There once lived two sisters. One was named Sadness. The other, Happiness.

Sadness was tall, skipped instead of walked, and always had a smile on her face. Happiness, on the other hand, was short, never skipped, and always scowled. If ever there were a case in which names didn’t matter, this was it. Still, people like names, and they weren’t about to let something like reality get in their way, which brings us to a young man named L.

(L, by the way, was not really his name, but that is what we’ll call him since he was as lonely as lonely gets.)

For a long time, L. didn’t like admitting to his condition because he noticed that, even though loneliness was not contagious, people acted as though it were. So he suffered in silence until, one day, he couldn’t take it any longer. He wasn’t sleeping well, and this was not good because, it should be said, L. loved sleep more than most things in life.

After a week’s worth of bad nights, L. paid money to an online dating service. He had his doubts, and after answering a lot of questions that he thought were too personal, his doubts grew even stronger. That was when he realized he had to write his own profile, which caused him a lot of anguish, though not as much as his loneliness, so he went on with it. Still, he didn’t know what to write.

He noticed that on the site there were a lot of not-so-clever young men trying to sound clever and that there were others who took the “honest and sincere” approach. The first group of young men sounded dumb, and the second sounded lonely, which made L. queasy. Now he understood why others had recoiled from him for all those years. In the end, he wrote something he thought was both simple and honest. He wrote, “I am looking for Happiness.”

Now this is something to keep in mind. First off, L. had committed a grammatical faux pas. Like the other young men on the site, he thought he was being clever. He thought that by capitalizing a common noun he was showing how, for him, happiness was and should always be Happiness with a capital-H. But if ever there were a case for correct grammar, this was definitely it. The good people at the online dating service saw his profile, and they did what anyone would expect: they fed the information into the algorithms and, lo and behold, the best pick, the cream of the crop, was none other than Happiness, the sad sister who put this whole story in motion.

Even though she was not who he expected, there was no point in arguing the matter with L. He believed in fate, and fate, via a Google-like algorithm, said that Happiness was who he should date, so L. accepted the decree and did everything he could to make sure his first date went well.

He rented a Zipcar, checked out a list of restaurants on Yelp, joined FourSquare so he could see if other wonderful (i.e.: not lonely) people were hanging out in any of these places. He compiled a list of ten restaurants, started a blog called The Countdown to Companionship, and asked for feedback. Though the blog was a featured WordPress site, he got very little help from readers, who, like everyone else, were a bit repulsed by the desperate and the lonely.

When the day arrived and L., waiting for Happiness on her front step, knocked on the door, it was Sadness who answered, smiling and tall and lovely, and for a moment L. thought that maybe the algorithms were wrong. But then he had a thought about names. Maybe algorithms can get it wrong, but a name is a name. You just can’t get around that.

Still, when L. first met Happiness and they shook hands, he couldn’t help that there was something sour about her, not just her face or the way she moved. Truth be told, the first thought that came to L.’s mind was an image from childhood when he would stick six or seven Lemonheads in his mouth and chomp down on them. The sourness was existential, not unlike the next six months he spent with Happiness, until he married her.

She was his Lemonhead. He would say that to her, each time hoping she might smile. But, gravity being what it is, the corners of her mouth could never find any uplift, so the best Happiness could do was to look at her loving husband and not say anything mean.

Now, if this sounds like a sad love story, think again. L and Happiness married and had children and they died an old couple. It wasn’t just that L. liked Lemonheads, which, even in old age, he did. He also liked irony and the unexpected things in life. There was something absolutely wonderful, he thought, in being married to a woman named Happiness who was the saddest person he’d ever met. And this paradox made him Happy, with a capital-H.

g. martinez cabrera‘s short fiction has been featured on the public radio show, VoicesRadio. His published credits include The Externalist, Verbsap, The Broome Review, Drunken Boat, Segue, Eclectica, and Sparkle & Blink.

Photo by Suus Wansink and Kristaps B.

The girl is starting to play guitar,
singing, then stopping, saying shit,
fuck, playing, stopping, one fast wail,
your heart is breaking and willing her
to keep playing and then she does
and doesn’t stop so you walk on.
The man is bending down to tie his shoes,
and he seems scary in this city,
a quick inventory of your clothes,
you have too many on. They taught you
to leave your scarves at home.
This is how he will strangle you, rape you,
drag you away. He stands and wishes you
happy new year in broken English and you
smile while guilt fills your body
because he was kind and that’s all you’re ever after.
You turn to walk back to the girl playing guitar
to tell her you understand. How being swallowed
is fulfilling, how this city, instead,
quietly tucks you away.

Abbie J. Leavens‘ writing has appeared in journals like Gargoyle, BlazeVOX, Barnstorm, FortyOunceBachelors, and others.

Photo by Chang Liu.

I spend a lot of time staring at my wall.

