I found it,

One morning slowly pushed to shore

A sagging face hung, like the beaten tongue of an old shoe.

 Slack jawed, stretched, eighty feet, from tail to tooth,

 A new horizon of old bone.

 Today’s dinosaur.

 The sea levels must have plunged,

 When what used to be this creature was stolen from its depths,

 As though it were pulled out like ice cubes from a glass of water.

 It sleeps for now on the edge of town.

 Dwarfing my existence,

 Flush in its rot,

 The smell of gulls collecting interest,

 Circling, thrashing, at those two sad crater-sized eye sockets.

Elegant in the empress sea.

 Bankrupt on land.

 Consumed by the same gravity as me.

We stood in soft decay,

 As gnats fed for an audience

 Like eagles at a mountaintop.

Starved machines arrived

 To harvest the sea’s offering,

 Its porcelain architecture.

 Anatomy tied to a flatbed truck,

 The stationary airplane shaped skull lay

 With the ocean wind passing through it.

 Ribs clutched, interweaving together like a fist,

 A dead prison to plankton,

 Mute xylophone spine,

 And biologists wiped the blood from their glasses,

 As they climb to spoon out samples,

 While I mourned in sacrificial heat,

 Kicking red sand over leftover meat

Back into the crust.

(I just read THIS STORY and was reminded of a poem I wrote over two years ago.  These types of stories are haunting. How the rulers of the Ocean are paralyzed helpless at our feet, on our beaches. Beside the Skeleton of a Blue Whale first appeared in Inkwell Journal’s Spring 2011 issue.)  

I wept with the President when he spoke from Newtown. The dismay had anchored in me from the moment I heard the news. I watched the media play again and again the footage of those children exiting the school, screaming and confused. It made me nauseous. I watched the President speak as I sat at the edge of my bed, overwhelmed by the fact that all those little lives were robbed. I mourned the eternally brave teachers who sacrificed themselves for the sake of saving the children that they could. I mourned the devastating loss of innocence that those surviving children will have to endure. I mourned the reality that they have to face now much too soon.

As the President wiped away a tear, I cried too, because I knew that those children and those families were going to find a certain unenviable strength within themselves, surrounded by each other, in a time when it’s hard to imagine that Earth isn’t actually Hell itself.

Thinking about those parents waiting outside Sandy Hook School, praying that their child walks out alive. It’s an upsetting thought my girlfriend and I couldn’t help but imagine and grieve for.

We all know the Media is a vehicle of sensationalism. It amplifies everything into sound bytes. Through our televisions, apps, radios, papers, and magazines, we find writers and editors conducting melodrama.

Enter Stephen Marche

. 

Stephen Marche is a columnist who has attempted to re-define Sandy Hook not as a tragedy, but strictly as a mode of highlighting bad policy. In his recent article for Esquire, The Newtown Massacre Is Not A Tragedy, Marche writes:

“Tragedy, even in common speech, means an exceptional and significant death. Those adjectives do not apply to Newtown. Mother Jones has the most incredible list of America mass murders here. What it describes is a new reality, which is simply this: Mass murder has become an ordinary part of American life. The horror of the Newtown massacre is that it’s not a tragedy. It’s not exceptional. And most likely it’s not significant.”

Marche is simply hijacking this tragedy to gain exposure and readership. He’s Rush Limbaughing the spotlight. It’s pathetic that Esquire even ran such a piece.  If those children dying needlessly is not exceptional and significant than what is?

The “most incredible list of America mass murders” that Marche cites is an abridged list that leads you to believe that yes, maybe this is a new trend in America. Unfortunately, the mass murdering trend didn’t start to boom in the 1980s. Mass murders have existed ever since America was nothing but colonies freckled along the Atlantic coast.

If you want to narrow it down to just the massacres on school grounds carried out by a single person, the list can date as far back as 1927. That’s not the first massacre to take place at a school in American history but it’s certainly one of worst.

The Bath Township Massacre saw Andrew Keyhoe detonate bombs inside and outside a school in Michigan killing over 40 people. Many of the victims were young students. That’s just one of the earliest massacres on school grounds in America.

