While it may seem relevant that Chechnya is auspiciously sandwiched between Russia and the Middle East — exhuming the dormant winds of the Cold War, and the current conflict with Islamic extremism — the Tsarnaev brothers, regardless of how perceived their exile was, acted as Americans; that is, with a kind of free volition this country violently preserves. To simply call them assholes is somehow to dishonor their victims, many of them now amputees whose incomplete image in the mirror every morning will remind them forever of the blast, whose unexplained birth out of nowhere does well to implicate the universe itself. Time will tell how politically motivated this act was — though one doesn’t imagine our young Dzhokhar being the most cooperative, or coherent — hence categorized into either the ideological camp of Ted Kaczynski/Tim McVeigh, or the, sadly, more senseless camp of Columbine/Sandyhook, whose executors are getting younger and younger, and better armed.

David Remnick’s piece (from which this illustration and title is unabashedly taken) in the New Yorker is vulnerably sympathetic to the Tsarnaev family, a liberal impulse which is needed, should one brave the harsher waters of the more “patriotic” sentiment i.e. that we should just bomb “them,” whoever they are (just when you thought the postmodern “Other” was dead). That a white male has taken the throne of the Other may launch us into a new era. Not colored, or queer, or part of some thesis, mush less exotic, he is simply another one of the ever expanding “us” lost in the fold of America, whose race is ostensibly raceless, and whose nationality is a slow and steady reduction of endless immigrations. The idea is rather genius. A country for all, though it often seems like we’ve stopped earning this.

Not since the Revolutionary War — with the exception of Pearl Harbor and 9/11, both quickly mythologized, as if to eagerly render them irrelevant — has foreign conflict breached American soil. Truman’s Hiroshima and Bush’s Afghanistan were respective responses, the former’s flattening sadly more effective. War for us is cordoned off as an abstraction of what happens “over there,” bestowing the general populace a bloodless, though vehement, discourse about its many possible meaning(s) from behind televisions and computers. The Boston explosions simultaneously remind us of two somewhat contradictory things: that there will always be insane, strangely entitled, people (usually white men, or boys) who kill for no reason at all, pointing at in inward pathos; or, more formidably, that a spreading global war, whose disenfranchised have less and less to live for, can always permeate our borders. The easy allusions to Syria or Gaza, frankly, scare the shit out of me, and I think all of us. As for the Tsarnaev brothers (one notes the eerie invocation of the Karamozov brothers), their patricide may be indirectly directed at our founding fathers: brave, violent, and tired men, who likewise came to America to escape a troublesome place.

Time may be a sedative, for it’s always harder to know who exactly the bad people were, yet so easy to tell — in the incessant now from which we cannot run — who the bad people are. Either moral clarity diminishes with time, or we simply stop caring, the euphemism being humility. Prisoner of war Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm is greeted by his family at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, California on March 17, 1973, about a year after Phan Thi Kim Phuc, aged 9, was photographed running from a South Vietnamese napalm attack on their own land after it had been occupied by the North. Richard Nixon, in his earnest paranoia loop, wondered to his Chief of Staff “if that was fixed,” upon seeing the iconic photo. Denial may be war’s greatest offense. The Strim girlfriend (wife, or sister) will come to know, understand, and to be forced to love, the dark PTSD crevices welled with ink inside Strim’s newly wired brain, as Phuc will be free to recount — with whatever pre-juvenile coping mechanisms she can employ — the senseless events of that day (June 8, 1972), its morning feigning repetition, on her little village road during her 14 month hospitalization slash 17 surgical procedures which returned her skin to human. Both enemy and kin run away from their personal and global hauntings, towards the idea of freedom, to a kind of endless finish line whose ribbons have already been broken by faster folks. And so, it’s not really a finish line, but a place to run away from something by running towards something else. Everyday we show ourselves how ugly and beautiful we can be, the shinny red inside us spilled out, touching others.

The Parable of David Shields’s How Literature Saved My Life

by Greg Gerke

My Mississippi writer friend gave me David Shields’s new book. Interesting, I said. I wasn’t sure I would read David’s new book—I looked at it askance, then I put it back in its wrapping paper. I was surprised they still made hardcover books.

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@adjameson @alecniedenthal @AlissaNutting @amysmcd @Benmirov @blakebutler @brookssterritt @camerainsecura @CatherineLazer @chen_village @david_fishkind @diddioz @esotika @higgschrishiggs @imposedabsence @kenbaumann @kmartsurrealism @KristenIsk @kyle_minor @lispservice @markleidner @matthewjsimmons @melissabroder @mikeayoung @mmkaufman @nickantosca @pompadoured @pubgen @rgay @ryancall @theblogpoetic @weeatherhead @adjameson @alecniedenthal @AlissaNutting @amysmcd @Benmirov @blakebutler @brookssterritt @camerainsecura @CatherineLazer @chen_village @david_fishkind @diddioz @esotika @higgschrishiggs @imposedabsence @kenbaumann @kmartsurrealism @KristenIsk @kyle_minor @lispservice @markleidner @matthewjsimmons @melissabroder @mikeayoung @mmkaufman @nickantosca @pompadoured @pubgen @rgay @ryancall @theblogpoetic @weeatherhead @adjameson @alecniedenthal @AlissaNutting @amysmcd @Benmirov @blakebutler @brookssterritt @camerainsecura @CatherineLazer @chen_village @david_fishkind @diddioz @esotika @higgschrishiggs @imposedabsence @kenbaumann @kmartsurrealism @KristenIsk @kyle_minor @lispservice @markleidner @matthewjsimmons @melissabroder @mikeayoung @mmkaufman @nickantosca @pompadoured @pubgen @rgay @ryancall @theblogpoetic @weeatherhead @adjameson @alecniedenthal @AlissaNutting @amysmcd @Benmirov @blakebutler @brookssterritt @camerainsecura @CatherineLazer @chen_village @david_fishkind @diddioz @esotika @higgschrishiggs @imposedabsence @kenbaumann @kmartsurrealism @KristenIsk @kyle_minor @lispservice @markleidner @matthewjsimmons @melissabroder @mikeayoung @mmkaufman @nickantosca @pompadoured @pubgen @rgay @ryancall @theblogpoetic @weeatherhead @adjameson @alecniedenthal @AlissaNutting @amysmcd @Benmirov @blakebutler @brookssterritt @camerainsecura @CatherineLazer @chen_village @david_fishkind @diddioz @esotika READ MORE >

I feel like it would be an honor to be left out of an anthology as much as it would be to be included in one (Ange Mlinko’s review of Paul Hoover’s Norton Anthology of Post Modern Literature from the Nation, follows. I expect this will get taken down soon, as the original article was behind a paywall…). Do you give a fuck about this? Or about being anthologized? Should I?

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My recent Netflix “viewing activity,” which I discovered to my horror, follows the break. If you would like me to review any of these movies (or shows), or engage in commentary with me about any movie (or show), just list it in the comments. I will tend to this post, as best I can, for the next few days. This post may or may not be deleted, depending on the results.

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