vctrmagazine

[vctrmagazine]

be cool, relax: the new gucci

jack klein

Glenn Luchford / Gucci

Since taking over at the helm of Gucci in 2015, Alessandro Michele has transformed the brand into a global power house that has dominated the luxury market ever since. His vibrant motifs, including embroidered animals and insects, as well as silly French phrases about love have become a signature on runways and street style guides from all over the world. Many say that the strength of Michele's work comes through his "modernization" of the Gucci look, adopting their traditional silhouettes and heritage designs into the 21st-century, enabling the brand to be the first in the luxury sphere to capitalize on the new international interest in fashion. As the brand continues to grow, blogs and reviewers are quick to prescribe this growth to Gucci's new appeal to younger audiences. Yet, as I browse through the Gucci website, I find that the only thing remotely affordable is the gift wrapping.

In early spring, Gucci unveiled the new collection of men's and women's watches, complete with a marketing plan for chock-full of "memes" undoubtedly crafted by a group of 20-somethings in the media department. While these advertisements did generate a good amount of buzz across the Internet – both positive and negative – I couldn't help but feel like Michele was staring at me through the screen, saying, "hello, fellow millennial". I'm willing to put aside the constant reminder that Gucci was generating some sort of "revolution" by embroidering denim jackets with patches of colorful thread, a trend made popular by punk culture in the 1980's. I am even conscious to catch myself from judging as a 50-year-old woman walks by me with her hedge-fund-managing husband donning a jacket that says "Blind For Love" in French. I don't want to sound too highfalutin when I talk about my personal opinion on high fashion, but this campaign seemed so forced that it left a bad taste in my mouth for an otherwise great designer.

Let me be clear on the fact that I think campaign was a rare misstep amongst an otherwise stellar portfolio of campaigns. One needs to look no further than other advertisements from this past year, like the pre-fall campaign, featuring a diverse collection of dancers donning sparkling garments and impeccable track suits, or the SS16 campaign, featuring angsty teenage models in glamorized, 70's-chic bathrooms. In my mind, there is no possible way that Gucci doesn't realize its place at the top of the luxury market. With this in mind, it seems that they are simply trying to reinforce their inherent coolness, a point that doesn't need any reinforcing at all.

However, this ad campaign highlighted a common issue amongst most haute couture houses operating across the globe today: connecting with younger audiences. Working for a luxury brand myself, I quickly came to realize that the core customers of most luxury clothing goods are around 50 years old; a group mostly comprised of upper-middle to upper-class citizens. In fact, it is almost impossible for these brands to appeal to most people under 25 because of factors like the rise of "fast-fashion" -- or simply the desire to not dress like ones grandfather. While Gucci was able to make their garments appear more vibrant to the millennial crowd, no amount of meme-ing or ad campaigns can solve the biggest problem: income and lifestyle required to afford the product. A very clear connection can be made between streetwear's surge in popularity over the past three years, and the accessibility and affordability of garments from brands like Supreme and Palace. For most high-fashion brands, directors are unwilling to give up any significant ground in order to bridge these divides, while other brands seem to be making quite drastic moves to align themselves closer with the trends of millennials (think: Louis Vuitton x Supreme).

In recent years, it seems that the idea of "high-fashion" has been diluted to include anything that comes down a runway. Brands have seemingly tried to make their own labels less about the well-off class that wears their clothes, and more about rediscovering some sort of trendiness and youth through these garments. Prolific menswear designer Raf Simons recently talked about this phenomenon in an interview with the Business of Fashion. "I was actually someone who was very often saying that fashion keep thinking that it can serve everybody, that I can be there for everybody, high fashion. I'm sorry, but high fashion was always for a small environment." I am obviously a huge proponent for brands breaking the bounds of their traditional, even somewhat aristocratic aura, but it must be done correctly. As much as luxury brands would like to push this proverbial "Fountain-of-Youth-Through-Style" onto their customers, they must face the facts that the clothes they make are not for the young kids that appear in their advertisements.

Even though I may never know why most of the men in my family always try to convince me to buy a wristwatch, no amount of promoted advertisements strewn across my Instagram feed – even from Gucci – will convince me they are right.

Jack Klein is a writer from Princeton, New Jersey. He is currently working for the luxury goods company Salvatore Ferragamo.

[vctrmagazine]

magnetic reality: setting the stage for mass murder in school

john-ivan palmer

Once a metaphysical mutation has arisen, it tends to move inexorably towards its logical conclusion. Heedlessly, it sweeps away economic and political systems, aesthetic judgments and social hierarchies. No human agency can halt its progress—nothing except another metaphysical mutation.

—Michel Houellebecq, Les particules élémentaires, 1998

Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) created a device called the baquet (tub, bucket) large enough for numerous people to sit around in a lavish studio. It was somewhat like a TV with rabbit ears, but the screen was inside your head. The rabbit ears were metal rods you touched so the “magnetic fluid” within the baquet, supposedly held in iron filings and “magnetized” water, could go into you like electricity.

Mesmer’s contraption was nothing new in the history of magnets and therapeutic mojo used by healers since antiquity. Cleopatra reportedly slept on an actual magnet as a skin treatment. But Mesmer’s magnetism, some invisible fluid captured by hocus pocus from empty space, went beyond its claimed power to heal whatever the ailment. It functioned as pastime, entertainment. If you touched one of the baquet’s rabbit ears you went bonkers, rolled on the floor, laughed, cried, kissed your brains good-bye. You were mesmerized. A fee was charged. It was quite the rage.

Those capable of analytical thought (Ben Franklin, to name one) dismissed Mesmer’s “animal magnetism” as nothing more than imagination. King Louis XVI, however, took it more seriously and formed a Royal Commission that concluded, “The spectacle of the crises [crazy responses] is…dangerous because of that imitation that Nature seems to have set as a law for us…In consequence, all public treatment at which the practice of magnetism is employed, can only have, in the long run, sinister effects.” He could not see what those long run, sinister effects would be, but did observe with concern magnetic imitators cropping up all over Paris to everyone’s great delight.

The modern version of Mesmer’s baquet is any object with a mesmerizing screen. Teenagers spend an average of nine hours a day in front of one and four thousand people a year die on the highway from having their attention taken away by its suggestive influence.

I used to demonstrate mesmerism as an educational program. School Assembly Service in Chicago booked me for thirty-six weeks at a time, traveling a thousand miles a week across ten Midwestern states performing two to four assemblies per day. I also worked through Dakota Assemblies, affiliated with North Dakota State University in Fargo, and appeared at a majority of all the high schools in the Dakotas as well as parts of Montana, Nebraska and Minnesota. This put me in more schools in a week, certainly in a month, than most teachers and administrators see in their entire career. A salesperson set up the routes a year in advance, scheduling me as well as folk singers, whistlers, jugglers and magicians who merged what they did with an educational “message,” however lame, to justify the cost, even though it was openly understood that the assembly was an excuse to get out of class for a little amusement. My program consisted of manipulating high school students into rowing imaginary boats and eating non-existent ice cream cones, talking Martian and meowing like cats. It was sold as “Mind in Action.”

There was something I didn’t realize at first because it happened so slowly. Over several years reactions to my program began to diminish. Demand itself declined from four hundred agency booked school appearances a year to fifty that I booked myself. Then half of that, and then half again. The same was true for the whistlers, jugglers and magicians along with their lame messages. School assembly agencies themselves went out of business one by one. With agencies gone, schools gave in to no-cost assemblies by military recruiters, religious proselytizers, or cops talking about drugs. A whole new administrative protocol emerged and principals receded into the background. They no longer wandered among their students like a shepherd tending their flock. They delegated assembly decisions to student committees loosely working under advisors. All pretense of educational message was gone and the committees were more likely to bring in local boy bands popular on Facebook.

The more television monitors I saw in halls and classrooms, the more computers I saw crowding out bookshelves in the library, the more channels available on TV, the more heads I saw looking down at gizmos in the palm, the less impressed they were by fantasy cats and Martians. I tried telling everyone to turn off their smartphones, thinking that would solve the problem of divided attention, but it was as impractical as telling everyone put away their shoes. I was competing against a whole new baquet.

In October of 2005 I arrived at the high school on Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota. Because of widely publicized spree shootings at American schools, most notably Columbine, Red Lake took no chances and installed an airport-style weapons detector at the front door. Schools had been the busiest and most open public places in any community, but they became locked asylums. Two friendly security guards in street clothes were expecting me for my noon assembly. “It’s OK,” said one. “The machine isn’t turned on.” I was trustworthy enough to bypass the weapons detector. One of them escorted me to the gym to set up my sound system and arrange the chairs for volunteers.

I saw on the wall a notice that read: HICKEYS WILL NOT BE TOLERATED. Schools often had their own battle lines over one thing or another: wearing hats indoors, skirt length, printing on T-shirts. One school had a major issue over the π symbol written on walls and mirrors, referring to some incident “too complicated to explain.” Hickeys themselves were no surprise, but this was the first time I’d seen them as an overt issue. The sign went on to read: If you are seen with a hickey you will be sent to the office and it will be covered with makeup. If not, then you will be sent home. In an isolated place like the Red Lake Reservation, what else was there for teenagers to do but suck each other’s necks, especially with the thrilling knowledge that it was forbidden?

Rules against unconventional hairstyles had long since been abandoned in schools so I was used to every kind of coif, but nothing quite like the one on the hefty, alert-looking boy who passed me at the hickey sign. He had gelled his hair up on the back of his head into two horns. As one odd stranger to another we exchanged greetings and went our separate ways.

According to my personal show report, I began my demonstration at 12:01 and ended at 1:13 p.m. I wrote that the audience was unfocused at first, but once the subjects (eight males and six females) were put into a mesmeric state and given suggestions of fishing, surf boarding, and driving a monster bus, responses were adequate, but not as frenzied as past years.

Eighteen months later I saw the horn-haired boy’s face again. It was in the paper. He was identified as Jeff Weise (“Wees”). His grandfather was a police sergeant on the reservation. At 2:45 in the afternoon Weise, now sixteen, stole his grandfather’s police car and crashed it into the front of the school. At the weapons detector (whether it was turned on or not didn’t matter) he pulled out a semi-automatic pistol and shot to death one of the two friendly security guards. The other fled for his life. Weise proceeded to the left down the hall where I had first met him under the hickey sign, entered a classroom and murdered seven more people. Then he put the pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger. That ended whatever state of mind he was in.

He was not one of my subjects a year and a half earlier and I can only assume he was among the spectators. Whether he was in a “trance state” during his murder spree is a matter of speculation. Whether he was in what’s called “baseline consciousness” is equally speculative. Perhaps he was in a state similar to the one he was in during those many hours he spent alone in front of modernism’s baquet, playing violent videogames and composing bloody “flashtunes,” murder animations composed with easily-obtained software and posted on Newgrounds.com. A year and a half earlier when I was at his school, if he had walked all the way down the hall to the gymnasium where the entire student body sat in the bleachers, he would have encountered a greater concentration of potential victims. Instead of the dubious distinction of enacting the second largest high school shooting in American history (after Columbine) he could have launched himself into first place. He certainly would have upstaged me.

