Cute Copy

I haphazardly applied to a few jobs this semester. One of them was a copywriting position for a clothing company whose dresses I would like to purchase, but could never justify if I want to keep buying fancy, glass bottle, hormone-free milk. It was not until after I sent my application into their cyberspace submission machine that I actually studied the clothing captions I would be writing. The template for the copy on this particular website went, “Awesome [article of clothing] featuring [clothing material]. Looks rad paired with [any pair of shoes or any belt]!” Variations replace “awesome” with “perfect” or “rad” with “amazing” and once, “totally hot.”

I did not hear back about my application because, I’m assuming, I did not pass the background check portion that detailed my order history of zero items purchased. A couple of the other sporadic jobs I applied for were not interested in my wardrobe, but impressed by my choice in milk so I think things worked out for the best. My nights spent filling internet shopping carts until they reach laughable totals hasn’t waned and now the result of applying for that job has only been to make clothing copy impossible for me to ignore. The photo below is not from the website I applied to that sells really expensive dresses. It is from a different website called ModCloth that sells pretty expensive dresses. Their punny product titles and “The Story” tab for each article of clothing rivals Elaine Bennis’ work writing for the J. Peterman catalogue on Seinfeld.

I came across the above dress on ModCloth’s website a few weeks ago and tried to like it just as much as I try to like every Molly I encounter, but the references to blogging, wallpaper, and The Story’s suggestion that I “hook a thumb on this dress’ self belt” were ultimately unappealing. I think a lot about how difficult it would be to write for this website. How many different ways could I describe an A-line, semi-retro dress? Do they have a bank of cutesy titles like “Cowl of the Wild Dress,” “Teal It In Dress,” and “Only Time Will Toile Dress” to choose from or does a copywriter have to come up with that within 24 hours of knowing the dress? I would stay awake nights trying to rhyme “pleat” with “please.”

Most of the time on this post was dedicated to think of a slant rhyme as mediocre as pleat and please, which means by the time I got around to writing a narrative about pockets, I would probably only have the creative capacity to come up with “totally hot.” The Story portion of ModCloth is the same tool that has been utilized in print long before I signed in to these websites. The J Peterman catalogue is not entirely Seinfeld fiction. As with most Seinfeld episodes, the show only portrays a more entertaining truth. The real J Peterman catalogue does provide an almost notoriously great example of the belief that a backstory on a product heightens its appeal. This article pokes fun at the discrepancy between J Peterman’s elaborate narratives versus the actual product. A short-sleeved linen shirt is captioned with:

“Anything was possible then. She took him hunting for blue crabs along Chesapeake Bay… They shook hands with Elektro The Mechanical Man. They gasped at the television-telephone in the Drug Store of Tomorrow…”

I like to think that I’m not the kind of consumer who gets taken by a paragraph that makes me visualize what it would be like to be the kind of girl who could drive with the windows down in a drop waist skirt. Then again, if the copy printed on the side of my glass milk bottles romantically referred to shaking hooves with a cow, I might be more inclined to try to be a hat person.

Zombie Nation

**WARNING: Ahead there be spoilers, matey. Like, for serious. I’m not even joking. I will ruin the ending of this book for you, and even though it is a book more about the journey than the destination, the destination is a little bit important. So, I don’t want you to forget that, and then yell at me. Because I’m a “Writer” and that means I am sensitive and go to therapy, and being yelled at is bad for me therapeutically.**

Whitehead

We recently read Colson Whitehead’s Zone One in a class I’m taking here, and so a lot of what I’m going to say is distilled in some way from comments/pokings/ proddings that other students and the professor might have made on my definitely-not-alone trip to the conclusions I’m making. Of course, I was a little confused and dazed in class owing to persistent insomnia, so I don’t remember exactly who said what and when. That’s my academic excuse for not citing anything, and–by lord– I’m sticking to it.

A couple of things have happened in this nation (regarding this nation) in the last month or so that, I feel, make this novel particularly relevant for discussion. The first, of course, is the raging box office battle between Twilight and The Hunger Games. Well, not really. I’m lying, because I’m trying to hide behind humor, and what I want to mention is pretty terrible and I wish I’d picked something else to think about (or have you read)– the killing of Trayvon Martin, and the massacre of Afghani civilians by Robert Bales (who, incidentally, was on his fourth tour of duty, a fact that will rapidly become important in what I’m about to say).

