In the Chameleon's Shadow Earns B.R.A.G. Medallion

My humble thanks go out to Book Reader's Appreciation Group (B.R.A.G.) for honoring In the Chameleon's Shadow with its Gold Medallion award. I encourage you to visit their site to learn about other honorees. They offer a great guide for high quality books overlooked by the major review sites and produced by small and independent publishers.

New Story in current issue of Per Contra

Per Contra, Issue 33

Many thanks go out to Miriam Kotzin and all the fine folks over at Per Contra. "Delays" is a humorous bit of micro fiction with a serious heart underneath. I'm so pleased to be in the company of many fine writers.

In Mean Country

Battleborn

Claire Vaye Watkins

Riverhead Books, 2012 (283 pages)

ISBN: 978-1-59448-825-2

In Mean Country

by Mark Hummel

Claire Vaye Watkins writes as if she scratches her stories from the grit and mining detritus of the Nevada desert she grew up in, then transforms the elemental by gathering language as rich and as natural as the sand or minerals found there like an alchemist. The work is as layered as the often brutal human history of the region, a history she both draws upon and to which she will surely add her own narrative. And like the harsh landscapes and histories that everywhere informs these brilliant stories,  when you peer long enough, closely enough, at what seems an empty, heartless place, you not only see its unforgiving beauty within the parched hills and among the tailings castaway after decades of exploitation, you also find glitter among the hardscape, the glint of silver and gold. Like the characters in her story collection Battleborn, the truths Watkins unearths require strong stomachs and strong wills to digest but reward the reader with sparkling prose, hard but achingly accurate portraits of unforgettable characters, and gemstones of hope among the chaos of despair and interior pain.

They are difficult portraits, not for the faint of heart. In Battleborn you pass time among prostitutes and failed prospectors, with the progeny of Manson’s Helter Skelter crew and with high school pizza makers seeking identity through sexual awakening in a Vegas hotel room with strangers. We meet a narrator so lost he writes life-revealing letters to a stranger whose address he found among the remains of an apparent desert car accident. Remarkably, however, Watkins is uncanny at not just allowing unfamiliar readers an introduction to such roughened and often weathered characters, within them she nearly always helps us also see vulnerability, sorrow, love, desire, and yes, hope.

Savagely gifted, Watkins can create an odd kind of beauty even in horror and ugliness like these lines describing a dying peacock, a bird that has become one of the last and most unlikely objects of affection for an aging, gay whorehouse manager, facing rejection from a beautiful, lost young tourist from Italy in “The Past Perfect, The Past Continuous”:

                For an instant the air is filled with the report of the sternum snapping. Michele’s never

                seen a bird like this. The snowy feathers redden as blood wells up around the prongs.

                He feels the give of the meat as he plies the rake from the bird’s breast.

Or consider this movement from wanted violence to heartache and defeat in “Man-O-War”, a story where a lonely old divorcee thinks he finds, then loses, new attachment to another:

                The truck pulled away and began its descent to the bald floor of the valley. Milo resumed

                her barking. Harris told her to shut up, but she went on. Rhythmic, piercing, incessant. The

                old man had never heard anything so clearly. He felt a steady holy pressure building in him,

                like a vein of water running down his middle was freezing and would split his body in two.

                He lunged at the dog. He wanted ore to skull. He wanted his shoulder burning, his hand

                numb. He wanted holes that had been her ear and eye growing wider, becoming one, bone

                crumbling in on itself like the walls of a canyon carved by a river. He wanted wanted wanted.

The stories are like a series of accident scenes from which you cannot look away. But more than that, you don’t want to look away. Like with Harris and this sudden urge for violence against his only companion, the only thing left alive in his life alone in the desert above an empty lake bed, we understand the deep, scouring loneliness that manifests itself in this moment when another person, a stranger requiring care, is taken away from him and he has realized that this target of his misplaced affection is as wounded as he.

