FEAST

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One Cent in Manhattan

ONE CENT IN MANHATTAN

Designed—I’m not sure why or how or even when—as a complimentary badge, you leave a single shiny penny face up on the table after you’ve received excellent restaurant service. In Chelsea,

good service is hard to come by, so seeing this penny left on the table next to yours made me grin in the promise of the experience you were about to have. I was a server for a while in college and would

have preferred a twenty-five-percent gratuity over the symbolism. I have a feeling that this server, probably an aspiring actor, would have preferred the same. The checks here are big: the penny could easily have been thirty-five bucks for the three people who had just left aswe were being “sat.” Maybe they left it on the credit card receipt. You can do that nowadays, have it both ways: symbol and substance.

“I am such a B-list celebrity…” he trailed off into a huff and a sigh, “So B list.”

You smiled, “B plus.”

Y’all sighed in a raspy C major.

Every detail derives its musical sense from the concrete totality of the piece which, in turn, consists of the life relationship of the details and never of a mere enforcement of a musical scheme—

Adorno, On Popular Music

Sitting outside on the patio of a Chelsea café across from a friend whose up-and-coming presence in - the New York acting scene has not yet peaked nor approached plateau, you preferred guiding the topic to the feta crumb sitting on his cheek. You had met each other through a mutual acquaintance (and this specific fact rather escapes you) sometime longer ago than thirty-six hours and shorter ago than two years. As you started to reach across the table to flick the crumb, a neighboring table of loud and preppy thirty-something pretty boys simultaneously leaned inward as if to build a teepee—perhaps a steeple—with their heads. “Don’t anybody dare look,” you imagined them saying as one coyly caught your eye and looked away self-consciously.

“Oh my God, it’s him,” you actually heard, not imagined.

You grinned, recapturing the glance of the same boy who could not bear the thought of not seeing what he was dared to not look at. The teepee—steeple—-was dismantled as each of the four boys leaned back and reached for something: a glass of merlot, an ultra-light beer, an ultra-light cigarette, the waiter’s ass. They school-girlishly giggled.

One one-hundredth of a dollar. Almost useless, it doesn’t even buy a gumball anymore. I usually throw pennies away when I receive them, something for the bums outside 7-11 to pick up instead of begging me to ignore them. I usually don’t even keep quarters. Change jingling in my pocket only weighs me down.

You were, after all, with a B-list celebrity. You were intrigued. From a supporting role on Broadway to a series of dandruff -shampoo commercials

the relations between the evil and the cure, between dirt and a given product, are very diff erent in each case—Barthes, Mythologies, “Soap-Powders and Detergents.”

in which his head was immortalized into two hemispheres (one of which was tingling while the other was poorly lathered and tingle-less), he was certainly best known for his recurring role on a trendy situation dramedy set in the City. He also had a bit role in a play-come-movie from which he said he still received royalties. The boys at the adjacent table cooed.

Your acquaintance ate his feta-and-spinach focaccia. You paid the check and suggested a walk to the park. Central Park would be “fine,” he interrupted, “but it’s sixty blocks away.” He rolled his eyes as you walked out to catch a cab.

Do you want to walk along? Or walk ahead? Or walk by yourself? One must know what one wants and that one wants –Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “Fourth Question of Conscience.”

You smiled at the boys who smiled back. The one who had previously reached for the waiter’s ass made a move toward yours which you handsfreely blocked by unsmiling at him.

Lincoln’s head adorns the penny, the front of it, since 1909. Maybe that’s what good service means: he freed the slaves and saved the Union after all. Plus he was a Republican.

You know many famous people. You know many wealthy people. You know many beautiful, intelligent, and political people. You see them on TV, hear them on the radio, read their words in newspapers and magazines. You can call them when you feel like chatting, you can stop by their homes when you want face time.

The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn, an Event—Barthes, Mythologies, “The Face of Garbo.”

You have long since been unimpressed by celebrity and even more unimpressed by people who are impressed by celebrity. This aversion to the idea of celebrity is probably not very different from a native New Yorker

being unimpressed by what is to you—whose personal transportation is as much a badge of freedom as the only way to get around—the gritty and foreign idea of sewer-routed mass transit.

I examined the back of a penny I found on the ground because I’d never really looked at one so closely; it says “E Pluribus Unum,” which means, “Out of many, one.” What a fantastic idea, rife with symbolism, that one penny becomes a badge of a whole people. Intrinsically, not so valuable, but the richness of meaning is overwhelming.

The image that is read, I mean the image at the moment of recognition, bears to the highest degree the stamp of the critical, dangerous impulse that lies at the source of all reading—Benjamin, The Arcades Project, “Theoretics of Knowledge, Theory of Progress.”

