The Missouri Review

I just read an article on newly discovered sea creatures that reminds me of a wonderful little essay by Lewis Thomas. The essay’s titled “Seven Wonders.” Everybody should read it. It appears in Lewis’s collection, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, a title that fits rather nicely with our latest List of the Week.

My first encounter with “Seven Wonders” was as an undergraduate at Southeast Missouri State University in a class taught by Dr. Gaskins, an insightful writer and writing center director who years later would chair my thesis committee. I’m grateful he made our class read it. It’s a list essay, and in the spirit of the list, here are three reasons “Seven Wonders” is remarkable. 

For one, it’s a great example of personal writing supported by science (or would it be science decorated with personal writing?) — a tricky negotiation, as anyone who’s graded freshman composition essays will agree. The blending of evidence with opinion is elegant, and the authority steering the piece is unquestionable. Absent altogether are the usual gear-stripping shifts between what the author knows from personal observation and what is known to science at large.

For two, it’s a refreshing example of a literary artifact by a writer who’s into more than just being a writer and doing writerly things. Why refreshing? Because a lot of writers nowadays — even the very good ones — are kicking it FUBU-style. Maybe that sprung from the “write what you know” movement. I’m not sure. In any case, there are a whole lot of poems about writing poetry, and a whole lot of stories about English teachers trying to publish their stories, and a whole lot of essays about writers and about writing. We’re drawing creative nourishment from ourselves, and after a while, it sort of feels like we’ve become characters in a castaway movie, stuck on a raft together and drinking our own pee. In “Seven Wonders,” Thomas shows that a writer with varied interests and separate areas of expertise is invigorating to read. He makes a convincing case that this approach to writing is much healthier overall.  

Reason number three — and this seems like a silly reason “Seven Wonders” is a remarkable list essay — is that it’s a list essay that’s remarkable. There have been other successful attempts at this kind of writing; Brian Arundel’s “Things I Have Lost” over at Brevity is one noteworthy example. Generally, though, most list essays read like responses to exercises in self help books, lacking the curiosity and … well … wonder that makes Thomas’s essay endearing. In just a couple of pages he inspires a feeling that life on Earth is miraculous and special. Bill Bryson, in A Short History of Nearly Everything, inspires the same feeling, only decades later, and in a few hundred more pages. What Thomas achieved is the primary function of the list: rank things concisely, creating structure through categorization. He takes it a step farther with his insight, conveyed through his exquisite knack at explaining.

Got a Seven Wonders list of your own? You know we want to see it.

What do we listen to as we write or do our creative work? When we raised this question here at The Missouri Review, we encountered (not surprisingly) a diversity of opinions on the subject. From one perspective, music is a instrusive and disruptive force, another artistic voice drowning out one’s own. To others, music serves a kind of mildly narcotic purpose — it creates a certain state of mind or emotion that enhances the creative process. And for still others, music is actually a means of attaining detachment and isolation from the disruptive noise of the outside world. Whatever our reasons, here are what some of our staffers listen to.

1. Brittany Barr, Intern

I like to listen to Regina Spektor when I’m writing. Both of her recent albums, Soviet Kitsch and Begin to Hope, showcase her multifaceted style which suits my writing mood well. Her music is chameleon-esque, shifting from poppy to jazzy to alternative from track to track (or sometimes within each track itself). Her lyrics range from the emotionally resonant (”And then you take that love you made and stick it into someone else’s heart, pumping someone else’s blood”) to the completely absurd (”I have dreams of orca whales and owls”) to the coquettish (”Come into my world I’ve got to show, show, show you. Come into my bed, I’ve got to know, know, know you.”) I know a lot of my friends like to put their music on shuffle so that they don’t encounter similar songs or styles as they listen–but with Spektor’s CDs, you don’t have to do that. Listening to one of her CDs is like putting your mind on shuffle–each new sound or style or song lyric contrasts so greatly with the last. So when I’m looking to write about romance, I can turn to “Samson,” an initially bittersweet but ultimately lovely ballad (as the lyrics say, “you are my sweetest downfall. I loved you first.” Or if a character is ecstatic, frantically happy, I put on “Us,” an upbeat, eager song, fraught with frantic piano strains and soaring violins. Angry? “Your Honor.” Lonely? “Summer in the City.” Sick and tired of being sick? “Chemo Limo.” Jaded? “Somedays.” The list of adjectives and corresponding songs could go on and on (although I wouldn’t recommend simplifying Spektor’s songs to that extent–each song is layered.)

Ironically enough, after I started listening to Spektor as I wrote, I looked up her methods for writing her songs. In an interview with MTV she revealed that her process is analogous to the way a creative writer crafts a piece. “I try to write songs the way a short story writer writes stories,” she said. “I always thought, ‘Why can’t I write a song from the point of view of a man or a criminal or an old woman?’ Obviously some of it comes from personal things, but it’s so much more fun when a concept or idea pops into my head and then I pull on it and out comes this thing that I never expected.” So perhaps her story-songs lend themselves to the craft of writing. Her pieces are so emotionally rich, character-driven, diverse, intelligent, and layered—all things that I aspire for my writing to be.

2. Lania Knight, Editorial Assistant

I listen to different music depending on the kind of writing I’m doing. If it’s heavy, heady stuff, I have to listen to something wordless. R. Carlos Nakai’s Canyon Trilogy is my favorite for this. It’s ethereal and calming, and it lasts about as long as I can sit for a single session of writing.

When I’m writing fiction, I listen to music that my central character would listen to, which in recently has ranged from Jack Johnson and Ben Harper to Rufus Wainwright.

My other favorite writing soundtrack is music with non-English lyrics. Beleza Tropical, an anthology of Brazilian musicians put together by David Byrne, is excellent–a mix of soothing tunes that help me relax into my work along with some upbeat danceable rhythms that get me off the chair when I’ve been in one spot too long.

3. Patrick Lane, Web Editor

For a long time, I regularly used movie soundtracks as mental stimulants for writing, particularly scores by Carter Burwell, whose work tends to be steadier and more mood-oriented rather than romantic or bombastic (as much fondness as I have for John Williams, I couldn’t write to his themes). But I began to grow suspicious about the influence soundtracks (which are, of course, designed to elicit specifically cued emotional responses) on my work; did my prose actually feel eerie or tense, or was that just the aura created by the music associated with it in my mind? Over the past couple of years, I’ve found myself drawn more and more to early music in place of soundtracks. I find it produces something more like a meditative disposition in me; it focuses my attention without insinuating itself into my work. 

4. Dustin Michael, Grad Advisor

British critic Bonamy Dobrée once wrote that my favorite essayist, Max Beerbohm, “seems to bring with him the aroma of an age that is just past.” I believe I bring a similar aroma to any room in which I am writing. In any such room, the air smells like Gorillaz.

It’s hard to say why I’m so taken with writng against a sonic backdrop of British electronica fused with hip-hop from 2005. I wasn’t always this way. Three years ago, when Gorillaz - a cartoon band created by musician Damon Alburn and cartoonist Jamie Hewlett - were inescapable, I wanted nothing to do with them, and I needed total silence to write or I’d accidentally start typing out lyrics to songs on the radio or snippets from newscasts on the TV in the other room. Now, though, I don’t know anybody who still listens to Gorillaz, and I keep their Demon Days album set on repeat from the moment I sit down to type.  

