The Butt-Crease Debacle: Kari Putterman on Pain and Fiction

In the weeks to come, the minnesota review will feature a four-part mini series by Virginia Tech MFA student Kari Putterman. Today’s post is the first of four excerpts from her essay, Living Tissue on the Page. Be sure to check back next week for the next part of the series!

The plan was, be the first one to arrive to class every day, that way no one would see me take out from my backpack the pink lacrosse ball and sit on it. Arriving to class before everyone else, however, was especially difficult at a school with so many impression-concerned, competitive about-(of all things)-punctuality types, but did I really care what those types thought of me? Last one to leave was easier. Write in planner or check phone until the classroom clears out; stand up; slip pink ball in backpack.

Years later, I can joke about the sophomore-junior year butt crease debacle. No doctor could figure out how to treat what was causing the pain, and after all the traditional tests and treatments failed, and then after all the invasive doctorly things failed, I tried every homeopathic thing I could think of: I sat on a pink lacrosse ball because maybe the ball would release my piriformis. I slept with a knit scarf keeping my legs tied together because if one leg flayed out, that motion could unnecessarily strain my hip. I ate no gluten or dairy because you know, inflammation, and drank cherry juice every single day. I foam rolled every night and performed a forty minute P.T. routine called ‘flossing the needle.’ I remember sitting down, doing homework, getting thirsty and debating for so long, which is worse, staying thirsty or the pain that will happen if I stand up, walk to the sink and back?

My first plan of attack was Google. I scoured all of my old reliables. Letsrun message boards, Running Times, Sportsmedicine.com. I tried “glute pain running” and “butt pain running” and “butt glute pain running.” I wanted to find other people who had had the same experience, who I could relate to and who would validate this pain that the doctors didn’t get. My object proved elusive, but the amount of near-misses I’d find kept me typing, searching, clicking. I tried, “butt pain shooting down leg and can’t run.” I tried, “butt crease top of thigh pain.” Whenever I heard of a pro runner getting injured, I would jump on their Twitter, wanting to see someone else going through what I was going through. I canceled out for terms like “lumbar spine,” “herniated disc,” “sacroiliitis,” things I had been tested and cleared for. All the while, I was telling myself, It doesn’t matter what some message board post says. It only matters when your own butt crease stops hurting. But I still believed that if I could find my pain in words, then I might find out how to make it better, or at least validation that it really sucked. I didn’t stop. My next set of search terms could be the time when I’d get the right phrasing, the right combination of quotes and no-quotes, when the search engine logarithm would be set just right, and there it would be: my compatriot, the one who would understand me and heal me. Oh, here’s a good one, “butt pain’ ‘leg lock’ running chronic.” Search:

I remember the earlier rounds of injections, and the MRIs and acupuncture and dry needling and sports massages and the doctor’s waiting rooms and the bout on crutches, winter in Manhattan and the mile-long uphill crutch to get to class every day.

I remember enumerating experiences that were disappearing forever. I’ll never know what it’s like to race in Heps. I’ll never know what it’s like to have a full collegiate cross-country or track season. I’d even take track! I’ll never know what my body can do. I’ll never know what it’s like to score points for my team. These were things that you only got one chance at, and the undiagnosable butt crease pain had me irreversibly side-lined and feeling bad for myself.

I’m only twenty! I would cry inside my head. I shouldn’t be missing out yet. And then, I’m only twenty-one! Then, I’m only twenty-two! But by then I was thinking, I’ve been in chronic pain for three years; and there was nothing I could do about it, it had already happened, irrevocable, like everything else.

What I don’t remember is the pain. I know it was there. I know I couldn’t fall asleep because of it and that crossing my legs or laying on my side was unendurable. But I know the pain was there as if I had read about it, or heard the story from someone else. Oh yeah, that girl who went to all those doctors and got that weird surgery? The one who carried around that pink ball and thought no one noticed? I know the pain in words. But even the word pain contains, built into its function, a road-block, a refusal. Pain, as a word and a concept, seems so impenetrably personal and so completely temporal that there is no way to completely convey it, to convey it so that someone else can feel it, too.

I was sitting next to these people in class, after all, elbow to elbow at a round table, our feet sometimes swinging out and hitting another set of feet beneath the table, and these fellow people had no idea the pain shooting up and down, endlessly up and down, butt to knee, knee to calf, back to butt, butt to knee. And if anything was going on inside their bodies, too? Inchs apart all semester, and I’d never, I’ll never know.

The doctors, however, tried to know. Tried to break down that word, pain. The original doctors passed me off to a new set of doctors, pain management ones, and every day in the Manhattan Pain Management waiting room I would fill out questionnaires. On the first set of questionnaires was a drawing of a body (usually female, but once when they ran out, male) shown as two side-by-side bodies, a front body and a back body. I was supposed to draw where my pain was and draw what kind of pain I was feeling. Squiggly lines for numb pain. Straight lines for burning pain. Dots for dull pain. Zig-zag for throbbing pain. Beneath the bodies was the 1 through 10 pain scale accompanied by disembodied faces. The face for 1 was a yellow smiling face and the face for 10 was a red face with its mouth wide open and tears coming out of its clamped shut eyes. The faces in between grew progressively less yellow and more red, their eyes progressively shutting and their mouth going from smile to frown to deeper frown to wide open. Mark your pain along this continuum. This continuum was difficult for me. My whole life I’d been told that I had an abnormally high pain threshold. When I was little and doctors gave me shots, I never flinched, let alone cried. When I was in high school, I ran on a stress fracture until it turned into a full-on fracture mid-race. What if for me the pain was maybe a 5, but if for the doctor evaluating my chart the pain, if it was in his body, would be a 7, and, because of that disparity, I was giving him misleading and perhaps wrong information, information that would forever prevent him from relating or understanding or healing? And what if my own perspective was skewed? What if I had never experienced a 9 or a 10, so even though sometimes I would cry getting out of bed and think, Surely today is a 7.5 day!, if I had, earlier in my life, experienced a true 10 day of pain, I would know, crying as I struggle out of bed barely ranks as a 6. Still: I tried! But usually I didn’t know. What was the difference between a throbbing and a dull pain? Could a throb be anything but dull? What if sometimes my pain felt one way and other times another way? What if it felt two ways at once? What if my pain had become so constant and all-consuming that I could no longer distinguish between a numbing and a burning pain because it was all just painpainpain or urrrrhhhhhh or dddd                 and what if, because it was all just painpainpain or urrrrhhhhhh or                      ddddddff I was giving the doctors the wrong information and they would never cure me, never even manage me? But if I got the words right and was able to articulate the exact, precise kind of pain, then they’d know what to do, then they’d save me?