No, Facebook junkies, I am not referring to that wall—though online self promotion has become a crucial part of a writer’s career, a task deserving its own article. I mean actual walls—four of them, arranged at 90 degree angles to form the shape of a room. Virginia Woolf suggested that a writer needs “a room of one’s own” to successfully produce work, and I agree with her. Not only because a writer needs his or her own place to focus, but because a manuscript-in-progress can be surprisingly messy.

When I started writing my book—not just indulgently drafting whatever came to mind but really getting into the mechanics of the story—I was a little daunted. I could not keep the different elements organized—how much to reveal about a character, when to flashback or pause the action for lyrical descriptions of setting. Worst of all was my short term memory. As I started drafting Chapters 3 and 4, I forgot what I’d already committed to Chapters 1 and 2. Re-reading the manuscript only worsened this problem. I grabbed a pair of scissors and started slicing away at each scene, rearranging them on the dining room table.

If this reminds you of a jigsaw puzzle, you are absolutely right. What else is a good book if not an elegant puzzle wrapped in an entertaining story? It is an author’s responsibility, like a magician, to create an illusion, making the work look easy to the reader, seducing them with the story so they do not feel the bumpy rules of writing. For many manuscripts, especially novel-length projects, notes and outlines are the only road maps a writer has to stay on track. Cutting and pasting (literally) the pages of my book and laying them in front of me, I could navigate the plot and produce the next scene.

Scenes were pasted together and taped to the wall to form chapters, but as the chapters accumulated, I soon found that I did not have adequate wall space before running into the original memory dilemma. Taking a cue from my old job at an after school program, where the class schedule was posted on a bulletin board prior to registration, I replaced each scene with a notecard. Each notecard was labelled with the chapter by number, scene by letter (eg Chapter 5: scene B). I listed the scene summary in bullets or numbers. At the after school program, we used colored notecards for each day of the week. Monday classes, blue. Thursday activities, purple. On my wall, I used different colors to represent plot action (yellow for the character at ‘work,’ green for the romantic subplot) and flashbacks (orange).

A wall is not strictly necessary.

Slips of dialogue, descriptions of character’s, and the narrator’s expository commentary soon covered the floor of the guest room. When I completed a chapter by pasting these components together, I recorded it into my word processor, the color coded scenes pasted onto the wall. With the mess I made, I was relieved to be able to work in a typically unoccupied room, where I could close the door and keep the cat from destroying my work if she decided to lazily shuffle through the room.

This strategy is not limited to writers with their own space. The notecard outline made completing my book a much more manageable task and is an effective tool with or without a wall. And the photo updates as my work progressed provided a quick and effective form of self promotion on my other wall.

Katie Li is a writer from Boston, MA. Her work has appeared in Write From Wrong, The Nexus, and has been performed by the Theatre Company, The Next Stage. She is currently writing her first book. To learn more, please visit www.katieliwriter.com.

Photos by Igor Schutz and Mark Skipper.

No relation, she says, tossing off an assumption
that years and travels would lead to ample coverage
of names. But the reputation feels ill-gotten, now that time
has intervened as a buffer between that world of long ago
and now. The past is some cloudy other, a fiction,
a parable of once was and spritely youth, innocence lost
back when reasons mattered less and simplicity danced for free.
For a moment, he is lost in the throes of a sweet reverie,
but the clamor of some dropped tray in the pub’s kitchen
brings him back in a hurry. She is working two jobs,
seeking to save up and furnish the new place she moved to
since breaking up with that guy, the unsteady steady,
he who promised without delivering, year after expectant year.
It has been difficult, she relates, approaching holidays alone,
doing things with friends that knew her only as half of a couple.
The dichotomy is strangest at large parties and occasions,
when it seems sides are chosen, allegiances pledged, and
fresh awkwardness encountered. She expresses a desire
to escape it all, to travel to China for a month next summer,
to traverse those same Silk Roads that inform her lessons
while building history of her own. Everyone has such
exotic stories, she says, yet she remains hesitant,
unsure as a teetering economy, worried about job security
and the notion of being so far away, so long. He encourages her
to risk it, knowing the mad genius of youth is best realized
through the freedom of uncertainty and possible peril.
Now is your time, and there’s much to be gained,
he reminds her, remembering when he too could throw
caution to the wind and chase rainbows to foreign horizons.

Gary Glauber is a poet, fiction writer, teacher, and music journalist. His works have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, as well as “Best of the Net.” He took part in The Frost Place’s conference on teaching poetry. Recent poems are published or forthcoming in The Compass Rose, The Fine Line, Front Porch Review, Kitchen, The Single Hound, Manor House Quarterly, The Ghazal Page, The Whistling Fire, Xenith, The Newtowner, Red Poppy Review, Midwest Literary Magazine, Corium Magazine, The Petrichor Review and StepAway Magazine.

Photo by Suus Wansink.

