Anger begins with folly and ends with repentance – Pythagoras
I’m no stranger to anger – I’m not proud of this – but I’ve poured beers over people’s heads, assaulted deaf heaven with bootless cries, smashed my brothers’ model of the human skeleton on a hardwood floor and shoved each individual bone beneath the door of his judiciously locked bedroom.
Even though I was much, much younger than Will Smith when I committed these examples of Deadly Sin Number Six, I can relate to rashness, the fire in the veins that short-circuits the pauser reason, the anger-spawned and awful daring of a moment’s surrender, the explosion, the exhilaration, but also the subsequent miasma of guilt-ridden regret, which, if you’re like me, might suddenly rise to consciousness a half century later and make you cringe as you recall your lack of human decency.
At least, in my case, my acts of assholedom weren’t caught on camera, much less viewed by millions. It’s bad enough reliving grainy reruns in my memory.[1]
Will Smith, on the other hand . . .
At any rate, I find it much easier to forgive the slap than the subsequent speech, which I heard live, a shameful, weepy, entitled, excuse-ridden justification that quoted the Gospels as Smith claimed to aspire to be a “vessel of love.”
No, man, that was some Old Testament smiting shit you were throwing down. For your own good, embrace shame because it serves you right to suffer. Take a month off, read Crime and Punishment or the Brothers Karamazov.
Uh-oh, my prose is starting to rhyme, which means it’s time to shut the-you-know-what up.
Nighty night. Until next time, indulgent readers.
[1] I realize many of my fellow Lefties believe we shouldn’t be talking about Will Smith’s bitch-slapping Chris Rock when there’s more serious badness afoot: to wit, a coup sparked by a President and partly organized by a Supreme Court Justice’s whacko wife, who later cajoled the White House’s chief-of staff to overthrow the election, not to mention the Ukraine horrorshow, tactical nukes, WW3, etc. etc.
But, hey, the Academy Award assault is interesting, worth contemplating, fun to talk about. I’m a big fan of Chris Rock, a fellow South Carolinian who has described our home state as “the dirt road not taken.” I didn’t dig his getting backhanded. Anyway, all existential angst and no schadenfreude makes Wesley/Rusty a dull [mannish] boy. Or, as the Underground Man puts it, “I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.”
For example, I don’t love a dog merely because it’s a dog, don’t love a baby because it’s merely a baby. Loving something just because in falls into category strikes me as indiscriminate.
Oh, look at baby Putin, he’s so adorable. Coochie Coochie Coo, Vladimir.
On the other hand, I have loved and do love individual dogs like Jack, Sally, Bessie, Saisy, Milo, Cosmo, Daisy, and KitKat because they cool, not because they merely possess four legs, sport fur, and love you unconditionally if you feed them and offer them the scantest attention.[1] I don’t love babies because they’re supposedly innocent or cute or whatever. I love babies with personality, party babies, babies with soul. Like this one:
Grandson Julian
If you don’t like dogs – and some people don’t – it’s probably not a great idea to announce it on your Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles.[2] For whatever reason, where I live dogs have risen in status approaching the parental love levels of demi-human.[3] Sometimes. it seems to me that people who bring their dogs to bars consider their dogs alter egos, like the dog is an extension of themselves, a walking scarf, as it were. I suspect that some dog owners work all day and feel obligated to drag their shepherds and Boykins to Chico Feo or Lowlife for a modicum of stimulation and companionship for the dog while the owners seek human contact and alcohol.
Unfortunately, today I had unpleasant encounters with three bar dogs. The first one, one of these ubiquitous poodle mixes (perhaps a waddle waddle doodle doodle) was lying underneath my stool and looked up beseechingly and me, so I addressed him as if he were human, saying something along the lines of, “How you doing, Buddy Roe,” and he immediately growled at me, showing his teeth. His owner, a dour faced woman eating an exotic dish, didn’t chide the dog, so I said to it testily, raising my hands with palms pushing outward, “End of conversation, canine.”
A bit later as I was leaving, my passage was blocked by two straining spaniels on leashes, held by an attractive smiling blonde, and when I tried to slide past them, they barked aggressively.
I stopped and addressed the dogs. “Look,” I said, “I come to this bar practically every day. This is my territory.” Then glanced at the woman and said, “I’m serious.”
A Dear Abby suggestion: If you’re gonna bring belligerent dogs to restaurants, sit in a corner.
On the way home, the light was beautiful as I walked down Cooper to Hudson to take KitKat out to pee, which she did indeed, happy but not overjoyed to see me.
