At the Guardian, Rumpus columnist Steve Almond comments on the histrionic attitude the media has taken on in the wake of the explosions, and wonders if “events such as Monday’s bombing can somehow morally enlarge us as a nation, can help us imagine the suffering of other people and our own duty to those people – wherever they happen to live.”

Boston.com’s Metro Desk eulogizes Martin William Richard, the 8-year old who was killed.

Esquire and Politico both have heart-felt and eloquent summaries on yesterday’s tragedy.

Boston area college students are organizing a walk from Boston College’s campus to the finish line this Friday in remembrance of those who were injured or killed and in honor of the 5,742 runners who were not able to cross the finish line. So far, over 12,000 people are planning to attend.

Brett Weer at Al Bawaba and Rinku Sen at Colorlines applaud and encourage Boston to continue nurturing the spirit of community, and to refrain from pointing fingers and making cultural and racial accusations.

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But it’s worth zooming out and looking at the buyout’s context: industry-wide changes to publishing’s traditional (and deeply dysfunctional) business practices. Says Almond,

I couldn’t help but think of the state of publishing in evolutionary terms: the lumbering dinosaurs were dying out, but in their wake all these industrious little mammals were thriving.

Read the whole thing here for a little peace of mind.

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Brian Sousa was not that student. Brian was pretty much the opposite of that student. He was one of those students where you just think to yourself: man, I hope Subway is hiring. It’s not that Brian was dumb. He was just, shall we say, distracted.

I was skeptical (to put it mildly) when I learned that Brian had decided to pursue writing, and not terribly hopeful when his new book, Almost Gone, arrived on my doorstep.

Rather than pursue a traditional bildungsroman, the novel offers a kaleidoscopic investigation of the immigrant experience, deftly weaving the stories of four generations of Portuguese-Americans, young and old, mostly working-class, haunted by the past even as they seek to build a future. The prose, like the characters, is spare and elegant, moving without ever dipping into sentiment. It was a shock to read—the best kind of shock.

So there’s the bona fides. Let’s do this thing…

***

The Rumpus: Please tell the readers what grade you received in my class, and why.

Brian Sousa: You gave me a B-, after warning me I’d probably get a lower grade if I didn’t fucking revise my shit. I told you that my thesis (a creative nonfiction book on traveling in Australia, that I’m not sure anyone will ever want to read) was sucking up too much of my time, and you informed me that you were writing a book too, and that was no excuse. “Gotta get the writing done,” you said, which I find myself saying to my students now.

You also ordered us to buy Playboy, because your story had just come out in it, and right after class I went to 7-11 and bought it, and then my girlfriend came home and found me intently reading it, as the story was funny and sad and hypersexual, and made me want to write. I told her it was my homework. She did not believe me and may have broken up with me.

Rumpus: When you say “order,” I think you mean “begged.”

Sousa: Right.

You gave me a B- because you thought I was a slacker. And to be honest, I was. You know, I knew we were gonna do this interview so I e-mailed my old buddy Ben Ritzo, who was in the class with me, to ask him what he remembered. Ben and I would get five-shot, espresso-laced iced coffees and skateboard to your class all jacked-up on caffeine.

This is what he said: “We were shitheads—me especially—I just remember showing up like forty-five minutes late with no writing utensil, and carrying on full-volume conversations while Almond was trying to teach… And laughing my ass off…it was probably my favorite class….tell him I’m sorry, and thanks for not failing me!”

Then he said: “Dude, I’m actually shocked he still talks to you…”

So, based on the evidence, I guess I should be pretty happy with a B-. Put it this way: I don’t think, right now, I would want to have my twenty-one-year-old self in my own class. I would probably want to punch myself in the face.

Rumpus: Almost Gone manages to tell the immigrant story in a new way. Was that your intent from the start?

Sousa: Not my intent, but if it does approach that, then I’m stoked. My grandfather was born in Portugal, and my father spent time there as a kid, but I didn’t set out to write anything other than a set of stories that are linked together and hopefully draw in the reader. The book began as a single story about a Portuguese-American man, Nuno, who was obsessed with a younger woman. Turned out, in the next story, that his son had a similar attraction. Then I just started writing about other characters and over time, the entire family climbed out, claiming their own chapters, and the grandson, Scott, emerged as an indirect protagonist.

