone? What then? Weakness #1: The Kool-Aid Man is beholden to the soft, sweet call of thirsty children. Where thirst and children come together, the Kool-Aid Man is there. For this reason, it's difficult for me to imagine him as an independent entity rather than a sort of Pokemon wielded for battle. But even assuming he can, in fact, act alone, how long could he ignore the siren call of "I'm firsty?" A willingness to exploit this weakness perhaps reveals more about the opponent than about the Kool-Aid Man himself. Weakness #2: The Kool-Aid Man is older than we think. I'm guilty of appropriating the Kool-Aid Man as the summer refreshment symbol of my golden childhood, but the fact is he was there for older brothers, cousins, perhaps even young aunts and uncles, all the way back to 1975. Who can say whether the Kool-Aid Man ages in the same way we do, or whether he, like us, has a time limit. But a 35-year television career will take it out of anyone. What's more, Kool-Aid's alter ego, Pitcher Man, has been around since 1954--a long life for a logo. No assumptions--but I will say I'm skeptical of the "youngening" he's gone through from then to now, the "friendification," a certain recklessness (look at that spray!) that has apparently evolved from his more sober and stable state. Strength #3: The Kool-Aid Man can run. Oh, you better believe he can run. Of course, as Kool-Aid Man also took a starring role in comics and video games, the answer to these questions may be right in front of us. Stats have been compiled (apparently his primary weakness is dehydration). Or if you're more inclined to gather your answers from history, as I am, try this review of Kool-Aid Man commercials through the decades and prepare to be creeped the hell out.

[Originally published for Uncanny Valley Magazine, September 14, 2010] I hesitate a bit to subtitle this as if it were the exercise itself that I'm interested in; really I'm interested in the results I got from it. Of course, if anyone is helped by this as an exercise I'm glad. In the intermediate fiction class I'm teaching, we read two stories about school: Charles Baxter's "Gryphon," in which a substitute teacher mingles fact and fantasy interchangeably, and Ed Jones's "First Day," in which a girl discovers that her mother is illiterate on her first day of school. I assigned both in an attempt to illustrate the old O'Connor adage that, if you've lived through adolescence, you have enough story material for the rest of your life. But we really ended up talking less about that than about some of Baxter's and Jones's language choices. In Baxter, we talked about the sad note that's struck at the very end, when the substitute has disappeared from the classroom and the students go back to their usual routine. Except this time the vibrancy and life that we've seen in them is replaced with the repeated phrase "We learned." The whole last paragraph is made up of sentences starting with "We learned," narrowing the rich experiences we've seen into a tinny list of lessons learned, all expressed in the communal voice rather than that of our first person narrator. The switch in tone is noticeable, deadening--that repeated phrase makes the last movement of the story happen. In Jones, a similar repetition is made, this one throughout the story. The phrase this time leads with "This is my mother:" and continues to highlight peculiar moments or expressions that would seem to characterize the mother through the child's point of view. Instead of really doing the job, though, these phrases seem woefully inadequate in the child's hands--we are getting a sense of the mother through them, but how we're really getting the mother is through this act of hers--the act of getting her child registered for school despite being turned away from one and despite being hindered by her illiteracy at another. The repeated phrase does characterize, but not fully. It provides more a picture of the child's mind as she's forming an impression of her mother. So after we'd pointed these out, I asked my class to choose one of these two prompts: 1) A la Charles Baxter, develop a story around sentences beginning with the phrase "We learned." Probably what is learned will reflect knowledge that is somehow inadequate or incorrect. 2) A la Ed Jones, develop a story around sentences that begin with "This is ____:" and expand to offer images, brief events, or snatches of dialogue that capture the person being described. Probably the descriptions will reflect as much about the describer as they do about the person being described. Again, the exercises themselves are not really my interest here, although I do want to acknowledge that the first was from Susan Neville, my instructor at Butler, and it did give me a good start to a story in that class. I mainly want to talk about what came out of them, to look at how something as simple as a sentence-level motif can make, and suggest, an entire story. For the Baxter exercise, my shining example was a male student's account of a breakup, which ended with a lengthy paragraph made of "We learned" sentences, much in the way that Baxter's story did. Here, though, the "We learned" lines served to legitimize and make concrete the high emotions of a college breakup. Taking the focus off of the "I" and showing the breakup through the lens of both characters allowed the writer to humanize both parties, whereas the straight first person voice really can't help but demonize or at least fail to understand the opposing partner. Showing the history of the relationship in terms of the concrete lessons of what they'd learned, too--for example, that "lying in the middle of the street to recreate a scene from The Notebook gets you closer to a head injury than anything else"--made the relationship feel like a prior condition, a lived-in space present in and behind the familiar terms of a breakup. The prompt in this case allowed us to see that there was a time when these two agreed with one another, when they thought and felt many of the same things--closely enough to serve as "lessons" for one another after the relationship was over. For the Jones exercise, the shining example came from a female student who chose to fill in the "This is ____:" blank with "me." Sounds like a gimmick maybe, but what made the piece great was that the "me" kept changing. Without saying as much, the student wound through her past, so when we saw "This is me:" we were actually seeing one of a number of possible "me"s, changing and evolving throughout a high school career. The memories and events associated with the recurring phrase were likewise in a sort of ghostly present tense--the details let us know where we were on the timeline, but the "me" being described was always theoretically present, with the overall feeling being that the "me" was constantly being built on and revised, asserted and scribbled out. The persistent present tense coupled with the authoritative tone worked with the disparate "This is me:" observations to build up a more complex character than more consistent observations would have yielded. This was a person who could not be summed up through her own eyes, and the story had this overtone of loss--like the narrator would like to be some of these "me"s again, if she could, even though her position as an ostensibly self-possessed adult was probably better. These were all, of course, hints in the piece; there was a lot of promise. But I was amazed at what a unique use of that simple phrase could lend to a story's atmosphere and characterization. Have you built a story around a repeated phrase like this? What did it reveal about the narrator using it, and what did it reveal about the character on the receiving end?