A few weeks ago, Paper Darts Editorial Director and Minneapolis journalist Courtney Algeo wanted to know about book reviewing—specifically, its place in today’s literary dialogue. In addition to important people like Laurie Hertzel, books editor of the Star Tribune, Eric Lorberer, editor of Rain Taxi Review of Books, and Melissa Wray of Minneapolis literary duo Hazel & Wren, Algeo interviewed yours truly. The fun thing about interviews is that they force you to put into words the murk inside your head, and when Algeo asked me about negative reviews I surprised myself. I’d never articulated it before, but when I indicated the only legitimate response to a poorly written book is disappointment, it just sounded right. Nobody needs to get angry and write one of those caustic rants about literature. Martin Amis did enough of that in his youth, and he did it so well there’s no point in trying anymore.

David Szalay’s US debut, Spring (originally published by Jonathan Cape in Great Britain), has been chatted up in the literary sphere as an unromantic romance. “He is worried that things are not okay. When he phones her, standing in the stale silence of the flat, it is only because he wants to know that things are okay.” These sentences, from the first page, stand in for the entire book. The idea of wanting a relationship for the relationship’s sake is not a new one, but it’s one that, when done well, reveals more about our mate-for-life culture than we’d like. In that sense, Spring hits the mark so deftly it’s hard to want to start a new romance ever again. It makes those nights in coffee shops where you overhear first dates all the more agonizing. It captures us at our most distant—when we’re close enough to caress our lover but too far away to have any idea what he’s thinking. Spring is an index of these misfired dialogues and mismatched emotions, evident from the first chapter:

“I thought you went to the mountains,” he says.
Surprisingly, she laughs. “No, of course not.”

I wish I’d counted how many times James or Katherine say everything is “fine” when it’s obviously not.

Graywolf Press, 2011

Unfortunately, Spring is more than an unromantic romance. It stretches itself into James’ destructive, pathetic, and not-always-unsuccessful attempts to build a fortune; into Katherine’s history with the husband to whom she’s still married through the novel; into the not-sordid-enough underbelly of the horseracing world. Of course, I’m not angry with David Szalay, just disappointed. With the exception of its loose, baggy prose (“The next Tuesday they had supper at the old trattoria near his flat—a place that still offered a prawn-cocktail starter served in a little stainless-steel dish and flaunted the stale-looking desserts in a transparent fridge.”), the book promises, in its first 72 pages, to be an intricate and quiet reflection on a relationship that can’t get itself started. Even the detours into James’ memory, traveling with his sister to visit his father in southern France, fit into the narrative’s gloomy framework. Throughout those 72 pages, James is trapped in the advance-and-retreat cycle, always on the cusp of securing Katherine’s adoration but never attaining it. Katherine’s distance is intriguing, frustrating, and erotic—everything it is to James and everything it should be to the reader. Then, on page 73, with the start of the second section, we’re thrown into Katherine’s head. The relationship is realigned from her point of view, along with her prejudices, her justifications, and her rationalizations. The book loses whatever energy it once had, and the following 180+ pages make up a plodding tedium. Szalay writes the book as though it were a bad thriller, jumping from one character’s thoughts to those of another, often in the same scene, and sometimes in the same paragraph. In a more experimental work this could prove effective, but there’s nothing in Spring to warrant a complete disregard for perspective or lens. Nothing is filtered. Inside every character’s head we know every character’s motivation, and when our eyes gloss over it becomes clear why an omniscient god wants nothing to do with us. Knowing everything bores the shit out of you.

After those first 72 pages, I wanted to fall in love with the book again. I wanted to feel the tension of a flat relationship with no pretense of fireworks or sparks or even the slow drunken flashes of fireflies, but the book and I fared as well as James and Katherine. In those pages, Spring promises an art that harkens back to artifice—a reconstruction and reorganization of reality that exposes its tender parts. But the joy of artifice is forgetting that it’s artifice, and when every last piece of information is on the page—when the novelist leaves nothing out—we’re reading mere schematics, or the blueprints for something that would’ve made us hurt. Because art should hurt. Without that hurt, and without that investment, there’s nothing left but indifference, and no bigger disappointment.

While you’d think this would indicate a pass, I discourage anyone from ignoring this book. For those truly invested in the literary arts, Spring is strangely valuable. All I could think, toward the end of the novel, was how one day I’d include it in on the syllabus for a fiction workshop. It’s one of those books that activate the novelist in you, your critical and revisionist senses tingling all throughout. For those of us who write fiction, books like this are pertinent. Writers don’t learn solely from masterpieces, and if we did, we’d have all committed suicide long ago, or at least given up fiction in favor of taxidermy. It’s a reason to not only hold onto the book once you start it, but to seek it out even after a precocious twenty-something has expressed his disappointment in it, as if his disappointment mattered. So seek it out.

“No dumbass, this is not the beginning of the book, this is the Preface.”