I didn’t set out to write an immigrant story, but I was able to close my eyes and revisit places and scenes from my childhood, so that helped. The more I got into it, the more I realized that a lot of fiction that focuses on immigrants is only about memorializing the past. I’d rather use the culture of assimilation as an origin of character and conflict; as a point to move forward from, rather than backward.

Rumpus:
 Do you identify as a “Portuguese-American writer,” or a writer who happens to be Portuguese-American?

Sousa: The second one, but I’m happy being called either. I’m actually just really stoked to have anyone call me a writer. I’ve debated that idea for a long time, and never know what to say when people ask what I do. I’ve been called a barback, a parking lot attendant, a snowboard instructor, a student, musician, starving artist…but now, with the book out, I think I can finally say that I’m a writer. So I’ve got that going for me. Still a starving artist, though.

We’ve all got stories to tell, and unique perspectives. I would say that our families and backgrounds definitely color the stories we make up, and that my dad being Portuguese has influenced mine. But at least half of the stuff that I write has nothing to do with Portugal, or Cristiano Ronaldo.

Rumpus:

 In the chapter “Jerusalem,” you write: “I close my eyes tightly and watch the colors. Someone told me in college that the red splotches that you see are actually your own blood, flowing beneath your eyelids. It was one of those stoned conversations that I don’t remember much of.” Do you really not remember the conversation? Because my recollection is that we got into some very deep shit.

Sousa: We did indeed get into some deep, deep shit. I thought that was you who told me that! Is that why you “resigned” from BC? That was one hell of a workshop. Were you practicing Rastafarianism at the time? It seemed like it. Maybe this is why, when I looked back at my transcript to find the grade you gave me, entire classes seem to have disappeared from my memory.

Rumpus: How has your family reacted to the book?

Sousa: This brings up something funny that’s been happening to me lately:

My sister: This book is good but dark. And, you know, we had a pretty idyllic childhood…

Me: But…this is fiction. I made it up.

Sister: I think you need to remind Mom that this is not you.

Me: But…it’s all lies. That’s what I do now. I lie for money.

Elsewhere…

My friend’s dad: But how does Brian know so much about domestic abuse?

My cousin: Why are you so well-versed in snorting painkillers?

Me: But…this…is…fiction!

Rumpus: There’s a rumor out there that you’re going to resign from BC if I’m invited as a graduation speaker. True?

Sousa: Can adjuncts actually “resign?” I don’t think they let us. They tell us when we can leave, maybe, or show us the way out. Actually, I wish you’d resigned in protest of Tommy Thompson speaking at my graduation in 2001. That was a nightmare. I’m glad I fell asleep.

I actually tell your resignation story to my students all the time. Some are inspired, some are indifferent, and the other day, one woman said, “Well, that’s a little extreme!” I think you scared the J. Crew right out of her! So, there you are. You are now officially extreme. In all seriousness, those Jesuits need to be shaken up every once in a while. Man, do I get freaked out by that tiny Jesus in every classroom, just staring down at me. I just want to say, “Happy Birthday, Jesus!” and send the old carpenter on his way.

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• Writs of Passion

For the Rumpus’s Steve Almond, it’s a complex question, which he tries to answer in an essay for the New Republic.

But there’s a larger and more unsettling truth lurking beneath his gripes, one that AWP inadvertently drives home: As a pursuit, literature is in a phase of incestuous contraction. Yes, people still read novels and stories and essays and poems. But today most of those people are also writers.

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I was deeply impressed when I read his first novel, A Kiss from Maddalena, which managed to capture the rhythms of village life in World War II era Italy. His follow-up, The Saint of Lost Things, tracked his heroine Maddalena Grasso as she sought to make a life in America with husband Antonio. It was an intimate and wrenching examination of the immigrant experience. His new book, All This Talk of Love, finds the now-sprawling Grasso clan in millennial American, where Maddalena and Antonio are left to grapple with their ambivalent legacies: a pack of fractious offspring, the cruelties of fate, and a haunted past with which they must finally reckon.

