View more of Holmquist’s work here.

Few artists in contemporary recording meld poetic narrative and musical accomplishment as well as songwriter and pianist Daniel Knox. This exclusive session recorded outside Chicago once again evidences the skill and haunting poignancy of a truly original musician.

1.”Yet Another One For You”
2.”Hahahospital”
3.”Untitled Waltz”

*This session was recorded by Garret Hammond at The Brill Basement Recording Studio in Downers Grove, IL.

photo: John Atwood

As an artist in residence at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center, Daniel Knox will complete a long-form piece of music based on the work of photographer John Atwood. The piece will premiere at the 92YTribeca in January 2012 along with the opening of an exhibition of Atwood’s photos. More info and tickets available at 92y.org

Original, haunting, and captivating, Evryman For Himself is the second album from songwriter and pianist Daniel Knox.

Sorry, streaming albums are only available during the month they are featured.

As an artist in residence at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center, Daniel Knox will complete a long-form piece of music based on the work of photographer John Atwood. The piece will premiere at the 92YTribeca in January 2012 along with the opening of an exhibition of Atwood’s photos. More info and tickets available at 92y.org

An excerpt:

Let her fail. Let her write pages and pages of painful poetry and terrible prose. Let her write painfully bad fan fiction. Don’t freak out when she shows you stories about Bella Swan making out with Draco Malfoy. Never take her writing personally or assume it has anything to do with you, even if she only writes stories about dead mothers and orphans.

I highly recommend reading the entire entry (linked above). Thoughts? As always, we welcome them in the comments section below.

“Curious Masonry” Christopher Patton
2011, 9781554470938, $15.95

Poet Christopher Patton

Christopher Patton’s third book, Curious Masonry, includes three translations of Anglo-Saxon poems from The Exeter Book, and “Hearth,” a work which he calls a “palimpsest,” mostly made up of erasures from his translation of “The Earthwalker,” using both the translation and the original text. The Exeter Book is an anthology of Anglo-Saxon poetry from the tenth century– a book so undervalued in days when Latin poetry was seen as higher than vernacular that the ring-stains on the original manuscript pages reveal that it was used, for part of its history, as a place to rest beer mugs. There is something appealing to our culture about the dark times of Medieval Northern Europe, as lovers of Lord of the Rings or Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal will attest, and those who come in search of some mead-hall existentialism will find the poems that Patton translates to be very satisfying.

A translation of an ancient text is an act of both scholarship and poetry. So is it best left up to scholars or poets? Scholars’ translations are often loyal to the text and context, but frequently make for clumsy poetry. For all their accuracy to literal meaning, they tend to fail in recreating any kind of visceral immediacy. Translations by poets can often stray far from the original, resulting in work that feels more like a creative project of their own than a faithful rendering of the text. These can often result in exhilarating poetic experiments, but are hardly helpful for getting a sense of the original text. Both of these have their merits, but clearly the best bet for a reader looking to discover a work in a language they can’t read is to find that rare middle ground—a scholar gifted with a poet’s ear and sense of line (Richmond Lattimore in his translation of The Iliad, for instance), or a poet with a scholar’s interest in faithful rendering, such as John Ciardi’s rendering of The Divine Comedy.

In his three “traditional” translations, Patton finds that balance. His approach to translation can best be described as poetic pragmatism. Lyricism is clearly given a high importance, as we can see in these lines from “The Earthwalker:”

Then the friendless one awakens,
sees the fallow waves before him,
seabirds splaying feathers, bathing
as snow falls, shot through with hail,
the heart’s wounds are heavier now,
raw with a longing for loved ones
long departed.

But he never sacrifices clarity or readability. He wisely turns the separated, double two-stress line of Anglo-Saxon poetry into a standard iambic tetrameter, which he handles with maturity. The meter is strong but subtle, and resists the primary danger of tetrameter: that it is the meter of most of the common nursery rhymes and can sound like it. He uses a comma to recreate the caesurae of the original whenever possible, and utilizes alliteration (the single most recognizable device in Anglo-Saxon poetry), but in both cases only does so when it does not distract from having clear, accurate, and readable lines. In his tone, I think he has achieved something similar to Lattimore’s translations of Greek, which is a unique ability to create a voice that manages to sound epic and dignified like the original without sounding archaic or stilted.

Most importantly, though, Patton’s translations leave the pathos intact. The poems, as one might expect, are bleak and sad:

All the kingdom of earth is hardship,
all under the heavens is turned about
by fate. Wealth is passing here, friends
are passing here, men are passing here,
kin are passing here—even the very
foundation of the earth is empty.

And at times strikingly religious:

A fool does not dread the Lord, when
death comes to him he is unready;
blesséd is he who lives in humility,
mercy comes to him from heaven.

As a result, these translations make us feel that these speakers are us. They remove the distance and the condescension with which we would be inclined to look on a work from the Middle Ages.

