We recently asked a number of writers to nominate a cultural phenomenon as "the great American novel", with the caveat that the were not allowed to nominate an actual novel. This nomination comes from the fantastic Mitchell Blatt -- The Editors


Everyone between the ages of 20 and 47 knows the story of Poop Head and his tragic journey West. When I was asked to nominate my choice for the Great American Novel, I couldn’t help but think of him constantly shitting liquid for days on end. Half the company had already died when the wagon flipped over while crossing the Green River, and the rest were near starving, since they had spend all their ammo killing 4,000 pounds of buffalo in Kansas, but they could only carry 100 pounds back. They had survived by pillaging abandoned wagons and became so good at finding supplies that some even wondered how “abandoned” the wagons really were when they first came upon them. Ole Poop Head was optimistic til the end. He was really hanging in there and could almost see the border of Oregon in front of him. But it was not to be. He died of dysentery just after Fort Boise. Of course the Banker from Boston had to continue immediately without providing a proper burial. It is in these themes of life and death, of greed for wondrous riches tempted by the reality that most will never make it, that make this a hallmark of the nation’s spirit. I am speaking, of course, of The Oregon Trail. 


It was a simpler time then, a time of innocence and naivety, when we thought new technologies could unleash education upon the masses, rather than dumbing us down and stealing our personal information in order to facilitate the election of a half-literate demagogue.


Mitchell Blatt is a masters candidate at the Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies. He is the author of Panda Guides: Hong Kong and editor of Bombs + Dollars. His work has additionally appeared in National Interest, Areo Magazine, Roads & Kingdoms, Korea Times, and Acculturated.
We recently asked a number of writers to nominate a cultural phenomenon as "the great American novel", with the caveat that the were not allowed to nominate an actual novel. This nomination comes from the terrific Nathan McDowell -- The Editors



 THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL IS OLD PEOPLE MEMES ON FACEBOOK.  I KNOW YOU TYPE LIKE THIS BECAUSE UPPER CASE LETTERS ARE EASIER FOR YOU TO READ, MARYAM.  I ASSUME THAT YOU'RE ALSO HARD OF HEARING, SO I LOVE READING YOUR POSTS AS IF YOU'RE YELLING THEM.  THAT IS TO SAY YOUR SELF-EXPRESSION HAS A VARIETY OF INTERPRETATIONS AND THEY'RE ALL BEAUTIFUL.  YOUR STRUGGLE IS PERFECT IN IT'S PROSAICNESS AND IT'S DEPTH.  YOU ARE THE ANTIDOTE TO THE NEUROSES AND POSTURING THAT IS KILLING ME AND ALL MY FRIENDS.  YOUR SINCERITY IS NOT DECONSTRUCTABLE, IT IS MORE PURE THAN THE CHILDHOOD MEMORIES I DARE NOT UTTER HERE.  WHO COULD POSSIBLY POST SO MANY MINION MEMES AND GIFS SHARED IN A VIDEO FORMAT, IF THEY WERE NOT AS SELF-ACTUALIZED AS YOU.  PEOPLE SPEND LONG HARD HOURS TRYING TO CAPTURE SOMETHING YOU EXPRESS EFFORTLESSLY BETWEEN JEOPARDY AND COOKING DINNER


Nathan McDowell is a poet from Rock Island, IL who's work can be found in publications such as Buffalo Carp and Off Channel.  When he was younger he was convinced that old people were ruining Facebook, but it's now become very clear to him that they've saved it.
For Father's Day, I wanted to interview my dad to hear how he experiences reading and writing in his everyday life. He was pivotal to middle school Cam's development as a writer, so I figured it would be appropriate to ask him about this experience, as well as his own writing style and literary interests.

I'll let the interview take it from here:








Second to the professor who taught his work, John Updike is our #1 on the list of Men We Hate. This was the first English class Alyssa and I had together, so, naturally, we sat together so we could chatter like little school girls over the 1960s Contemporary Literature we read.

Sure, shit-talking a dead (thank Jesus) writer isn't the classiest thing to do. Especially in front of a professor who --and I will frame this as delicately as possible -- definitely masturbates to The Maple Family series. It's petty, it doesn't accomplish anything, I'm disrespectful, I need stronger grounds for an argument against Updike beyond the notion that the man who taught Rabbit, Run failed to anticipate our objection of a text that so vulgarly painted women in the oil paint sludge of their sexual employment for men.


