A few hiccups

The next few days will probably see a few lapses in content- not to worry. I’m figuring out how to get this thing hosted on my own domain, so please bear with me. Soon you’ll be able to just head to coerceyou.com, leaving the “.blogspot.” out of the equation.

They Were Mercenaries Under Contract to Cheap Thrills

The mob was a thrifty lot. They didn’t get their rocks off unless there was going to be a landslide. They didn’t go for broke, they went for insolvency. They didn’t spill blood unless they were going to wash the streets with it, do the dishes with it, brush their teeth with it, pour it on their Wheaties– their Wheaties poured from a novelty oversized box from CostCo. That’s the kind of crowd this was. They took their thrills in bulk.

“Life is short,” they chanted. “You have to sweeten it through concentration.” They lived it like it was vanilla extract- sweet, sweet nectar, 90% alcohol. They lived it like it was cologne: a few fragrant ounces to cover the smoke of whole tens of years going up with the glory of roman candles bought by the shipping crate. Also 90% alcohol. They lived it like they could hardly stand up. They could hardly stand up.

Everything was shocking. Nothing was shocking. You couldn’t put anything past these rubes. They saw you coming- They saw you going. Occasionally you saw them going. On the sidewalk.

Forget double-fisting, they drank with their feet.

They lived fast- forget horse pills, they wanted cheetah pills.

They hung so loose they couldn’t tie their shoes.

Their double dates made Mormon Moonie weddings look like a fallout shelter under a battered woman’s halfway house. At the end of the world.

They were mercenaries under contract to cheap thrills- thrills so cheap, they’d go dutch twice in one date.

Their orgies ended at 2- why go all night long when they could get it done in half the time?

They didn’t drink like it was going out of style. The only drank when it was out of style.

Their ladies had been around the block more than once. Mostly in order to find an ATM to pay the cabbie.

They didn’t buy rounds of drinks, they bought crescents.

They lost their virginity on the way to the prom to save time.

The abducted my kid sister in Saskatoon, and by the time I caught up with them her hair had turned a premature off-white, old-ish before her years.

Talk was cheap, so they talked a lot- and that’s how they convinced my kid sis to ride with them- to give them a ride- to the next drinking establishment.

They were mercenaries under contract to cheap thrills. They answered to no one between the hours of 6 am and 9 pm.

Surrendering to the Lure of the Great Known

The meeting occurred like every moment that changes life. It began as though it had been planned. No one was aware it was happening until someone lost an eye, or brushed a nipple, the gist being that it resulted in that deformation of a moment commonly packaged under the nomenclature “impropriety”.

So, in the moment after he had glanced at a new placard pasted up on the plywood shell of some new scaffold, overcome in that moment of marketing genius when the second and third glances at the shirtless girl photographed there, while failing to produce a better or more substantial view of the breasts she so provocatively managed to cover with an arm while still granting the voyeur full access to the knowledge that her breasts were very significantly present (very significantly), in that moment when he was contemplating the contradiction that had arisen between his desire to understand why he would be driven into a state of limitless potential action by this particular variety of beauty despite all that he knows that he has already and his awareness of his knowledge of the sudden object of his desires in reality (the Russian is no more than a girl, her beauty is cold in its perfection, her eyes are round and staring, bold but lacking the investment to care enough to know they are bold, her cheeks- the perfect skin is so new- are high, and fear of want and early, perpetual envy have made her limitlessly cruel in her new and weaponized beauty-it’s clear!) and his surrender to this evoked desire, in that moment when he is overcome by the urge to fuck an attractive stranger, the woman who is not his girlfriend recognizes him.

They knew one another in earlier days, and the two were strangers then- both to each other and to themselves. They ended as strangers, and only strangers, can end. They parted vaguely, and on good terms.