One should note Patton’s artistic integrity for including “Hearth,” the fourth and final poem in the collection. A book with only the “traditional” translations that make up the first three sections — which I think have the potential to become the definitive modern translations of these poems — would attract a far wider audience than it would with the fourth and final section. A work of bilingual erasures liberally peppered with asterisks, “Hearth” will find appreciation in a much smaller and more specialized audience, most of whom will be poets themselves. However, the concept in this last poem is quite sound, and clearly grew organically out of the considerations that went into the first three translations. One who works with manuscripts from the Middle Ages, such as Patton has, knows that oxidation, time, and poor care of books created erasures long before poets like Jen Bervin made it into a literary technique. Furthermore, working with manuscripts that came before standardization of spelling or spacing must have caused Patton to question our own rigid typology, and the homogenous sterilization of our language. And if you read “Hearth” aloud (though not in a public place where you might be thought insane) you will find a careful and very musical attention to rhythm within the deconstructed language of the piece. “Hearth” unites Curious Masonry into a work that both provides three welcome modern translations and explores the nature of translation itself– a work that renews poetry from an ancestor to our own language, while at the same time exploring contemporary poetic and translation practices.

It wasn’t that she was sad, though she was. It was life’s awful brilliance – the eternity of every single thing, small and big. A flood brought misery with it, but the click of her heels when she walked was sublime. Families were executed in turbulent times, but the scent of home brought deliverance. She could, in a moment, be swept into melancholy, madness, or glee. At any moment, reality might be undone, and the true vision of her hysteria could overpower the night.

Julia cried when she was born, and she cried every day after. When a fly came into the room she cried, and she cried when the fly left. When there was no milk she cried; when there was more milk than she could drink she cried again. She cried at night and in the day, at dawn and at twilight. The doctors couldn’t say why.

Despite her parents’ concerns, Julia learned, grew and played like any little girl. Her mother thought the affliction might become worse with age, and that adulthood – with its setbacks – would bring a more terrible sickness. She stayed up nights and invented a time in which Julia’s heart was broken in some immature love affair, and Julia, unable to absorb the consequences, had to be hospitalized to prevent suicide.

She expressed her fears to Julia’s dad. Equally afraid, he only responded, “We will protect her.”

When she was five her mom and dad brought Julia a fish. Golden lived in a bowl with white pebbles on the bottom, and a green stone castle. Julia watched Golden float. Her eyes followed the easy roll of Golden’s fins. When Julia swam she kicked and struggled, but Golden was quiet in the water. Julia talked to her, and imagined Golden had the same problem with tears that she had. Only Golden’s tears were lost in the water, and became invisible.

“Don’t be sad,” Julia whispered.

When Golden stopped swimming they made a cake. Julia drew Golden’s portrait in the frosting. Julia cried, and her mom cried too, as she licked sugar from her thumb.

On her next birthday, Julia’s mom and dad took her to see a hot-air balloon. When the balloon lifted from the ground and into the sky above them, Julia hopped with excitement.

“There it goes,” her dad said.

Julia’s mom pulled a tissue from her purse and wiped Julia’s cheeks. Julia bit her lip and her weight shifted quickly from one foot to the other. The balloon drifted into the clouds and then a thousand more joined it. The pilots inside leaned out to her, each becoming ever smaller in the offing.

“Julia, come join us!” they shouted.

“I will!” Julia cried.

The pilots fired their burners and the balloons rose until they disappeared.

“You will what?” asked Julia’s dad.

Julia waved to the shrinking balloon.

They took a cross country train on family vacation. Julia’s mom pointed out the window to the mountains, cows, and crows. Julia touched the glass. There were more tears. They bought candy from a cart that passed through. Julia unwrapped a caramel and let it melt on her tongue until it dissolved completely.

Tragedy came in a rocky place where the trees were thick and green. The train left its tracks at a curve and slid down a long hill. It had been a quiet moment, just before nap time. Julia’s dad sat with his fingers intertwined and his eyes half-closed. Her mom read a magazine. Julia sat between them and kicked her legs up and down. Then the car tilted. Tree limbs shattered the windows. Leaves, dirt and stones violated the air. As the train twisted and turned over itself Julia’s tears floated in space around them. They splashed against a thin man’s suitcase and at the base of a grasping woman’s empty hand.

When the train stopped moving Julia lay between her parents and thought she was dead. Heaven seemed a strange place to her. Suitcases shifted and fell. Dust swirled in the sun.

For months afterward Julia lived in a hospital. During the day the nurses made her practice walking in the hall. She walked between parallel bars until her arms ached, or was strapped into a wheeled device that made her feel more machine than girl.

She was in bed one night when a meteor shower took place outside her window. The meteors were great fireballs that lit up the church steeple in the trees a mile away. Julia was so frightened she pulled the blanket over her head. She moaned and choked as quietly as she could. Her gown became damp with sweat, her legs trembled, and the muffled obliteration of everything she knew reached her from the unobserved distance.

When she woke in the morning the sky was clear. Instead of a field of ashes and fire the city stood the way it always had. Julia was terrified that she’d lost her mind; that she’d been misplaced in some endless delusion.

A nurse arrived holding a tray. She observed Julia’s bloodshot eyes and quivering lips.

“What’s wrong?” the nurse said.

