Bright red shirt. Big belly. Thick black suspenders. Open Hawaiian shirt. Hands me a two-faced nickel and explains how a friend of his makes them. Then asks:

"Do you think you'll use it as a conversation piece?"

Image: coincommunity.com

The restaurant is small: ten tables total, plus four stools at the counter. 8:30 a.m. on a weekday, a woman walks past the "Please wait to be seated sign" and sniffs around the booths. The restaurant is still half empty. The host attempts to guide her toward one table, then another, this one next to a table with seated customers. The woman looks at the table, turns, and says:

"I don't like sitting that close to other people."

image: drericmorrison.com

Party of five: Grandma, Grandpa, Mom, and two young sisters crouched together staring at a smartphone. They are not talkative but not unfriendly. The three adults order their breakfasts but the sisters do not look up when it's their turn. Grandpa looks at Mom and says:

"Are you going to coach your daughters on how to order?"

Image: closetcooking.com

Last week, I ventured into a Minneapolis mystery bookstore to hear William Swanson read from Black White Blue: the nonfiction account of a St. Paul police officer killed in the line of duty forty years ago. The next morning, I learned that a man in Minneapolis had shot and killed five people, injuring several others, at his former place of employment, before killing himself.

Two things struck me: at the reading, the audience responded forcefully to the story of the assassinated officer and the subsequent legal case, but they didn't seem as interested in the tumultuous cultural environment in which the crime took place. And in Friday morning's paper, it was a line spoken by the Minneapolis Deputy Police Chief: "This is something we see on the news in other parts of the country, not here in Minneapolis."

For me, such a statement only conveys a desire to separate one's sense of regional identity from unwanted behavior. It communicates, most immediately, I am afraid.

The audience at the bookstore was, I can only assume, typical of nonfiction crime fans: most sat in bright, inquisitive attention as they asked about the specifics of the legal proceedings and the author's access to sources. The murder described in Black White Blue seems to have been entirely sociopolitically motivated: the State's case claimed the perpetrator was vying for the attention of the Black Panthers by orchestrating the shooting of a random white cop. Yet beyond a general description of the seventies as tumultuous, full of police brutality and politically very active (shit being blown up, etc.), very few specifics were brought up about the particular racial climate in St. Paul at the time.

At one point, Swanson said that in addition to the chaos, it was a rather exciting and liberating time, and the one black man in the audience pointed out that it wasn't exactly exciting and liberating for others in the community. I sensed that few attendees wanted to get anywhere near talking about the racism or police brutality or segregation or inequality. In this case, "not here" suggests a different kind of avoidance from the kind the Deputy Police Chief conjured after last week's shooting. But it could've been uttered just the same.

There is likely no better way to write nonfiction crime than to focus on a central character or pinnacle case around which everything else can be explored. Since last Thursday, the local papers have been focusing on two central characters: the shooter, Andrew Engeldinger, and his boss (who had fired Engeldinger that afternoon), Reuven Rahamim. Without fail, this story will be compared to other office shootings and other mass shootings, Colorado no doubt on the top of the list. I won't be surprised when op-eds begin to spring up about modern mental health practices and accessibility, the desperation of the economy, gun control. And other attempts at feeling productive after an event for which there is nothing to be done.

We will come together as a community and be defined by our response, our social activism, our Minnesotan sense of civic duty. Meanwhile, it might help if we stopped trying to cast certain behaviors as un-Minnesotan, so we could be able to move just a little further forward.

Image: Stringer/Reuters

Molly Ringwald wrote a novel. Andrew McCarthy has just published a travel memoir. It seems inevitable to me that Duckie (or, as he probably prefers, Jon Cryer) will shortly follow suit with his own literary achievement. And I have an almost frighteningly clear premonition of how he will join the highbrow ranks of his Pretty in Pink co-stars.

