KRRRRRRRUUUGGGGHHHK KRRRRRRRUUUGGGGHHHK

KRRRRRRRUUUGGGGHHHK

SNORT KRRRRRRRUUUGGGGHHH phew

An hour now. Lying here listening to this. Because he drank himself to sleep again. All those histamines. He’ll wake up all stuffy, but he’ll at least get some fucking sleep. I’m the one who’ll be up all night listening to the shake of phlegm in his throat. These snores. He’s got a problem. They all do. Booze kills cops quicker than any bullet out there. I get why he does it. Not like he works for a florist or in a library. But he has to know that he’s killing himself. I’ve tried to say it. Bill, what the fuck are you doing? How long you going to go on like this? Just another bitch wife raggin’ on her man. Another reason to stay out all night, come home reeking of liquor.

Up for a piss. Too dark to find my slippers, watch out for the corners. Stubbed my toe and the nail stayed black for weeks. Didn’t even know how bad till I removed the polish. Cold floor. I like it cold. He complains about the bills, but he never pays them. He’d forget if it wasn’t for me. If he lived alone he’d never run the AC or turn on the stove. Just microwave leftover takeout and drink until he passed out no one next to him to hear his snoring. Worse than usual tonight. Maybe he has a problem. Sick. Like one of those sicknesses where people have to wear a thing on their face when they sleep. A machine that helps them breathe. He might die in his sleep if he doesn’t get that checked out. I’ll wake up next to his corpse. Jesus, just imagine. How do you get over that? Lynn’s husband dropped dead at the table right into a plate of spaghetti. Heart attack. Just went. Remarried not even six months later. Her kids won’t forgive her.

If he fell face first into a plate of spaghetti that would at least shut him up. Shut him up. Shut up shut

Fuck.

Still going. Might as well read a book or something. Eyes too tired. Burning. Bags under my eyes that’ll never go away. He’s making me old. God, he’s like a machine. A noise machine. One of those white noise machines, maybe? Would that cover it? No way. Those things don’t get loud enough to compete with his snoring. Just be more noise in the room.

Maybe tomorrow. I’ll wake and he’ll be stiff as a board. I’ll not have noticed, fell asleep around 4:00 AM when he finally stopped snoring and then the alarm will go off at 5:30 and I’ll hit snooze and he’ll be there next to me stone dead. I’ll give him a shove and feel how cold he is. Will I scream? I’ll call Ritchie. He’ll handle everything. Pack him up and take him to the morgue. Ashes. No burial. Never liked the idea of anyone being put in the ground, even if they’re not alive to know it. Just seems gross. His mom will complain about how that’s not Catholic, how I made it harder for him to get into Heaven by scattering the ashes and making it so the Good Lord can’t find him. I’ll never have to see her again or his brother or any of them. No more of those dumb Christmas games or lousy food and all their drunken bullshit. I could move out of the city once he’s gone. Somewhere new, not this “vintage” building crap. A place that’s not so drafty, where the appliances aren’t holdovers from the Reagan era. A little place of my own in the quiet suburbs. Take the train to work and back. Plant flowers in the yard. Not have to worry about parking. Sprawl on the bed alone or maybe get a little dog. A cat. Just me and my pets. A condo if his insurance pays off and I get his pension. Do I get his pension? How does it work? Papers to review. Look them over. Tomorrow. Fuck it—tonight. Now. Can’t sleep anyway. Need to know all this. Just in case.

Samantha Hackett was born in Georgia and has lived most of her life in New Jersey. She recently moved to Chicago to see if she’ll have more luck.

Savior

Criminally unknown outside of Chicago’s borders, Francis O’Neill, Chief of the Chicago Police Department from 1901 to 1905, is more responsible for the endurance and preservation of traditional Irish music than anyone else on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. While that alone cements his cultural importance, O’Neill’s legacy includes appointment as CPD Chief by both Carter Harrison and Edward F. Dunne, unheard of in an era where loyalty to the exiting city leader cost a person their job once the next mayor took office.

During his tenure as Chief, O’Neill recruited police officers from the community of Irish musicians, which may sound ridiculous, though if the top cop himself is an accomplished fiddler and piper, why not? And O’Neill was accomplished at those instruments, as well as the flute. One might surmise that his true passion was the music of his birth country and that law enforcement was merely what paid the bills, though rising as high and so quickly through the ranks suggests that O’Neill was a motivated police officer. Records of his time from beat cop to chief are elusive and all mentions of the man focus on the novelty of a Chicago cop, circa 1901, being devoted to something other than busting heads and politicking.

After retiring from the big job, O’Neill published the vast amount of traditional Irish music he’d collected over the years since he left County Cork. He’d maintained correspondence with citizens of his native land and had them send phonograph cylinders of Irish dance music. His efforts have, according to the title of Adam B. Whiteman’s play about the Chief, saved the soul of Ireland.

O’Neill’s story is more than noteworthy, though I include him in the early pages of this book as a sort of establishing figure; Chicago’s immigrant communities, past and present, are plentiful and varied, and while Irish heritage seems utterly normal to Chicagoans of my generation, that Irish ubiquity is largely due to individuals such as O’Neill. Culture endures through effort. And if it endures long enough, it becomes unremarkable.

Confession

I really tried with the last entry, didn’t I? The ending aims at profundity and misses the mark. When I wrote the piece about Chief O’Neill, I was still thinking of reappointment and felt each entry in this compendium needed justification. Instead, I land on some muddled idea about cultural preservation that, perhaps only to me, suggests that readers might think of the ongoing struggles of the less-entrenched ethnicities fighting against waves of marginalization. Did I mention my university’s mission of social justice?

It is with that mission in mind that I penned the earliest bits of this book, thus the shoehorned message. Now that this compendium has come to nothing, I see those efforts as transparent toadying.

Confession: I know about Chief O’Neill not because of a deep knowledge of Chicago arcana but because of the bar named after him, one that serves a reliable Guinness and some pretty solid fish and chips. I’ve been there for double dates with other married couples and early evening to-dos that wrap in enough time so I’m back in bed before ten. Tamer affairs than my wilder days at Rose’s and Delilah’s. I see a theme emerging in this book that might alter its title: Compendium of Eccentrics Inspired by Bars in Which the Compiler Wasted His Life.

Last night, I made toast. With butter and grape jelly. Not strawberry. That would have been better, but I had only grape because last week I was in the grocery store and saw Smuckers grape jelly and it made me think of the 1970s and I welcome anything that sets me thinking about the 1970s. Grape jelly and Land O’Lakes even though I prefer Kerrygold. To make it complete, I bought Wonder Bread instead of my usual Turano Rustic Grain loaf. White bread. Claylike and synthetic. Grape jelly. Salted, competent butter. Two bites in, I wanted a Big Mac. And fries. And a bottle of Coke with real sugar and a chocolate malt. And something that I vaguely remember that was called a tamale and came wrapped in paper instead of corn husks. A steamed Tom Tom tamale brazen and false and covered in Hormel chili. Topped with Jays potato chips. A dash of Tabasco sauce. Government cheese. For dessert: freezer-burnt Breyers Neapolitan ice cream and tinny chocolate syrup. Or a scoop of vanilla with a Magic Shell helmet. I wanted all this and more. I settled for toast and jelly and a glass of water and imagined that one day I might be content with the cloistering winter and my cat and memories I know are forever threatened by a trip to the grocery store in the middle of the night, head full of entitlement, no one to stop me.

Robert Burkenhare is getting older every day.

The last thing we sent recklessly into your inbox was the beginning of a book that, as stated previously, we’re serializing just like Joyce’s Ulysses, only his book was a work of genius. We thought a quick note on this endeavor might be worthwhile.