As the upcoming series director, Andrew Davies, notes: "Some of the things have been a bit difficult for young intelligent females to cope with... but I think [Updike's] insight into both men and women is just so extraordinary"



In contrast, I think that Updike had insight equal to putting your penis in a toaster.


I did not finish reading Rabbit, Run.
It is one of few books I've abandoned, period, and perhaps one of two that I did not finish reading in college. Apparently, the baby drowns.

So let's address what information I barely remember from that penny dreadful: the novel was a thinly veiled recount of Updike's own extramarital affairs with seemingly no plot or continued conflict beyond what Rabbit created for himself. Oh no, making love to two women is hard, which one do I dispose? Why do I still feel like an empty, wrinkled scrotum? Things were so much easier when all that was expect of me was to literally run away from my problems.

I could go fish through my college notebooks for the page-by-page summary I created for it, or the contextual notes I jotted down, or how redemption and Kierkegaard's philosophy shape Updike's writing. Except, if I did all of that, I'd probably induce a brain aneurism.

So instead, let's come up with the two most ridiculous notions of Updike's writing that I've failed to appreciate:

1. Rabbit's existentialism as an excuse for his reckless actions and vulgar thoughts
2. Rabbit's disrespect for, manipulation of, and disposal of women [this might lack parallelism, so ad hominem me and sue me]

Kierkegaard, known as "The Father of Existentialism" in philosophy, is the thundering bass guitar of this self-indulgent cacophony. Who knows, maybe there is some redemption to his beliefs, but certainly not as they serve Rabbit, Run. Rabbit's existentialism is the average mid-life crisis: I'm old (he's 26) , life is ephemeral, my wife doesn't look hot anymore. The "spiritual enlightenment" path that Rabbit takes to redeem his soul from God's alienation is to ditch his pregnant wife, have a months long extramarital affair, and move in with that younger woman.

From my recollection, our class stopped at analyzing Kierkegaard after assigning passages of the text with different stages of existential crisis, thereby downplaying the fact that Rabbit alienated himself by zigzagging back & forth between his wife, Janice, and his side-chick, Ruth. "Zigzagging", specifically, because that is what a rabbit does when distressed to escape death, as my classmates and professor noted. As though between each zig and zag, a rabbit has sex with the zig, gets tired, goes for the zag, who rejects him, then back again to the zig.

Alienation through self-destructive behavior is not uncommon - ask my depression. It happens - but it is not excusable. If you drink to forget that you're upset, and you... I don't know, accidentally drown your baby...whether or not you blackout, it's socially expected to show remorse for "what you could not control" Because it starts with that first choice: that reaction to despair. "My ennui made me cheat on you" or "It's not my fault that you felt morose and drank to forget that I cheated on you and then accidentally drowned our baby" is the equivalent of Albert Camus' "The sun made me do it" No, bird brains: your narcissism, impulsivity, and -10 Ability Score in Kohlberg's Morality made you do it.

Updike said that this novel was an exploration of "the everyman" in middle class 1950s and his conflicting feelings about sex, religion,, death, sex, identity...sex.

 It's difficult for me to identify Updike's tone - it's certainly not condemnation... maybe complacency, this exploration of this changing era that somehow tolerates marital and extramarital sexual assault. My regrettable experiences on Tinder & other "dating apps" take me back to Rabbit, Run, to this man who is the protagonist of everyone's world, who launch into phrases like "please tell me you're here for the ass-eats (heart eyes emoji) " or "well f--k you, b---h" when faced with rejection, or abandons you before you can abandon them (ghosting)

It makes me wonder if Updike, had he his own moral compass, could have written Rabbit, Run with more than ennui. Imagine if his tale of the everyman was a story of The Everyman, a character traveling through sins and refining his soul before physical or spiritual death... but maybe I've spent too much time with my tarot deck.

What does this text say of men of the past and of men of the present? What does this say about their viewpoints of women, or how women really react to these cave man brains and primal dicks? What discussions could our primarily female class have had about this text if our voices weren't reactionary to our male professor's, but instead interpersonal, as though he weren't in the room? What viewpoints could we have exchanged, or what realization could I have come to about this text? What could I have felt beyond disrespect, beyond objectification... what was my existentialism?


I don't know. I cannot speak. I'm simply a walking vagina.







Playing The Sims has always been a fast-burning flame.
Exhibit A: thirteen-year-old Cam binge-downloading hundreds of wallpapers, floor tiles, and eye colors.
Exhibit B: thirteen-year-old Cam, two weeks later, uninstalling the game and all the recently acquired add-ons.

