“I’m in good shape. That shape is round.”  This quote, from Jorod Kintz’s This Book Has No Title came to mind the other day while I was shopping in a Philadelphia store and came across the latest “natural compound” to hit the fitness market. The company boasts that the rare African plant derivative can increase lean muscle by 600% in seven weeks with no side effects.

Notwithstanding my healthy skepticism about the safety profile, my mind began sifting through recent human growth hormone and anabolic steroid-related headlines and wondering how the claims about this substance could change the landscape. The Tour de France, the Olympics, and even the Philadelphia Police Department—all recently caught up in the all too familiar allegation that members were using illegal substances.  If this compound were effective and legal, I knew that these would not be the only things that would change.

Once again, I would be in for a self-image adjustment.  Summer is around the corner which means that the University City  twenty-somethings and the Center City thirty-somethings would again do a good job at making me feel physically inadequate.  So as I returned the bottle of food additive to its shelf, I decided that this time around, this summer, this holiday season and this lifetime—I’m in good shape.  That shape is round.

-Tony Brown

Photo: schoolworkhelper.net

Record Store Day originated in 2007 and takes place in the third week of April, right around the Feast Day of Saint Mark the Evangelist. The purpose is to encourage people to spend money at their local businesses. It’s a great idea even if it is a consumerist holiday artificially constructed to blackmail us into taking care of some personal responsibilities we should already be on top of. It goes without saying that we should already be supporting our neighborhood shops. But there we were, crammed into a tiny store as tight as a pair of skinny jeans left too long in the dryer.  The attraction of Record Store Day is the exclusive vinyl, those limited-edition LPs released that morning and which will often sell out before noon. At Main Street Music, in the historic Manayunk section of Philadelphia, there was an even greater lure: a short, solo acoustic set by Billy Bragg. We got there early enough to squeeze inside to catch his performance, but too late to score a prized copy of The Cure’s “Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me.” They went fast. Sure Record Store Day might be an awful lot like Valentine’s Day for hipsters, but this copy of the Zombies’ first LP—remastered in glorious mono and one of just a thousand copies pressed—sounds incredible.

-Andrew Ervin

Tomorrow is the seventh anniversary of the death of Saul Bellow, one of America’s finest novelists, and one of the first Jewish-American novelists to break heartily into the mainstream with his popular books, The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Humboldt’s Gift.  His influence runs well beyond his own particular cultural mileau.  One can’t imagine a Philip Roth without a Bellow, but one also can’t imagine an Updike without Bellow.  Both were freed by the older novelist to write freely about contemporary life, particularly love and paranoia.

Bellow’s second novel, The Victim, published in 1947, tells the story of Asa Leventhal, a middling trade magazine man in Manhattan who allows himself to be bullied by a former colleague, Allbee, an antisemitic drunkard.  The confrontation between the two leaves them both contemplating the meaning of luck and fate in a post-industrial democratic society.  Martin Greenberg, for Commentary, wrote that “The Victim, then, is concerned with one of the great themes of European literature.  Knowing this, one feels the disparity between the largeness of its theme and the modest, narrow, bare, abrupt American genre of writing in which it is realized… He is writing an American novel, and the American accent is inevitably a modest one.”  I thank Greenberg for his own narrow-mindedness as it has made me appreciate the very American-ness of Bellow’s work all the more.

-Michael Buozis

Cleanliness might be next to godliness, but godliness doesn’t interest me all that much. I have been thinking a lot about soap lately for some reason, however, so I stopped by Duross and Langel in the heart of Philadelphia’s Gayborhood. In 2004, Steve Duross and James Langel made a few batches of soap in their kitchen and sold them out of the front of their Philadelphia home. Today their retail operation promises what they call “good clean fun.” Their soaps and shampoos are locally sourced, derived from 96% botanical sources, and their packaging materials are all environmentally sound. I like the idea of using more cruelty-free products.