Jabber has been up its own ass lately, politically and philosophically, inasmuch as we have thought long and semi-hard about the state of publishing, what even is a book, how we might best hawk our wares, and other matters less literary and more productionary. (Not a word, but it is now because we used it. History in the making. Thank you, OED, for its inevitable inclusion in your pages. Be sure to spell my name correctly.)

The conclusion of these ruminations are few, chief among them that we’re ready to throw away the system that does not want us anyway and become full blown socialists. Heartened by the election of DSA candidates and laughing for a solid week at the Democratic machine’s reds-under-the-bed freakouts, we thought we’d further seize the means of production and cut out the printer and warehouses and distributors and send a novel directly into your hands, so to speak. It’ll be digital and appear on a screen, not the ideal way to read anything, but it’ll be free free free. Unless you wish to support us by sending some rubles our way. (Our second book is still for sale here.) Thank you, comrades! Readers of the world, unite! You have nothing to loose but your purse strings.

Back to the free stuff.

This Compendium of Eccentrics will come monthly and accumulate like so much un-shoveled snow. The crafty reader may print each of these installments and staple them and make a makeshift book. We’re offering a special contest: print the entire thing once it’s done and design your own book cover. Best design gets a prize to be determined in the future but of no less than $12 value. A free book, an opportunity to flex creative design muscles, and a shot at twelve Yankee bucks? Your cups runneth over, people!

Some come with us, dear readers, and we’ll do our best to amuse and engage. If nothing else, this will be a real clock eater. We’re all for filling the void.

Yours,

Vince(nt) Francone, Editor-in Chief

Intro

In early 2014, I took a job teaching English at a university in Chicago. The job being non-tenure track, I was never under the illusion that my employment was permanent. The powers that be could fire me for any reason, so long as they did it between contracts.

Renewing a contract involved little more than doing my actual job, teaching. At least on paper. But in late 2016, when my first contract was approaching expiration, I was told that I had not established myself well enough.

I was confused. My student and peer evaluations were solid and I’d taught not only my own classes but had subbed for colleagues, taken over a composition class after an adjunct disappeared mid-semester, and agreed to teach Intro to Shakespeare—last minute—when the school’s resident Shakespearian fell into a coma. I devoted the last six weeks of the summer before that semester to reading the Bard, including a lot of plays I’d never read before, all in preparation for a class dropped on me without much notice. I could have phoned it in, but no. I was committed and willingly spent time over summer break working, uncompensated, toward a goal I’d never set for myself: knowing enough about Shakespeare not to look the fool in front of a group of theater majors who didn’t care about literary theories or anything other than costume choices. (These kids really hated me for making them read the sonnets.)

I was a team player. And a serious teacher, if not a brilliant one. But I lacked sufficient outside scholarship, publications, and service to the university. While not necessary to for reappointment, these extras were “deeply encouraged.” In other words, I should find a way to sweeten my reappointment portfolio.

It was toward this goal that I conceived of a research project regarding the histories of lesser-known Chicagoans. I may have stated to the reappointment committee that my work would culminate in a published monograph that filled the gap between more famous figures (your Burnhams and Daleys) and the characters who populate Chicago lore yet remain excluded from traditional academic discussion (the Tamale Guy, the Old Navy State Street Preacher, the Lincoln Park Pirates). Whatever language I used in my portfolio worked—the university granted me reappointment.

Of course, I then had to write the goddamn thing.

Without getting into all that went into the original compendium, I will state that I began with the sincere notion of including only notable figures whose biographies were verifiable (all quotes and biographical details come from interviews, articles, and profiles published in periodicals of certifiable legitimacy, bibliography available upon request) and whose stories, I felt, offered something in the way of amusement or interest. Other books have honored Jane Addams and The Jane Collective; better effort has been spent on giving Jean Baptist DuSable his due attention. I wanted to find the secondary, maybe tertiary denizens who did something perhaps less grand in effect but equally worthy of discussion. The amoral businessman who helped make Chicago safe from ice and sleet, the mysterious woman distributing rosaries, the forgotten Nazi propagandist—in short, the eccentrics.

A friend of mine once said that money grants one the honorific eccentric. The poor are merely oddballs, cranks, weirdos. While this seems too simple, I get the idea— eccentric is a term that suggests a certain manner in line with the monied class’s behavior. We can regard Howard Hughes’s reclusive conduct as eccentric, even as a less famous and considerably poorer individual urinating in jars would merit coarser adjectives. Eccentric suggests a strange nobility, though perhaps less in contemporary parlance.

The Oxford English Dictionary cites 1556 as the earliest usage of eccentric, its meaning being “Not concentric with another circle” and, in later usage, “Not agreeing,” “Not centrally placed,” “Remote from the Centre,” and “Of actions, movements, and things in general: Irregular, anomalous, proceeding by no known method, capricious.” And those are just the definitions dating up to 1649. Perhaps most relevant to today’s usage is the 1832 definition: “A person whose conduct is irregular, odd, or whimsical.”

Reader, if you feel that my etymological digression is of no use or interest, well, the reappointment committee agreed. They also doubted my compendium would ever find a publisher.

I present the above quick dip into the root meanings of eccentric to both decry my friend’s idea that the word implies wealth and breeding and to save it from similar misuse. Eccentrics are, going back to the earliest definition in the O.E.D., decentered, out of frame, out of step, off beat, odd. Class and money may make their eccentricity more tolerable, even charming, but I put it to you that the eccentrics in the following pages are all worthy of consideration regardless of their caste.

The reappointment committee agreed with that last statement. They wanted me to dig deeper into marginalized communities and better represent the often under-represented. As you’ll see, assuming you continue reading, I didn’t do so great there. In fact, after starting strong with my research, I did what I have too often done—I pivoted to writing about whatever I wanted. This included entries on individuals with no claims to fame other than being some oddballs I’ve known personally. My oldest friend who saw aliens in his sleep, a conspiracy theorist who used to bring coffee to the bookstore where I worked, an ex-girlfriend who made the papers briefly after she stole cats from an animal shelter— while I maintain that these eccentrics merit inclusion in this compendium, and not merely because I knew them personally, the committee really hated that I strayed so far from anything academic. They accused me of lying to them, of padding my thin research to secure reappointment.

I have a few years left on my contract. It remains to be seen if the work I have done in others ways (committee service, assessment projects, curriculum review, not to mention my actual job: teaching) will keep me employed. At the very least, I have to redo the portfolio, but I have nothing more to add. My professional future is tenuous.

Regardless, I didn’t abandon the compendium simply because the powers that be rejected it. Why should rejection stop me? What follows is the result of both the more academically justifiable effort and the personal bits. I don’t apologize for its contents, structure, or tone, however lopsided, because, after all, why should a compendium of eccentrics be anything but off center?

Ra

I feel compelled to begin with Wesley Willis. Plenty of fine texts already document the man’s creative output and demons, but I start with Willis because it was a memory of him headbutting me that sparked the idea for this compendium.

Wesley Willis is remembered as an outsider artist, largely for his music. His songs, most of them spoken word verses and atonal choruses strewn over preprogramed music from a Technics keyboard, work surprisingly well. In his music, Willis discussed concerts he saw (“Shonen Knife” and “Urge Overkill” for example) or stories of his tortured life (“They Kicked Me Out of Church”). He often praised bands saying they “whipped a mule’s ass” and ended each track with, “Rock over London, Rock on Chicago,” and a slogan from a popular television commercial, such as “KFC: we do chicken right!”

More or less low-fi home recordings, they maintain a charm that his eventual backing band, The Wesley Willis Fiasco, lacked. Before he gained the attention of punk rock elder statesmen like Jello Biafra, Willis sold his CDs by hand in the bars across Chicago. Delilah’s is where I frequently saw him. A typical encounter:

“Wes!”

“Hello. You want to buy my rock and roll CD? Ten dollars.”

“I don’t have ten dollars, sorry.”

“When will you have ten dollars?”

“Um… I get paid next week.”

“You want to buy my rock and roll CD next week?”