The cat, on the other hand, hangs with me in the study, now asleep he is, curled up like a black, hairy caterpillar. No way I’m ever taking him to a bar.
[1] I’m a slack ass grammarian and lazy to boot, so I omitted the verb here because most of the dogs are dead, though a couple are alive, and I didn’t want to clutter the sentence with the verbs “were” and “are” as in “because they are and were cool.” I could have used “be” as in “they be cool.” But you really don’t need it:
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
[2] Donald Trump isn’t into dogs, not to mention not being into his son Barron, or whatever his name is. Some people consider not liking dogs a character flaw, but I don’t. Not liking your son is a different matter. Trump’s father doesn’t seem to have loved him, which reminds me of these lines from Larkin:
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
[3] Parental here means ownership. Dogs have become like offspring, especially for single people, which is fine.
I believe that old folks, senior citizens, golden-agers, stooped shufflers – whatever you want to call them – tend to project their mental and bodily decay on the world at large, which leads them to disparage the present and overpraise “the good ol’ days.” Of course, their parents did the same, derided those good ol’ days we fondly look back on as doom-ladened even as they themselves waxed nostalgic about World War II or the Great Depression.[1]
And I can’t help but wonder if this tendency might have something to do with moon-faced Vladimir Putin’s waging war on Ukraine as he nostalgically looks back on the post-Stalinist era of his youth, on good ol’ Nikita banging on a UN desk with his shoe, a lapse of protocol that makes Marjorie Taylor Greene’s and Lauren Boebert’s screeching during Biden’s the State of the Union address seem downright urbane.
The 60s, the good ol’ days
owning the libs
Putin wants to restore the Soviet Empire, a project not unlike restoring the Blade Runner set. Look, I spent twenty-eight days in the Soviet Union in 1989, and I’d never witnessed a population more depressed, especially in Leningrad where virtually every face I encountered was stamped with despair.
If you’d like, you can click HERE for a side trip that offers more specifics on the despair.
Ah, yes, 1989, fun times in the Evil Empire
To be fair, Putin did a fairly good job of fostering a middle class, even in a Kleptocracy, that is, up to now.
At any rate, Putin is suffering from some malady, perhaps Parkinson’s, as his shuffling gate and clenched fist suggest, or perhaps he’s had a stroke. At any rate, he’s obviously on steroids, and some have even suggested his belligerence is rooted in “roid rage.”
What’s the diagnosis? Immunosuppression, metastatic cancer, frontal lobe tumour, steroid abuse, other autoimmune disease, Botox with fillers, Parkinson’s disease, dementia, tertiary syphilis with delusions of grandeur & Hitler fixation, psychosis or simply NFP (Normal For Putin)? pic.twitter.com/MGuuUE8p4T
Given the six-thousand nukes he has at his disposal, it’s pretty damned scary. I remember in the fourth-grade squatting under desks during the Cuban Missile Crisis in duck and cover drills[2].
Now, with my bad back and aching knees, I’m not sure I’m capable of squatting, so let’s pray –if we pray and hope if we don’t – that Putin shows some restraint. He does, I hear, have to daughters via his first wife and four more with a mistress, an Olympic gold medalist gymnast, who, no doubt, is very adept at squatting.
I’ve been devoting un-precious moments of my wee-hour insomnia thinking about Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
[Swoosh]
He’s lying on his back in a crib or cradle kicking his little legs and waving his little arms.
Grandmother, Mother, and Baby Putin
[Swoosh]
He’s in middle school, pasty and sawed-off[1], targeted by bullies who stink of B.O and Turkish cigarettes.[2]
[Swoosh]
Now, he’s sitting at the end of a table, a fifth of an American football field[3] from his nearest underling.
(Photo by Alexei Nikolsky\TASS via Getty Images)
In a recent NYT op-ed piece. Madeleine Albright, who spent three hours with Putin when she was Clinton’s secretary of state, described him as “reptilian.”
Exhibit A
Exhibit B
Exhibit C
So obviously something went terribly wrong with him somehow, somewhere.
He claims to have revered his parents, so they must have loved him – or maybe not.
A bad seed?
I bet it’s complicated.
Then end product is overcompensation. Why all the overcompensation?
Overcompensation, micro and macro.
Micro: Judo black belts, bare-chested horsemanship.
Macro: Resurrecting the former Soviet Union.
