When the Market Basket Workers Fight Back, Everyone Wins

I didn't make this, but it sums up the movement's feelings pretty well

Market Basket supermarkets, my first-ever place of employment, has made the news for its companywide demonstrations against the ousting of former president Arthur T. Demoulas as part of a longtime family rivalry.  Arthur T.’s firing led to employee demonstrations in front of every store (“Honk if you love Artie T!”), a call for shoppers to boycott Market Basket, and empty grocery shelves as truck drivers refuse to deliver products. 

The rivalry between the two Demoulas families has been longstanding as the board of directors split into two factions: one in favor of keeping employee benefits substantial and its store prices ridiculously low (Arthur T.’s side), and the other (led by Arthur S., a.k.a. the Bad Arthur) plotting to make more money by raising prices and looting the employee profit-sharing pool.  The pictures on the movement’s Facebook page sum it up pretty well.

I don’t work for Market Basket anymore, but the Warner store was a big part of my life for a long time.  I spent most of high school and college there, used its paychecks to buy my first two cars, and spent a great many hours in its dairy cooler goofing off with my friends. It’s also where I learned about work, how not to fake sick when going to a music festival, and how to balance a part-time job with school, creative work, and a social life.

It’s more than just nostalgia, though, that drove me to follow the saga of the company where I once earned my living stocking the half and half shelves; it’s what the Market Basket battle represents in our country’s struggle to counter trends of increasing imbalance.

Right now, Market Basket employees earn twice yearly bonuses, varying in size depending on the worker’s wages and the time spent at the company.  They’re also offered shares in an employee profit-sharing program where they can cash out a large sum of money after retiring.  Again, this amount varies depending on the time spent with the company.  In an age where the pension and profit sharing programs of the post-war era have been dismantled in favor of individual retirement plans, Market Basket offers its workers (even the part-time ones) a long-term deal that rewards loyalty and discourages job-hopping. 

Think of it this way: if the grocery store across the street offers an experienced worker with profit-sharing benefits a higher salary to do the same job, that worker is less likely to accept because the offer involves a greater long-term loss.  Employee longevity offers pluses for both sides as workers enjoy higher benefits and the company spends less money training new employees.  It also gives workers more incentive to stick up for their rights, while a culture of job-hoppers will just grumble and seek out a better deal somewhere else.  The people in charge don't always like that.

Profit-sharing weighs heavily in company politics, as when Arthur T. replaced a full $46 million in bad investments lost in the 2008 crisis.  Such an act did not go unnoticed, and with Artie T. gone, workers fear their profit-sharing and other perks could be taken away. 

Financial matters aside, though, building a loyal worker base offers social benefits that, as Arthur T. has stated, “can’t be measured in dollars and cents.”  Higher benefits mean workers can put their children through college, buy houses without being foreclosed on, and take vacations to improve their quality of life.  Developed skillsets and company loyalty also yield positive results for communities as customers enjoy consistent service and interact with happier employees rather than a revolving door of untrained workers and policies favoring anonymity.  Customers are growing tired of the big-box model anyway, as this 2011 NewEgg commercial suggests.

These values go beyond company profits and bottom lines.  Contrary to what Mitt Romney might think, corporations are just abstract entities existing around the people who work for them.  When real, human workers (the people who make up the majority of the company) are seen as transient and expendable rather than loyal members of the group, it becomes easier for CEOs to dismiss them as undeserving of the company rewards while they quietly increase their own salaries.  Americans are becoming more aware of increasing gaps between the top and bottom of the corporate hierarchy, and one way to discourage such behavior is to consider all members of a company as playing for the same team.

It’s one thing, though, for us to sit around on the internet discussing poor working conditions and another to actually do something about them.  The Market Basket delivery boycotts and employee protests (thousands attended the Tewksbury rally on Friday) are the closest I’ve seen to a full worker strike in my area, the kind of Upton Sinclair/Sylvester Stallone-style protests that gave us the five-day workweek, safer working conditions, and hundreds of other benefits that people every day take for granted.  The strength of the Market Basket protests sends a clear message that corporations can’t manipulate workers and get away with it, and that people will take action when they’re treated unfairly.

Some may argue that with capitalism, workers are free to get a new job if working conditions don’t meet their satisfaction, and that a competitive free labor market can only help workers as companies fight to win their favor.  Unfortunately, though, with nationwide unemployment still at 6.1% and some states as high as 7.9%, finding a new job is easier said than done.  Worse still, if every company offers low wages and minimal benefits, what incentive does a new company have to offer more when it knows that workers will settle for less?

The Market Basket workers have said they’re not going to give in until Arthur T. comes back.  Meanwhile, the bad publicity, empty store shelves, and lost revenue have prompted rumors of Arthur T.’s buying out the other side as the quickest path to resolution.  No matter what the outcome, the New England grocery world isn’t likely to remain the same, and if we’re lucky, both workers and board members everywhere will take notice.

Daily Grind (or, What I've Been Working On Lately)

Few things bore me more than hearing about other people's writing habits, but here are a few words about mine:

Summer's here, grad school classes are done, and aside from some paying work not worth mentioning, I've been living out an entirely self-motivated schedule, something I've been working toward for a long time.  My biggest task is finishing the novel (the current draft, anyway) once and for all, a goal that's nearer now than it's ever been.  Mornings are good for that, a chance to wake up, plan a point of attack while in the shower or frying eggs, and sit down at the computer (internet cable safely unplugged) until lunch.  Getting started can be rough, and reading a few pages from an old favorite (most recently Catch-22, Murphy, Lucky Jim, The Mezzanine, or Something Happened) helps get me motivated and starts the words flowing.  Reach a stopping point, eat lunch, and schedule the next novel-writing day.  Repeat until done.

Having more time also means more devotion to side projects - undertakings both necessary and dangerously distracting.  Foremost has been this year's Art Swap project, more complex than I'd planned, but moving toward an ideal that combines both writing and graphic art.  (More on this later, though my last entry sprung from an Art Swap outtake.)

Then there's been my real and always arduous attempts to get more of my writing out there (like, in places where people can actually see it).  For a long time, I've been torn between how much time to devote to creation vs. self-promotion: given our limited creative energy, does submitting and researching publishing outlets detract from the (more important) process of creation?  This question's hounded me for a long time, but I've realized that I spend far, far too little time on the distribution end of things, especially since the two tasks occupy different portions of the brain, can be done at different times of the day, and aren't mutually exclusive.

So I've been delving into realms both traditional (fiction slush piles) and non (podcasts, literary essays, travel fiction, etc.) in hopes of snagging some bites.  I left one success sadly unmentioned: Sam Roman was kind enough to feature my short piece, Korean-Man Purse, on her new project, Non Finito, the journal of unfinished writing.  I was glad to help Sam out (getting this thing started meant a lot to her), and I found...relief in sending out a scene (and a character) from the novel that ended up on the cutting room floor. Jackson did a lot to form the first draft's quick pacing and irreverent tone, and if all goes as planned, we haven't seen the last of him.

I've also let my personal reading slip by the wayside, and the stack of unread books next to my bed recently rose to rival my nightstand in height.  Reading's always been important to me, and I felt disgusted at my inability to prioritize it against grad school assignments.  Highlights of my return to the page include The Loved One (a solid comic novel by the underappreciated Evelyn Waugh), Don Delillo's White Noise, and a supermarket crime novel (i.e. a crime novel set in a supermarket) by my last workshop teacher Sean Doolittle (here's his actual webpage, not a Wikipedia entry). 