Beerbohm himself admits, in his essay titled “Laughter,” that things never held appeal to him while they were popular. Of the great works of his time, he writes that “somehow I never manage to read them until they are just going out of fasion.” Maybe that’s what’s going on here. But maybe there’s something else, too. I know that at some point - probably many points - Alburn and Hewlett had to be like, “Okay, every single part of what we’re trying to do here is asinine. All of it. From the notion that people making music as cartoons is cool to the presumption that anyone would ever want to listen to it, it’s just ridiculous. But whatever. Let’s keep going.” I feel that way every single time I write. Gorillaz reminds me that it’s possible to be successful even if the whole premise of what you’re doing is totally absurd.

The creative process between Gorillaz song and essay seems similar, too, though the models used are different. Gorillaz is a puppet show. I don’t see a big difference between scribbling out a figure to mouth the lyrics to the song and creating a speaker in an essay to mouth the words on the page. Seems like the same idea at work.

Plus that bass is thumpin’, to use a term that, like Beerbohm, his literary preferences, and my taste in music, went out of style a while ago.

5. Evelyn Somers, Associate Editor

I can’t write to sound and never have been able to.  Since my household is very noisy, it’s a problem.  Music is out because the rhythm drowns out the rhythm of whatever I’m writing at the time. Music with lyrics is worse, but any music is a distraction. I’m ashamed to say that when I’m writing, I’m not inspired by music.  It’s cool and hip and artistic and enlightened to write to music, but perhaps I am none of those things. That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy music and even take ideas and inspiration from listening to it–especially the lyrics of bad country songs–at other times, but not while I’m writing, please. My husband drums a lot at home, so if I’m writing I have to make him stop. There are no TVs in the vicinity of my computer. My children are not allowed to talk to me. I tell them to pretend they don’t have a mother. Sometimes I give them money, just so they’ll go away. I have thought about wearing earplugs–well, I’ve gone farther; I’ve tried it, but you’d feel extremely stupid plugging your ears to write, wouldn’t you?  I feel like an idiot, and it also clogs me creatively. Very early morning is about the only time I can get silence, for free, and without earplugs or conflict.

6. Kris Somerville, Marketing Director

The Beatles have poetic reach, the Rolling Stones have limitless hedonistic energy, but it’s David Bowie and his stylishness, both musically and visually, that captures my imagination.  Though I don’t listen to music when I write, I do turn to it for inspiration.  Bowie’s musical canon embodies qualities all writers can admire.  First his work is timeless.  He has been around for five decades and is perhaps cooler today than he was in the early 70s.  He is also a skillful storyteller.  Listen to “Space Oddity,” a ballad about Major Tom, an astronaut lost in the cosmos.  Before Prince and Madonna, Bowie was the master of innovation and self-reinvention.  As a singer he uses persona– androgynous alter egos like Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke.  As a musician he blends and blurs blues, rock and jazz genres. 

Every Christmas, in a bid to get in the holiday mood, I watch a video of David Bowie and Bing Crosby singing “Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy.”  As they stand beside a baby grand piano–Crosby in his nubby cardigan sweater and Bowie in a slick silky blue blazer–the crooners bridge a great stylistic and generational divide that reminds me of the genius of juxtaposition.  The blend of glam boy and grandpa shouldn’t work, yet it does, beautifully.

Visitors to the popular website Poetry Daily can get a taste of the work of poet Todd Boss, who readers and listeners of TMR already know as the poetry winner (and first runner-up) of our inaugural Audio Contest, for his poems “To Wind a Mechanical Toy,” and “Yellowrocket,” respectively. His poem, “To Be Alone Again in the Thick Skin,” which Poetry Daily is featuring, will give readers the chance to see Boss’ deft attention to sound and sense, which when read aloud produce such dazzling sonic effects. Find ample example of this here.
It’s also a great opportunity to remind our readers that as we move into the center of November, they have just over two weeks to make ready and submit their own sound (and video!) recordings of original creative compositions. The deadline is December 1, and all you need to know can be found here.

Congratulations, Todd!

The Missouri Review is no stranger to the digital world. We were the first literary magazine to launch a website–in the early 1980’s at that, before the internet was truly the world wide web. Beginning in 2007, we started recording all our content, and will soon offer an audio version of the magazine for readers on the go. We feature digital copies of our stories, essays, and poems on our website and through Project MUSE. We blog, we podcast, we produce videos to post on our website. And now, we’ve taken our digital dominance to the next level: we’ve created a TMR facebook.

For those of you who don’t know, facebook is a social networking site similar to Myspace. People without facebook don’t realize its significance until they finally break down and sign up for one of their own–then they start to feel the gravitational pull that the simple little website exercises over most of its users. Status updates can alert all your friends (or long-lost high school peers, ex-boyfriends, and co-workers) about what’s going on in your life– you might be a more literal person, and post what you’re actually doing; perhaps a philosophical soul, who posts meaningful song lyrics or poetry or quotes; maybe an enigma who crafts ridiculous, nonsensical status just to remain a mystery. The photo feature allows you to post pictures to share with others–but watch what you put up, because potential employers are now prowling pages (hyperlink: http://www.nydailynews.com/money/2008/03/10/2008-03-10_employers_may_be_searching_applicants_fa.html) and checking out job applicants. The “looking for” portion of a user’s profile also says a lot about them– everyone knows a romantic relationship isn’t official until it’s proclaimed on facebook. You can also post videos, notes, events, and information about yourself–favorite books, movies, music–on your facebook profile page.

So what does TMR have to do with facebook? Do we want to declare an online relationship, post photos of our wild nights, or write on someone’s wall? Not really. We just want you, the readers of our blog, the fans of our magazine, the contributors to our issues, to stay as up-to-date on TMR as possible. We’ll be using the page to announce our contests and preview our latest issues. So if you have your own facebook, feel free to search for “The Missouri Review” and become a fan of our page–and invite other lit-mag lovers as well!

Want to get noticed in a good way? Get out there and buy a sled. 

Today I discovered the power of the sled-bearer to bring joy to the masses. Everyone pays attention when a shopper carries a sled through a store. Some people even pause to compliment the sled and speculate as to the amount of fun that will be had with it. Crowds part, allowing more room for the bright new herald of winter to pass. Young and old alike perk up. Almost everyone smiles. 

I bought my sled today at Target, and let me tell you, I feel like a rock star.

When I arrived at the register with my sled, the cashier, who’d seen me coming, was pretty excited.

“Omigod!” she said. “Do we sell these?”

“Yes!” I was confident. 

The cashier then told me she’d just moved here from a really flat place but this one time there was a huge snowstorm and the snow in the K-Mart parking lot all got plowed up into this huge mound and everybody slid down it and even though it was all frozen and sharp it was still fun.

A line of customers had formed by the time the cashier finished her story, but no one seemed bothered. In fact, those near the front of the line were nodding and probably thinking, That sounds like fun indeed! If I may, I shall relate to you all a similar sled anecdote. Farther back in line, a small child asked if she could have a sled, too. Suddenly, it was exactly like Citizen Kane — only way cheerier and minus all the newspaper tycoon parts.

It should come as no surprise that the 1941 Orson Welles classic isn’t the only address at the largely unplowed intersection of sledding and publishing.  The response one receives after announcing a new publication credit is largely the same to the reaction the purchase of a sled provokes: approving smiles, congratulatory glances, a momentary spike in attention. Why walk a mile in your favorite author’s shoes when you can walk a few hundred feet, from the back of the store to the front?

There’s also the insight I had as I left the store with my fierce new flame-emblazoned toboggan, which was that its purchase represents one of my totally rare acts of forethought. The last time I had one of those was when I submitted stuff for publication before applying for grad school. That turned out to be an awesome move for me, unlike one I made last winter when I put off shopping for a sled until there was snow.