In the irrational pre-dawn of my depressive sleeplessness, it seems we’re regressing, devolving, that even in the US democracy is disappearing.[4]
Meanwhile, In Ukraine, babies lie on their backs, kick their little legs, wave their little arms.
[2] I spent twenty-eighty days in June of ’89 in the Soviet Union. Anonymous high rises galore, the stench of Turkish cigarettes, shuffling pedestrians everywhere looking down at the sidewalk.
Putin’s citizens are more prosperous, less woebegone. He’s popular, especially among the countryfolk, c.f. Trump
[3] Approx. twenty yards, two first downs, i.e., 18.288 meters, give or take a centimeter or two.
[4] Folk wisdom insists “that just before daylight is the darkest hour.”
When I first started writing as an adult, around 1978, publishing short fiction was very difficult.[1] Hotshot quarterlies like The Georgia Review received a thousand manuscripts a month, and of those three thousand submissions, they’d publish maybe two an issue. Stephen Corey, one of its editors in those days, told me if the story didn’t grab a reader’s attention in the first paragraph, it was tossed in the “thanks-for-submitting-your-manuscript-but-it-doesn’t-meet-our-needs” pile.
Fortunately, my home state of South Carolina has an Arts Commission that provides writers chances for publication. I was fortunate to be selected to participate in a workshop led by Blanche McCrary Boyd. We met once a week for six weeks or so, and I learned a helluva lot about technique, but on the less positive side of the ledger, I discovered that my writing was no great shakes. Jo Humphreys, Lee Robinson, Starkey Flythe Jr., and William Baldwin were among the participants. It was humbling –disillusioning in the positive sense that – poof – an illusion had disappeared.
It was through the Arts Commission that I published my first story “Airwaves,” which was later anthologized by the Hub City Press. Encouraged, I started sending manuscripts out to literary journals I’d cull from the Fiction Writer’s Market published by Reader’s Digest Books, a pre-internet storehouse of possibilities.
One journal that caught my eye was a quarterly out of Richmond, Virginia, the New Southern Literary Messenger. They, according to the entry, received 140-150 submissions per month and published five. The pay was meager, $10, 6 copies, and a free subscription. So, I sent them a story entitled “Almost Blue,” my latest.
It took them so long to get back to me that I had forgotten I had submitted it. In fact, I’d gotten full-time teaching job in the meantime and had more or less given up writing.
I’ll never forget reaching in my mailbox in Rantowles, pulling out the acceptance letter, and doing a little jig of joy. They wanted me to provide a photograph and write a first-person bio. Of course, I was ll too happy to comply.
I crowed, I boasted, informed my parents and in-laws and my new bosses at Porter-Gaud. After all, Edgar Allen Poe had once been an editor of the [Old] Southern Literary Messenger!
I should have been more careful reading the entry in the Writer’s Market, for example, that the journal was 5×8 with card stock cover.
Here’s a Xerox reproduction of the last page. To say I was disappointed at the layout would be an understatement.
My poor parents, my poor in-laws, my poor wife. The Georgia Review this was not.
So now that I’m finally publishing my first novel, I have some trepidation about the quality of the product, but so far so good. I received the preliminary proofs this week, and the editors had gone through the manuscript with [awkward attempt at avoiding a cliché alert] a cootie comb, and with David Boatwright doing the cover, I’m confident that the book itself will be high quality.
The quality of the writing, however, I’m still not so sure about.
A Cootie Comb
[1] It’s still very difficult, but a bit less so with so many on-line journals out there nowadays.
Senator Mike Fair, the carefree hypochondriac, has successfully struck a clause from cutting edge South Carolina’s not-so-new new science standards as the Modular Home State continues to lead the nation in embracing the concept of a 1st Century AD classroom.
This educational apostasyphilosophy, according to Senator Fair, will prepare students for the most profound challenge they will face in the upcoming century, i.e., avoiding an eternity of everlasting perdition, “torture without end [. . .] a fiery deluge, fed with ever-burning sulphur (sic) unconsumed,” as the 17th Century astro-physicist John Milton put it.[1]
Here is the controversial clause in question:
Conceptual Understanding: Biological evolution occurs primarily when natural selection acts on the genetic variation in a population and changes the distribution of traits in that in that population over multiple generations.