Reviews like those offered by no less potent a voice in short fiction than Joy Williams have likened Watkins to Joan Didion for her mature management of economy and sharpness of prose, and it is an apt comparison, for Watkins proves to understand not only the power and beauty of the perfectly chosen word or phrase, she demonstrates that she understands what not to say just as keenly. It is often the sparseness of these stories that is most striking, the space that allows a focus on just how lonely and lost so many of these characters are. In such characters, Watkins echoes other writers of the literary West with her presentation of trailer parks and one room casinos and unforgiving apartment complexes, landscapes passed over and cityscapes better left unvisited, places and people that recall Raymond Carver most closely, with a nod to Nathanael West, or moved East, characters that could inhabit an Andre Dubus story. Like those writers and like Didion, her prose is precise, sometimes nearly deceiving by feeling so understated and matter of fact. Yet, just when you are brought closest to the story by its accuracy of detail or directness of dialogue, she’ll leave you abruptly panting at the beauty of a turned phrase or graceful description. The details are precise and revealing, the stories nuanced and extraordinarily mature in their vision. Here for example, the narrator of “Graceland”, trying to find her bearings six months after her mother has committed suicide, reflects on her boyfriend’s unfaltering patience:

                After Peter and I have sex there is some smallness in me that wants to turn to him

                and ask, In your professional estimation as a scientist, how long can a relationship

                be sustained on pity and anthropomorphism and a postcard on the fridge?

                But there is such bigness in him that he would say, As long as it takes.

This remarkable ten story collection certainly has not gone without notice and praise, winning the Story Prize for 2012 by gaining the nod over collections by Junot Diaz and Dan Choan, and listed by the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the best books of that year, still, like most story collections and indeed like most literary writers, Watkins has not gathered the readership she deserves. Not all readers love collections. But this one offers the very best the short form can accomplish, presenting stories that read with the breadth that seem ready for expansion into novels yet that, every time, prove fulfilling and complete as they stand. You will not want to seek out the real-life equivalents of these characters to pass your leisure among but you will cherish the way that meeting them in fiction can transform your vision of your own fears of failed life ventures and castings of hope.

Finding Substitutions for Loss

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

Anthony Marra

Hogarth 2013 (379 pages)

ISBN #978-0-7704-3640-7

  

Finding Substitutions for Loss

by Mark Hummel

A failed doctor, unable to mend the ailing, sketches portraits of refugees fleeing war and paints life-sized painted plywood cutouts of those disappeared from his village. A refugee, conscripted into prostitution and forced heroin addiction, now returned to the place and the war from which she sought refuge, draws the cityscape over a curtained window of buildings now missing or ravaged by bombs. A father, who has lost his fingers in pointless, cruel interrogation, turns to his child to become his hands. Another doctor severs the limbs of landmine victims with the ease of lopping branches from trees, substituting in her efficiency the loss of a disappeared sister and the life of comfort and love she could have had in London. A father saves his voice and his love for the son he has created by love rather than the one created by blood, this now unwanted son who informs on their neighbors. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, the title itself a substitute for the definition of life according to an aged medical text, creates brilliant layers of substitutions of love for a populace slowly being exterminated by hate. Over-arching the entire novel is another substitution—those filling the role of parents and caregivers for others stripped from their families by an illogical and chaotic war—acting out a tale brought down from the Bible and the Koran.

Set inside a layered rendering of the wars and their aftermaths that destroyed Chechnya from 1994 to 2004, Marra takes the reader into terrain—historical, literal, and political—that we should be embarrassed for not knowing. Long-listed for the National Book Award and short-listed by countless “best of” lists of 2013 fiction, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a literary debut worth every piece of praise it has garnered. So adroitly does the novel manage complex layers of time and overlapping events, a reader would never imagine this is Anthony Marra’s first novel. Certainly his background demonstrates all the vestiges of America’s literary incubators—a degree from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford—but one remains shocked at the knowledge Marra demonstrates of the wars that have razed Chechnya or the control he exerts over satisfyingly complex and self-contradictory characters or the maturity of recognition present in this parent story of caring for a variety of displaced orphans. Perhaps most impressive is how beautiful Marra is able to depict images and actions that should be so ugly; instead he salvages beauty from the very language he employs and the precise details he uses. If you are a reader of traditional print books because you are forever writing in the margins, your margins of this book will be filled to overflowing if only marking the moments of breathtaking and exacting prose. Everywhere Marra shows us the dignity and the beauty of people we might otherwise dismiss as inept, or as cold, those we might regard as without meaning or those already destroyed by the cruelty around them. If this is where Anthony Marra starts his career, it is difficult to imagine and wonderful to anticipate the books he will write in his future.