I spoke with emphasis, as if talking to a Kindergartner.

My Samoan roommate thought it was a prefix.

“No, that’s like step-father. Didn’t you read any books those five years in the state pen? I read ten doing two months in The Orange County Hilton.” I stated this proudly. Proud about the books, not about The Hilton.

“Fuck you, White Mexican. Two months in county? You sooooo hard.”

The Samoan smiled. Then he paused.

“I don’t read very well.”

The Samoan pronounced read red, like the color.

“That’s because you went to Covina High School,” I said.

“So did you, motherfucker.”

He brushed my arm lightly as he walked by me. I was sitting on the couch. He went outside to have a smoke. I laughed at him as he opened the sliding door.

“Yeah, that was the biggest mistake of my life!” I said, half mumbling. “I transferred there as a sophomore. Before that, I went to private school. That’s why I know what a preface is and you don’t.”

The Samoan had already walked out the door. He acted like he didn’t hear me. The Samoan was good at ignoring people and acting, just like me. In fact, this Samoan was a good friend of mine.

You wouldn’t catch me talking to any other Samoan like this. In fact, whenever I saw one, I stayed clear of him, if I could.

Beware of Samoans flashed in my brain.

I realized they were the only race I was truly scared of. There is a reason behind that. It wasn’t racism or because they looked scary. It wasn’t because they were big.

Samoans were always big. Very big. However, big never bothered me.

Big vs. Gun? Gun always wins.

My particular Samoan friend was small for a Samoan. Yet he still was 35-40 pounds heavier than me. This Samoan acted more like a blonde California surfer than a Samoan.

The reason Samoans scared me was that my older brother told me they were scary.

My brother was the scariest person I knew, and to this day, have ever known. He told me a story about a Samoan. I was eleven years old at the time. My brother told me many stories about shootings, stabbings, beatings, and robberies. He knew these things because he had been involved in all of them.

That was my brother–the scariest guy I knew.

Until he told me the Samoan story. He once saw a Samoan take four .38 caliber rounds to the chest.

The Samoan fell briefly, got up, and proceeded to beat down the guy who shot him to a bloody pulp.

Then the Samoan laughed and passed out.

My brother avoided getting into fights with Samoans. That scared the hell out of me as an eleven year old boy and still does, to this very day.

That’s why I’m scared of Samoans.

End preface.

Kyle Scot Martinez shares the same birthday with William Shakespeare, April 23. He has been published in the Istanbul Literary Review, the Sacramento News and Review, Free My Verse, the Indiana Crime Anthology, and currently writes for CBS Sacramento. He is working on his first novel entitled Chase.

Photo by beau-foto.

The younger man remembered wooden desks (The graffiti was more creative—
you could at least understand it), the older man went further into the past,
as though he were an Enheduanna channeling some “shadow world”—

Do you remember inkwells? Of course we never used them, but I could always
imagine an impish father dipping a poor girl’s pigtail in ink

*

Somewhere between Bandini and the South Central Farm (about 6:15 a.m.)
the beforewrit was cut from life, then modified

Crossing the tracks and switching gears, I found myself tripping over
Was ist der Mensch, daß er Pläne macht

Intuitively I passed the dirty yellow light of cataracts and neglected latrines
through prism after prism

Nada. Nada from nada. Nadja

Dirty yellow light begets dirty yellow light

R. L. Swihart currently lives in Long Beach, CA, and teaches high school mathematics in Los Angeles. His poems have appeared in various online and print journals, including Barnwood, Bateau, elimae, and Rhino. His first book of poems is forthcoming in 2012 by Desperanto Press.

Photo by Jon Feinstein.

As often as I fly, it is surprising how infrequently I have sat in business or first class. On the most recent occasion of my short-lived moment of traveler’s luxury, a familiar feeling of discomfort began to surface, reminding me of how much I did not belong in business class. I was unused to offers of champagne while waiting for the rest of the passengers “back there” to squeeze into their cramped quarters. My stomach, trained by many flights to subsist on economy class’s meager fare (food still being provided on international flights), felt overloaded with business-class-sized meals — only to find out that what I’d thought a rather filling meal was merely the first course. But nothing was more devastating to my self-esteem than seeing everyone around me whip their noise-reduction headphones out of their fancy little zippered cases. I was shut out, in the company of only the big, unreduced noise of the airplane’s engine, while everyone around me retreated into their own private universes.

It has become commonplace, in the past decade or so, to see contemporary society described in a way something like what follows:

Technology has made it possible for us to expand the boundaries of our individual worlds in ways undreamt of by our forebears. In former times, “the other side of the world” was a place almost unreachable. In order to get there, one needed to literally risk one’s life. Today, we can virtually reach the other side of the world with the flip of a switch. One can sit having breakfast Monday morning in Phnom Penh while following a live broadcast of a Sunday Night Baseball game played in Pittsburgh. We are no longer bound to wait days, weeks, or months for news of what is happening in remote parts of the globe. It is possible for an individual to virtually live in more than one place at a time, making our worlds seem infinitely large.