Not so fast, says broad-minded Baptist Fair: “To teach natural selection is the answer to origins is wrong. I don’t have a problem with teaching theories. I don’t think it should be taught as fact.”[2]
In agreement with Fair is state Superintendent of Education Mick Zais, a Darwinian doubter who for some odd reason introduced forensic chemistry into Newberry College’s college curriculum when he served as president. “This has been going on in South Carolina for quite some time,” Zais noted. “We ought to teach them both sides and let students draw their own conclusions.[3]
Actually, Dr. Zais’s idea of teaching the theory of evolution vis a vis with creation mythsscience has already been implemented in a few avant garde Upcountry independent schools in the state. Your commentator has obtained an exclusive copy of a comparison/contrast essay by a senior at Pitchfork Ben Tillman Christian Academy.
***
Skinner Hodges Mrs. Tammy Jean Weektee English IllI Febuary 2014 A.D.
For the six thousand years man has walked the planet
earth, they have been arguing about how this God-Created
miracle of a planet came to be. And we are not only talking
about people, that are saved, but about pagean people, too.
That being the case, it is not, we reckon, not all that
surprising that people are still arguing about this topic.
This six-weeks we have been studying two different
versions of creation. The scientific and biblical versions.
The scientific version is based on human observation, that
is often faulty, and the Biblical version is based on the
unerrant Word of God. This paper using the block method
will compare and contrast the two theories.
First, the scientific theory, which is full of holes. According
to this, out of nowhere this bigbang spit stars that cooled
and somehow or other little cells popped up on earth,
started dividing and over a ridiculous long period of time
ended up being monkeys that ended up being man. Not to
mention they haven’t found a missing link to prove any of
this.
The Biblical theory is that the Lord created the world and
all of its creatures. This makes more sense. First, the world
did not come from nothing, which even a special education
kid could tell you makes no sense, but from the Hand of the
Almighty. Adam and Eve started out as people, not as
germs and viruses, who could walk upright in the garden
from Day 1. Add to this that this version does not come
from the faulty observations of Fallen Man but from the
Mouth of the Almighty by way of Its servant Moses.
In conclusion. We live in a free country. You’re free to
believe in evolution if you like or in the Biblical version.
The facts, though, speak for themselves.
A+
Great job Skinner. Almost perfect, except that “Six Weeks” should be in capitols because it refers to a specific school-related period of time
***
In other good news, Governor Hayley is expected to sign the bill allowing patrons to bring their firearms into bars without their having to go through training or criminal background checks.
[2] When self-proclaimed right-thinking leftist Pointee Head questioned if Fair, a product of SC schools, could actually read, given that the above clause says nothing about “origins,” he was easily squashed by Fair’s Churchillian sally, “Hey, if I can’t read, how did I get a football scholarship to USC?”
[3] The “naked” this in above sentence doesn’t refer to sex education but to “not believing in science.” Dr. Zais believes students should receive abstinence only sex education and that students should not be aware that condoms even exist because sometimes letting students “see both sides” and “draw their own conclusions” can lead to eternal damnation.
Bill Thompson, prolific reviewer, travel writer, and retired editor of the Post Courier Arts and Leisure section has written a profile of me that features my art and upcoming novel Today, Oh Boy.
In 1989, the South Carolina Fiction Project selected my story “An Invasion of Tourists” as one of twelve short stories to be published in Columbia, South Carolina’s daily newspaper, The State. The story, written in second person, dramatizes a male twenty-something’s encounter with two very strange bar patrons who seem not only foreign, but downright alien, and by alien, I mean alien in the extra-terrestrial sense:
There’s another woman, but something’s not quite right about her. In a tropical print sundress, she’s practically catatonic. Her eyes are fluorescent green, very far apart and don’t blink. Slowly, she picks up her banana daiquiri, cocks her head, and laps it up with a flickering tongue.
You stare in disbelief. She looks at you and smiles stupidly. “Hello,” she says, “how goes it, amigo?” Her voice is fresh, friendly, but somehow mechanical, like the voice on your Portuguese Made Easy records.
[snip]
“Where y’all from?’
“Q.”
“Queue? Where’s that?”
“Just around the corner from Tri-Alpha 6.”
They’re smiling like his and hers ventriloquist dummies. You manage to muster a fake laugh as the jukebox engages. Pop-a-top, pop-a-top, pop-a-top. Reggae. Bob Marley.
“Excuse us,” they say in unison and head for the small, tiled rectangle that serves as a dance floor. Like exotic birds, they go through elaborate steps, a mirror image mating dance. Then shoulder-to- shoulder, back-to-back, butt-to-butt, they shimmy, like two people with terrible itches.
“What’s the scoop on those two?” you ask the bartender.
“Beats me,” he says, “but they sure can do the Dorsal.”