Despite my deliberation, the forms were never articulate enough. The PA would take my clipboarded forms, ferry them and me to the empty, freezing cold (always) examination room; the PA would read and enter all of my carefully inscribed symbols, leave the clipboard in a plastic holder nailed to the back of the door, and the doctor would arrive, read my forms, read the PA’s (to me) mysterious decoding and analysis of my forms, and say, “Describe the pain.” I would try! “I call it my butt crease pain, but it’s not really my butt crease. It’s just that it’s not my butt, and it’s not my leg, so butt crease seems … the closest. Sometimes it locks up and my whole leg just goes like dead. Sometimes the pain shoots down all the way to my calf, and that usually makes my leg go dead, too. Whenever I sneeze it always shoots down like that. It hurts the most if I sleep on my side, cross my legs, stand up, bend down, sometimes I literally can’t bend down, and it’s pretty much never not present.” The doctor will come back with things like, “What do you mean ‘locks up’?” or “What do you mean ‘goes dead?’” or “What do you mean ‘butt crease?’” And the session would usually end with me standing up and pointing, “It hurts here, and then it goes down here, and then it just centers right here,” and the doctor no longer taking notes and eventually asking, “Do you want a blanket? You’re shaking.”

Kari Putterman is getting her MFA in Fiction at Virginia Tech.

An Interview with Danny Krug

Danny Krug is a photographer and writer based in NYC. He publishes a bi-monthly music and culture magazine called 1.21 Gigawatts. In the following interview I try and get commentary on the connections between music journalism, literary labels, and cultural reporting in the digital age. In a time when the multiplicity of channels provided by the internet seems shorted by more narrow channels and tastemakers, where do authors and literary consumers stand? Danny provides insights and says “bullshit” a lot.

MB: Where have you published? What have you published?

DK: I publish a music and art magazine in Brooklyn called 1.21 Gigawatts. That’s my main focus. In the past I’ve also written for various blogs and I did a little work for the Deli magazine in LA. Gigawatts isn’t your normal magazine. Its made by artists not writers. I’m primarily a photographer. I just write because without the writing we’d have a 32 page photo album. We generally do whatever we want with our brand. We aren’t limited to our 32 page print copy. I don’t like including anything in the magazine that I’m not a fan of. Why take up space and people’s time just to tell them that something sucks? If its good we’ll tell you, if it’s not maybe look to Pitchfork or Rolling Stone to fill your negativity quota because we just won’t talk about it. Its how people say “If you don’t have anything nice to say then don’t say anything at all” but for music journalism. I firmly believe in talking shit on people and I do it often, but I’m not going to waste my time talking shit on a band I hate in my magazine. Bands I hate include Radiohead and U2. Also Jay-Z can generally fuck off too (so can Conor Oberst, except Desaparecidos, that band rules). No need to talk about it in my magazine. The general Gigawatts state of mind is “This is what we do. This is who we like. If you like em too, if you like us too, that’s great. If not, fuck off.”

Back to the question though, we try to publish every two months. It’s tough though. Print is a beast. With Internet everything is instant. With print we have to wait at least two weeks to get the copies and then we have to take them around to places for people to get them. 
Every day people tell me print is dead and ask why I do hard copies. Those questions are usually followed up by them telling me how cool the magazine looks as they flip through a copy. Print is far from dead. If cassettes have a place in the world still, then so does print media. The problem with a lot of print media is that it’s bullshit. Stuffed with ads. Articles bought out by corporations to promote their own product as opposed to letting the magazine give their actual opinion. We aren’t driven by money and that’s why our magazine is different. No one on our magazine has made a dime since we started. I’ve personally dumped hundreds of my own dollars into the project. That being said, there is a list of companies I’d love to have advertise in the magazine (Nintendo, Sub Pop, Dr. Martens get at me).

MB: Based on our conversations and hang outs, and what I’ve seen of your work, you seem steeped in the contemporary indie music scene, particularly in NYC. In tracking and re-presenting the work of up-and-coming bands and artists, how much interest is there in ‘literary’ considerations? Is your work always oriented toward the short term, or is there a larger literary/cultural project taking place?

DK: Mainly I’m focused on indie and punk music, but I always maintain that we (as a publication) are open to anything. From the start we’ve wanted the magazine to have no more than 25% text. The other 75% would be visual art. That concept limits our ability to open up to literary ideas, but that’s not to say that I’m closed minded to including anything. If the right story or article comes to my attention I’ll find a way to include it. We recently featured Keith Morris’ new band OFF!, and Keith, as you may know, is the original singer of Black Flag. That guy has been around for a loooong time. If he came to me with some crazy tour stories, I’d feel dumb not to print them. Keith is a crazy dude. I used to see him at the grocery store near my house in LA being totally normal and then I’d see him later that week on stage screaming his lungs out. I’d love to run a piece about what happens in his day-to-day life. Stuff like that is fascinating to me.