As Richard Powers writes in Gain, my favorite of his novels: “Chemistry was not the means to soapmaking. Soapmaking was, rather, a means toward the consummate chemical end. To that goal, the elements moved from one incarnation to the other the way that the seasons, variously advantageous, moved through the eternally renewing year. If Nature were no more than eternal transformation, Man’s meet and right pursuit consisted of emulating her.” (79)

Duly inspired, I load up with black pepper soap, sea clay soap, and much more. The cherry almond wheat protein shampoo smells a bit too much like Robitussin for my liking, but I can’t live without their licorice lip balm. It’s only available part of the year, so I like to stock up then and stash them all over my apartment and in every book bag. There’s a lot of lip service these days about shopping local and as far as soap goes there’s no better place in Philly to do just that.

-Andrew Ervin

Photo: Dave H., yelp.com

I don’t normally pay attention to manufacturer names mounted on the side of airport imaging equipment, but a weekend last month was different.  It was President’s Day weekend and I stood in the security line, having already placed my belt, suit jacket, shoes, computer, wallet and various other items into the plastic bin which I was pushing down the rollers towards two scanners—one for my belongings, one for me.

Several minutes earlier, bored of people watching and eavesdropping on other passengers’ airport small talk, I decided to fantasize about a new airport protocol that might make my airborne mornings a bit less stressful.  “Since I have to remove twenty-five percent of my clothing in the security line, why don’t I save time at home by not putting those things on in the first place?”  “Even better,” I pretended, “I would save both the time that it took to put the items on, and the time that it took to take them off in the security line.”  Aware of the various shortcomings of my theory, I still decided to present it to the lady ahead of me so that I could have fun disproving it until our turn to disrobe.

Having easily refuted my theory and placed our clothes in the bins, the stranger and I stood at the front of the line waiting our turn to enter the scanner.  I listened as the Transportation Security Administration representative told the current occupant “hands above your head and stand still for a full ten seconds.”   Making one last effort to brainstorm how to expedite the protocol, I thought it ironic that the poor passenger had to stand there a full ten seconds (which by the way is longer than I have to be still during my dental or chest x-rays), yet the shiny name on the side of the machine read “Rapiscan.”[i]

According to the New York Times, “Deepak Chopra, the company’s president, said the decision to cancel the contract and remove the scanners from airports was “a mutually satisfactory agreement with the T.S.A.”  It has only been three years since the machines entered our airports, but that was thousands of complaints ago in passenger-time as person after person objected to the overly invasive technology that produced needlessly revealing images of travelers.  New imaging technology will be in place by June of this year in our Philadelphia airport which will represent passenger in a less revealing, Avatar-like image.

 -Tony Brown

Image Credit:  ablogabouthistory.com

Sex and cancer–two words that would not (should not) normally be used in the same sentence, yet in February 2013 on philly.com, contributing writer-physician Jie Xu, from Riddle Hospital, Main Line Health answered a request in the “Embarrassing Questions” section of the site for advice from a reader whose girlfriend had been infected with the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV).

HPV is amazing in that it deploys a predator-like protein which seeks out a cell growth regulating protein and marks it for destruction by a third protein.  The targeted Tp53 proteins normally act as cancer suppressors by halting the cell growth cycle long enough to induce enzymatic repair of cancer-causing mutations or even programmed cell death if necessary. Besides cervical cancer, HPV infections are associated with osteogenic sarcoma and bladder cancer.

While all cancer is genetic, not all types are hereditary.  For instance, HPV also prevents the binding of another protein named RB1which normally suppresses tumor growth in the retina.  A child who comes into contact with the virus after passing through the birth canal of the infected mother might be five years old before the HPV infection is diagnosed.[i] A child that appears in family photographs with a camera flash-initiated “red-eye reflex” in only one eye would be suspect of having the non-hereditary form retinoblastoma.  Suspicion increases if the child has leukocoria, also known as “white eye,” or “cat’s eye.”  The odds of the child having hereditary retinoblastoma increase if these problems are present in both eyes.

Concerned parents, with the means, do not have to depend on such signs to determine the health of their child.  Once costing as much as $50,000, a family can now have their members’ DNA examined for the presence of a disease-causing mutation for a still considerable $10,000 or less.  The tests are offered by U.S. Government institutions, academia and private companies. The National Institutes of Health and Baylor College of Medicine are two examples, and the Rare Genomics Institute is a third.