At the same time, the technology that enables the hugeness of one’s private existence has also allowed us to miniaturize our worlds more than ever before. Not only are our communication devices smaller, but so are our means of consuming cultural products. Music, movies, and books have always been the expression of humanity’s communal existence. Today, these experiences have been privatized. Standing shoulder to shoulder with strangers on a train packed full of people, one can retreat into one’s own world of book, game, movie, or music. And the world outside the earphones can seem narrow and constricted when compared to the vast spaces opened up by even the smallest gadget carried in one’s pocket.

Written long before the days of miniaturized, personalized electronic windows opening onto the world at large, John Donne’s poetry famously conflates the individual experience of life with the universal. In “The Sun Rising,” he speaks of the bedroom in which the two lovers meet as a world unto itself, and also as the center of all that exists, the fulcrum around which the sun should turn. “The Good-Morrow” likewise has the poet saying to the beloved, “Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.”

This notion permeates Donne’s writing, a conceit he uses in countless poems. While there is an aspect of it that is obviously playful, there is a sort of performative side to it as well, as if the verse plays out its message in its utterance. The poet’s expression of his own feeling that he is living on two planes is his, and yet seems not to be unique to him. Donne’s poetry often enacts this paradox while discussing it, highlighting the private/public duality in which we all live.

In Donne’s day, and for a long time both before and after, the communal life of the Western world centered around the theater. Many of our greatest cultural products were designed for the stage, and so reading a play in written form effectively reverses the original process of its writing and staging. The writing of the play begins with an individual experience, the playwright taking the ideas and words from the mind’s private spaces and putting them on paper. It becomes a truly communal experience when these private ideas are put into the hands of an acting company and performed in front of live audiences.

A play in print form takes the tale from the public space of the theater and packages it for private consumption. When it unfolds again in the silent spaces of the reader’s head, it is a very different experience from the performed text in which one may participate on any given night at the theater, seated side by side with other viewers taking in the same event.

Like a play in written rather than staged format, a movie viewed on an iPod screen privatizes an event that was originally intended for a public setting. The digital technologies available to the entertainment industry have resulted in a revolutionary change best compared to that brought about by the printing press, and this advancement in technology has likewise changed the shape of our social lives.

Besides privatizing our consumption of cultural products, the miniaturization of our communal experiences of culture has given the entertainment industry the potential to expand the life span of any single creation. No longer are movies bound by how long they can sell tickets, nor songs by how long radio stations will play them, but by how long they can attract users to download them for private consumption. The longevity of our cultural products has increased as they have become geared more for personal than public enjoyment. Thus our cultural products enjoy longer lives, as they are consumed in increasingly smaller spaces across increasingly larger portions of the globe. Their expansion into the consciousness of ever broader audiences is enabled by diminishing the size of each iteration of the text.

As our private worlds have grown vastly larger, our screens have gotten unimaginably smaller. We can carry our access point to the whole globe in a pocket, but in order to view it, we must have a tunnel vision of the narrowest kind. Our desire to know what is going on in the other hemisphere can often lead us to terrible extremes of self-absorption, causing us to miss out on the events going on right before us. This sort of self-absorption can even be fatal if the cell phone doesn’t go back into the deep recesses of the pocket while crossing a busy road.

During my postgrad studies, a professor amused the whole class one night as he told us about his experience at a wedding banquet. Somehow he and his wife got split up on the seating chart, and he found himself at a table with nine strangers. As he ate in a subdued silence, he noticed coming from behind him, at his wife’s table, the sounds of warm and interesting conversation. He was surprised to hear his wife’s laughter and her voice speaking in lively tones. He found it unusual for her, considering that, like him, she was seated with strangers. He turned back to look, and found that all ten people seated at the table were speaking on cell phones. The warmth and friendly conversation expected at this occasion were there, but no two people at the table seemed to be sharing it between them.

Japan has seen the keitai shosetsu (cell phone novel) rise to unprecedented levels of popularity, with many selling copies in the millions. Keitai shosetsu authors, mostly young women, compose their novels on their cell phones’ LCD displays, uploading screen after screen of text each day. Millions of readers follow online as the confessional narratives unfold. The genre is (at least ostensibly) made up of autobiographical tales of woe, love, and all manner of heartbreak. When completed, the best (or most popular) of these novels are given substantial contracts and printed in paperback form, where millions continue to purchase them. This staggering phenomenon has brought new life to Japan’s publishing industry.

The keitai shosetsu in printed form retains many of the features of a cell phone screen. The paperback versions of these originally-formatted-for-cell-phone novels use narrow print columns, and are often filled with cell-slang and smileys. The apparent popular appeal of keying in enormous amounts of text on a tiny screen, then disseminating it to huge audiences opens up a whole new possibility for cultural expression, and no one in the world has clutched this potential so firmly in hand as have the Japanese.