Of my last month's reading, though, I most recommend Steve Martin's Shopgirl to anyone looking for something smart, funny, and incredibly observational.  The Shopgirl movie's good, but the book is better, while also being a fast read (barely over a hundred pages).  The absurd commentary of Steve Martin's storytelling makes it all work in a way that's just fun to read.  Here's a piece:

Jeremy took Mirabelle on approximately two and a half dates.  The half date was actually a full evening, but was so vaporous that Mirabelle had trouble counting it as a full unit.  On the first, which consisted mainly of shuffling around a shopping mall while Jeremy tried to graze her ass with the back of his hand, he split the dinner bill with her and then, when she suggested they actually go inside the movie theater whose new neon front so transfixed Jeremy, made her pay for her own ticket.

Wish I'd written that.

Community's important too, and long, solitary days have led me to venture out to SP CE (pronounced "Space"), Lincoln, Nebraska's own poetry studio and writer's workshop group (prose and all hybrids welcome).  It's been good having people to talk writing and just share observations with a few hours a week, plus interacting in an environment that's primarily about the work itself, and not what it can do for one's professional career.

That's all for now.  I won't lie - I miss this blog tremendously, and as my entries become fewer and online traffic merges from blogs to Facebook, what I post here has become even more focused toward an audience of one (though Google still rates me as an authority on people who hate being called "buddy").  I've also been inspired by my former roommate and partner-in-writing-crime Randall's return to blogging with the creation of his Magic the Gathering-inspired card game 21 Others, which he's been writing, assembling, and testing.  No one stays away from the process for long.

Someday, I imagine, I'll have a bona fide website (or at least a Wordpress one) with pictures, more links, and a flashy design scheme, but for now, I'll just keep posting stuff here.  You know, because it's fun.

On the Writing of "Salinger's Wishes"

An essay I originally wrote for this blog about the leaked J.D. Salinger stories recently appeared in The Millions literary magazine.  For those who haven’t heard, back in November, a manuscript entitled Three Stories by J.D. Salinger surfaced online and has been passed around widely since, in discordance with the author’s wishes that they (along with his other work) not be published until specific intervals after his death.  The essay proposes that Salinger kept the most polished of the three, “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls,” hidden because it tells an earlier version of Holden Caulfield’s brother’s death and focuses the tragedy for the reader less effectively than The Catcher in the Rye does.  The subject matter and timely nature of the essay seemed to make it worth submitting, and a few e-mails was all it took.  Writers like to pretend that submitting is an arcane, secretive process, but having never submitted a literary essay before, I found it surprisingly easy.  Click here for the link.

I don’t take a strong stance on Salinger’s strict, almost obsessive desire to keep his writing and personal life hidden.  If anything, I believe the man was entitled to his privacy, though I venture that his reclusive behavior probably did more to rouse attention (intentionally or unintentionally) about his life, writing, and personal relationships than a New York literary life would have.  Though we don’t know enough about Salinger to judge why he stopped publishing, the leaked stories provide some clues.  Two of them are rough drafts with crossouts, misspellings, and incomplete character relationships.  That Salinger chose not to polish them implies that he’d lost interest in them.  When I read “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls,” however, I saw a story that was ready for publication but showed three Caulfield brothers that were different than the ones in Catcher.  Because Salinger chose to change their relationships and the presentation of events in the story, we can infer that there’s something inherently unfinished about “Bowling Balls,” something that wasn’t what the writer wanted.  While Salinger’s reasons for guarding his later, finished writings may be shrouded in mystery (for a few more years, at least), his reworking of elements from "Bowling Balls" into Catcher provide more telling evidence.

I found myself drawn to Salinger’s process because, as a writer, I know it’s hard to get it right the first time.  This goes double for writers just starting out, as Salinger was in the 1940s.  While we can enjoy a novel or movie sequel safe in the knowledge that we can pick up our favorite characters where we last left them, readers of “Bowling Balls” must remember that its characters aren’t fully developed the way Salinger wanted them, and can't exist in the same world as Catcher.  Can we still enjoy stories like “Bowling Balls” with the understanding that they’re prototypes?  Of course.  But it requires extra effort to avoid being pulled out of the story, effort that isn’t required when we read Faulkner’s novels or watch Kevin Smith movies, and effort that’s harder for most casual readers to muster.  Salinger understood this, which is why he didn’t want “Bowling Balls” published but was fine with leaving it in the library for the scholars to read.

I expect, though, that as more of Salinger’s works are released and more facts revealed about his life, Salinger fans will understand more about his secrecy and his existing canon.  But we don’t have those answers yet, which is why people have made pilgrimages to his house or traveled to research libraries to read his early stories.  It’s natural to want to know more about the things you love, and frustrating when you can’t find the answers.  Nick Hornby writes about this in Juliet, Naked, where online myths and legends run amuck about a rock star who’s left the public eye, and when we find out how banal his life really is, the legends appear all the more ridiculous.

I’m not saying that people shouldn’t read the Three Stories manuscript, but I do think that, as I write in the essay’s final sentence, they should view the stories as experiments from an earlier time.

Something Universal

In books, I'm always searching for moments that reveal truths I've intuitively felt but have never understood clearly enough to attempt expressing. Sometimes you discover an author's more successful attempt to describe exactly that feeling you've always had but could never understand, and in hearing this thing from someone else, you realize it's something we all share.

I came across one last week in F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story, "The Rich Boy." The protagonist Anson, who has spent most of the story successful, drunk, enjoying wild nights out, and making out with hot girls, has reached his late twenties and finds himself alone in a New York hotel phone booth on a Saturday evening, reaching out to people from his old life [italics mine]:

Later he said that he tried to get me three times that afternoon, that he tried every one who might be in New York — men and girls he had not seen for years, an artist's model of his college days whose faded number was still in his address book — Central told him that even the exchange existed no longer. At length his quest roved into the country, and he held brief, disappointing conversations with emphatic butlers and maids. So-and-so was out, riding, swimming, playing golf, sailed to Europe last week. Who shall I say phoned?

It was intolerable that he should pass the evening alone — the private reckonings which one plans for a moment of leisure lose every charm when the solitude is enforced.

I've experienced this a thousand times, and I'm sure you have too. How often have you been overwhelmed with work projects, overtime, studying, classwork, family gatherings, or housework, dwelling first idly then intensely on all the fun or productive things you could do if only you had the chance: the novels you want to write, e-mails to answer, foods to cook, shops to check out, music to listen to, hobbies to spend more time with, or whatever else you'd like to be doing that you just don't have time for.

Now, how often have you been surprised with a free evening, a day off, a work vacation, or unemployment seemingly without end? You had a plan, but now it's gone.  The initial respite from stress turns into an excess of free time that becomes impossible to fill. What happens to our imagined projects then? They go from alarmingly real to frustratingly unfocused, or maybe we realize that we never wanted them that much at all. (Maybe we should have written them down.)

Fitzgerald knew this back in 1926, and little has changed since then. One could easily imagine Anson in polo shirt and Crocs sending text messages to everyone on his contact list and getting terse, negative responses, then reaching only voicemail as he became desperate enough to call. Fitzgerald describes this feeling using far fewer words than I've done here. We know what he's talking about; we've all been there. He's touched on something universal.

These are the things I think about when I'm stuck at home on a Friday playing Tetris instead of at the sold-out showing of The Room with Q&A by Tommy Wiseau. Damn you, UNH.

Five Books Every Twentysomething Should Read

Several years back, during one of my online rants about the lack of reading in America, an old Bennington classmate called bullshit and offered some advice: Don’t chastise people for not reading enough, because they probably don’t know where to begin.

He’s right, of course. Bookstores and libraries are intimidating places that make it difficult to know whether a particular book will be an awe-inspiring epiphany or a waste of your time. If you’re at the same point in your life as I am, or have found any of this blog’s ramblings and reflections relatable, I recommend these five books as ones that expose the delights and perils of being a twentysomething in a way I wish I was capable of.