What both these incidents do is point out to us the constant dehumanizing that we, as a species, are embroiled in. If this was a freshman composition paper, I’d say, “From the beginning of time, man has been mean to other men by pretending they are not actually human and sometimes they do it for no defensible reason either.” It’s not, so you got my customized spoiler alert at the beginning instead. The thing though is that these instances of dehumanizing occur and are explained on a local level–George Zimmerman & Robert Bales are bad guys who did bad things that the rest of us wouldn’t ever, ever do. We should ensure that lone bad guys can’t pull this off again.

Now, I’m not defending either of these men. I kind of want to make sure we’re clear on that. I do, however, think that there’s a code that allowed them to do what they did, that’s a little more complicated than the “bad apple” theory we like to espouse in these situations.  It might be because I read Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz as an undergraduate, and I remember that at a certain point Levi says, basically, that it’s amazing that as humans we can still imagine humanity as good when every bit of evidence has proved that theory to be incorrect.

Levi is talking about possibly the greatest human atrocity–Auschwitz– ever, but its a worthwhile thing to look at. A lot of the work coming out of studies of the Holocaust argue, convincingly, that a nation did not collectively lose it’s mind, snap into evil, and then snap back to being normal, but was a case of people who just fell in lockstep with others, who spoke more loudly, because–well, that’s just what people do. In works like Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem or Browning’s Ordinary Men, the operative word is “banal.” There’s something banal about how Nazis looked at a majority of the human race as not being human, as being sub-human, as being impediments to progress. The Nazis were not all inflamed with Hitler’s harmful, hateful, illogical ideology. They just did what others were doing. It’s the same logic that dictated the slave trade, that is currently being used by Assad in Syria, that is the logical thought process anytime someone says, “Hey, there’s somebody who doesn’t really deserve to live. We should probably rectify that situation.”

What does this have to do with Colson Whitehead? Well, Zone One is a zombie novel, and we all know from experience with George Romero that zombies are best used as allegories. Except, in Zone One the reader is not entirely sure what the allegory is. Who is represented by the zombies? African-Americans? Minorities? General malaise? White collar workers? Suburban families out of touch with the world? The result of an environment gone mad?

Knowing Whitehead’s work as being very interested in the issue of race and conversant in the ways of allegory (as exemplified in The Intuitionist), one can assume that perhaps the zombies are an allegory for race relations in this country. After all, there’s segregated living areas, and a persistent worry about gentrification once Manhattan has been cleared of both “skels” and “stragglers”–the two kinds of zombies in this world. Whitehead’s protagonist, Mark Spitz and two others are part of a team that’s clearing buildings of “stragglers”–non-dangerous zombies who must nevertheless be killed because what if? It’s not the most glamorous work, but its necessary as the country tries to fix itself after the zombie epidemic nearly wiped everything out.

Whitehead’s protagonist is a singularly laconic man, which gives rise to the first complication in reading the book. While this is ostensibly a “zombie novel” and invests itself in the genre, having a main character who consistently talks about being “average,” takes a lot of time to think about stuff, and doesn’t seem to run into too much obvious danger kind of explains all the Amazon reviews that are mad about how slow and non-action filled the book is. It doesn’t have a plot, it doesn’t have an arc in which the zombies are beaten by good ol’ fashioned elbow grease, and it’s organization (ostensibly spread over two days) takes a fairly cavalier attitude toward the representation of time–the novel constantly flits back and forth in time without ever clearly signalling to us what happened when.

There’s two ways to look at it then: The first option is that Whitehead, who’s a pretty good novelist by any account and has a MacArthur ‘Genius’ grant, just kinda got sloppy. He wanted to write a genre novel, but literary writers are inherently boring and fuddy-duddies and sit around in their pajamas reading Harold Bloom, so stop messin’ with genre, will you please? The second is that Whitehead might have planned some of this.

In which case, what exactly is he planning? Why write a zombie novel? Well, there’s the success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies; there’s a movie about Abraham Lincoln being a vampire killer coming out, we’ve already worked through wizards and vampires and werewolves and the chupacabra might be fake. It’s a good way to get in on the top floor and sell as many copies as Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult. Whitehead is a self-serving hack in this distillation of events.

Or, Whitehead is using the inherent allegorical systems and structures built into the zombie novel to talk about something else. Besides race, what could he be talking about? The novel is set in Manhattan, the humans are penned into a secure base named ‘Fort Wonton’, they go out in small groups on sorties and excursions, and once in a while, when they’re bored, they’ll draw stuff on zombies they then splatter.