So it was a few drinks later, she was telling of trying to make it as a writer in a bar he had chosen and, until then, had kept familiar only to himself, and they were distracting themselves by faking wonder at the truths, witnessed or passed to them through hearsay, that were so much stranger than the fiction they churned out- the fiction that they secretly felt revealed how paltry their talent, as well as the world’s real need for writers, really was. That’s what they were doing with all those words. Faking wonder and keeping secrets, dancing a long white lie and spending time with an extravagant wastefulness unbefitting of their station.

She, being a woman, beautiful, had the more interesting story.

“I had a friend, someone I had met through the club somehow…”

He knew about the loose association of drunks and part-time recidivists to respectability she mingled with from before, from when it could be said he knew her, the changing cloud of bleariness and impressions of social memories she referred to as the “club”. He had been a droplet in one of those nimbuses at some indeterminate time in the infinite before, himself, around when he met her, though it wasn’t how he had met her.

“She was a “dancer”,” she spoke so that he could hear the quotes, “and she just lived to have fun. She had tried going to school, she had moved around, she had “serious” “relationships”,” again with the audible quotes, “and eventually she learned she had to live with herself as someone who realized she only enjoyed one thing or hate herself for the rest of her miserable life.”

“I can imagine the conversation you were having. The cockfight of sincerities, I call it. I’m trying to work it into a story. It’s where two drunks meet and try to out-sincere each other with vasty declarations of common bonds. Always amusing. Always amusing in hindsight.”

At the word cockfight, her eyes raised at the same time as her glass.

“I suppose we’re having one of those right now?”

“No, but I think we’re moving in that direction. So, finish your story.”

“So, she realizes that, for better or for worse, and she knows it’s shallow, she knows there is a world of depth to be reached just by acknowledging one iota of the contrivedness and eventual emptiness of the life she is living… the only thing she enjoys doing is stripping, being sexy in a totally contained environment set aside for nothing but. All she cares about is having fun and that’s all she thinks is fun.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. And then one time I run into a friend of hers, she comes up in conversation, and all anyone can say is that they think she moved home. Or somewhere equally conceptually far away from here and now.”

The warm reciprocation of description, of aiding in adding to the narrative was kicking in, so he threw in,

“Forever. That’s it.”

She used it.

“Forever. That’s it. And do you know why?” She ended her sentence like she was sharing a secret. She was getting a bit sincere.

“Pregnancy? Death in the family? Nervous breakdown?”

“Nope. One day, for no reason, she started to get nauseous when she was cold. Not even cold, really. She’d get nauseous when she had a chill. At goosebumps. And that was it. She couldn’t parade her terrific tits out in front of anyone anymore.”

She, the attractive stranger, the woman who was not his girlfriend, had had really terrific tits. She still did. He had always remembered them and her own fondness of them and awareness of just how terrific they were with a wistful sort of sentimental horniness. He liked that she was letting it happen that the two of them were able to share that memory together again, finishing the story like that, with those words and with her terrific tits right there at the table with them as a visual reminder.

She put her glass down. She had those lips that were red without lipstick when she was a little flushed, a little excited. She stared a little past nothing, pursed her lips and blew.

“And then one day you stop being able to enjoy the one thing you love,” she said as though writing it down. Speaking in the expository style.

They both sat still for a moment and really thought about how lousy and undeserving they were as writers, then about their age, and then their peers.

“Stupid.” He said.

Stupid that someone would live so willfully shallow a life, stupid that life would reciprocate by demolishing the foundations of that contrivance. Stupid how the two of them suffered for their romantic ideas of success as writers among their small professional circle of the envious.

They reserved a split second of guilt and reassurance for crimes as yet uncommitted, then the teenage gameshow wash of surrender to pounding hearts and mystery outcomes hidden in boxes. Mystery mostly hidden in shaved boxes, with a trim of light blonde hair.

The Lonely Nature of Episodic Existence

The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel

The cliche when reviewing the work of New York City writer Amy Hempel is to praise her sentences, to turn in orbit on her tell-tale calling card turns of phrase, to always take pains that the praise lays on the concise wit of what she says. Though not without merit, and certainly not undeserved, this criticism should be put to assay, for we may look at her incontrovertible appeal in another, perhaps more proper, way.