The Lies We Tell Ourselves

I've been more than a bit obsessed of late with the nature of deceit, likely because we live in a culture in which we find deceit omnipresent, so much so that we’ve come to expect it—in our politicians and government, in our corporations (in their actions, bookkeeping, and advertising), on our food labels, within the films and programs and books with which we like to entertain ourselves. I’m more than a guilty participant, and that is the larger reason for my obsession. I am a novelist. The word “fiction”, by which I make my living, comes to us from the Old French “ficcion” meaning “something invented” and originates in Latin, with roots meaning “to build, form or knead.” Moreover, I have written under a pseudonym for twenty-five years, so I guess that functions as a kind of lying inside of lying. So why should you trust me? You shouldn't.

But then you know that, don’t you? You know enough not to confuse the fabrications of a novel with reality. What troubles me, however, is that collectively we seem to have an increasingly difficult time separating out the lies we are told by those with substantial agendas requiring we accept such lies from the actual truth of facts. This, despite coming of age in a culture where we should know better, a culture where those trying to sell us things have been appealing to our vulnerabilities—our desires and our fears—all of our lives. As a teacher, I've worked hard to help students develop the critical thinking skills to differentiate truth from fiction in their everyday lives. Often, even among the brightest, it is an uphill battle.

At this moment, I am thinking of one student specifically. She was smart, scored well on tests, found acceptance into a good college, pulled in above average grades. Yet she aggressively claimed the position in a class discussion that there clearly was no harm caused to local communities by the presence of nearby large-scale oil and gas development. She had, after all, gone the extra mile most never do (or have the chance to do) and was a participant on a class field trip to a natural gas development site. She’d been shown around, had the process explained, saw completed drill sites, and was shown the public works facilities, such as a joint school district and community aquatic center that contributions from natural resource companies had helped finance, as had tax profits from oil and gas development. She refused, however, to see that the fact her tour had been led entirely by a public relations official from the company might have provided an incomplete picture of the impact, just as if seeing the neat, fenced pumping station told the whole picture of the process by how gas is brought to the surface. What she saw was real, after all. But she failed to talk to the police officers who had seen a 300% rise in domestic violence calls in the years during the most active gas field development, or the high school principal who lamented the spike in teen pregnancies in students who had briefly dated oil field workers, or the bank manager who made more money from her side job on Friday and Saturday nights than she did making now non-existent loans to locals, no more than she had investigated the warnings now frequently issued by the state for poor air quality conditions, something non-existent in a rural place prior to development. Now had she also had these conversations, she still might have reached her original conclusion (after, one hopes, some real investigation) and certainly she would have seen that taken alone, no one such piece of data offered irrefutable evidence, no more than her carefully controlled tour had. My concern as a teacher was not with the opinion she held but with the fact she had left so many questions unasked. When we fail to ask the questions critical thinking demands of us, we become guilty participants in propagating deception.

In imagining the story of Aaron Lugner in my novel In the Chameleon’s Shadow, I trace the actions of a man who has been living entirely by deceit for a decade, trying on entire false identities, profiting from the interest of women, and running scams that gain financial profit by appealing to the vulnerabilities and vanities of others. But I’m even more interested, in Aaron and in all the characters of the novel, in the nature of self-deceit, those ways in which we delude ourselves about our own natures. I’m interested in large part because I think we are all guilty participants. Indeed, I’m not certain any of us could quite make it through our individual difficult lives without a little self-deceit, for don’t we all, at the very least, possess rather selective memories? Ask three people who were all present at the same event twenty years ago for their recollections and tell me you won’t get three different stories. Cobbled together they may reflect some proximity of the truth. We can argue that this is merely a matter of differing perspectives and faulty, aging brain wiring, and that would be right, of course, but isn’t the way we remember also guided in part by how we wish to remember and shaped by psychological forces we don’t fully understand? I would argue that is partly a measure of self-deceit, though not necessarily an unhealthy one. I suspect it is difficult, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, not to be deceiving in one’s perception of oneself about such ordinary and inescapable things as the way we view our waistlines and our hairlines. Part of this is even a biological function. After all, how many women would face a second (or third or fourth…) round of childbirth if they weren’t able to shape selective memory about the pain of the first one, supplanting physical pain with the joy of new life?