It is, in my view, an American masterpiece, a tenderly ruthless examination of the bonds of family, the ways in which love perseveres in the midst of insoluble grief and complex regrets. I read the book in a kind of frenzy, feeling all the while that exquisite stab of envy that overtakes us when we feel our own talents eclipsed, and our hearts enlarged. How had my friend managed to cut so deeply into the hearts of his people?

The Rumpus sat down with Chris to find out.

***

Rumpus: You’ve spent more than a decade tracking the Grasso family across 60 years. Did you know what you were getting into when you started A Kiss from Maddalena or did it just evolve?

Chris Castellani: When I started what became A Kiss from Maddalena in 1999, my goal was to cover at least three generations of the Piccinelli-Grasso clan in one fat novel, taking a character loosely based on my mother from her birthplace e in an Italian village in the early 1930s, through World War II, an arranged marriage, her journey across the Atlantic, immigrant life in the U.S., her relationships with her children and grandchildren, a return to Italy, and whatever her life would look like beyond the millennium. I’d just come from an English Literature PhD program, where I’d fallen in love with thick 19th Century tomes with multiple storylines that told the entire history of a city, a region, and/or a way of life; I wanted to do for the Lazio/Abruzzo region of Italy – where my parents were born — what Hardy did for his fictional Wessex. Oh, and I’d also read A Hundred Years of Solitude a few too many times and thought such a masterpiece was a reasonable model for a twenty-something who’d never written a novel or even finished a successful short story.

What happened instead: I got to page 400, and I’d covered only two years of Maddalena’s life. She’d just made it onto the boat. Turns out I had zero talent for the kind of expansive writing that my plan required – the sort that Jeff Eugenides pulled off so beautifully in Middlesex, which was published around the same time and remains the book I wish I’d been able to write.

So I decided to play to my supposed strengths and divide the saga into three representative parts, each of which would cover a shorter but more intense period of time in Maddalena’s and other characters’ lives. The Synechdocal Approach, I called it, if only so I could finally use a term I’d learned in grad school.

Rumpus: One of the major achievements of your trilogy is to strip away the sentimentality that’s grown up around the “immigrant experience.” You manage to convey the abiding sense of dislocation and despair that lives beneath the aspirational blather. Is this something you did consciously, or is it just the story as you know it?

Castellani: It was definitely a conscious goal in each of my books to avoid sentimentality at all costs while remaining true to the emotional lives of the characters, who are each, in their own way, passionate melodramatic Italians. This was a hard line to toe because the stories I wanted to tell all focused on family and romantic love, and it’s hard to avoid at least appearing sentimental when you are in that “domestic” sphere. I’d become frustrated with the many one-dimensional depictions of Italians in the media (including books), and I wanted my books to feature complex and challenging characters with deep inner lives and struggles.

I understand the need for, and even the enjoyment of, books designed primarily to celebrate or prettify or wax nostalgic about the so-called immigrant experience, but I don’t find those books nourishing. They don’t give me what I ask from literature, which is, as you recently put it, to “bring us deep enough into the minds and hearts and souls of others to make us feel less alone with ourselves.”

Italians in particular are seen as either benign and child-like (the sweet old nonna with her meatballs), menacing mobsters, or hyper-sexualized housewives and gigolos; the kind of nourishment I’m looking for doesn’t lie in any of these stereotypes.

Around this time, someone usually asks me about The Sopranos. That debate’s now quite dated, but I’ll just say that, on balance, I was a big fan of the show and greatly admired its explorations of the characters’ inner lives. The mob stuff always struck me as little more than a vehicle for those explorations. I still think of the heartbreaking loneliness on the face of Carmela Soprano during that lingering shot on her slumped over with her bags outside Meadow’s dorm room; that sort of moment is what I tried to capture and contextualize in my books.

Rumpus: As you know, I’m a big fan of your first two novels. But I was blown away by how much deeper this final installment cuts. The psychological and emotional depth is astonishing. Did it feel different to write from the others?

Castellani: First of all, thank you. That’s the highest compliment I could receive, especially coming from you. All This Talk of Love did indeed feel different to write. First off, the subject matter (the death of a child, the sorrows of aging and disease) was much more difficult and emotionally wrenching than what I dealt with in my first two novels. This, too, was a conscious decision, in that I really tried to “write to my fears,” as Dorothy Allison advises writers to do. I had to step away from the book for weeks at a time because the subject matter was just too close, or too “possible.”