Starting with the most highly recommended, here’s the list:


#1. High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby (1995)

The movie version is amazing (beating both Say Anything and Better Off Dead as my favorite John Cusack movie of all time), and the book is better. I recommend High Fidelity to everyone for four reasons:

1. It’s a quick read
2. It’s funny 
3. It’s relatable
4. It has enough pop culture references that you’ll feel clever for getting at least a few of them

But it’s more than this that make this book stand out. Hornby speaks to our insecurities, our curiosities, and to those thoughts we all have but can’t quite explain. His protagonist, Rob*, fucks up with women and wonders what went wrong, is mean to his friends without knowing why, and is disconcertingly aware of his unsettled state. He runs his own record store, revels in the music he loves, yet he’s unhappy and can’t seem to grow up. We spend the entire book in Rob’s head as he wonders about himself and the world around him, including those mysterious first discoveries of sex:

This is the sort of sex education I never had—the one that deals with G-spots and the like. No one ever told me about anything that mattered, about how to take your trousers off with dignity or what to say to someone when you can’t get an erection or what “good in bed” meant in 1975 or 1985, never mind 1955. Get this: no one ever told me about semen even, just sperm, and there’s a crucial difference. As far as I could tell, these microscopic tadpole things just leaped invisibly out of the end of your whatsit, and so when, on the occasion of my first. . .well, never you mind.

The entire book is full of these observational gems, most of which never made their way into the movie. It’s those moments when an author reflects on something you’ve always known, or been thinking about, or maybe just thought about in a different way, that make me love the medium. A good book will show you things about the world around you, and High Fidelity is no exception.

* Author’s Note: At the risk of being fact-checked in the comments section, I’ll note that Rob is actually a thirtysomething in the book, though his plights speak to anyone above college age who isn’t happily married with kids.


#2. Rabbit, Run by John Updike (1960)

Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom was a basketball star in high school, but now demonstrates the MagiPeel vegetable peeler to housewives at department stores. His own wife drinks too much and watches television all day, and together they live in the same suburb they lived in when they were young and life was more exciting. One day, Rabbit gets in the car and starts driving, searching for something he can never quite describe to anyone and desperate to separate himself from his life’s confines. This is how the book begins.

Harry’s nameless dissatisfaction is still relevant today for college graduates who now lack the structured environment to pursue the things they used to. Readers are unsure whether to encourage Rabbit on his journey for self-discovery or to chastise him for abandoning his family. Is he a bad person for leaving his son and his pregnant wife? Or is he bettering himself by striving to break free of his bleak suburban existence? The novel never tells us for sure, and this dichotomy makes it all the more interesting.

Rabbit, Run also isn’t as dense as Updike’s later work, and is a far easier read than anything he wrote in his later years. His novels are full of great descriptions of things (for example, the dot on a tube television that lingers after you turn it off, or the way a stack of chairs gradually leans forward if you pile it high enough*), and contain a gracefulness of prose that perfectly captures these moments in time.

Finally, this one deserves a place on the top five books that changed my life because it (arguably) prompted me to break up with my own girlfriend. Who can argue that such a call to action isn’t indicative of the book’s power?

* Images from Rabbit Redux and Couples, respectively.


#3. The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway (1926)

A lot of people read this book in high school and hate it; I probably would have too if I’d been forced to read it when I was sixteen and still living out the comforting routines of adolescence. The Sun Also Rises is a book for people whose lives lack definition and purpose: its expatriate characters wander Europe, drink themselves stupid on absinthe and champagne, avoid their families, work uninspiring jobs, and never get any girls. Its narrator, Jake, was left impotent after World War I, and can’t consummate his relationship with Brett, the woman of the group, who’s content to live up the night life with the rest of them instead of settling down and having a mess of children like a good housewife.

The book lacks a clear plot, and is basically just the main characters moving from one alcohol-fueled romp to another for two hundred and forty pages. While this frustrates a lot of people, I find it to be a more accurate representation of real life (which, in most cases, also lacks a clear plot). Behind the nights out and the exotic trips, Hemingway’s brief, understated prose hides a distinct sadness as readers become aware that nothing will come of the characters’ lives. This should make The Sun Also Rises more relatable to unmarried twentysomethings who lack concrete goals and whose jobs offer few opportunities for advancement, but it’s jarring for readers to see this emptiness captured in novel form when they’re accustomed to a three-act structure. Though more happens closer to the end (I won’t ruin it), the novel is best enjoyed as a look at the highs and lows of what life shouldn’t be.


#4. Afternoon Men, by Anthony Powell (1931)

This book is the British version of The Sun Also Rises, but with more plot. There’s more to it than that, but the situation is the same: a bunch of unmarried twentysomethings get drunk, have sex, nurse their hangovers, have witty conversations, and do very little that can be considered productive. The main character, Richard Atwater, spends the book in pursuit of a girl, Susan Nunnery, he really likes but who just isn’t interested in him. Let me clarify: no jealous boyfriends, no hidden psychological trauma, no climactic confrontations, Susan Nunnery just isn’t interested. The very banality of Atwater’s courtship makes it relatable because we’ve all experienced infatuation with someone we have no chance of getting with.

Like The Sun Also Rises, this is a novel of understatement, where we have to read between the lines to understand the characters’ feelings. In this dialogue between Atwater and Susan Nunnery before she leaves for America, we see both Atwater’s desperation and Susan Nunnery’s flippant replies:

“Anyway, I shall see you when you come back.”
“Yes,” she said, “whenever that is.”
“But you said it would be soon?”
“It will be soon. I don’t know why I said that.”
“Do you mean you’re going away for ages?”
“No. Only a little time.”
“We shall meet when you come back, shan’t we?”
“I don’t know. It always seems rather a business. Our meetings.”
“Perhaps we’d better not then?”
“I think we’d better not.”
“You won’t be away long, will you?”
“No,” she said. “Not long.” 

Aside from their unfulfilling relationship, Afternoon Men is notable for being one of the books to best portray a character slacking off at his job: Atwater works as a museum clerk, where he spends his workdays writing letters to friends and trying to convince visitors that their time would better be spent else elsewhere. Office Space, eat your heart out.


#5. Murphy, by Samuel Beckett (1938)

The most difficult book on the list (though easily the most approachable of Beckett’s novels), I’m including this one because, unlike the first four, Murphy features a protagonist who cannot fit in with society and has no desire to. Murphy is an Irishman living in London who wants nothing more than to sit in his rocking chair and be with his girlfriend Celia, a former prostitute who thinks Murphy should get a real job like everyone else. The thought of gainful employment makes Murphy ill, but rather than lose Celia he leaves his apartment in search of work, where he’s set adrift in a world that’s strange to him. The novel’s other characters, driven by money, sex, and greed, pursue and take advantage of Murphy to satisfy their own ends, though all he really wants is to be left alone.

Though Murphy speaks to the more misanthropic reader, the novel is essentially about a young person looking to make his way in the world and not having an easy time. Substitute Murphy’s chair for the comfort of living with one’s parents, and the novel becomes a story about growing up and becoming independent. (It’s not surprising that even in the 1930s Murphy is provoked by a woman to leave his nest.) Beckett, however, is never critical of his main character, and Murphy’s discomforts and misfortunes are unceasingly real.

I love this book, and in thinking about it recently, realize how relevant it really is.  Ours is a generation of Murphys: unwilling to face adult responsibilities, cynical of what the outside world can offer us, and eager to retreat into solitude (again, substitute Murphy’s self-reflection for, say, the Internet). How many people do you know who are stuck at home, spend too much time online, and are cynical about their chances on the outside? Could this be because the outside world is as twisted as Beckett makes it out to be?