It comes with a guilty solace: controlling an animated version of yourself and your friends instead of interacting with one another in real-life, spending hours completing mundane tasks to get that +1 Cleaning skills when your real mother has to remind you seventeen times to empty the real dishwasher.
A once-in-a-lifetime moment of Sims me doing the dishes

But there is always one aspect of which I never seem to tire: World Building. Break open that Build Mode. Sink that entire lot into a pond. Throw in a dozen more windmills. Name that Downtown "Telenovela".

The demands of World Building are seemingly endless: what does the terrain look like? what natural disasters are common? how do people dress? what's the architectural style? what jobs do everyday people have? is there magic?

As both a visual and linguistic artist, trying to keep straight all those images in my head get confusing. I just spent five minutes yesterday trying to remember a character's mom's name because I never got around to making a family tree. But having the opportunity to construct houses for the characters in my story is hands-down one of the best things my tweenage self ever discovered.

One of many houses, exterior. Interiors are (c)

First off, designing a house for your characters gives you a realistic view of space, style, and dimensions. Using The Sims to render a 3D model is vastly more impressive than a simple paper and pencil drawing. I will forever know that my girl Samantha climbs up the stairs and takes a right to walk down a long hallway to get to her bedroom. I'll know the north and east windows let in way too much sunlight every morning, and not even the massive maple tree on the east side can block out that ball of fire.

I'm forced to consider aspects I might have otherwise overlooked, like if characters would keep their bedrooms messy or neat, what colors they like, what clothes they'd own. It becomes obvious that I'm not just building a house, but I'm crafting a home, and I'm exploring the character through the space they live in.

I will spend hours on hours constructing a home before I start designing a Sims family to live there, if ever. You cannot honestly tell me you've considered how many baths & half-baths your protagonist's home has, or what kind of light fixtures there are, or how much counter space is in the kitchen. We just think that stuff is just "there" and worry about our character's love-square about to fly off the tracks. BUT SOMETHING MUST BE SAID FOR DESIGNING EVERY TILE PATTERN, WINDOW CURTAIN, OR WALLPAPER SWATCH.

A diagram showing how you can customize furniture by texture / pattern, layers, and 256 coloring (by Norma Blackburn of Carl's Sims 3 Guide)

One aspect about The Sims 3 that I'm working to death is the ability to customize the color of anything: ever 256 shade/hue/tint is available to you, dozens of patterns/textures/woodgrains. You can get so specific. You can really see if a mahogany wood looks alright with cerulean-painted walls, or if that white leather sofa will look nicer next to that black bookcase or maple-wood door.

You can view the house from 360 degrees, from a bird's eye, a worm's eye. You think about the landscaping, or if there's a 1 or 2-car garage, or what kind of fencing you should have for your fenced-in yard.

Let's end with this so I don't go on for an eternity about The Sims: when the author knows what the environment / building / home looks like for their characters, they are less likely to make simple mistakes describing the layout. In fact, they are more likely to actually describe the layout, which will help your readers better imagine what the world looks like, which means your characters won't just be walking around in a box.

I spent fifteen minutes of a twenty minute grocery trip in the liquor aisles tonight. I seldom drank in college, but the four months I've spent at my first job are tombstone-marked by empty bottles beside the end table in my bedroom. These aren't the only bottles keeping track of me.
I've been taking anti-depressants for almost seven months, and let's be clear that mixing SSRIs with alcohol once a week, or three days in a row, or any increment of time other than "intermittently" packs a suckerpunch of health risks. There's something very Beatnik about mixing prescription drugs with alcohol.
Clockwise from top left, skeletal diagrams of the neurotransmitters serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine. Diagrams from Wikimedia Commons.

I hate the Beatniks.

There's always been a bad taste in my mouth when I read writing inspired by someone's drug use. I don't regard my art as my own if taking a substance that modifies me is to take credit for my creativity. There's a lot to do with intent behind it: I don't agree with choosing to take some mind-altering substance in order to create art. It feels cheap to me -- like, what, you weren't creative enough on your own? Steroids build muscle and water is wet -- you just don't have enough of a drive or the skills or the talent to succeed the God blessed American way through hard work and tenacity.

To me, artwork inspired by and promoting drug use isn't something with which I connect. I guess Bush's War on Drugs really did succeed - thanks, D.A.R.E.

During my teen years, I mentally cautioned myself against getting mixed up in drugs --whether they were hard, soft, smoked, injected, cheap, expensive. I knew that, as an artist, I had an addictive personality, and substances are typically, you know, addictive.
Now, I've found myself using alcohol to fall asleep, or to feel happy and carefree for once. It's even inspired a poem for me.