“Are my parents alive?” asked Julia.

“What?”

The nurse gawked. Julia peered back. Her hair fell in stale black strands over her ears.

“You know they’re not,” said the nurse.

She placed the tray across Julia’s bed. It was runny eggs, juice, and toast.

Julia became convinced that she hadn’t invented the meteors, and was frustrated when the nurses wouldn’t believe her.

“It was real,” she screeched. She threw her pillow on the floor. “Real!”
A nurse put on the T.V. and pointed at the news.

“There’s nothing there!” she shouted. “Get your head out of the clouds!”

The nurse was a big woman with flabby arms. She lifted Julia like she was paper and put her on her feet.

“Now walk,” the nurse grunted.

Instead of walking, Julia went limp.

“Walk!” the nurse screamed. “Walk! Walk! Walk!”

Tears came. Julia couldn’t speak or move. She let her weight fall and the nurse dropped Julia on the tile. Then the nurse growled and stalked out of the room, her fat ankles struggling against her white sneakers. Her socks were pink with lace ruffles.

Julia lay very still for a long time.

When she could walk again Julia was taken to an orphanage in a large, wood house painted blue, with an iron filigree fence. Julia thought it looked haunted. She saw sorry spirits around every corner, and behind all the doors.

Julia was left in the front hall and the headmistress took her hand. The headmistress was a tall woman who walked with an angry limp. She had black eyes and spoke as if she’d been insulted at birth. As Julia was led upstairs a row of girls peered down on her from the second floor banister. They looked like dolls, or as if dolls had been made with them in mind.

Sometimes the girls went on field trips. At the aquarium Julia admired the starfish most. The other girls preferred the seahorses. A person in a scuba suit hung in the middle of a great tank and gave out pieces of pink flesh to the barracudas and sharks. The diver wore a mask but Julia could see his eyes were wide and excited. She watched; the other girls squealed, their faces to the glass, and the headmistress tapped her foot behind them.

At the petting zoo, on another day – at the first touch of a lamb’s tongue – Julia knelt on the ground – in the straw and dust – and she bawled, with her fingers curled into fists. The other girls stood far away and they whispered. The headmistress put her hand on Julia’s shoulder and shook her. It was no use.

“Is something wrong?” said an employee.

“Nothing at all,” the headmistress sighed. “Except this little girl who confuses crying with breathing. You’d think everything was a funeral.”

The employee, an old woman with thick glasses and breath like a candy cane, leaned over Julia.

“The lamb is just fine, dear,” she said. “The lamb is just fine.”

The clouds were pink and a warm, warm orange, in the shape of many things, and the sky beyond was cream.

When she was thirteen Julia took notice of an ancient woman who often passed by the orphanage. Her face resembled a ravaged skull, and her body was slight as a breeze. She wore long, drab gowns, even on the hottest days. Most notable was her head, which was bald and spotted with lonely islands of downy white hairs. The old woman’s gait was so proud, and her scalp so stunning, that Julia wept at the thought of her.

One morning Julia stood in the bathroom mirror and cut chunks of her hair away, until her own head was as bald as the old woman’s. She buried the hair she removed under a tree in the front yard of the orphanage.

“You’re never going to be adopted,” one of the girls said from the porch.

Julia wiped her tears and hissed. The girl ran inside. Julia showed her head to the woman as soon as she could. The woman opened her toothless gums and, for several minutes, laughed her approval.

The other girls in the orphanage wore brightly-colored dresses and had long, blonde hair. They had fine manners and sat up straight at the dinner table. In the evenings they tried on each other’s clothes and practiced kissing on their hands. They were adopted quickly, then new girls took their place, and the new girls were even prettier.

Julia did not want to be pretty. Her clothes were faded and mismatched. She gnawed her nails so they were uneven and raw, and refused to clean her ears. She licked her lips until they were chapped, then chewed them until they bled. Her eyebrows grew in a single line and she didn’t pluck them. At the dinner table she slouched.

Couples came to the orphanage and fawned over the girls, but when they came to Julia, crying, they didn’t know what to do. One would lean over her and ask what was wrong, and Julia would respond that nothing was wrong. The other would cross their arms and say, “You’ll never be adopted that way.”

Julia drew a collection of friendly houses. Inside each she sensed the remains of better days. The place felt like one she’d known, but she couldn’t complete it in her memory.

“What is that?” one of the girls sneered.

“Nothing,” she snapped.

Julia crumpled the page.

Julia didn’t think the life she drew was real, but then, sometimes the life she led didn’t seem real either. The colors were too vivid, and the people too strange. Events passed that seemed impossible, and sometimes she was the only one who saw them, and sometimes not.

She drew her mom and dad, and put the picture under her pillow next to a stamp with a yellow frog on it, and a plastic man with a top hat who seemed to have no purpose at all, and to belong nowhere.

The girls shared a room with two long rows of beds. The other girls decorated their beds with pink sheets and left fresh flowers on their bedside tables. Julia had no sheets at all, unless it was cold. Then she used one blanket, and it was brown.

