Author Archives: Dustin

What I Did While Everyone Was at AWP

Word has it that our stand at AWP, along with several of our competent, cheerful interns and many innocent Chicagoans, was nearly torn apart by the clamoring throngs who had poured into the conference in the hopes of meeting me, only to find out that I didn’t go.

I’d like to take a moment to apologize. 

I’m sorry, folks. Thanks for making the trip, but there’s only so much of me to go around. I am, after all, just one humble blogger. I understand your disappointment — believe me — but there’s really no need for the violence. It is my honest hope that you were able to find other fascinating people to hang out with in the Windy City. 

Besides, somebody had to stay back and hold down the TMR fort, and let me tell you, I think it was time well spent. Allow me to present a little project I like to call “TMR Valentine.”

The best part? It’s just in time for Valentine’s Day!

Well, actually, the first phase probably won’t be ready until next Valentine’s Day, but here’s a sneak peak: TMR-themed candy hearts! Now, I realize they may be a bit hard to read here, but imagine holding them each between your index finger and your thumb an inch from your eyeball.

You may be thinking. How come nobody at TMR came up with this up before? It baffles me, frankly, because candy Valentine TMR hearts are so intuitive! Many of our subscribers and contributors are teachers, and teachers use chalk, which is exactly what these babies taste like.

I know — so obvious! The only downside, as I said, is that there’s no chance I can get them out the door (or approved) in the next eight hours.

However, since I don’t want to break anybody’s heart on Valentine’s Day, I’ll go ahead and roll out phase two: actual TMR Valentines. Just download the image to your desktop, load the image into the photo editing program of your choice, resize, color adjust, render, rasterize, and print! It’s so simple!

I’ll admit, creating this handsome image was no small task. First, I wanted the text to be some moving snippet from our magazine’s pages — a touching stanza, or an essay in very, very small font — but all that stuff comes with copyright baggage, so I had to come up with something witty on my own. Then, I wanted to decorate it with actual cover art, or maybe one of our cartoons, but, same deal — copyrights. I found an image from our web page that I think is good to go. A little somber, yes, but nothing a few clip art hearts and a flying cupid can’t perk up. Oh, and the dashed white line — I had to eyeball it. Go ahead and fold on the dashed line, but keep the scissors handy, just in case.

Also, seriously, safe travels home from AWP, everyone. Happy Valentine’s Day!

Mark Gets Dashed

Bad news this week for advocates of the apostrophe, and no, O gentle reader, I’m not talking about this kind of apostrophe — it’s doing just fine — I’m talking about the captain of contraction, the prince of possession, the hovering hero who hauls “he’ll” out of “hell.” Officials in the English city of Birmingham have decided to turn away from the apostrophe — a punctuation mark that takes its name from the Greek apostrephein, which means ”to turn away” — and have banned it from use in public signage.

As the Birmingham story was breaking, it just so happens that I was finishing the chapter on the apostrophe in Richard Lederer and John Shore’s Comma Sense: A Fundamental Guide to Punctuation. My fiancée, who had devoted much of the day to deciding how to most convincingly dress up like a cowgirl, was currently having a hootin’, hollerin’ girls’ night out across town, which left me a few hours to let my mind get buck wild in the world of grammar and punctuation. I learned a lot I didn’t know about the apostrophe. I came to appreciate the way it floats at the end of a word, flung forward, jeopardized, but elegant, nonetheless, much like the image of my fiancée in the photos I would be shown later that night, her slim figure frozen in flight an instant after being launched helplessly from the back of a mechanical bull.

Associated Press writer Meera Selva reports that those responsible for the Birmingham apostrophe ban justified it by claiming the apostrophe compromises GPS navigating systems (Garmond users, please weigh in on this). They also claimed the back and forth over apostrophes has taken too much time in city planning meetings. Plus, they said, many of them have become obsolete, and are, in general, confusing. The following quote was given by Councilor Martin Mullaney, pictured at the left on what the British call “a lammy,” from Birmingham’s transport scrutiny board. And yes, that’s right — he’s from their transport scrutiny board.