I might be stretching this a bit, but if you can decipher its nonlinear plot and arcane dialogue, this one might offer you some perspective on your own existence, as I hope the other books on this list will as well.

Modern-Day Recounts of Bible Stories: Samson and Delilah

Samson, drained of his man-seed (not shown) enjoys a satisfying nap in the garden.

Back in the day, before the Jews had a city of their own, they spent a lot of time hanging out in the hills of Israel trying to keep a bunch of Canaanites and Sidonians and Perizzites and Hivites and Jebusites and Moabites off their land, so they were always getting into fights and slaying a bunch of enemy soldiers they had to cart away after every battle.  Because they were God’s chosen people, it was pretty much a guarantee that they would win every time, but sometimes they got cocky and decided to worship other gods like Baalim and Ashtaroth that had more interesting names and fewer rules—plus, the people worshipping those gods were usually beautiful, large-breasted women.  (Back then, the Israelites were always getting cozy with other gods as an excuse to sleep with women from other tribes. They were pretty clever that way.)  So the Isarelites met some heathen women through the pink-light classifieds and started visiting pay-by-the-hour hotels and getting drunk on weeknights even though they weren’t supposed to.  God (as you might expect) didn’t like that very much, and lo and behold, the Israelites get royally fucked when the Philistines (and the Gazites, who pledged with most of the same fraternities as the Philistines) rolled in, and soon, no Israelites were going out to sleep with anyone.

Around this time, out comes this dude Samson from the hills and rips a lion in half with his bare hands.  He didn’t want anybody to know he did it, so he turned the whole thing into a riddle and tried to swindle the Philistines overlords out of a whole bunch of sheets and changes of garments (which were basically like money back then).  This doesn’t go so well, so Samson catches three hundred foxes, ties flaming torches to their tails, and sets them loose in the Philistine’s cornfields.  Then the fire spreads to the vineyards, which makes the Philistines really mad.

After the flaming foxes incident, the Philistines had it out for this Samson guy, though they still didn’t know about that whole ripping a lion in half thing.  They got revenge by killing Samson’s wife and father-in-law (which was kind of a good thing, because the father-in-law sometimes wouldn’t let Samson go in unto his own wife), but then Samson came right back and slew a bunch of them hip to thigh (think about this for a second).  For revenge, the Philistines tricked the Israelites into tying Samson up, but of course he escapes, grabs an ass’s jawbone (no other weapons being available) and slays a thousand dudes by himself at Ramathlehi because he’s so freakin’ strong.

That’s when the Philistines went to Delilah, Samson’s new girlfriend from the valley of Sorek, and offered her eleven hundred silver pieces each if she could figure out the secret of Samson’s crazy strength. (In comparison, all Judas got for betraying Jesus was enough to buy a measly field.)  Samson, having recently carried off the main gates of Gaza on his back, was pretty tired and wanted to spend some time in bed with his girl, who immediately got on his case about where his strength came from.  To make her happy and get her on her back, Samson told her that if he was ever tied with seven undried withs, he would lose his strength.

Delilah was pretty confused about what a with was, but went out and bought some undried ones to tie Samson up with.  Samson woke up from his post-coital reverie the next morning to find himself tightly bound, but he snapped the withs like dental floss because that wasn’t really the secret.

So Delilah tried again, and Samson told her that if he was ever bound fast with brand-new ropes, he would lose his strength.  Ropes were more expensive than withs back then, but Delilah went out and bought some to tie Samson up with the next time he spent the night, but of course that didn’t work either.

Now Delilah really wants those silver pieces, so she puts on this huge sob act and tells Samson that he if he honestly and truly loved her he’d tell her the secret.  Samson really wants Delilah to sleep with him, so he makes up another cock and bull story about putting his long Fabio-hair through the loom and weaving it into seven locks to get rid of his strength.  You’d think, that when Samson woke up the next morning with his hair in a loom and a closetful of Philistines to contend with, he would recall the previous two incidents and realize that something’s up.  But Samson apparently doesn’t realize this, and the next night tells Delilah that his strength actually comes from his long Fabio-hair.  Why does Samson tell her the truth?  I have a few theories:

1. He was so comically stupid that he just couldn’t figure out what was going on.

2. He loved and trusted Delilah so much that he wanted to tell her his secret, like when people play that game where one person fall backwards and the other person catches them.

3. Delilah wouldn’t have sex with him unless he told her, and he’d run out of stories about ropes and withs.

I don’t have any proof, but I’m guessing it was that third one.

After Delilah promptly shaved off all of Samson’s hair during the night, of course the Philistines popped out of the closet again (internet porn hadn’t been invented yet, so there was a pretty long line for who got to hide in the closet all night listening to Samson and Delilah do it) and beat him senseless.   Instead of killing him, they tore out his eyes and dragged him back to the Philistine palace, where they got really drunk and brought the now-blind Samson out to make fun of.  Unfortunately for them, a few weeks had passed, Samson’s hair had started to grow back, and he’d recovered enough of his crazy strength to knock down the pillars of the Philistine palace and kill everyone inside.  This was more people than he’d slain in his whole life—pretty impressive if you recall that thousand men with an ass’s jawbone thing.

Apart from the timeless lessons that Samson and Delilah have to teach us about trust and honesty in relationships, the story’s ending has roused much debate among Biblical scholars over the precise correlation between hair growth and Herculean strength, as well as the maximum occupancy levels of Phillistine palaces during the Mesopotamian era.

Click here for an all ages-appropriate version of this story.

Calamity Cash and the Town With No Name: A Success Story

My good friend, former roommate, and fellow writer Randall Nichols just released his own indie comic, Calamity Cash and the Town with No Name, a collaboration with artist and fellow West Virginian Justin Cornell 4+ years in the making. This is a success story of the kind you don’t often see in the post-college abyss: a writer and an artist, both contending with their own responsibilities and commitments, harness the time to produce a full-length comic over a period of years. This is evening and weekend warrior shit at its finest, and now they’ve invested the capital in their very own print run. That’s why you should buy it.

"Calamity Cash & The Town with No Name" Synopsis:  The mother/daughter vigilante team of Tana and Cal Cash are on the run from an Afro-rocking, Kung-Fu assassin, and have been forced to make their last stand in a nameless desert town hiding a unbelievable secret - every last citizen is in the Witness Protection program! Out of gas, low on ammo, and with their backs against the wall, Calamity and Mama Cash become the town's unlikely protectors, but with friends so quickly becoming enemies, and old enemies becoming friends, is the whole place doomed to burn around them? And will our heroines be the ones to light the first match? A modern-day action/adventure western with words by Randall Nichols, and art by Justin Cornell. "Calamity Cash & The Town with No Name - Pt. II" (25 pages, $4.50 w/shipping).  [from The Mojo Wire]

If that doesn't wow you, here’s another reason to buy: Randall’s work is witty, bitingly observational, and he portrays his vagabond, struggling twentysomethings with an insightful sincerity that never stoops to melodrama or cliché. Based on my dealings with the writer, I can guarantee you that this is going to be good.

One more reason: copies are only $4.50 (including shipping!) signed by the author and the artist. Click here or on the picture above to go to Randall’s blog, The Mojo Wire, and purchase via Paypal.

For those of you still reading who haven’t yet clicked above, I’ll give you another chance to buy Randall’s comic now.