Long before the uniquely Japanese fad of the cell phone novel, the Kronos/Saturn myth drew attention to the fact that humans are beings made of both earth and sky, representing a duality to our nature that has always been present. Our awareness of this strange duality in which we live might have changed shape, but really, haven’t we always known we were living on two planes? All humans are small, self-contained, earth-bound worlds living a global existence as expansive as the heavens. My ability to experience this as a unique individual iteration, and yet to recognize it as partaking in a tradition which includes all of humanity, is simply another instance of the same phenomenon.

We like to think that the isolation one often feels in the middle of a crowded airport, at a large social gathering, or in some similarly overpopulated locale is the product of our high-tech, urbanized age. But it might not be quite as new a phenomenon as we imagine. Upon his arrival in Venice in the late 1780s, Goethe wrote, “At last I can really enjoy the solitude I have been longing for, because nowhere can one be more alone than in a large crowd through which one pushes one’s way, a complete stranger.” He looks backward in time from the age in which he sits, and longs for that imagined ancient time “when a people were more of a people than today.” It would appear that the feeling that a group of people is merely a collection of isolated individuals, instead of some idealized community of like-minded people has been with us for quite a while now.

It seems that we are destined to always live on two planes. One is vast, encompassing spaces that should be too big for our puny powers of comprehension. The other is intensely narrow, jealously guarded, and marked “Private!”

I suspect that our private and public lives are not really as neatly split as all that, though. Take, for instance, the matter of a contract. What is a contract if not a public statement of a private agreement? I am not here thinking of business contracts, though something similar may be said of them, but of contracts such as marriage or adoption, those which function as a public recognition of one’s personal relationships. (And isn’t this why the issues of marriage and adoption as they relate to gay couples is such a hot topic today?) Similarly, a last will and testament makes the disposal of one’s private assets a matter of public concern. For all that we like to imagine our worlds as neatly divided into the realms of public and private, it is not really a very accurate view of how we, in fact, function.

The notion that the public-private binary is a false dichotomy is nothing new. At the heart of many of Shakespeare’s plays, we find that the driving conflict is really nothing more than a tension between private and public demands, and the supposed split between the two realms ultimately collapses under this tension. In Richard II, Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear, and nearly any other of Shakespeare’s plays that seems to be “about” politics, you will find that the protagonist is torn between his or her personal and political loyalties. Lear’s conditions for dividing his kingdom are based on his daughters’ ability (and willingness) to express their filial affections. Antony must choose between the woman he loves and alliances made for political gain. And all of Richard’s civil wars are really nothing more than family disputes over how to divide up the collective assets.

In Heiner Müller’s adaptation of Titus Andronicus, he notes the tension between public and private loyalties that confronts Titus, saying, “The general stands divided by his sword / half Roman and half father of his children.” The play is only brought to some sort of resolution when “the general turns into the father.” In all of these family quarrels, there are political implications, and in all of the political strife, family ties are threatened. Müller’s adaptation rightly highlights Shakespeare’s mastery in collapsing the distinction between the public and private worlds. He would almost certainly have loved the feminist mantra, “The personal is political.”

The appeal of writing a confessional novel on one’s cell phone is perhaps not so difficult to understand after all. The practice of sending text messages to friends and loved ones is so familiar, and it just feels so close. No matter what I might be involved in at any given moment, I can always know that a close one is thinking of me, or let them know I am thinking of them, with a minimal amount of effort.

The keitai shosetsu, then, allows the writer to feel that she has shared her burdens not with masses of unknown faces, but with her closest friends. Who, after all, could be closer than the friend carried around in one’s pocket all day long?

Barack Obama’s presidential campaign recognized the same potential for feelings of closeness that is utilized so effectively in the keitai shosetsu. Accordingly, his campaign made excellent use of cell phone technology, and was especially effective in reaching young, tech-savvy voters.

The appeal of text messages to American voters is very similar to that felt by Japan’s cell phone novelists, though the feelings perhaps move in the opposite direction. Whereas the novelist feels closer to her audience because of the use of text messaging, the voter feels closer to the sender of a text message than of traditional forms of media. The text message has an illusion of the personal touch. It is easy, when the ring tone sounds in the pocket, to forget that this same exact “personal” message was simultaneously sent out to millions of strangers.

The successful keitai shosetsu writer almost always works under a screen name, very often a typically Japanese “cutesy” style of name. Even some of the most successful, well-paid authors of cell phone novels in Japan refuse to let their real identities be known. Their reluctance, many of them say, grows out of the confessional style conventional for the cell phone novel. While many young Japanese don’t, apparently, mind sharing in sordid detail the events of their lives, they are also loathe to publicly admit that they have done so. The keitai shosetsu novelist is willing enough to come public with her private life, as long as she need not publicly own it as hers.