Guess what? No sleds anywhere.

So listen. It is unwise for the sled shopper to wait for snow. It is also most unwise for the grad school applicant to put off sending out manuscripts until two months before admission packets are due. To conclude the proverb, submit! Get published now! Bring joy to the masses! Enhance your curriculum vitae!

Then, once you’re published and accepted into grad school, all you have to do is remember to keep your head down, try not to fall off, and slide as far as you can.

… If you happen to be on my dissertation committee, I’m just talking about sledding.

As election season draws to a close with the now customary fits and starts of provisional ballot counting, run-offs, etc., we thought we’d take a look at some of our favorite politicians from literature. Prince or puppet-master, tyrant or revolutionary, the figure of the politician is a canvas upon which we can project our fondest hopes and most cynical fears about the state of society. Below we offer a few of our favorites.

1. Lear

My sophomore year in college I was cast as Cordelia in King Lear.  A sophomore in every respect, I was disappointed that the director thought me more ingénue than villain.  Goneril and Regan have better lines and one dies on stage.  They spin their “oily art” while Cordelia, daddy’s favorite, sweetly declines to flatter her father with blandishments of love.  For her refusal to outdo her sisters’ hyperbolic flattery, she is disowned and banished from the kingdom.  She doesn’t make another appearance on stage until the closing act, which meant hanging out in the greenroom for two hours while Lear blusters on to his fool about his bad decision to abdicate his throne. 

Other than my lines, I didn’t even read the play, and if I had, I doubt that I would have appreciated Shakespeare’s wisdom about death and loneliness. 

What I did understand was the danger of relinquishing power, both political and personal.  Each night as Lear divided his kingdom among his two “favored” daughters, I wanted to shout, “Don’t do it.”  In fact, instead of refusing her father a verbal demonstration of her love, Cordelia should have warned him off early retirement. 

The next semester I was in Eugene Ionesco’s Exit the King (someone in the theater department was preoccupied with kingship).  Rather than willingly give up his control, King Berenger’s kingdom and his power has slowly dimmed.  The king must die by the end of the play, but he doesn’t want to.  Both plays lament mortality as they portray the “lion in winter.”  In the end, neither Lear nor Berenger goes gently and their rage against the “dying of the light” is full of pathos and poetry.  Twenty years after playing in them, I understand these plays and rank them among my favorites. –Kris Somerville

2. Big Brother

I’ll go with an obvious one: Big Brother - really a valid “literary politician/ political figure” or “literary monster” despite his arguable existence in the first place.  I remember my first and only reading of 1984 with mixed emotion.  In my 9th grade english class, the reading of 1984 was the one month out of the year students would wipe the drool off their desks and actually care about reading.  For some reason Orwell was the one guy everybody dug.  Of course, for the few of us who stayed awake, that meant we had to do more to get an A than go through the motions - meaning the teacher would ask and let linger in the air until the silence became awkward for everyone (while the teacher lost their focus wondering why the ever signed up to “Teach for America” in the first place), followed by the chime-in, last-minute save.

Anyway, Big Brother.  I was too naive to feel haunted by Big Brother.  Maybe it was because I read it well after the Cold War…with no real understanding of the Cold War.  I guess by then we had pretty much been full of the idea that Orwell was wrong and Huxley was right, to paraphrase Neil Postman.  How many people would buy a television if they knew it stared back at them?  If they were on sale, probably more than you’d think.  I did like the idea of fighting the system.  I was very into handing out socialist pamphlets during high school, but I really did it for the George Washington University socialist group parties.  Hoards of pseudo-Marxists would get drunk in one bedroom apartments and throw books at each other.  Most of the parties were called something like “the communal struggle (of getting sober).” 

1984. All I can think is, with that much oppression, the sex must have been great. –Seth Graves

3. Thomas Gradgrind

If I had to describe why, when I think of memorarble literary politicians, I immediately go to Thomas Gradgrind of Hard Times, it would probably be that he starts the novel as the manifestation of everything a person in the literary arts should despise and fear.  He believes in nothing other than fact, standardization, and viewing the world from a mathmatical/scientific standpoint, and goes so far as to raise his own children under this same belief.  As a result, his own daughter is emotionally dead inside and his son becomes a criminal with no remorse for simply being one of his father’s statistics.  The reason I love his character though, despite all the terrible things his doctrines bring about, is that at the end of the novel he comes to see the error of his own ways and realizes that there may be more to the world than cold hard fact, and everytime I read this ending I can’t help but wonder if it has a good message for a country like ours where schools seem more and more focused on standardization and memorizing facts. –Nick Quijas

4. Brother Jack

Struggling to survive in 1930’s Harlem, the narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is discovered by and offered employment with an organization known as “the Brotherhood,” a thinly veiled signifier for the Communist Party.

Sporting a mane of bright red hair, Brother Jack, the charismatic leader of the Brotherhood, initially appears in the novel as a compassionate and intelligent individual. He explains to the narrator that his organization defends the rights of the socially oppressed, those “dispossessed of their heritage,” to build “a better world for all people.” The narrator is swept up by Brother Jack’s ideological optimism.

But as the novel progresses, the narrator realizes that Brother Jack exhibits his own brand of racial prejudice that objectifies the narrator as a mere tool - an invisible man - as invisible to Jack as the rest of white American society.

In an epiphanic moment of high drama and symbolic potency, the narrator discovers that Jack has a glass eye: “Suddenly something seemed to erupt from his face….  A glass eye.  A buttermilk white eye distorted by the light rays….  I stared into his face, feeling a sense of outrage.  His left eye had collapsed, a line of raw redness showing where the lid refused to close, and his gaze had lost its command.”

Ellison’s portrait of this political figure reveals a man blinded by his single-minded commitment to an abstract ideology, one that blinds him to the actual plight of African Americans in Harlem.

Deprived of his charm and intellectual jargon, Brother Jack reveals his base and arrogant motives when he tells the narrator, “We do not shape our policies to the mistaken and infantile notions of the man in the street. Our job is not to ask them what they think but to tell them!”

Initially inspirational, but ultimately close-minded and blind, Brother Jack is a Ralph Ellison’s absurdist version of every politician who has lifted our hopes only to let them fall and shatter into pieces. –Eric Thomas

5. Lysistrata

The ancient Athenian comic dramatist Aristophanes has left us with a whole rogues gallery of satirically drawn politicial characters, from Pisthetairos of The Birds, who helps found a utopia (”Cloudcuckooland”) only to become its tyrant, to Dikaiopolis of The Acharnians, who brokers his own private peace with Sparta. But the eponymous heroine of Lysistrata is perhaps the most striking, an enterprising ancient lobbyist for peace. Fed up with the tribulations of the Peloponnesian War, Lysistrata leads the women of the Greek city-states in a massive boycott of sex: no nooky for the men of Greece until they end to fighting (a plan that she find just as difficult to hold the women to).  –Patrick Lane

Who are your favorite politicians from literature? Let us know in the comments below!