As the story progresses, the unnamed protagonist sees more and more evidence of an intergalactic incursion. For example, the lead story on the eleven o’clock news is unexplained lights hovering over cars on I-26. After a sleepless night, he drives to the television station to share his story with the anchor. There he encounters a teenager convinced he’s also seen an extraterrestrial. The kid looks crazed, so the protagonist decides to bail.
You’ve called in sick. Deservedly so. You’re shook. You came within a heartbeat of making an utter fool of yourself. You can’t believe that you’d ever fall a victim of mass hysteria. With so little sleep, your memory is even more suspect than usual. Probably her tongue wasn’t as long as it seemed yesterday. Maybe she was wearing contacts that made her eyes that color.
Maybe you’re going insane.
You head out to the beach for rest and relaxation. You’ll swim, exhaust yourself, and go home for 18 hours or so of sleep.
Food. You haven’t eaten. Food will make you feel better. So you pull into Frankie’s Place, a rundown joint on the front beach. Seated on the deck with a salt breeze blowing, you feel better already. Frank, a fat, freckled, tattooed ex-Marine brings you out a cold one.
How’s business,” you ask.
“Great,” he says. “Tourists are flocking in from everywhere.”
“Do you get many from Tri-Alpha 6,” you ask, as if he’s your pal, as if it’s an inside joke.
“Huh?”
“Tri-Alpha 6.”
“What’s that? A fraternity?”
You don’t answer him.
As he waddles off, he shakes his head as if to say, “Give me a break.”
You turn to look out over the ocean, half hoping to see one flashing over the horizon, but there’s nothing, not even a cloud in the sky.
***
Well, brothers and sisters, yesterday I had a real-life strange encounter, though not quite as disorienting as the one in the short story.
I was walking my dog to the end of the unpaved road where I live (see above). A grey medium-sized SUV slowly made its way towards us and stopped. An elderly woman on the passenger side rolled down her window, and the driver, another grey-haired woman, leaned towards the steering wheel so I could make eye contact with both. They didn’t look like aliens from another planet but like characters in a David Lynch movie, corny and blandly friendly in a creepy, Trumanshowesque[1] sort of way.
“We just have a question,” the passenger said in a vowel-deprived Midwestern accent.
“Ask away.”
“What’s behind these houses? Marshes?”
“Yes,” I replied. “Marshes and the Folly River.”
“A river?” the driver asked. “There’s a river back there?” Her tone was incredulous.
“Yes, ma’am, a river.”
“But what are those long things jutting out? Flat wooden things projecting outwards. It looks like you could walk on them.”
“They’re docks,” I said, somewhat taken aback, wondering what planet they were from.
“Docks!” They seemed flabbergasted.
The passenger said, “You mean you can have boats back there?”
“Yes, ma’am. It’s deep water. You could take a boat out of there and sail all the way to Lisbon, Portugal.”
The passenger said, “We’re not from around here.”
I laughed. “I’d never guess with those accents of yours.”
They were beaming.
“Where are you from?”
“St. Louis.”
I mentioned going to see the Braves play at Busch stadium when my boys were young.
“We’re Cardinal fans,” they said, almost apologetically.
“No shit Sherlock,” I thought, but instead said, “I got to see Ozzie Smith do his backflip.”
They both smiled genuine smiles. They knew who Ozzie Smith was, which came as a relief.
(You may have heard that during the Battle of the Bulge, army units would quiz each other at checkpoints with baseball trivia after they learned that German spies, wearing US uniforms and speaking perfect American English, were attempting to infiltrate the lines.)
I showed them where to turn around (it’s a dead end road) and bid them goodbye. Twenty minutes later, as I was walking to Lowlife for my afternoon constitutional, they passed me without waving, puttering along about fifteen miles an hour.
When I told the tale to my pal Jeremy at Lowlife,” he said. “Haven’t they seen movies? There are docks in movies. St Louis is on the Mississippi, for chrissakes. They must have seen a dock before.”
He added, waving and nodding, “I would have said, ‘good day’ and walked away.
“Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.” ― Henry Louis Gates Jr.
“[. . .] and above it the mouthing of orators, the arse-belching of preachers.” – Ezra Pound, “Canto XIV”
Okay, so we don’t want to ban AK-47s because that would be unbarring the door of tyranny. On the other hand, we don’t want our precious, delicate children exposed to depressing historical events like the Native American genocide, slavery, the Holocaust – perhaps even Sandy Hook – because the truth might make them feel uncomfortable.