Our work is made in relation to the short term (who’s popular/got a new record), but I feel that it should be generally relevant in the long term. What’s good now will still be good in 6 months or a year. Fuck, I still listen to Blink 182 every day. Once something is good it will always be good and worth reading about. We write about bands and artists and we may mention new albums and upcoming exhibitions, but the overall content of the article should still be relevant a year from now or even 10 years from now. The new Babies record came out. We wrote about them and the album. It’s good. It’s worth reading about. 
There definitely is a larger project taking place. Gigawatts started as a magazine and shortly after its launch we started booking shows as well. Now we have a monthly night at Legion Bar in Williamsburg, and we’re always talking about doing shows here or there. Our lead illustrator and I have also been talking about other ideas. More visually driven ideas. He’s been making custom t-shirts and silk screened pillows. He’s out there sometimes, but I’ve never seen a 19 year old with better ideas than Brandon. Gigawatts is (in a perfect world) a bi-monthly publication. We’re trying to come up with ideas to stay active in the in-between time. Today’s society moves so fast that if we don’t stay visible I fear that people will forget about us. Do we have an end goal for the big picture? No, we’re just kinda having fun and seeing where we can take it and where it can take us. Do I see and end in sight? Not really. Do I want it to end eventually? Yes, but I’m in too deep right now to get out even if I wanted to (which I don’t btw). Once I’m worn out and the team is worn out we’ll figure out what to do next. I’d like to work for NME in a photography capacity (they’re the only decent music magazine anymore).

MB: It seems like music criticism for indie-rock has remained its own thing, in its own world, with only a few writers crossing over into the ‘literature’ zone like Greil Marcus, Chuck Klosterman, and Lester Bangs. How does music criticism and music-related journalism fit into a larger scheme of literature?

DK: I haven’t read much Klosterman or Lester Bangs, that’s not to say I’m not aware of it. I know these are important people. I probably SHOULD read them. But there are a lot of things I should do. As a photographer I should probably be able to name more photographers than David LaChapelle, Terry Richardson and Annie Liebovitz (who I think is fucking boring btw). In the grand scheme of things, for a guy who does what I do, I should probably be more privy to Pitchfork and all that. I don’t really expose myself to other influences regularly. I live in my little Bushwick bubble and it’s comfy here. 
Basically, I think that music criticism is bullshit in most cases. I don’t care what so and so from Rolling Stone thinks of the new Strokes record. I have ears and an Internet connection. I can figure out what I like and so can you. Where music journalism is successful is with smaller bands. Shit you’ve never heard of. My favorite record this week is Audacity’s Mellow Cruisers (I’m listening to it right now). A lot of people don’t know Audacity. How do I know this? They played last week at Death By Audio as opposed to Madison Square Garden. Is there anything wrong with that? No. Should they play MSG? Probably not. But you should know who they are because they rule. My place in music criticism is to tell people what I’m listening to and that I like it. From there they can go decide on their own. 
I think guys like Klosterman and Bangs that can write whole books on music and hold people’s attention should totally do so. If I ever write a book on music, don’t buy it. It’s going to be shit. I’m telling you this now. Klosterman and Bangs have a place in literature because they’ve been around the block . I don’t. Pitchfork doesn’t.

MB: Does music criticism and music journalism want to be separate from narrative writing? If so, why?

DK: Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t. Music reviews and stuff like that obviously would be dumb as narratives. Articles like we write in Gigawatts are a little different. A lot of the bands we feature are either friends of ours that we like to listen to or people that we like to listen to that we’ve become friends with as a result of the magazine. Some of our articles take on more of a narrative feel just because I might meet up with a band and interview them for an article, then put that article on my hard drive and forget about it for weeks, but during those weeks I’m hanging out with the people I’ve interviewed and what we do while hanging out can influence the article. Generally if a band is in the magazine its because we dig their music and wanna hang out with them. We’re really just hoping that one of them gets booked for Coachella and we can get free tickets. Not really, but that would be cool (Hey DIIV, hook a kid up. I know you’re playing that shit next year). Does it wanna be separate? I don’t know. I do know that it’s not always able to stay separate. It’s like how that kid in Almost Famous started the article he spent the whole movie writing by saying that he was on a plane with the band and it was about to crash. That’s way cooler than just saying these assholes are in a band and heres some stuff you should know. 


MB: Blogs in all their informal glory have cranked up the output of literary work, but also made low-quality blurb writing the norm. Do you see high quality blog content as work that strives toward literary labels or are well-made blogs a unique form of their own? Are novels grand-daddies and blogs the reckless children in the literary lineage?

DK: I haven’t encountered many well made blogs. I do think a lot of blog writers think they’re cooler than they really are. Blurbs are cool. When it comes to music criticism, it’s generally pointless, but if I’m going to read it it shouldn’t take longer to read than it does to listen to one of the band’s songs. I think most people who write blogs would rather be writing something else. Maybe a magazine article. Maybe a book.

 

Max Brooks paints nothing professionally, partakes of the highest quality macaroni, and writes like a young Tom Clancy.

[Call for Papers] Special Issue: Katrina- A Decade After

the minnesota review invites submissions for a Special Issue on “Katrina – A Decade After” to be guest edited by Gaurav Desai (English/African and African Diaspora Studies, Tulane University). Our aim is to reflect on the hurricane, the measures that could have been taken to prevent the massive devastation caused by it, and the immediate and long term response by the government, private industry, and civil society. How has Katrina left a permanent mark not only on the Gulf South, but also on our larger national imaginary? What lessons, if any, have we learned and what actions and policies have we adopted to better mitigate against future disasters? Haunting though the images may be, the impact of Katrina was not limited to flooded homes and emergency rescues from rooftops – it altered fundamental social contracts in cities such as New Orleans – from public education to public housing. It also awakened a new activism focused on calls for better levee protection to addressing the loss of wetlands in coastal communities.