So, you walked through the park, past the softball fields, under the carved stone archways, through the well-trodden pathways. You talked about the impending Broadway actors’ strike which, though he wasn’t actually working at the time, he supported. You discussed a political albatross which was strangling the new mayor: the homeless. You talked about the fourth of July in Manhattan, his new SoHo apartment, the Brooklyn Bridge, and his new shoes. You talked about everything except Fossy, Chicago, Sex and the City, and dandruff . Finally ducking into an Upper East Side bar as the sky turned yellow with dusk, you noticed that people were looking at you as much as they were staring at him.

I met a seer,/Passing the hues and objects of the World,/The fields of art and learning, pleasure, sense,/To glean eidolons.—Whitman, “Eidolons.”

Though you didn’t have B-list celebrity in which to bask, you did have the mystery of anonymity on your side. Your celebrity by association was far richer. Indeed, you caught more glances, smiles, and embarrassed

looks than it seemed he did. “Oh there’s that guy from,” you imagined them trailing off . “Who’s he with? A writer? His agent? A model?”

His first glance found him—Mann, Death in Venice.

Lincoln died for the Union, martyred forever as the second father of our nation.

O powerful western fallen star!/ O shades of night—O moody, tearful night!/O great star disappear’d—O the black murk that hides the star!/ O cruel hands that hold me powerless—O

helpless soul of me!/ O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul.—Whitman, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”

You ended your tour of the Upper East Side. You returned to your hotel and he to his new apartment. He had to meet the movers and prepare for an audition in the morning. You would see him soon, you knew.

With another friend, you stepped out onto Forty-Second Street in Midtown. You were totally and luxuriously dressed down: shorts, flip flops, a ballcap, and some shades which, in a moment of silliness, you

had paid five hundred thirteen dollars for. You were going to a cookout at one of his buddy’s midtown lofts.

Being a bit shy, you insist that you are not presented according to your vocation, but to your avocation. So you were introduced around with the air of usual vagueness that you insist upon (“ he is a student”

is how this friend introduces you; for other of your friends you are “a poet”). An especially catty member of the group winked at you as if you were in some special two-person fraternity: “You’re an actor,

aren’t you?”

The singularity of ‘vocation’ is never better displayed than when it is contradicted—but not denied, far from it—by a prosaic incarnation: this is an old trick of all hagiographies—Barthes,

Mythologies, “The Writer on Holiday.”

“No.”

“You look awfully familiar.”

“Nope, just a student from Central Florida. I write a little.” You could sense tension beginning to build. You flashed your bright white teeth and blinked nervously—almost flutteringly. You breathed in deeply through your nose.

And all he gets is a penny?! Perhaps this is because there are so many of them. The U.S. Mint says that there are billions of pennies in circulation. Technically, the government calls them “cents.” They cost more to make than they are worth, about two-point-four cents worth of materials in each one.

As a circle began to form—you sensed an impending steeple—your friend intervened on your behalf: “Who him? Oh, he’s nobody!” Such a seeming insult never felt so good. The circle crumbled and one of them

whispered something about Abercrombie and Fitch to his friend. A faceless source was definitely heard: “Well, I know he’s somebody. I just don’t know why these people have to be so bitchy.”

Even the youngest child carries a shiny penny. It is not too much to have: one cent. And then, when there are more cents, sense. A sense of history caught up in the future with the hope of raising up a new American to carry on this mantle.

After a few Grey-Goose Cape Codders (don’t forget the lime, please), the tension from the previous whispers and nudges was released. The usual questions about your visit were piled high, much more densely than

you could answer. “Yes, I was at that party.” “No, I wouldn’t be going there this time up.” You finally excused yourself for a bit as you found a mostly empty couch being held down by an extravagantly handsome and broodingly quiet guy. You sat and basked in each others’ awkward snobbiness until your friend came and introduced you. You shook hands. Your friend raised his eyebrows as he turned his back to your sofa mate and mouthed with silent exaggerated words to you that the guy on the couch was the weekend anchor of a local TV news show. In Manhattan, that’s really something, you thought, grudgingly wallowing in your unmitigated bitchiness.

Productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities

with the products of men’s hands.—Marx and Engels, Capital.

“Great party, lots of nice folks. Can I get you a drink?” It was as if he were reading off the teleprompter.

“No thanks,” you answered. “We’re just getting ready to go. Nice to meet you though.” It is obvious, in retrospect, that your status as co-celebrities (even though yours wasn’t actually a celebrity—but that he considered you “somebody” also) warranted the comment and invitation. “Maybe we’ll see you out later.”

“I hope so.” You were the gracious recipient of the anchorman’s smile. He loosely and flirtingly bit his lower lip.

On the other side of the penny, opposite the head, on the side with the “E Pluribus Unum,” is an engraving of the Lincoln Memorial. So gracious in detail, the statue of Lincoln at the center of the building is visible. Odd that they would stamp a picture of a memorial on a memorial.

Knowing that a system which takes over the signs of another systemin order to make them its signifiers is a system of connotation, we may say immediately that the literal image is denoted

and the symbolic image is connoted.—Barthes, Image-Music-Text, “Rhetoric of the Image.”

