New York Press, Paper Magazine, Workabells, Los Angeles Times, No News Today, Penguin Blog, Work Wonders, 12th Street, The Believer, Vice, and The Seventh Wave
The Seventh Wave: Claim + Thesis = Evidence
(02/19/2015)
The Something Something of Power. I was fulfilling a requirement at Hampshire College. Hampshire is a hotbed for creative and political thinking; I was only there for the creative. The course was sought after, and didn’t look too terribly painful. Michael Klare, the professor, is/was a highly regarded activist, author and political thinker. The course would explore the dynamics of power, policy making, the manipulation of democratic populations, and the history of civil disobedience in the United States—from the workers unions and the labor clashes of the early twentieth century to the non-violent resistance of the late 60s.
The class was held in a giant lecture hall—even though there weren’t that many of us. I sat way in the back. From the high seats, I looked down, absorbing the material from a distance, participating as necessary, and studying Michael Klare for my outside-of-class Michael-Klare impression—he had a distinct hand-waving mannerism, and overused the word “vis.”…
Believer: Something Witchy for Leslie Van Houten
(05/16/2014)
…I’ve been thinking about Martha as part of a longer piece about my grandparents. My grandmother, with Munchausen by Proxy, killed four or five people—mostly by accident, but still. (My experience with the police—I’ve talked to them—is not exactly CSI.) One victim was her husband (her second husband, who was terminally ill, and took a very sudden turn for the worse), one was her lover (he was younger than her, in his 70s, not 80s, but he kept breaking limbs, and after Grandma’s series of several frantic calls about the level of care he required, he dropped dead), and two were her children. Martha and Norman. Or, well, I shouldn’t blame Grandma entirely. Martha died of melanoma, which doesn’t usually kill people (though Grandma may have cared for her to death), and Norman died in a scuba diving accident.
To explain: Grandma didn’t want Norman to go diving that day, but he had already put money down for the boat (scuba diving is very expensive), and he insisted on going, so she poisoned him, probably with prescription pills (but it could have been vitamins, she had been a nutritionist), and then when he went anyway he made a fatal miscalculation (he waited, um, on the sea floor, for help).
Should I say that my brother, my mother, my wife and I all believe this, but hope to be mistaken? My parents were very young when they had me, and until I was old enough to care for myself, Grandma would take me in for weeks at a time, and at Grandma’s I’d be amazed by this unusual thing that happened, which I assumed happened to everyone. Sometimes I would sleep for 48 hours straight. Also, a few times in the middle of the night, maybe half a dozen, I had trouble breathing, and Grandma had to rush me to the hospital…
12th Street: Who Is Your Audience?
(04/17/2013)
12th Street ran a series on this. I contributed an equation, which tracks who one’s audience is through the drafting process:
“Audience Equations for Myself (and/or anyone who is interested (in terms of a something intended for publication)).”
Draft 0: Taking notes, not sure what it is, experimenting, etc.
Audience = self. (No rules, no boundaries, no structure, no worries. Not all projects have this draft; if you can, begin at “draft 1″)
Draft 1: A draft is defined as a whole unto itself: it can be read through and it more or less makes sense; a writer usually gets about five of these before the project loses focus…
Work Wonders
(06/20/2012)
Matt (Lenski) and I worked on these in 2004. We had 30-second and 45-second versions of each.
2021 update: oh, hmm, here they are in a google folder, too.
Penguin Books Blog: Outro, All the World’s a Grave
(02/11/2012)
GIST
It is assumed by most of us that Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist in the world …. But take the poetry and the incredible psychological insight away and you have artificial plots that were not Shakespeare’s own to start with, full of improbable coincidence and carelessly hurried fifth-act denouements. —Anthony Burgess
Shakespeare’s flaws, if unspoken, are self-evident enough. Padded lines. Tangential subplots. Absurd dramatic turns. Interminable speeches. Character and narrative boilerplates. A limited number of dialogue modes: the hero, the fool, the low-birthed, the villain; comedy, drama, exposition….