During the night she was at the girls’ mercy. Julia kept her eyes closed tight, even when they surrounded the bed and tormented her. They pulled on her clothes, poked her stomach, jumped on her mattress, and smeared toothpaste on her face. They prodded and bit, spit in her ears, and when it was cold, they took her blanket.

She didn’t open her eyes, except once. A girl named Wendy leaned close and whispered, “You’re the saddest thing I ever saw.” Julia opened her eyes then. The girls were distorted and monstrous. It was so terrible that Julia closed her eyes again. The girls pealed. The game went on.

She took a walk one morning past the overflowed creek to the supermarket. She stood by the oranges and watched the boy at the cash register. He had dark skin and big eyes. His voice was soft as tissue. Her tears fell harder when she was near him, and she was embarrassed. She could see his back sway one way and then the other as he rang up old women’s cabbages and fish.

Julia sighed and took an orange, then she got in the boy’s line.

The boy twitched when he saw her. Julia eyed the candy. She put the orange in his hand.

“One orange,” he said.

Julia nodded and a tear came loose from her lashes.

“I think I’m going to the circus when it opens,” the boy said.

His nose was peeling. He and his friends swam in the creek on occasion, when no one else was around.

“Are you?”

Julia rolled her head, then shrugged and nodded.

“We could go together,” said the boy. The orange was still cradled in his palm. He handed it to her. “Take it.”

Julia held the orange in both hands.

The night of the circus, the girls wore their most colorful summer dresses and tied ribbon around their waists. The headmistress did the girls’ hair and put on their makeup. The bedroom was fogged with hairspray and powder.

No one attended to Julia, because she had no hair and she refused to wear makeup. She wore the only dress she owned – it was gray and black. Everyone else hated it, and the more they hated it, the more she wanted to wear it.

“Where did you get that thing?” the headmistress asked.

Julia couldn’t remember, so she made something up.

“My mom made it,” she said.

“That’s not true,” the headmistress said. “Your mother died long before you were big enough to wear it. Where did it really come from?”

Julia ignored her. She convinced herself that the dress had been sewn by her mother, and it became her most prized possession.

When the clock struck seven she sat in the front room and waited. The other girls’ dates came all at once. They were clean boys with blue eyes and stupid grins. The girls skipped down the stairs and were led out of the house on the arms of their immaculate escorts.

Julia waited patiently. It became late. The headmistress clucked her tongue and went to bed.

“It’s because of your hair!” she called from upstairs.

It was much later when the girls came home. Their faces glistened with sweat and first kisses. Wendy threw herself in the sofa across from Julia. She blew hair out of her face.

“We saw your boy tonight,” she smiled. “The one from the supermarket.”

Julia started. Wendy puckered her lips and extended her arms, then played her fingers on the cushions of the couch.

“He is a beautiful kisser, you know,” she smiled. “He invited me to go swimming with him.”

Julia’s mouth fell open in a great frown, her lips curled and her teeth bared. Wendy crossed her legs.

“I think I just might,” she whispered.

The girls tittered from the hall.

“Quiet down there!” came the headmistress’ voice, accompanied by the bang of her fist on the wall.

Julia leapt from her chair, but before she could put her hands on Wendy, the other girls were on top of her. They giggled and held her down. Julia sobbed and choked on their perfume and the cherry scent of their lip gloss, until she was too exhausted to move. The girls rushed upstairs, each one of them still sniffling with delight, until the door closed overhead.

Julia lay on the rug. The circus was long over. She went to the front porch and looked for the boy. A dog walked into the street, stopped to sniff a manhole cover, and continued on.

The rain came. Instead of going inside Julia walked to the bus stop. The bus arrived shortly after. The only other person on board was asleep in the back row.

“Something wrong?” the driver said.

Julia shook her head. She dropped her quarters in the slot then found a seat.

The driver shifted and the bus moved. The shudder of the bus was a comfort. The driver and the sleeping man in the back seat felt like friends to her. Julia closed her eyes. When she opened them a different man was asleep in the back row. Julia rubbed her eyes as the bus came to a stop on the edge of a vast lot. A tower at the lot’s center illuminated two great swaying hulks. Their backs glistened with water and massive chains were attached to their legs. Their trunks were listless and their mouths hung open. The elephants stood one behind the other. They lifted and dropped their ears. Julia could see tents and trailers. The shapes of people moved between them.

She left the bus and passed her way forward through the rain. She looked in the windows of the trailers. One held a band of singing gypsies. A burly man with a beard sat on top of a dresser with an accordion. A curvy woman with red lipstick was at a table with her legs crossed. There were two children at her feet. The woman sang.

Julia moved on. Another trailer held the fat lady. The next contained the bearded woman and the tattooed man. Finally Julia came to the trailer of a dark-haired woman at a tremendous desk. Julia knocked on the door. The rain seemed to fall harder. The woman appeared in a red and black tuxedo. She introduced herself as Donna, the owner of the circus, and invited Julia in. Julia stood in the warm trailer on a plush red rug. Water dripped into its fibers. Julia held her arms out and evaluated the ruins of the dress her mother had made.