You left with your friend after giving thankful nods and hurried handshakes to your host and his other acquaintances who re-encircled you at the exit. The doorman in the lobby tipped his hat to you as you sauntered into electrified Manhattan. In a city of ten million residents are twenty-million eyes, twenty-million ears, and ten-million each of noses and mouths. There are one-hundred million fingers with which to feel and touch. There are billions of lights and scents and tastes and sounds swirling from the gut of the island. The Manhattan gaze is hypersensual, and it is not difficult to confuse these sense perceptions. Seeing is not so different from hearing or smelling, or even saying—taste your words.

The Medium is the Massage—Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage.

Times Square’s lights obscured the black sky and the sidewalk bustle obscured the lights. The smells intoxicated you. You turned your ballcap around so the bill faced backwards and put on your happy-to-be-walking face. You became part of the bustle, the not-so-distant lights sparkled .

For a time, during World War II, the penny was made of lead. They weren’t actually lead, but a tin alloy that fundamentally changed the coloration of the coin from the familiar copper to a sheen more silver. Something about needing the copper for munitions to fight the Nazis. Lead pennies, they called them. Like the women who gave up nylon stockings by painting lines on the back of their legs, and the rationed butter exchanged for stuff called “oleo” that made all meals stateside taste “a little odd,” as my grandmother described it, there was a sense that sacrifice was necessary. We’ll save our cents in order to save our way of life. What are pennies, anyhow?

“What’s it like?” your friend asked. “Why does everybody stare at you?” Your engorged senses perceived the same. You embarrassedly feigned nonrecognition of the source of his inquiry. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, whoever ‘they’ are must be staring at you,” you deflected.

It is an important mechanism, for it automatizes and disindividualizes power. Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights,

gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up.—Foucault, Discipline and Punish.

New York is a voyeur’s paradise. Scopophilia reigns. People watch New York City and expect New York City to return the glance. Diners and cafes that line busy thoroughfares (every thoroughfare in Manhattan is busy) have huge plate-glass windows through which walkers and eaters alike can and are intended to be seen. Storefronts exclaim that it is as exciting to be a shopper as to be seen shopping, and finally to be shopping and see those that see you shopping. Aspiring actors, writers, scholars, restaurateurs, and clothing designers all make their way to this place in search of the gaze that was so instantaneously and indelicately turned on you. People go to museums and theatres and universities to be seen seeing the arts that the city has to offer. This city with twenty-million eyes looks out in order to be looked upon. This jealous and needy gazing framework pervades the city: power is disseminated not merely by conveying the gaze upon objects, but with the expectation that the gaze will be returned in a mutual sharing of celebrity, power, beauty: sublimity. You disrupted this equilibrium.

So with Lincoln looking on, presumably from every pocket, America defeated the Nazis and the Japanese and the Fascists. The slaves that we might have become to totalitarian hatred remained theory, speculative reason for thanksgiving and an emerging Military-Industrial complex.

This driving force of American imperialism has since been augmented by Media and Entertainment. We produce and consume for the entire world: food, software, ideas, Hollywood. Hundreds of trillions of pennies spread across the earth in the name of freedom and in the name of money itself: market, capitalist, economy. Because the Union was saved and our American Christ was slain, there is always hope.

According therefore, as this produce, or what is purchased with it, bears a greater or smaller proportion to the number of those who are to consume it, the nation will be better or worse supplied with all the necessaries and conveniencies for which it has occasion—Smith, Wealth of Nations.

You did not know the protocol. What your admirers wanted in return for their candid on-the-spot interviews and ultra-sensual stares was an acknowledgment that—by virtue of being in your presence—they had value despite their own existences in the mundane. You should have indulged them and empowered them by acknowledging that “Yes, I am somebody.”

If you could be somebody in a city with twenty-million eyes, then they could  be somebody in a city of twenty-million eyes. If you could be an actor or a model or a writer or a politician, then they could be too—even if it was by mistake. By becoming the object of the gaze of this city, you allowed the

city—the home of your admirers—to be its own subject, to be empowered.

Society absorbs via the apparatus whatever it needs in order to reproduce itself.—Brecht, The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre.

The final day of your visit, you ambled down Fifth Avenue, again on the Upper East Side. Your friends circled and played, lagged behind and caught up. They jeered and cut up with each other. They would look and point in windows, up at the tops of buildings, down at homeless people mumbling to themselves in building entrance ways, at crazy New York City cabbies, and at you.

But flanerie itself had been more complicated, existing as a kind of deadpan parody of the scientific method, a reduction ad absurdum of disinterested observation, practices as an end in itself.—Jean, Surrealist Games.

You continued on intently, going wherever it was that you were going. You carried a Barney’s of New York bag, your hair was perfectly spiked, your pale-yellow Lacoste collar was turned up, your jeans sat just where you liked them on your hips. New York people continued to do their thing—to look and watch. You looked back as if to say “Yes, I can be famous if you want me to be.” You slapped a smart smile on your face and took off your shades: “I, too, can look.”