When such an anomalous performance occurs people want answers. Simple ones easy to understand. If we just do this. If we just do that. There is no lack of professional advice. “Cause” is the operative word. Psychologist David Walsh, leading proponent of “scripts” theory, proposes that certain behaviors are “wired” into brains. Note the indirect reference to the combination of suggestive influence and electro magnetism. Dr. George Realmuto, University of Minnesota child psychiatrist, is quoted on Public Radio as saying that certain people are genetically predisposed to school shootings. “I don’t think we have a mechanism for stopping them,” he adds. Clearly, a costly weapons detector did nothing to stop Jeff Weise. One can focus on such proximate factors as bullying and treating mental distress, factors in Weise’s case and in most other school shootings, and addressing those issues, however imperfectly, is about all that can reasonably done besides the lock-ups and buzz-ins. Beyond that that we’d have to turn the clock back to an age of a simpler, less lethal baquet. Dr. Edward Shorter, Faculty of Medicine at Toronto University, says, “It’s hard to imagine an Adam Lanza [Sandy Hook massacre, twenty-eight dead] existing a century ago, before this culture of violence and depravity [was] available at the click of a mouse or press of a button.”

In August and September of 2004 Jeff Weise was deeply immersed in his private baquet on Newgrounds.com, a forum for videogames, many violent, like “Minute of Rage” (“Try to survive one minute on [sic] the deadly arena”) and “Outsourced Hell” (“Manage your own little hell in this dark idle game”). He posted his own reviews of several games and amateur animations, and, curiously, gave the highest rating to a notably nonviolent, minimalist piece titled “Hidden in the Snow,” consisting of just one static image of three small, white, meteor-like streaks on a black background. It’s not known whether Weise saw this image as a symbol of his own disintegrated family (he was the only child of an alcoholic mother and suicidal father), but he did make this comment: “Jawohl… you've managed to captivate my simple, and often moronic, child-like, mind.” He added, “lacks three things: content, naked women, and guns...” The artist responded to Weise’s comment by writing, “wth [what the hell] does jawohl mean?” All he had to do was Google the word and find it means “yes” in German. Why the German? Why did Weise identify himself elsewhere in a chat room as “Todesengel,” German for “Angel of Death”? Because, as a Native American mesmerized by the Internet, he had come to idolize Hitler and was active on the website Nazi.org.

He posted two flashtune animations on Newgrounds.com under one of his various pseudonyms, “Regret” (197 fans). The first was the thirty-second “Clown,” featuring a psychotic bozo trembling to a background of eerie death music by the goth band Evanescence. A male figure enters the frame and the clown grabs him. Cut to the clown’s big shoes on which splats a huge gush of blood.

“Target Practice” is another thirty-second flashtune by Regret with more complex animated movement. A male figure with no facial features except a horizontal bar across the eye area, appears carrying a bag. He coolly puffs a cigarette, removes an assault rifle from the bag and shoots four people, none of whom have faces either. One figure stands with hands behind its back as if a prisoner awaiting execution, another is simply a bystander, and another is sitting on a park bench. When the bullets hit, their heads explode in bursts of red. The shooter throws a hand grenade and blows up a police car before finishing off someone in, paradoxically, a Klan hood. Then he puts a pistol in his mouth and pulls the trigger in a final blood-burst of red. Something like that is more darkly stimulating in a primal way that a live person licking an imaginary ice cream cone. The similarities between “Target Practice” and Weise’s performance on March 21, 2005, are so obvious they hardly need pointing out. Beginning with the word “practice” in the title, it goes on from there. Similar flashtunes by others are just as violent, yet do not result in their creators committing mass shootings. But they still entrance and influence through the digital baquet. “Target Practice” is still posted on Newgrounds.com and registers over 500,000 views.

In their world of virtual unreality, the Columbine shooters, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, let the baquet’s mesmeric mania enter and take over their minds. With the imitative quality King Louis’s investigative Commission warned of, they influenced each other and a few pals to become a death cult known as the Trench Coat Mafia. When showtime came around, their staged performance, planned to coincide with Hitler’s birthday, left fifteen dead, including themselves, and twenty wounded, mostly among books in the school library. It was not from the interaction of their personal pathologies with books, but with the baquet.

Through the electro-mesmeric ether (electronic media) the power of suggestion traveled with the speed of thought into the mind of Jeff Weise in the Minnesota boonies. Spending more time at his computer than in the real world, his rational mind slid toward annihilation. Like Klebold and Harris before him he wore a long black trench coat. Like them he admired Hitler and planned his attack on the dictator’s birthday. During the Columbine massacre Harris asked one of his victims before shooting her, “Do you believe in God?” Weise parroted the same question before shooting one of his own victims.

Ironically, Benjamin Franklin, in Paris at the time and part of the Royal Commission, could not see the future power of his own discoveries in electricity to some day transmit mesmeric suggestions over great geographical distances. “Sensitive creatures,” as the Commission described them, in whom “reason has less empire over them,” combined with the discovery of Franklin’s electro-magnetic flow, set in motion the long line of interactive causation resulting in the Columbine and Red Lake massacres. A student in Tuusula, Finland murdered eight people at his own high school. Another Finnish shooter was alleged to have been in touch via the Internet with a teen planning a Columbine-style attack back in Pennsylvania. Evidence found in a chat room led to a similar plan at a school in Kaart, Germany. A plot in Göttingen was based on the anniversary of a school shooting in Emsdett, Germany. A similar plot was uncovered in Cologne. Five years prior, a school massacre in Erfurt was the largest mass killing at a German high school, exceeding even Columbine, with seventeen killed, including the shooter, who missed Hitler’s birthday by less than a week, landing instead on the birthday of William Shakespeare. Ironically, at the very moment Jeff Weise was shooting his classmates, a film on Shakespeare was being shown in a nearby classroom, which he overlooked because it was dark, and thought the room was empty. This grim juxtaposition of the pre-baquet (Shakespeare) with the post-baquet (Columbine) era is similar to another juxtaposition depicted in a photo in Beiler and Smucker’s Think No Evil, Inside the Story of the Amish Schoolhouse Shooting (2009), where an Amish horse and buggy passes by a “media horde” of satellite dishes relaying the event.

Criminologist Frank Robertz is quoted in the Guardian: “The phenomenon of massacres by young people in schools…has only existed since Columbine.” What Robertz does not mention, probably because he is not a mesmerist, is that the seeds of Columbine began to germinate when the two magnetisms (animal and electro) merged to massively inflate the imitative, unstoppable power of suggestion warned about centuries earlier. If nothing could be done about it then, most certainly nothing can be done about it now.

John-Ivan Palmer's work has appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Nth Position, Wild River Review, Wisconsin Review, New Oregon Review, and Other Voices. The Drill Press published his novel, Motels of Burning Madness, and in 2009 and he received the Pushcart Prize for fiction.

[vctrmagazine]

before graduation: this side of paradise

ruth landry

I spent the summer before college working at an away camp in Tennessee. For two months, I lived in a cabin with a dozen thirteen-year-old girls and stood as a sweaty lifeguard on the dock of shallow lake. During my rare free time, I tried to finish all of the books that I had been assigned, but never actually read, during high school English class. The list was embarrassingly long; I had skated through high school on a combination of SparkNotes and the understanding that teachers wouldn’t pay much attention to me if I turned in work regularly. And that’s how, on the eve of my 19th birthday, I found myself reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise by flashlight on a bunk bed in the middle of the Cumberland Plateau, Tennessee.

The story behind the novel’s publication was just as exciting as the novel itself. In 1919, Zelda Sayre broke off her engagement with twenty-two-year-old Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. He didn’t make enough money, and seemingly never would. Fitzgerald was undeterred, and set to work on his novel (versions of which had already been twice rejected by Scribner’s) with the hope that upon its publication, Zelda would agree again to marry him. This time, he hurriedly cobbled together short stories, poems, a one act play, and his previous novel “The Romantic Egoist” into one disjointed narrative. This Side of Paradise was published in 1920. He and Zelda were married a week later.

It’s a sloppy first novel. The seams of Fitzgerald’s patchwork are immediately visible—almost two hundred pages pass before stage directions are suddenly introduced, a brief interlude is composed only of letters and poems, and the story itself is clearly made of several episodes rather than a linear plot. Yet Fitzgerald’s sharp wit and eye for detail make this unruliness seem playful and fresh, rather than merely haphazard.

The semi-autobiographical protagonist Amory Blaine is vain, lazy, convinced of his own genius, and prone to statements like, “I hate to get anywhere by working for it. I’ll show the marks, don’t you know.” And yet, he is also charming, imaginative, and occasionally self-aware. At Princeton, he befriends the few of his classmates who he takes to be smarter than himself, though any time they assert their talents, he sulks. He falls in and out of love with debutantes who enjoy shocking their peers with their cigarettes and their freely-given kisses. He pursues wealthy girls who have a tendency of making scornful declarations like, “It’s so hard to find a male to gratify one’s artistic tastes.”

Moments of growth are all the more harrowing for their brevity. At Princeton, Amory spends his nights alone, wandering the campus. One night, lying in a quad and gazing up at Princeton’s Gothic spires, Amory realizes his own “unimportance…except as the holder of the apostolic succession” and this “idea became personal to him.” This epiphany won’t change his character. In This Side of Paradise, self-knowledge is fleeting and often treated as just momentary anxiety. And despite his resolution to work hard at Princeton, Amory finds there are better things than school; after all, there are parties to attend and debutantes to kiss.

Like many coming-of-age stories, This Side of Paradise is an exploration of youthful folly—both of the protagonist, and in some ways, of the author. It is the immaturity of the author that makes the novel so interesting: it is the work of a young writer circling a message he couldn’t quite articulate, and surprisingly, the novel is all the better for it. In both subject and form, This Side of Paradise is a portrait of youth that is accurate because of its uncertainty—at eighteen, I understood the fragmented impulses of This Side of Paradise much better than the clear-sighted skill of The Great Gatsby.

At eighteen, I knew that Amory was selfish at best and amoral at worst, but he and the other characters in This Side of Paradise possess a candor and glamour that I admired. He constantly worries that Princeton is “conventionalizing” him, that he will “lose his personality;” I thought of my own stifling Catholic high school with chagrin. A girl compliments him on his “keen eyes” and he immediately tries “to make them look even keener;” I thought of my own silly tendency to pose in hopes of catching the attention of handsome strangers. When describing a childhood friend and future love interest, Amory thinks, “She had gone to Baltimore to live, but since then she had developed a past.” I scribbled it in my journal—it was so fitting, I hoped, for the adventure I was about to have. Amory’s downfall seemed to be an avoidable footnote to an otherwise desirable story, perhaps just an accident of the sketchily rendered novel, not at all a natural result of his laziness and egoism.

I won’t lie; part of me still resonates with Amory’s romance and rebellion. I do not regret the nights of college that I spent sneaking onto rooftops, ignoring work to gossip on a friend’s bed, attending parties and leaving parties with boys who soliloquized on Marxism, but who had embarrassing affinities for their fraternities. And I understand now what Amory means when he thinks to himself after leaving Princeton, “I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”

But as I prepare to graduate from college, This Side of Paradise no longer seems like the enticing literary proposal that I believed it to be at eighteen. At twenty-two, only a year younger than Fitzgerald was when he wrote the novel, I think if I were Zelda, I would be wary of my fiancé. For different scenes in This Side of Paradise draw my attention now. When Amory realizes his own unimportance while lying in the middle of a Princeton quad; I remember the nights in the library that I swore I would work harder—next semester. When Amory drops most of his clubs in a sudden fit of apathy; I think of all the activities fairs I skipped, content with just my hour on air at the student radio. And maybe it is just pre-graduation nerves, but when Amory realizes too late that his hardworking friends have “discovered the path he might have followed;” I can’t help but think of that pile of unread books, still growing on my bedside table.

Ruth Marie Landry was an editor for Vector.

[vctrmagazine]

letter from the editors

What does it mean for writers, who seek to expose the truth, when the highest office in the land was won by duplicity: fake news, pants-on-fire lies, and demagoguery? See how language has become most politically useful as a tangled mass of lies. In the post-factual era, writers must, more than ever, use their craft in the pursuit of truth and tell how things are exactly.