“You’re sure a mess, aren’t you?” said the woman.

Julia’s features came undone and she fell on her knees and sobbed. Her hands covered her face and shook. Snot poured from her nostrils and into her mouth. After her surprise passed, the woman led Julia to a hammock by a window and helped her lay down. Outside the gypsy music played, the moon was clear between the rain clouds, and a moth clung to the window screen.

Days went by and Julia didn’t stop crying. Jugglers and clowns came and went. A pony was brought in on a leash. Dwarves did somersaults outside the window. Nothing worked. The tears didn’t end.

At a loss, Donna put Julia on the midway. A tiger had died a few weeks earlier. Donna gave Julia a red-sequined ballerina costume and put her on a stool in the tiger’s cage.

Visitors looked at her, moaned with sympathy, then moved on. Women who seemed very kind – some of whom reminded Julia of her mother – bent over their children’s heads in long dresses that hugged their rear ends, pointed, shook their heads, and led the children away. One evening Julia thought she saw the boy from the supermarket, near the back, peering over the shoulder of a man in overalls. She caught the boy’s eyes and he stared back, eyebrows raised. Then her vision blurred and she dropped her head. When she looked again he was gone.

A red and white sign was painted and placed above her. It said, “THE AMAZING CRYING GIRL!”

Julia no longer left her cage. She took her meals there, and did her private business in a corner, behind a black curtain. She sat on the stool all day and wept, and at night she slept sitting up. She wobbled but kept her balance, and salty tears slipped from her closed eyelids to the sawdust at her feet.

A member of the cleaning crew swept around her cage every morning. He was a dangerously lean man of seventy, who, due to cancer, whispered when he talked. One morning he put his face between the bars of Julia’s cage. Julia lifted her eyes to his.

“Why do you cry?” he asked, so softly Julia almost misunderstood him.

“Isn’t there every reason to cry?” she said.

The man didn’t respond. He looked on a moment longer into Julia’s cage. It was just long enough for Julia to catch the swimming moistness of the man’s eyes. She almost reached out to him. She wanted to ask if he missed the world they used to live in, where things were what they were supposed to be; if his escape was the same as hers; if he was who he said he was. She almost asked him if he knew where she was from, and if she could go back. Instead she stared, and after a moment the man shuffled away, his overalls faded and greasy with dirt, and Julia soon forgot him.

The circus traveled in a train painted with the faces of its most popular clowns. Trapeze artists in elegant dives flew across the churning body of the locomotive as it traveled over bridges and hills. Julia was transported in the same car with the dogs and ponies. Her life seemed now an unalterable night.

Her car shook. The train had been moving for days, and Julia was lost in thought and dream, with no recollection of time or place. The hot afternoons on the midway were one continuous stink of hotdogs and cotton candy; a blur of leering red faces and pitying looks. She floated in her body. The car bumped and screeched. The circus, she’d learned, was beautiful and ugly. Its delights were reserved for children. Its terrible mechanisms were in hiding below. Julia didn’t look for beauty where she was. It had been too long since anything touched her.

The train entered a soft curve, then all seemed still before a roar and a force lifted Julia and her cage free. She was tossed into a familiar space. She felt her tears splash across an ankle and back into her eyes as she was upended into the darkness. There was a horrible sound of metal twisting, bones breaking, screams, cries, then, a deep silence.

Julia lay on her side, afraid to move. She heard nothing. After a long time she stood, and found her cage had been battered open. She limped to a small spot of light in the dark, and pulled the door of the car free.

The country had been decimated. A layer of ash muted the miles all around. Trees hung low with soot, and the train was charred to black.

“Was it a bomb?” she said to no one.

There was no life. The air moved with floating powder, and soon Julia’s red-sequined tutu was as gray as the sky.

She stepped from the train and searched from car to ravaged car for survivors. There were only burned and mummified corpses that looked as if they’d been left embalmed some centuries before. Cars had been torn open, and human and animal bodies lay in the ash like distorted statues in a blanket of snow.

Just inside the muttering wind there was a sound of shuffling. It came from the car where her cage had been. Julia ran to the opened door and peered in. There a pink pony named Perfect was getting to her feet, and a mongrel dog named George was shaking his body at her side.

Julia put her arms out and helped the pony and the dog to the ground. Perfect searched the ash for food and George walked in a circle before resting on his haunches. A minor dust cloud rose around him.

Tears streamed down Julia’s face. She grinned and tears fell on her tongue.

“I guess we better find food,” she laughed. “This is the way. Come with me.”

Perfect and George followed her from the train and onto a path past a line of trees and a decaying row of friendly houses. Julia knew them. She’d learned to ride a bicycle in front of one; at the next she’d skinned her knee. Farther on was someplace better; someplace thrilling. A purple dragonfly buzzed across the path and disappeared into the keening ruins of the earth. George yipped. Julia skipped ahead.