“Okay. You got it.”

At which point Willis would headbutt me and implore me to say “Ra!”

It was well known that this somewhat-gentle giant suffered from “hellrides” with demons brought on by schizophrenia. Willis had a difficult upbringing in a Chicago housing project with volatile family and survived via his brothers’ shepherding. In his 1990s heyday, Willis lived as much on the streets as under a roof. He documented those streets with his ink pens and obsessively rendered cityscapes, sitting outside for hours drawing what he saw in front of him and from his memory. Since his death, his artwork has been displayed around town, and those who hung onto their ten- or twenty-dollar Willis originals prize the intricate pictures.

Willis’s death came early, though it didn’t necessarily come as a shock. He often seemed on the verge of doom, as much from his girth as his mania. Willis’s life was tragic, beautiful, odd, and uniquely Chicago. He was embraced by locals who might have sometimes regarded him less than generously, but even when he was headbutting them or vocalizing his paranoia over the demon voices “calling me an ASSHOLE!” Willis was hard to dislike. An outsider who became a fixture in a city that, for all its grit, is midwestern and welcoming.

Aside

Checking their website, I see Delilah’s still has nightly drink specials that are hard to beat. Mondays are the best—a dollar for an Outlaw beer and two dollars for a shot of Jim Beam. And free pool. For twenty bucks, a person can ride high on a Monday night.

I have not been to this bar in years, but its legend sticks in my mind. Thanksgiving nights drinking Wild Turkey and plenty of metal and punk music on the speakers entertaining the weirdos with nowhere else to go (or the people like me who hate Thanksgiving and prefer drinking among strangers to visiting family).

While compiling this compendium of eccentrics, it seems fitting to occasionally make space for these establishments that are every bit as unique as their patrons. Delilah’s qualifies for sure, but up the street on Lincoln Avenue sits Rose’s Bar still, miraculously, as the place always seemed on the verge of close. The owner, Rose, hailed from Estonia and opened her bar among the seedy dives of Lincoln Park well before the neighborhood gentrified. Famous for changing the price of a draft beer depending on how poorly the bar was doing that evening, Rose could be generous. I enjoyed more than a few free shots of slivovitz. But after suffering a blow to head during a robbery , Rose changed. No more smiles from behind the bar, no more free shots, just suspicious looks and as much distance as possible.

Sometimes I hate this city.

Darin Caudle is a filmmaker and writer based in London.

The unspoken rule is that you don’t speak when you’re changing in the locker room. Just don’t. Sure, this guy doesn’t say a word. But what’s with the nod?

I’m six feet if I’m an inch, but I don’t think the nurse measured me right last week when I went to my first doctor’s appointment in this new town. New to me. Come to think of it, she didn’t weigh me right either. This scale in the gym locker room is electronic. None of those sliding weights. According to this, I gained six pounds since the last time I stepped on a scale. Two years ago, not counting the doctor’s visit. Because the nurse messed it up.

This gym is so deserted. Nice! All to myself. Mostly. Maybe that’s how they do it here? Meaning they don’t do it. It = work out. They do seem to grown ‘em large in this city. No wonder. Donuts shops on every corner. Beer and sausage everywhere. Not exactly the most walkable town either.

I hit the cardio room and fight off the pounds I’ll one day have no choice but to wear around my middle. But today’s not that day. Twenty minutes on the treadmill. Then lift some free weights. Then another sprint on the treadmill. Break it up. Shock your muscles. My rough math makes it 400 calories I’ve burned. Good enough. I can eat an extra cookie after dinner, but let’s be safe. I jump rope until my chest feels like it’s having issues. Then more weights. My arms need work. Skinny little twigs.

Back in the locker room, I strip and step to the scale to see if the workout took anything off. A few ounces. A start!

“That’s the way to do it,” says this old guy. The one who nodded at me earlier. Finished his workout at the same time? Creep.

“Huh?”

“Weigh yourself in a towel. Not with shoes and a bunch of shit in your pockets.”

“Right.”

“But you know, even the towel adds something.”

I laugh a little and deny him the peek at my cock.

Hot shower. Real hot. Water in the condo doesn’t get this hot. And they have this nice smelling soap. Citrus and… is that coconut? Let’s take a moment to thank the owners. My old gym used this soap that smelled like high school. I’ll have to come here as much as possible. Jump start the day with a workout, then shower and head to the office. Lots of energy and smelling sweet. This is a new chapter. That’s why we moved here.

What’s the fuck? Dude… the shower doors close. No need to put it all out there.

“See anything you like?”

Almost my height. Better shape. Lots of tattoos and the arms to pull them off. Not like my wet noodles that’re already sore from three reps of curls. I’m not going to answer him. Not supposed to say anything. Don’t these weirdos know the unspoken law of locker rooms?

Right. He would be using the locker by mine. Rubbing himself down more than drying himself off. And not taking his eyes off me. I mean, that’s how it feels. Like he’s eyeing me. Had his eye on me since I walked in, but that’s not possible. I only saw him when I stepped out of the shower. The second guy to talk to me in the locker room when I just want to get dressed and go back to the condo and have breakfast. That is, if she got up to make it. I could call her on the way home and tell her how much I worked out. Sure worked up an appetite. Anything to eat? Any chance for a plate of eggs and bacon? Any coffee, or should I pick some up? Who am I kidding?

“You’re hurt.”

I tell him no, it’s a weird birthmark that looks like a bruise. I’m fine. No, I’m sure. Really. Okay. See? Nothing. Been there for as long as I can remember. Weird, right? And weird place for it. It’s raised some eyebrows, yeah. What? No, man. Come on. What are you talking about? Hey, seriously. What if someone? Just a quick. Fine. Wait. No… this. Wait. Try. Okay. There. Better. Shhh. Maybe don’t say anything. Just. Yes. What do you? That? No. That? Okay. Quick. Slower. Okay… there. Yes.

I don’t bother calling to see if she’s made breakfast or coffee. I get some on the way home. Venti for me. Grande for her. And some croissants. Good enough breakfast. But I’ll be hungry again soon. Worked out too hard. Need more. Always.

Jonathan Wallace was born in Kansas City, MO. He dropped out of college before earning an MFA, a decision he sometimes regrets.

Since The Guardian ruffled the literary world’s feathers by listing their 100 best mostly European, largely British novels, we decided that similar biased proclamations were fair game and that we might get people all angry at our picks. Anything to generate clicks.

Without further much ado about nothing, here are our (my) 100 favorite novels (and plays and stories and poetry because who cares?) all tied for #1:

Ulysses – James Joyce

Finnegans Wake – James Joyce

Hotel World – Ali Smith

The Accidental – Ali Smith

The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner

As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner

The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov

Bartleby the Scrivener – Herman Melville

Three Trapped Tigers – G. Cabrera Infante

Infante’s Inferno - G. Cabrera Infante

Rene’s Flesh – Virgilio Piñera

To the Lighthouse – Viriginia Woolf

Orlando – Virginia Woolf

Doly City – Orly Castel-Bloom

Quicksand – Nella Larsen

The Obscene Bird of Night – Jose Donoso

The Third Policeman – Flann O’Brien

At Swim-Two-Birds – Flann O’Brien

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing – Eimear McBride

Berg – Ann Quin

The Butcher Boy – Patrick McCabe

Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson

Sexing the Cherry – Jeanette Winterson

Senselessness – Horacio Castellanos Moya

Vilnius Poker – Ričardas Gavelis

Swing Hammer Swing! – Jeff Torrington

A Disaffection – James Kelman

How Late it Was, How Late - James Kelman

Under Milk Wood – Dylan Thomas

Watt – Samuel Beckett

Endgame – Samuel Beckett

Worstward Ho! – Samuel Beckett

Plum Bun – Jessie Fauset

Cain – Jean Toomer

Yes – Thomas Bernhard

The Loser – Thomas Bernhard

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner – James Hogg

Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes

The Blind Owl – Sadegh Hedayat

Complete Plays – Sarah Kane

Deadeye Dick – Kurt Vonnegut

Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut

The Last Samurai – Helen DeWitt

Lightning Rods - Helen DeWitt

Cosmicomics – Italo Calvino

Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino

Amulet – Roberto Bolaño

2666 - Roberto Bolaño

By Night in Chile - Roberto Bolaño

Pedro Páramo – Juan Rulfo

The Invention of Morel – Adolfo Bioy Casares

Most of the stories of Jorge Luis Borges

Black No More - George Schuyler

Autumn Journal – Louis MacNeice

Belfast Confetti – Ciaran Carson

Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon

Faust I – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The Decameron – Giovanni Boccaccio

The Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri

The Canterbury Tales – Geoffry Chaucer

The Restraint of Beasts – Magnus Mills

Frankenstein – Mary Shelley

Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky

Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

Fathers and Sons – Ivan Turgenev

The Red and the Black – Stendhal

The Man Without Qualities – Robert Musil

The Castle – Franz Kafka

The Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison

Blood and Guts in High School – Kathy Acker

A Working Mother – Agnes Owens

Caramelo – Sandra Cisneros

The Color of Summer – Reinaldo Arenas

The Doorman – Reinaldo Arenas

Farewell to the Sea – Reinaldo Arenas

Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman – Laurence Sterne

In Transit – Brigid Brophy

Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

Spurious/Dogma/Exodus – Lars Iyer

House Mother Normal – B. S. Johnson

The Sopranos – Alan Warner

The Man Who Walks – Alan Warner

Clear: A Transparent Novel – Nicola Barker

Good Morning, Midnight – Jean Rhys

Neighbors – Thomas Berger

The Threepenny Opera – Bertold Brecht

The Tin Drum – Gunter Gräss

The Panopticon – Jenni Fagan

Ducks Newberryport – Lucy Ellmann

Sister Mary Ignatius Explains it All for You – Christopher Durang

The New Me – Halle Butler

Please Be Advised – Christine Sneed

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles - Haruki Murakami

The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure – C. D. Rose

Subdivision – J. Robert Lennon

Night – Vedrana Rudan

Bartleby & Co. – Enrique Vila-Matas

If – Nicholas Bourbaki

Oreo – Fran Ross

Autobiography of Red – Anne Carson

I Burn Paris – Bruno Jasieński

Dead Souls – Nikolai Gogol

Snowball’s Chance – John Reed

The Compromise – Sergei Dovlatov

The Suitcase - Sergei Dovlatov

Black Box – Amos Oz

Geek Love - Katherine Dunn

Beloved - Toni Morrison

Eggshells - Caitriona Lally

My Year of Meats - Ruth Ozeki

Pig Tales - Marie Darrieussecq

The Tempest - William Shakespeare

London Fields - Martin Amis

The Taste of a Man - Slavenka Drakulić

The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco

Grattan and Me - Tom O’Neill

There are more that we can’t recall at the moment, though these should more than suffice. Come at us, one and all.

— Vincent Francone, Jabber Editor-and-Chief

The Pickwick Papers - Charles Dickens

One may marvel at the audacity of any government, even one as historically oppressive as the United Kingdom’s, when they invade countries without clear moral or strategic justification, plunder the third world, or prop up the least charismatic, intelligent, and cunning. Electing dubious rogues to high office is nothing new, but at least the Walpoles, Gladstones, Blairs, and Camerons had a shred of guile. But what can we say about the current PM who refuses to release the Pickwick Papers? Surely this represents Britain’s nadir.

It is refreshing to review a book that I have not read because I cannot read it. The fault lies not with my lazy eyes but with the vast conspiracy to suppress this collection of emails, flight records, and other documents that clearly threatens the elite of elites. However great the machinations of the powerful, information has leaked. I was able to surmise that this text includes an unsparingly brutal account of the Pickwickians and their disgusting sojourns throughout the English countryside and the many fleshpots therein. Enlisting the widow Bardell in these misadventures, we see only her having met a just fate in Fleet Prison, though she has not stopped angling for clemency, even after transfer to Club Fed. Samuel Pickwick, the mastermind behind this tawdry enterprise, did eventually stand in the dock, but his sentencing was absurdly light and his “suicide” has been rejected by a rightly skeptical public. Who bears full responsibility for his ignominious end? Surely one of the surviving Pickwickians who, had we full access to these papers, would find their names besmirched for all time. Credit likely goes to Winkle, obvious blunderer who, despite his ineptitude at weapons and horse riding, spent considerable energy these last ten years boasting of his sportsman’s prowess and denying he ever travelled alongside Pickwick. Just ran in the same social circles. Acquaintances, that’s all. Why are we still talking about this?

The world waits for the truth and for the guilty to be held accountable. And we at Jabber wish to add our indignant voices to the cry: RELEASE THE PICKWICK PAPERS! Until such time, we shall continue speculating not all that wildly.

Reviewed by Vincent Francone

The following is a story I wrote years ago. Like, twenty years ago. It was published in a journal that has gone belly up, so I decided to give it a home here. I recognize that, as editor of this Jabber thing, I shouldn’t publish my own material, but I like this story and it got some editorial oversight outside of my dumb eyes, and I am trying to do more with this Substack and keep some Jabbing in action. I appreciate your indulgence, and let us never speak of this again. — VF

I had time to kill. An hour, to be exact. Money had been tight, but I was lucky enough to be selected for a focus group in the John Hancock building. I was to sit and look at advertising in embryo, give some empty reactions and walk away with a hundred dollars—nothing to sneeze at. They said to arrive at 7:30. It was 6:27.

I took a seat in the plaza off Michigan Avenue by the Water Tower building. The weather was pleasant. Within second of lighting a cigarette, I heard, “Can I get one of those?”

I’d noticed her, of course. Curly brown hair, clear eyes, a summer dress, a tattoo. She looked quirky but not overly affected.

I gave her a cigarette and a light and tried to think of something to say other than, “Nice weather we’re having.” Sadly, nothing better came to mind.

“I don’t mind the heat. I prefer it to the winter. It gets cold here.”

“Well, that’s Chicago. I like it like this, though. Maybe the last nice day we’ll have for a while.”

“Maybe.”

“Of course, winter’s not so bad…” I said trailing off, trying to come up with something more interesting.

“The snow is so oppressive, relentless, you know. It gets difficult.”

“I suppose. Of course, it’s nice to curl up at home and sit in the heat.”

“I don’t have heat.”

“Really?”

“No.”

“Not even a radiator?”

She didn’t answer, just smoked. Her hair really looked wonderful tossed about in the wind.

I decided on another old standby. “You from Chicago?”

“No. California.”

“You here for school?”

“Originally.”

She said she graduated a year ago, which made her young in my book, but not too young. Ten years my junior, more or less.

“So you’ve stayed in our fair city. You like it?”

“Not really.”

“Sorry to hear that. You have a job then?”

“I don’t. I had one. After graduation I got a job in an art gallery. I studied art. I wanted to be a painter. Do you paint?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“I write.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, I suppose there’s no shortage of aspiring writers here. Or painters… but that’s no reason not to have a go at it, you know?”

“You speak in a strange way, do you know that?”

I think I blushed.

“So where do you live? I mean… you don’t need to tell me exactly where, just, you know… the neighborhood.” She looked me over. Such gorgeous eyes. “I’m not a stalker, I swear.”

“I live here,” she said.

“In Chicago, right.”

“Here. In the plaza.”

“Where, in the Water Tower? Plenty of closet space, I’d imagine.”

“I live right here. Right where we’re sitting.”

“You sleep on the benches then?”

“Sometimes. But I don’t really sleep. Not anymore.”

“Really? I like to sleep, myself. Sometimes nothing else gets me out of bed except the prospect of going back to sleep at the end of the day.”

