ISSUES | fall 2008

At his apartment, after work, him studying from the kind of book you’d keep a door open with. They did not discuss his concern about the licensing exam. She wanted to go out, but he said he really had to study. The fan going. A clean-line apartment building. The walls were all white. He had put up a number of large photographs of him and his father, sailing competitively. Dark blue water and a sharp white sailboat named Madeline, its sails bulging. His mother had taken the photographs. The girlfriend never asked him about this.

The evolution of a species was echoed in the evolution of an individual-they rhymed, he’d write, the development and diversification of a progress of an particular feature similar to the progress of an idea-and after tea and biscuits in the basement, after opening the morning’s mail, after tending to his climbing plants in the study, the old man laid the grey heron out on his work table and opened her lengthwise. In the tight crop of the bird he found small stones, bits of shell, of seaweed, a smooth blue fish. In the belly of the fish he found the silver grizzle of a smaller fish. And in that grey paste he found the hard pearl of a berry.

It is very difficult and kind of stupid to be confident about something that is inherently unknowable. Let’s say I think a band is better than another band: I might really believe that, and maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s true. Maybe I’m wrong. I probably think it’s probably true, in my opinion. So I don’t know why it would be better writing if I removed the “probablys” and made it a “stronger” statement. Criticism is an unclear world, and the major critics, or rather the ones who’ve seemed to establish the tone of how criticism is written, have concluded that having an authoritative voice is better, even if that fabricated authority doesn’t match the way they think. I use qualifiers because I think things need qualification.

It is said that dogs are good. People with dogs live longer, are happier and are less likely to have their homes burglarized.

I have never owned a dog. This is in part because I am afraid of them but also because I do not want to take care of them. My daughter would love a dog, but I will never buy her one.

So I guess you know what kind of person I am.

“Don’t blame Baby,” she would say as I’d rummage through the apartment trying to find the television remote that he’d hidden somewhere or while I held up a job application he’d “marked” before I had a chance to fill it out. “Maybe it’s you,” she’d say. “Maybe he’s trying to tell you something. Don’t forget, he’s a very gifted dog.”

To say I was addicted to gambling would not be accurate. I was never addicted to gambling. I was merely addicted to the money I made from gambling. For almost six years I earned my living as an online gambler. I gambled at casinos and sport books, many of which eventually blacklisted me. I played over a million hands of blackjack, my game of choice, and when I was banned from blackjack, I played video poker, roulette and baccarat. I wrote “gambler” as my profession when I filed taxes. On a good month I made $12,000; on a bad month $6,000.

Lee Smith said somewhere that as a girl she would write out additional chapters when she reached the end of a book, conjuring alternate endings that would sprawl on for pages. Because I grew up in a working-class family of little education, I was more apt to grab tools or weapons-a torque wrench or crossbow, say-than I was a pencil or typewriter as a way to extend the story at hand. But I see now that our hunger was the same.

Nathan Paterne shifted in the white iron chair when his oungest son approached him of a sweltering Sunday afternoon on the narrow front porch and declared, “Paw. I am going to marry.” The world waved unsteadily in the heat as the boy spoke. A moment after, Nathan turned his head and saw the radiant girl, trailed by nightdark hair, riding up the smooth incline of the driveway perched sidesaddle on a camel. He blinked. He looked back to his son, who smiled and darted his eyes nervously toward the girl, then back to him.

Why are flaw and conflict so basic to literature? Literature, like sport, starts by meaningfully enacting conflict and somehow dealing with it. Conflict is basic to literature because it is basic to life. Without it, the airplane usually won’t fly. We are meaning-making creatures with little tolerance for chaos. It’s a platitude but also true that literature, like religion, gives shape and meaning to the struggle of living.

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Don was perched on a big wet rock, and when he lost his footing, he was laughing. He’d turned to tell my father something, and he tumbled instead. He slid of f the rock, landed in the current and went over the falls. He was stil l laughing when he went over, and my father was screaming. . . .

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