It is my long-held belief that the "actors" in John Hughes' films always played themselves. How is Molly Ringwald any different from Andie — or, for that matter, Samantha  (Sixteen Candles) or Claire (The Breakfast Club)? How is Andrew McCarthy, in the core of his being, distinguishable from Blane? And what has Jon Cryer been for the past however many years onTwo and a Half Men anything other than Charlie Sheen’s underappreciated, sensitive sidekick? I’ve never even seen that show, but I know Jon Cryer, essentially, is yearning and gets dumped on and continues to yearn and show up and be loyal and get dumped on. Pure Duckie.

And if the smart, pretty, kinda weird girl grows up to write sensitive family shit about flaws making us human, and the kinda dark misunderstood loner with abundant privilege anxious to truly connect with someone writes a memoir about travelling alone to reconnect with his fiancée, then Duckie gets to have his say, too.  

So what better medium for an unloved, unwanted but loyal sidekick than science fiction? What better medium is there for Duckie to demonstrate the extent of his yearning than the imagining of impossible worlds? The effort alone will be pathetic: he’ll seem as though he’s trying to latch on to the sci-fi craze, and he’ll likely compare himself to Colson Whitehead. It will be so embarrassing for him and he will be so very earnest. And we will be touched, but more than that we will be embarrassed and quietly judgmental and feel so deeply relieved that we have not yet embarrassed ourselves so devastatingly as Duckie.

I dare Jon Cryer to prove me wrong on this one. Tell me honestly he hasn't seriously considered writing sci-fi. I think the publication of such a book is almost impossible to resist. It's a force of nature, an inevitability of the future John Hughes so painstakingly laid the foundation for. It would also be such an embarrassing catastrophe. I long for it to exist in the world.

image: heavemedia.com

While I find it very exciting (and positive!) that the naughty vs. nice criticism debate has so thoroughly made the rounds, I’m starting to wonder if people have forgotten that the internet isn’t just about commenting and connecting; it’s also about doing things differently. To me, the fuss isn’t really about being too nice (frivolous) or mean (unproductive). The real issue is that people demand better writing from their criticism: criticism that demonstrates an honest, thoughtful engagement with the book at hand regardless of attitude or posture.

Let me be very clear: personally, I think meanness and cruelty can be exceptionally funny. But I have my suspicions that in this day and age, in the panicked pleas for attention, attitude often usurps critical engagement because that approach gets hits. My issue with the much despised William Giraldi review of Alix Ohlin is that I learned more about William Giraldi — how important it is for him to show us how smart he is — than the books he was reviewing. Book reviewers (traditional ones, anyway) can totally go ahead and be scathing and super mean, but they should be tearing the book apart so we know what’s wrong with the book, not what’s right and self-righteous about the reviewer.

But! We don’t have to live like this. This is the internet. We don’t have to play within the rules of naughty or nice. The Times Literary Supplement,Harper’s, and sometimes the New Yorker still contain very good, serious reviews, but we can also help foster a literary environment that is more interested in exploding the conversation than ending a dialogue at "good" or "bad." Take any shitty book and analyze the decision to write it in the first- or third-person — and then discuss how this may mirror or contradict the "modern experience" of the grocery store, text messaging, OkCupid. How does the author grapple with new media, and how do those choices affect our sense of authenticity? Throw the book into the mortar of anthropological linguistic analysis of pronoun usage. Identify the author’s tics and psychoanalyze the crap out of the poor person who made the mistake of showing their book to you.

There are countless games to play beyond Billy-said-he-likes-it-but-Suzie-said-it-stinks. The Millions, Flavorwire, and BrainPickings have shown that there is serious fun to be had plowing through literature, whether it's top ten lists, favorite quotes, or essays on craft or writer's conferences, and there's no reason we can't invoke that same sense of seriously engaged, enthusiastic play when it comes to reviewing. What I want from criticism is thoughtful engagement with books, the ideas they spread, and the processes by which literary effects come about. While traditional book reviews can and will still accomplish this, there is ample space for criticism that is concerned less with assessment and more with exploration — with enlivening the ways we talk and think about books.

image: doanie.wordpress.com

Indulging in some late-August back-to-school nostalgia, the Daily Beast put together a list of "Must-Read College Novels" ranging from Kingsley Amis’Lucky Jim to John Williams' Stoner. As a fan of college, books, and college books, I thought I’d work up a supplementary list: the principal ingredients that no college novel can do without.