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It’s uplifting to hear that, in a world teeming with mundane distractions and lacking the financial and emotional support so vital for creative work, projects like Calamity Cash are getting finished instead of abandoned. Projects like Cash need an audience willing to shell out the few bucks necessary to keep them coming, but lack the marketing resources of a large publishing house to spread word of their existence to an overcrowded market. To know that so many projects have gotten off the ground through Kickstarter and other grassroots campaigns is inspiring, though even the most promising or awe-inspiring of projects is doomed to failure unless people know about them. I look and listen to the advertisements surrounding me on a daily basis and find that most of them feature products I already know. Yes, Coke is a sweet drink, Planet Fitness is a badass place to work out, and Old Spice makes you irresistible to women. Mass advertising, though its secondary purpose is to inform, first and foremost inundates us with those products profitable enough to warrant support while the smaller ones struggle to get noticed. How many amazing comics, novels, blogs, musicians, movies, webcomics, animated films, photographers, architects, dramatists, and other media could we discover if only we had the means?

Randall realized this long before I did, and, for a significant period after we left Bennington, blogged, Tweeted, Facebook shared, and generally talked about as many of his friends’ projects as he possibly could, to the point where his social networks obsessively centered around the achievements of others. My own meager work failed to escape his attention, as he tweeted a lot of things from this blog and eventually devoted an entire Mojo Wire entry (featuring one of the most unflattering pictures of me ever to grace the internet) to my metablog project Corporate Takeover. When asked about his constant sharing, he said that his friends were doing great things and he wanted to help in any way he could.

Creative pursuits (especially writing) are isolating avocations, and for those of us lacking contacts, the chances of getting your work noticed can be frustratingly slim. We owe it to ourselves to harness those resources available to us, but we all need friends willing to shout our achievements from the metaphorical rooftops of social media and weekend drinking sessions. We also owe it to those friends to return the favor without being asked.

So again, buy Randall’s comic for a measly $4.50, or explore the blog to read about its long, arduous history. For those who enjoy samples, try some of his fiction: New Hooverville, Arches, and more . Or take a peak at the writer himself during our more formative years:

Revenge is sweet. Thanks for the support, man.

The Less-Frequently Discussed Second Half of the "You're Not Special" Speech

In this blog’s time-honored tradition of providing commentary on cutting-edge issues that everyone’s already forgotten about, I present for your enjoyment the “You’re Not Special” Wellesley high school graduation speech.


Youtube’s great and all, but I really recommend reading the full transcript.

For those who haven’t heard (or haven’t clicked above), last month, English teacher David McCullough told the entire 2012 graduating class of Wellesley high school, their families, their friends, and (after the resulting media frenzy) the world, that if everyone was special then no one is, that in 2012 American high schools would graduate 37,000 valedictorians and 37,000 class presidents, and that today’s graduates have been pampered and complimented all of their young lives instead of experiencing the hardships they needed to grow. This of course got people talking more than the humdrum “Go out and achieve!” speeches usually do. Most commentators (Rush Limbaugh included) took McCullough’s side, launching rants against the younger generation comparable to an angry grandfather waving his cane at the neighborhood kids for wearing sideways caps and low-riders.

But I don’t want to talk about those things because they’ve all been said before. I, however, am more interested in another section of McCullough’s speech that antsier Youtube viewers might not have reached:

In our unspoken but not so subtle Darwinian competition with one another—which springs, I think, from our fear of our own insignificance, a subset of our dread of mortality—we have of late, we Americans, to our detriment, come to love accolades more than genuine achievement. We have come to see them as the point - and we're happy to compromise standards, or ignore reality, if we suspect that's the quickest way, or only way, to have something to put on the mantelpiece, something to pose with, crow about, something with which to leverage ourselves into a better spot on the social totem pole. No longer is it how you play the game, no longer is it even whether you win or lose, or learn or grow, or enjoy yourself doing it… Now it's "So what does this get me?" As a consequence, we cheapen worthy endeavors, and building a Guatemalan medical clinic becomes more about the application to Bowdoin than the well-being of Guatemalans.

McCullough’s explanation for why we love praise and awards more than personal fulfillment is, I fear, accurate, because if we’re constantly in competition with each other for the best grades, the best colleges, and the best jobs, then deeds that bring those rewards closer to our trembling grasp become all the more precious. It makes us desperate to get the things we want: we’d do anything. In a dishonest world, if we don’t take the fabulous prizes by any means necessary, then someone else will. If the average high-school senior, worried about getting into the college of his or her choice, was faced with whether to carefully research and prepare a term paper for a class in which he or she already had an A, or join an overcrowded after-school club whose leadership qualities would look really good on a college application, which would that student choose? How often have you seen a co-worker follow correct protocol, say something intelligent, or work a lot of overtime not because it was the right thing to do, but because the boss was watching?

The most satisfying actions aren’t always the ones that carry the most reward. The girl who wrote all those Twilight books earned far more fame and riches than John Kennedy Toole ever did for writing A Confederacy of Dunces, but which will likely last longer? Moving past the soundbites, McCullough’s speech speech actually calls for a more honest world where people work to produce something real (like a Guatemalan medical clinic) and not just to fill up their resumes with important-sounding achievements and program names.

 And I’m not just saying that because I got rejected from Bowdoin back in high school

Worlds of Power: Mega Man 2 (A Review)

Isn’t it a little strange that our hero has chosen to attack Quick Man with his bare fists?

The Worlds of Power book series was a moneymaking scheme concocted by marketing extraordinaire Seth Godin to sell video-game based books to adolescent boys who spent most of their free time playing NES (though, to be fair, anything that helps adolescent boys enjoy reading can only be a good thing). The series included novelizations of Metal Gear, Castlevania 2, and Ninja Gaiden, as well as two junior edition books for younger readers: Mega Man 2 and Bases Loaded 2. All contained helpful game hints in upside-down boxes, though sadly, none included the quintessential center insert with eight pages of color photos.

In the Mega Man 2 novelization, author Ellen Miles imagines the eponymous character as a whiny eight-year old with a limited vocabulary and a penchant for clichés like “cool your jets” and “he was just full of hot air.” The plot proceeds as follows: Mega Man is transported to a robot boss’s lair, kills some enemies, then easily defeats the boss. Repeat seven times, and then add in a slightly expanded version for Dr. Wily’s castle. There’s also a poorly-developed subplot where Mega Man accidentally becomes human and must deal with his newfound emotions for the first time, but this was handled a lot better in the movie Blade Runner. Several times in the book, Mega Man encounters obstacles like oversized enemies, or weapons that seem to have no effect on the bosses, but each of these challenges is quickly remedied as the Blue Bomber continues on his quest (fortunately, the author leaves out the part of the game where you choose the wrong boss, find out that all your weapons are useless, and have to go back and choose another).

The most annoying loyalty to the game comes when Mega Man has to fight all eight robots a second time by going through teleportation machines. Instead of omitting this relatively unimportant scene, in an act of deft narrative summary, Miles describes each battle in a single alliterative sentence (“He wiped out Wood Man,” etc), leaving only Air Man’s battle described in minor detail (presumably because she couldn’t think of a destructive verb beginning with A).

To make things more exciting for younger readers, the author also litters the book with italicized KaBoom!s, Whump!s, Pow!s, and FWOOSH!s of the type one might expect from the Adam West Batman series. Even more annoying is Bubble Man’s habit of inserting underwater sounds into his speech, which is poorly handled at best:

Mega Man swam through the gates. Bubble Man was waiting for him. “Mega blorble man!” he cried. “How gurgle dare you enter my king-burrble-dom!

While I’m quoting, here’s a typical example of the author’s attention to detail:

The door to the Robo-Transometer* swung open, letting in a stream of light. Mega Man stirred. His head hurt.

“My head hurts,” he said.

