Not surprisingly, one of the most public ways this plays out is in politics.  While I’m not big into blaming the media (and I think that Fox News referring to the other networks as the “mainstream media” in the same breath they taut that they are the #1 cable news network is just the tip of the iceberg of their hypocrisy), I think how newspapers and the media frame the political discussion is both a symptom and a cause of the horrible political climate and the decline of public discourse.  Examples and more thoughts after the jump.

The New York Times

The Huffington Post

The New York Post

“Bloodies”?  Really.

It’s important to note that the above examples form The New York Post all appear within inches of each other – on the same day!  The New York Times examples are beside each other at the top of the page.  The Huffington Post is infamous for their headlines about individuals “blasting” and “evicerating” one another.

What’s the effect of this use of language?  Politicians need to get coverage and headlines and if the media continue to use this language then politicians have little choice but to “attack” and “bloody” one another.  How does this help?  Of course, the media use these types of headlines to attract readers’ attention so they can sell more papers and more ad space.  It comes down to money, in many ways, as much of politics does.

While we have come to expect idiocy from our politicians (unfortunately, we do come to expect it), we should expect a bit more restraint from the media.  Journalists’ main task is not to make money, but to inform and protect our democracy.  There has been much talk about getting the money out of politics (and I agree that Citizens United was a horrible decision with sickening consequences), perhaps we should also be talking about getting the money out of the media.

The Walking Dead on AMC is simply a great, character-driven show based on an equally interesting comic book.  The French have also created some high-quality zombie cinema (e.g., The Horde).  But, what of literature?

The New York Times recently published an article on zombie poetry.  Frankly, I found some of the example poetry to be childish and not at all quality work.  My question is will mainstream, literary publishers be interested in short fiction that has a zombie context, but that deals with human emotion and relationships just as any other story?  Or, will possibly high quality work be summarily dismissed without real consideration because of the context and deemed more appropriate for the sci-fi/horror genre?  I ask these things because I started a zombie story (after the jump, in a very, very rough form) and consider it literary fiction rather than genre fiction.  This, of course, leads to bigger questions about genre versus non-genre and the separation between the two.

*****

The bite had occurred 37 hours ago.  It would take 48 hours for Will to turn into one of them.  He traveled some 15 miles since then with his teenage son and daughter.  He is now 10 miles away from what he hopes will be a safe haven for them before he must say goodbye.

He looks at them as they forage through the remains of a 7-Eleven.  It was a larger-than-normal store since it was right on the highway.  There are enough parking spots form twenty or thirty cars, but only a few burned out ones remain. The front window of the store must have been broken days ago, right when the troubles began.  Most of the glass that would have been cleaned every few days is now littering the ground just inside the store.  The shelves look bare, even from the outside.  There is not much left for them to find, but the twins are surprisingly resourceful.  He’s certain they will find something to provide them enough sustenance to continue on their journey.  Between the three of them, they can carry a lot of supplies.  Plenty of water and food.  Water has been easy to find, but food has been more difficult.  They had several cans of Hormel Chili from a supermarket they ran across weeks ago, but that is gone now.  This is the longest they’ve gone without eating.  He would help, but his breathing is labored and the bite hurts something awful.  Six hours ago he would have been able to help.  He doesn’t think they have noticed.

“I think I got something,” Will Jr. says.

Brooke pokes her head out from behind the front counter and, with surprising agility, dodging downed magazine stands and the car supply aisle.  Her blonde hair, which had always been her finest feature – long and curly – has been chopped off and cut closer to her scalp.  These days, necessity trumps luxury.

“No, never mind,” Will Jr. says.  “False alarm.”

“Fucking hell, Junior,” Brooke screams throwing up her hands.

Will does not forget his parental duties.  “Language,” he yells from his perch on top of a burned out truck near the front door.  The truck is red, the parts that aren’t charred, that is.  He worries that the compromised steel on which he stands might give way under his 200 lb weight (he’s lost 25 lb in the past couple of weeks).

“Seriously, Dad?” Brooke yells to him.  Will Jr. laughs.  That laugh.  He has yet to lose it, despite all that has gone on.

“Get back to work.”

He hears the twins rummaging again as he scans the horizon.  Nothing is coming this way, but there are a lot of hiding places and the last time he was surprised was – he looks at his watch – 37 and a half hours ago.  He will not make the same mistake twice.  But, for now at least, all he can see are a few birds gliding in the sky, the green trees lining the ridge above them, and white puffy clouds dotting the otherwise bright blue skies.  Will notices for the first time that a trickle of sweat is running down the middle of his back.  Is it the heat?  Or something else?

Brooke yells, “Ah-ha!”  More rummaging, furious this time, a grunt from Brooke and then a big crash.  Will turns his head.  “I’m okay.  Really.  I am.”  Will learned long ago that he needed to let his kids fall and hurt themselves.  They needed to fail and know what failure feels like.  They got scrapes and bruises – figuratively and literally.  But, the nervous parent in him has returned.  No one has written a parenting manual for the new world.  She bounds out of the store with her treasure in her hands.  “Fucking beef jerky.  How do you like that?  I win!”

“Language!”