I love clothes and have enjoyed the primaries and this election in part because all the candidates are so snappily dressed. We are well past the days when politicians were limited to power ties, button-down shirts and navy blue Brooks Brothers suits. Much of Washington has discovered designer duds.
Yet, female politicians and political wives are so scrutinized for what they wear, how they wear it, and what it costs that I have begun to pity them. Most recently in the news Sarah Palin is getting slammed for her $150,000 wardrobe from Barney’s and Saks, paid for by the Republican National Committee. There are all sorts of reasons to take issue with Sarah Six-pack, but her clothes ain’t one of them. In fact, she deserves the touch of silk against her skin. If I were living on an airplane, giving ten or more campaign speeches a day, kissing babies, pretending to like beer and barbeque and having to act as if Tina Fey’s impressions don’t bug me, someone would have to drop six figures on what I was wearing.
Obama gets a pass for his Armani suits because he promises that he only owns a few of them. (A $1.9 million advance for a three-book deal buys a lot of Armani.) He is praised for his youthful, forward-looking fashion—slim cut, single-breasted suits, crisp white shirts and pale blue ties—while Hillary is criticized for her boxy pant suits, which are fashion relics in Crayon colors. Not so subtly, pundits discuss their clothes as if they are extensions of their political visions. The future verses the past. And when Hillary showed a sliver of cleavage, the same critics who railed against her antiquated taste moved to charges of immodesty. In America we get weird when women show skin, or even wear tall black boots. Condoleezza Rice boxed up her knee-high boots because she was told she looked too threatening. Since then, she’s consistently dressed like a junior high school principal in nondescript polyester-blend suits and pearl-button earrings.
Then there was the much publicized butter-cup yellow shirt dress that Cindy McCain wore to the Republican National Convention. Vanity Fair along with other news outlets itemized the cost of her outfit:
Oscar de la Renta dress: $3,000
Chanel J12 White Ceramic Watch: $4,500
Three-carat diamond earrings: $280,000
Four-strand pearl necklace: $11,000–$25,000
Shoes, designer unknown: $600

All of this was based on estimates, and then overnight her $300,000 outfit became a $300,000 dress. Is there such a thing? Standing on stage next to Laura Bush in a demure cream colored embroidered suit (Oscar de la Renta suit: $2,500), McCain did look like a million bucks, while Laura seemed to have returned to her roots as a school librarian.
And of course keeping with our class-conscious focus on clothes, we know Michelle Obama wears fake pearls and buys off the rack. Her convention dress cost around $900, and a Gap cotton frock she wore to a fundraising picnic sold out instantly. Every time she wears a sheath dress—one fashion magazine called her “the Commander in Sheath”—we are told she is the next fashion icon a la Jackie Kennedy. Sorry to be a myth buster but Jackie lived and breathed Oleg Cassini.
Politicians and their spouses give up every modicum of privacy. They can never drink more than one glass of wine in public again. And with cell phones and YouTube every imagined misstep is sent around the world in seconds. The least we can do is let them look good.

My apologies, folks. My TMR blog this week was going to be a comic strip, but Berkeley Breathed — my favorite cartoonist ever — is retiring his Opus character tomorrow, and, frankly, I’m just too sad.

If I may, a few words in remembrance of a beloved friend.

Farewell, gentle penguin. Many will remember you as funny and a little shy. Those who really knew you will remember you as existentially troubled and frequently conflicted, but always modest, concerned, and supportive. During the last three decades, you showed us how to hunch down and waddle along in a world where everyone else is louder, taller, and pushier. Through your exploits, we learned that when life hands us lemons, we should make lemonade and pretend it tastes like herring slurry. 

But wait. It gets sadder. Breathed says he’s not only finished with Opus, but with comic strips, period.

It’s easy to see why he’s bummed. Few among us can fathom the ambivalence of widespread exposure and accessibility in a time of widespread indifference and amnesia. On second thought, maybe many of us can imagine it; Pushcart Prize nominees, for instance, who have to explain repeatedly what the Pushcart Prize is, what small presses are, and so on.

For sure, Breathed knows all too well how demoralizing it can be when the hard work of creating satire goes largely unnoticed and the very source material on which it draws is instantly forgotten. Here’s a perfect example. Close to the wrap up of Bloom County in 1989, Opus somberly declared that the strip, like the late comedienne Gilda Radner, wasn’t supposed to end. Today, Breathed’s target demographic — 13-30-year-olds — for the most part neither remembers Gilda Radner nor recognizes Opus the penguin.

Breathed told Salon that he doesn’t want his disenchantment with American political rhetoric to poison Opus, whose innocence and naiveté are the qualities that make him enchanting. Therefore, he’s leaving comic strips and moving to creating books and films for children — a move I can only view as disappointing, similar to the speculative withdrawal to Canada many say that they’re considering from time to time. But we all know any such exodus to Canada would leave the U.S. populated exclusively by jerks. The same applies to the landscape of national rhetoric. If the political climate really is getting ornerier, as Breathed believes it is, how unfortunate it is to lose Opus, who has long been good company in bad times — a source of comfort, sweetness, and meek optimism. Likewise, if national discourse is growing more garbled, how terrible that a clear, confident voice should go silent.

So in a sense, farewell to you too, Berkeley Breathed. Good luck on those children’s books of yours, and on the upcoming non-Opus animated film with the Polar Express motion capture technology … hopefully minus the Polar Express creepiness. You want to prevent the venom of the current national discourse from spreading to your cherished character — which is less cherished than ever since newspaper readership has withered so much in the last decade and a half. Who can blame you?

I can’t blame you, but I also can’t help but think that Opus isn’t supposed to end.

We asked the captain what course of action he proposed to take toward a beast so large, terrifying, and unpredictable. He hesitated to answer, and then said judiciously: “I think I shall praise it.”

–Robert Hass, epigram to Praise

Some of our oldest surviving narratives are tales of monsters. Tiamat, Leviathan, Polyphemus,Grendel: monsters feature again and again in texts recorded in the moments that civilizations transition from oral to literary culture. And it is fitting that monsters are there, helping to usher in literature as we know it. The word monster derives ultimately (after a sojourn through Old French) from a Latin verb meaning “to warn, to portend.” Monsters are signs. They are signifiers. They point out our anxieties and our desires. That is, they do what great literature does.

As a Halloween treat, then, we offer our own favorite literary and cinematic monsters, human and inhuman, who continue to linger at the fringes of our dreams (in no particular order).

1. Thomas Ripley

I have a fondness for crooked souls:  Humbert, Humbert, Heathcliff, Gilbert Osmond, Iago.  But my favorite literary monster is Thomas Ripley, a small-time con artist and bisexual serial killer from Patricia Highsmith’s series of psychological thrillers.  His seductive crimes ignite the reader’s imagination as he gives expression to our darkest fantasies.  In The Talented Mr. Ripley, Tom befriends and then kills Dickie, a spoiled, wealthy American living in Italy.  Assuming his identity and his lifestyle, Tom outsmarts the Italian police at every turn while manipulating Dickie’s father who wants his son found and returned to the bosom of the family.  The plot is a delightful cat and mouse game, with Tom more predator than prey.  When a writer has a magic touch, she can make us care for and be on the side of a selfish, sociopathic killer.  How does she do it?  Read it and see.  –Kris Somerville

2. Count Orlok

Cinematic vampires enjoy true eternity, preserved in celluloid. But the granddaddy of them all has to be Nosferatu. Max Schreck’s ratlike, cringing portrayal of Count Orlok in F.W. Murnau’s Dracula adaptation is the stuff nightmares are made of. With oily body language and glittering eyes, Schreck made himself appear utterly inhuman. Many modern viewers find silent films otherworldly and disturbing to begin with, but Nosferatu’s eerie, German Expressionist cinematography is specifically designed to psychologically unsettle audiences. 86 years on, this vampire’s embrace is still dreadfully effective.  –J. Bowers 