This month T.C. Boyle sits down with me to discuss the inspiration behind Wild Child, we stream Judson Claiborne’s much anticipated second release, Time and Temperature, Thomas Matlack opines on being a good man, Randall Mann and Glenn Ashley Paterson debut and read new poems, Ruth and Max Bloomquist share their folk, Gabriel Duran makes me laugh, Alexa Meade’s brilliant and innovative installations leave me in near disbelief, and Judson Claiborne frontman Chris Salveter plays an intimate acoustic session in a Lakeview apartment, along with much more.

Sincerely,

Benjamin Evans
Executive Editor, Fogged Clarity

• John Paul Jaramillo Lena’s Trip Home

• Randall Mann Workshop
• X
• J. Delayne Ryms Blackberry Winter
• Glenn Ashley Paterson Connective Tissue
• Daniel Romo 1.21 Jigowatts
• John M. Anderson The Cellini Night
• Dawn Schout Vapors

• Jamie Baldridge Dystopia
• Alexa Meade Acrylic on Flesh
• Michael Massaia Chinatown Nights
• Afterlife

• Judson Claiborne Time and Temperature
• Chris Salveter The Fogged Clarity Sessions

• T.C. Boyle Discusses process and “Wild Child”
• Ruth and Max Bloomquist The folk duo talks and plays

• Thomas Matlack It’s Not Tiger, It’s Not Jesse, It’s YOU!
• Gabriel Duran Birth Rate

• Scott Hightower The Soliloquies of William Wenthe

Molly Jenson

Strand of Oaks

Samantha Farrell

with opening act Milano

Friday November 6th 2009, 7:30PM

Wheaton College Chicago

Tickets are $10.00 for students and $15.00 for general admission and are available at The Wheaton College Bookstore or by selecting an option below.

Twenty years after the Great Depression, Tom continues to spend his life trying to recall the moment his father forced him to bury his favorite pet. In his current state of fatal depression, Tom must finally uncover the truth to the secret that tore his family apart before he loses the only thing he has left…life.

Every day for ten years Robert had come to this café on the second floor of the Borders on North Michigan Avenue. He was a talented day-trader, fluent in the language of the market. He saw candlesticks and skylines in graphs where those with less training saw only the patternless movement of a line; in cloud-clusters of data points he saw writing as clear as Times New Roman type, with outliers dotting and flourishing the letters.

Some of his peers embraced the label “speculator,” but Robert rejected it – he was an investor, a finance professional. In earlier days, he had meticulously showered and donned a suit every morning, combed his hair and been out the door with a nod to the morning doorman and a swinging briefcase by seven-thirty – but that was only to visit Ahmed’s news-booth on the corner of Clark and Adams to purchase his cluster of morning papers, and then it was back to the office he kept in the corner of his small studio apartment. Dressed every bit as keen as if he had been entering the Board of Trade with a badge on his label and a firm behind him, and incoming calls on a cellular phone.

He did keep a phone, but it rarely rang. He was a broker for himself, and worked full-time on behalf of the same. His habits were rigorous: six morning papers (and the Journal read twice), several newsweeklies, and then the messages of the market. When necessary he would carefully consult the shelf of experts that sat above his trading desk: Fabozzi, Graham and Dodd, and others, and the great 20th century economists – Hazlitt, Hayek, and Von Mises, whom he loved, and Keynes and Galbraith, whom he abhorred but kept around just in case.

Now seventy, he still worked and would work until forbidden by the seal of the casket. But for the past ten years he had not worked from home; his practice was based out of the café in Borders. To his great impatience, the store did not open until 9:30, long after the market’s opening bell. (He had struggled with himself and with his sister over whether to move to New York to be more in tune with the schedule of the market, had several times packed the contents of his apartment into a few boxes and vowed to make the move that very weekend before the markets opened on Monday, but never seemed to be able to finalize things, to bring that decision to its lonely conclusion).

When the Borders manager-on-duty turned the lock of the first foyer door, Robert would be waiting without fail – the two exchanged a familiar nod and good-morning, and Robert quickly made his way up the escalator to claim the first cup of coffee poured that day, which he drank black. And then he sat at the very same table as the day before, the one with the best view of the old Water Tower through the trees and the horse-and-carriages stomping at the side street. After a sigh and an unlidding of the coffee he would fan his morning papers out across the table and pile a stack of books and company prospectuses high upon an adjacent chair and get on with his business of underlining and graph-reading, finding pictures heavy with meaning in the dimensionless points of the scatterplots and the suggestive starts and stops of the trend-lines.

It was the seventh of June, one of those rainy and sixty-degree days so familiar in the early Chicago summer. He knew the date well, and paused a moment with his pen hovering over an underlined section of a page. His hand trembled with a tremor he carefully ignored. The branches of the fir trees in the plaza stirred, and he paused to reflect: it had been ten years since he made his last trade.

Events in the window and in the café were different and the same – the other regulars, the eternal students, the homeless, and the businessmen seeking refuge from their offices in the Loop, had aged and changed their wardrobes, and many familiar faces were gone, having moved on to other cities and other lives. But Robert was a fixture of the place. On the rare occasion that a traveler with a bit of fondness in his heart for the café would stop by and look to Robert’s table and find it empty, a moment of disorientation and even sadness would follow: a reminder that even the most permanent things of this world must pass.