We invite contributions that chart these changes and their significance to larger policy debates that confront the nation and indeed the world. In the spirit of the legacy of the journal, the best contributions will be those that take a stand, however controversial, and are prepared to make the argument in no more than 4000 words. In keeping with the multi-genre nature of the journal we welcome position papers, review essays, interviews with key figures involved with the hurricane, poetry, fiction, and photo-essays. Potential contributors are invited to consult with the editors before submission. The issue will be published in April 2015 to mark the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina in August 2015. Final submissions are due on June 1, 2014. For further information and consultation, please contact editors@minnesottareview.org.

Contributor Update: Toni Thomas

Toni Thomas’s “My Mother’s Body Turns Traitor on Her” first appeared in Issue 71/72 (Winter/Spring 2009) of the minnesota review. Since then, Thomas has published two chapbooks, Walking on Water and Fast as Lightning, which won the 2010 Gribble Press Poetry Competition. Her poetry collection Chosen was a finalist in the 2010 Brick Road Poetry Press competition, and two additional full length manuscripts were finalists for the Anhinga Poetry Prize, the May Swenson Poetry Award, and the Crab Orchard Poetry Prize. Thomas lives in Oregon with her family and likes to contemplate the moon from her bed.

My Mother’s Body Turns Traitor on Her

til she doesn’t recognize herself anymore
curtains the bathroom mirror
scissors herself out of family photograph albums.
What will she do with the remainder
of her life now that the
hourglass of curves have turned
into grapefruits of discontent?
Some might say she has
fudge marbled her life away
given into dissolution, wrinkles
lacks self-respect.

How can I tell you about loss
the way it eats heathen street shoes
the way loneliness dwarfs the tongue
and courage can be a secret pact that keeps
a family stick pinned together
on heavy knees
the way time sometimes slays the voice
sets up a graveyard we start
to live in.

Over time my mother’s body turned
traitor on her.
It was my childhood.
A sadness I watched with a rapt tongue.
But in the sum of a life
there are more terrible
irrevocable losses
than this one.

[From the Archives]: An Interview with M.H. Abrams

Today’s post is an excerpt of an interview with M.H. Abrams, from Issue 69 (Fall 2007).  The interview took place on 26 August 2007 at M. H. Abrams’ home in Ithaca, NY. It was conducted by Jeffrey J. Williams, then editor of the minnesota review, and transcribed by David Cerniglia, then assistant to the review while a PhD student in the literary and cultural studies program at Carnegie Mellon University. M. H. Abrams is an iconic name in literary studies, appearing on the spines of over eight million copies of the Norton Anthology of English Literature and as the first entry in the references of two generations of critical books. His career has spanned, as he remarks in an essay on “The Transformation of English Studies: 1935-1995” (in American Academic Culture in Transformation: Fifty Years, Four Disciplines, ed. Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske [Princeton UP, 1997]), over half the life of the discipline of English, and he has been a major participant in its development.

Williams You’ve seen a lot of change in literary studies. You’ve seen it go from literary history, when you were at Harvard in 1930 or thereabouts, to New Criticism, and then to Northrop Frye’s archetypal criticism, to deconstruction, and finally to New Historicism. Maybe you could talk about the course of criticism that you’ve seen.

Abrams I was brought up in the days when to get a PhD you had to study Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Old French, and linguistics, on the notion that they served as a kind of hardcore scientific basis for literary study. But the fact is that good teachers taught literature too. Very clearly the bias of the teaching, even by the most lively teachers, was historical. They dealt with the changes in literary forms, with the history of the novel, and there was very little attention to the analysis of the literary text itself. We owe to the New Critics the ability to do what they called close reading—a close, extensive analysis of the construction of a poem and its metaphoric structure. That was new when I was an undergraduate, and it was distrusted, as new things always are, by the traditionalists.

I remember that I was one of the young bucks at Harvard who, as a graduate student, tried to get a New Critical kind of question into the general examination in English studies for English majors. At the end of your senior year you took a written exam, if you were aiming for honors at any rate, and the questions in those exams had a historical bias for the most part. Even when you were asked to discuss a particular poem they didn’t expect you to open it out in the way the New Critics opened it out by close reading. So two of us graduate students got together and we proposed that one of the questions confront a student with a poem, unidentified either in time or place or authorship, to see what he would manage to say about it.

Williams Like I. A. Richards in Practical Criticism?

Abrams I spent a year at Cambridge on a fellowship studying with Richards—and yes, our proposed question was modeled on Practical Criticism or on the sort of thing that Cleanth Brooks and Warren in Understanding Poetry were doing. The whole notion was pooh- poohed by the older people who were writing the exams, who said students wouldn’t be able to cope with the question. So we organized an experiment, I. A. Richards-style: we got together a dozen English majors, seniors, we dug out a poem, they were confronted with it and were asked to say what they could about it, and the results were very good. And we showed it to Douglas Bush and others who were the old timers in the department. Bush was one of the best of the old line teachers. He wrote a wonderful book about the use of mythology by the English poets. He was persuaded that maybe we ought to try it and, as I recall, the examiners did put in such questions.

You can read the rest of the interview, available through Duke University Press, here.

Summer Posting Schedule

It’s looking and feeling like summer in beautiful southwest Virginia, so we’re going to go soak up the sun. We’ll still be sharing weekly content on this blog over the break, though. Every Tuesday, look for a mix of new posts from past & present editors, stellar critical work and interviews from our archives, and information about upcoming issues and contributors. Thanks for reading the minnesota review!

A Word from Our Editors – Fiction

My name is Samantha, and I’m one of the fiction readers at the Minnesota Review. I am also an undergraduate Professional Writing major here at Virginia Tech.

 

I’m going to tell you what I want to see in a submission. Since I’m only one member out of nine, please don’t feel like you have to cater to me. The truth is, I’m going to read whatever you submit, even if it’s not something I’m interested in. It all depends on how well you tell a story.