-Tony Brown

Image Credit: thehindu.com

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Jeanne Marie Laskas, Director of the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh, set out admirably in her stories for GQ and Smithsonian magazines – which have been collected in a new book called Hidden America - to explore, as the book’s subtitle has it, “the unseen people who make this country work.”  Laskas can put together a smooth narrative when she gets out of the way of the people in her stories, as when she tells of a family led by a migrant harvester navigating a health crisis in rural Maine or of a roughneck on an oil rig on a man-made island off of Alaska’s North Slope.

Unfortunately, Laskas allows herself to become a character in her stories and, with one exception, she never proves her own story or her own reactions to her subjects’ stories worthy of our time.  Magazine writers, no matter what they might tell you in J-School, do not make this country work, and they are much too often very much seen.  I knew, for good or bad, that coal miners and migrant harvesters and air traffic controllers and gun retailers and cattle ranchers and oil drillers and truck drivers and landfill operators and – yes – NFL cheerleaders, made this country work in the glorious and often dysfunctional way it works, and Hidden America only reinforced this.

Laskas’s way of injecting cheap memoir into her otherwise accomplished narrative non-fiction often detracts from the impact of her stories and, ironically, prevents her from taking a stance on the obvious political and social implications of America’s reliance on so many problematic industries.  Still, there’s some grit and spunk in Hidden America that too many of us choose to ignore.

-Michael Buozis

Photo Credit: Anthracite Heritage Museum

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From an introduction to a reading by Joe McElroy at the MFA Program Poets and Writers Reading Series at Temple University in November 2012.

Joe McElroy is a longtime friend of the Temple Graduate Creative Writing program—going back to the 90s. He has been writer-in-residence twice and he has used this venue, the Poets and Writers Series, to debut new work many times. He is our familiar. So it is easy to forget that Joe McElroy is also one of the great fiction writers of our time, about whom one can claim, without exaggeration, that he has changed the form. He is changing the form of fiction. This lends a special excitement to the moment of his reading tonight.

In 10 novels and shorter fictions, Joe McElroy has primed readers’ expectations that they will always know themselves on the last page in a way that was unimaginable on the first. Joe’s books, from the earliest, A Smuggler’s Bible, to the more recent, Actress in the House are nothing if not feats of discovery: or perhaps it is best to say that in McElroy’s fictions every word pushes us to the threshold of a new rapport with the world. The marvelous variety of Joe’s fictive inventions attune us to uses for language that, in a sense, we haven’t yet imagined a life for. He tests our resilience for new experience.

No doubt examples are in order. Well, I think of the way that consciousness travels from character to character in Joe’s magnum opus Women and Men. It makes us think that the concept of character itself may not be enough to express what it means to be human. Or I think of that disembodied brain in Joe’s fabulous quasi-science fiction novel, Plus. In the brain’s decaying orbit of the earth, hurtling toward its own destruction, it gathers its memories around it with a verbal density that feels like a body gathering inertia. Reading in the arc of its fall we can’t escape the thought that our own mental fate might be to become ever more fascinated strangers to our physical existence. Plus is an out of body—inner being experience, all at once. In Actress in the House, an act of staged violence in a theatrical performance stages our own coming to blows with the force of syntax in McElroy’s prose. McElroy deploys the sentence in a way that refuses vicarious passage into a scene of action. We are the actors in the scene of the sentence. In McElroy’s fiction each word doesn’t so much fit the sentence as it makes the sentence fit a world whose dimensions we are still learning to compass.

The hallmark of this fiction is its inducement for us to become speculative about our experience without losing the immediacy of the most viscerally “felt” moments of life. It is the stuff of experimental practice with the understanding that experimentation is no different in the humanities than in the sciences. Its value is its usefulness to us. McElroy’s books are indeed useful experiments. As McElroy says in one of his marvelously self-reflective essays: “being exposed to a work of art adds to a person in a way that can’t be separated from usefulness” (“Personal”). Well, personal usefulness portends a future. For my money this is what McElroy’s fiction is all about, the future of fiction. So when we speak of McElroy changing the form of the work of art, the form of fiction, we can take the liberty of thinking that this has something to do with us. I don’t know what greater hopefulness a writer can bestow upon his readers.