[Originally published for Uncanny Valley Magazine, October 12, 2010] A lot of writers talk about generosity in writing. I'm not sure, unfortunately, that I've ever totally understood what generosity in writing would refer to. I have an understanding that is intuitive, sure--generosity means giving, and there are many things that writing can "give." Let's say I'm forced to use the word in a sentence. I might say that a story that carries a sense of full disclosure about its character (I thought of Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) is generous, meanwhile countering that an unnecessary vomiting of information (Franzen's "They were the kind of liberals that...") is not generous but slack. Or I might say that a story or poem that wallows in its language a little, turning and turning and turning phrases round past the point of need till they come out more honest, more meant, is generous; I'd take care to differentiate this from a story or poem that twines its adjectival phrases, its nested subordinate clauses, delicately about to the point of rolling in its own slop. When I examine it this way, I wonder if the difference is really as simple and abdominally visceral as I imagine--is generosity an act of holding forth (and what a weird expression that is--I picture squeezing something tight as you deliver it into another's hands), not to be confused with excess, with indulgence, with binge or purge? I came across the term most recently not as a description of writing, but as a description of music. My favorite musician, Owen Pallett (who I am going to see in concert tomorrow--I break the ban on Arizona to see this man) tweeted about Sufjan Stevens's new album, The Age of Adz, saying on its behalf, "I'm gonna be interested to see if anybody can give The Age of Adz a negative review and not come off like a complete asshole." Then, "It's like coming home to find that Sufjan's made you dinner, ironed your clothes, washed your car and installed a new hot tub," ending with the hash tag, "#generous." I hadn't realized Sufjan had a new album, which made me feel very stupid; he's rather a hero of mine too. So I went and found it waiting on the NPR site (generously). And I started listening, and obviously within mere moments I felt very stupid again, because I did not realize ahead of time that this album was made pointedly different from his last few, the ones I got to know him by. And so I started looking for that generosity, because in one sense I knew it was there--to explode your style the way Sufjan does here, to both totally unmake it and tease it to its limits, is some kind of generous. It's been a long long time since I memorized your face / And it's been four hours now since I wandered through your place / I do love you / I do love you The opening song is incredibly lovely--these little Hauschka-esque plucked strings (I also love Hauschka), the immense overblown echo, the surprising strikes of a very homely piano. I think it's my mother's, which I reached a hand up to play when I was two years old, which I thought all children loved but they don't, which hasn't been tuned since I've been born. But before long comes Bigfoot stepping through piles of sonic acid, banging trash cans on his way out of the sewers. A sick couple of trombones, eventually, dovetailing pleasingly and grossly into more pancreatic explosions. Flutes and clarinets, the same--trills that could eat their way through the ozone layer. It's kind of amazing, and awfully disturbing. It's the kind of thing I was always afraid I might hear in my head. The kind of thing that, in my deepest trances of composing, I was always afraid I'd make. When it dies, when it dies / It rots / And when it lives, and when it lives / It gives it all it gots It's the power of electronics to create worlds that don't exist for sensations that do, to create blight where real instruments and voices can't. You don't hear a whole lot of music that creates blight, that wastes itself. It's something writers don't really have. (Do we?) It's clearly a work of great musicianship. It seems to fight logic so hard, but it has a vocabulary that can be tracked and made to fit next to the part of the musician's personality we already know. In some ways it's exactly what I always wanted Sufjan to do; I wanted him to yell at me, to break down, to scream. He doesn't really do that here, but he does put something of himself at risk. He risks his own overexposure; there's a quality of self-destruction, but without anger, without full violence. Balanced with it is certainly this quality of Sufjan inviting himself into your house, of playing in your brain--is this generosity? Or is it that he's inviting you into his house, his brain? Because he seems to do both. Does a generous writer invite you in? Or does generosity impose? Owen Pallett has a new album, too, to my joy: an EP called A Swedish Love Story. And he's trying new things too--the string arrangements are rickety in places; they strive as they always do, but they also scratch and warble and spread. There's a quality of openness to that--as with Sufjan, it's not a deliberate misplacement of elements, a coy wink at an intentional mistake; it's not an abandonment of craft but a careful deflation of it. Generosity, maybe, breaks the membrane a little to let us all see what'll leak. Generosity as human stuffing, as life fluid. Generosity as abdominal after all. Generosity as bandage for a suppurating wound. These are generous people, and maybe it's in part because they perceive a generous world. Just last week came this, too, which is one of the most generous things I've ever read (though I'm not sure it's necessarily generous to share). Generosity, maybe, bleeds. It does more than share. Generosity works glory out of blight. I want to be well / I want to be well / I want to be well / I want to be well / I want to be well / I want to be well / I want to be well / I want to be well / I want to be well / I want to be well / I want to be well / I want to be well / I want to be well / I want to be well / I want to be well / I want to be well / And I forgive you even / As you choke me that way /