Unfortunate romance
The great thing about romance in college is that it’s either totally doomed from the beginning or the participants are guaranteed to screw it up. At least, this is how I justify my ridiculous relationship with an unsuitable upper classman and the continued obsession I have but could never act on with a simply wonderful professor. Whether it’s faculty, students, or the time-honored tradition of faculty/student infatuation, college is a good time to fall hard for someone who is absolutely wrong for you, but who will continue to tear out your heart with their math skills or commitment to social justice.

College exposes you to romantic situations you are not at all ready for, as seems to be the case in Nathan Harden's new book Sex and God at Yale. You will learn a whole lot about yourself, mostly in the areas of failure and weakness. And it will all seem very important at the time, but not after graduation. Unless you insist on being totally infatuated with past professors, which is completely acceptable.

Blunder
If we can think of adolescence as the time when weird things happen because of our changing bodies, college is like an adolescence for that body being in the larger world. While the awkwardness of high school has passed, the vast and slippery social dynamic of college allows for a whole new set of embarrassments. All college environments have that unique mix of shelter and independence. You have this great chance to redefine yourself, but then you're also more exposed to other people who might actually help you figure out who you really are.

Freedom means that college students will try stupid things (like bleaching your hair). Greater responsibility means that being stupid has more consequences (like having bleached hair). Just ask the characters in Donna Tartt's novel The Secret History.

Illusion of safety
College students are insulated from the real world at the same time they’re learning more about it: their sense of self in relation to the world and the possibilities of what they could do within it are totally exploding and hyper-vivid. And part of the shelter that any college provides is the impression that other people care about your ideas. Any novel can have main characters finding themselves; what makes it a college novel is that characters engage with the same kind of exploration but within a closed system that won’t pan out in real life.

This illusion can also be true for professors, as we learned in Michael Chabon's The Wonder Boys.

Hyper-awareness of time passing
Whether the plot moves forward through the passing semesters or the novel as a whole is a nostalgic look back at such brief time, four years is only four years. College is always in some way about transition. There is perhaps no better illustration of this dramatic shift than Bret Easton Ellis'Less Than Zero. Hopefully, most of us don't find ourselves disillusioned by the party scene in our freshman year because the kids back home were all prostitutes for smack, but who among us didn't experience that same whiff of disappointment — the sense that home had changed without you? The sense that you'd maybe surpassed home?

Serious transition happens with or without college. It's just really, really nice to undergo that transition without your parents looking.

Image: cineplex.com

The Millions recently proposed the idea that if MFA graduates were finding themselves unsatisfied with adjunct teaching (which, um, obviously), they should look into teaching high school. Nick Rapatrazone, the post's author, does make some pretty sexy arguments for giving your time to sweaty, self-interested quasi-adults who are horrifying at being adequately human toward one another. Still, I’d like to supplement his advice with a few second thoughts.

Let me be clear: if you’re into teaching high school, I applaud you. The prospect of a bunch of MFAs entering the public school system with enthusiasm and literary encouragement fills me with excitement and something close to glee. But as long as we're weighing it against adjunct teaching, I feel other perspectives might be of use.

Maybe try being poor for one minute. This is not to encourage anyone drowning in adjunct drudgery to continue drowning in adjunct drudgery. You are a sucker and totally not being paid what you’re worth. If you get some weird sadistic glee out of the it, please, by all means, keep encouraging universities to crumble under the weight of their own lack of integrity.