I don’t know which one of the two of us is writing this page.—Borges, “Borges y Yo.”

Perhaps, then, a penny isn’t just so bad for good service. Without the penny, and without what the penny represents, what would thirty five dollars be? Would it even matter how good the service was?

Without the penny and what the penny represents, what would any of us have? A bunch of Deutschmarks, I guess.

Manhattan blushed.

Manhattan blushed.— You, One Cent in Manhattan.

Manhattan blushed.

HOOPS

Thank you for your interest in reading HOOPS from the forthcoming book, "Black Kettle." The preview has ended, but please feel free to read other stories from MOMENTITIOUSNESS available here.

Obtuse

Obtuse

(explicit content)

Knobby-kneed and flat-chested, I was a lanky cauldron of empty threats and spritely libido for the first two years of our relationship. Though I had been offering to since we were twelve, I was all tease and talk until that day. My burgeoning sexual energy was properly constrained until the eighth-grade afternoon when we were alone in the same room, dressing out for gymnastics practice.

He was as beautiful as any boy I had ever seen and he gave off a musky scent that most probably should have been better controlled by a good antiperspirant. The aroma was intoxicating; not a single girl since Eve's first-daughter-in-law--from China to California to Charlotte to Mumbai-- has smelled that scent emanating from the boy that she adored and not quivered. The loin-blazing reaction to this scent---rising from the first boy a girl loves--- is matched only in ferocity by the dulcet combination of aromas that waft from her three-year-old son, swelling a mother's heart.

I had completely disrobed, and stood before him. With his head bent down and his eyes looking toward the ground, I was close enough for his tallest curls to tickle me. They did. I stepped in so that the tips of my pink-painted toenails touched the fore-rubber soles of his sneakers. He noticed my naked feet first.

Crouched to tie his shoe, when he looked up, he was in perfect position to kiss it. Even though he had never even kissed my mouth, I was oddly self-assured that one was not a prerequisite to the other. I knew that my boundless desire for his lips upon it would only be satisfied when he complied.

Although I had loved him since the day he first spoke to me, it was not until that instance when my loins sizzled with the same ferocity as the red carefree can-sized curls upon his milk-toned head that I positioned--with more than passing whimsy--my unclothed pelvis in his face. I stood bare before him, naked head-to-toe, emitting my own erotic scent. I shuddered, ready to erupt, as I awaited what I fantasized would be his autonomic lingual response. With the squeaky-sultry voice that might have been reminiscent of a Marilyn-Monroe/Candace-Bergen love child, I spoke the words , "Kiss it."

"OH MY GOD!" He screamed from the most deeply-pitted spot in his diaphragm as though toward the back of the gymnasium—never mind that we were in an eight-by-ten bedroom --"Oh. My. God."

I was arrhythmic.

I knew that he smelt it too. Suddenly wrapping around my legs and swirling with the scent of female desire, a silent, invisible, gaseous bubble had snuck out from the opposite side of my body. I looked down at his face, pokered as though he held a pair of aces and didn't care about the flop, and waited for it to tense in reaction to my emission. It did not. I smiled down in his direction with an emulsion of elation and horror. Although I had gassed, I was no less afire; it probably served as a propellant because for every second that he smiled with the explicit joy of his two previous almighty-inspired exclamations, I felt more and more ready to burst.

For the next fifteen years, my love for him grew forth from this moment. , expanding outward in every direction, consuming my heart and every chamber-shifting beat. He would be my husband some day; I gazed dreamily into the not-so-far future. We would have a perfect lovesome son--I knew it--who would dash between our legs and complete our universe. Though I wanted him in the most primal way, I wanted him more absolutely and completely into an eternity that spread unconstrained into the future and into even that future's future. And from that contrived imaginary future, I looked back again to this moment as the genesis that must have banged forth from this special kiss--the kiss I expected.

Just a few months after this event, he told me he thought he liked boys and proceeded to name certain classmates. "Yes," I agreed, "what is not to like about him or him or him?" They were, no doubt, the comeliest boys in the school, so it did not seem wholly odd to me. He was attracted to beauty, and I thought this was acceptable given his affinity for all other things beautiful. After all, he enjoyed a cappella gospel music, black-and-white Tennessee Williams plays made films, contemporary art museums, and he wrote blank-verse poetry.

He made up a language to describe our relationship and taught it to me. With our language, we lorded over all others around us. He was consumer and creator of beauty, and I was beautiful by proximity and affiliation.

This did not deter me nor did it deter my aspirations to be the future Misses to his Mister. I always spoke of our future wedding as though it were a foregone certainty: how I could not wait to stand by his side at the altar before God and before our families. He always agreed, so I knew that all I needed to do was persevere through the silly phase that seemed to have gripped all of the boys on the cheerleading squad and most of the more patent male members of the drama club.