We have a long history of this type of savagery. In no way is this new reality, as Marche rails. It has always been this perversely violent. Marche’s 21st century cynicism only has so much reach. His piece could have been stronger if he wrote about how long and sick America’s historical problem with mass murders really is. And how, it is hard to have to keep naming these tragedies since they keep coming. How our mourning seems to overlap from tragedy to tragedy.

Sadly, Marche is wrong, these massacres are not at all a new American reality. They have always been a stain on the ugly portion of our American identity. America’s reality has continually dealt with the gruesome massacres that scar deep into the fabric of our history. We just forget about them faster now. We try not to but we do.

Besides trying to make a point about enacting real policy and shaking up our government to do something, I read Marche also as bringing up a good point (whether he meant to or not) about the death of our language and how we abuse it. I can agree that in our society we tend to destroy the meanings of words. If we use words like Love and Hate too often, if we apply them to too many things, they begin to lose their meaning. And yes, I agree it is possible to even lose the meaning of the word Tragedy. People love to indulge in extreme adjective sports. I do it all the time. I’m probably doing it in the piece as I write.

These days everyone is in Love with Everything and Everything is Tragic. The Best thing Ever. Or Awesome. Or Amazing.

Says Louis C.K.:

“We go right for the top shelf words now. We don’t think about how we talk. ‘Dude, this is AMAZING.’ Really, you’re amazed? By a basket of chicken wings? What are you gonna do with the rest of your life now? What is something really happens to you? What if Jesus comes down from the sky, makes love to you all night long and leaves the new living lord in your belly? What are you gonna call that. You used ‘AMAZING’ on a basket of chicken wings.”

However, when 26 people are murdered in an elementary school, I am confident in labeling that an absolute tragedy. Nothing else. Obviously Marche is trying to make a “point.” To make policies that help prevent terrible events such as these. But to what end is he making a point? His piece just comes off as offensive. As a ploy to get more people to click on his link. (Which is one reason why I didn’t want to write this, but he pissed me off too much…)

Marche trying to strip Sandy Hook of it’s unfortunate status as a Tragedy is tactless and is another part of the sensational machine that has deeply infected media. He even goes so far as to question any tears shed by anyone not directly involved by the Sandy Hook massacre. Including the president.

Why was President Obama crying when he spoke at the vigil? I don’t know, maybe he’s actually a human like the rest of us. Whether you like him or not. He also cried during his last stump speech. And also when he spoke to his campaign staff after winning a second term. Maybe, this tragedy opened up a well in him that is connected to the stress of the economy. I believe we saw him cry as a father. As a human who can empathize. That is all. I don’t find it necessary to question his tears here. Or anyone else’s.

A politician’s tears are transparent when they are being used for political benefit. The president’s tears however were motivated by nothing more than honest human sadness.

Marche writes:

“My hope is that he was crying out of shame. Because if he was crying because the children of Newtown are “our children” and this is a “tragedy,” if he was crying out of some worked-up sentimental empathy, then forget him. Really… Newtown wasn’t a tragedy; Newtown was a policy decision. We can do nothing for the children who are dead; weeping for them like they’re our own is partly ridiculous, and partly obscene.”

Rightfully so, Marche demands action from our President.  We should all demand action from every single one of our presidents. Especially when we are faced with moments like Sandy Hook. However, no amount of Government or policy or precaution can brace anyone for the unnecessary evils we face in the world. We live in a world where evil people will always find a way to be armed.

So when Stephen Marche attacks not only the president’s tears, but my own, and those of my family, and friends, and anyone else with a fucking heart, I’m insanely concerned. If I wasn’t concerned enough already about the misuse of sensational news media as our journalists seek to drain every last inch of “angle” from every disturbing story, like disaster vampires, we have Marche, a Canadian novelist, making a reckless plea against a very real urge to empathize. To be intrinsically human.

Those children do not have to be my own for me to experience utter remorse. As a writer, you think Marche would exhibit the ability to empathize. He’s worn the skins of his own characters, how could he not?

I fear that Esquire is no less prone to sensationalism than the NY Post or The National Enquirer.

Why would Esquire run a piece like this? Even as some of those families are still burying their dead. This article was published entirely for the shock value. To start Facebook comment wars. To gain followers. As much as Marche might want to bring about change in policy, to make our Government do something to stop this type of misery, it falls short. It’s insulting.