“Exactly. Have you ever read Nelson Algren?”

“Chicago’s very own. Yes I have.”

“In Walk On the Wild Side, he wrote of a character that felt cheated when he awoke in the morning and duped when he fell asleep at night. I understand that completely. I used to think that sleep was something that caught up with you like a creditor. I hated succumbing to it, but then I realized that there was nothing to stay awake for. Nothing was waiting for me, no one, not a thing. So why was I so resistant to sleep? I would go out and sit in cafés or clubs, someplace where there were people because that way I would stay up. I was forever meeting people and giving myself to them.”

“Giving yourself?”

“Sexually at first, but then it became more involved. I would sleep with them, which was fine. I could handle that. I was prepared, but before I knew it I was giving them more. I was giving them myself. It isn’t something I can explain, only that I was letting them have me, not just my body, and not just the emotional part of me. I was sacrificing myself to them so they could possess me. I wanted them because that way I would always be awake in them.”

“How’d that work out for you?”

“Fine for a while, but eventually I failed. I gave myself to someone who was unwilling to have me.”

“Rejected?”

“She wouldn’t even touch me.”

“She?” I asked with great interest.

“Yes, she was indifferent. I met her in a bar, which sounds so trite. It sounds like such fiction bullshit, but we met in a bar and we drank together, had a conversation that lasted through the night, or so I thought. We were not really conversing, you see, but I was talking at her. That’s not a conversation.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“Well, I killed a whole day, 24 straight hours that way, just talking at her, telling her everything I was capable of. Usually I would give myself to someone like that, talk to them, tell them my story, my thoughts, and that would suffice, but I realized at the end of the 24 hours that she was not listening. She sat there looking right through me. She knew what I was trying to do and she refused me. I asked her to take me to her place and she did. She stripped and so did I and we got into bed, but nothing happened. I touched her, kissed her entire body, but she wouldn’t touch me. She just lay there without saying a word, barely looking in my direction. I was at a loss.”

“I can see why.”

“It wasn’t that I was a poor lover. She responded to everything I did, but not verbally or even by moving. I knew I was giving her pleasure physically, but there was nothing I could do to really touch her. She was completely resistant. I didn’t know what to do.”

“I think I might have left.”

“But what then? I wanted to give myself to her, desperately. I had to. Otherwise, I would be right back asleep, duped, like Algren wrote. May I have another cigarette?”

“Certainly.”

I had another as well. We lit up, smoked, and looked at the people walking past. Mostly families— lots of children chasing each other, angry mothers and bored fathers.

“So did anything ever… improve?” I asked, feeling a bit creepy.

“Eventually. I stayed with her for a year. I slept so much then. It was all I ever did. She would come home and we would make love, or would try. I would make love to her, but it was like I was making love at her. She never touched me, not once.”

“But there had to be, you know, contact.”

“Yes, but it was incidental. I touched her, so yes, there was contact, but she never reached for me. She was so sadistic, so calculating. I tried everything I could to make her take me. It took a year before she would even speak a word to me.”

“She never spoke?”

“Not for a year. She refused.”

“And you stayed with her?”

“Of course. I was determined. There were, of course, things I had to do. I had my life at that time. I worked. I finished school. I ate. I painted. In the evening I would return to her apartment but she was never there. I let myself in. And I slept. I slept so much. All day long, really, even though I was walking, eating, talking to people, going to school, I wasn’t really conscious. I slept for a whole year that way. But when I got to her apartment, I really fell into sleep. I would sit in the kitchen and start reading a book or make a cup of tea and before you know it I would just pass out. Eventually she’d return and I’d snap out of the coma long enough to try again with her. I’d get so exhausted trying that it wasn’t long before I was back asleep.”

“So what happened in the end?”

“It was a year to the day that we met when she finally spoke to me. Unlike the other 364 days, she was there when I arrived. She had dinner waiting, chicken and mashed potatoes. I hate mashed potatoes because they’re so heavy and they make me fall asleep even faster. But when I saw the food I realized I was ravenously hungry, so I sat down and ate. I ate the entire bowl of mashed potatoes, three chicken breasts and a thigh. And I drank a bottle of wine while she sat and watched. She was smiling throughout the entire meal, which she never did.”

“She never smiled?”

“Never before that night, no. After I finished eating all of the food and drinking the wine, she led me to the bed, stripped me out of my clothing and began kissing my body.”

“She touched you?”

“She did. I know I said otherwise, but she did that night. Forgive me. It gets difficult to fully communicate things. We are programmed to speak in absolutes but we only do so in order to express the weight of something. If I said she only touched me once it might not relay the severity of the lack of touch I experienced for 364 days. But yes, she finally touched me. Fist gently, in such a soft, caring manner that I cried out as if I’d been hit. Her fingernails traced my body, across my back and around to my stomach, over my breasts and my neck. She lingered over the bones in my face. It seems so ridiculous, like an erotica story, but I’ll say it anyway: her touch made me feel alive. Something inside of me was awakened and I knew the 364 days I had spent asleep were all in preparation for that night. I had earned the right to have her touch me. We actually, jointly made love together for the first time and I have not slept since then.”

“Not at all?”

“My body shuts down for an hour or so, yes, but I am always aware of what’s happening around me. I can sense everything that happens in this plaza. Usually my body shuts down around four in the morning. It never lasts. I can hear every footstep. A rat will race across the plaza and I’ll sit up before it reaches me. Birds fly above and I can see them perfectly even with my eyes closed. No, it’s not sleep. It’s just my body performing maintenance. I believe I could avoid it altogether, but I don’t mind it really. Actually, the sad fact is I miss sleep.”

“You… I’m sorry?”

“I know, foolish. I tried to escape it for so long and now that it’s gone, I miss it. I used to have such wonderful dreams. I hated them at the time but I look back on them now with fondness. I would dream all sorts of bizarre scenarios. Ducks that spoke. Flying… how I used to fly…”

“And now?”

“No dreams, not since that night. After we made love, I collapsed—a total wreck in her arms. I never recovered. I swear I felt her for so long after. I can feel her now, but it’s like the phantom itch of an amputated limb. I feel her in my memory. But she’s gone. She was gone in the morning. I have not seen her since.”

“You never told me what she said to you that night.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s all right.”

“No, that’s what she said. ‘I’m sorry.’ She said, ‘I’m sorry’ and then she took my dreams from me. I left the apartment once it became clear that she was never coming back.”

The alarm on my phone went off. 7:20.

“Oh, shit. Sorry—I have to go now,” I said.

“Okay.”

I gave her another cigarette and left her in the plaza.

The focus group was exceedingly dull and I tried my best to come up with something constructive to say to the moderator. Mostly I lied, said I preferred the ads I really thought were lousy. They gave me the hundred in cash and I was on my way. She was still in the plaza, throwing stones and looking distant. I walked past her on my way to the subway, not bothering to say anything. I’m sure she noticed me but she didn’t make any indication one way or the other. I couldn’t get on the train because all I had was the hundred and that was far too much to put on a fare card. I walked for an hour, stopped at a diner and had a cup of coffee. After much argument and apology, the manager broke the large bill and I had enough for a bus ride home.

Vincent Francone edits Jabber and is bad at self-promotion.

All well and good, but why not stack some subs while we’re at it?

To that end, we’re calling for the subs. Send us something that NEEDS eyes, those tales or snippets or oddities that may not find homes in more conventional “journals.” For while we do not pride ourselves on unconventionality for its own sake, we’re nothing if not fuckabouts. So fuckabout with us.

This is a long way of asking that you send us poems or stories or essays or flash fiction or some other form of organized words and punctuation. See our guidelines for some idea of what we’re after or just read a few past posts and you’ll get it. Got it? Good.

Send your work to jabberthemag@gmail.com addressed to yours truly.