“Apostrophes denote possessions that are no longer accurate, and are not needed,” said Mullaney. “More importantly, they confuse people. If I want to go to a restaurant, I don’t want to have an A-level (high school diploma) in English to find it.”

Basically, the argument is that apostrophes are confusing, and it’s better to take them out. After all, on many street signs, mailboxes and billboards, they’re already missing or misplaced. And yes, they can be confusing. Words like “hers” and “yours” are possessive, and they don’t need apostrophes. Family names that end in S are hard enough to do right when they’re pluralized without throwing apostrophes into the fray. And who among us nails “its”/”it’s” 100% of the time, in every medium, even text messaging? Not I. The apostrophe was just an early printers’ innovation, anyway. It wouldn’t be the same as, say, flushing out the colon.

Still, to me, this all seems a little unfair. All this time, it’s been doing its own job and somebody else’s — expressing contraction (the job it relocated from France to work, according to a history by Cavella and Kernodle) and also expressing possession. Hire some more help? Not in this economy. So while all the hip little marks are hanging out together, bragging about the quotable quips they get to punctuate or the celebrity names they expect to hyphenate, the apostrophe’s doing double duty up in low orbit, keeping pretty much to itself, but being largely misunderstood, and wildy abused.

Something else I notice, now, as I look at my fiancée’s pictures from last night at the honky tonk: a woman on the dance floor, dressed in Western wear, who has paused mid boot-scoot to shoot my fiancée and her faux-cowgirl posse the evil eye. I flip a few photos further to the image of my bride-to-be in apostrophic ascent off the bucking mechanical bull, and it occurs to me that regardless of the location, the environment, or the culture, there will always be some who would rather remove something than make an effort to learn about it. What a sad thing that is.

I flip back to the image of the glaring, Western wear-ing woman.

“Whoa,” my fiancée says, “I didn’t even see her do that.”

I’m glad she didn’t. I hope the apostrophe didn’t see it coming, either, over there, across the pond.

Merrily, Merrily, Life Is but a Hologram

Good news this week for people who like holograms. An article just out in New Scientist says we all just might be living in one.

… I know, right? As I read the article I noticed my face mimicking the expression of the tiny framed Shakespeare hologram I have on my wall here, which I purchased from the hologram store in the Denver airport reluctantly for $10 when I was in junior high, having lacked the two hundred bucks needed to purchase the wicked hologram of T-Rex. Yesterday, as I learned about how that shop was maybe a hologram that sold holograms, my expressions cycled from enlightened to puzzled, with tiny 3D Shakespeare watching me from the wall — paused, at my angle, midway through his reverse-epiphany, as if to say, “Methinks … whoa!”

The New Scientist article reports on the findings of German scientists who noticed some weird readings from a huge, entrenched detector that was supposed to measure gravitational waves, but instead kept picking up ”an inexplicable noise.” It’s been suggested that the “noise” is the threshold at which the image that is the universe becomes grainy — kind of like how a newspaper photo becomes nothing but dots at a point when looked at very closely. People who know about black holes wonder whether this means that the universe is not just “a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface,” but a blurry one, at that.

I can see that — literally — especially after last week when my fianceé shot me in the eyeball with a Nerf gun while I was driving, thus bringing about the exact scenario my mother warned could happen anytime my kid brother and I dared to wave our Nerf guns around in the car except that we didn’t crash and die. I hypothosize that since last Tuesday I have perceived existence as it truly is with my right eye — a big, slightly blurry mess where things are mostly as I perceived they were before, but not quite.

Of course, I lack the mathematical machinery to express this — a foam dart leaving a plastic barrel at an unknown speed while also traveling at roughly 50 mph down the road at a perpendicular angle — or to check the findings reported in the New Scientist article, or to do much of anything, really. The room-length chalkboard in the math and physics lecture hall of my mind still shows the faint traces of perimeter and area problems, maybe some notes on how to multiply fractions, part of the quadratic formula …. As I look at this photo, to me, the person on the left, who knows a lot about black holes, could easily be standing one position up the conveyor belt from the person on the right, who knows a lot about donut holes. They appear to have similar hats.