Rumpus: I know I shouldn’t do this, but as a friend and admirer of yours, I kept wondering how much of the plot comes from family history. Can you talk a little about this? The pluses and perils, I guess I mean.

Castellani: It’s a fair question. Anyone who knows me or my family will see aspects of us reflected in each of the novels. And there are, of course, some literal similarities: my parents did grow up in a small Italian village and emigrate to Wilmington, DE after World War II; my immediate family does include two brothers and a sister of roughly the same ages as the characters in All This Talk of Love; like Frankie, I attended graduate school in English Literature at a Boston-area university. In addition, I’ve liberally borrowed themes that have echoed through our family for generations, as well as the cadence of my parents’ broken English in Maddalena’s and Antonio’s dialogue.

The obvious plus here is that I’ve had the context and the relatively solid ground on which to build these novels. When I struggled for a plot point or a character trait, I turned first to someone I knew, considered what she or he might have felt or done, and that consideration gave me a form of access. But, in every single case – and this I want to make very clear – I changed something fundamental to the character or to the story as a way of distinguishing it from its referent. I did this not only out of discretion and artistic integrity and in deference to the imagination, but, selfishly, to keep myself from getting bored. I had no interest in retelling a tale that had already been lived, either by myself or any member of my family. This is hard for people to believe, especially when, for example, they read a description of Maddalena and it sounds exactly like my mother; she may by the source of inspiration, but she is not Maddalena. The same with every other character in the book, including that pretentious Mamma’s boy grad student who reminds some people of the author…

Rumpus: Maybe what I’m trying to ask is how tough was it to write this installment, which takes the Grasso family into the present.

Castellani: Well, the first two books were historical (1940s Italy in Maddalena, 1950s U.S. in The Saint of Lost Things), so the jump to 1999 was very jarring. I missed the objectivity that time and distance brought me. I realized that you have to deal with a lot of baggage when you write about your own era, that it’s harder to separate what is actually compelling from what is interesting simply because it mattered to you at the time. Also, the details you have to work with seem thin and ephemeral and lackluster compared to the cool and surprising and rich details you can uncover while researching another era.

But what made it especially tough was that, because this was the last time I would write about this family, I was very conscious that I was saying goodbye to them. I think that’s why one of the major themes that emerged was letting go of the people you love. Every character deals with this issue: Prima needs to let her sons grow up; Maddalena has to face people she shut out long ago; Antonio has to let go of the guilt he’s always carried for the death of his youngest son; and Frankie has to find a way to grow up without his parents.

Without question, that’s why this book took almost twice as long to write as The Saint of Lost Things. I didn’t want to say goodbye, and yet I knew I had to. And I wanted to give them a proper send-off. I was also conscious that there might be readers out there who’d read the first two books, already knew Maddalena and Antonio, and didn’t need me to re-introduce them. It was helpful, actually, that they were now in their seventies and eighties; I was excited to find out how and if they’d changed since 1953, and I was excited to explore how each of their children might understand them differently.

I think that’s actually what draws me to family stories: the various roles we each play with each member of our families, and how different they can be from who we are with our friends and partners and lovers. I’m endlessly fascinated by how we navigate these family dynamics; they are the dramas each of us live out day after day, often in ways we don’t even realize.

Rumpus: How has your family reacted to the various books, this one in particular?

Castellani: I don’t come from a family of readers – in fact, my parents are unable to read the books in English, and they have not yet been translated into Italian – but everyone seems to understand the commitment and concentration it takes to produce novels. They’ve been incredibly supportive from the beginning, even as reviewers and friends have insisted on identifying them as the characters in the books, and even as those characters haven’t come off in the most positive light.

We are a fevered and often fractious bunch – constantly arguing over issues big and small, in each other’s business at all times, wildly emotional, and passionately devoted to each other. We are fiercely loyal to each other, practice radical acceptance and inclusion, but that doesn’t mean we don’t make each other suffer or feel guilty or that we don’t drive each other completely crazy. That is very much true of the Grassos.