Parallel to my fantasy, over fifteen years, we grew into this family, with this child, with this blessed union. We made it through the humps and bumps, my infidelities and his, through school and parties and tailgates; we made it through the excruciating years at the groves and the death of his best friend whom I loved for his sake.

We made it through since that first day: when the third "Oh my god!" was accompanied by, "I have one too."

I looked confusedly down at the top of his head as his eyes bulged with excitement of the discovery which I had libidinally exposed and forced before him.

He had noticed a piece of dark lint that had caught itself upon the stubble around my labia.

"You have one what?"

"A mole, just like yours, in the exact same spot! It's like a little chocolate chip!"

I looked down and noticed the lint which did, in fact, look like a piece of my anatomy. Not wanting to diminish the excitement of the moment, wishing for any connection onto which I could grasp, I confirmed that I, too, had been searching for another with the same beauty mark.

He broke into a cadenced rap--an impromptu cheer-- spitting out a barrage of variations of the word chip: "Chippy chip chipsters, chippily chipping chips...CHIPPER! Weeeeeee're CHIPPERS!"

Awestruck by what I had just witnessed and its utter randomness to the situation as I had staged it, I instantly banished it from my consciousness and memory. In short shrift, it would return as the basis of our organically grown 'chip latin.'

"Yes, it is. I bet it is very sweet," I sultrily managed to respond to a question he did not ask. I wanted to invite him again--hoping that this time it would be accepted--to kiss it. I was ready to beg, but the intense heat that was raging through my core soldered my tongue in place. I was ready for what the inescapable words could not have captured anyhow.

He stepped back, now focusing his gaze on my face. He smiled with such intensity that I could feel the muscles in his face flex in my own. He reached his hands down into his white shorts and firmly grasped his penis with one hand while he used the other to pull his shorts and underwear down to his mid-thighs.

My alveoli emptied and my areolas tingled.

His newly-unleashed musk mixed with the other scents which, on their own, had already combusted all around me. I was on the verge of melting into a pool of my own desire. My heart throbbed in my ears and I felt my face flush.

I looked down at his flaming red pubic bush and traced with my eyes his stubby, stark-white penis. Again, I gasped. Still holding his penis in his hands, he walked nearer me. Unable to maintain my equilibrium, I managed to control a faint onto the chair against the wall. Wiping an imaginary bead of glistening perspiration from my brow with my entire forearm, I heaved deeply and could feel the fire in my loins explode outward through my belly then my knees then my cheeks then my feet. For a moment I felt my elbows throb.

He continued steadily in my direction, taking steps constrained by his shorts, the elastic waistband of which still stretched just above his knees. Except for a dusting of blonde hair on his legs, the white shorts blended almost completely into the palette of his white legs. Shirtless, I could see the slightly darkened change in hue on his stomach, above where his shorts usually sat. His skin was so light, save some tiny orange freckles on his shoulders where some sun had visited but never stayed long, that I could see his blue and green veins tracing along his pectorals, rippling in some spots on his biceps and forearms. It was as though a marble statue had come to life and ambled toward me. The bright orange explosion of hair was the visual manifestation of the same red heat that raged invisibly throughout my entire body.

He had now assumed the position with which I had recently enticed him. My face was a tongue's length from his penis which he maintained in his hand. Entranced, I looked up into his eyes and waited for him to give me my instructions. I told myself that I would obey without equivocation. His lips parted and, at last, he spoke.

"See, I have one too!"

He began digging through his pubic hair and parted it with his two hands, his penis dangling and noticeably un-erect. With his two thumbs and forefingers, he created a heart around a flat, brown mole. "Up until a few months ago, when all this hair started growing, it's all you could see, well that and my penis." Matter-of-factually, he continued. "And you have one too. This is perfect!" He beamed, "Like a couple," he continued without irony, "chocolate chips." He repeated, this time nearly squeaking, "You have one too!"

"Yes," I deflated. I could feel bile surging toward my throat. I faked a smile and lied, "I do."

Then, without warning and without changing the expression on his face or the position of his hands, he bent down and kissed my forehead. I knew that, for the next sixty years, I would eye-pencil-dot my pelvis with a chocolate morsel-sized chip.

"I bet it tastes sweet," he said playfully, in a way that was completely devoid of anything but a passionate love for sweet milk chocolate.

"I bet it does," I considered inviting his kiss again, but settled for the dollop I had just received above my eyes.

With that, he quietly farted as he reached down to pull his shorts back up.

"Excuse me," he chuckled.

"I love you too."

DIALOGUE TWO: WHAT IS MOMENTITIOUSNESS?

 

MMTN:           We have reconvened with Jason Leclerc, the author of Momentitiousness, to continue our fascinating discussion about his book.

 

JL:       It's good to be back. Thanks.

 

MMTN:           I would be remiss if I didn't ask the simplest author question of all: Can you summarize your book in one to three sentences? Something tells me no.