Will Jr. is not far behind.  He nearly trips on a downed display of the newest variety of M&Ms. “You did not win.  I just found these.”  Out of breath, he holds up a lone bag of red and white mints, individually wrapped.  These were the kind of candies no one wanted when things were normal, the kind that usually sat on the shelves years before someone’s grandmother came to claim them.

“Oh, yeah.  That’s really going to help us, Junior,” Brooke scoffs.

“There are no rules to what we have to find.  We just have to find something.”  This game had been going on for days, the rules for which are made up as they go along.  It was not unusual for the twins to go head-to-head in some kind of competitive match.  In the past, it was admirable – it made sure that they both got the best grades and excelled at school sports.  But, now, it was something more.  A coping mechanism.

“Well, first.  That’s lame.  Mints will get us nothing nutritional.  Second, I was first, that’s why you heard my voice first.”  She often makes her persuasive arguments into verbal bullet points.

“For Chrissake!” Will snaps.  He does this without looking at them, keeping his eyes on the horizon and either end of the highway.

“Language, Dad,” Brooke too quickly retorts.

He ignores her response but admires her quick wit.  He has no time for admiration, though.  “Let’s get out of here,” Will says.  “Something isn’t right.”

“As long as you fulfill your duties as Scavenger Commissioner and declare me winner of this round,” Brooke says as she puts her hand on his elbow.

Will cringes and pulls his elbow away.  The bite.

“What’s wrong, Dad?” Will Jr. asks.

“Nothing,” he replies.  There is no reason for them to learn about the bite now.

Reblogged from Both Eyes Book Blog:

With apologies to Sir Mix-a-Lot: Oh, my, god.  Becky, look at her book. It is so big.  She looks like, One of those writers’ girlfriends. But, you know, who understands those writers? They only talk to her, because, She looks like a dang librarian, ‘kay? I mean, that book, is just so big. I can’t believe it’s just so thick, it’s like, A tome, I mean – whoa.  Look! She’s got a stack! I like big books and I cannot lie You other bloggers can’t deny I’ve got my books stacked up in an itty bitty space And …

Pretty awesome!

-Mark Doty, The Art of Description

Distance
by Tim Fredrick

Distance can be measured
in miles, inches, feet, yards, kilometers, meters, millimeters, centimeters, light years,
and who knows what other units scientists have come up with.
They – the scientists, that is – are pretty ingenuous with that
I heard somewhere that with new technology and the ability to study distances farther and farther away, they have to make up new units of measurement.

Some units of measurement are not as science-y as others.
When you take your driver’s test,
you try to measure distance by car lengths.
We also talk of football fields being a common length of distance,
but to be honest, that’s still 100 yards,
so I’m not sure that counts in the “alternate units of measuring distance” category.

There are some pretty interesting numbers
when it comes to distance.
The sun is about 93 million miles from the Earth.
Even at that distance, if the sun were to just “go out,”
it would take a week for the Earth to reach 0 degrees Fahrenheit,
a year to get to -100 degrees Fahrenheit.
The moon is about 238,854 miles from the Earth
depending on where you measure to and from
when you do the measuring.
Paris, where you were born,
is 3626.944 miles away from NYC,
where we live now.
The place where I grew up, Glenshaw, PA,
is 312.798 miles as the crow flies,
380.812 if you have to stick to the actual roads.
My place of work is three miles from where we live,
or 5 subway stops, which is sometimes how we measure distance in the city.

You are much farther away than any of these,
laying here right next to me.
This distance has no unit of measurement.

Until the week before Christmas, that is, when I found American Pastoral at a used book stall at the Brooklyn Flea. It won the Pulitzer and that was enough for me … Well, it was also cheap and I needed a third book to receive an even bigger discount making this book effectively free. So, why not?

When I sat down to read it, I was enthralled by the voice of the narrator and how a tangential character was telling the story of the main character, Swede Levov. I found the technique that Roth was using particularly effective and, as a writer, instructive. A few chapters later, though, the narrator changes to a third person narrator who is highly mobile both in time and space, though, almost always staying “with” Swede. The narrator whizzes around telling the story of Swede’s childhood, early adult years, and – mainly – the years surrounding his daughter’s bombing of a local general store and post office in protest of the Vietnam War. This action wrests Swede out of his idealistic life as manufacturer/husband/father and thrusts him into the world of the “berserk”. The effect of such a highly mobile narrator works well with the subject matter. Just as Swede’s world becomes a whirling dervish of memories and feelings, Roth’s narrator spins a tale that keeps the reader incredibly ungrounded. The strength of the narrator is also its difficulty; the book is not an easy read and I found myself skipping parts which often lead to confusion about the time period in which the narrative was taking place.

The only other aspect of the book on which I would like to comment is the subject matter. The Vietnam War and the decades of the 1960s and 70s are not my favorite historically. But, luckily, the emotional heft of the story got me past my usual biases against that period in American history. The plight of Swede and his family is rather timeless. His journey is one of reconciling a view of the world and the people who fill it with the unrelenting reality. At one point we think our lives are going in one direction only to find out that they are indeed headed in a direction not of our choosing. As the years pass, I have begun to understand that this is the way of the world and Roth’s book masterfully brings out this universal – if not unfortunate – truth.

Oh good lord!

A very thoughtful post from my friend Anna Smith regarding what is copying and plagiarism in art and the digital age.  Definitely worth a read.