Vice: My Grandma the Poisoner
(02/09/2012)
When I was four or five, sometimes I’d walk into my grandmother’s bedroom to find her weeping. She’d be sitting on the side of the bed, going through boxes of tissues. I don’t believe this was a side of herself she shared with other people; she may have felt we had a cosmic bond because I had her father’s name as my middle name and his fair features. She was crying for Martha, her daughter, who died of melanoma at the age of 28. Ten years later, after Norman—her youngest child, my uncle—died, also at 28, she would weep for him.
People were always dying around Grandma—her children, her husbands, her boyfriend—so her lifelong state of grief was understandable. To see her sunken in her high and soft bed, enshrouded in the darkness of the attic, and surrounded by the skin-and-spit smell of old age, was to know that mothers don’t get what they deserve. Today, when I think back on it, I don’t wonder whether Grandma got what she deserved as a mother; I wonder whether she got what she deserved as a murderer…
No News Today: Ergonomic Armageddon
(01/31/2012)
Robert,
John Reed here. I stumbled across this article in the “Asia Pacific Coalition on Male Sexual Health” (don’t ask), and it seemed to me that the disclosure, a rather significant one to all men with testicles, warranted more attention than academic publication, and the oblivion of a subscription wall. Maybe we could post until they ask us to take it down? See if someone picks up the story?
Admiration, John….
Los Angeles Times: Summer reading: John Reed on ‘The Dark Knight Returns’
(12/07/2010)
Jacket Copy: Do you remember reading a book or books during a specific summer?
John Reed: A few things, I can tell. I can usually tell a martial arts guy: he’ll have a look like ‘I could move a lot faster, but it hurts too much.’ And, probably related because a lot of martial arts guys were abused as children — or are living something down — I can tell when someone had an alcoholic parent. Sometimes takes a bit, but that will usually reveal itself — a person too good, too facilitating, probably as he or she had to be through childhood. I didn’t learn that at Al-Anon, no doubt the better course, I learned that in the arts. I grew up in the artworld, stayed somewhat, and have added in a writer crowd. Nothing more obvious — ‘I was a neglected child’ — than that smiling schmuck author shot. There’s one of me on the back flap of my first book.
Which brings me to the two types of schmucks. 1) The kind that cares what other people think. 2) The kind that doesn’t.
It was while reading ‘The Dark Knight Returns,’ Frank Miller’s update of the Batman legacy, that I realized my life, or the quest of my life, would be to transform myself from the first kind of schmuck to the second. I haven’t always succeeded, and I still rip my shirt off my back three times a week, but I think my development as an author — from Civil War love story (‘A Still Small Voice’) to ‘Tales of Woe,’ twenty-five true stories that just get worse — shows progress….
Workabells
(06/30/2005)
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Paper Magazine: Valentine
(02/14/2004)
As published in Paper Magazine, 2004:
When I follow him I am always three steps behind. He is too young for fatherhood. His strides are long, and I run two steps for each step I walk. I have no time to stop, but I do. She is holding the hand of her grandmother. They seize the marble floor of the Metropolitan with prim, crisp footfalls. They are not from my part of town, or the city, even. The girl has blue eyes. Her hair rides her shoulders, catches on the blue wool of her coat. I can see she wears plaid tights. I know her—the ones like her—she sits at the head of the class, she knows the answers. She organizes her pencils into plastic satchels that zip. I am tattered and thin. My jeans are worn-thru at the knees and the heels. My jean jacket has a lining of clumpy fake fleece, and an unraveling corduroy collar. My eyes are brown and humorless. She is serious too, and only fleetingly narrows her eyes in my direction—but her ample cheeks seduce me.
New York Press: Kill All Artists
(02/20/2003)
“A Modest Disposal”
Jail all living artists. Elvis stays.
The recent Supreme Court ruling on copyright extension gives culture less incentive than ever to support artistic endeavors. The Supreme Court’s Jan. 15 decision to uphold the 1998 Sonny Bono Act extends copyright to life of the creator plus 70 years, and 95 years for corporate copyrights. Designed to withhold Mickey Mouse from the public domain, the extension has been sold as a way to reward artists for their creations. But since copyrights on revenue-generating works are rarely held by artists or their families, this can’t be viewed as the Act’s primary intention, which is to increase the value of copyrights already maintained by corporations. …