Because I've been using SSRIs and alcohol to cope through this depressive period, I decided to try a style of poetry I was first introduced to by our loving and lovely leader, Alli. The form is a palindrome: a poem that can be read forwards and backwards, producing two meanings or stories from one form. It's a BOGO deal! Some common palindrome words or phrases are racecar, borrow or rob? , or red rum, sir, is murder.
I regret to inform you that "palindrome" is not a palindrome.

Damn Beatniks. Photo courtesy of The Onion

Though the poem itself was about alcohol, the difficulty of crafting a palindrome required sobriety. This kind of inspiration from alcohol seems a bit ass-backwards and atypical, though, and a choice of which I think the Beatniks wouldn't be too fond. I don't know if I'd be open to appreciating artwork inspired by someone's drug use, though the concept has crept into my own life in an unexpected way. It's definitely something I need more exposure to and consideration of.

--Cam

I used to play in a band with a friend who referred to cannabis as "green inspiration", the implication not only being that was inspiration something that he could turn on and off through his consumption of marijuana, but that inspiration would not come unless he smoked. In this way, he used art-making as a way to excuse a frankly disgusting habit.

On one hand, I resent artists who lean on mood-altering substances of any type for inspiration, if only because it impedes collaboration. As a songwriter and a former bandleader, I have had to wrangle musicians who have shown up to performances or recording sessions lit up like a pinball machine, stoned out of their gourds, rolling down paradise parkway, monkey tripping, candy flipping, or good old-fashioned drunk. These incidents almost always resulted in my best impression of J.K. Simmons' Dr Fletcher from Whiplash.

On he other hand, while keeping in mind that mood-altering substances should never be a crutch, I nevertheless support the idea that they provide crucial supports in the creative process and in living. We all do drugs, in one way or another. But please do not misunderstand me - by "drugs" I do not strictly mean "controlled substances" or "psychedelics" or "uppers and downers". We all have some sort of habit, either regular or irregular, that we use to regulate our moods and support ourselves in our creative lives. Philosopher Alain de Botton has cited, in his School of Life videos, that his drug of choice is, based on this definition, emmental cheese.

Increasingly, I have become interested in what drug use means as a wider social phenomenon. My generation is one that came of age between years of peak methamphetamine and cocaine overdose deaths (2007) and peak opioid overdose (2016, but perhaps 2017 or 2018). What are we to make of that? My generation has embraced the use of adderall and microdose LSD in order to maximize productivity. What are we to make of that? My generation holds a generally positive opinion regarding the use of magic mushrooms, ecstasy, and ayahuasca in mental health treatments, or even for "spiritual healing". What are we to make of that?

From the National Institute on Drug Abuse

Making sense of large-scale drug use trends usually means talking to drug enthusiasts, which has invariably led to some of the most frustratingly circuitous conversations of my life. Broadly speaking, drug users I have spoken to fall into one of three camps: supplementers, brain hackers, and oblivion seekers. Supplementers see drugs like cannabis, adderall, or microdose LSD as harmless supplements they can take to improve their day-to-day lives. These drug users see drugs as room for personal improvement, making them less anxious, more productive, more perceptive, or more outgoing. Brain hackers see the human mind as something than can be radically altered for the better by entheogens or psychedelics. They might be simply more intense supplementers, but more frequently they carry utopian visions - think Timothy Leary, Huxley's Doors of Perception, or Tao Lin's upcoming Trip - that radically from simpler self-improvement goals.

The benefits of brain hacking, from Tao Lin

The oblivion seeking mode of drug use, in my mind, represents the Thanatos to the other modes' Eros. A drinker looking to black out is an oblivion seeker, as is an individual who seeks out opioids, benzodiazepines, or other drugs that slow and mind and numb sensation. True, the current opioid crisis is due in large part to the greed of the Sackler pharmaceutical family and the flaws of the American healthcare system, but do what degree did these drugs satisfy a preexisting, Freudian death-drive? I don't have an answer to that. Not yet, at least.

--Vernon


Alison Evans’s novel Ida has just won the 2018 Victorian Premier’s People's Choice Award, and by all measures the prize is well-earned. Ida is a taught thriller, a coming of age tale and, at times, a romance and a horror story. But what sets Ida apart is the way the story is grounded in the authentic experiences of queer and transgender Australians. On the phone from their hometown of Melbourne, I ask Evans, who identifies as genderqueer, if they had to defend having a majority non-cisgendered cast.