The novel does not focus entirely on these normal measures of self-deceit but rather more extraordinary ones, for Aaron is a character that begins to believe he may be creating realities by the lies he tells. But then I would argue that America, collectively, is guilty of something similar, often too willing to accept the lies we have knowingly participated in creating. How else did we, with notable opposition from those who did not buy in, accept the self-delusion that our involvement in Vietnam was to protect Southeast Asia from communism, to keep the world safe for democracy?  How else do we continue to boast that we remain the most advanced nation in the world when a 2012 Pearson report ranks the US 17^th in a global educational index based on student graduation rates, test performance, and pursuit of college admission; when our infant mortality rate of 5.9 deaths per 1,000 live births places us behind not just most of Europe but behind countries like Cuba, Taiwan, and Slovenia; and when we are ranked as the 18^th most obese nation in the world? How else do we accept presenting ourselves as a model for democracy when our own Congress is barely functioning and represents the interests of lobbyists rather than those of their constituents (and we are certainly lying to ourselves if we believe differently)?

In the Chameleon’s Shadow never enters the realms of deceit, self or otherwise, with a political eye. It is a story about people and about their individual decisions, not their political ones. But its writing was everywhere informed by the geopolitical arena of lying, for the bulk of the novel was written at the height of the most recent recession, at that time when, even as it was still unfolding, collectively American consciousness was rapidly forgetting the lies of the Bush administration that had carried us into war and those that had created tax policy and stripped regulation to ensure that the wealthiest in the society (and the biggest campaign contributors—though now, in the age of the Citizens United ruling such contributions not only flow directly through corporations but unchecked through interest groups in a purposeful, deceptive attempt to hide individuals) grew richer. Is it self-deceit to fail acknowledgment that since 1979 the incomes of the middle 60% of Americans have grown 38% while the incomes of those in the top1% of income brackets have seen 277% growth, as reported by the Congressional Budget Office? It is a useful reminder that the wealth gap between the very wealthiest Americans and the rest of us reached a peak in 2007 and mirrored, almost exactly, a peak recorded in 1928,the latter immediately followed of course by the Great Depression, the former triggering the recession from which we are still struggling to recover despite its technical end. By 2009 and 2010, the years during which most of my novel was written, we were fully aware of the consequences of the enormous, collaborative lie that generated the mortgage crisis. And what is it but a confluence of self-deceit and purposeful deceit to sell people homes they could not afford, financed by loans they could not pay and based on appraisals that were pure fictions for the purpose of packaging such loans to inflate a market that was, in itself, essentially a fiction.

As banks failed and the Bush administration initiated policies to bail them out, we watched CEOs line their pockets, something we have already clearly chosen to forget, which begs the question whether this habit is a symptom of cultural ADD or self-deceit or both. It is this myopia that troubles me most, for immediately the blame shifted to the Obama administration as we quickly and conveniently chose to forget the circumstances and policies that created the nightmare President Obama inherited. Instead we saw the rise of movements like the Tea Party, which steadfastly likes to believe—and I do accept that many, even a majority of its participants actually do believe—that it is a grassroots movement, quietly ignoring or choosing to remain ignorant of the fact that it has been bankrolled almost exclusively by members of the ruling class, most notably by David and Charles Koch through donations to groups such as “Americans for Prosperity”, “FreedomWorks” and others. Everyone has a right to his or her agenda, including the Koch brothers, but I can’t tolerate the kind of self-deceit masked either as simple ignorance or total lack of critical thinking ability that allows so many Tea Party members to view their agenda as one developed and funded by “the people” to represent hard-working, ordinary Americans.

