No news today - Guest Post - Jess Walter

True story: When I was twenty I was sent to see about a dead woman on some railroad tracks. I’d only been at the newspaper a few weeks. I drove out to an industrial area between downtown and the suburbs, my wire-bound reporter’s notebook jutting from my back pocket. The intersection with the railroad crossing was cordoned off, traffic was stopped. The woman’s body was between the rails, under one of the cars of the train, except for a bruised leg, which was draped over the tracks. Some firefighters had laid a body bag next to the tracks, and as I watched, they counted to three and then lifted the woman off the tracks. That’s when her back gave out, like an old grain sack, and she sort of … dissolved into the bag.

All afternoon, I interviewed people about what had happened. Drivers had seen the woman pacing by the tracks for at least an hour, as if she was waiting for a train. She let one train pass. The engineer of the second train saw the woman pacing and thought: Oh no, don’t do it. Because you can’t stop a train, he said over and over. Not like a car. Right before she stepped in front of the train, the woman looked up and made eye contact with the engineer.

It turned out the woman lived in a little house near the tracks. She crossed that intersection nearly every day to walk to a grocery store, where she bought food for her husband, who couldn’t work because of a bad back, and her son, who was developmentally disabled. There was a fabric store next to the grocery store and after shopping, the woman went into the fabric store sometimes but she never bought anything. She just fingered the bolts of fabric and then left. However, on this day, on the day she waited for an hour to step in front of a train, the woman bought several yards of material. No one asked what she was making. The fabric was in a bag next to the tracks.

Back at the newspaper, I organized my notes, imagining I was writing a small but vital story—tragic, ordinary, inexplicable. I planned to write it matter-of-factly, to avoid making judgments and connections. My editor came over and I told him what I was working on.

He said, Forget it. We don’t do suicides.

Why not, I asked.

He said, because it’s not news. I just stared at him.

Look, he said, people who commit suicide want desperately to share their misery with the world. If newspapers published the morbid details of suicides, it would just make other people want to kill themselves, too, to share their misery with the world.

Looking back, I think it was probably a good rule. But it seemed kind of insane to me at the time: we don’t do suicides. Later I became a novelist. Misery is big news for a novelist; for a good suicide, we’d stop the fucking presses.

Jess Walter is the author of five novels, most recently 'The Financial Lives of the Poets.' He won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best novel in 2005 and was a National Book Award finalist in 2006.

No news today - Guest Post - J.A. Tyler

The no news today is that two boys played near an open well
deep in the ocean and none of them fell in. The no news
today is that there was no explosion. The no news today is
that instead of falling in, these two boys fell up and
broke their heads on the sky. The no news today is how
it hurt, the clouds coming slowly down and spilling, the
land a mess of white in the shape of all these animals.


J. A. Tyler is the author of eight books including the
recent INCONCEIVABLE WILSON (Scrambler Books, 2009) and the
forthcoming A MAN OF GLASS & ALL THE WAYS WE HAVE FAILED
(Fugue State Press, 2011).He is also founding editor of
Mud Luscious Press.Visit: www.mudlusciouspress.com.

No news today - Guest Post - Lucy Corin

Sometimes when I’m trying to find the microsoft word icon to pull up a new document I do get it mixed up with what it feels like to scrounge around for a piece of paper. I’m going to have my own website, soon, and I have seen the mock-up or whatever you call it for the blog page. (Mock-up is a technical term I don’t feel qualified to use.) When I imagine my voice in the blog it’s a little stiff and anxious (like this), the blog is a confessional (the world of the internet is my priest) and it is a diary (the world of the internet is my projected self). I might post a few entries from my actual childhood journals, which I addressed after a great deal of thought, to “?”. I think I’m finally old enough that nothing from childhood is embarrassing, because it’s from childhood, the pod of me—it’s not embarrassing because of the way things are turning out. A babysitter saw that I wrote in journals and bought me one that said on the cover in iconic bellbottomed 70’s font “I’m okay and getting better!” (I did not use it but I had a hard time getting rid of it even though I did not like that babysitter.) A writer horrified me at a reading I went to a few months ago by saying that “autobiography is the quest literature of our time.” The incredible journey up my ass. Can I say that on this radio?

Lucy Corin is the author of the novel Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls (FC2) and the short story collection The Entire Predicament (Tin House Books). She's working on a novel and an assemblage of 100 apocalypse stories, currently strewn about the web.

No news today

There is no news today. An 86 year old former senator from Alaska, who survived a plane crash in 1978, seems to have perished in a plane crash. At the same time, readers of Publisher's Weekly named all kinds of writers as part of an extensive underrated list, including Donald Antrim, Deborah Eisenberg, Brian Evenson, Richard Ford, Mary Gaitskill, Michael Kimball, Sam Lipsyte, etc. There is no appropriate reaction to being included on such a long list, I don't think. Still, there is a certain amount of appreciation and comfort in knowing that this certainly qualifies as no news.