*Robo-Transometer (n): a machine capable of both cloning robots and making them human.

The Game Tips (requiring the reader to turn the book upside-down like a Slylock Fox puzzle) range from revealing enemy weaknesses to laughably basic advice (“To kill Air Man, carefully jump the tornadoes to get close to him”). Amazingly, later in the book, the same tip is repeated twice within ten pages (“To get to Heat Man, use the C weapon to cut through the wall”), meaning that either the editor got a little lazy, or this tip was so important that it had to be repeated twice for the forgetful reader.

I’m probably being a little hard on this book considering it had a target audience of eight year-old boys back in 1989, but it was a fun way to kill a half hour. I definitely had a good time making fun of this book that I wouldn’t have had making fun of a book based on Call of Duty 4 because childhood memories of the gameplay, however cheesy, made it fun. While one can’t possibly attribute any objectivity to this nostalgia, it will add a noticeable degree of enjoyment for any twentysomethings who grew up with NES.

Or, you could skip the book and watch this video of James Rolfe reading it in its entirity instead.

A Bizarre, Saturnalian Cover

1967 Bantam paperback edition of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49*

I love old paperback art, and this one is no exception. Paisley designs should be integrated into far more book covers.

Also, I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in a bizarre, off-the-wall, novel that still manages to retain a concrete hold on its plot and characters. (It's also short!) Pynchon's prose expresses the most everyday actions in strikingly unique ways, and for that I adore it.

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* I hate it when items that normally appear in italics (i.e. book titles) appear inside other items that normally appear in italics (i.e. picture captions) so that the italics cancel each other out and the former must then be unitalicized. It just looks wrong to me.

Fiction and Memoirs of Japan: Some Reviews

Learning to Bow: Inside the Heart of Japan by Bruce Feiler (1991)

This was the first book I read before going to Japan myself, and, simply put, it is not very good. Feiler taught with the JET program in Japanese public schools back when this was a new thing, and this book was the result. There is nothing wrong with the book, per se; Feiler accurately recounts the realities of both Japanese society and the Japanese school system while injecting his own reflections and anecdotes in a work that is polished, dignified, and teeming with poetic haikus that show Japan’s spiritual, insightful side.

Maybe that’s why I found the book so uninspiring: it’s too polished, too perfect. Feiler spends more time summarizing research unearthed for a thesis paper on Japan and less time recounting his struggles to adapt to Japanese life, leaving the reader feeling detached from him as a narrator. This book would have found a far better home as a series of informative nonfiction essays, but as a story unto itself it falls disappointingly short. When we do get Feiler’s personal experiences, they almost always consist of him having long conversations with Japanese people about Japanese-related topics, with occasional glimpses of him bumbling through the culture around him. Both narrative tactics get old very quickly. His attempts at self-deprecation aren’t self-deprecating enough, and his funny stories (the one exception being his discovery of Love Hotels) aren’t that funny.

Simply put, it’s an informative introduction to the fundamental differences in their culture, but readers looking to find the real Japan won’t find it here.

Rating: 3/10


The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto by Pico Iyer (1992)

Unnecessary subtitles aside, The Lady and the Monk is an insightful, beautifully-written, more personal look at Japan, this time through one of its most beautiful cities (i.e. one of the few not destroyed during World War II). Iyer has a keen sense of prose that makes this a pleasurable book to read as his words form a conscious melody complimented by the observant eye of the travel writer. Instead of boring us with abstract facts and information, Iyer shows us vivid images of Japan: the autumn trees of Kyoto, the deserted back alleys, the neon lights of the city, the quiet monks hidden in the temples.

There’s actually a bit of a plot, too. Iyer meets Sachiko, the dreamy wife of a workaholic Japanese salaryman, and tells the story of their friendship. Sachiko is fascinated by the world outside Japan, firing off pop culture references in her unique brand of garbled English that is all the more entertaining contrasted with Iyer’s otherwise careful prose. Sachiko is a living, breathing Japanese character who lets us into her world by sharing her hopes, frustrations, and reflections on the society around her, and this one character proves more valuable than a thousand textbook lessons.

Rating: 8/10


If You Follow Me by Malena Watrous (2010)

I’m ambivalent about this book. Marina (an apparently fictional narrator, though I spent half the book thinking this was just the Japanese mispronunciation of the author’s first name) and her girlfriend Carolyn come to rural Ishikawa as JET teachers as their relationship is strained by the challenges of the move and Marina struggles to deal with her father’s suicide. This has all the makings of a good story that could take place almost anywhere, and at times (especially when Watrous shares long, detailed flashbacks of her narrator’s family life back in America) the Japanese setting feels almost inconsequential. The difficulties of Japanese life (garbage laws, indirectness, avoiding confrontation, and blatant sexism) are covered well, but they almost seem an archetype for the difficulties of fitting in with any culture. Most of the writing is also overly sentimental, though after Marina commits several egregious blunders her pain and discomfort become almost painful to read.

Watrous’s world of dilapidated small-town Japan is described with bitter realism, though her background characters are mostly forgettable and underdeveloped to a point where a seemingly climactic and shocking incident is left on the backburner by happening to characters that readers aren’t really familiar with. Where Watrous shines is in her spot-on rendering of the way Japanese speak English: her Nihon-jin characters confuse their r’s and l’s, make realistic grammatical mistakes, interweave their conversations with Japanese words, and end sentences with ne? It’s just a shame that Watrous blurs the line between spoken English and translated English as Marina, who claims to struggle with basic Japanese grammar, is often seen conversing flawlessly with characters whose English is supposedly very poor. Thus, her ability to write realistic conversations spoken across cultural barriers is marred by their inconsistency.

This book is a decent read, but its numerous shortcomings kept me from enjoying it more. That’s a terrible shame, because I really wanted to.

Rating: 4/10


Charisma Man: The Even More Complete Collection, edited by Neil Garscadden, character by Larry Rodney (2010)

Back in print after a frustrating hiatus, this new collection brings together the Charisma Man comic strips that first appeared in The Alien (later rechristened as Japanzine) with some new stories illustrated by different artists. The premise is a superhero spoof of the clueless gaijin: Charisma Man was once a burger-flipping nobody back in Canada, but after arriving in Japan, he gains incredible confidence and good looks that make him irresistible to Japanese women (accompanied by a physical transformation reminiscent of Calvin and Hobbes). The setting for Charisma Man is the world of the young eikaiwa teacher: a world of late nights, city streets, tedious English lessons, unpaid overtime, wild parties, binge drinking, and beautiful women. In their finest panels, the strips comment on both the darker moments and glory days of this life, along with the reoccurring theme that any bum can teach English in Japan and become a hero.

Sure, a lot of the gags are cheesy and the jokes repetitive, but maybe I enjoy Charisma Man so much because this was the life I lived for two years, as opposed to the life of the small-town JET teacher or the carefree wanderings of the meditating traveler. The writers know how boring English lessons can be, and don't disguise that the true purpose of hanami is to get blackout drunk in the middle of the day. They capture the zany moments with a humorous spin that makes me lol while beneath the surface there always lurks the harsh truth about the gaijin existence: no matter how great the Japanese may think you are, as far as the Western women are concerned, you’ll always just be a burger-flipping geek.

Read this book. I’ll loan you my copy if necessary.

Rating: 8/10

The Years of Wandering

I've been reading a biography of Samuel Beckett written by Deirdre Bair (who some of you might remember as a guest teacher at Bennington back in '06), as I've become more and more curious about what my favorite authors were doing before they became authors. So far I'd just like to say that if you thought your life was horrible when you were a twentysomething, you've got nothing on Beckett, who was stuck on his parents' estate in Ireland with no money and no job until he was into his thirties. During this time, he also wrote an amazing poem, entitled "Gnome," that speaks pretty well for his feelings after leaving Trinity College and the Paris literary community:

Spend the years of learning squandering
Courage for the years of wandering
Through the world politely turning
From the loutishness of learning.