The political discounts writers as silly, selfish, flaky—altogether out touch with societal issues and reality. And perhaps they are right. Our strain of symbolic resistance, protest and journalism, may not suffice for much longer; the “more unromantic forms” of total dissension might be necessary (Greif, n+1). But it is the writers’ continued role to inspire and mobilize such forces. The editors of Vector believe in the power of literature and language, in the power in words. Readers seek to have their held beliefs inverted and their eyes opened to new possibilities. We urge our readers to listen, to read those marginalized writers pining for you to understand them, to write themselves. Those of you who have immeasurable power in your identities: help. Those of you with something to share, write with nettles. In the words of Cheryl Strayed, “Write like a motherfucker.” If your writing is serious it will forever be taken seriously.

If we are not challenging you—to think harder, to speak up—then we are not working hard enough.

In 1944, amidst the rise of Fascism and Communism, theologian Rienhold Niebhur wrote in his essay The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.” For Niebhur, humanity was corrupted through and through—products of origin sin that condemned us to forever live governed by self-interest. Idealism, philanthropy, were tropes disguising the pursuit of power. He creates a duality in every man: the children of the light, and the children of the dark. The former, foolish as they are, believe in universal law and harmony, believing that such a taint can be shurked. The latter are wise because they believe in the power of the self and seek power in accordance to the world.

Reflect on the two rhetorical messages projected by the two campaigns: “Stronger Together” and “Make America Great Again”. Hillary Clinton thought she could unite the country by circumventing their self-interest, ignorant of the fact that America thrives on it, has shaped its mythology around it. Donald Trump, on the other hand, appealed to such division. Trump’s method was easy; Hillary’s, nearly impossible. The election of Barack Obama was a miracle for many reasons: he was black, young, his middle name was Hussein. But it was also miraculous because his message inspired Americans to transcend their interests—to believe in empathy, and the common ground. To help others. It makes sense, then, in a tragic way, that the economic comfort of some should be sacrificed for the fundamental rights of many.

Perhaps this is due to Obama’s rhetoric. It was masterly in its literary value and charismatically delivered. Writers, in their most fundamental mission, seek to persuade. Can we, collectively, inspire? Can we explain why it might be important for you to pay more taxes to lift others out of the mire, or explain why people who don’t look like you should be seen equal under the law?

In the 1980s, my mother, freshly graduated from university, worked to defend Roe v. Wade. Recalling her times at Planned Parenthood, she remembers how trying it was, how she would lecture young girls about birth control one week and how they would reappear three weeks later, pregnant. It would devastate her. It made her feel as though the effort she projected into the world, her chosen cause, was as futile as it was trivial, but she persisted.

My father, on the other hand, is a finance major turned entrepreneur—a former Republican voter. During the 2012 election, he confronted my family with a conundrum: who do I vote for? Obama was the rock and Romney was the hard place. I responded, “I’m gay, so if you vote for Romney, you’re voting against me.” My father voted blue that year, and every year since. Despite his steely resolve, he realized the new set of priorities before him: to ensure that his son would feel secure at the cost of his economic comfort. It was the right thing, and important for him to realize. Today, that decency no longer stands—it proves that his love was the outlier, and that I was lucky. My parents can love one another despite their polar differences; my father forgoes his interests for the sake of his love for me. Can writers provoke the same to readers they have never met?

It’s a matter of persuading people using the right arguments.

[vctrmagazine]

collaboration between stem and the humanities

Both STEM and the humanities offer deep, yet disparate insights into how humans perceive and study the world around them. I believe that these disciplines are more similar than they are different, in both their pursuit and purpose. Poets and authors, in their careful consideration and construction of language, engineer creative works. Likewise, engineers, in fashioning novel approaches to complex problems, creatively consider the world around them.

Both capture reality in their own way and with different responses; neither is more true than the other. The work of an Abstract Expressionist and a Renaissance master cannot be compared in terms of value because their intentions are different. By diverging from realistic representation, the abstract artist offers a portal into deeper, less definable human experiences like emotion and interpretation. In the same way, mechanical engineers and environmental engineers would offer differing analyses of the same model—say, a combustion engine. The former is more concerned with maximizing the engine’s energy output, while the latter is more concerned with minimizing the engine’s reliance on fossil fuel emissions. We believe that these multitude of lenses are representative of the differing means that are used to achieve a shared goal. Interaction between them would create more comprehensive and intensive study.

The image above is a 3-D model of meter in William Shakespeare's The Tempest, from Act 4, Scene 1, in which Prospero says: You do look, my son, in a moved sort, As if you were dismay'd: be cheerful, sir. Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind.

America's current academic culture is tense and factional. Amidst ongoing veneration for STEM fields is talk of the declining importance in the humanities, as if the study of the human condition has somehow become obsolete. But it is increasingly apparent that the world’s problems cannot be solved by technology alone; ideas, constantly morphing, are more necessary than ever.

Matan Grossmann has a Masters degree in Civil Engineering. He is currently a business analyst in New York City.

[vctrmagazine]

revisiting the goon squad

madison archard

I have a clear memory of reading Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad for the first time. I am on a park bench on a Saturday afternoon, the air hot and buggy. I have to mark my page and place the novel aside as a pair of white-jowled dogs, happy to be off-leash, arrives to sniff at my sneakers; I burst into tears at the sight of their warm, wet eyes, their little bodies thrumming with excitement. It is late spring, I am sixteen, and for the first time, I am in love.

The boy is a beautiful, curly-haired poet with slim hands (“I wish I had calluses. I’ve worked hard, but my hands look too perfect,” he says; I am immediately smitten.) The first time we speak, I recommend a list of books that he should read; White Oleander, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, and, of course, A Visit from the Goon Squad. By the end of that conversation, I know with an uncharacteristic certainty that I love him (no—I am in love with him), and tell him so. We are together for four years; when he breaks up with me in April of my junior year of college, it feels like a sort of death.

Of late, I find myself thinking about him more than I’d like to admit. These are the first holidays I will spend without him; I experience his absence as one does the loss of a tooth, running one’s tongue over the hot, painful place where the tooth used to sit, the nerve pressing close to the surface. One such attempt to probe that pain (to find—by force of exposure—that moment when the tongue becomes used to the blank space in the mouth) was rereading Egan’s Pulitzer prize winning novel.

It is a book about time and memory perhaps more than anything else; the chapters flit from speaker to speaker, from era to era in a sort of whirlwind that gives the reader the impression that time (the novel’s titular “goon”) is not a line but a liquid, a medium in which all things occur both simultaneously and unfathomably far apart.

Distinctions of all sorts fall away as one becomes absorbed in the novel-cum-ouroboros Egan has crafted; the view shifts from third person limited, to second person singular, to first person, then back again. The characters’ lives are so entwined that they, too, begin to blur and move together; each story happens separately, but bleeds into the others, so that one is not surprised to find the one-night-stand we meet in Chapter 1 resurrected at the novels close, leaving us with this final image: “It was another girl, young and new to the city, fiddling with her keys.” Another girl, another start, another visit with the goon squad.

Anyone who has been through a breakup—a serious one, one which finds you weeping behind the wheel of your Subaru Impreza at 4 a.m. in front of your ex’s house—can recognize this narrative fog. The time with your beloved feels bruisingly close, yet alien; suddenly, you see your ex everywhere (for weeks after the breakup, my heart would race whenever I saw a man with curly hair walk by.) You are absorbed, constantly, by memory, submerged for hours at a time until something pulls you up (the moments when Egan’s characters fish in the East River feel particularly resonant in this way.)

When I first read this novel, I identified most with Rhea, a young punk living in San Francisco, hopelessly freckle-faced, hopelessly in love, and hopelessly outside. Back then, I, too, felt young and odd, and on the cusp of something great. Today, some those feelings linger.

But the second time around, I find myself drawn most to Rob, a recovering depressive reentering the world with the help of his strange shamble of friends; he is young, in love with a woman (and a little bit in love with that woman’s boyfriend, too), and trying to find the next place to plant his feet. He is shocking, and sad, but emphatically himself (broken or not.)

One night, he is talking with his friends, watching the New York City crowds go by. “We’re going to meet again in a different place,” they say. “Everyone we’ve lost, we’ll find. Or they’ll find us.”

Madison Archard is a writer, musician, and student of women, gender, and sexuality studies pursuing a degree in poetry at the Johns Hopkins University. She has worked with Winter Tangerine, Ink, J.Mag, and Vector, and was the recipient of an Arts Innovation Grant from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars department. She reads mostly novels, watches mostly Gilmore Girls, and talks mostly to dogs. You can find her writing in the Postscript Journal, the JHU film and media studies blog, earlier editions of Vector, and elsewhere.

[vctrmagazine]

on voter suppression

allison claire

George Wallace did not want black Alabamans to vote.

As governor of the state, in his 1963 inaugural address, he called for “segregation today… segregation tomorrow… segregation forever.” His speech was a resounding echo of antipathy to the civil rights movement. The 14th Amendment was “illegal,” in his view; school integration was tyranny. The South needed to resist federal intervention into the affairs of their states or forever compromise their values. The values of the South were the values of white people.

When thousands marched from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery, in pursuit of an end to the suppression of black voters, Wallace reluctantly agreed with President Johnson that the demonstrators deserved to be protected by the Alabama National Guardsmen. He nonetheless refused to receive their petition when it was presented to him.1 Wallace’s concerns with the civil rights movement were more closely related to integration, but all of his fears stemmed from his own racism, and his belief that Alabama only needed to represent its white residents. He did not support a society that would give black people the same voice as white people.

In recent years, the most controversial voting laws are those that require registered voters to present photo IDs at their polling places. They are designed to prevent voter fraud—people must be who they say they are—and also to keep undocumented immigrants, who often have their citizenship or lack thereof marked on their drivers' licenses, from voting in federal elections (of course, non-citizens cannot vote; their attempted registrations to do so would be rejected). They have come under fire from the left for their needlessness and their potential to disenfranchise those who lack government-issued photo IDs—most specifically poor people of color in urban areas.

To register to vote by mail, citizens are required to provide either a valid photo ID or proof of residence in the form of a utility bill, bank statement, or some sort of government document that lists a person’s name and address.2 In-person registration often requires a photo ID, which seems to offer some support of the claims of voter ID proponent—that it isn't difficult to access a photo ID.

And yet photo ID laws have led to mass disenfranchisement. Not all those who wish to obtain a photo ID have the necessary documents.3 A birth certificate is required to get a driver's license in most states.4 Poor communities, migratory communities, black and Latino communities, and others are less likely to have access to their birth certificates and Social Security cards. Moreover, states such as Wisconsin, contrary to their claims, have made it difficult for these populations to obtain IDs by failing to provide the easy access to the documents they need. This is not a matter of not putting forward enough effort; this is a matter of making it futile to put forth an effort.

In-person voter fraud, or impersonation fraud, is incredibly rare. One News21 analysis found only ten cases of voter impersonation in twelve years.5 These new voter IDs laws will only be effective in targeting and eliminating impersonation fraud; they will not be able to keep non-citizens from registering to vote, nor will they keep ineligible voters from sending in absentee ballots. They do, however, target people who are unable to obtain photo IDs.