But I have to ask: since when were writers supposed to be comfortable? You really want to have to go back to high school just so you can pay rent? In this economy, I say take whatever shitty job you can get. But I also suspect that there’s this lingering hope that getting an education guarantees some future stability in a fulfilling career. I kind of have the feeling that the whole MFA-to-high-school-teacher track is an adjustment, a concession to the dream that was really only for the generations before you. That shit was for the baby boomers and whatever unnamed generations became between them and...what, Gen X or Y? You need to talk to your grandpa (great grandpa?) about the Depression and lard on bread and some shit 'cause you want way too much.

My point here is that if you want stability while you write, be an artist who doesn’t need the approval of a teaching career. Stop thinking you’re owed something because you went to school. School was a privilege you lucked out on. If you write, worry about writing and don’t give a shit about anything except forming your life to allow writing to happen. And if youstill want to teach, god bless.  

People who went to school for teaching K-12 are turning away from careers in education. My own mother, an excellent and incredibly dedicated public school teacher for over thirty years (and counting) has said she probably wouldn’t have gone into teaching if the atmosphere had been the same as it is now. This largely has to do with the sheer amount of time spent on test preparation for tests that don’t actually result in students learning anything. I find it horrifying that teachers no longer have as much discretion in what they teach, and I find it doubly horrifying that potentially excellent teachers might be turning away from that career because education is now such a shit show. Sure, steady paycheck, making a difference, etc. etc., but anyone going into teaching high school English under the impression that they’re going to teach kids how to appreciate literature should know that such labors will account for maybe twenty percent of their workload.

I hope with all my heart there are folks out there who will fight to make public education better, whether from the classroom or the capitol. But, my fellow MFAs, just know that it will indeed be a fight.

image: bestofthe80s.wordpress.com

For reasons unknown to me, this story about a St. Paul man threatening a 62 year-old woman with a sword over a borrowed book has gotten way toomuch press. As a fan of St. Paul, and in the spirit of promoting the Midwest as a fairly decent place to write, I’d like to dwell on some of the story’s finer aspects.

Books matter to Midwesterners. As far as I can tell, the whole ruckus began when the suspect threw the book he had borrowed onto the floor, and the kindly loaner of the book gave him a little shit about it. Not only does the woman here acknowledge the value of books by suggesting they don’t belong on the floor, but the borrower, by his swift decision to get a weapon, suggests that he, too, knows the import involved here. If the guy didn’t think it was a big deal to throw a book on the floor, why would he bother brandishing a sword? It hard to imagine any of this happening over a Gilmore Girls DVD.

Midwesterners have Scandinavian impulses regardless of whether they are actually Scandinavian, and Scandinavians are insanely afraid of getting called out on something they did poorly. Scandinavians are also almost godlike in their ability to bring shame on others. We have here the genius of seemingly innocent Midwestern passive aggression: the woman suggested he just throw the book away if he were going to leave it on the floor. She doesn’t accuse him directly of doing something shitty but suggests that he might as well have done something shittier. Most people have likely expected the worst from him his entire life. And the poor guy, who later in jail admits he is an idiot, can’t help but get emotional: he, too, is caught up in the Scandinavian shame cycle.

And then there's his choice of weapon. A sword. Really? Most people I hang around with aren’t really prone to take an unsheathed sword as a threat. A gun? Sure. A big knife? Oh yes (more on that in a second). But a sword? From a kid who also has ninja stars and nunchucks? If it weren’t for the sword, there would be no story. Whatever the guy’s intentions, he has succeeded in provoking a great amount of curiosity. He might not be a good neighbor, or a good criminal, but he has proven that minor criminals can still surprise us, and that sometimes people’s small quirks get the most attention.

Saturday's frightening incident in Times Square lies on the opposite end of the blade-wielding spectrum. While our book borrower's actions provoked lots of trashy curiosity, the killing of Darrius Kennedy brings up a whole lot of actual fear. His standoff with the cops, the bystanders, and the rolling cameras of a hundred smartphones was not funny; it was chaotic and very sad. For all we know, both men might have begun with the same small, dumb impulse: a trigger response to a mix of panic, fear, helplessness. Our book borrower only briefly acted on the impulse. Mr. Kennedy took it to the limit.