Image courtesy of The Guardian

“I had one review that was very resentful of what they called my ‘gender agenda’,” they laugh, adding, “People who don’t think they know any trans people have been like ‘Oh my god there are so many’, but it reflects my real life.”

Evans’s critics tend to accuse their work of pushing ‘political correctness’, not realizing that they are in a shrinking minority. A 2017 study by GLAAD found that twenty percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 25 identified with a sexual orientation other than heterosexual and a gender identity other than cisgender.

“One-fifth of millennials identify as LGBTQ in some way and I love it,” Evans says, “Everybody is trans, so everybody’s going to be trans in the book!”

Ida follows the eponymous Ida Wagner, a young woman living in the Dandenongs region of Victoria. At the beginning of the novel, Ida can travel in time by slight increments, allowing her to rescind any decision she makes. However, she soon begins traveling to paralleldimensions – some of which are hauntingly bleak – and finds herself hounded by mysterious doppelgangers with malign intentions. Yet, despite this, Evans does not consider Ida science fiction.

“Scifi is about highlighting human nature by taking a human out of their natural life and putting them some place alien,” they say, “And I love science fiction, but for me, Ida is contemporary fiction in the way that it’s rooted in everyday life.”

This distinction is an important one. Treatments of gender in science fiction are rare, and many of those already seem outdated. Ursula K LeGuin’sThe Left Hand of Darkness, for example, while nonetheless on the cutting edge in its time, presents a non-binary conception of gender as something wholly alien. Evans, in contrast, rootstheir spectrum of queer and transgender characters firmly, not just in the “real world experiences”, but in the distinct and lovingly rendered landscape of suburban South-East Australia.The tree-ferns, drizzling rain, and smattering of Australian slang constantly reminds readers that they are not on another planet or in an alternate dimension.

“Is there a right way, then, to handle representation in fiction?” I ask Evans.

“It’s very dangerous to think there is a right way,” they reply,“Especially for gender stuff, because our understanding of gender is evolving rather rapidly at the moment. You read a book from even five years ago, and it feels really outdated.”

“So how do you approach representation in your work?”

“The way I do it is I can only speak for myself,” Evans says,“That’s also why I had so many trans characters in the book, to show that there are many ways to be trans.”

Photo courtesy of Joan Caldwell

As Evans and I talk, we reminisce about the young adult books that shaped our tastes and, quickly, it becomes clear that while there is no right way to approach representation, there is certainly a wrong way.

“How did you feel,” I ask, “When JK Rowling revealed that Dumbledore was supposed to be a gay character from the beginning?”

Evans audibly winces.

“When it first happened, I was pretty happy then, because I was just realizing that I was queer too,” they say, “But now, I find it really lazy and a bit shit, honestly.”

“Queerness should be evident in the story,” they add, “Otherwise it’s just cheating. People use the ‘scraps’ metaphor. Cis-het people get a meal and queer people get tiny little scraps and crumbs they are told to be grateful for. I think Dumbledore is definitely a crumb.”

“How do you make that evident in your stories?” I ask.

“A lot of my issue with queer characters, especially bi characters, in a lot of things they never use the word,” Evans says, “In every single piece of media where a character could be bi, nobody uses the word, which is why I used it in Ida. It would be cool to reach a point where you don’t have to use the words at all, but I don’t think we’re there.”

What ultimately makes Ida so compelling is the way it is fundamentally about the process of creating identity. To do so, Ida struggles against her ghostly doppelgangers, but for Ida’s genderqueer partner Daisy and her transmasculine cousin Frank, the struggle is against a world that is at times painfully homophobic and transphobic. Over the course of the novel, all the characters claim agency over external pressures and create their own unique gender identities through lived experience. Evans expresses this conviction in an article they wrote for The Guardian, saying, “We can make a new way of talking about ourselves, one that includes and expresses our gender the way we want to. We are writing ourselves into existence with our words, lives and stories.”[1]

Such is the power of Ida and novels like it. We need more stories that reflect our rapidly evolving understanding of gender and, more importantly, guide us in constructing and accepting our own gender identities. There is no doubt that Alison Evans will continue to provide some of the best work of this type on into the future.


Read more of Vernon's work on Floodmark.


[1]: Alison Evans, “My gender didn't exist in fiction when I was growing up – so I wrote myself into existence,”The Guardian, 28 February 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/28/my-gender-didnt-exist-in-fiction-when-i-was-growing-up-so-i-wrote-myself-into-existence
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