In one US District Court case, Judge Lynn Adelman determined that about nine percent of Wisconsites lacked the photo IDs they would need to vote. This population was largely low-income—earning less than $20,00 a year—and African-American. Many members of this group lacked a birth certain, one of the key materials needed to apply for a photo ID. The struggle to obtain the necessary documents were elaborated in great detail in the decision; to summarize, the judge found it a significant burden to place on citizens who should be eligible to vote.6 These laws can be found across the United States. All have been backed by Republican-dominated state governments. Many have been criticized and declared illegal by higher courts—a law in North Carolina was called “the most restrictive voting law North Carolina has seen since the era of Jim Crow” after it was shown to disproportionately target African Americans and other racial minorities.7

To these arguments, the Republican response is the same: they are trying to combat voter fraud. "All it takes is one," argued Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker8, despite the fact that elections are typically decided by thousands of votes. Wisconsin passed its law in voter ID law, “Assembly Bill 7” or “Act 23,” in 2011, almost entirely along party lines.9 One former Senate staffer recalled the moment, and reported that Republican State Senators were “giddy” at the idea of making it more difficult for certain demographics to vote, a statement that only confirms the GOP’s true intentions with these laws.10 An NBC News article further spoke to the efficacy of passing this law after a new Wisconsin measure was created to help all those in search of a photo ID obtain one at the DMV. By providing Wisconsinites with an easy way to get their photo ID, after attempting to make impersonation fraud out to be a crime committed by those who cannot legally obtain a citizen’s photo ID, proponents of photo ID laws reveal that their principal motivation was never really the avoidance of voter fraud.11 They simply wanted to keep those who didn’t vote Republican from voting to begin with.

Republicans know that people of color and the low-income in the United States are not likely to support their party. They want to keep their opponents from having an opportunity to express their opposition at the ballot box. It is thus not racism that motivates these voter ID laws—or, at least, it is not racism in its most pure form. It is hunger for power, and, more specifically, a power-hungry Republican Party that does not view disenfranchisement as undemocratic so long as it is their political opponents who are disenfranchised.

George Wallace would, in his last years, renounce his opposition to civil rights. President-elect Trump has, in recent days, declared that millions voted illegally in a race that he won. He does not trust the American electorate, and he represents a party that has been trying to strip away the rights of large sects of the American electorate. Voter fraud is a phantom, but it now seems to haunt the man who will soon occupy the highest office in the United States. Wallace saw his America, his South, integrate and continue to survive. This was because of democracy—the voice and strength of the people—and not because of efforts to suppress it.

1. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Global Freedom Struggle. “Selma to Montgomery March (1965).”

2. Register to Vote. “Voting Frequently Asked Questions.”

3. Ari Berman. “Wisconsin Is Systematically Failing to Provide the Photo IDs Required to Vote in November.” September 29, 2016.

4. DMV.org. “How Do You Provide Identification When Applying for an ID Card?”

5. Sami Edge. “Risk of voter fraud small, but ‘all it takes is one person.’” August 23, 2016.

6. Ruthelle Frank v. Scott Walker, Case No. 11-CV-01128 (Wisc.2014).

7. William Wan. “How Republicans in North Carolina created a ‘monster’ voter ID law.” September 2, 2016.

8. Zachary Roth. “Analysis: New Wisconsin Voter ID Rules Expose Law’s Real Aim.”

9. http://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/2011/related/votes/assembly/av0330; http://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/2011/related/journals/senate/20110519

10. Todd Allbaugh. “Republicans were ‘giddy’ about suppressing turnout with voter ID law, recalls former staffer.” April 6, 2016.

11. Zachary Roth. “Analysis: New Wisconsin Voter ID Rules Expose Law’s Real Aim.”

Allison is co-editor-in-chief of Vector Magazine, and a student of Writing Seminars & History at Johns Hopkins University.

[vctrmagazine]

man and apple seeds

chaconne martin-berkowicz

How can one purchase five hundred Galas without alarm from the cashier? How does one drive back home? Imagine: thumbs sticky and stout from peeling, picking, crushing. Before the dive at a Motel 66. A guest observed the small, bald man who faced his reflection on vending machine glass, where the events preserved—His gaze unsure he’d made the correct selection. Later, the cyanide of a thousand seeds lifting inside his skin. The manager the first to call. Seeing the ghost, the man—floating under chlorine, slow wanderer. When he called to state the situation: a laugh, a straight line to vexation.

Chaconne Martin-Berkowicz is a Baltimore-based filmmaker originally from Portland, Oregon.

[vctrmagazine]

queer interiors: constructing and navigating the home in an lgbtqi+ body

“Mornings with you covered in firm sun light driving down the coast of our arms the ocean of space & rolling skies to find us breathing here, where we house each other where we glimpse in & dream we love the distance…” *

The form of Rahne Alexander and Jaimes Mayhew’s oversized bed on view at the BMA recalls something like the minimalist cube. Indeed, a gallery housing several of Anne Truitt’s totemic sculptures is steps away. The echo of this shape on a monumental scale feels at first confrontational. The bed imposes itself on the space, immediately commanding the viewer’s gaze and requiring interaction. The viewer thus circumnavigates the bed, noticing where its rectilinearity softens and spotting the suggestion of a plush surface beneath faint folds of fabric. Here, traces of minimalism quickly dissolve. The viewer is invited onto the bed, breaking the illusion of an observer-observed dichotomy. Their forms press against one another; the body shapes the work of art, and, for a moment, the work of art is the body’s home.

The mammoth mattress is one of three works that comprise Queer Interiors, a multimedia installation by Alexander and Mayhew, in conjunction with Chase Brexton’s LGBT Health Resource Center. Importantly, the works feature contributions from members of Baltimore’s LGBTQI+ community.

Exploring home becomes less straightforward when interiors are “queered.” The place someone lives, we call that person’s “home.” And yet for LGBTQI+ people, especially youth, the home often complicates living. Caretaker abuse and homelessness disproportionally affect LGBTQI+ individuals, about one-quarter of whom are kicked out of the home after coming out. Housing and housing insurance discrimination can interfere with the creation of a safe home for oneself. These hardships are compounded when one doesn’t feel at home in one’s body. Within the LGBTQI+ community, “home” can become terrifying, vague, or confused rather quickly.

We often don’t feel as if we have a home. We often find a home in one another.

The interior, to me, suggests both a contemplative turning inward and a spatial moving inward, to some locale further separated from public life. These gestures are linked—the self’s compulsory navigation through arbitrary spaces until intimacy with itself is achieved. None of this is simple in a queer body, whose movement is constantly obstructed—by the state, by the abuser, by fear and self-blame. All this, and still countless queer interiors exist, and still they are accessible.

The installation, crafted by Alexander and Mayhew but ultimately authored by many, offers a fragmented view of the home lives of LGBTQI+ people, in a communal interior space.

*

You’ve likely heard someone say, “I don’t care what they do in the bedroom; I just don’t want it shoved in my face.” When perceived to be publicly visible, queer sexuality, however misconstrued as the insignia of LGBTQI+ life, seems to eclipse all other aspects of personhood. So what do we make of a massive bed, a massive “queered” bed?

On the surface, it might appear as an assertion of queer sexuality’s presence. We return to the idea of confrontation. The bed is formidable, even titanic; it puts California kings to shame. Its form commands visual attention and physical engagement—acknowledgement of its existence and substantiality. Just the same, the bed does not serve as an imposition of queer sexual activity. In fact, the bed does not serve as a bed at all.

The museumgoer perceives that no one has spent a night sleeping on its surface; that no one has tucked another in, rubbed their back until they fell asleep; that no one has fucked their lover’s brains out or tenderheartedly made love among its giant pillows. So no, it does not recall sexual activity beyond its surface. Rather, in its cartoonish gargantuan presentation, and the foregrounding of its lack of conventional functionality, the bed plays up the absurdity of these connotations.

Moreover, when viewers become participants, i.e. sit on the bed, the spectacle vanishes. As the unidirectional, perhaps voyeuristic, gaze is subverted, so too is the reduction of LGBTQI+ identities to some essentialist sexuality. The faux insignia vanishes and in its place is a group of distinct individuals, a community.

*

There is a fragmented quality to the remaining two works on display. Baltimore LGBTQI+ Home Movie Quilt quite literally stitches the discrete lives of LGBTQI+ people together. No image or video is fixed, permanently displayed on the surface of the quilt. Rather, on each of the nine central quilt squares, one snapshot replaces another every few seconds, making it impossible to take in each image within the composite or to take in the composite as a whole.

There is a vastness here, an immeasurability—the awareness that these lives exist beyond the confines of the quilt and that they exist among countless others. The unfeasibility of grasping the full range of LGBTQI+ experiences is palpable; the artists themselves are not capable of representing all perspectives, nor is the viewer capable of absorbing the subset at hand, nor is a single photo or video capable of capturing the whole of any person’s lived experiences.

Identity Shifts, too, is an accumulation of sorts. Arranged with careful consideration, objects from the homes of Alexander and Mayhew sit on glass shelves within a display case. The case itself would fit nicely in someone’s home, to display meaningful books and photographs and ephemera, not unlike those that currently fill its shelves. In form and function, the case calls to mind a cabinet used to display fine serveware. Perhaps its most obvious resonance is that with a museum display case.

Each of these pieces of furniture was designed for a sort of showmanship, for exhibition of one’s most valued holdings, selected and arranged strategically in anticipation of guests. Immediately we get the sense that the objects that comprise Identity Shifts are dignified and imbued with meaning. On one shelf sits photographs of Mayhew’s grandparents, on another is an empty bottle of estrogen from Alexander’s medical transition. Its form echoes that of Mayhew’s jar of evil eyes, which is surrounded by a lucky handkerchief, books on nature and queerness, and a vase of rocks. Alexander also displays books, but hers are bookended by cassette tapes, such as a Violent Femmes / Credence Clearwater Revival mixtape. I laughed upon “discovering” this latter object, largely because I identify with this particular mash up of tastes. As guests in this queer interior, pouring over fragments of identities, we quickly find pieces of ourselves, if not in Identity Shifts, then on the surface of the quilt or among the pillows of the mega-bed.

Identity Shifts places an emphasis on both the spatial and the temporal; a shift suggests movement, literal or metaphorical, but when applied to identity, the shift carries with it a sense of duration. Alexander and Mayhew map identity shifts they experienced over time, yet their congregation presents something like the contemporaneity of identity, a composite of the self’s past, present, and future iterations.

We live fixedly in our bodies as we navigate space, moment after moment, in a constant state of becoming—folding endlessly further into our essential selves, our interiors, via external journey. This is a universal phenomenon; your identity constantly shifts over time and throughout space, and its composite state is your interior, if only you are willing to look for it.

As Alexander and Mayhew serve as examples, they also call us to action, offering fragments of us in others and in themselves.

* “… though sleep itself is the nightmare of being only one thing though tomorrow is the you in this scenario & never is the me in this case we house each other & you kiss me regardless of death or whatever.” —Joshua Jennifer Espinoza Queer Interiors sits beside Imagining Home, the first exhibition for the Patricia and Mark Joseph Education Center, in the Center’s Commons on the first level of the BMA. The installation will be on view through August 2017. Admission is free.

Mia is a writer, editor, and art nerd from Baltimore by way of Hartford. Additional art criticism and essays by Mia can be found in Baltimore City Paper and Argot Journal.

[vctrmagazine]

me, my dad, and the old man and the sea

shannon romig

When I was thirteen, I was a fisherwoman. Every Saturday, my dad and I went out on our small boat - a simple 12-foot skiff - the Jumping Tuna. We stayed out all morning on the water, watching the soft, orange glow creep onto the horizon. We packed thermoses of coffee, roast-beef sandwiches, and watched the leaping, silvery fish of Reynold's Channel. It was always quiet on the water, as we casted our rods out to sea, and watched the bait dimple on the surface.

On most of our trips, I had the strikes, but set the hooks too slowly - almost always, I missed the fish. I watched my dad, much stronger and more patient than I, reel in the winners: tremendous, five pound bass, all golden and glistening in the sunlight. Often, my catch was less exciting: piles of seaweed, half-eaten bait, and on one truly disappointing dawn, an old diaper. Still, I was a fisherwoman nonetheless - inspired, hopeful, and completely in love with the ocean.