Speaking of hats, the hats we happen to wear, as writers, and artists, and critics, and readers, designate us as people who have feelings about the nature of reality and how it is to be negotiated. What the news this is all a hologram means for philosophy and religion is anyone’s guess. I have a sneaking suspicion it will be taken as kind of depressing by some, and as kind of validating by others. In other words, I expect global reactions to be a lot like tiny 3D Shakespeare’s, who is very disturbed, or very satisfied.

Psst! Ghost of Christmas Future, your line!

The Ghost of Christmas Future, everyone will agree, is the most awesome and hardcore Christmas spirit of all the spooks and specters in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

His spectral cohorts, Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present, are like a couple of hippie high school teachers, whereas he’s like that tyrant prof who ruined your 4.0 GPA in grad school.  They’re like, “You could do better. Try harder.” Ghost of Christmas Future’s like, “You fail!” He hands back your paper–no marginal comments, no encouragement. Only judgment.

We here at The Missouri Review respect that. We like folks who call ‘em like they see ‘em, or foresee ‘em, in this case. So in that Spirit … er, spirit, get ready to take your scary, black, hooded cloak out of mothballs and plug in your fog machine, because it’s Ghost of Christmas Future time!

Guide us away from our reflective, cautiously hopeful present and into the swirly mists of an age yet-to-come. Lead us through the alleyways of our post-”still-calling-it-an-economic-downturn” cities. Will there be bookstores? Libraries? Literary magazines? Will there be … paper? Will there be coffeeshop musicicans? Or coffeeshops, for that matter? Or coffee? Or musicians?

Point the way, Spirit.

And for goodness sake, tell us how we may sponge away the writing on this stone!

Writing is like _____________.

Frank Gannon, in his inspiring essay “English 99: Literacy Among the Ruins,” writes about trying to teach basic writing to an assortment of college freshmen that consisted mostly of bored/oblivious white suburbanite traditional students mixed in with a few shell-shocked Bosnian refugees.

In the piece, which originally ran in Harper’s, Gannon describes how he taught that “writing was an activity more than something that can be studied,” and how he tried to get his point about writing across through simile:

“[Writing] was like juggling. Like riding a bicycle. Keep doing it and one day you wake up and you can do it. If you don’t quit, you will get it. It is like golf. It is like tennis. It is like the hula hoop. It is like jumping rope. Like riding a bicycle.” 

I do this, too, not just to my freshman composition students (second drafts due on Tuesday, people!), but to some of the ones who ask me, “So, how’s that ‘writing thing’ working out for you?” If they’re jerks, or if I don’t have to see them regularly, I usually say, “One moment,” take out my cell phone, and pretend to talk to someone I haven’t just received a call from until they go away. If they’re in my family, or they’re in my (amazing/gorgeous/brilliant) fiancee’s family and therefore in my soon-to-be-family, I cannot resort to this manuever. I have to engage, and almost invariably I come out with both barrels blazing simile like, I don’t know, some kind of simile gun or something.

“Well, Uncle Don,” I begin, exactly as I have the numerous other times I’ve been asked this during small talk, “writing is like _________________________.”

Here’s an incomplete list of my previous writing comparisons, off the top of my head.

• rock climbing
• playing an instrument
• practicing a martial art
• breaking a board
• assembling a bookshelf from Wal-Mart without looking at the instructions
• running a race
• training for a race
• swimming
• being a lifeguard
• mowing the lawn
• being sent to the principal’s office
• driving across the country
• changing a tire
• taking an overseas flight
• steering the Titanic in an alternate universe where the Titanic doesn’t sink
• getting dumped by your girlfriend
• preparing for a garage sale
• tying and walking a tightrope
• walking through fire!
• starring in a play
• having Christmas all year long

Moments ago, after I asked my (sweet, incredible, gifted) fiancee what she thinks writing is like, she muttered, “having a nervous breakdown.” It should be noted that she is currently studying for her Ph.D. comprehensive exams, and quite possibly her remark was more an update than a reply. For all I know, she didn’t even hear me ask. 

So on that note, I’ll sign off, leaving it instead to you to complete the simile.
“Writing is like _____________________.”