 

JL:       That is a challenge, especially when you consider that this is very clearly not a novel.  I've already made it clear that it is not driven by traditional narrative, so that leaves me with three sentences about form. The book is not driven by narrative, it is driven by form; it flies in the face of traditional narrative in favor of form. Depending upon the way you approach the book--the order in which you read or omit the moments--it can be a grand narrative about first loves, anger and revenge, cutting edge scientific discovery, or a zombie war.

 

MMTN:           These stories, of zombie war for instance, talk about "Semiotic Arbitrage?"

 

JL:       No, they, taken in these groupings, use "Semiotic Arbitrage."

 

 

MMTN:           So, we have established where you're coming from on an intellectual level? You've unpacked the term "Semiotic Arbitrage" for us, and I think it's much more approachable than it was at first blush. How does this theory manifest itself in your book?

 

JL:       You might imagine that you are reading the same story thirty times.

 

MMTN:           Well, I'm not sure I get that. Surely, there are a few stories, like Obtuse, Acute, and Equilateral for example, that make that obvious. But how can we say that Juans is related to, say, Flag?

 

JL:       Ah! The triangle stories. These are the most obvious example of our threes. I use these stories to lay it all out. They are, to use trigonometric terminology, a proof.

 

MMTN:           If a reader doesn't connect with trigonometry, can they still get it?

 

JL:       God, yes.  I never really considered this, but you raise an interesting point. Perhaps this can also be a "Math for dummies."

 

MMTN:           And also "Physics for dummies" and "Economics for dummies."

 

JL:       And, well, "Sex for dummies."

 

MMTN:           You are not shy about sex. Sometimes very explicit sex.

 

JL:       I got in some trouble with the publisher on a couple of stories. "Too explicit," they said.

 

MMTN:           You had to re-write a couple of stories.

 

JL:       Yes, I did. It was frustrating because I saw nothing wrong with them. Readers will understand that Bloom and Obtuse are truth-seeking, even if they do get a little raw.

 

MMTN:           Before we talk about some of the particular stories, I want to challenge you on your statement that they are "the same story" from multiple perspectives.

 

JL:       Maybe I should have been more specific. They "could be" the same moment thirty times told.

 

MMTN:           Yes, but clearly some stories happen way in the past while others are way in the future. In totally different cities and with completely different characters.

 

JL:       So, you are approaching the metanarrative from a linear perspective. You are trapped by the conventions of the novel and the cinema.

 

MMTN:           With respect, Faulkner used shifting perspectives a century ago. Movies like Crash play with time and irony. They are nonlinear.

 

JL:       Well, they are told non-linearly. They are linear stories that are clipped up and re-told in such a way that the story itself is narrated for effect. What I do is different. I imagine that, because of wrinkles in time-space, non-linear moments can occur simultaneously.

 

MMTN:           So is this about perspective or is it about actual simultaneity?

 

JL:       It could be both, because I play with the narrative voice as well. I almost want to believe that the same narrator exists throughout, shifting shape and dropping into moments.

 

MMTN:           Sounds like Quantum Leap.

 

JL:       In a way, yes.

 

MMTN:           But in some stories, the narrator is first person. In others, omniscient. 

 

JL:       This narrator is a devious sucker. One of the things I like about this narrator is that we never know when to trust.

 

MMTN:           You talk as though you're not sure. Just to be certain, the narrator is not you, right?

 

JL:       God no. The narrator is just a story teller.

 

MMTN:           One of the things I had a hard time with was how some of the very disparate characters fell into the same, almost poetic, didacticism. If you expect us to believe that there is a singular narrator, that makes more sense.

 

JL:       "Poetic didacticism." I don't know if I like that or not.

 

MMTN:           I don't know if readers do either. Although, I have to admit that it is easy to get sucked in by that poetic voice...especially as it ducks in and out of the form of the characters in the stories.  For example, here's a line from that story we've mentioned a couple times, Obtuse. Would you mind reading this part for me?

 

JL:       Sure.

 

            Though I wanted him in the most primal way, I wanted him more absolutely and completely into an eternity that spread unconstrained into the future and into even that future's future. And, from that contrived imaginary future, I looked back again to the moment as the genesis that must have banged forth from this special first kiss: the kiss I expected, the kiss I desired.

 

MMTN:           Now, that's a thirteen of fourteen year old girl talking. Rather introspective for such a young person.

 

JL:       Well, actually, it's an adult woman looking back through time at the moment.

 

MMTN:           I'm coming to understand the use of the word "moment" to describe these vignettes, but please continue.

 

JL:       So, I admit that these aren't necessarily all the thoughts of the thirteen year old girl. Nor are they the ruminations of a thirty year old woman, completely. They are thoughts of a young girl being recalled by an adult woman who is channeling the poetic voice of our devious narrator.

 

MMTN:           Translation?

 

JL:       Arbitrage! But translation is a fair depiction in a paradigm that lacks "Semiotic Arbitrage" to explain it.