Reading Ernest Hemingway’s short novel the Old Man and the Sea only sunk this hook deeper. I was thirteen at first read, the peak of my fishing career, and the 1952 novel became for me a kind of central text - equal parts fishing primer and spiritual insight to a life at sea.

The story is of an old, Cuban fisherman Santiago. Nearly the whole tale takes place on the Gulf Stream, on Santiago’s skiff with patched sails. It has been eighty-four days since he has made a catch. Still, he thinks about fishing in the same, hopeful vein that I had: “Each cast was a new cast and he never thought about the past losses when he was doing it.”

On the eighty-fifth day, a marlin strikes Santiago’s bait - a beautiful, 11-foot marlin with soft blue flesh. He reels and tugs hard at the fish, until it is right below the boat - with a harpoon, he strikes. In the fish’s eyes are nothing; they are dead.

Then, Santiago feels another pull at the line; it jerks the pole straight up. It is a Mako shark, breathing in the clouds of marlin blood. With a club and pocket knife, Santiago tries to beat it off, but he cannot. The shark bites right through the marlin, ripping out the best, dark meat. Santiago takes a step back and lays down the oar. He has failed, and now returns home with just the big and little bones of a once beautiful marlin.

A few weeks ago, I returned to this tale - on the couch in my early home where I grew up. It was Thanksgiving time, and each morning I began my day with it, with old man Santiago and his skiff out at sea. Still, I felt the excitement and tension of his quest: the pleasures of the natural world, the love, the loss, and the haunting powers of the ocean.

Certainly, Hemingway has mastered the solitude a fisherman feels at sea - how the quiet pervades. On a stormier day with no bites on his line, he talks to his hand: “How do you feel, hand?” he asks the cramped hand. “I’ll get this next fish for you.” And then to the fish: “Fish, you are my friend, but I must kill you.” And then to himself: “I am a strange old man.”

On the couch, my father passed by me and smiled. “It’s supposed to be clear skies and almost no wind out there tomorrow,” he said to me. I smiled too, thinking about those quiet mornings spent on the black-jade water - nearly six years it has been since I’ve picked up a line. “I’ll get out the chips and sandwiches,” I said to him.

Like Santiago, my dad and I waited for hours that day to feel a touch on our bait. We stared down below at all of the shining scales, and talked for hours about the tides, the moon, the striped fish, and how long it’s been. We waited for hours to feel those gentle tugs, to hold those dark and slippery bodies in our hands, and to smile once we had them, and then slowly, let their fighting bodies go.

.

Shannon Romig is a writer originally from Point Lookout, New York.

[vctrmagazine]

the red line

theodore kupfer

Building, fixing, and maintaining Maryland’s roads and bridges is our top transportation priority. —Gov. Larry Hogan

Larry Hogan cares about his constituents. The Governor of Maryland has, since he was elected, paid tutelary attention to the transportation needs of Marylanders. One instance of his guardian spirit came in July 2015, when Gov. Hogan, a Republican, announced that he would embark on a spending spree in excess of a billion dollars to facelift some highways. Interstate 270 is getting an “innovative congestion reduction”: $100 million. Drivers on I-495 will now have easy access to the Greenbelt Metro Station — a stop on the D.C. Metro, mind you — for a cool $185 million. MD 140? Say hello to a bicycle-compatible shoulder. Perhaps most custodial of all Hogan’s guarantees was his decision to widen Route 404 on the Eastern shore. After all, traffic can be slow. Larry Hogan doesn’t want you to get bogged down on a measly two-lane road; he wants your commute to be just perfect. Larry Hogan cares: he proved it in July 2015.

Much of the money allocated to those highway projects came from a federal grant of $900 million. That money was originally reserved for the Red Line, a proposed, 14-mile long, east-west addition to the extant north-south light rail line in Baltimore. The Red Line would have gone through neighborhoods like Edmondson Village and Rosemont in West Baltimore, tunneled beneath the harbor and Fells Point, and extended east to neighborhoods like Canton and Bayview. It had been in the making since 2002, involving more than $400 million on research and development, several economic and environmental impact studies, a “community compact” among its stakeholders, and the passage of a gas tax to help fund the project.

Chief among the Red Line’s subjunctive virtues was that it would have given residents of Baltimore’s impoverished neighborhoods easy access to downtown. Since William Donald Schaefer presided over the revitalization of the harbor, jobs downtown have abounded. Kevin Plank, playing Roller Coaster Tycoon in Port Covington, is assuring that will continue. Yet in Baltimore, fewer than one in three jobs is accessible via public transit. Along the Red Line’s hypothetical corridor, 28% of people don’t have cars. This means that getting a job at Sweetgreen (Long Island transplants at Hopkins: omg!) or the Under Armour corporate metroplex (It’s like Silicon Valley, but with clothes!) is a tough proposition for those who need employment the most. The Red Line would have been a functional public service for Baltimore, and for the entire public. In a city where armed agents of the state bully black citizens, in one case literally shitting in a suspect’s bed, that would have been a welcome change.

But Larry Hogan cares about his constituents, meaning he cares about having enough electoral support to maintain power, meaning he cares about white Maryland suburbanites, meaning for all he cares the cops in Baltimore can keep on keepin’ on. Hogan killed the Red Line on June 25th — and in so doing, proved the dark side of our initial proposition.

What’s the case against the Red Line? Estimates are that its construction would have directly generated $2.1 billion in economic activity, creating 15,000 jobs. But of course the state can create jobs by paying people to dig ditches. Public works projects are not always economic panaceas, no matter how nice the term “investment” sounds. Meanwhile, although extensive planning had taken place, the project’s expenditures would have been quite high. Estimates of $2.9 billion were challenged as optimistic; Hogan labeled the project a “wasteful boondoggle.” Red Line opponents cited the underground tunnel in particular as an area where the costs would have inflated. If the decision was one of fiscal responsibility, then Hogan’s decision could at least be explained with reference to his enunciated political platform. It would, in other words, make sense.

It doesn’t, because it wasn’t. Costs are not just reducible to expenditures; they are foregone opportunities. The concrete opportunities presented by the Red Line were manifold: instant creation of 15,000 construction jobs; access to 500,000 jobs in the city; functional public transportation that runs four directions through the City of Baltimore. And provided with the $900 million in federal funds, the case against the Red Line is actually resoundingly stupid. In political language, it’s fiscally irresponsible. Larry Hogan is that sort of Republican governor who comes to power in blue states by being reasonable on social issues—neutering the most effective line of attack for this neoliberal incarnation of the Democratic party—and promising citizens a fiscal resurgence via lower taxes and responsible spending. Yet federal money for the Red Line had already been awarded. It was there, in the coffers, waiting to be spent. Cannibalizing that to spend it on something with no discernible economic benefit can, by no honest person, be considered the fiscally responsible move.

Baltimore would have reaped immediate and secondary economic benefits from the Red Line. But the city’s problem is not simply about dollars. Embedded now, into the Baltimorean consciousness, is the sense that they might be another forgotten city, that their own Governor has reified their status as an afterthought both on the eastern seaboard and within their own state. A city’s cultural memory is instrumental in its quality of life, and if public transit was something considered, something treated as if it mattered, then maybe murder rates would decline and incomes would rise.

The governor of Maryland is considered by commentators to be one of the more reasonable Republicans around. He refused to endorse a fascist for President, and enjoys decent popularity numbers. But Gov. Hogan neglected necessary triage in his state’s most important city to perform plastic surgery to appease those who can keep him in office the longest. Hogan doesn’t need Baltimore to win elections. So he doesn’t care about it. Larry Hogan cares about his constituents.

Theodore Kupfer is a Baltimore-based writer originally from Camp Hill, Pennsylvania.

[vctrmagazine]

right / left

jesse shuman

As I get older, I realize how hard it is to get to the center of myself—how odd it is that life’s most exclusive knowledge is lived everyday. Suddenly those probing, adolescent questions about purpose seem less cliché and more like a hallow quest filled with contradicting riddles. It is a search all too often abandoned for definitions easily handed over. Why go about the long, dreary business of finding truth for myself when someone can tell it to me? I am not this, just as much as I am this, the mind tells itself, and so we prescribe to archetypes that lack the complexity of who we truly might be. It feels like a rush, like serendipity, when something of such purity is discovered.

I once revered myself as right-brained. In the paisley, velvet walls of my head, pink machinery churned out ideas, the mechanism of creative verve. Next door, the left-brain’s cube of glass and steel atrophied. Reason was manufactured piece-by-piece then slid along tracks into their allotted storage spaces. That claim, that each hemisphere is uniquely operative, has since been debunked, but just because something has been cast into the untenable depths of pseudoscience does not mean it is without merit. It allowed me to prescribe to either side of human flourishing: calculation or the world-defying imagination—the science that propels and the culture digesting its progress. It also allowed me to ignore a whole set of faculties. Recurringly, in all relationships, this duality of emotionality and rationality presents itself. The tendency to be governed by one or the other—whichever we relate most to—comes to define our pursuits, professional path, and the very core of our mental being.

Learning the cognitive maps of others has helped me navigate my own mental landscape. I find that rational people (my boyfriend J., my father) are blocks with corners—definitive shapes to trace my finger around. For all their vertices, they often have circular, therefore insular, thought processes. My mother and I are always spiraling deeper into ourselves, unable to get the pinpoint center of certitude out from under all that feeling. I never know the origins of what I think or feel. I admire those governed by reason because I can see it splayed out before me and still choose to ignore it and make my own sense.

And yet, to say I’ve lived outside the tenets of rationality is not wholly true. If reason is innate, something you have or you don’t, then it might still be inherited but given to genetic chance. In early 2000, my father started a business that relies on the same sense of order that shapes his life. His take the most cluttered room in the house, the garage, and makes it beautiful—to him, organization is sublime. His closet is labeled polos, t-shirts, underwear, socks, as if he had recurring amnesia and needed to know which drawers held the different pegs of his life. When my grandmother would visit, she would rearrange our refrigerator so that its contents were alphabetical. “The yogurts are to the left,” she said one morning, hidden behind a newspaper. Startled, I dropped one all over the floor.

The caution one needs to take when vacillating between shrewd businessman and family man is that wires can cross. Callousness can easily be misinterpreted. To the emotional being, not bearing every bit of oneself on the face (“the heart on the sleeve” becomes a badge of honor eager to be desecrated), in a sense, turns one stone. My father has taught me that exercising order is to deprive the calisthenics of emotion. When chaos collides with his imperatives, the jagged edges of panic. Or so my mother says.

The cost of my mother’s commitment to the ones she loves is that she will cry at any perceived slight. Engaging with her requires certain stealth in inflection. In her, I see the sagacity of emotion—something uncanny, the cumulative memory of being hurt, angry, happy. Growing up, it was hard to reconcile my father’s style with my mother’s undulating sensitivity. Today, they are free from the joyous burden of children, and though it seems they’ve outrun the strains and tedium of marriage, reaching this equilibrium required thirty years and the learned humor of the other’s ways.

J. and I have not had thirty years together. We are in an unending state of itinerancy, deviating from the baseline and then restarting, arriving at a new normal. The advantage to this freshness, incredulous and graceless as it is, is that, as an inchoate thing it can be made better. Even if that means it might never be perfected.