Similarly, is it not likely that public figures with microphones are disproportionate to the larger population in their sham suggestions that climate change is a hoax? Consider this as illustrated by Congressman Steve Stockman’s (R-TX) words: “The new fad thing that’s going through America and around the world. It’s called global warming.”?  Or that they are completely off track in their understanding, like the fearless Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH), explaining: “Every cow in the world, you know, when they do what they do, you've got more carbon dioxide.” How long will we allow a tiny minority of either the self-protective, profit-motivated or the entirely ignorant continue to deny the careful and well-documented research on climate change? Do they even understand the nature of scientific inquiry? Are those who continue to deny the science guilty of purposeful lying or of self-deception? Either way, the inaction promoted by such absurd claims only help to delay movement towards solutions, and either way, who pays?

It is a similar surreptitious methodology based in denial and lies that has helped form a near single point of focus by conservatives over the past election cycle and into the next on the deficit. Now no one in their right mind is going to suggest carrying huge deficits is any way to fund a great country and no one should deny that its presence must be addressed. That said, common sense also suggests that in a time of significant recession, high unemployment, two wars, and in the presence of a crumbling infrastructure that largely has not been addressed in over a half century is not the ideal moment to pitch an all or nothing battle on the deficit. Now this is all the more in evidence when so many actually appear to believe in the calculated deception of forgetting where most of the deficit came from. Isn't it convenient to forget that the last large deficit experienced in America had much of its root in Reagan tax policy and the folly of trickle-down economics and was erased in a time of prosperity and growth during the Clinton administration when deficit was transformed to surplus? And while I and others would be equally guilty of practicing deception if I did not acknowledge the significant growth in the deficit during the Obama administration, it is silly to remove such growth from the facts of the surrounding economics. This is equally true of the last acts of the Bush administration and the actions of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, for that occurred in a time of unprecedented economic freefall and to fail action would likely have exaggerated the problems. To view that and the current deficit growth outside the context of the very recent history is simply stupid. But it would be equally mindless to fail to recognize the policy decisions that helped create the terrain in which such catastrophes occurred, as it is inaccurate to falsely represent the impact of such spending when compared to the other choices that account for the bulk of the deficit. (And if you want to deal in those pesky little things called facts, when examining the years after 2008, it might be revealing to recognize that spending on TARP, Medicare Part D, and The Recovery Act COMBINED do not equal expenditures on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and pale when compared to the 2001 and 2003 Tax cuts.) There was an extremely readable and useful chart reprinted in The Atlantic (originally from the New York Times) that helps clarify a visual reminder of the truth about deficit growth and its sources, and to place it in the same context I attempt here, it is useful to quote from the accompanying article:

“It's based on data from the Congressional Budget Office and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Its significance is not partisan (who's "to blame" for the deficit) but intellectual. It demonstrates the utter incoherence of being very concerned about a structural federal deficit but ruling out of consideration the policy that was largest single contributor to that deficit, namely the Bush-era tax cuts.”

And consider this statement from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

"If not for the Bush tax cuts, the deficit-financed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the effects of the worst recession since the Great Depression (including the cost of policymakers’ actions to combat it), we would not be facing these huge deficits in the near term. By themselves, in fact, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will account for almost half of the $20 trillion in debt that, under current policies, the nation will owe by 2019. The stimulus law and financial rescues will account for less than 10 percent of the debt at that time."

While not the largest single contributor to the deficit, consider these boggling numbers from an article from March 2013 in the Washington Post: “The U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will cost taxpayers $4 trillion to $6 trillion, taking into account the medical care of wounded veterans and expensive repairs to a force depleted by more than a decade of fighting, according to a new study by a Harvard researcher.” And, remembering that the war in Iraq was based either on a complete absence of analytic logic or an outright lie, let’s ask the questions: what did American men and women give up their lives and limbs to accomplish? Is Iraq a more stable place today than it was prior to our invasion? Will we exit Afghanistan and leave it any less corrupt or any less tribal than have the countless foreign armies who have fought there before? Have we made more new enemies and created more future terrorists than we removed? Are the geopolitics of the larger region more or less stable today than they were before ten years of war? And who, overwhelmingly, serves our country in such wars, members of the top 1% of income brackets or those of the bottom 10%?

The answers to such questions, like the realities beneath who sets the Tea Party agenda and those who deny climate change suggest to me that, collectively, we are extremely adept at self-deception and easy marks for those who wish to deceive us with purpose.