I’ll tell you what made me feel uncomfortable when I was teaching: crouching under a Harkness table stifling a fart with my AP Lit students during a live shooter drill.
And, O, my Brothers and Sisters, we read many a bannable book in those AP classes.
Oedipus Rex – parricide, incest, sacrilege
The Canterbury Tales – vulgarity, profanity, nudity, plagues
Hamlet – fratricide, adultery, vulgarity, a corpse-strewn stage
Crime and Punishment – murder, prostitution, crushing poverty, alcoholism
Madame Bovary – serial adultery, suicide, insanity
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – atheism, masturbation, prostitution, adolescent rebellion
The Sound and the Fury – promiscuity, suicide, racial epithets, abject cruelty
The Song of Solomon – premarital sex, vulgar language, murder
The Hand Maid’s Tale – dystopia, sexism, theocratic cruelty
And that’s not even considering the poetry we read.
Crazy Jane Talks to the Bishop
I met the Bishop on the road And much said he and I. `Those breasts are flat and fallen now Those veins must soon be dry; Live in a heavenly mansion, Not in some foul sty.’
`Fair and foul are near of kin, And fair needs foul,’ I cried. ‘My friends are gone, but that’s a truth Nor grave nor bed denied, Learned in bodily lowliness And in the heart’s pride.
`A woman can be proud and stiff When on love intent; But Love has pitched his mansion in The place of excrement; For nothing can be sole or whole That has not been rent.’
. . . either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral . . .
Polonius, Hamlet, 2.2
First, as cliché demands, the good news: my novel Today, Oh Boy has been accepted for publication, which, of course, delights me. Already my mind is running riot with unreasonable aspirations. No, I’m not dreaming of PEN awards or Pulitzers. We’re talking commercial fiction here, a narrative devoid of deeper meanings, a plot concocted to distract, not to enlighten. No, I’m not rehearsing acceptance speeches but wondering who is going to play the protagonist Rusty in the Hula Netflix TNT USA Network Apple TV adaptation.
You know of any skinny redheaded sixteen-year-old actors with acne?
And now the potentially bad news. The publisher (who shall remain anonymous for now) has classified the novel as Young Adult. Here’s a quote from the acceptance letter:
“The characters fit nicely into their setting, embodying the south of the past and making the story stand out against a typical high school drama. The Board was keen to comment on the dynamic writing style and believes the story has the potential to excel within its genre.”
But the thing is, I wrote Today, Oh Boy for literate adults, not for tweens. Here’s a sentence from the novel describing one of the characters, AJ, who has cut school in the middle of the day and just finished smoking a joint with his dropout friend Will Waring:
“While Will has been daydreaming and tuning out his mother, Weeza has been quizzing AJ about his dismissal from school, essentially perp-walking his thoughts right out of lotus land into the dingy confines of a Raskolnikovian closet.”
Of course, I know whoever the editor might be will definitely ax “Raskolnikovian closet” because no tween or teen (or typical adult for that matter) has read Crime and Punishment and therefore won’t recognize the allusion to its agoraphobic protagonist pent up in his impoverished toilet stall of a rented room. But, hey, I like the way it sounds.[1] Read it aloud: Rask-KOL-ni-KOV-ian closet.
And to add insult to injury, I don’t dig YA novels, have only read a handful because I taught 7th and 8th grades in my earlier teaching career. Although well-crafted, The House on Mango Street and The Giver aren’t up my alley. I’m not an admirer of To Kill a Mockingbird for that matter.
I’ll admit, though, that Today is difficult to classify. In one sense, it’s historical fiction because it takes place in a real place, Summerville, SC, in the year 1970, which in the Hula Netflix TNT USA Network Apple TV adaptation will require period clothing and vintage automobiles.
In another sense, it’s a souped-up Greek comedy sans chorus: it takes place in one day and essentially in one setting with continuous action.
It’s got a gruesome death, stolen goods, drug use, kung-fu fighting, and a highspeed chase.
So, what are we dealing with here? A historical-romance-Greek Comedy-Mystery-Action Adventure?
If it were up to me, and I was forced to ram into a sub-genre, I’d call it Pulp YA.
If I had self-published, I could have had full autonomy, but now my brainchild is under the authority of others. They say they’ll work with me, but the contract also makes it clear that they have the final say-so. Chances are Today, Oh Boywon’t be sporting the cover below when you buy it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or better yet, from your local independent bookstore.
[1] I did read the Classic Illustrated version of C&P when I was ten or so and didn’t enjoy it.
You Do Hoodoo 