The immediate clarity I lack I equate to lacking a fundamental reason, and because of that, I assume that J. must be immune to emotion—as if there is implicit deficiency in making sense. “You think I’m a robot,” he accuses me one day. I’m rearranging the Buddha figurines on his shelf (he notices). “But I feel, too.” It was striking to see how I was constructing an identity for myself by comparing to others. Implicit in this was adhering to binaries at every turn: inside/outside, myself/others, emotion/reason. I became the sum of rejected ideas so that, like an atom, I considered myself in terms of empty space. Sensitivity does not exist because reason is absent. I have seen J. at the brink of emotion, but if I have ever proven the logical one, a moment eludes me. It was unfair of me to assume J.’s rationality as sociopathic, but in the face of steely reason, too much emotion becomes something to be feared, something shameful.

I feel x, therefore…becomes the logical problem of every sentimentalist. What is felt cannot be argued with, but reason pivots on more fundamental truths that make it less solipsistic. One hits a point where interiority (the emotional, introspective self) becomes pressurized and manifests in some moment of action, seen from the outside as highly irrational. Volatility in the face of calmness comes across as psychosis. But there is some logic and planning behind it—some sort of blind design, insatiably crazy but undoubtedly carefully considered. The difference, it seems, is emotion’s reactive tendency. On poetry, Wordsworth writes, “[It is] the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” The emotion is contemplated until, by way of reaction, something kindred and useful is produced. It is a shame we all do not have the patience of a poet.

Anything internally signaled yet somehow incommunicable morphs into rage, and rage feels justified because it is an excellent substitute for action. It is frustrating that the mind might need such long spells of time to produce anything tangible and worthwhile. In the day-to-day, as-it-comes, it is impossible to have this ascetic responsibility—so why go about thinking everything out? I jump in before puzzling together because I exist in the flux of trying to communicate something before it is lost. Annihilation is often the price. It is the reason why that to be young and sensitive is to be the most hurtful.

Reason is a fish I am ready to kill because I am tired of cleaning its tank. I don’t feed it, but think of quicker deaths by drowning, just laying its small body on the countertop of the brain, stark red reason contrasting grey matter, and watching it shrivel. Milan Kundera, in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, writes, “When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.” Thought garbles when confronted with feeling, and what’s left in the head is droning static. Emotion is when the heart is speaking, but Kundera never mentions how it cannot put anything into words—that what bubbles up pleads to be labeled, defined, communicated. I defer to Wordsworth, who offers a solution in thought. But still, I wish I had half a mind to have a mind.

To try to understand J., I often look to the stars. Here, I find us both inscribed. There is a certain comfort taken in astrology – that somehow, the person you are is beyond formative control. I am fixed, immutable. As the interpretation of light, space, and time, it is a science. As a science, it is total bullshit. I am the water bearer Aquarius, a misshapen oval pouring out rivers of stardust. We are creative visionaries, progressives, and humanists; we are as deep and temperamental as oceans. The 1967 musical Hair, with its opening song, tells us with famous words, that this is the dawning of the “Age of Aquarius”, the harbinger of all things New Age. It is defined by idealism and electricity, but also irresolution and nervous disorders, which seems fitting: I think big, feel high-voltage, I am stymied by indecision and anxiety. For an age ushering in harmony and ease, it feels as though I am condemned to lack both. That is emotion’s curse: what is so deep within us rarely makes it to the surface. It pickles inside us and sours.

J. is a Virgo, a stick figure splayed out. She is a maiden, so no comet or asteroid passes through her belt. This, too, seems fitting: his mind is insular. It has taut walls of restraint. He decides what comes in, and only after careful deliberation, what to put out. His methods to this are lace-like intricate, I’m sure. He quarters his life up by planning and scheduling. It means he has a tendency to act in accordance to strict tenets he knows as right – his truth is his own, and it goes unhewn by context. In this sense, the paradox of reason emerges: rationality is a thin veneer that masks the irrational. In a text exchange, he put it like this:

I make too many quick judgments. I do not look at the facts. I stick with my first position and rarely waver. I do things that will give me the most mental quiet, which are rarely rational. After months of being subjected to his reason (we were too far apart, in different transitional phases, perhaps too different), I answered, I feel like you wavered for me. To which he said, And irrationally so.

In our many attempts to typify one another—right and left, heart and mind, reason and emotion—we break each other down into binaries, then quarters, ignorant of what might happen should they come together. Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy lays out the dichotomy between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, embodiments of straight-laced perfectibility and frenzied debauchery, dream and intoxication—the imagined space constructed in the mind and the nectar we lap up in its pools, the critical distance and the buzzing closeness. The convergence of these two modes is not just synergistic, it is an act of procreation: from it, the Attic tragedy is born. When the two come together, the consequences are at once disastrous and artful. Think of the Oresteia, Oedipus the King, Antigone. The greater the friction between the two, the greater the art. It is a beautiful fight.

The responsibility of a writer is to exercise what Wordsworth laid out every day. By giving form to that which is intangible, literature is the struggle to communicate emotional experience within the vacuum of fiction. It uses what is inherently false as a conduit for truth. But why does this talent not translate well to quotidian practice? I should think that my kind would be the most adept at communication, but the opposite is often true. As a writer, my rationality is tied up in memory; it’s a lump of coal undergoing transmutation into diamond. As a result, writers are tied up not only in the past, but also with the act of thinking as just that—a conscious act. So the stereotype goes: there are Plath-like suicidal visions, ruminations on one’s own duress (of the bourgeois variety), obsessions with bygone loves. We are supposed to stew in self-pity and end up like Nietzsche, totally unhinged by the accumulation of seemingly small stresses, until our genius turns to mush.

In art, there is a tendency to combine the two: emotion is expressed through mechanized rationality. In real life, one often eclipses the other. In my tendencies to reason emotionally and distort cognitively (when my fantasies, driven by sensitivity, run amok), I find that writing, in the explorative sense, is therapeutic. In evaluating what is felt and its causes, it seems clearer when scrawled on a page. The blueprint of the mind becomes clear; the netting of thoughts and feelings can be untangled. Solutions often present themselves when the heart of a problem is dissected. And I can learn from that. It’s a matter of constantly surfing on emotions, not really in control of where they take me, but not quite petering out either.

Jesse Shuman is a Baltimore-based writer originally from Long Island, New York. He is the editor-in-chief of Vector Magazine.

[vctrmagazine]

john, tom, and plants

john durovsik

For a birthday in my adolescence—maybe 10 or 12—my father gifted me with a bonsai tree. Following the clues hidden within an acrostic poem, I ran around the house, inside and out. The tree, tucked within an underused gazebo, was a small ficus, over 100 years in age. I was helplessly unprepared to care for such a plant, to contribute to such a lengthy history. During the Pennsylvania winters, the tree sat, in a darkened corner between two drafty windows, shaded in a space that welcomed only the faintest glow of the setting sun. A selfish custodian, I had decided the ficus would remain in my own room, ever available for my personal viewing. Waxy leaves turned yellow, falling atop gnarled roots. And yet, the tree remained, a balding victim to my winter adamancy.

Down the hall, another ficus stood. This one tall, its unruly limbs scraping high, whitewashed beams. Standing, poorly postured, in a grey plastic container that mimicked marble planters of antiquity, the ficus was no specimen tree. Found by my father, abandoned and bare, on a DC street in the 1980s, the tree was slowly nursed back to health. Decades later, the tree stands, unsightly, as an proclaimed metaphor, a veritable parallel echoing my father’s own growth. Yet I fought this plant—this parallel—taking clippers to its wild limbs, pleading for the removal of its kitschy vessel. But still it remained, a divine host to be venerated, invulnerable to my iconoclasm.

—

It has, until now, been a largely unspoken connection. One of bulbs, of cut stems, small piles of sticky weeds, and orange-handled spades. It’s a relationship forged, overtime and begrudgingly in my youth, around plants—their growth and death, their purpose and purposelessness. Knees in the moist dirt, I work silently in a bed of pachysandra. Inside, my sisters lie lazily, in bed or on the red-stitched couch. We work in silence. I slowly, sloppily rip out unwanted greenery, careful to erase the delicate trace of intricate, web-like root systems. My father, dressed in a blue bandana, an oversized white t-shirt, and biker’s spandex, arranges purple and yellow pansies in simple rows. It was never John and Tom planting. Rather, it was John, and Tom, and Plants. Not two subjects, but three. One mediator. It seemed, to a younger self, that I had to compete, or at the very least attempt to compete, with the beguiling aura of my father’s gardens. So we worked—palms stained with crushed chlorophyll, foreheads marked with the residue left by dirty hands wiping sweaty brows—and my father, close enough for me to hear the metal coil retract on his rusted shears, settles his gaze upon the azalea between us.

—

Falling from a stonewall into a patch of tiger lilies, I’m scolded by my father for my clumsiness. I’ll have to pay for new bulbs, he says. But I never do, or am never made to, and the site of my fall lays bare, perfumed and haloed by saffron corollas.

—

At 12, I planted a small orchard in an open field, tending to the slender saplings myself. Pear, peach, and apples trees—two of each specimen, a botanist’s arc—formed a short allée. Although they grew, the trees produced no fruit and, instead, slowly succumbed to the curious nibbles of neighborhood whitetails. Early one summer, surrounded by five brittle trunks, the lone pear tree blossomed quietly, its swollen buds putting forth firm fruits. But I never did enjoy the nectar of my own pursuits, the pear’s thin frame snapped by unforgiving jaws.

—

On walks with silver scissors, I trim the flowering boughs of trees and shrubs—my father’s, my neighbor’s—and arrange the leaves and blossoms into small vignettes, which I declare potent in their pewter and glass. One afternoon, I take to my father’s garden, clipping haphazardly—snapdragons, Russian sage, lavender, and daisies. Chaotic in its polychomy, I slip the rough bouquet, thick with leaves and drowsy buds, into a tall glass hurricane, fresh petals pressed against the glass curvature. My father, the inconspicuous observer, mimics my act. A playful competition. Clipping one small stem, balanced by dual blooms of disparate heights, he places the single specimen into a hurricane identical to mine—an elegant repose to my botanical bedlam. Aesthetics challenged and denied, I retreat. My realm—the interior and its makeup, art and its composition—claimed, convincingly, by another.

—

My father built a house in Massachusetts, on a small island called Chappaquiddick. Set atop a steep bluff, the house is charming in its New England banality—wooden singles, white brick, an American flag. Although dotted with pitch pines, the house is framed by two trees: one an oak, leaning slightly over a brick footpath, the other a holly. Convinced of the power of threes, I plead my father to plant a sycamore. Set to the right of the oak, the sycamore’s limbs would grow, with time, toward the Nantucket Sound, shading the modest grass of the present. Plan rejected, I find my own agency, buying small saplings from a Japanese garden hidden along a dirt road. I plant a Japanese maple amidst a cluster of stripped rhododendrons, a dawn redwood adjacent to an exposed generator. Years later, exposed to October’s brisk winds, we observe the yellow needles that fall from the fragile redwood, cellulose semaphores signaling a period of rest after summer’s growth.

—

The bonsai succumbed to my sequestering after three winters. Each June leading up to its death, I would carefully place the tree into the truck of a packed SUV. For three months the tree sat atop a wooden potting table, exposed to the therapeutic summer sun. Like the miraculous powers of a Byzantine icon, the salt air would bewitch the ailing ficus with a sacred aura, wrapping its barren limbs in a mandorla of gold-foiled rays. Knobbed branches display new growth, translucent in their nascency, electric-green shoji screens masking aphids and ants. The bonsai’s shallow-footed basin sits empty now, its terracotta chipped by the passing of seasons. The tree’s centurial history snapped by teen indolence. My father’s ficus, too, shed its vessel. Its plastic shell discarded for the heavy latticework of a sleek, iron planter.