Marche sounds just as repulsive as Mike Huckabee blaming the recent events on a lack of God in our schools. “We’ve systematically removed God from our schools… should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?”

Marche sounds just as hideous as the Evangelical radio host James Dobson who said, “I mean, millions of people have decided that God doesn’t exist or he’s irrelevant to me, and we have killed 54 million babies, and the institution of marriage is right on the verge of a complete redefinition. Believe me, that is going to have consequences, too.”

These comments are right up there on the lunatic meter with John Hagee blaming Hurricane Katrina on homosexuality.

Where was Marche during the Aurora shootings? He wrote an article called, Don’t Blame the Movie, but Don’t Ignore It Either. In it, Marche only briefly touches on the idea of tragedy.

“One possible etymology of ‘tragedy’ — much debated by scholars — is ‘goat song,’ suggesting that the performance of each play followed the sacrifice of an animal.”

It’s columnists like Marche that abuse these tragedies and spin them in such a way that it boosts their audience. It is a lousy attempt to sound provocative.

Marche has a history of whoring himself to controversy. In October 2010, for Toronto’s Globe and Mail, Marche covered a mayoral race. One of the candidates was an overweight man. Marche had this to say, “The mounds of fat that encircle” the man’s “body like great deflated tires of defeat are truly unprecedented in Canadian politics.”

Surely, Marche is in it to make people feel like fools. Fools for being out of shape. Fools for mourning.

Marche even plays fortune teller in his Sandy Hook article, like a blindfolded dart player, and loosely threatens us with the next massacre in 2013 where, “at some point, a young man with severe mental health issues is going to find a way to access automatic weapons legally. He is going to go into a public place, and he is going to massacre many, many innocent people. Are we going to call that a tragedy, too? Is President Obama going to weep for them, too?”

It’s a penny prophecy from another internet drama queen. His article reads like a heavy Facebook comment. It is opinion that is meant to astonish.

No matter what policies and changes we see in the upcoming months. We will never see it coming. The persons carrying out the evils have been Army Majors. It’s been grad school students. It’s been lovers. It’s been White. Korean. It’s high school students.

In the aftermath, when we look back at the tragedy, and whatever facts we might have to make sense of it, it’s any of us. There is no rhyme.

What Marche fails to spotlight is the actual goodness that comes out of such tragedies. As hard as it is to believe, goodness does still happen. Those stories unfortunately don’t get picked up as much by the big magazines and papers. They are spread around social media by people who are sickened with the type of news and reporting and opinions that columnists like Marche write.

Youtube is flooded with people singing songs in tribute of the victims. Individuals across the country are doing 26 good deeds in honor of Sandy Hook. People are reaching out to one another. Athletes are playing games in honor of victims. Writing condolences. Remembering each victim, honoring them, and trying to ignore the media as they wave around the killer’s face on the front page.

To say that this wasn’t a tragedy is a gross interpretation. America has been witness to these types of massacres for far too long. It just always cuts deeper when children so young are involved. Marche should be embarrassed for trying to make his point in such a way. Yes, we can use this time to talk about prevention and awareness and also to help give comfort to the children that survived. And to also comfort the children who can’t help but see the news and who have questions.

Honestly, I don’t think the word “tragedy” is a strong enough definition for what happened. Nothing is. In that sense then, maybe Marche is right about Sandy Hook not being one.

- Shane Cashman

You can read Marche’s article HERE.

Sandy Hook had their own school song. A recording of the children singing it is on their website. There is no way anyone can hear this song now and not mourn the devastation.

Listen HERE.

I am very proud to be a new reader for Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading. 

This was one of the first stories I read for them. 

It’s also one of my new favorite stories! So good. Read on!

recommendedreading:

Vol. 8, No. 1

EDITOR’S NOTE

In the acknowledgments of “White Dialogues,” Bennett Sims writes that he “borrows liberally” from a few important thinkers, among them André Bazin. Before I ever read Bazin’s What is Cinema? (in college, where else), I was seduced by the audacity of this question. What do you mean, what is cinema? Cinema is motion pictures. Cinema is the movies. But then his first chapter opens with a bold idea: like a family photo album that preserves images of the dead, cinema preserves their vitalities, “mummifying change.”