No news today - Guest Post - Christopher Kennedy

Inception is a very thought-provoking film. Here are some of the thoughts I had while watching it:

The beard’s not working for Leonardo.
Ellen Page annoys me. I hated Juno. And Smart People.
Hey, Leonardo is driving a Hyundai Genesis. No one’s dream car is a Hyundai Genesis.
Shouldn’t Leonardo’s wife be standing on the ledge of their hotel instead of the one across the street?
I must be deep in my own subconscious, because these two and a half hours feel like two and a half years.
Did Tony get whacked? Oh wait; wrong black out ending.
That was the worst Batman film ever.

Christopher Kennedy's fourth book, a collection of prose poems, Ennui Prophet, is due from BOA Editions, Ltd. in 2011. He is an associate professor of English at Syracuse University where he directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing.

No news today - Guest Post - Susan Daitch

I had some characters who needed to go to the Berlin Zoo in 1933. It’s a place I have visited, but not in 1933, and I wanted to make sure, to the extent I was able, what the zoo was like about eighty years ago. In the process I got sidetracked by the story of Carl Hagenbeck, animal and human impresario. Hagenback was born in Hamburg in 1844. I imagined him living in the quaint folkloric Germany of Clemens Brentano or the fairy tale middle European constructions of Ghislain de Diesbach. His father, a fishmonger with a side business in exotic animals, gave Carl, when still a child, a seal and a polar bear cub as presents. Hagenback displayed them in a tub and charged a few pfennigs to spectators interested in watching arctic mammals splash around. These early entrepreneurial endeavors eventually led to a career capturing, buying, and selling animals from all over the world, destined for European and American zoos. Hagenback, known as “the father of the modern zoo” was a pioneer in the concept that animals should be displayed in some approximation of their natural habitat. Acknowledging little difference between human (at least some humans) and animals in terms of questions of captivity and display, he also exhibited human beings: Eskimos, Laps, Samoans, African, Arabs, native Americans, all stationed in zoos across Europe in reproductions of their native environments. Creating panoramic fictional spaces for his creatures, Hagenbeck is often credited was being the originator of the amusement park. How these captive people felt about the peculiar dress, language and eating habits of the spectators has not, as far as I know, been recorded. European emissaries, whether propelled by diplomatic missions or for purposes of trade, went into the world and brought back artifacts, instigated the concept of collecting for those who could afford it. German museums would come to display the Gate of Ishtar, vast Chinese temples, Assyrian fortresses, and other treasures. Hagenbeck, a hybrid figure: ethnographer, zoologist, showman, anthropologist, capitalist, but also the son of a fishmonger was not of this class of adventurer. A populist, ok, but also the question hangs in the margins: when did the Berlin Zoo stop displaying humans? 1931, I think, but I’m not sure.

In a Berlin bookstore I found a copy of Gerald Durrell’s Zoo in My Luggage, a long lost book from my childhood. In 1957 Durrell and his wife traveled to Cameroon to collect endangered animals and bring them back to England for his private zoo with the intension of re-introducing species back into the wild whenever possible.

Susan Daitch is the author of two novels, L.C.(Lannan Foundation Selection and NEA Heritage Award, The Colorist, and a collection of short stories, Storytown. Her work has appeared in Tinhouse, Conjunctions, Guernica, Bomb, Ploughshares, failbetter.com, McSweeney's, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction and elsewhere. Her work was featured in The Review of Contemporary Fiction along with William Vollman and David Foster Wallace. Her fourth novel, The Dreyfus Book, will be published by City Lights in Spring, 2011.

No news today - Guest Post - Joshua Furst

We got the news, when it came at all, weeks after it had occurred, and—though by then, it was meaningless, useless, a fading dream, to the rest of the world—we read it, when it arrived, like it still mattered. The outrageous claims of political hucksters, the baroque tales of intrigue and violence in the cities, announcements of bills passes or stalled in the Senate, of inventions and slaughters and weddings and sporting events, all so crucial, so bloated with change-making implications, we’d read all about these goings on, nodding, stroking our chins, exclaiming, “Well, who woulda thunk that could ever be?,” pondering how the news would affect our lives, or if it already had, and if so, how, when?

We’d mosey out to the porch and look across the fields—the fresh cut alfalfa, the stream, the old oak tree—all the same old same old we knew so well. That stray tabby had given birth to a new litter; they were hobbling around now, their eyes still half glued shut. We’d feel just the same as we had the day before, and the day before that, and last year and so on. But different too, a little less sure of whether to believe the story of the land sloping out before us or those tales that had floated in from the capital, a bit more resentful about being told, so long after the fact, what was real and what wasn’t. Like we didn’t have eyes. Like we couldn’t see for ourselves.

Storms were brewing in the sky, tornado season was on its way again.

Joshua Furst is the author of The Sabotage Cafe and Short People. His work has been published in the Chicago Tribune, Conjunctions, the New York Tyrant and Esquire, among other periodicals.