 

No matter what genre your submission is, I want the first paragraph to wow me. I want a strong first sentence. This is your work, and you need to be confident. If you present me with a submission that has a weak opening, I’m already going to be disinterested. Short stories shouldn’t take pages to get to the main storyline, and the shorter your story is, the more powerful each sentence needs to be.

 

When I finish a story, I want to still feel an attachment to it; I want to feel for the characters. A well-written work will give me reason to. Give me concrete details about the characters and their surroundings. However, I don’t want clichéd details; I want originality. Dig deeper than the obvious.

 

A sense of humor is great, but not required. I love reading stories with sarcastic or humorous undertones, but it’s very difficult to be funny on paper. 

 

I look forward to reading your submissions, and thank you to everyone who has submitted so far.

 

Books Received, Issue 81

the minnesota review welcomes proposals for reviews of these and other recent books as well as journals, significant articles, and other works reflecting cultural and intellectual currents.  For reviews, we much prefer overviews to reports on specific books. For examples, check the review essays in recent past issues, available here. Please submit review essays to Janell Watson at submissions@theminnesotareview.org.  We do not publish reviews of creative works.

• Berger, Jason. 2012. Antebellum at Sea: Maritime Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Comentale, Edward P. 2013. Sweet Air: Modernism, Regionalism, and American Popular Song. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
• Cruz, Denise. 2012. Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Demos, T. J. 2013. The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Doyle, Jennifer. 2013. Hold It against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art. Durham: Duke University Press.
• Dussel, Enrique D. 2013. Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion. Translated by Alejandro A. Vallega. Durham: Duke University Press.
• Esposito, Roberto. 2012. Living Thought: The Origins and Actuality of Italian Philosophy. Translated by Zakiya Hanafi. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• Henderson, Lisa. 2013. Love and Money: Queers, Class, and Cultural Production. New York: New York University Press.
• Knighton, Andrew Lyndon. 2012. Idle Threats: Men and the Limits of Productivity in 19th-Century America. New York: New York University Press.
• López, Antonio M. 2012. Unbecoming Blackness: The Diaspora Cultures of Afro-Cuban America. New York: New York University Press.
• Lundblad, Michael. 2013. The Birth of a Jungle: Animality in Progressive-Era U.S. Literature and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Marion, Jean-Luc. 2013. Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• Morris, Meaghan, and Mette Hjort, editor. 2013. Creativity and Academic Activism: Instituting Cultural Studies. North Carolina: DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
• Nikolopoulou, Kalliopi. 2012. Tragically Speaking: On the Use and Abuse of Theory for Life. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
• Ricœur, Paul. 2013. Hermeneutics: Writings and Lectures. Translated by David Pellauer. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Polity.

[From the Archives]: Why Everyone Should Study Linguistics

Robin J. Sowards‘ “Why Everyone Should Study Linguistics” first appeared in issue 68 (Spring 2007) of the minnesota review. Sowards teaches English at Duquesne University. His research interests include British poetry of the Long 19th century, literary theory, German Idealism, linguistics, and Noam Chomsky.

All literary critics already do some kind of linguistics. When we make even the most off-hand assertions about the meaning of a literary text, we commit ourselves de facto to assumptions about the nature of language and about specific aspects of linguistic structure. It’s no surprise that intricate observations about the linguistic nuances of literary works depend on a theory of language. If we start talking about count nouns, subordinate clauses, or the indicative mood, we are drawing on a technical terminology that only has content by virtue of a specific theory of language (a theory, for example, in which some groups of words count as “clauses” and other groups of words don’t). But one need not be a formalist for one’s claims to depend on linguistics. Even a mere paraphrase would be unintelligible without unstated linguistic premises, and if its claims were to be justified explicitly these premises would necessarily step into the light. For example, say we are considering the first line of Shakespeare’s first sonnet, “From fairest creatures we desire increase.” We might plausibly gloss this line as saying “We want the most beautiful things to reproduce.” But in asserting this as a paraphrase, we must assume that there is some systematic relationship between the sentence we started with and the sentence we offered as a gloss on it. We would want to say, for example, that “we” remains essentially unchanged between the original and the paraphrase, but to do so we must assume some notion of grammatical subject that explains in what sense “we” remains the same when it is obviously in a different spot. Even the most innocently general summary of what a text says—even the publisher’s blurb on the back of a novel—would, if it had to get down to brass tacks and really make all of its claims and assumptions explicit, turn out to depend on premises of this kind. Linguistics is our inevitable hidden premise, just like one cannot infer “I am” from “I think” without assuming that “Everything that thinks, exists” (which is why Descartes goes to such trouble to deny that the cogito is an inference [68]). The only way one could avoid any implicit dependence on claims about language would be not to talk about the text at all, and a work of literary criticism that did not talk about the text at all could hardly meet even the most minimal standards for evidence.

You can read the rest of “Why Everyone Should Study Linguistics” through Duke University Press, available here. You do not need a subscription in order to access this article.

A Poem from Quinn White’s Chapbook, Moustache

WHALE RESCUES STRANDED MOTORIST

 

I won and my trophy was permission to dance

without fear. Dance in the basement where

everyone wins at pool and ping pong. Everybody

wants to kiss. Too drunk doesn’t exist. Jesus never

meant temperance. We all die after each other.

Nobody misses anybody. Every every is a me, 

but no-one minds. Because is a seashell, 

a stranger’s poem on saving whales. 

In whale salvation cases, every every is a whale, 

every whale is a motorist. In the basement, 

prayers are nil because eyes lift easy to snap

beyond the plaster. Every shoe is a bird. 

Every body, a chandelier. 

Poems are waking to a body I forgot. 

Issue 80 Now Out!