 

MMTN:           I should have seen that.

 

JL:       But here's another point. You don't have to see it. You can see it if you want to.

 

MMTN:           It's a sweet story in the absence of these insights.

 

JL:       Exactly. At least I think so.

 

MMTN:           You tell a mean story. I found myself comparing you to Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

 

JL:       I'll take that. They're pretty different types of authors with completely different methodologies, but viewing the stories--moments--as discrete units provides some of the qualities of these masters. In storytelling technique, I'm not sure there are two American writers that I would rather emulate.

 

MMTN:           I see you try to give a go at Borges, too. Not sure you hit it square on, but you dance around it.

 

JL:       Borges is my god. But, really, this form, this "Novel Collection" is about the oscillation between the parts and the whole, between the GUI and the contents. It can be nibbled in pieces with no regard for a larger narrative, or can be consumed in chunks to develop an individual read that is free of narrative "truth."  Meanwhile, the individual stories are entertaining as discrete units: touching, gripping, sentimental, erotic, joyful, and compelling. In a "soft pre-release" of the story Flag, thousands of online readers and critics from around the world consumed and acclaimed the unexpectedly sweet and complicatedly patriotic "moment."

 

MMTN:           We'll talk about FLAG in a minute, but tell me why you didn't merely call the book "Moments" or even "Momentousness," both of which are real words and both of which seem appropriate titles.

 

JL:       Actually, neither is exactly right. It isn't merely moments. It's a collection of possibly related moments. It would be disingenuous to lead readers to believe that there are no connections. And "Momentous" implies something grand and spectacular. That is not really correct either.

 

MMTN:           Possibly related? So, you're saying that you haven't written connections--you point out tangencies--into the collection?

 

JL:       I've written in the possibility of connections, but some of them are spurious and inexact. Is the character from Borges the same as the one from Coma? There are a lot of similarities, but one goes to Southern Africa while the other goes to Western Africa? Wouldn't a good narrator be more specific? More precise? So the reader gets to make that call, to make that connection when the narrator fails--for whatever reason--to make the connections concrete.

 

MMTN:           Sounds noncommittal. Are you abandoning your responsibilities as an author?

 

JL:       I'm ratcheting up the responsibilities of the reader to be complicit in the storytelling.

 

MMTN:           Do readers want this responsibility?

 

JL:       Mine do. Let me reiterated that Momentitiousness is not merely a collection of "related" stories. Instead, it is a collection of moments that may or may not be related, depending upon how the reader approaches it: A "Novel Collection." The physical text is organized in one of 30 factorial (that's 30 x 29x 28 x 27...x 2 x 1) ways that the book can be read. The points of tangency are intentionally spurious, allowing readers to wonder (perhaps decide) whether the jagged connections should be overlooked to strengthen the story they want to read or perhaps challenged as the deceptions of an untrustworthy narrator.

 

MMTN:           Momentitiousness, then, is...

 

JL:       The residue of a moment. A sense that something has happened and that it may have happened to you. That it may have happened just now. And in fact, it did. If nothing else, you just read it. It's the aura of somethingness in time-space that you only know in recollection.

 

MMTN:           Isn't that what all story is?

 

JL:       All of my stories.

 

 

MMTN:           Do you think you're taking something that belongs to everybody and claiming it as your own?

 

JL:       I'm taking something that should belong to everybody and making that explicit. I would also argue that this is not what a novel does. The job of the novelist is to tell the story, to expose what she wants when she wants and how she wants. The novelist holds the power of narrative.

 

MMTN:           You don't expose and hide certain truths?

 

JL:       My narrator may, but even my narrator provides freedom to the reader.

 

MMTN:           Like a "Choose your own adventure?"

 

JL:       Almost exactly. Like a "Chose your own adventure." We haven't talked about the organization of the book too much, but the way I present it in print is just one way of reading it. I would love readers to read it out of order, skipping around, randomly. I will tell you that if you read Juans-Blast-Briarpatch, you get a far different story than if you read Arbitrage-Blast-Briarpatch and differenter still if it's Walden-Arbitrage-Briarpatch.

 

MMTN:           And the tangencies?

 

JL:       They take on different meanings in the absence of other pieces. The Arachne poem without the Fire story creates a completely different set of relationships.

 

MMTN:           "Chose your own adventure?"

 

JL:       If you approach the book that way, randomly, then you can look back and say, "here is the story that I created." You aren't active in its telling, but you are active in the connecting.

 

MMTN:           Let's talk about Flag, because you've had some success with that story independent of its place in Momentitiousness.

 

JL:       True. That is a story that, like all the others, stands on its own. If this project were simply about telling great stories, I think I've nailed that.

 

MMTN:           As an artist, you have to believe that.

 

JL:       Bravado.

 

MMTN:           Some of the "moments" are rather opaque on their own. But I'll agree that I can imagine reading these stories without regard to Semiotics or Arbitrage or time-space. Flag received some great press. It is sweet and tender and yet powerful. Where did this kid come from?