Gottit. It’s an allegory for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We shouldn’t have done that. It’s weird being at war with these invisible enemies. How do you know who’s a friendly Iraqi and who’s a “bad” Iraqi? How can you really tell the difference between “skels”–who are coming to eat you–and “stragglers”–who are the soulless carcasses of once-healthy people? You could if you investigated, but why bother? Kill the stragglers because, well, they could be bad sometime later, right? In other words, kill the damn zombies.

The case should be closed here. Colson Whitehead, like every other latte-drinking, arugula-guzzling, PBR drinking East Coast snob just simply hates the troops, and by extension America. But the thing is that he doesn’t castigate the remaining civilians for treating the zombies as sport. It’s sort of what they do–it’s a result of their PASD (Post Apocalyptic Stress Disorder), and–in the absence of a full bureaucracy– is just the cost of doing business.

Here’s where the allegory gets interesting. Because the thing about Mark Spitz (Major spoiler ahead) is that he’s black. Ain’t nothing wrong with that, you’ll say. I agree. But Whitehead doesn’t let us have that piece of information till he’s fifteen pages from the end of the novel. Then he just drops it. As in, it doesn’t have much importance after that.

Is Whitehead messing with us? Did he think that by not telling us the protagonist’s race we would just assume this average, suburban kid was white, and hey, that’s a real problem ’round these parts? Why give us this piece of information as late in the game as he does?

And if the black protagonist is fighting against the zombies, who’re supposed to be the faceless hordes of savages baying at the walls (literally in this novel), then what are we supposed to think about the zombies? And how does Mark Spitz’s being black reflect on that? Was it just a side note, a little inside joke Whitehead is making while telling us about zombies?

Or is he trying to gauge American reactions to this protagonist being black as a way of making them think of the zombies (Afghans & Iraqis) as being deserving of that sort of individualized attention? Because, here’s what Trayvon Martin and Robert Bales have kinda shown in the last couple of weeks. Firstly, what happened to Trayvon Martin is a travesty. It’s a violent, unnecessary example of institutionalized racism–racism practiced by George Zimmerman, and the Sanford Police Department. But Trayvon Martin’s death will not be in vain. There’s a whole lot of good people in this country who want to rectify the situation. Now contrast that with reports of the Robert Bales case. In report after report we hear about Robert Bales, we hear about his breakdowns, we hear from his attorneys, his friends, his wives, previous business partners. We do not necessarily hear from the families he decimated. We do not get invited–not regularly anyway–to be in the shoes of the Afghans. The dominant narrative is one of, “How could one of our soldiers have done that?”

It’s that dichotomy that I think Whitehead is getting at. He wants us to think about race when we finish reading Zone One. That’s why he answers the novel’s biggest question (“why is the protagonist named Mark Spitz?”) with the answer that well, Mark Spitz can’t swim, and isn’t that a black stereotype? Because American audiences know how to handle this information. They know how to read a novel about race when it comes to black Americans. Because of Maxine Kingston Hong and Sandra Ciseneros and Sherman Alexie, they can do a passable reading of Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, and Native Americans. But what about the zombies outside America? They’re a different ‘race’, one America doesn’t know what to do with. The “humans” in Zone One are arranged and deployed much as the American bases in Afghanistan and Iraq are. The scene where the clearing squads break up the tedium of shooting confused zombies by painting their faces and posing resembles nothing so much as the atrocities of Abu Ghraib. And the soldiers who are out there, on the ground, might think of their antagonists in somewhat personalizing, characterizing terms, see them as human (in other words). But for us, the reader and the American, they are faceless, blending into one, non-understandable, ciphers and mysteries that pose some sort of danger even though we’re not sure what.

And I think what Whitehead gets at is that there’s something a bit wrong with that. Because here’s the thing about America post-9/11: the country as a whole has realized there’s a world outside of itself. It’s gone to war with that world, but all we get are images of the war, and sanitized images at that. It’s almost impossible to actually understand the Iraqis and Afghans, and there’s very little attempt to–at least in open dialogue. They are, because of our inability to conceptualize them, sort of “sub-human.” When Mark Spitz is alone with his thoughts he wonders why “stragglers” attempt to do the most boring tasks–photocopying, operating the fryer at a Mickey D’s, sit at a desk. He has no way of understanding them beyond knowing that his orders are to kill them.