—

My father tended to a large garden, back when we spent our summers in Pennsylvania. Set between a fieldstone wall and wide, flagstone drive, the garden was a rose window—a circular body of multicolored blossoms, their blooms aromatic, fugitive. The flowers were many: hyacinth, peonies, roses, tulips, and daffodils. Overtime, the garden shed its garish hues. Annuals and perennials uprooted for a neutral monoculture, a hedge of white hydrangea. But we moved north in the summer, neglecting to watch the bulbous blossoms reveal themselves from within their verdant nests.

My first summer in Pennsylvania since our northward migration, I watched the slow transition from green to white, from leaf to petaled burst. Silver scissors in hand, I take hold of my father’s plantings, young buds and mature blooms enlivened with a summer radiance that superseded the familiar, pre-autumnal brown. White blooms arranged within a small hurricane, I ride the northbound train, damp palms obscuring glass. An introduction—flowers given to a father, not mine but his. Wilted petals, exhausted from the journey, hang toward the floor in a new home.

John Durovsik is a Baltimore-based writer originally from Philadelphia.

[vctrmagazine]

that chicken place in st. charles

W. Jack Savage is a retired broadcaster and educator. He is the author of seven books including Imagination: The Art of W. Jack Savage (wjacksavage.com). To date, more than fifty of Jack’s short stories and over six-hundred of his paintings and drawings have been published worldwide. Jack and his wife Kathy live in Monrovia, California.

[vctrmagazine]

the advantages of being a lit mag editor

lou gaglia

The best reason for being a lit mag editor is the money, which far outweighs any corny sense of accomplishment that comes from putting out a product with literary merit. In fact, there are so many reasons for being an editor that I couldn’t possibly catalog them strictly, in order of importance, so I’ll start with money and then think up other advantages that come to mind and write them down before I forget them.

The Money

Editors of lit mags quite often receive generous donations from unknown sources and buy coffee shops and send their kids to college on such donations. I personally know an editor of one major mag who quit his day job as a toy store manager.

“Because of this one person’s generous donation,” he told me recently on his yacht, “I’ll never again have to call a lazy employee to aisle three to help a snotty customer.”

Despite the many unsolicited donations that pour in, most editors hang onto their day jobs, but the smart ones realize they don’t need to be working stiffs any more.

“For a while I was making no money, just reading stories and selling fruit on street corners, and I was thankful whenever I could crash with one of my buddies,” said one editor acquaintance to me. “Most of the time, though, I slept in garbage cans and read stories in the early mornings. I even received some submissions right there in my favorite garbage pails because writers somehow knew where I was. But now, after a series of very generous donations, I run my lit mag from the comfort of my own garage. I can feed the kids and afford roofing caulk, and later I’ll retire to a condo in Hilton Head or the Hamptons when the time comes and I’m old and feeble and don’t know what commas are anymore.

“You’re very lucky,” I told him.

“No, I’m smart,” he said, “and you’d be smart to take up editing yourself. Do you know where to place commas at?”

“Sure, I know where to place commas at,” I said. “What do you think I am?”

“I don’t know what you are,” he answered, “but you ought to try it anyway.”

The Acclaim

My grandmother died long ago, but when I was a small child she gave me some advice and I’ll never forget it. We were sitting in the living room staring at the walls when she turned to me and grabbed the front of my shirt collar and lifted me up to her face.

“When you get older,” she said me, “you ought to be an editor of your own literary magazine. They make—” (she was struggling to hold me in the air) “—they make oodles of money, and they are patted on the back by some of the most—the most prominent…”

She couldn’t hold me any longer, so she dropped me, and she never did tell me who would pat me on the back.

Still, I never forgot her words of wisdom, and although I’m not an editor myself, I’d sure like to give it a whirl someday. One of my editor friends recently showed me his gold cuff links and his private golf course.

“Your grandmother was absolutely right,” he said to me on the fifteenth hole. “We editors have it made. And it’s not just the donations that roll in. It’s the praise we get from some of the most—the most prominent—the most—” Then he urged me to the next hole because an impatient foursome of editors was up our backs.

Later, while we were hunting our slices in the woods, he said to me, “Do you know, I was on an assembly line when I decided to start my own lit mag. I was picking ice bags off conveyer belts and brown bagging my lunch, and I couldn’t even feed my own family or the parakeet. But last month I was rich enough to tell my floor manager to stick it. And do you know why?”

I was busy hunting for my ball in the weeds and didn’t answer right away, so he lifted me by my shirt collar. “Do you know why?”

I still didn’t answer because I didn’t remember the original question, so he dropped me in the weeds.

Only later did I recall what he’d asked me. I never did find out why he told his floor manager to stick it. His secretary always answered his phone after that, and I came to understand that I was no longer part of his Will.

It’s Easy Work

Being an editor is much easier than most other jobs, because a smart editor only needs to put his feet on a desk and grab a red pencil and read the first paragraphs of five hundred stories, and if he likes a paragraph he flips it onto the Read This Later pile. He chucks the others into a bin, then copies and pastes rejection slips for the poor chumps.

“The only pain in the neck part about it for me,” said my friend the former toy store manager, “is that I have to change the names on the rejection slips so that they fit the rejected writer. I wish to God they all had the same name.”

“Why not just address it, Dear Writer?” I suggested.

“Too impersonal. I’m not heartless, you know, and one of those writers may very well be an anonymous donor down the road. So no, I make sure to address rejections personally. That’s why in my submission guidelines I ask writers to include their nicknames.”

“Nice.”

“Last week, though, I had to address three different rejection slips to writers nicknamed Cuddles. It was embarrassing.”

“Still, it all sounds like easy work,” I said.

“That’s true, and if writers keep calling themselves Cuddles, I can always copy and paste that name too, so I don’t have to keep typing it.”

We were walking along his garden pathway. He sighed.

“So it’s all pretty easy for me, I guess. It doesn’t take much effort to chuck a story onto the reject pile, or ask my wife if she thinks a story is okay or if it sucks. But in a way, it can be rough. Writers are sensitive over rejection—too sensitive, if you ask me—and some of them fall into such bouts of depression. That’s all I need—for some writer to take a swan dive off a cliff because of one of my rejections. If the cops find one of my rejection slips in his hand, I’m sunk. I tell you, it’s tough having such power.”

We stopped for a martini at the edge of his garden, near statues of other prominent editors and proofreaders. He sighed.

“You can’t blame yourself if a writer takes rejection personally,” I told him.

But he wasn’t listening. He was dabbing at his eyes with a tissue. “I sure hope Cuddles is all right.”

Clout

When Don Corleone was alive, my best friend’s sister, who edits a powerhouse lit mag from her upstate New York computer, fixed the grammar on the Don’s notes to his enemies. We were on our way across the Tappan Zee Bridge to her online midtown office, and her driver had just aimed her limo into a pothole when she produced a lined paper from her purse.

Your amigo, Buzzy Bibbozzo, is a-sleepy wid da fishes, the note said in the Don’s scraggly handwriting.

“That’s impressive,” I said.

“But...look how I edited it.” She pulled another paper from her purse. In her own curvy blue handwriting, she’d written, “Your friend, Mr. William Brannigan, is at this moment asleep with the fish in the deep blue sea.”

“It’s just a copy, of course,” she said while I compared the notes.

“It’s much clearer,” I admitted as she took them. I tried to peek into her purse for more celebrity messages but she pointed the purse away from me.

We were stuck in traffic on the bridge, and she was impatient, so I tried to distract her with chit-chat “But what if the cops had found the original Corleone note and traced it back to you through handwriting experts?”

She rolled her eyes. “Naturally I disguised my handwriting to look like a mobster’s,” she said, and showed me the notes again. “Do you see this S?”

I stared at it.

“Doesn’t it look a mafia S to you?”

“Well…”

“And this F in fishes?”

I paused. “Yes, I guess that is an underworld F, I have to admit it.”

“Of course.”

We never reached her online midtown office, because it didn’t exist, but we did stop at a Starbucks where she pulled her laptop from her purse and got busy editing.

“Whatcha doing there?” I inquired.

“Editing the autobiography of Buzzy Brannigan’s daughter, of course.”

“Will it be a best seller? Can I sign it and send her a copy?” I asked.

But she was busy muttering about commas and banging on the keys.

A Family Tradition

Admittedly editors face enormous pressure—especially the above editor, who flipped out on me at Starbucks and made a scene in front of the patrons (who didn’t look over anyway) after I politely inquired if she’d teach me where commas went. But most editors are pretty even-keeled, which leads me to one last advantage of being a lit mag editor: it can bring families together.

My friend the ex-toy store manager now runs a family run rag. His momma is editor-in-chief and he is listed as its founding editor. The magazine’s headquarters also doubles as a bakery (“so we can pay the online fees” he explained to me when I knit my brows).

“Momma is a huge help to me,” he told me inside over coffee. “Not only does she run this place, but she knows a good story when she reads one. She replies to some writers personally, but she’s really fast with the slush.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you wouldn’t believe how many submissions we get that are written in crayon. She automatically rejects those and saves me so much reading time, it’s amazing. And then there are stories about mice. It’s specifically written into our submission guidelines that we don’t like stories about mice, yet writers insist on sending them to us. She does a word search before she even reads a submission, and if mouse or mice show up at all, or even vermin, she sends them form rejections without batting an eye. I’m different, and probably foolish. I read entire pieces. But sometimes I’ll get through almost a whole story, and in the last paragraph there will be some mouse hurrying across a room and I’ll roll my eyes and reject it. But Ma, well, she’s amazing. She automatically rejects stories that end with that’s all folks too. I don’t even look at an ending until I get to it, so I guess I have a lot to learn.”

He pointed to the bakery counter where a dozen workers took orders and filled boxes with baked goodies. “See those people? They’re my cousins and aunts and uncles, our proofreaders. They’re some of the richest people in America. And little Sally there…” He pointed to a back room where an older woman sat with a young girl. The young girl was drawing circles onto paper with a red crayon. “She’s learning to get rid of improperly placed commas.”

“Well, isn’t that something,” I said.

“Frankly, buddy, you’re a chump not to be an editor,” he said to me. “I mean, between the donations, the baked goods, the golf, and the boating…how can you beat it?” He paused. “Well, what do you say?”

But my mouth was stuffed with a bite of cream donut, and I must have had powder on my lips because he looked away with a smirk.

Lou Gaglia's short story collection, Poor Advice, received the 2015 New Apple Literary Award for Short Story Fiction. His fiction has appeared or will soon appear in Menda City Review, Forge, Halfway Down the Stairs, Serving House Journal, Thrice Fiction, and elsewhere. He is a long-time teacher and T'ai Chi Ch'uan practitioner, first in New York City and now in upstate New York. Visit him at lougaglia.com.

[vctrmagazine]

chasing the mouth of the last summer storm

james croal jackson

  we were               apples,                             bobbing,                                               waiting                                                             for that                                                      first bite                                                      (the river rushed                                                             as a violin                                                         sautillé                                                                on our way to sea)                                                         she came to me as a siren.                                               not as a mythical seductress,                                                                                         eyes spilling thunder–                                                         but as a tremolo                                                                           encompassing Oklahoma                                               in the midst of another                                                                    tornado warning.                                                         we were waiting                                            for the salt to stop                                            kayaking with our tongues                       (I never uttered                 won’t you look at me now)   I        always        pretended          to sleep, to                  watch you smile                                  in the shape                                  of the moonlight                                sonata–                              too dark                        to see.                    we were                           a constant applause,                                harpooning                                       a glory                                              into ourselves                                                          (clapping                                                                 until our hands                                                              did not recognize                                                                         our hands)                                                       we, with zigzagged                                                      lightning,                                                  entwined–                                                (shoelaces on                                              the verge                                            of untying)                                          seashells                                            clacking                                                together                                              in an attempt                                                 to hear…                                              pacific wind, stagnant in                                          our separate summer beds.                                    on an air mattress,                                                        I float                                                    on my own                                                       breath,                                                            half-inflated–                                                       like a falling leaf                                                    missing its tip–                                                 like an apple, bitten,                                                               still bobbing                                                                    to sea

James Croal Jackson’s poetry has appeared in The Bitter Oleander, Rust+Moth, Glassworks, and other publications. He grew up in Akron, Ohio, spent a few years in Los Angeles, traveled the country in his Ford Fiesta, and now lives in Columbus, Ohio. Find more at jimjakk.com.