3. The Hound of the Baskervilles

When the topic of this blog was announced during TMR’s weekly editorial meeting, my mind leapt instantly to Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, the novella I’d just finished reading for a British literature course I’m currently enrolled in . The literary monster that comes to mind is, of course, the horrifying hellhound of the title, a creature that haunts the Baskerville line starting with Sir Hugo and ending with Sir Henry. Reading about Holmes and Watson’s investigation on the moor sent my mind into overdrive; I imagined the otherworldly beast with flames dripping from its fangs and eyes flashing red. However, I found that the hound was truly most terrifying in my imagination. For this course, which is about adaptation of literature for film, we watched the 2002 Masterpiece Theatre production of the novella, and the obviously computer-animated hound of this version was more laughable than frightening. As the CGI hound pursued Sir Henry on the moor, my classmates and I were overcome by fits of giggles rather than temors of terror. I suppose that goes to show you that sometimes, the scariest part of literary monsters is that they’re only as scary as we imagine them to be–once they are reimagined by others or depicted on the screen, the fear that comes with turning pages is somewhat diminished or entirely eliminated. –Brittany Barr

4. Scylla

A good old-fashioned literary monster of note is Scylla, most known for her appearance in Homer’s Odyssey.  Through no fault of her own, only through her disinterest in a certain scaly sea god, and through the jealousies of an angry witch, she was transformed into a hideous beast.  She entered a pool of water to bathe, a normal everyday activity, and emerged with a belt of angry puppy dog heads around her waist.  She became another one of those misunderstood monsters that can’t help the way they are.  It’s not her fault that her belt barks and eats passing sailors!  She lies waiting along a channel with her buddy, Charybdis, catching wandering sailors as they go by, and all because of someone else’s unrequited love. –Nicole Walsh

5.The Misfit

The best literary monsters are the ones whose monstrosity is a miasma that creeps over you and lingers after the reading experience is long over.  That’s because they’re more real than some of the classic “monster” figures. Dr. Frankenstein’s creature isn’t so scary.  Miss Jessel and Peter Quint are.  Ill-defined motives, the shadowy inclination toward doing harm, are particularly frightening to me personally.  Read Elizabeth Bowen’s Death of the Heart, for instance.  Is Eddie a monster?  Is Anna?  Both of them wreak harm on Portia, the young protagonist, and both are aware of it.  Are they monsters?  Yes-and no. They’re scary in part because their intent to do damage seems unfocused-a byproduct of their having adopted a certain lifestyle. What wouldn’t they do if it served their purposes?  One is never quite sure.  

A more obvious monster but one whose impact lingers after the story ends is Flannery O’Connor’s mass-murder from “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”  The Misfit combines some of the overt monstrosity of a comic-book villain with the ambiguous motives of a realistic villain of psychological fiction.  In the course of the story he slaughters an entire family-an innocent family that’s en route to a vacation spot.  Of course, they’re not exactly a family of saints: the grandmother is vain and manipulative, the parents bland and dull and the children obnoxious.  Still, do they need to be shot in cold blood?  The Misfit’s stated motive is that they’ve recognized him as the criminal whose escape is being publicized by the media.  But in the course of hearing the grandmother’s urgent plea for her life, tells her that he’s turned to evil because he was wrongly imprisoned, allegedly for the murder of his father.  In response to the grandmother’s admonition to him to pray for Jesus’ help, he replies, “I don’t want no hep,” and a minute later tells her that, having rejected the option of goodness, he’s settled instead on evil:  “. . . it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can-by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness. . . .” 

Random acts of senseless violence are the Misfit’s brand of monstrosity, and I find it a little too real for comfort. –Evelyn Somers

6. Heathcliff

As I was overhearing you talk about literary monsters, I thought of one particularly complex, yet dastardly villain who seems to be driven to this point by love. Wuthering Heights is already remarkable in the fact that it has absolutely no redeemable characters in it whatsoever. Heathcliff, however, is the worst. He forces his stepbrother’s son to live in slavery. He declares everyone around him to be mentally incompetent to be in his presence. He drives the love of his life, Catherine into madness and eventual death. He also manipulates Edgar Linton every step of the way, so that he can help Catherine to cheat on her husband. He takes advantage of the stupidity of Isabella Linton so that he can produce an heir that will help him to acquire Thrushcross Grange. He also hates and abuses his son Linton Heathcliff at any chance that he can get, because the son is just as foolish as his mother. Heathcliff does all of these horrible atrocities while maintaining a sense of normalcy, as if everyone around him should just expect to be mistreated and devoid of any real human affection. I think what makes Heathcliff the most terrifying of villains is that he does all of this evil in the most mysterious and calculated ways and there is no basis or justification for his actions. Based on the facts of these abuses and the fact that he brings about tragedy and despair to everyone that he is around,  there is no worse human being and no one who live with more misery in the world than Heathcliff. –Nick Woodbury

7. Boo Radley

I have a fondness for the underdog, the downtrodden and misunderstood. That’s why my nominated monster turns out to be no monster at all. Boo Radley, the character in Lee Harper’s To Kill a Mockingbird, was a recluse and mentally challenged man in 1930s Alabama. Scout and other kids in town thought Boo came out at night to eat cats and squirrels. Of course, we all know the ending to this classic: Boo saves the kids from revenge-minded Bob Ewell, the real monster of the narrative. –Richard Sowienski

8. Frankenstein’s Monster

This monster, often simply refered to by its masters name, has shown up over and over in literature ever since Mary Shelly first revealed it to us.  Dr. Frankenstein attempts to create a living human out of the pieces of the recently deceased, but fails in the end, instead unleashing a semi-human creature upon the world.  Frankenstein is horrified over his creation and refuses to help it by making a second female one to be its companion, leading to a horrible series of attacks on his family and friends and a pursuit of the creature to the furthest reaches of the Earth. The critique of man’s obsession with himself and fear of anything too closely resembling him is timeless, as is this monster. –Nick Quijas

9. Miss Havisham

Freshman year of high school, we were assigned to read Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations.  Ten years later, the mad and vengeful Miss Havisham still haunts me. I close my eyes, and there she is - a withered specter, wasting away in her yellowed wedding dress, wearing only one shoe, surrounded by the darkness and decay of a rotting mansion and a rank garden, overgrown with twisted weeds. Every clock in the house is stopped at twenty minutes to nine - the precise moment when she is jilted on her wedding day.  And the wedding cake, now a festering pile of mold, cobwebs, and mice, still remains.

Miss Havisham is not a believable character.  Dickens makes no pretensions to such a reality.  Rather, he presents a surreal, drug-induced hallucination of excess and absurdity.  Miss Havisham, the perpetual bride, who raises Estella to torment men and “break their hearts.” Fueled by an obsessive vengeance and cruelty, Miss Havisham destroys lives, not through violence, but like any great monster, through manipulation and emotional sabotage. –Eric Thomas

10. The Great Old Ones

H.P. Lovecraft’s status as an American literary icon still feels tenuous, despite his recent induction into the Library of America. But he does deserve credit for one major contribution to literary horror: the Cthulhu mythos. Lovecraft created in his tales a new mythology of ancient, godlike entities, creatures whose names are as unpronounceable as their motives are incomprehensible: Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath, Nyarlathotep. These names surface in story after story in locked tomes and moldering manuscripts, tying them to Gothic tropes of the occult. But these are thoroughly modern monsters: creatures who come not from hell or mystical underworlds, but from dimensions outside of space and time. As often as not they are blind forces of nature, gargantuan, chaotic masses of flesh and energy, with minds completely inaccessible to human kind — if they have minds at all. They are truly deities for an age of nuclear weapons and quantum mechanics. Lovecraft’s monsters don’t symbolize any particular aspects of human nature. They signify the complete rejection of human nature. It is hardly surprising that many authors and filmmakers have continued to adapt and expand on Lovecraft’s monstrous pantheon of tentacled abominations and formless horrors. –Patrick Lane

Next week: From literature’s greatest monsters to its most memorable politicians…

We are delighted to report that Rick Hilles and Benjamin Percy have just been named recipients of 2008 Whiting Awards. Each writer received a $50,000 prize from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. Presented annually since 1985, the Whiting Awards, according to the foundation’s website, are presented to authors who exhibit “exceptional talent and promise in early career.”