The appeal of the writing of Amy Hempel is inherent in its shocking accessibility, the surprise of the moment when the prosaic narration makes the concatenation of outwardly unrelated cause and effect a matter of fact, the only available taxonomy of the world the narrator describes, if the reader were to be held faithful to the evidences her narrators make available, despite the oft disconcerting, nearly non-sequitur-esque jumps between squirm-inducing memories or events and the emotionless realizations that make up a person’s duties as curator and office manager of the independent self.

There, in the cuts between the realms of adjacent sentences, therein the reader will find the factor that cements the appeal of Hempel’s writing. The quality of the sentences that leaves readers in a reel is the brutality of distanced adjacency.

from April 27th 2006 Powell’s interview: “I don’t know that I’m not good at as much as I’m not interested in the big picture in any given story. I like the moment the thing changes. I like the aftermath of the big event more than I like to portray the event itself.”

It is because of the reward the reader feels following along with her often ill-elucidated mise-en-scenes when the endorphins and hormones drop from the normally responsible hand of the all-controlling ego to the carpet of the bloodstream that Hempel is able to bring us along to the aftermath of her events. Lesser writers would have to explain themselves, would be chastised for opening a story mid-plot and never stopping to fill the reader in. It is because of this that I think it is possible that Hempel misrepresents herself in- or that the reader could misread the meaning of- the quote from the Powell’s interview above. She absolutely does love the aftermath of the event more than she prefers to describe it, but she is more intent on illiciting the aftermath of the event, the reaction, in the reader than writing it.

The aftermath of all events in Hempel’s stories are emotional, internal, ruminative. The solitary and terrible matter-of-factness with which her narrators deliver their deadpan realizations or conclusions is bell-jar like. Lonely. The reason Hempel can avoid laying out every architectural detail of the physical aspects of one of her stories is that they are meant to function as memories, they are meant to knock the wind out of us using the same internal cues our memories might- they are stories told as we remember our own stories. Milemarkers are stuck haphazardly along the mutable forks of the paths and they show nadirs and acmes of fear, love, hate, surprise, disappointment. It’s how she circumvents heeding her own discouragement below, taken from the the same Powell’s interview referenced above:

“Why are you telling me this? Someone out there will be asking, and you better have a very compelling answer, or reason.

There are people who have been raised by loving parents to believe that the world awaits their every thought and sentence, and I’m not one of them. So I respond to that. Is this essential? The question might be, Is this something only you can say—or, only you can say it this way? Is this going to make anyone’s life better, or make anyone’s day better? And I don’t mean the writer’s day.”

Hempel’s characters move in montages of huge snippeted group conversations among old friends and easy neighbors and intuited, half-described, alluded revelations of internal significance. On the first page of the novella Tumble Home contained in this collection, she sums up her guiding principle, or the concept the awareness of and the struggle with which guides her writing:

If I understand it, the Western Tradition is this: Put your cards on the table.


This is easier , I think, when your life has been tipped over and poured out. Things matter less; there is the joy of being less polite, and of being less– not more– careful. We can say everything.

Although maybe not. Like in fishing? The lighter the line, the easier it is to get your lure down deep. (233)

Hempel writes straight ahead, finishing most of her stories in a single stroke, leaving the impression that each one was more like a single extended coup de grace than a telling of events yoking the service of more than one set of punctuation marks. The loneliness of the world of dying friends, remembrances of near-drownings on illicit escapades with married men, the obsessively compulsive companionship of dogs, the solitude of coming to conclusions while mired in quotidian tasks or old age: these intimate the actions and the chronologically verb-laden events that predicate the pen coming to paper. She withholds nothing of importance in her brevity. That she struggles with the appearance of a simple, resigned retelling of the tortures of the many kinds of solitude a human being can experience and wish to alleviate speaks the silences and gaps and pauses and cuts not hopeless, but tellable, personable. The stories are sad, but for this author are points of connection.

Excited to get hold of a loft this weekend to finally start making my room a livable space. Been so goddamned long since I've lived in one.