Or, as Bennett Sims puts it, “Every movie is a pyramid, stuffed tight with mummies. Every movie is a mobile gallery of death masks.” You read that and, suddenly, cinema is not just the movies.

Bennett’s version of Bazin’s What is Cinema? is, What is story? What is this thing that has been, so many times, in front of your face? The answer, it would seem, is as far-reaching and complex as you’re willing to allow.

“White Dialogues,” a story that reads like film criticism or film criticism that reads like a story, is more than influenced by great ideas. It lives inside them—plays them out, gifts them the arc of discovery and application.

For its pedigree, for its language, for its length, “White Dialogues” will make people nervous. It makes me a little nervous. Because the minute you fall in love with this story, as I did, everything becomes fair game in fiction, available for the taking like it never was before. Take Hitchcock’s best film, put it in your story. Take Bazin’s best idea, put it in your story. Borrow from Roland Barthes, while you’re at it. There are no rules. This is fiction. This is story.

Halimah Marcus
Co-Editor, Electric Literature

IS THIS WORTH POSTAGE?

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Single Sentence Animation

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White Dialogues

by Bennett Sims

Recommended by Electric Literature

LISTEN TO HER, BEREYTER SAYS, as together we watch the mute woman mouthing something on the screen. Earlier this semester, the fall of what is to be my final year at the University, Bereyter accepted our cinema department’s prestigious postdoctoral fellowship, to continue his so-called groundbreaking work on white dialogues. Now, several months later, on a dismal morning in November, he is delivering a lecture on the progress of his research, addressing a scattered audience of roughly twenty people—humanities majors, graduate students, film colleagues—from a walnut lectern at the front of the darkened seminar room, down here in the basement of our historic Wolfsegg Hall. Bereyter, only in his late twenties, is a natty dresser, and for the occasion he is wearing a bone-white oxford button-down with a black cable-knit cardigan, a prep-school ensemble that—combined with the short trim of his hair, his boxy eyeglass frames, and his lean build—only serves to reinforce his precocity. That is the brazen boy-genius image he means to project: so young, and yet already he has (in his own terms) fashioned a brand-new technique of close reading, or else has (as my colleagues in the film department have put it) blown cinema scholarship wide open. I am sitting alone in the back row, in one of the room’s hideously uncomfortable desk chairs, with their stiff polyethylene seats and retractable writing surfaces. Of all the audience members, I am the only one with a lowered desktop. I have laid an opened notebook and two pens atop it, even though note-taking will be impossible. The single light source in the room is the overhead projector, a rectangular turret mounted directly above my head, where it is beaming its dazzling adit through the air: a passageway of light extends between the screen and the bulb, the movie and the room. Hundreds of dust motes can be seen fizzing around inside, sucked by some breeze toward the back row. As they approach the projector’s bulb they burn whiter, rising through the light like bubbles up a champagne neck: carbonated, candent. If I were sitting nearer to the screen, I think, I might be able to see better. That is no doubt why my colleagues have chosen the front row: there, Dzieza, Plunkett, and Guss are free to grovel at Bereyter’s feet, taking notes by the glow of the white pull-down canvas behind him. Whereas I, shrouded in secrecy and darkness at the back of the room (there are three rows separating me from the nearest person: Bereyter likely does not even realize that I am back here; Dzieza, Plunkett, and Guss likely have no idea that I am back here, listening to everything), cannot see my notebook page beneath me. Until he turns the lights back on, it will be impossible to jot down my observations, criticisms, or aporia, in preparation for the Q&A. I will have to hold them all in my head until the Q&A. That is the only reason I have come to Bereyter’s talk today: to destroy him, to disturb and destroy him, by posing unanswerable questions and merciless provocations throughout his Q&A. Earlier this morning, before he turned off the lights, I was able to copy down the few scant lecture notes that he had written on the whiteboard. The first item was a works-cited entry for Vertigo, the movie under discussion: Alfred Hitchcock, 1958, Paramount Pictures. The second was a quotation, attributed to (what I took to be) an early lip-reading manual, The Listening Eye, by Dorothy Clegg: When you are deaf, Clegg writes, Bereyter wrote (and I transcribed), you live inside a well-corked glass bottle. You see the entrancing outside world, but it does not reach you. After learning to lip read, you are still inside the bottle, but the cork has come out and the outside world slowly but surely comes in to you. The last was an aphorism of Michel Chion’s: The silent film may be called the deaf film, Chion writes, Bereyter wrote (and I transcribed), because these films gave the moviegoer a deaf person’s viewpoint on the action depicted. Listen to her, Bereyter repeats now from the lectern, his body half-turned to the white pull-down canvas behind him, one hand elegantly indicating the image onscreen. He is exhorting us to listen to the woman seated at the bar. The clip in question keeps repeating itself on a loop, the same four seconds over and over. We have now had the opportunity to witness this woman mouthing her line several dozen times. While James Stewart, seated in the foreground, peers hauntedly off-camera—hoping for a glimpse of Kim Novak—the barfly in the background mutters something to her companion, smiling demurely into her drink, teasing him (or herself?) with a coquettish roll of the eyes. She is a gray-haired woman in a dark blue suit and a matching navy beret. Whatever she is saying, her dialogue remains inaudible.