This won’t ruin the ending of All This Talk of Love for anyone who hasn’t read it, but I want to say that, in the original ending, the Grasso family falls apart completely and scatters. Again, I was writing to my fears as well as taking inspiration from the dissolution of the Buendia family in One Hundred Years of Solitude. My agent at the time, Mary Evans, balked. “This is a family that stays together,” she said. And she was right. The same, I think, I hope, can be said of the Castellanis.

Rumpus: Is it true that you, like Frankie Grasso, talk to your parents every night?

Castellani: Yes. Just like my father did. In fact, I’ve never gone more than two days without speaking with them, even while on trips around the world. And this was before cell phones! (Note: I don’t imply this is a healthy way to live. But my relationship with my parents is among the greatest gifts of my life.)

Rumpus: Can you talk a little about how in God’s name you wrote these books while also running Grub Street?

Castellani: I wrote in the mornings, often in cafes, on the way to the office. I gave myself a daily word minimum, usually 750. I tried to save revision for the weekends, when I had more consecutive hours to string together. Pages accumulated this way, miraculously. And, in many cases because of Grub Street, I could call on wonderful readers who’d offer feedback and help.

In the meantime, Grub Street grew into one of the leading literary arts centers in the country, with over 600 programs each year. My work with the organization has been less of a distraction than an inspiration, connecting me with an incredible community of talented writers and devoted readers. The two types of work feed each other. I haven’t hit the bestseller list, but I consider myself one of the luckiest writers in the world, and this is mainly because of Grub Street.

Rumpus: What’s next?

Castellani: All I can say is that I’m working on another historical novel that takes place both in Italy and the U.S., but has nothing to do with the Grasso family. I’ve done most of the necessary research, and once the book tour for All This Talk of Love is finished, I’ll be back at those daily word minimums hoping for another miracle.

***

Author photo by wowe.

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• Writs of Passion

It’s an excerpt from Writs of Passion, a set of six tiny books made up of Almond’s stories and essays that are too dirty for prime-time.

The book covers fit together like a puzzle to reveal a steamy scene by Brian Stauffer. Below you’ll find a sneak peek of the cover image and details on ordering:

Limited edition of Writs of Passion is available until Valentine’s Day. To order, send $25 per set via Paypal (sbalmond AT earthlink.net) or send an email to stevealmondjoy AT gmail.com.

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• “Attention Is the First and Final Act of Love”
• Why I Write Smut: A Manifesto
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About.com guide Corey Silverberg interviewed Almond about pleasure, emotional danger, and how to write sex scenes.

A preview:

…even if we do enjoy sex, we find all kinds of ways to punish ourselves for that pleasure. I wish it wasn’t so complicated (believe me — I wish!). But it is. I’m trying to capture that.

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2. Because human beings are never more alive to their own hope and shame and fear than when they are naked and aroused, and because the same must therefore be true of our characters, who are nothing more than poorly disguised versions of ourselves.

3. Because I’m really tired of seeing sex used to sell SUVs and underarm deodorant and crappy light beer, rather than being portrayed as a natural and sometimes even holy human endeavor.

4. Because I have accumulated over the years such a tremendous surplus of sexual humiliation that it seems stingy of me not to re-gift some it to my readers.

5. Because I happen to agree with Freud’s naughtiest disciple, Wilhelm Reich, who argued that a true political revolution would only be possible once sexual repression was overthrown, which pretty much rules out the Tea Party as a true political revolution because, boy, is that a movement that needs to get laid.

6. Because I am now married with two small children and thus writing about sex often constitutes the closest I get to having sex.

7. Because President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky did have sexual relations, and while I could care less about the big phony scandal that story became, I am interested in the sweet and deranged version of love that passed between them. Aren’t you?

8. Because I’m really tired of having to listen to well-meaning religious folk misquoting God about how the rest of us should use our genitals.

9. Because both my parents are psychoanalysts – and despite what you are all now thinking, which is basically, Wow, you must be a really crazy person, which is a very interesting thought for you to have, by the way, and something we might want to talk about a bit later in the session – the one lesson my parents managed to impart, as I lay those many afternoons on the analytic couch that was, in fact, the only piece of furniture in our living room, is that our libidinal drives are not some bright new user option, but an essential part of our beings, an inborn riot of wants and counter wants that we can never control entirely. And because, as a writer, I’m interested in the loss of control, in the danger of forbidden thought and feeling, it strikes me as utterly foolish – just from a practical perspective – not to write about sex. Why skip over the part almost guaranteed to teach you something new about yourself?