The retreat into our private worlds, even in the face of almost constant company, has been oft lamented. Many seem to think that, while it is true that our pockets today are deep enough to contain the whole of our worlds, this is only the case because our worlds are so shallow.

I wonder, though, whether we are not wrong to mourn the situation of contemporary humanity. Perhaps this tendency reflects not so much a move away from being, in Goethe’s terms, “more of a people,” as it does attempts at understanding the people of which we are a part. Maybe it is less a tension between public and private than it is a negotiated commerce between individualism and complete absorption of one’s identity into the masses. Perhaps our retreating into the most private of universes is what keeps us sane enough, human enough, to interact with one another.

Or, maybe we really are just completely self-absorbed these days. But even if that is the case, I’m not so sure that’s as exclusively contemporary a phenomenon as the old folks would have us believe. I’m beginning to suspect, rather, that it is precisely this that is at the center of the human experience.

But is it even a uniquely human situation? Are humans, in fact, the only ones who experience this supposed dichotomy? Do monkeys and muskrats not, like us, oscillate between self-absorption and a sense of wonder at the vast history in which they are caught up? Why, I wonder, are the individual cells in my body oblivious to this same phenomenon? Why do they not feel a sense of dislocation when they think of themselves as self-contained cells simultaneously functioning as just a small part of the vast universe that is my body?

Then again, how do I know they don’t feel this? How do I know what their experience of the world might be?

And on the other end of the spectrum, might Terra herself not be wondering the same thing about me as I am pondering over the minute cells that make up my body? And the universe in which she is but a tiny atom at the same time wondering about her?

Perhaps in every life, even those that seem shallowest, there are pockets of surprising depth, just waiting for a willing explorer.

My confidence received a substantial boost at Christmastime when I received a set of noise reduction headphones from my sister. On the flight back across the Pacific a few days later, I discovered exactly why these gadgets were on the ear of every business class passenger when I’d earlier flown there (an event, sadly, not since repeated). Even in the pinched spaces allotted to the masses in economy class, my noise reduction headphones created a private world inside my own head. They were made most effective on those legs of the flight where the airline kindly equipped each passenger with his or her own screen (a small taste of business class luxury), giving each the ability to exist in solitude, even while fighting for elbow space with the nearest neighbor (or neighbors, for the really unlucky). With such private facilities available, one might even be tempted to travel without the personalized universe of the iPod.

Or, maybe not.

Shelly Bryant divides her year between Shanghai and Singapore, working as a teacher, writer, researcher, and student of Chinese language and culture. She is the author of  two volumes of poetry, Cyborg Chimera and Under the Ash, and a travel guide to the city of Suzhou entitled Suzhou Basics.  Her third volume of poetry, Voices of the Elders, is due out in early 2012, and her travel memoir The End of the Line is slated for release in late 2011.  Her current projects include writing an updated guide to the city of Shanghai for Urbanatomy and translating Sheng Keyi’s novel Northern Girls for Penguin Books.

Shelly’s poetry has appeared in journals, magazines, and websites around the world, as well as in several art exhibitions, including dark ’til dawn, Things Disappear, and Studio White: Exhibition 2011. You can visit her website at http://web.me.com/shellybryant.

Photos by Ding Yuin Shan and Azlan DuPree.

This excerpt is from an unpublished young adult novel, Moonpants, in which a shy loner joins the highschool soccer team. He actually is quite a good player, and attracts a beautiful exchange student from Finland who is a cheerleader. When she breaks up with him to go out with a more naturally athletic boy, John visits a homeschooler who is studying the 1960s, and gets laced with LSD. This chapter reveals the upheavals.

“YOU’RE NO MOONPANTS, YOU’RE A MOONBAT, JOHN WILSON!”

I put my hands over my ears. I was walking on lower Main St. and there didn’t seem to be anyone about, but I was embarrassed. Then it seemed to me there was someone standing next to me. He had a green face and a top hat and was speaking to me in what I imagined was Carthaginian. Had it once been spoken in the deserts of Tunisia? I realized it was telling me I should jump off the highest bridge.

The idea seemed very good. I walked to the bridge between Stroudsburg and East Stroudsburg. It was not a beautiful bridge, but it was the highest one. Underneath it streamed a river. Was it called McMichael’s Creek, or was it the Brodhead? Was it the confluence of the two?”

“Who cares? Just jump!” My new friend said.

This apparition was tall, thin, and elegant, like something out of Oscar Wilde. He was also a bit unkempt. I looked out over the bleak snow landscape and then looked down into the cold waters rushing below. I couldn’t jump if I didn’t even know the name of the river. The jump would be about 40 to 80 feet, and the water looked about five feet deep. I didn’t want to break a leg and have to drag my torso to the hospital. I wanted it over as soon as I landed.