Ten years since his last trade, and ten years since he moved his daily operations to this table in the bookstore café. He permitted himself only a moment to reflect – this was one memory he could not stand to look at for long, and anyhow there was much to get done before lunch, and he could not afford to fall behind. But the anniversary of that day forced itself into his consciousness, will it away though he might.

One day, when very recently he had begun to dabble in short-selling, that is, betting that a stock would fall but assuming unlimited liability in case it should rise, he had misjudged the direction of a stock. A grave, grave misjudgment – his books and papers had failed him, and it was all he could do not to burn them and burn his apartment and trading desk down on top of them.

The next day, he was sick and missed the morning bell for the first time since his first day on the job as a mail-sorter and clerk for a small brokerage operation in his Indiana hometown. And the day after that, he had been lured away from his desk for a breakfast with his brother-in-law; his sister, who by order of some long-ago court supervised his accounts for reasons of a diagnosis he refused to name as he knew it to be false and a lie, begged off and was unable to attend. He ate anxiously with the brother-in-law and thought of the markets and how he might climb back to where he had been; he thought also suspicious thoughts, thoughts of betrayal – the food tasted strange and the tone of his brother-in-law’s voice was strange. His eyes were strange. Some of the more ominous messages that one finds in the chart of a stock-price may sometimes be found as well in the eyes of a man; this, too, Robert understood.

But it was too late. He returned from the breakfast to find his trading desk empty of its most prominent feature – the array of computers and monitors that surrounded and cradled him as he sat in his hard-backed chair. He always, without fail, locked his apartment door; for Robert to forget to lock his door would be for to the sun to forget to set or for Kant to forget to take his afternoon walk through Königsberg. Besides the landlord, only his sister had a key.

He searched the apartment and opened every cabinet five or six times over, threw his books and papers around the room, kicked his treasured copy of Graham and Dodd’s Security Analysis sprawling spine-broken into a corner, pounded with his fists on the imperturbable plexiglas of his floor-to-ceiling thirtieth-floor window overlooking the desolate landscape of the West Side. The computers, and his livelihood, were gone. Stolen by his sister, his one link to the non-economic world.

His was a blue-chip firm, and he had read much about companies bouncing back from crises. His business, too, would recover from this setback. It must go on – there was meaning in it, it mattered. And within days he had moved his operations to the table in the Borders café, the one with the best view of the old Water Tower through the trees and the horse-and-carriages stomping at the side street. The computers were gone, but in the end he had never thought much of that method of trading – had found it effeminate. The old paper-traders knew how to do things right after all.

Enough of such thoughts: Robert turned back to his papers and began furiously underlining the latest intelligence about the movement of copper prices – it was serious business, it would affect the summer production schedules of many firms in which Robert had an interest.

Eventually he finished his first reading of the morning Journal and, with a sigh and a cracking of his knuckles, turned his attention to the Tribune. Familiar headlines; then he unfolded it and his heart broke as he read, and read again:

BORDERS TO CLOSE FLAGSHIP MICHIGAN AVE. STORE

Often while riding my bike through the alleys and streets of Chicago, my mind gathers the imagery and often peeks through the windows of neighbors and strangers. I began collecting these images in drawings and later making them into relief prints, carving linoleum to create my pieces with a sharp, clean illustrative quality. However, I found these prints to read as static and flat, and as much as I loved the process of carving and multiples, I was not as interested in creating editions. To remedy this, and to make further use of the vocabulary of imagery I had amassed, I began to cut and collage the prints, making them more dynamic. I was able to change the colors and create arrangements that were completely unique even if I repeated motifs from piece to piece. The end result combines the things I love the most: the bouncing imagery and stream of consciousness of city life, drawing and carving.

Joe Meno discusses politics, process, and the inspiration behind his new novel, The Great Perhaps with Ben Evans.

Purchase The Great Perhaps here.

It began at the carnival.

Those magic nights, the whole of St. Greg’s parish there, all strolling
over from the bungalows and two flats and apartments all mix matched
throughout the neighborhood. There were the games, the shouts of the
carnies, the swirling thunder of the Tilt-A-Whirl, lights flashing,
pulsing, the colors of yellow and red and green and blue exploding like
fireworks against the walls of the church, the old nunnery, the high
school and grammar school that encircled it all like a towering red brick
fortress. The carnival set on top the school parking lot, the exits were
the alley to the east near the priest’s house, the tunnel through the
school that led out onto Bryn Mawr and the opening between the church and
nunnery, the noise trapped and echoed with booms that bounced from wall
to wall. And there was the crying joy of the children and the wild in
their eyes and the running and no knowledge of anything else.

Joe was nine years old, he was hanging out near the beer tent with some
kids from the block. His big brother Lil Pete was in the beer tent
drinking with the other hoods, something he’d been doing for years, the
priests too scared to throw the young guys out. Lil Pete was the tallest
of them, his shoulders set close and only his profile revealed the large
potbelly. They were somewhere between greasers, cholos and jocks. Some
wore shirts with sports logos or sweats pants and dago T’s, some wore
Dickies, some with buzzed heads, others with slicked back hair and the
sides almost shaved, their voices rose and fell in that squeaky Chicago
slang. Gold was new to that summer and it shone on their fingers, wrists
and necks. They were a dying breed, the great white flight was taking
their numbers and the neighborhood was changing.