10. Because I’m tired of living in a culture that allows children to fire make-believe glocks but freaks out at the first sign of a naked boob.

11. I just really love being able to write off lube as a business expense.

12. Because our best writing resides in the senses, and sex invokes all five of our senses—at least if you’re doing it right.

13. Because, though I watch pornography, and am terrifically involved with it for about two and a half minutes, I am most often made sad by pornography. Not simply because it involves the self-exploitation of people who probably have suffered a good deal of misfortune, and not simply because porn stars can perform in manners that often seem like physiological, geometrical, and even gravitational impossibilities (and thus make me feel like the abject sexual nebbish I surely am) but because porn stars are actors being paid, most often, to simulate pleasure. They drain sex of its single most intimate aspect: the vulnerabilities that bring us to the act in the first place, the drama of our imperfect bodies as we seek to make a communion of our desires.

14. Because I believe literature’s central purpose is not to pretend we don’t have bodies and their consequent needs, but to make us feel less alone with these needs.

15. Because the Puritans themselves were—don’t kid yourselves—total horndogs who wanted nothing more than to tear off those black robes and suffer a spiritual crisis. And because when I write about sex I am writing, ultimately, about a dream that begins with the Puritans: that we the people of this violent and troubled kingdom will at last forgive ourselves the lust and loneliness the reddens our blood, and will seek a final remedy in the warm temple of one another’s bodies. Who’s with me?

***

This Manifesto is part of a set of six tiny books called Writs of Passion. They are adult material, stories and essays that have appeared in Tin House, The Normal School, Playboy, Best American Erotica, etc., but are too dirty for prime-time. The covers fit together like a puzzle to form a gorgeous image, created by my DIY partner in crime Brian Stauffer. Limited edition, available until Valentine’s Day.

To order, send $25 per set via Paypal (sbalmond AT earthlink.net) or send an email to stevealmondjoy AT gmail.com.

***

“Why I Write Smut: A Manifesto” originally appeared in The Normal School, Spring 2012.

Art by Brian Stauffer.

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• “Attention Is the First and Final Act of Love”
• Writs of Passion
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• Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks: The Rumpus Interview with Annie M. Sprinkle
• Boston Marathon Roundup

“[Hamilton] Nolan is right to decry this kind of cynicism,” writes Almond. “But what he gets wrong in his piece is just as important as what he gets right. The reason most people shouldn’t write about their lives, he argues, is because ‘most people’s lives are not that interesting.’…This is—to use a technical term—complete crapola.”

Read the rest at Cognoscenti.

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• Notes For a Twenty-Something’s Memoir

A young Asian woman with a scone was holding forth. “They said on their own website that it cost 79 but I got here and suddenly it’s $1.20 and there’s like ten left, all in gross colors. I told the sales lady, ‘It was 79 on the website’ and she was like, ‘I don’t know anything about that, honey.’” The guy across the table stared at her from beneath a gelled shingle of hair, listening in that super empathic manner suggesting these two had yet to fuck.

At the next table, an older couple was berating their teenage son for his tardy appearance. He kept claiming his car had stalled on the way, an excuse not even he seemed to believe.

The woman making coffee was keening about the new device she wanted, only the Apple Store opened while she was on her shift, of course, so she had to ask her friend who worked at Pier One, but he couldn’t do it because he had his own stuff to buy, so she was going to have to ask her mom, who would probably mess it up and buy her, like, the Nano Four.

After a time, these voices began to merge. They composed a kind of seething national chorus. I will never get what I deserve.

And who was I to complain about their complaint? I say the same thing all the time.

***

It was a particular moment in time, in the suburbs of central Connecticut, where nearly all public discourse happens in a Starbuck’s or a Bertucci’s, in an Anne Taylor or a Pier One, where the Brownian motion of civic life is contained within white-trimmed malls.

I’d landed here on Black Friday, a newly minted “holiday” devoted to the sacred rites of shopping, to transitioning Americans from the corporeal gluttony of Thanksgiving to the retail gluttony of Christmas.