And it isn’t necessarily the individual soldiers’ faults. There’s a shadowy headquarters in Buffalo (which is how you know it’s a post-apocalyptic novel) that sends out orders that the grunts basically have to do. The dehumanizing of the dehumanized zombies is an institutional problem. It’s the same institutional problem that allows George Zimmerman to shoot someone for the crime of wearing a hoodie, being black, and carrying a soda and Skittles. It’s the same institutional problem that doesn’t tell its soldiers what is happening, sends them into dangerous territory against enemies they don’t understand, then sends them again and again till they do something wrong. Which is sort of what I think Whitehead is pointing us at. It’s complicated out there, and it’s complicated in here. Against the Iraqis we are all American; it is only when we are by ourselves that we are members of our ethnicity or creed. Which makes this more than just a zombie novel or even a political allegory. It makes it a very, very good book.

Feel free to disagree.

Meet the Past

William Faulkner has never been on my list of (dead or alive) dinner invites or authors who I wished I could have seen give a reading or even men with accents who I would want to spend an hour with. I came as close as I ever will in meeting my uninvited non-idol recently though when I sat through a one-man Faulkner impersonation as part of an assignment for a course titled Performance of Literature. The act was bizarre, but apparently part of a professional genre of performance called Chautauqua where actors take on the role of a historic figure in an effort to educate an audience while entertaining. The beginning of the performance felt like a play, with an actor arriving on stage and in character. As Faulkner-Not-Faulkner began reading excerpts from his novels and laughing at his own autobiographical jokes, I couldn’t help comparing again the subtleties of literature to the production of performance.

John Anderson, the actor portraying Faulkner, recounted stories of the author’s life in an accent with a pipe in hand. The performance became odd with a question and answer portion where Anderson remained in character. It seemed that as an audience we were supposed to pretend like we didn’t know how this whole thing would turn out. There was a moment of tension when an audience member asked Faulkner about how much of the author’s own attitude on race is present in his books, but the question seemed more like a challenge to Faulkner (but not really Faulkner, who is dead) to admit that he is/was a racist. Faulkner stumbled over his words and the silence following his response made most of the audience cringe. Finally a woman two rows ahead of me broke the silence with a question that she asked with complete sincerity and curiosity, “How many children do you have?”

The real William Faulkner wearing a blazer.

Anderson removed his blazer after Faulkner had answered everyone’s questions and explained that the costume change signified his return to reality. A second round of questions and answers began. Anderson called Chautauqua a storytelling genre, a medium less about mimicking and more about knowing an author like Faulkner in a personal, performance way as well as having vast scholarly, literary and historical knowledge of the character. The art of storytelling line is one that I’ve used before to describe writing and to hear Not-Faulkner use it made me wince a little as somebody who always believed the art was in the subtle details rather than the accents.

The sort of suspension of belief required during the first Q and A was a stretch for me. I’ve seen plays and musicals and read fictional stories where I could get behind operatic phantoms and Emerald Cities, but the imposed agreement that the audience ignore our foresight of Faulkner, a real person, seemed unfair. As my Performance of Literature class continually points out, acting a story and writing a story are much different mediums, but from my theater chair I still tried to think of a literary equivalent. Authors ask audiences to pretend not to know all the time. The audience knows before Jennifer Egan’s characters in A Visit From the Goon Squad how the eighties punk scene ends. It’s not only fiction either, an audience senses tragic implications in Richard Rodriguez’s Late Victorians at the mention of AIDS and San Francisco. Chautauqua is an elbow nudge and a wink after somebody tells a joke whose punch-line is already apparent, while good use of time and history in literature shape a believable narrative. Overall, I can appreciate that the use of performance to narrate a figure’s life can be more entertaining than reading a biography and certainly takes up less of my Friday night.

Not Amelia Earhart

The Kansas City public library series Meet the Past created time warp interviews with some of Kansas City’s local, dead historical figures. The library director wears a suit and tie to talk to Jesse James, Amelia Earhart, Langston Hughes and others. James showed up with two holsters and a surprising willingness to tell the story of the first daylight bank robbery, which incidentally took place in my hometown. The interviewer gives the more likable, less chiseled James a flippant definition of collateral damage after the innocent, unintended victim of the robbery comes up. James makes a joke about watching where you’re going and the audience laughs. I suppose the literary equivalent of Chautauqua is reading the same book a second time and knowing that Dorothy makes it home, the only difference in performance being the hand-over-mouth giggle of a Q and A session where an eager audience member asks her, “What size shoe do you wear?”