Hilles previously won our Editors’ Prize in Poetry and Benjamin Percy’s story “Dial Tone” appeared in our summer 2007 issue.

Eight other writers also received awards, including Mischa Berlinski, Laleh Khadivi, Manuel Muñoz and Lysley Tenorio in fiction, Douglas Kearney and Julie Sheehan in poetry, Donovan Hohn in nonfiction and Dael Orlandersmith for playwriting.

The American poet Hayden Carruth passed away several weeks ago at the age of 87. He seemed to pass away as quietly as his poetry took root and grew around us: 30 books. I don’t recall hearing any announcements of his death on the news. The news of his death reached me by way of a small newspaper clipping sent down from family in Chicago.

I first encountered Hayden Carruth in high school when we were using his comprehensive anthology of American Poetry The Voice That Is Great Within Us. That anthology seems ground breaking that in included many poets who stood outside the canon, or the established schools of poetry, or the university poets. It was in this anthology that I first encountered the work of Cid Corman. Cid’s work struck me immediately and would have a large influence on my life as I would eventually come to know him in Japan and learn from him. In Japan, I would learn from Cid that he never allowed his work to be anthologized. In this one case, with Hayden, he made an exception. When Hayden asked Cid to contribute something to the anthology, Cid refused, initially – and this despite their friendship. The way I understand the story, Cid would not contribute unless Hayden was willing to take a collection of poems, something like four or five poems, a group of poems that would be representative of his work. Corman had an additional request as well. He asked that several other poets be included – poets that he felt were doing significant work. Fortunately, Hayden accommodated Corman’s requests. If Hayden had not, I probably would have never encountered Corman’s work as Cid lived in far away in Japan and did not publish much in established literary magazines in the United States. In thinking of this today, I feel a desire to acknowledge my gratitude toward Hayden Carruth, not only for the poetry he gave us, but for his work as anthologist – for the poetry he introduced us to.

Time to address a seldom discussed but alarmingly common trend I’ve noticed in creative nonfiction submissions — a specific kind of essay I call the Embarrassing Restroom Adventure.  

The details of ERAs vary widely, limited only by the number of ways going to the bathroom can go horribly wrong. Still, almost all ERAs follow the same basic trajectory: narrator enters restroom and gets comfortable; narrator notices that something isn’t quite right (the door won’t lock, the toilet paper’s gone, etc.); someone else shows up and suddenly there’s a big, embarrassing mess; narrator cleans it up, vowing to avoid similar situations in the future.

If one were to bust into the mail room of any literary journal that accepts essays, steal all the submissions, scatter them randomly over a five-acre plot, and stroll back across it blindfolded, guaranteed that person would step in a couple ERAs. I’ve been a reader for three literary journals, TMR included, and I can report that ERAs show up pretty often — about as often as essays about losing a pet or experimenting with sex or illegal drugs, but not quite as often as essays about cheating on a spouse, living with a debilitating illness, or attempting to finally reconcile things with mom or dad.  

The impulse to commit the ERA to paper is easy to understand, but hard to resist. They are stories told to make our close friends laugh, and in that sense they’re practically failsafe. If ERAs were employees in a corporate workplace, they would be low-level sales reps, the funny, jokey kind that bristle with personality and form quick rapports with others — and they’re great at their jobs. So great, in fact, that it will be suggested by others that they be promoted. “That’s a hilarious story, dude,” friends will say of the ERA. “You should totally write it down!” And in a move familiar to anyone who’s ever done corporate work, this promotion will remove the low-level ERA employee from a position where it almost can’t fail and install it in a higher position where it almost can’t succeed. 

In an ERA, the speaker assumes a position where there’s trouble but not danger, where taboo is flirted with but not violated, and where the audience is invited to laugh and sympathize but isn’t called upon to reevaluate or challenge. The subject matter’s universality makes it immediately accessible, so very little setup is required to contextualize the story up front besides where and how long ago it occurred. An ERA provides ample opportunity for the use of awesome literary devices like narrative suspense and colorful exaggeration, which are tricky to pull off in other personal writing endeavors.   

What’s really tricky, though, is making a case for an ERA’s literary value. While the story might be immediately accessible, there are also a lot of readers who will immediately choose not to access it. The purpose — to entertain — could be misinterpreted as an attempt to shock. Humor takes a privileged position, making insight and reflection secondary, and pretty soon the reader questions whether the piece should have been written at all. 

Then there’s the fact that there are so many ERAs floating around, and I admit I’m personally to blame for some of that. My Masters thesis is clogged with ERAs. I dropped an ERA on my creative writing workshop just last year. I can no more explain why I wrote so many — surely was aware I wasn’t breaking new ground — than I can explain why going to the bathroom without incident is hard.  

I still cheer for just about every ERA manuscript I get, and I pass my share of ERAs up the chain. However, take note: No ERA I’ve passed has ever been accepted for publication. Likewise, none of the ERAs I’ve sent out have ever been published.

Therefore, my advice to anyone planning to write an ERA is this:

Make it very good. Make the language captivating and the scenes vivid, but don’t be gross. Don’t let it even approach shock value. Don’t cuss. Make it so funny that it validates its own existence, but not so funny that the humor overshadows whatever insight it arrives at — which, incidentally, had better be more breathtaking than “…and that’s why I’ll make sure and go at my house next time.” Make it somehow touching but not emotionally gooey. Make it bigger than the confines of its situation without allegorically implying that life itself is a toilet.

Most importantly — and I think this goes for all essays — make the engine behind it be powered by something other than just the circumstances, because circumstances can seldom ever be unique, but with some careful thought, accounts of them can.

I’ve never been a baby person. More than that, I find baby lust a boring subject. There’s been a recent spate of movies about women whose biological clocks are ticking loudly, the alarm set to go off somewhere around forty. Baby Mama, Miss Conception, and Then She Found Me are three movies that immediately come to mind. This one-note conflict reduces women to feral cats in heat. In Miss Conception, the worst of the bunch, Heather Graham yowls and pounces on the men who have got what she needs while Tina Fey and Helen Hunt simper and whine as they consider their limited baby-making options.
Thankfully the short story hasn’t been infected with baby fever. Problem stories in general and I-want-a-baby-now stories in particular seldom work because they cast the character in simple conflict solving mode. Complex desire is good, simple problems are bad.
During the last season of Sex and the City, poor Kristen Davis’ character was saddled with the gimp “I want a baby” storyline. Her waspy character Charlotte York has friends, beauty, and a once thriving career in a posh gallery but no little babe to swaddle in Burberry. One wonders when was the last time the show’s writers spent an entire afternoon with a toddler.
I also wonder about the message are we sending girls when films and television are populated with so many women on a mission to procreate. In fact, these fertility-challenged thirty-something’s are so desperate they are willing to settle for men they’d never consider in their twenties.
Last semester, I assigned to my advanced composition students Lori Gottlieb’s article “Marry Him” published in the March 2008 issue of The Atlantic. When our single New York author wanted a baby and there wasn’t a man insight, she didn’t seduce her gay best friend, troll the singles columns, hit on lonely divorcees, or hire a surrogate, some of the options offered by Hollywood, she simply shopped on-line for donor sperm. About six months after her son was born though, she realized that she didn’t enjoy going it alone. She wanted a man to co-parent. Her advice to young women: settle. It gets worse; “Don’t worry about passion or intense connection. Don’t nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling ‘Bravo!’ in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go. Based on observations, in fact, settling will probably make you happier in the long run, since many of those who marry with great expectations become more disillusioned with each passing year.”
Great! Desperate wanna-be mommies and now desperate wanna-be wives.
I have some better advice. Keep your cool and offer to babysit your niece or nephew or your best friend’s kid. This will help the most baby-frenzied woman chill out and get a little perspective.