Issue 80 has now mailed, and we’re excited to bring you work from the following authors:

Creative

Christopher Citro
Jadyn DeWald
Katie Fallon
Keith Flynn
Taylor Collier
Sean Lovelace
Susan B.A. Somers-Willett
Erin Pringle-Toungate
Laura Wetherington
Roxane Gay
Benjamin S. Grossberg
Jon Pineda
Dean Rader
Christian Nagle
Patty Seyburn

Critical

An Interview with Barbara Herrnstein Smith

Special Focus: The Medieval Turn in Theory (Guest edited by Andrew Cole)

Andrew Cole   Introduction: The Medieval Turn in Theory

Kathleen Biddick   What Does “Deconstructing Christianity” Want? The Institutional Imaginary of the Incarnation

Amy Hollywood   Derrida’s Noble Unfaith, or What Reading Hadewijch Can Teach You about Reading Derrida

Andrew Cole   The Call of Things: On Object-Oriented Ontologies

Bruce Holsinger   Object-Oriented Mythography

D. Vance Smith   Death and Texts: Finitude Before Form

Maura Nolan   Medieval Sensation and Modern Aesthetics:  Aquinas, Adorno, Chaucer

If you don’t already have a subscription to the minnesota review, access the Duke University Press website, available here. Subscription rates are only $30 per year for individuals and only $20 per year for students. In addition, you can also access the minnesota review through Project Muse if your institution carries a Project Muse subscription.

Reading “The Axiom of Choice” – Will Bebout

 “The Axiom of Choice” is a story that I encountered recently which I think is just fantastic. Written by David Goldman, it originally appeared in the Winter 2011 edition of The New Haven Review, but I first encountered it as episode 211 of Podcastle, a fantasy podcast that I listen to on occasion.

 

To clarify, “The Axiom of Choice” is a somewhat confusing rule that comes from math which says (as I understand it) that we are allowed to choose from the choices in a given set of numbers while trying to figure something out (as opposed to not having the logical ability to make selections at all). I think it’s pretty straightforward to just make a selection, but I suppose math requires you to spell every little thing out in black and white.

 

The story itself is simple enough, it follows a musician over the course of his life as he makes certain decisions, such as going on this trip or not, or talking to that girl or not, and then deals with the consequences of those decisions. What makes this story unique is how it is framed. “Axiom of Choice” is written in second person voice and is written like one of those old “Choose Your Own Adventure” novels (if the whole “choice” metaphor is getting a bit thick, you’ve been paying attention), where you read a section, then are presented with a choice of actions, which call on you to turn to a specific page to follow through on that action, allowing you to have many different adventures in a book.

 

Since this is a short story, not a full “Choose Your Own Adventure” book, we do not have all the pages (and all the options) a full novel might afford. “Axiom of Choice” gives you a passage, closes that passage by saying “If you wish to do this, go to page 70. If you wish to do that, go to page 94” as if we actually had those pages (which we don’t, in this 28 page story), but then the story continues on with the passage the author selected to follow through with, leaving us to wonder where the other option might have taken us. So while the story masquerades as granting free will to the reader, we really have no say in what happens, except to choose between continuing to read or putting the book down(just like with most short stories). I kept reading because the story is very playful in how it examines choice and free will and very clever in how it uses the constraints of the medium (in this case, the limited pages and space allowed for a printed or read-aloud short story) to highlight the concepts being explored in the story itself.

 

Because of its cleverness in playing within the rules of a printed short story, exploration of philosophical questions about determination and destiny, and still telling an interesting story, I award “The Axiom of Choice” a gold star, and I highly recommend that you check it out. Print or podcast, the choice is yours.

 

print version:

http://www.newhavenreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/NHR-9-Brown.pdf

podcast version:

http://podcastle.org/2012/06/05/podcastle-211-the-axiom-of-choice/

Tips for Authors on Promoting Your Work- from Duke University Press

the minnesota review would like to invite our authors to check out a new resource produced by Duke University Press. The new webpage, “Promote Your Article,” provides authors with tips and best practices for promoting their publications in their own professional and social networks. Topics include the importance of online usage statistics, how to update professional profiles, tips for effective tweets and blog posts, course adoption, and the Duke University Press academic conference program. To learn more, check out the Duke University Press website, available here.

A Word From Our Editors

Hey. My name’s Joshua Vaught, or Johva. Some things about me:

I’ve never been to a town hall meeting, a circus, a freak show, or a soccer game. My favorite author isn’t Stephanie Meyer, J.K. Rowling, or E.L. James. I plan to avoid any and all high school reunions. If possible, I would redefine the word “doh” to mean “America the Beautiful”; also, I would create a new word, “asdf,” to mean “a word that means what it’s intended to stand for.” I sleep on a futon using a folded blanket as a pillow and pillows as a blanket. My biggest pet peeve is forgetting where I’ve placed something. I’m currently reading The Court of the Air by Stephen Hunt, which has proven difficult because I’m squeamish. My favorite “quote” is a section from Philip Larkin’s poem, “Church Going”: “Yet stop I did: in fact I often do, / And always end much at a loss like this, / Wondering what to look for.” My hobbies include writing and reading (go figure), making computer music, watching Japanese shows, and playing video games. My favorite genres are short fiction and romance. My favorite book is Moon Palace by Paul Auster.

Comments for writers of fiction:

I feel like many fiction writers picture the reader as someone sitting in a crowd of groupies. This concerns me, since I feel I have to be interested in the story’s genre and format to properly judge the piece. I shouldn’t have to feel this way, though. If the writer is doing his or her job correctly, it won’t matter if the story is about religion, Aids, rock-climbing, or what have you because I’ll want to read until the conflicts and characters are resolved. To put it directly, I want you, the writer of fiction, to show me you’re wild side, that part of you of that makes you you.

Look at it this way. I, the reader, am your lover, a close friend, a family member. I am someone that needs more than a silly pat on the back, and someone who you need to desperately open up to. I want you to speak with your voice from your unique perspective. It goes without saying that you need to adhere to the basic conventions of writing and story-telling, but your story needs to be about what you’re interested in; otherwise, the story is going to feel recycled. Recycled stories are good for making money, but aren’t truly stories in my opinion. They’re old models with new clothes—gilded clichés.