Art of Omission Contest Winners

The Missouri Review and textBOX are delighted to announce the winners of the Art of Omission contest. We asked entrants to compose a short short or poem of 50 words or fewer using only the words contained in an excerpt from Reesa Grushka’s essay “Arieh.” From the 68 entries received, we selected the top five, all of whom will receive a one-year subscription to the Missouri Review. Caryn Suhr, the grand prize winner, will also get a free entry in the 2012 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize. Thank you to everyone who entered!

Grand prize winner: Caryn Suhr

White People and The Wire

You turn to the girl and boy beside you and connect over black city streets and meaningless pay-phones. I understand that recorded language unwinds the blueprint, but are you aware that you are a white girl? And, regardless of the black friend you lost, you are a white girl.

Caryn Suhr is currently an MFA student at Florida Atlantic University. She normally resides in Georgia, but, for the time being, is located in Delray Beach. Currently, she is working on a short story collection and a novel.

Winner: Husnah Khan

Because Jerusalem is a garden,
there sprouts a child’s shoe,
olive trees, and a donkey.
Recorded prayers that cross air
unwind like the tissue of brain.

Cross a street, turn a corner.
Choke on gasoline and smoke.
Tall soldiers circling.
To understand is meaningless.
Banal laws become a new language.

Husnah Khan is a 2010 graduate of The University of Michigan (Go Blue!) and is currently studying for the LSAT so that she can pursue both human and animal rights law. Her passion for poetry can be explored online at husnahkhan.blog.com and husnahkhan.tumblr.com, where you can read all 365 poems from 2011 as well as poems from 2012. During her free time, she likes to raise money for various causes (crowdrise.com/husnahkhan) and spend time with family, friends, and her orange cat, Houdini.

Winner: Dan Souder

I understand, a blueprint is like a chain. It is there, flat on the
street, a measure of narrow functions, orderly and banal. Crossing it
is an intrusion. Soldiers are protecting you from me. I dream into the
past. Broken pay phone, connect me to my friend.

Dan Souder lives with his wife on an intersection near the police, two hospitals, and a fire station. He is using software to learn Brazilian Portuguese. Obrigado.
ds-litjournal.tumblr.com

Winner: Jenn Hollmeyer

You are busy. I understand. I smoke prayers in the corner, burning my dreams. The weeks twist and choke, and time becomes a tomb. You circumscribe my language, and it breaks me. There. The argument crowns. The moon reveals a new road. I will turn. You will pay.

Jenn Hollmeyer is a founding editor of Fifth Wednesday Journal and holds an MFA in writing and literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Post Road, Salamander, Meridian, Etchings, and other publications. Jenn works as an advertising copywriter and paints architectural portraits. She and her husband live near Chicago in a blue house with a white dog named Red.

Winner: Erika Dreifus

Jerusalem Dream

In Jerusalem,
……………you dream of soldiers, effective
……………and tall, protecting the city,
……………the streets, and the olive trees.

Suddenly,
……………the orderly chain unwinds
……………and becomes a Sabbath dance,
……………circling over old, flat stones.

The moon is like milk,
……………the prayers, like bells.
……………You understand the language
……………of heaven and God.

Erika Dreifus is the author of Quiet Americans: Stories, which is a 2012 ALA Sophie Brody Medal Honor Title for outstanding Jewish literature. She lives in New York, where she writes fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews. Web: www.erikadreifus.com.

The excerpt from “Arieh”:

“Jerusalem is a dream city because there is no blueprint, no draft against which to measure or understand it. The streets are not orderly but twist, as a friend suggested, like the tissue of a brain. And certainly in my first weeks there I felt that Jerusalem was aware of my intrusion and was willfully protecting itself from me. The city undercut reason and the forward flow of time, as well as the functions of a compass—banal laws that I had taken for granted as effective regardless of borders. But to measure and to understand in dreams is meaningless—a busy street becomes a garden. A garden suddenly sprouts a tomb. A tomb reveals a child’s lost shoe, a patent-leather shoe with a broken buckle. Beside a bank of pay phones, an argument breaks out about the number that will really, truly, connect you with heaven. Crossing a street leads you to a new language, a new currency, a new god. Bells, sirens and recorded prayers circumscribe and cross the air. You choke on gasoline and smoke from burning trash, but turn a corner and you smell the dry, gentle olive trees, the aromatic grass. The hawking of wares unwinds past a stand of tall soldiers into a circling Sabbath dance, a white chain of song twisting over flat, old stones, and a girl and a boy with black eyes leading a donkey down a narrow road, the moon in their hair like milk, like silver beads, like crowns.”