Read More

We’ve got some killer work from Danniel Schoonebeek this week up at The Paris-American. 
Visit his first of three poems HERE.

Also, Danniel runs a tumblr page that I frequent often. Sleek pictures. Interviews with writers. Meditations on language. 

Stalk him @ dannielschoonebeek.tumblr.com

Lifestyle snakes,

America’s landscapes.

Xanax passed around for the holidays.

Big October lakes amid the moonglow.

Monday night beat down skull. 36 die in

ceremony glitch.

Bears vs  Cowboys for Halloween. Wizards

celebrate the planet, alien planets,

orchestrating evidence.

Farmer eaten by his hogs

voted sexiest man, rejoices. 

 * In this installment from Poems Written By The Internet a poem is created using pieces of headlines from the front page of MSNBC between October 1st and 2nd, 2012.

Find one story from the day’s news HERE. 

Converge Aimless Arrow (From the Poems Written by the Internet Project)

Holy fuck

he’s on fire.

Still kicking.

Crushing.

They never seize. 

This beast

only preys.

I’d never let her go

like the moon.

Nothing to prove.

Anybody else have goosebumps?

                            - written by the Internet & conducted by Shane Cashman

* This project consists of poems that are made up of exact lines, words, and or fragments collected from Youtube video comments.  Each poem pulls from one specific video. Poems will be named after their respective Youtube videos. 

** Everyday is a day less that I have to wait for the new Converge album. I’m beyond stoked I get to see them October 12th in New Britain, CT. And my friends in Living Laser are opening! Fall is good. 

John Coltrane Spiritual

A tribute to the energies

call it chaotic

that ladder to the upper land

the world in its disordered parts

 keep your definition

celestial

    - written by the Internet, conducted by Shane Cashman

* This project will consist of poems that are made up of exact lines, words, and or fragments collected from Youtube video comments.  Each poem pulls lines from one specific video. Poems will be named after their respective Youtube videos. 

Cat Sitting Relaxed

It’s not a wire, it’s a flea collar.

He sits voluntarily.

Masturbation.

I’ve been there

for slaughter and sale

in school lunches.

Monsters.

What am I doing with my life?

                 (Pls check out my channel I need comment abt my singing.)

You should know this

cat is famous

in Japan.

    - written by the Internet & conducted by Shane Cashman

 * This project will consist of poems that are made up of exact lines, words, and or fragments collected from Youtube video comments.  Each poem pulls lines from one specific video. Poems will be named after their respective Youtube videos. 

** Also, this cat has a blog - HERE

Gangnam Style

Anyone else see the lady

wearing the sunglasses?

I, like the guy in the cowboy hat, have

that random urge to get up and dance.

I have never eaten a dog

or cat -

invisible horse

civilized in the USA.

I speak Chinese and English. 

I think most people would agree with me.

People

eat

birds.

Weird shit.

Calm down.

You still have

a lot to understand. 

     In  this world there’s a hidden meaning. You obviously need

to be punched in the cunt

and I have no dick.

    - written by the Internet & conducted by Shane Cashman

* This project will consist of poems that are made up of exact lines, words, and or fragments collected from Youtube video comments.  Each poem pulls lines from one specific video. Poems will be named after their respective Youtube videos.