“Aye Joey C’mere,” Lil Pete yelled with a wave of his hairy knuckled hand as he stood near an older woman and a kid Joe’s age.

“Hey did you ever meet Brian?” Lil Pete asked.

Joe shook his head no.

“Well, he’s Mickey’s nephew,” Lil Pete said nodding towards where a
stoutly built young man stood with a round buzzed head, his face flexing
as he spoke to the hood next to him so that he looked like a pit bull. Joe recognized him, it was a hard face to forget.

Joe looked at the kid in front of him, Brian. He was like a mini Mickey,
his hair in a short buzz cut, same pit bull face but softer. He wore old graying Adidas shoes with thick blue laces that made Joe wonder if he was very poor.

“Well shake hands or somethin’, Jesus,” Lil Pete said as his features
scrunched up in distaste.

“What’s up,” they both said looking down.

Joe noticed a thick gold bracelet on Brian’s wrist.

“Nice gold,” Joe said.

“Thanks,” Brian said looking at the tips of Joe’s Air Jordans. “Nice rope. I got one like dat at home.”

“Well, you two go play,” Lil Pete said brushing his hand through his trimmed goatee and mustache as he turned away. “And stay out of trouble you little shit,” he said as they both smiled.

They made quick friends and soon they were laughing and playing with the
other kids, white, black and Mexican kids, dipping and dodging through
the maze of grown ups.

The gunshot was abrupt, and in the masses of people, no one knew what
direction it had come from. Joe saw it though, the fire through the
barrel, and he watched Lil Pete run and jump the fence in the direction
of the tall skinny Syrian kid who held the pistol to his leg, the barrel
smoking slightly. The confusion continued as the Syrian began sprinting
down the alley. Lil Pete gave chase with Mickey close behind him. Joe and Brian followed the older boys. They ran down the alley and turned right, and Joe could hear the wild laughter coming from Lil Pete and Mickey. He glanced at Brian, his brows arched, eyes bulging and darting wildly in their sockets as gravity seemed to turn Joe’s stomach into a helium filled balloon. Joe ran as hard as he could but the older guys pulled away from Brian and him slightly as they turned at the T in the alley, their shoes clapping the pavement as Joe’s Nikes slipped and ground on the light dusting of dirt and small pebbles that littered the cracked cement.

Joe could see them running across Ashland and through the Jewel Parking
lot. Joe and Brian crossed Ashland, Joe’s heart pounding in his ears. He
could see through the parking lot as the Syrian guy ran into the front
door of the pharmacy on the corner across from the 7/11, Pete and Mickey
close behind him, still roaring with laughter. As Joe got close to the
pharmacy, he heard the screams from inside, but no shot. A few moments
later, Pete and Mickey emerged from the drug store. There was a bulge in
Pete’s waistband and as they jogged out of the place still laughing, his
shirt raised up above his belt and Joe saw the wooden pistol handle. They
had not seen the boys who’d ducked into a nearby doorway.

There was still the screaming inside, it was a woman’s voice and it was
the only voice that could be heard, there was a sort of panting between
each scream. Joe listened as he hid there in the doorway next to the
pharmacy, Brian beside him, their chests heaving. After Lil Pete and
Mickey were gone, Joe and Brian entered the drug store. The woman still
screamed, it was loud and rang in his ears. Joe and Brian walked towards
it, both trembling; Joe saw the red puddle on the floor as it slowly grew
like a shadow across the white and black tiles. He walked closer to the
puddle’s edge where he saw the young man not moving, eyes still open as
blood oozed from his head, his frizzy black hair wet with it. The woman
still screaming, was crumbled on the ground with the phone in her hand as she
shook terribly. Joe looked at her in silence and the boys walked out of
the store as others came running to its front door.

The boys walked towards home in the quiet, their heads hung, there was
the weight of it all around them. The air was thick, the carnival roared
on in the distance, the sound of the children’s joyous screams rose
and fell. The boys walked down Clark Street to Hollywood where the yellow
sign of the corner store glowed stale and flickering, they stood there a
while.

“You think dey’re gonna get caught-up?”

“Naw, ain’t nobody gonna rat dem out.”

“Shit… he was dead wadn’t he.”

Brian didn’t answer. They walked down and crossed Ashland with the sirens
floating in the air. Brian went his way and Joe went home. He went up to
his room and sat on his bed a while in the dark, the orange yellow of the
streetlight seeping in through the window. After the others had gone to
sleep, he went downstairs to the TV room where he watched the reports of
the murder.

And that was the birth of Pistol Pete.

The above is an excerpt from Bill Hillmann’s upcoming novel The Last White Hood. The book is an autobiographical fictive work about a family living in the racially diverse neighborhood of Edgewater in the North Side of Chicago.