Awaiting dazzlement,

Vincent Francone, Editor-at-Large

The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

As far as prequels go, this one is a letdown. One would hope that the scheming, brilliant prince of Machiavelli’s book would display at least some of the wit, charm, and intellect of the first installment. Sadly, there is none of that in this coming-of-age story. Alas, this is the problem with fan fiction—this de Saint-Exupéry fellow is not half as good as Machiavelli, despite having an equally exotic last name.

This little prince is more interested in airplanes than amassing political influence and power. Typical sanitizing of a great man’s story, a dilution no better than Walt Disney’s digestible fairy tales that drained all the blood and fun from the Brothers Grimm. I mean, the kid becomes smitten with a rose! And we get a whole ponderous space exploration plot that goes nowhere despite trying way too hard to be smart. I mean, we haven’t seen pretentious trash like this since Interstellar. Equally annoying as that film, the little prince sacrifices himself, furthering the liberal agenda at the heart of this book. Machiavelli is turning over in his grave.

Reviewed by Vincent Francone, Editor-at-large

Never at a loss for words, Thomas Mann initially envisioned this story of a man who goes for a spa weekend at Davos and gets romantically involved with Madam Chauchat, chairwomen of the World Economic Forum, as a novella. But Mann, does this guy go on! To his defense, who could boil down the intricacies of the Davos convention—lousy with political intrigue and colorful characters representing every racial stereotype—to a mere 300,000 words?

In the space between the covers, our hero Hans meets a ragtag group of European misfits, chats philosophy, eats things that sound yummy, and develops a severe bronchial infection that nearly keeps him from joining the army and fighting in The Great War. Luckily, manpower is so scarce at this point that he fulfills his patriotic duty and defends the good name of Kaiser Wilhelm II. We think he’s dead at the end, but Mann keeps things open ended, clearly angling for a sequel.

Dismissed upon its publication as ponderous, jingoistic, didactic, pedantic, and sadly mis-titled (there is very little magic in this depressingly naturalistic novel), readers today will find much to relate to, specifically the digressions on Franz Schubert. Get a copy while they last.

Reviewed by Vincent Francone, Editor-at-Large

Resurrection — Leo Tolstoy

Countering this legal thriller with the typically realistic yet spiritually-informed novels that cemented Tolstoy’s reputation, Resurrection is a bit of an outlier. Nevertheless, the book sings with a sort of breath-of-fresh-air quality that one normally does not find in works more than a week old. Credit this to the pot boiling plot, easily the match of any Grisham novel, and nearly surpassing Twelve Angry Men.

What strikes the 21^st century reader while perusing this 19^th century offering is the utter relatability of the protagonist, Atticus Ivanovich Levin, defense attorney tasked with freeing a little girl (nameless, of course) from a Siberian jail, which is where our hero meets her for the first time. The tension in that initial meeting is thick enough to pour over waffles, yet Tolstoy keeps it PG 13, thankfully. We know all too well the ways of the 1800s. But no, what makes the book feel as though it could easily find an audience today is its adaptability. Reading the pages, I could see the Netflix series to come, which, saints be praised, is slated for arrival and streaming this winter in keeping with the Russian setting. Ted Danson will handle the leading role with Sydney Sweeney, naturally, starring as the young girl. Get psyched for this age-appropriate romance and Sweeney’s breathy line delivery.

Reviewed by Vincent Francone, Editor-at-Large

I keep thinking about writing. Or maybe I’m thinking about thinking about writing, or perhaps it’s just the smell of coffee drifting like a memory I forgot to finish. Or maybe it’s the way the sky looks like it’s melting at the edges, soft and blurry, as if someone left the universe out in the sun too long. Or maybe it’s nothing at all, and that’s the point. No, wait, points are boring. Doyle says no points. Cunningham says point-driven versus ruminative. Ruminative, ruminative, ruminative. It sounds like a river. Rivers don’t rush to conclusions. Rivers curve, pause, spill, wander. Rivers don’t care if you’re late or lost, and maybe essays shouldn’t either. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Watkins has structure, real structure, paragraphs with spines, rules that snap into place. She folds her words into clean origami birds, each sharp, crisp, perfect. Maybe a little angry. Definitely deliberate. I admire it, but it makes my stomach flutter. My words are spaghetti, hot, slippery, falling off the fork in globs. Splat. Why do I even try to catch them? Maybe I like splats. Maybe splats are essays. The mess may be part of it.

Childhood. Twilight. Grass in your socks. Socks in the grass? The kind of evenings where time stretched at the edges and no one cared about endings yet. Games without finish lines. Pretending you didn’t hear your parent yelling dinner, pretending the world wasn’t waiting, stretching the magic out like chewing gum, sticky, sweet, thin, almost breaking but not yet. Essays could feel like that. Maybe they should. Words that stretch, stretch, stretch, even when they’re about to snap.

Circles. Loops. Loops within loops. Arrows are liars. Arrows are teachers with red pens, stabbing at the margins. Red pens are judgmental. Pink pens are gentler. Circles at least don’t pretend to know where they’re going. They let you wander without shame. Rivers again, spilling over rocks, drinking clouds, carrying leaves and regrets. Essays should spill, too. Should drink. It should be wet. Wet with thinking, wet with wandering, wet with maybe.

Sometimes I make lists in my head, crooked, half-broken lists that start somewhere and end nowhere:

● Pancakes shaped like clouds and hearts

● rain on asphalt, that hot metallic smell

● Coffee too hot, sip anyway?

● the word perhaps

● Squirrels. So many squirrels.

● Ink smudges on fingers

● The silence right before a thought arrives

I like squirrels. I like tangents. I like the idea that none of this matters, or all of it does. Mostly, I like the in-between: the almost-there, the half-done, the unfinished, where something is happening even if no one can name it yet. The half-drawn doodle. The sentence is hovering between sense and nonsense. The words are going wherever they want, like they’re following their own tiny lines under the page.

Sometimes I think essays aren’t arguments, they’re weather. They shift. Drift. Cloud over. Clear up. They don’t owe anyone a thesis statement. They just have to feel like something is moving, like a breeze in a room that was too still for too long.

And somewhere in all that wandering is the little pulse that says yes. Here. This moment. Alive. This is alive. This is good. This doesn’t need a point to matter. This is enough.

Kathlyn Honline is a writer who can be found on Instagram @He1lo_kittyyy

We thank capitalism for homogenizing culture.

We thank algorithms for homogenizing culture.

We thank Hollywood for homogenizing culture.

We thank helicopter parenting for homogenizing culture.

We thank suburban sprawl for homogenizing culture.

We thank urban uniformity for homogenizing culture.

We thank artificial intelligence for homogenizing culture.

We thank toxic politics for homogenizing culture.

We thank ennui for homogenizing culture.

We thank hashtag activism for homogenizing culture.

We thank education-as-job-training for homogenizing culture.

We thank ham-fisted Substack ranting for homogenizing culture.

We thank interchangeable theories for homogenizing culture.

We thank Gucci Buddhism for homogenizing culture.

We thank prohibitively-priced yoga retreats for homogenizing culture.

We thank paywalls for homogenizing culture.

We thank billionaire editorial oversight for homogenizing culture.

We thank wellness for homogenizing culture.

We thank alcohol for homogenizing culture.

We thank hand-me-down rebellion for homogenizing culture.

We thank nostalgia for homogenizing culture.

We thank myths for homogenizing culture.

We thank raves for homogenizing culture.

We thank clubs for homogenizing culture.

We thank committees for homogenizing culture.

We thank pharmaceuticals for homogenizing culture.

We thank big four publishing for homogenizing culture.

Without all of you, Jabber’s followers might be even smaller in number.

Enjoy your lore!