Is it common for people to shun learning after that final graduation ceremony? In many cases, yes. Does the pedantic learning of post-secondary education turn out to be less useful than we thought it might be? Again, I think so. Is the rhythmic structure of those years of formal education far easier to face than the uncertainty of the big world outside? Definitely.

Dilemma

George Orwell once wrote (in The Road to Wigan Pier, I think) that it is impossible for people to focus on creative pursuits if they have to struggle to make ends meet. I'd love to reflect on this further, but I really should be seeking gainful employment instead.

Censorship, Maturity, and the N-Word

As you may have heard, an Alabama publisher will soon be a releasing an edition of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that replaces the n-word (which, just so everyone’s on the same page, is “nigger”) with the more reader-friendly “slave.” Amidst cries of censoring what is arguably the most important work of American literature, editor Alan Gribben maintains that he changed the word to appeal both to a more general reader and to schools who wouldn’t feel comfortable teaching the book in the 21st century. I feel his intentions are honorable, certainly, as anyone who tries to make literature more accessible to the public usually gets a thumbs up from me. However, in this case the politically-correct edition is merely a way of avoiding the problem by limiting the scope of Twain’s vision.

I’m no expert on Twain, and I’m slightly ashamed of how few of his works I’ve read (especially when this blog has least one regular and one occasional reader that could comment on Twain’s character far more completely than I could), but I do know about using words in context. When 1930s editions of the Hardy Boys series use outdated stereotypes of Asians, African-Americans, or Jewish people as part of their narrative structure, those stereotypes are like a time capsule showing how the author embraced those stereotypes during that time period. In Goldfinger, when Ian Fleming has Bond go off on a tangent about how the abundance of “pansies” in modern society is the result of increased equality between the sexes, it does a lot to show Fleming’s individual opinions of homosexuality and women’s rights. And, if some blogger refers to an African-American as a “nigger” in a derogatory fashion, it means that blogger is just being racist.

However, racist language can also be used consciously in fiction and nonfiction to help readers understand the attitudes of both society and individuals. Skilled writers can put racial slurs into the mouths of their characters without having those words embody their own ideals, using the language as part of a vivid world in which racism is an inherent part. In Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, for example, he is not shy about having his racist white characters use racist language because he wants the reader to see them as racist. Simple, yes? Were he to hold back for fear of offending people, readers would not have a complete sense of how the controlling white minority in South America treated Mandela and the other blacks.

Shelly Fisher Fishkin summarizes this point far more coherently than I in a New York times article about the removal of the n-word from Huck Finn:

To understand how racism works in America, it is necessary to understand how this word has been used to inflict pain on black people, challenge their humanity, and undercut their achievements…to criticize racism effectively you have to make your reader hear how racists sound in all their offensive ugliness.

In literature, you simply can’t portray racist attitudes effectively without using racist language. Of course you could capture racism through another medium like sculpture or interpretive dance, but in writing the words have to carry the feeling. To shy away from that language is to create a weaker picture of racism on the printed page.

To use one of my favorite literary characters as a final example, Jason Compson, the paranoid, self-righteous, misogynistic, racist narrator from William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, not only refers to all of the novels black characters as “niggers,” he treats women like trash. The latter opinion is summarized perfectly in his opening line of Part III: “Once a bitch, always a bitch, what I say.” Jason goes on to say and do terrible things to women, and as part of his overall character, of course he would use the term “bitch” to refer to the opposite sex. To remove this line because someone was offended by the word “bitch” is to destroy an integral part of Jason Compson, just like cutting out “nigger” tones down the realistic intensity of Twain’s racist characters.

Instead of worrying about offending students or the general public, responsible teachers and parents should show how these words are used in context, and responsible readers should make every attempt to understand the difference between Twain’s language and that of the Hardy Boys. Learning about how to control language is part of becoming a better reader and writer, and understanding which attitudes are worth considering and which aren’t is an important part of growing up.

Fortunately there’s still some hope. In order to preserve the author’s original tone, the Japanese translator of The Sound and the Fury chose outdated, racist Japanese to match the English that Faulkner so carefully chose. At least some editors are still aware of the power of language.

Further Reflections on a Subject that Interests Only Me

A few weeks back I picked up a copy of the McGraw-Hill Handbook of English Grammar (and by "picked up" I really mean pulled off my bookshelf where one of my apartment's previous inhabitants had left it) and started devoting a morning or two every week to expanding my knowledge of grammar, usage, and all those pesky technical terms. This may have been a poor decision since the Japanese Language Proficiency Test looms forebodingly on the horizon and I already had a lot of grammar and kanji to brush up on, but I knew it would be helpful for my writing, my ability to self-study, and my job. The latter was really the biggest contributing factor, as students will often come to me with grammatical queries ranging from the commonplace to the minutely detailed.

"I have a question," asked a particularly curious high-school girl after the lesson had ended.
"Of course," I replied in a tone of utter confidence.
"What's a modal?"

My blood ran cold as I leaned over the grammar page of her textbook (which was thankfully in English) and read a note about how to adjust the structure of requests using modal verbs with an example that did not make at all clear what a modal was. The other students were attracted by her question and looked at me in intense anticipation of some useful bit of information they could only get from a native speaker. There was a dead silence in the room as I ran through the sentence trying to figure out which of those words could possibly be a modal, a term I knew I'd skimmed over lightly in grammar textbooks a dozen times without bothering to understand the meaning of.

I waited as long as I reasonably could keep up the charade of interpreting the textbook example, then feigned an exaggerated note of recognition. "Ah, I see! Here, a modal is a kind of special verb in English, but don't worry about this too much. Basically, this sentence means..." (Here I lapsed into an explanation of the example sentence using the grammar we'd covered in class while dodging the initial question, which yielded thoughtful nods from everyone in the room.)

This situation happens more often than I care to admit. It is particularly humiliating when the question comes from one of my junior high-school students, a precocious girl who is studying for several major English exams and is interested in nuances so subtle that they boggle my mind. There is an expectation inherent in every class that a native-speaking English teacher will always know the answer, and to admit that I don't dashes students' confidence to a crippling degree. It also makes me feel like a gaijin hack who gets by using only his natural ability rather than any actual knowledge of English grammar, and it is a sad reminder that any English-speaking idiot can come out here, hold up the cards, play the CDs, and be an eikaiwa teacher. I guess I just want to do it better than that.

Some interesting facts I learned from my foray into English grammar:

• A modal verb is one of a special list of helping verbs paired off with other verbs to talk about the future or clarify other meanings: can, may, must, shall, will, and their past tense forms.
• The only English verb without a past tense form is must.
• In American English, commas and periods should always be placed inside quotation marks. However, in the rare case where a semicolon or a colon overlaps with quotation marks, it should always go outside. Question marks and exclamation points can go either way, depending on the situation.
• Went, the past-tense form of go, comes from the older English word wend, which also means to travel.
• Apostrophes were originally used only in place of omitted letters in words and contractions such as can't. During the Elizabethan era, grammar handbooks started recommending them for use in possessive forms as well, citing that the phrase Arthurs land was really a shortened form of Arthur, his land, and so the former needed an apostrophe: Arthur's land.
• Even after carefully studying that entire book, there will always be grammar questions I can't answer.