 

JL:       Honestly, there might be a little bit of me in him.

 

MMTN:           Memoir? I knew it!

 

JL:       NO, NO, NO! Don't even try to pin that label on any of this, it's all fiction. I had other readers respond very sweetly that they felt I was writing about them.

 

MMTN:           You capture this child's thoughts with such precision. Would you read this section from Flag for us?

 

JL:       Sure.

 

            As a twelve year old, his concept of metaphor was yet undeveloped, so the flag did not merely stand for an America that he loved, it was an absolute object of adoration, like his dog, tater tots, and his mother. This is not to say that he didn’t also love America or Ronald Reagan in the same way, but they all had the same intrinsic value. One was not merely a symbol of the other; they all stood in a pantheon of things patriotic, not simply representing, but being. Too, his sense of love was nascent yet, and there was no distinction by the type of care or profundity with which he addressed the objects of his seemingly excessive adoration. Thus, he was bound by the same rules and expressions of intemperate love that he rained upon his dog, tater tots, and his mother.

 

MMTN:           This was not you? Our little fledgling conservative lover of Ronald Reagan? And, the way he stands on the precipice of developing this idea called "metaphor," which is really to one day become "Semiotic Arbitrage?"

 

JL:       Fiction. To deny that an artist does not draw upon experience is to lie about the author’s craft. But to assert that an author writes only what he knows is to deny the artist of his craft.

 

MMTN:           Fair enough. So, does this character--he has no name--recur?

 

JL:       Do you want him to? Is he the same kid in Doritos? Or Merry-go-Round? Is he the adult in Blast? The boy in Words? The protagonist from Borges?

 

MMTN:           He could be, I guess.

 

JL:       Exactly.

 

MMTN:           So let's talk for a second about your masterful use of pronouns in place of character names. I found this annoying at first.

 

JL:       I don't want to limit your read, the possibilities of connections. Names necessarily do that.

 

MMTN:           But you do name one character.

 

JL:       He is only a vessel for the imperfectly omniscient narrator to take form. The main character is the fully empowered reader, the "you" first introduced in One Cent in Manhattan: the foil to the narrator who carelessly shifts in and out of bodies and over time to present the moments that comprise the full text. The blurred lines between subject and object make "main characters" a redundant and unnecessary construction.

 

MMTN:           By the time you finally give us a name, I have already come to accept that I don't need names. But the name and the character you do finally give is somewhat disturbing. You put the narrator in blackface. You pull the voice of the actual character in and out, as though he is fighting to tell the story himself.

 

JL:       My homage to Joel Chandler Harris.

 

MMTN:           Would you mind, another section? From Briarpatch?

 

JL:       Sure

 

            I know, you aren’t supposed to know my name because it shatters the “universality of the anonymous.” In a thorny world where we have adopted the compulsion to name everything, you’ve made it all this way without knowing who anybody in this whole damn book is.  Must have driven you crazy, wondering, “Is that the same guy in those six stories?” and “How dare he talk that way about women,” and “That is the worst, most offensive black dialect I have heard since Joel Chandler Harris.” But Lawdy be, you don’ been throw’d in that briar patch, so you may’s well stick it out sin’ you already don in her’.

 

MMTN:           You may get some angry press over that.

 

JL:       So be it. I think this masking and unmasking is absolutely critical to the storytelling on the micro level. It is absolutely essential to the project and as a key to the accessibility of "Semiotic Arbitrage." Without this moment within this moment, there is no tacky glue holding the text together.

 

MMTN:           The last thing I'm going to ask about is the footnotes. This is where I really see Borges.

 

JL:       Do you find the footnotes distracting?

 

MMTN:           At first I did, then I just ignored them. When I arrived at Tangency Four, they made sense. I went back and reread them, disembodied from the stories they pretend to clarify.

 

JL:       Beautiful. I'm not sure I could have asked for you to have treated them any differently. Truly, they are the text. Everything written large above them is fluff.

 

MMTN:           What do you know about Dark Energy?

 

JL:       It's not what I know, it's what the text knows.

 

MMTN:           So the text has a life of its own?

 

JL:       As much as you or I do.

 

MMTN:           Getting rather metaphysical here.

 

JL:       I'm not sure you can disentangle what the footnotes do from metaphysics any more than we can disentangle the sign from the signifier or the signified.

 

MMTN:           Or the chair?

 

JL:       Or the loonies.

 

MMTN:           Jason Leclerc, Momentitiousness.  Thank you so much for your time.

 

JL:       Thanks again for having me. This has been a blast.

 

MMTN:           Best of luck.  Jason Leclerc, author of Momentitiousness.

You can blast through this book, or you can savor each carefully wrought word in this lyrical bootcamp for the mind. Either way, you will emerge on the other side banking more than you started with. Truly an adventure, from Arbitrage to Zombies.