My friend disappeared and I decided to walk back into town and enjoy a kind of Last Supper at the sandwich shop. I ordered a corned beef on rye with a Diet Pepsi. If I was going to jump, I didn’t have to worry about making weight, but there was no point in adding unneeded calories. I eyed the potato chips on the side when the dish came and ate only one, to prove I could. I was eyeing the sandwich, but unfortunately, it began talking to me.

“Behold,” it said, “how weird to eat a talking sandwich!”

I tuned out the sandwich and ate it.

It continued to rumble in my stomach but now I couldn’t hear what it was saying, although it appeared to be talking. I burped, and heard the words, “Green pastures.”

I thought about how I had been normal until soccer season, and that that had forced me out of my usual rut, and now I was certifiable.

The waitress looked at me as if I was normal, which calmed me down. She didn’t know. The walls and floors of the place were somewhat liquid, and the waitress looked like my former girlfriend. I pressed my fingers against the table and the electrons in my fingers and the electrons in the table interpenetrated. The laws of molecular chemistry were no longer intact. I had melted into the table.

Now my ex was looking in the window of the sandwich shop. I got up and paid the waitress, who now appeared to be about fifty years old, and went outside, and saw the real Erika. Erika was kissing Billy Smith by the curb.

On closer inspection, it was a middle-aged man and his girlfriend. I walked up Main St. toward the high school. My friend was dead and my girlfriend was with someone else. I might as well wrestle one last time.

I went in the gym and went to the weigh-in. In spite of the sandwich and the soda, the ref said I was eight pounds underweight. I hadn’t eaten for several days before the sandwich, as I had been preoccupied. I got my gear on and waited to wrestle.

I was standing on the mat with my hands on knees. When the ref whistled, I looked around at the lights and the stands. Then I was on my back seeing stars when the ref hit the mat with his palm. When I came to I was in a hospital with a tube down my throat.

Nurses in blue dresses were bustling about. There was the smell of ammonia. A doctor was talking to my mother and showing her something on a chart that he had pinned to a clipboard. Something about my chemical levels.

“John, how are you feeling?”

“Fine,” I said. But it was as if someone else had said the word. I could still speak English. This was a positive.

The doctor asked me if I could explain anything unusual that had happened.

I told him about cutting weight, and began to cry. When I told him about the party several nights before when the episode began, he asked me if I had taken any drugs at the party, or if I had drunk anything. I remembered I did drink a Pepsi there, which a friend had poured into a glass for me.

“Did he slip anything into it?” The doctor asked.

“He put pepper in it, and said it would be a Dr. Pepper,” I said.

The doctor gave me a depressant, and my hallucinations and sense of panic diminished. The doctor told me he thought I had been laced with a hallucinogetic drug and they were going to hold me overnight.

I didn’t want to stay in the hospital overnight because I wanted to attend church on Sunday morning to see Erika, but the doctor’s orders were binding. I watched Jason and the Argonauts on TV. It was the 1963 version, with the mechanical bull, and the special effects by Ray Harryhausen. I had always loved the inventions of Haephestus, and the mechanical bull, and the live skeletons sequence, and ordered bowl after bowl of ice cream from room service. It was strawberry first, and then chocolate, and then mint. I began to enjoy life again.

Kirby Olson has been published in several journals, including Partisan Review, Cortland Review, S. Dakota Review, and Poetry East. Black Heron Press released his novel, Temping, in 2006. He currently teaches at SUNY Delhi.

Photo by Diogo Costa.

Weekends we went
in that battered family van
where we’d spend hours
drifting between borders.
I’d pass them by, guessing license plate numbers
and when talk got tawdry, I’d conjecture
the blue sedan was consoling a lost soccer match,
the tanned Mustang was speeding in smeared lipstick
(late again on her first date)
and the luxury car coated in tuxedo black
was flaunting espionage on the capital beltway.

After we were alone on the asphalt,
I’d stare through my moving screen
to see the sky phase from blue to cadmium yellow
rebelling any true form, though I knew
its best was when white-puffed dragons drifted
like sundrops in the summer,
like making blanket forts and grapefruit-peel artillery
and spelunking for grizzly bears in the basement
or watering pansies with plastic syringes–the
days when codenames and hide-and-seek
were just make-believe.

Sometimes it got dark before we reached University Blvd,
and what else could I do but squint at the stars?
I’d amuse myself, wondering how twinkles
came to be massive globes of hot gas,
too cool to come back down to earth.
Then, when astronomy’s void got to me,
I’d praise the weathermen
because the best was when it drizzled
so I could watch the raindrops race and
when they stopped, conjoin as twins—
their foggy laughter drawing crooked hearts
that evaporated through glass.

Elena Nguyen, 17, is a pre-med student from the East Coast. Her hobbies include brooding, watching period dramas, and eating chocolate cupcakes.

Photo by Cameron Russell.