[vctrmagazine]

solo

adam moorad

I.

I was seven years old when I first saw the Rocky Mountains on the cover of Time in my school library. Twenty-three years later, as the Boeing makes its final approach, I’m in Denver. The moon hangs above a sprawl of tangled runways. A quizzical voice: What brings you to Colorado? A man with a steak for a head. No eyes or mouth, just a seared USDA Prime brand where his nose should be. I say, Business, which is partially true. We shift down the aisle. What sector? I say, Health. Frozen plaque on the glass panes of the concourse, somewhere beyond them, the Dragon. Sounds expensive, the man says. I say, We work with every budget. Smiles and shoulder slaps. Baggage claim. A $50 cab fare and I’m on a stoop then a stool at a countertop. Friday. An evangelical-type congregation imbibes in a tangerine verve. Collegiate basketball. It’s March after all and Tennessee just upset UMass. Conversations involving the government and aliens. I mix amongst the meal and melodrama. Happy has a penchant for poetry, a DUI in Arizona and a Maine Coon named Bobby Love that could have passed for a bobcat. He confesses to “taking on too much liquor” after a recent breakup. Stranahan's Whisky, his eyes glow as he mentions it. Distilled locally. Everyone has at least one skeleton. His apartment is a dry place. Happy walks across it and sprays catnip on a beige scratchpad. Bobby Love rolls off the sofa. Two smaller felines steal down a spiral staircase in the foyer forming a sexed up trio of fuzz at the foot of the scratchpad. Bobby Love crawls onto the cushion beside me and purrs like a chainsaw. It was good to see it, that kind of contentment, that it was possible. Go on, Bobby Love. Buzz. Spread the Love. This place has a lot of potential, I say. Because what else do you say? Happy lulls. It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything, he starts. I’ve been working on my poetry collection 15 hours a day for 10 months now. It has not been easy. My nest egg has been depleted and I’ve had to ration my food. He keeps producing a different contraption from which to smoke tobacco. My father descends the staircase. He is not sick, but young and healthy holding a tennis racket. I call through the haze for him, but he doesn’t move because he’s gone. There are several bicycle bits strewn randomly about Bobby Love’s litterbox. Happy apologizes for the mess. His puffy red face slowly splits apart and dissolves. Though sociable, he appears prone to fireworks. I sense this in his grinding teeth and for no reason at all an element of trust materializes between us. Outside. Fewer hoboes than New York, but younger and crustier. I speak with my brother on the phone. There is a weightlifting gig in San Francisco and he is in the running for a professional contract. Wheaties is interested. A tsunami sweeps Naomi Watts across the television screen in my hotel room. Good, I think. We all have to swim, damn it. Broken palm fronds froth and whisk her through a brown chop. Hang on, sweet Naomi. Ride the break. Don’t let go.

II.

Elevation: 5,100 feet. I run four miles on the treadmill. I pull on a pinstriped suit. I overload on caffeine at the Rialto Café then explore the Colorado Convention Center. Saturday. Doctors in scrubs circle the building, smoking cigarettes. The interior resembles the exterior of a grey scrotum. Insert Biblical Analogy. The Thai food line consists primarily of khakis and stethoscopes. Everyone sees themselves walking around as someone else. I don’t know what to do. A sea of heads, tongues swinging from clenched jaws. My shadow paces the floor. I find Bulldog and Lisa from the home office. They flag me down beneath a sun block display. A giant blue lizard hovers above us. They want dinner and it occurs to me the entire day has passed without notice. I have done nothing and have nothing to do. It’s snowing outside. We drink cola while we wait for our food in the window booth of a Casual Mountain Dining restaurant. Open daily. The wind rakes wet flakes back and forth across the glass. We speak of New York, which I could feel faintly infighting inside me from afar. Bulldog and wife are expecting. Lisa is newly engaged. Congratulations and congratulations. The phrase “Rocky Mountains” seems to jar them. The purple buildings across the street blur. A Light Rail scrapes along. Elevator music. I eat cold roast beef. I am here, though something somewhere else must be actually happening.

III.

Ray is not a Cognitive Behavioral Therapist. He is not a professionally licensed chauffeur. He is an acquaintance who will serve in both roles with an amateur capacity, along with his beagle Gus. Gus had just shat on a yoga mat in the boot of Ray’s hatchback. He made you a present back there, Ray says. Didn’t you ol’Gussy? He ruffles the beagle’s head. It’s fresh. Welcome to Denver. Ray and I are not close, per se, but we once nearly lost one another in a whiteout in New Hampshire. We were lucky then and we know it and Ray doesn’t climb mountains anymore. We speak of Quebec, a mutual friend, who is recovering after a boating accident on a lake in Texas. The propeller grazed his legs which now evoke those of an octopus. But he’s alive…Some people have all the luck…How much closer to Death can you get?…Death did not want him…That’s Quebec. We drive south on a Yelp recommendation. There is a highway-side train yard. We sip something in a place where Kerouac drank but I don’t feel anything. What are you climbing? Ray asks. The Dragon. Solo? I shrug. Good luck, he says. The bears and cougars are waking up this time of year. I say I’ve never seen either. He says, But they’ve seen you. We move up Arapahoe Road. Gladys and the Porcelain Crownettes sing classic 30s and 40s tunes and ol’ Gussy yawps along. Popcorn and sarsaparilla are on sale in the narthex. Shooting courses are offered to the General Public. No previous experience required. Live-fire training. Emphasis on marksmanship. Revolvers and semiautomatics. Ammunition provided. Some sort of organized Mario & Luigi pub crawl unfolds. Dayton tops Syracuse and the bracket crowd whips into frenzy. The three of us split a picnic table with a beer-enthusiastic couple from Wisconsin. It’s all brewed here, I’m told. Locally. We discuss a number of ways Life is and isn’t. The couple says they went ten days on the Appalachian Trail without showering. I was impressed, but my head felt thin and my skin white and my hand soft. I’m really hungry…It’s the altitude …I think I’m just tired. Ray nods, Altitude. I look west. Sunday. Sunset. Denver seems at peace. I have never quite felt like this before; have never felt the rise of the land so deeply.

IV.

That’s why I moved here, the Hertz guy snaps his fingers. It’s sunny and there’s a substantial amount of marijuana in the air. The citizens of Colorado have deemed it an acceptable lifestyle of sorts, democratically. He escorts me to a Chevy 4x4 pickup. Nothing else is available so they upgrade me. Luck. I veer the monster north. Like a Rock. America! America! God shed His grace. I feel all eight pistons thunder through my privates. Eventually I lose all feeling. I check into the Historic Crags Lodge on a hillside. Elk dung coats the footpath to the entrance almost entirely. I walk. The sensation of marshmallows flattening underfoot. Handsome establishment. The air is thin. An elderly Helen provides a key and shows me to my room. She’s nervous with me, but happy I’m here. Estes Park. Elevation: 7,500 feet. The Tea Party Patriots are hosting a debate Monday on a few important issues. Issue 1A: the town is asking for a 1% increase in the sales tax. Issue 1B: the town is asking voters for permission to sell Lot 4 for development. Issue 2: the Friends of Lot 4 would like to put Lot 4 into Conservation Easement. I’m concerned as to whether or not my varied hallucinations are valid, but I’m okay. I drive to Many Parks Curve. I drive to Beaver Meadows. I drive back to town. I speak with a teenage Park ranger about the Dragon. I spread a map across his desk. What’s it like? I ask. He has no clue, just curly hair and brown clothing. Haven’t been up there recently, he says. But I hear it’s nice this time of year. Yawn. I drive across town to the Estes Park Mountain Shop. I find an old ski bum who looks conveniently wild. The Dragon? He scratches his ashen head. 100 mph winds up there today. I say, What about tomorrow? His expression suggests uncertainty but he still waves me over. A stack of Xeroxed papers on the counter. He pulls one, on it a black and white game of tic-tack-toe as if transcribed by a spastic. He points. A series of four frozen lakes. Bear. Nymph. Dream. Emerald. A narrow chute rising 1700 feet heavenward in the form of a dotted squiggle. The Dragon. He taps his finger. First time I saw it, it exploded. He continues scratching his head. Exploded? It just kinda cracked…then broke away. He looks up so I look up. The ceiling groans as the wind pounds the roof. Nother time saw dude blown off it, he says. Piece o’cake though. I mull “cake” over a tankard of Coors with a black-haired girl from Jackson, Mississippi. She works at a nearby boarding school and laughs when I tell her I’m from Brooklyn. I can’t blame her because I look jaded and half-asleep and all I do is grunt. She invites me to a beard-shaving competition with a co-worker with whom she shares a bunk bed. I back away graciously insisting, I’m here on Business. I steer the Chevy uphill. I crank bathwater to a boil and fix my mind on the winds whistling like frozen earworms in the dark. A force has pushed me here, somehow curing yet jet as coal.

V.

Helen takes my mother’s number down and I bid her good day. I drive into the gorge. Snowflakes on the windshield. A heard of elk and dead grass surround me. Rime coats the antenna. A coyote darts across the road. Elevation: 11,000 feet. I act instantaneously on impulse in this uncharted dimension. A vertical vortex of grey and white matter. I slog several solitary hours to an impasse. My axe will not catch. Nothing holds me in place. Nothing. Just clouds and crunching and the sound of barely audible voices. I turn around and my tracks are gone. One foot forward and I slide five feet down. Handcuffed. I dig a trench. I reach for my eyes but I can’t feel my hands. The epitome of blindness. I shield my face from the wind by delving deep into the snow. I can’t breathe through my nose. Through a cloud break I spot an ex-girlfriend naked beneath a plume of cornice picking at the dry skin on her ankle. Code Red, she says. I feel selfish. I hadn’t seen this coming or another soul all day. Only elk and coyotes and the ghosts in my head. A path of incurred resistance. A dotted squiggle. The Dragon. Tuesday. I am alone. I imagine radio waves flagging satellites triangulating my whereabouts. I have my mind and skin and teeth and the repercussions of fucking up. You can’t make it anywhere on a sick camel. I walk away. Helen looks surprised and relieved and is clapping when I walk in that evening. A man standing beside her says, People disappear up there every year. We stare and nod at one another in silence for a moment. I say, I didn’t make it but I made it here. Helen and the man smile. Every year…his voice trails off. Not me. Winter will be over soon and I will be in New York again. Everything will be green again. I flop onto the sofa in the lobby. The stone hearth crackles across the room. Two children play Connect Four. I stare out the window. Mountains and spruce at dusk and a tapering wind. I win, one child says. Plastic chips click as they void the yellow stand. The other says, You were lucky. I am.

VI.

Home. It’s time to catch the Boeing by the dawn's early light. Etcetera. House cats perch at windows waiting for the ground squirrels to pop their heads up from hibernation. Michigan over Tennessee and my Cinderella is out. Wednesday. Colorado is an icy place but the temperature has risen and the days grow longer. The gravel road lines the canyon ahead. It’s difficult to read. What is it that makes us function and moves life forward? Time. Chevy. Spring. I’ll believe anything. The cycle begins anew.

Adam Moorad is a salesman & mountaineer. He is the author of four chapbooks and a novella. He lives in Brooklyn.