Please join me in welcoming one of the really useful artists of our time, Joe McElroy.

-Alan Singer

Image Credit: Dalkey Archive Press

In the fall of 2002, I moved from Philadelphia to the Midwest to attend graduate school at Illinois State University. There, I studied with Curtis White, whose magnificent novelRequiem I had reviewed in glowing terms in the San Francisco Chronicle. (Unfortunately, David Foster Wallace left his teaching position at Illinois State after the Spring 2002 semester, and I never had the chance to meet him. I did, however, manage to score a signed copy of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again at a Normal, IL bookshop.) At that time, Dalkey Archive Press was located at the same university and I got an assistantship there in exchange for a tuition waiver and small stipend. You may have read something recently about the working conditions there.

Mulligan Stew was and remains one of my all-time favorite American novels, but otherwise I hadn’t read many Dalkey titles so I asked White for some suggestions. He sent me a list of five titles, which I read immediately. These aren’t necessarily his favorite Dalkey books, or the “best” (whatever that might mean), but the ones he thought would be useful to me. And he was right—these continue to inform my writing life in wonderful ways.

Since then, I’ve come to find other Dalkey Archive Press books I love just as much or more, but here are the five that Curtis White recommended I start with:

A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family by Peter Dimock

Island People by Coleman Dowell

Concluding by Henry Green

Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson

Cigarettes by Harry Mathews

-Andrew Ervin

Image Credit: dalkeyarchive.com

“It is difficult to see a painting when you are inside the frame.”

That is the saying that came to my mind as I listened—embarrassed—to a British Broadcasting Company (BBC) news report last week.  It started something like this:  “As they always [emphasis not mine] do after a mass shooting, Americans are again questioning their gun laws, video games and healthcare for the mentally ill.”  That reporter was right—as a country, it has been decades since we have moved measurably forward in our conversation about these topics and their connection to mass gun killings.

In a 1993 study, five males from a large family were reported to have demonstrated abnormal behaviors such as arson, attempted rape and impulsive aggression while the remaining family members exhibited no such abnormal tendencies.^[1]  The DNA of each of the five violent family members contained a point mutation which led to deficiency in   monoamine oxidase A, the enzyme responsible for breaking down neurotransmitters in the brain—which rise to pathological levels when the enzyme is absent.  Neurotransmitters are tricky—too little dopamine for instance, is associated with Parkinson Disease, while too much could lead to schizophrenia.  Of course, this begs the question:

Can we blame violent behavior on genetic disorders?

“It is almost inconceivable that there is a common genetic factor” to be found in mass murderers, said Dr. Robert C. Green, a geneticist and neurologist at Harvard Medical School. “I think it says more about us that we wish there was something like this. We wish there was an explanation.”[2]

I am not in total agreement with Dr. Green, nor disagreement with Dr. H. Wayne Carver II, the chief medical examiner in the 2012 Newton, Connecticut elementary school shooting who told the press that he hoped to find a clue to the killer’s actions by studying his genome.  I do not believe we can examine this issue as cold, calculating scientists.   As scientists, we like answers. Once we get the answer, whether it’s a cure for the common cold, cancer or criminality, we move on to the next challenge.  In effect, an answer becomes an excuse to stop thinking about the question.

The dead: the students and teacher at Columbine High School; students at Virginia Tech, Batman moviegoers in Aurora, Colorado, a congresswoman’s aide in Tuscon, Arizona, first graders and teachers in Newton, Connecticut, two Webster, NY firemen killed while fighting a fire, and the 92 year-old grandmother bludgeoned to death by the same killer’s hand—deserve, all of them—our continued struggle with the question:

What can we do?

-Tony Brown

Image Credit: leahmorrigan.wordpress.com

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