Loophole

I got an idea last night while lying in bed worrying about my various problems. This entry may never see the light of day for reasons that will soon become obvious, but just the prospect that it might fills me with hopeful glee as I run to the keyboard not with my usual dread, but with the same exhilaration I get when I’ve solved a difficult adventure game puzzle while far from the computer and must churn the solution over mentally until I can see it to fruition. My last few entries, distorted as they were, went unmolested by my superiors because I technically didn’t break any rules. Therefore, I should be able to produce this bit of nonsense and earn some freedom with my remaining 427 words. Feel free to skim lightly:

Advancement of categorical inherent qualities is merited by an excess of contemporary achievement. The goal of exhibiting high-quality consideration must be incorporated. Utilization of appropriate capacities is necessitated by mass standardization. The situation is rectified by careful fragmentation of the original usage. Countering commensurate commitments is candidly captivated covering chaste chicanery.



I’ve randomly assembled these fifty-one words together to fulfill both the passive voice requirement and the five sentences necessary for a full paragraph. I’ve used (perhaps “utilized” is more appropriate?) more than the minimum eight words from the required vocabulary list. The content is irrelevant, but there are no rules about content. So, as long as I don’t use any emoticons in the rest of this entry, I’ve technically done everything I needed to do. (The above picture also has no bearing on anything, and is just a screen cap Mike and I took from Microsoft Golf.)

I used to think that one could create beauty out of restriction and order, and though it may be possible for some, I’m not that talented, and lack the willingness to conform. There are also some restrictions that are near impossible to work around. For instance, I challenge anyone to coherently discuss a current event with only the following seven words: inopportune, six, assimilate, tungsten, magic, derogatory, paper. You can’t do it, can you? You could probably use an artistic flourish to turn them into an interesting poem, but I doubt you’d get much farther.

I realize my example is ridiculous, but there really are some things that not even the most talented of artists can make beautiful. More realistic guidelines can yield more positive results. Oliver Goldsmith wrote The Vicar of Wakefield (I mention this as a citation, not a reference) solely for money, using a familiar plot and style of the time. His restrictions were fairly loose, and the result was an entertaining and well-written novel. Sometimes you can deliver a final product in accordance with the rules, and sometimes you have to skip deftly through the loopholes to achieve your own ends. Like now.

Cynicism

I realize that recently this blog has taken a cynical turn when it comes to all things Japanese. I’ve been pretty stressed recently, and it’s only natural that these feelings would surface in the fiction I’ve been posting. Since I started this blog I’ve been wary of letting negative feelings worm their way into what I post; for, if left unchecked, negativity can easily turn into an all-out internet rant-fest the likes of which we’ve all seen on a thousand message boards and Facebook status updates.

However, that’s not to say that writers can’t harness cynicism to horrify, shock, inspire, inform, rouse to action, or simply to make people laugh at the stupidity of the system. Swift couldn’t have written Gulliver’s Travels if he hadn’t been just plain pissed off at the way humans were behaving, nor could Joseph Heller have written any of his novels without the skeptical eyes he constantly turned toward the world. Not that I am so arrogant as to compare myself to either of these writers; I mention them merely as examples of how cynicism can be used to create something meaningful, not annoying.

The project I’m planning for May was certainly born out of frustration, but I hope the end result will be something thought-provoking. I don’t mean to be mysterious, but look for an update sometime before the end of this month when I head off to Nagoya (a city known for its miso dishes, auto-production, and the birthplace of the Tokugawa regime) during my Golden Week vacation.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to point out two excellent blogs belonging to fellow gaijin. Life's Too Short for Cheap Whiskey is run by my friend Tom, who recently finished his contract with a certain eikaiwa corporation I shan't mention here. In only a few months he's written some excellent in-depth essays at Japanese cultural issues that are a must-read for anyone interested in modern Japan (and make my own blog seem cheerfully optimistic). For something more lighthearted but no less informative, check out fellow Bennington alum Heke's blog, Shiso Style. Hers provides an insider's perspective on the Japanese public school system and some fine anecdotes, all with a layout that's artistically-pleasing .

Finally, some of my readers (and by some, I really mean both) may have noticed a small change in some of my past entries. Nothing serious, just a little precaution I decided to take rather than risk attracting unwanted attention. After all, you never know who might be reading.

Titles to Unwritten Blog Entries from the Last Two Weeks

- In which the author learns how to play shogi (Japanese chess) but is at a loss for a partner since the only people who actually play the game are junior high-school students.

- In which the author struggles to contain his dribbling mucus in a culture where blowing one's nose is considered rude.

- In which the author and a band of other foreigners (two of which are not quite certain on the rules) attempt to play poker around a small table precariously balanced on a tatami floor

- In which the author badly bends his new glasses and must navigate half-blind his way to and purchase food at an unfamiliar Japanese grocery store

- In which the author flirts with several Japanese women of low English-speaking ability, and finds more incentive to study their language

- In which the author fakes his way through a painfully formal business meeting by making jokes instead of real answers, and earns his superiors' disgust

- In which the author threatens to take away the chair of a twelve-year old student constantly hovering near sleep

- In which the author shamelessly rips off the lengthy chapter title homages used by J. Maarten Troost in his travel books, and makes subsequent apologies therein

When the Cheese Runs Out...

I have a tendency to evoke ridiculously outdated bits of media matter in this blog (Coming Soon: My In-Depth Critique Goldeneye vs Perfect Dark. Did the latter push gameplay to its limits, or complicate a near-perfect formula?), though I'm sure most of my single-digit readership either ignores these entries or accepted them long ago. One of my students is reading Who Moved My Cheese?, and asked me to explain some of the difficult grammar. I read this book shortly after high school ended and hadn't thought about it much since; but after flicking through her highlighted and dog-eared copy, I was hit with a rush of memories that made me stagger and shake my head from side to side.

When the cheese runs out, you have got to find new cheese.

That's been the core of my life's philosophy for some time. Too many days spent watching over indolent high-schoolers and staying home with attention-starved dogs lead me to search out bigger things; I'd forgotten where exactly that inclination came from.

Who Moved My Cheese is a quick, easy read for even the most dedicated of non-readers. Don't expect anything too mind-blowing, but definitely read the book to spark some reflection on your own situation; especially if you too are fumbling through the Post-College Abyss.

Thirteen

Does anybody else remember the Great Brain books? When I was in elementary school I lost count of how often I lugged those big hardcover editions home from the library to reread over and over; following Tom “The Great Brain” Fitzgerald, who uses his superior intellectual abilities to swindle neighborhood kids out their pocket money, in addition to solving the occasional bank robbery. Tom’s biggest mark is his younger brother J.D., whom Tom enlists to help with his schemes and tricks into making impossible wagers. Throughout the series, Tom smuggles candy into his boarding academy, rigs the town-wide tug-of-war, and opens his own gambling casino among other escapades in his sleepy world of 1890’s Utah.

In the last chapter of the final book—ominously titled “Thirteen”—Tom becomes a teenager and receives both a raise in his allowance and a talk from his father about the burdens of work and responsibility. To J.D.’s prepubescent horror, Tom begins to take an interest in neighborhood girls and is seen carrying the books of one whom he particularly likes. These new preoccupations swiftly take the place of his youthful shenanigans, leaving poor J.D. miserably bored with Aldenville’s routine.

This would be a disappointing end to the series, but the author lets a ray of hope shine into this dark future. On the final page, Tom once again pulls J.D. aside as he has so many times before to propose a scheme. And J.D—who has repeatedly been left broke, humiliated, frustrated, embarrassed, punished, and bitterly vindictive against his brother—agrees unquestionably to Tom’s plan before he even hears it; for these pains are nothing compared to the ennui awaiting him without the Great Brain to add excitement to his humdrum existence.

And if that’s not the epitome of growing up, I don’t know what is.