V. Francone, Editor-at-Large

We must no longer keep silent. Silence is not an option, to paraphrase Ezra Klein, titan of dubious prevarication. For how could we not speak up and share our stance on this most draconian overreach of state power, by which we mean the Real ID. They who wish to make us mad send us to the DMV. A tactic as old as Methuselah. Well, some of us already have passports, so I suppose we’re okay, but still, the audacity of the powers that be to penalize the culturally incurious who have yet to travel beyond these shores… utter cruelty.

We were about to dive into the policies behind this most Draconian of Congressional Acts, but our heads are hurting from small print and legalese and political speech so vague AI could do better. Suffice it to state that this measure will not go unaddressed by people infinitely smarter than we, although they are unfortunately busy at the moment frying bigger fish. Something about due process and civil liberties… we’re not sure. It’s been a long day already. And our trains were delayed. And Starbucks ran out of our favorite breakfast sandwich this morning and who wants to walk two blocks to the next one? The struggle is real.

To those who might argue that this is no forum for political discourse, or that adding our hot takes does zero to further the conversation, or that the best we might do is live our best lives and enjoy the small things or touch grass or find solace in the beautiful and tasty things life has on tap that might remind us that things are not so bad, we’ve been here before, things will improve, we’ll never let it get worse than this, we’re a country of laws, a world firmly inside a universe with a moral center and a caring god and a sense of rightness because humans are basically good when you take the time to get to know them and see they are just doing their best and that we’re trying and hang in there baby, and if I told you you had a beautiful body would you hold it against me, pass the dutchie on the lefthand side… well, we hear you. And so we’ll cease amateur punditry and return to our usual literary concerns. After all, art and politics never mix, right folks?

Staying in our lane,

Jabber (AKA: Vincent Francone, Editor-at-Large, feeling very small and deeply terrified)

I saw a woman who looked sleepy in a very specific way and deduced she was a mother. Every animal is free of the social contract. Individuals are capable of great feats, yet rarely when within a group of the likeminded. Everything I’ve ever said is true. The last sentence is crap. An apple is only an apple if it has a core. You can peel a banana and eat its perfect flesh and it’s still a banana. Within its shell, an oyster is sleeping. Outside its shell, an oyster is food. Only after a cigarette am I awake. You’re not yourself today. You’ve changed.

There are no absolute statements. Truth is illusion. The one truth in the universe: no one wants to see your vacation photos.

In the past, when asked if I believe in god, I used to answer: “Well, someone has to be responsible.”

To be or not to think therefore I am what I eat.

I heard an interview with Dan Savage yesterday. He stated that a couple, meaning two people in a romantic relationship, is an idea. A myth the couple co-creates. Intriguing. One might say the same thing about nations, that they are merely ideas, realities shaped by those both within and without. My conception of what it means to be an American is as valid as the person who votes diametrically opposite of me, not to mention the guy in France who sees my country differently, or the guy in the White House who uses platitudes and lies when discussing what exactly is going on in this “land of the free.”

America the beautiful, baleful, plentiful, minimal, habitual.

I’ve never been to Australia. How do I know it’s there? A friend of mine spent a summer in Paris, returned an insufferable bore. When does lost bread become pain perdu?

A cigarette takes seven minutes off your life. On an average day, I smoke 30 cigarettes. That’s 210 lost minutes a day; 1,470 a week; 5,880 a month; 70,560 a year; 352,800 minutes taken in the five years I’ve let Nick O’Teen back into my lungs. All those minutes disappearing in lovely clouds of smoke.

I quit smoking once. Two friends, in separate conversations, said: “No one likes a quitter.”

I quit smoking again and again and again. This time, I’m sure it will absolutely take.

A cigarette is a cigarette until it’s smoked. A cigarette is useless until it’s smoked. A cigarette is not a cigarette but for the smoke. Cigarette smoke is the absolutely perfect metaphor.

History is smoke. “No history, only historians.” Love is smoke. Ideas are smoke.

Fair and balanced. Democracy dies in darkness. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Vote blue no matter who. Better dead than red. Look for the union label. Keep calm and carry on. Rule Britannia. Brits out! Death or glory. I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees. I regret that I have but one life to give for my country. I cannot tell a lie. Read my lips. I am not a crook. State’s rights. Yes we can. America first. The whole world is watching. Keep America strong. Remember the Alamo. Viva la raza! Vive la France! Westward ho! The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. There is no God but God. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Fellowship, Justice, Labor. Arbeit macht frei. Por la razón o la fuerza. Mexicanos, al grito de guerra. Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country. Ich bin ein Berliner. Deutschland über alles. The buck stops here. Tear down this wall. Walk softly and carry a big stick. Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State. History will absolve me. Serve the people! Workers of the world, unite! Free at last. Manifest destiny! Be the change you want to see in the world. Publish or perish. So help me God. E pluribus unum. In vino veritas. Excelsior! We will fight them, sir, ‘til hell freezes over, and then, sir, we will fight them on the ice. We shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight them on the landing grounds, we shall never surrender. Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes. No Irish, no blacks, no dogs. L’Union fait la force. My way or the highway. Plato o plomo. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Till death do us part. Think different. Move fast and break things. Just do it. Why ask why?

The Official Book Launch

We are excited to announce that the special edition copy of Unreality and Other Plays by Caleb Roitz is now officially available!

The collection features:

• Unreality

• This Animal Man

• Smile Happy

• Biesuk and Hemitnel

Unreality and Other Plays is a beautiful, dark, and surreal collection of four plays from one of Chicago’s most compelling playwrights, Caleb Roitz. Unreality is an existential standoff between friends unfolding over the course of one night in a pressure cooker of narcotics, loyalty, and denial. This Animal Man gives us three teenage girls in a carnival wasteland, with a ringmaster figure whose role—part guardian, part tormentor—is pushed to its breaking point. Smile Happy traps its characters in an absurdist loop, exposing the limitations of language and meaning in a world longing for connection. And Biesuk and Hemitnel is a dream-epic, complete with golden-robed acolytes and a sleeping giant, where myth and mortality are braided into a tale at once comic and laden with meaning. The connective tissue here isn’t just Roitz’s ear for dialogue (though it’s sharp, manic, and bruised) but his commitment to placing tenderness and violence, dream and daylight, side by side. What unites these works is an unflinching vision that leaves us with unsettling yet illuminating insight into the nature of reality and the meaning of life itself.

Here’s a note about the collection from our Editor-In-Chief, Vincent Francone:

Roitz pulls off many a feat in this collection, not the least of which is nodding at absurdist traditions while crafting plays uniquely his own, in his voice, with his playfully odd and compelling sensibilities. Head scratchers, rib ticklers, and more than a few curiosities.

We at Jabber Literary are so proud of this work, both for what Roitz penned and for what it represents for our publishing ambitions. We formed Jabber Literary with the intention of publishing books that belong on a bookshelf—books that honor the words within and give each author we work with the opportunity to see the fruits of their labor reflected in meaningful, lasting editions. This is the first time we’ve been able to create a linen-bound, gold-leaf-stamped book, and it won’t be our last. We would like to thank Roitz for believing in the process and for allowing Jabber Literary to house the first edition of these works. It’s been a long, educational, and worthwhile process.

Limited Copies Available

Limited copies are available, and if you are interested in purchasing one, please send an email to the playwright below. Each copy is $40 + $8 for shipping (if needed).

Please email: RoitzPlaywriting@gmail.com

We have many more plans for the collection in the near future, so if you are unable to get your copy of the first edition, stay tuned!

Cheers,

August Gibson, Managing Editor

When Jabber was envisioned as a place for the absurd, we couldn’t have imagined Christine Sneed’s Please Be Advised, because only she could. But I do recall hearing what I now know was a selection from this novel in memos in 2019 when I had the pleasure of reading with her at the Northwestern Summer Writers Conference. Now that the book is in print, I wanted to chat with Christine and get some insights into the novel as well as her own history with office life. She was kind enough to oblige my request, results below. (PS: Please Be Advised is about the funniest and most original thing I’ve read since forever. Buy a copy. Buy two. Give one to someone you know. Read it, enjoy and commiserate with anyone who’s ever worked in an office.)