Here’s a question for you, writer. What do you keep in your writing toolkit these days?

What materials do you keep within arm’s reach when you work? What does your reference library look like? What, in other words, is vitally important to your job as a writer?

Do you still use your trusty old print thesaurus, or do you now get your synonyms and antonyms online or out of Microsoft Word? 

Do you have a book of quotations? A glossary of literary terms?

And what about your dictionaries? Are you periodically squatting down to relieve the Merriam-Webster’s pocket edition from its faithful duty of propping up the coffee table? Do you descend cold, stone staircases by candlelight and wind through ancient catacombs until you come at last to the chamber that houses your OED? 

Perhaps you have a variety of dictionaries. For instance, I’ve got a dictionary of clichés, not to blow my own horn — an expression meaning “to boast,” first used in the late 16th century by Abraham Flemming. 

(I’ve got a dictionary of puns, too, but most of my colleagues consider it canon fodder)  

To put it as a freshman composition essay writer might, specific tools have been used by humans since the dawn of time. The Acheulean hand ax and assorted stone scrapers got the job done for hunter gatherers for more than a million years.

That was primitive man’s basic toolkit. What’s yours?

Do we really care what our political candidates read? Well, as devoted readers ourselves, of course we do. And it seems the larger world does too. Some people are afraid of what the candidates read — witness the e-mail circulating that shows a photo of Barack Obama toting a copy of Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World. Some are afraid of what the candidates aren’t reading, as seen in reactions to Sarah Palin’s failure to name a major periodical that she reads. What would we like our presidential and vice-presidential hopefuls to read? The staff of The Missouri Review offer their own recommendations.

1. Joe Biden

Kris Somerville: Unlike Bill Clinton, Joe Biden was no Rhodes Scholar.  He graduated from the University of Delaware in Newark in 1965 near the bottom of his class:  506^th of 688.  He attended Syracuse University College of Law in 1968 and ran into a little trouble with a law review article he had written; five of the fifteen pages were plagiarized.  Today all is forgiven and his early academic foibles, his humble middle-class roots, and the fact that he’s one of the least wealthy members of the Senate endear him to voters.  Yet, there are two books that he should have carried in his backpack during his academic career:  Christopher J. Yianilos’ The Law School Breakthrough: Graduate In The Top 10% Of Your Class, Even If You’re Not A First-Rate Student and Ann Raimes’ Keys for Writers, 5th Edition  Today, to figure out how to fill his personal coffers he might hire “peak performance” coach Tony Robbins.  After all, only owning one home is hardly vice-presidential these days.

Joe Aguilar: From introducing his running mate as “Barack America” to proclaiming that in Delaware “you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent” to stating that when “the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and…said, ‘Look, here’s what happened,’” Joe Biden’s mid-speech gaffes, accidental as they might be, form a wonderfully bizarre vision of an America where presidential candidates have secret superhero identities, only East Indians are legally allowed to shop at convenience stores, and presidents make nationally televised speeches long before television sets actually become household items.  Mr. Biden’s taste for the absurd makes me think that he would enjoy Tatyana Tolstaya’s novel The Slynx, the story of a post-nuclear-bomb Russia where people barter in mice and the KGB-like Saniturions rove the country in sleighs, dressed in red robes, confiscating books, while the dangerous screeching Slynx lurks in the woods, waiting.  If Mr. Biden likes this novel, he should also check out Tolstaya’s fantastic short-story collection White Walls, which contains some of the weirdest, prettiest stories in my recent memory.

Evelyn Somers recommends: Conspiracy Theories & Secret Societies For DummiesYes, he’s an expert on foreign policy, but does he really know all the behind-the-scenes stuff?  Also, it would provide him with some insight about the Kennedy assassination, which would prepare him for the unthinkable worst if he and Barack are elected.  The book purportedly tells you how to “figure out who ‘they’ are.”  Always a useful thing to know if you’re next in line for the Presidency.

2. Sarah Palin

Evelyn Somers: Sarah Palin ought to read Washington, D.C. For Dummies so she can get in the capital groove.  It’s a long trip and a big leap from Wasilla to Washington, and she’ll want an efficient way to learn about her new home away from home. And if she needs an urban pastime to replace her moose hunting hobby, there’s Car Hacks & Mods For Dummies.

Brittany Barr recommends: The Supremes’ Greatest Hits: The 34 Supreme Court Cases That Most Directly Affect Your Life by Michael G. Trachtman. Given her recent struggles with recalling Supreme Court rulings other than Roe vs. Wade, it looks like this potential Vice President needs to brush up on her history. This comprehensive guide to the 34 “most significant” cases should bring her up to speed.

Dustin Michael: I hate to admit it, but I’m a one issue voter. My one issue: dinosaurs. And though I’ll let some things slide (mispronouncing spinosaurus so that it rhymes with rhinocerus, for example), I find others (such as a baldfaced disregard for the fossil record) unacceptable. 

Originally, I thought of recommending my trusty dinosaur field guide to GOP veep pic Sarah Palin, but I recognized that it wouldn’t have the same sentimental appeal for her as it does for me, and that she would find it insulting instead of nostalgic, and that people would find it mean instead of sincere. So I’m recommending instead The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould. This insightful work is handsomely bound, and more up to Palin’s reading level. She’s no dummy, after all; she’s just a little mixed up about how old the planet is, and about what kinds of animals roamed the earth when. A good dose of Gould ought to clear things up for her, doggone it. You betcha!

3. John McCain

Evelyn Somers recommends: Foreclosure Self-Defense For Dummies. This handy guide tells you what to do if you’re facing foreclosure: “stop worrying about why this has happened to you; resolve to fight the foreclosure and save your home.” Does that sound like McCain language or what? Reading this book might even help him refine the details of his proposed plan to buy up $300 billion in bad home loans. 

Lania Knight recommends: If I Live to Be 100, by Neenah Ellis. No, this is not a tongue-in-cheek selection. Despite McCain’s age, past illnesses, and former imprisonment when he was a soldier, I hope that if he is elected president, not only that he lives to 100, but that he takes the time to reflect upon the wisdom of his many years on the planet in a way similar to what Ellis’ interview subjects have done in response to her gentle, but probing questions. In this book, Ellis, producer of NPR’s One Hundred Years of Stories, describes the interviews of her centenarian subjects with grace and candor, illuminating for the reader differences among older Americans, both nuanced and stark, and the ways in which growing up in an era very different from the present can enlarge one’s worldview and allow one to see solutions where there might only appear to be problems. In our modern culture, advanced age is too often seen as a liability; it is treated with an indifference reinforced by segregation. How will we know or remember that our elders are wise if we don’t ever see them or take the time to listen to their stories? I’m recommending this book not only for McCain, but for the many adherents of youth culture (wittingly or not) in the U.S. who, because they have little meaningful contact with members of older generations, can easily overlook the power of thoughtful reflection and a long lifetime of experience.