The two most important aspects of any story in my opinion are the characters and their interactions with each other. Fully realized characters and highly developed interactions can help in the development of other aspects of a story, such as setting—a room is more than a few walls and props, so long as there are characters to create meaning for them. When it comes to characters, I’m looking, for instance, for the bastard in lens-less shades willing to knock down my front door, armed to the teeth: Hello Kitty squirt-guns in western-style gun-holsters, slanted around the hips, several packets of caffeinated gum bulging from the front pockets, and an ammo belt filled to capacity with miniature Starbucks canisters. That’ll grab my attention. But then I want to know, why? I don’t mind if you make him smile or snarl or rear to hock a loogi, just so long as you make him say something afterwards to justify the intrusion. I hate it when characters don’t speak up, talk to others in the room, and make things meaningful and relatable. You can’t expect to make an impression by having him just stand there. Sure the outfit may speak for itself, but there’s nothing like a badass with a badass attitude who feels the same way as you do about, say, the irrelevancy of using doors to make you feel like a badass too. You can keep it short with just a few powerful sentences if you have to, but make sure it’s worth the cost of a replacement door. Finally, when you decide it’s time for him to leave, you should make him whistle the tune to Seibu no Kettou as he kicks his way through the debris, or do something equally as memorable, or it’s just not complete. Make his exit epic. Interesting. Worth it.

There are plenty of things that need to be considered when writing a story. Just be sure to make it your story and to make it real for your reader. If you’re going to fly around on a winged bic pen, then I need to be their riding with you. I don’t want to watch from the sidelines.

[Call for Papers] Special Issue: Katrina- A Decade After

the minnesota review invites submissions for a Special Issue on “Katrina – A Decade After” to be guest edited by Gaurav Desai (English/African and African Diaspora Studies, Tulane University). Our aim is to reflect on the hurricane, the measures that could have been taken to prevent the massive devastation caused by it, and the immediate and long term response by the government, private industry, and civil society. How has Katrina left a permanent mark not only on the Gulf South, but also on our larger national imaginary? What lessons, if any, have we learned and what actions and policies have we adopted to better mitigate against future disasters? Haunting though the images may be, the impact of Katrina was not limited to flooded homes and emergency rescues from rooftops – it altered fundamental social contracts in cities such as New Orleans – from public education to public housing. It also awakened a new activism focused on calls for better levee protection to addressing the loss of wetlands in coastal communities.

We invite contributions that chart these changes and their significance to larger policy debates that confront the nation and indeed the world. In the spirit of the legacy of the journal, the best contributions will be those that take a stand, however controversial, and are prepared to make the argument in no more than 4000 words. In keeping with the multi-genre nature of the journal we welcome position papers, review essays, interviews with key figures involved with the hurricane, poetry, fiction, and photo-essays. Potential contributors are invited to consult with the editors before submission. The issue will be published in April 2015 to mark the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina in August 2015. Final submissions are due on June 1, 2014. For further information and consultation, please contact editors@minnesottareview.org.

If You’re Stuck, Wait It Out – Advice from an Editor

As writers, we have what would appear to be a very easy job: float through life, and wait for the muse. Forget the crafting, forget the editing – the worst part of writing is just starting.

Usually my writing process follows a very similar trajectory: wait for weeks, think about needing to write something, wait another few days, lose hope and begin to think there’s nothing inspirational anywhere. Sometime after passing the last three stages though, something shifts and I open myself up to the world around me. I start observing.

Something begins then, when I really make myself available as a listener and thinker, that changes the game. I listen to people speaking and it evolves into dialogue. I look at the way someone adjusts his or her shirt or opens the door for someone else. I start thinking about how things feel. Washing your hands in the bathroom, but with cold water. You lather and rinse and dry off. Somehow they still sting after they’re dry. And then you hear someone else in the bathroom. You thought you were alone. There’s a story.

So that’s when you’re most receptive – in that waiting, feeling, listening, hearing period. That’s when your muse comes up and smacks you in the forehead.  

I can most easily describe it in the way it usually happens to me. I wait tables. It’s half soul-sucking and half gratifying, but somehow, it is great for writing. My three most recent creative endeavors have all come from things I’ve overheard, mannerisms I’ve seen, or conversations I’ve had while working.

Lately I’ve been all about the ever-talented Louise Erdrich, who I think says it the best. But what’s new. “Nothing I force myself to write about ever turns out well, and so I’ve learned to wait for the voice, the incident, the image that reverberates.”

And it’s true. If you’re stuck, wait it out. Listen to people, wait tables, use public bathrooms.

Start with something concrete, an image. Your dry, tingling hands. Now, make them do something. Write.

 

- Danielle Buynak, fiction reader

New Submission System

We are pleased to announce that starting today, April 2, the minnesota review will be accepting creative writing submissions via our new online submission system. Critical authors may still send submissions via email to editors@theminnesotareview.org.

Please consider our submission guidelines before sending us your work:

• We only consider unpublished work. Please do not submit previously published material, including work published in anthologies, chapbooks, or online.
• We read creative work August 1-November 1 and January 1-April 1 of each year. Submissions may be uploaded at any time.
• Simultaneous submissions are permitted. Please notify us immediately if a work is accepted by another publication.
• Due to the large number of submissions we receive, we must place a limit on submission of new work until three months after your last submission (regardless of whether we’ve made a decision on your most recently submitted work). If a work is still under review, you may withdraw it and submit new work, up to the limits already mentioned.

If you have any questions about the submission process or our new submissions manager, please email Lorin Shellenberger at support@theminnesotareview.org.