Vincent Francone: Jabber was essentially created as a place to house what I was reductively calling “absurd” literature, though we’ve branched out a bit. Please Be Advised fits what I was looking for perfectly. Am I wrong to consider your novel as a perfect example of absurdist literature? If forced, how would you classify it? Corporate satire?

Christine Sneed: It’s definitely meant to be an absurdist take on the ennui-inducing corporate workplace. It took me a little time to realize I was writing, in particular, a surrealist examination of the dictatorial insanity and the related indignities that often characterize the experience of working in a corporate office.

I think for me the biggest challenge was not being bored by the work I was given to do during my stints as an office employee—which could often be completed within a matter of a couple of hours (and then, what to do with the rest of the day other than try desperately to look busy?) I think many of us are familiar with this pressure, especially if you’re in a support staff role. Tedium! Ennui! And the repetitive schedule of 8 or 9 AM – 5 PM five days a week—it drove me bonkers.

I think most of us would be a lot better off if employers trusted their staff to do the work in the actual period of time it takes to complete a task and subsequently allowed them to pursue creative projects for the remaining hours. I suspect some people would take advantage of this generosity, but I bet productivity would increase overall.

VF: I’ve worked in a number of offices, and so much of Please Be Advised feels correct, despite the exaggeration (I once read an office memo about appropriate casual Friday clothing that your memo regarding proper footwear nailed). I have to assume you’ve worked in a few offices in your time, right?

CS: Oh yes! I have worked in quite a few offices, starting in high school when I got a job doing part-time secretarial work in a collection agency in Lincolnshire, Illinois, which was about 20 minutes or so from the town where I lived. The pay was abysmal, under four dollars an hour (this was the ‘80s), but the people I worked with were funny and interesting, and in some cases a little kooky. My closest friend Melanie and I worked there together one summer, and we both still joke about some of the characters we encountered. It was a fun workplace, despite the boring, repetitive nature of the work we were doing, e.g. stuffing envelopes and filing.

I also worked for the two years between college and graduate school at a highway safety products company located in the building where Quest Industries is housed (1 E. Wacker Drive), and it is this job, probably, that provided the biggest inspiration for Please Be Advised, although none of the characters are based directly on anyone there—the atmosphere of that corporate office instead provided a springboard for the events and people in Please Be Advised.

I’ve worked in at least five or six other offices too—academic and non-profit, each place defined by its own quirks. For the most part, I really liked my colleagues, even if the work itself was far from inspiring and also poorly paid (hence the trope about some of the Quest employees making wages so low they essentially need second jobs.)

VF: The book is fun, a pure joy to read, but I imagine it was a hard sell considering the format (a novel in memos) might not make sense to some readers. Did you have trouble convincing agents or editors to give it a shot?

CS: It wasn’t an easy sell, you’re right. I showed it to a few agents I know and/or had worked with over a period of several years, none of whom were interested. The first two thought it wasn’t really a novel; the third did not get the book at all. Humor obviously is nothing if not deeply subjective—not everyone will laugh at the guy who slips on the banana peel—some will feel sorry for him and worry about the damage to his tailbone, which I think explains why drama is an easier sell—no one can disagree that a new mother being killed by a hit-and-run driver is a tragedy. (Even just typing that phrase, I find myself cringing.) And look at all the hype disaster porn movies and TV shows get – they’re everywhere (and I find them, in most cases, extremely tedious—I’ll always take a guy slipping on a banana peel over a story about a tornado wiping out half a town’s population in a matter of minutes).

I wrote most of Please Be Advised in late 2017/early 2018, and it wasn’t until almost four years later that it landed with Kurt Baumeister at 7.13 Books. He got it immediately and told me within a week that he wanted to publish it. This was a very happy day, needless to say, and he was an excellent editor for it—he knew what to play up and also suggested I add another plot thread or two. After this conversation, for example, I came up with the IRS audit, and also added a few more memos to the matchmaker thread.

VF: One thing that struck me was how much I found myself rooting for some of these characters, even when they acted horribly. Specifically, the ascension of Ken Crickshaw Jr. And even Hannah-Louise Schmidt and Bill Dubonski—I followed their relationship the way people follow Ben Affleck and J Lo. Curious if you had any intentions (or concerns) in regard to making the characters likeable despite objectively bad behavior.

CS: To be honest, no. I didn’t worry about making anyone likeable because I liked them! I felt instinctively that the humor would carry the book and all the questionable behavior of the goofballs that populate it was what really fueled the narrative too. Because I was having such a good time writing it, I didn’t worry about readers being put off by the hi-jinks of someone like Bryan Stokerly, Esq.

My thought was, If they’ve gotten onboard with the tone within the first few memos, this is why they’re going to keep reading the book.

VF: Again, regarding the characters: the danger of a book like this might be in making characters into caricatures, but I didn’t get that from your book (even the tone of Jeff Snow’s story of getting laid for the first time was spot on). Any thoughts on how you avoided this?

CS: Well, I’m not sure how I did it, but I used the same tactics I do for some of my more straightforward, less overtly comedic books—I was always striving for the telling detail, for specificity. Specificity and precision are usually the qualities I admire most in the books I love best (as well as the tone—e.g. Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy—those three books and how their narratives unfurl are somewhat mysterious to me—Cusk is equally adept at creating an interior, emotional landscape to go with what’s external in her books.)

The universal is in the particular—I think that’s how this maxim goes. I’m always most interested in and/or identify best with characters whom I recognize based on some detail, no matter how small, that the writer incorporates into the story. You mentioned Jeff Snow’s Story of Personal Triumph—when I added the detail about the red Illy espresso machine he keeps in his bedroom, I thought, Ah ha, that’s who this guy is. Even if he lifts weights and has a big science calculator, it’s the espresso machine that was the key for me as I wrote his story.

VF: The point about little details making the character or giving the reader something to lock onto is interesting. Of all the people in Please Be Advised, I most looked forward to the memos by President Bryan Stokerly (am I wrong, by the way, in seeing him as a reference to Bram Stoker?). But! Stokerly is objectively terrible. Nevertheless, I laughed hardest at his memos, including the one that speaks… um, candidly about his employees. I don’t guess this was your intention, but my eagerness to lap up his terrible behavior feels like it has to do with more than just laughing at what a rotten person he is. Maybe there’s a way that the reader (or me, I guess) is implicated as they read? Feel free to ignore this question or tell me I’m full of shit.

CS: I wasn’t thinking of Bram Stoker when I came up with Bryan Stokerly’s name, but my editor asked me that same question, so maybe there is something inadvertently to it. I do know that I wasn’t sure who Bryan really was until I started writing more and more of his memos. Eventually it became clear he was a delusional egomaniac, an unapologetic drunk, and a well-spoken buffoon. Those faults aside, I do think he’s a good critic of American culture, though he has no sense of his own shortcomings, like most egomaniacs, I suspect.

I’m so glad you laughed at his memos. That was very much my hope! It was important to me that he have no idea of how ridiculous he is, how grandiose and self-important others at Quest find him. He is meant to be a spectacle of some of the worst qualities in a corporate leader, and of course he’s not even qualified for the job with his BFA in Fiber Arts. But frankly, an arts degree strikes me as, if not more, valuable than an MBA. Bryan has an imagination, but it’s addled by booze, his egotism and single-minded pursuit of pleasure.

Christine Sneed is the author most recently of Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos, The Virginity of Famous Men, and Paris, He Said. She is the editor of the short fiction anthology Love in the Time of Time’s Up, and her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Ploughshares, New York Times, O Magazine, and other publications. She's received the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation, among other honors and has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She lives in Pasadena and teaches for Northwestern University’s and Regis University’s graduate creative writing programs.