4. Barack Obama

Speer Morgan: Yes, Obama gives great oration, delivering his rhetoric with grace and gravity.  Yet when he tries to shift into a folksy, storytelling mode he grinds gears.  Listening to him is a rough ride.  In fact, I have noticed during rallies poor Michelle’s eyes glaze over.  I can read her thoughts:  “How about a little narrative compression, dear husband?” 

And does he know a joke or two?  These are hard times, but lighten up, Mr. Almost Pres.  This Christmas, his staff should stuff his stocking with a mini-library of joke books-Craig Kirsner’s The Art of Telling Great Jokes & Being Funny!and Larry Getlen’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Jokes, with maybe something by Mark Twain to loosen him up.  With a little humor under his belt, he might be able to appreciate the “controversial” New Yorker cover.

Evelyn Somers: Barack Obama has been burdened with the same intellectual label that has hurt the Democrats’ nominees in recent history, Bill Clinton excepted.  For Obama, the only candidate for whom I wouldn’t recommend a Dummies guide, I’d suggest a short read on declining Presidential rhetoric by Elvin Lim, The Anti-Intellectual Presidency.  You can read Lim’s blog Amazon on the debate rhetoric here.

Good news this week for transparency, which is poised to make a huge comeback in the wake of global economic apocalypse.

This is one of those weird moments in history right after the words, Oh, busted! echo through the collective human consciousness, when it’s still unclear just how much deception there’s been, but all parties tentatively resolve to sit down and try to work it out (for the kids’ sake? Spotted: Henry Paulson on one knee, begging in public to Nancy Pelosi — ancient history by now, but telling, nonetheless).

Enter a new age of caution, where yesterday’s faith in basic honesty comes off as an eagerness to be misled. Say goodbye to NINA loans, political debates sans on-site fact-checkers, and nights out with buddies that don’t involve minute-to-minute significant other text message updates.

Re-enter transparency, the hottest quality/condition of Fall 2008. It’s a lot like faith, but without all the hassle of not knowing for sure. And while investors and American voters are scrambling to get a piece of the transparency action, they aren’t alone — Cycling champ Greg Lemond wants it. Australia’s Labor party wants it. College students who use Facebook want it.  

I’m willing to bet TMR readers want it, too.

As Marketplace listeners are now reminded almost daily, this is a worldwide crisis of trust we’re in. It therefore would be sort of understandable if many of our readers found themselves thinking, The essays, poems, stories, found texts, and interviews in The Missouri Review are too good to be legit. What is TMR up to?  How can it remain uncorrupted without regulation and oversight?

Good questions. Yes, we’re legit. The things we publish are Just. That. Good.

Luckily, that’s due to the talent of our contributors, so our own integrity doesn’t really come into play. We deal in manuscripts, and for us, business is good. If it weren’t, who knows whether we’d have attempted to apply the reckless economic policies that ravaged the national economy to our publishing enterprise … gathering up subprime submissions, tranching them together, and reclassifying them to give them higher ratings. Or making imprudent offers of publication to writers bankrupt of insight. Or encouraging those same talentless writers to take out equity lines of publication against the value of the story we imprudently published in the first place …. Oh, busted?

No. Not here, anyway. The plain, transparent systems analysis of our operation is this: We read submissions, send back the many that need more work, and publish the few that don’t. 

So in the unlikely event Henry Paulson shows up at our offices and gets down on one knee, we’ll know in our case that’s just his special way of saying thanks.

                               Mammon led them on,
Mammon, the least erected Spirit that fell
From Heav’n, for ev’n in Heav’n his looks and thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
The riches of Heav’n’s pavement, trodden gold,
Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed
In vision beatific: by him first
Men also, and by his suggestion taught,
Ransacked the center, and with impious hands
Rifled the bowels of their mother earth
For treasures better hid. Soon had his crew
Opened into the hill a spacious wound
And digged out ribs of gold. Let none admire
That riches grow in Hell; that soil may best
Deserve the precious bane.

[Paradise Lost, Book I, ll. 678-92)]

As the economy continues to plummet like a falling angel, we thought we might take a moment to consider some books that have the love of money or the catastrophe of debt at their heart. Many of our staff were too busy stuffing their mattresses and minting bullion to contribute this week, but we welcome your own contributions in the comments below! (Note: if you’re a newly registered user, your comments will appear after the first one has been approved by our webmaster.) 

1. Katy Didden, Poetry Editor

Two books of poetry came to mind when we decided on this week’s list:  Capitalism, by Campbell McGrath, and The Displaced of Capital, by Anne Winters.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t track down Capitalism at the library, which could be a confirmation of its pertinence right now, as someone has probably sequestered it in their study carrel for close reference.  I looked it up on Amazon yesterday, and one copy was selling for around $80.00, but today the prices have gone down–a strange phenomenon which I find delightfully ironic, given the title of the book.  In any case,  I did find McGrath’s Road Atlas, which might be just as relevant to this list.  McGrath writes a series of prose poems about specific places, most of them cities in the US.  I’m a fan of the way McGrath uses consumer language in his poems-while I guess there’s an inherent irony in a line like “While Elizabeth shops at Costco, Sam and I play hide & seek/ among the bales and pallets in that vast warehouse of pure things,”  I think McGrath does not just critique capitalism, but admits its seductiveness.  Anyone who writes a line lamenting the theft of his “Incredible Hulk piggy bank” has something funny and insightful to say, I think.  Winter’s book, The Displaced of Capital, is also concerned with maps, though it is not panoramic America, but a close-up of New York City: Brooklyn, and Manhattan.  In “An Immigrant Woman,” a poem in ten sections, Winters recounts a personal history of Williamsburg tenements, and the neighborhood’s attempt to mobilize against the construction of a wider bridge ramp into Manhattan that endangers the tenement residents, and ultimately results in tragedy.  The book is a profound, elegiac history that traces the brutal effects of urban poverty, both  financial and cultural, mixed with the resiliency of those who live inside that poverty.  Check out the fourteen sonnets in “A Sonnet Map of Manhattan,” and the title poem, with its echoing line: “The displaced of capital have come to the capital.” 

2. Patrick Lane, Web Editor

I’ll start with a thoroughly unvetted pick — a pick whose quality is as uncertain as a batch of mortgage-backed securities. That is to say, a book a haven’t read. But it sounds both interesting and timely, and the selections I’ve read have been intriguing. The book is 1923’s Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefevre. It’s a portrait of the early days of modern Wall Street, which (as we sometimes forget) had seen plenty of panics and disasters before the Great Depression. Here’s a tone-setting excerpt:

Another lesson I learned early is that there is nothing new in Wall Street. There can’t be because speculation is as old as the hills. Whatever happens in the stock market today has happened before and will happen again. I’ve never forgotten that. I suppose I really manage to remember when and how it happened. The fact that I remember that way is my way of capitalizing experience.

The book is available in reprint, or you can read it online here. My second pick is for those who need a little levity with their economic crisis. If you want a little stock-ticker-tinged confection, you must watch the Coen Brothers’ The Hudsucker Proxy (curretnly dirt cheap on Amazon). A comedy that begins and ends with a corporate president jumping from the 44th floor (not counting the mezzanine) has to warm the cockles of even the most miserly heart in this troubled time. The film also features a wonderful performance by the late, great Paul Newman.

Here’s a particularly brilliant sequence that to my mind is one of the greatest marriages of music and images in cinema:

3. Marc McKee, Graduate Advisor

As we make our rocky way through some of the extreme turbulence of late capitalism, maybe it’s a good time