Image: faildaily.blogspot.com

Of course we all have to acknowledge how incredibly sad it is that the beloved brainchild of the brain, Jonah Lehrer, has gone down. Not only has he packed up his New Yorker blog, but his publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, has pulled his top-selling book, Imagine: How Creativity Works. All because he self-plagiarized and made up some Bob Dylan quotes.

First, can we acknowledge, in addition to the incredible sadness, how morbidly funny this situation is? I mean, really. Imagine? How Creativity Works? Well, it works by making stuff up. Plus, creativity helps to take original ideas out of context or combine disparate ideas that had nothing to do with one another. That’s fucking imagination. Second, can we imagine, just for a moment, the lengths to which Lehrer’s own personal imagination must have gone in order to even desire pulling off such a ridiculous (and probably unnecessary) deception?

I don’t have a degree in neuroscience, so I can’t begin to explain whatever logical or evolutionary brain systems were responsible for Lehrer’s many missteps. But I do have a healthy imagination, so I’d like to propose a few made-up justifications for Lehrer’s choices. (For a rundown of those choices, check out this article in Tablet.)

Reason #1

He’s actually into psychology and wants neuroscience, as a hip intellectual phenomenon, to fail

In the raging battle fought between sciences for popularity—a vicious, cutthroat, and often violent battle—accuracy and peer-reviewed precision are daggers the scientists use to kill each other’s dreams of maybe being read one day. For Lehrer to so blatantly flout the basic tenets of science changes the conversation from science to feelings. Shame, doubt, disappointment...the interest now is not how fun our brains are but how messed up and totally incomprehensible they are.

Reason #2:

He believed himself to be beyond reproach

In other words, he’s got gigantic, delusional balls. Of the gazillion people who are huge fans of Bob Dylan, approximately half have devoted their lives to studying and memorizing everything the man has ever said. How could Lehrer think no one would notice discrepancies? Also, and this is just a hunch, as I haven’t had the chance to read Imagine, but were the fabricated quotes even necessary to prove his arguments? I sincerely doubt the neuroscience of creativity lives or dies based on the lyrics to "Like a Rolling Stone." I'd also like to thank the New York Times for pointing out that Dylan himself likes to keep his facts slippery. Which either means A) Lehrer's mirroring Dylan but just didn't know how to explain the joke to the rest of us, or B) see "delusional balls."

Reason #3:

He secretly hates Bob Dylan

...and is ragingly jealous that, even with his mind-blowingly hot career, he will still never be as cool as Dylan. Let’s say little Lehrer is at the kitchen table working studiously on some homework while mom has Blonde on Blonde playing in the background. Lehrer tries to show her how his genius kid mind just did something awesome but she’s a little busy singing along to “Absolutely Sweet Marie.” Lehrer launches further into his studies in hopes of one day gaining recognition and becomes super famous neuroscience man, not only succeeding academically but making neuroscience fucking hip. But who will always be hipper than neuroscientists? Rock stars. And as much as Lehrer has utilized science to show us some awesome and true things about humanity, Dylan kinda also already showed us a shit-ton of awesome and true things about humanity. And Dylan didn’t need a degree or science or anything else to do it.

I do think there's an opportunity here for us to acknowledge the fallibility of human beings and get all warm and fuzzy about how all of us fuck up all the time. But what I'd prefer to take away from the whole affair is this: artists are better than scientists, both ethically and as conduits of truth. Bob Dylan uses storytelling and fabrication in order to reach certain truths that never relied on the facts of the matter, but which ring true in people's hearts anyway. Lehrer's entire body of work relies on facts building on top of one another to establish a particular reassurance of truth. Artists work at bringing about new truths from what never existed before. Scientists have a different kind of task, one that must reveal the truth of that which already exists.

The great tragedy, I think (among the many small tragedies here), is that Lehrer could've probably come up with much better untrue things to say.

image: bobdylan.com