Interview with Quinn White

The following is an interview with Quinn White.  Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from journals such as Bayou Magazine, Word Riot, Weave Magazine, and Sixth Finch. Her chapbook, My Moustache, is due from Dancing Girl Press in March 2013. Sometimes she wants to dig holes.

1. Who’s the first person who encouraged you to be a writer?

My grandmother caught me singing while I was playing in the bathroom sink with mermaid ponies. She told me that my songs were quite good and suggested I write them down.  

2. What is your biggest pet peeve?

Pet peeves. For example, people say they hate “mouth-breathers.” Ridiculous. I have asthma. My nose doesn’t provide me with enough oxygen to remain conscious at all times.

3. What’s your most effective tactic for falling asleep?

Cold to warm bed. Warm to cold lights.

4. What book has given you nightmares, or otherwise appeared to you in dreams?

   The Shining. I was taking a Kubrick and Cronenberg class and King’s book was required reading. I couldn’t finish it. In fact, if I’m about to cry, one of my strategies for keeping a straight face is to imagine that woman in the bathtub. 

5. What book(s) are you reading right now?

   Essays by Emerson. Robert Hass’ What Light Can Do. ALIEN VS. PREDATOR by Michael Robbins. Woolf’s The Waves (in spurts). Williams’ play, Night of the Iguana.    

6. What is the worst film adaptation of a great book that you have ever seen?

I heard the 70′s adaptation of The Great Gatsby was awful so I didn’t watch it. A friend wears a t-shirt that reads: “Movies: Ruining Books since 1910.” I think I have that date wrong. I love lots of movies adapted from films, by the way.

7. Have you ever been to a town hall meeting?

No. When I was little, however, I formed a teddy bear government. They attempted democracy.

 8. Have you ever been to a freak show?

No. Freaks, directed by Todd Browning, is a great film, though.

9. Who’s your favorite author (or book) that no one’s ever heard of?

James Herriot.

10. Who’s your favorite author that everyone’s heard of?

Charles Schulz.

11. Do you avoid high school and college reunions or do you embrace them?

I avoid gatherings of more than three people.

12. What’s your favorite single syllable word?

I love this question because it caused me to realize I am unable to separate the word from the thing it describes. I came up with “paw” and “kiss” but I don’t know if they count because what I love about them are their physical counterparts.

13. If you could make up a word, what would it be? Definitions permitted.

Mank. verb. from the French Manqué. 1.) to long for your significant other.

14. What existing word would you prefer had a different definition? State word and redefine.

Pronoun: the quality of favoring nouns over verbs.

15. What question would you like to ask of me?

 Why are people who need people the luckiest people in the world? 

A Word from One of Our Editors

The name is Shelby, and I’m one of the poetry readers at the minnesota review submissions. I’m also an English graduate student here at Virginia Tech in the M.A. program. In previous experience I was the poetry editor for Silhouette, the literary and arts magazine ran by undergraduates at Tech.

It’s kind of hard to nail down what exactly I look for when reading for publications, other than to say: good poems. When reading through numerous poems at one time, I have found that the best thing to do is to trust my instincts. I have to trust that I know what a good poem feels like when I’m reading it. After narrowing down the selections to my “instinct poems,” I then can take the time to see what exactly is making the piece work for me. I then I have to make the hard distinction between a poem that works just for me, and those that are going to speak to a wider audience. Trying to find your own biases in poetry is not an easy thing.

One example of the things that I find myself drawn to are poems with strong images. This obviously is extremely vague, and each artist can take so much out of it. I like to be intrigued by new combinations, by daring combinations. Or perhaps a writer will base their writing from one strong, central image, as I often find myself doing in my own poetry.

I also like poems that are obviously trying to do something with language. Language is our own construction, so what happens when poets push it? Can their writing handle it, or does it just fall short?

I also have a couple of danger words and images that invoke little alarms to go off. Some examples: mirrors (or reflection), roses, your soul, blind love, burning love, tears like rain, shadows, sands of time, tree of life, and other clichés that we’re all just tired of hearing. For me, if any of these are in your poems, there better be a hell of a good reason for it. Now hear me out, some poets can use these images and create a great, unique poem. But most cannot.

I want to read a line, a poem, or an image that makes me jealous that I did not think of it myself.

I know that I have my own biases in poetry, everybody does, but it’s the best when we find those that we like personally and those that we know our readers are going to love too. That’s one of the best things about being a part of a literary magazine. 

Spring 2013 Reading Period Closes April 1!

The close of our Spring 2013 reading period is Monday, April 1, less than a week away!

If you are still mulling over whether or not to submit your work in this reading period, don’t wait until the last minute!  But if you do, here are a few hints to help you get through that last-minute submission.

• We cannot accept submissions via e-mail. If you have difficulties with the online submission system, I can generally walk you through the problem. Please check our help document or contact me (support@theminnesotareview.org) instead of e-mailing your submission.
• Don’t wait till 11:57 p.m. It will take you a few minutes to get through the submission process, especially if you haven’t yet registered as an author, and your work must be uploaded by 11:59 p.m. EDT (Eastern) on April 1 for it to be considered by the editors. If it’s marked 12:01 a.m. April 2, the editors will not be able to consider the work until the next reading period (August 1- November 1), and you probably don’t want to wait until then.
• Not sure how to register as an author? The help document will walk you through the process.
• If you’ve already registered, you can simply log in and begin the submission process. We’re going to ask all sorts of questions when you get started. Please don’t just skip past those questions or click them randomly. Those questions are pretty important – we do not publish previously published works, for example.
• Please don’t ignore our guidelines (available here). For example, we ask that you upload multiple poems as a single document. This streamlines the review process, which means you get a response more quickly.

Is there anything else you’d like to know? Send your questions/comments via the comment section below or e-mail me at support@theminnesotareview.org.

Lorin Shellenberger is the editorial assistant for the minnesota review. She will only understand approximately 17 percent of pop culture references and claims this is because she grew up on an island.