And such is the larger domestic atmosphere prevalent in the years spent writing In the Chameleon’s Shadow. The book touches on none of these, but I hold by novelist Ishmael Reed’s belief that “writers cannot write outside of history.” Aaron Lugner, the protagonist of the novel, came entirely as a surprise to me. I don’t honestly know why I stumbled upon his story during this writing, for the book has its genesis only in a visual image that opens the novel. The rest of the writing, as it typically is for me, was simply trying to catch up to the people who populated the fringes of that image. But can any of us live outside the history of our times? In hindsight, it is not so terribly surprising to have found myself writing a novel preoccupied with the themes of deceit. So while the novel is not political, it is ideological, and one of the central questions the book ended up exploring is this: “Is not answering the question that has never been asked a kind of lying?”

I think it is an intriguing question in its own right, not only prevalent to the relationships within the novel but as a larger question for our lives. We all edit. Even in the age of social media and an overage of sharing, we pick and choose what we reveal, and honestly, it seems to me that increasingly people are so busy making such choices about what is revealed that by and large we are not very good at asking questions any more. This leaves a lot of room for non-disclosure or partial disclosure and comes in an age when we are extraordinarily aware of the images, public and otherwise, we wish to broadcast. If we fail to ask the question, can we ever expect an answer? And if we are carefully crafting a public face, how much of that portrait is rooted in truth and how much in a partial illusion guided by self-deception?

What I do feel strongly is that when we take such ideas back into the collective of the larger culture, our ability to be deceived, by the self or by others, is rooted in our lack of asking the difficult questions. We live in an age where we are skeptical of smart people yet fail to critically review the most omnipresent parts of our lives. We listen to pundits when we should be conversing with scientists. We watch fabricated television and call it “reality” and pretend to be shocked when its participants prove to have little relationship to the personalities (characters?) they portray. We allow the wealthy elite to set the country’s agenda and then pacify ourselves in the belief that they are looking out for our best interests. We accept the mission taglines of corporations as truth. We need to ask more questions. We need to question our representatives, our corporations, and ourselves. If we fail to ask the questions, we are guilty of passively accepting a camouflage of lies.

Journals and Gifts and the Gifts of Journals

There is a odd but lovely pleasure in starting a new journal, like an opportunity for new beginnings. It awaits. Blank pages. I take strange pleasure in starting a new journal that is not paralleled by the accomplishment of filling an old one. Indeed, I don't view it as an accomplishment. Instead the pages fill as if I was not a participant in their making. But the new journal seems filled with anticipation, with possibility. I'm very guilty of keeping at least one blank journal at the ready most all of the time, sometimes, as in this case, waiting for nearly a year before being called into action. Most of mine a simple and most are black. When I'm tight on money or just feeling miserly, I use composition books that can be had for as low as 49 cents in bargain bins. And there have been times in my life when I've recycled such comp books from others who have filled a few pages and then abandoned them. This one is far more stylish than most I use, featuring an Edward Hopper painting I like:

It has good memories attached to it as well, purchased in the gift shop of the de Young museum in San Francisco on a trip last year to see dear friends.

But better still, when I opened the new journal to start writing, the surprise of a gift appeared:

I'd forgotten all about the fortune until I opened the journal and then a whole memory came flooding back to me: a amazing and lovely meal with my wife at a unassuming Korean barbecue restaurant nearly hidden in a block of unassuming shop fronts in a workaday neighborhood on the west side, the smell of the charcoal and the sizzle of the lean meat, the spice of the pickled vegetables.and this, a Chinese fortune cookie to end a Korean meal. I was largely attracted to the advice as a career educator, for it rather sums up experiential education in three neat sentences. But I suspect it is sound advice for a writer as well.

To see how liberal arts grads really fare, report examines long-term data | Inside Higher Ed

To see how liberal arts grads really fare, report examines long-term data | Inside Higher Ed As the parent of three daughters, all college graduates, two who went to small liberal arts colleges, the other to a liberal arts oriented small university and one of which is currently completing a graduate degree, I found this article heartening. Certainly it brings some real world figures to an argument I've been making, both as a father and as a career educator for a very long time. As a writer, I find a certain satisfaction in reading such material as well, particularly when the article suggest that while earning potential is real, self-described satisfaction and career happiness seems the more meaningful argument still.