I should have been in a library, but I didn’t know where to find a library in central Connecticut.

I kept trying to think about the election, but I couldn’t get back there. It seemed ages ago. Instead, I thought of this line from The White Album, Didion’s long sad strange poem about how we let the Sixties slip through our fingers:

It is as though she feels deeply that all human effort is foredoomed to failure, a conviction which seems to push her further into a dependent, passive withdrawal. In her view she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations which commit them inevitably to conflict and failure…

 ***

Why does my heart operate like this? Why, in the face of good news, does it seize upon portents of ruin?

Are you like this, too?

How long did it take you to relocate your anxieties about the election to the rest of your life?

I gave myself about three hours. At last, I thought. Democracy has served as an instrument of moral progress. Americans have disavowed the use of selfishness and bigotry as political tools. Paul Ryan can now return to his given role as the star of an infomercial for a workout regimen that makes you poop gold.

Then Palestinians and Israelis started killing one another again and congressional leaders launched into their horseshit soliloquies about the sanctity of tax cuts and the same old huckster pundits were back in their pancake makeup, while the corporate money slunk back to the drawing board, in pursuit of more efficient ways to poison our common sense.

By the next day, the election had begun to feel like a stopgap, like some terrible disaster – not averted or vanquished, but delayed. And then even less. Like a diversion from the real business of America: the frantic effort to buy off our loneliness.

***

It’s more complicated than that, though.

I spent Election Day in the town where I’d grown up. I’d come to give a lecture and to visit my mom, who had just endured the removal of several internal organs, her second such surgery in the past five years. “It’s alright, Stevie,” she told me. “I wasn’t using them anyway.”

So I watched the returns with my folks on either side of me. The numbers came in from New Hampshire and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin; my dad and I began to feel the woozy flush of pessimists proved wrong.

But my mom wasn’t getting it. She stared at the blizzard of data washing across the screen, then glanced down at her belly, at the wound there. I could see, just for a second, how frightened she was.

By which I mean of course how frightened I was.

My dad clicked over to Fox, so as to witness Karl Rove confronting the voters of Ohio. But even this spectacle couldn’t distract him from the real story in that room. He wanted my mom to snap out of it, to act like his wife again, not some addled patient in danger of drifting off to the other side.

***

I watched Romney deliver his gracious concession speech at an airport bar, then caught the rest on a red-eye back to Boston, a hundred little blue screens aglow as our plane zoomed over the black mountains below. We landed at dawn and there was my own little family waiting for me at the airport, my beautiful tired wife and my tender shrieking children.

I should have fallen to my knees in gratitude. I should have found a God to thank. But I picked a fight with my wife instead, because she had the audacity to fall ill and to expect me to take care of her, when I was the one with the sick mother, the maybe dying mother, and anyway at the bottom of it all I wanted her, my wife, to become my mother, young and forever healthy, which isn’t fair, but is.

***

I was still in the Starbucks, still trying to figure out what to say about the election. It was barely a fortnight ago, but the squalls of Black Friday had blown me off course. I kept hearing the voices of those b-list actors from Dawn of the Dead, George Romero’s 1978 paean to zombie consumerism.

“What are they doing?” the blond says, of the blue-faced goons staggering around the mall. “Why do they come here?”

“Some kind of instinct,” her guy says. “Memory of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.”

***

My mother took part in the Civil Rights movement and was one of half a dozen women in her class at Yale Medical School and she raised three troubled sons and wrote two remarkable books and read every novel Charles Dickens wrote, most of them several times, and she has cared for her patients with great compassion and taken far too much shit over the years from my dad and me and my brothers. She deserved, and deserves, better.

And I guess that’s what I feel about the election, when I dig to the bottom of it.

It is my hope that Obama will become far more radical in defense of the common good; that he will suggest to Republicans, for instance, a return to the top tax rate of the Eisenhower era (91 percent). I would love to see him campaign for a constitutional amendment banning all private money from political races. I would love to see him empower scientists to solve our climate change crisis. And so on and so on.

***

But none of that will keep my mother alive forever. Or me. Or you.

The final crisis is always personal: how do we fight back against what Wallace Stevens called “the pressure of the real,” which I take to mean those anxieties that keep us apart from our souls. (I’m not sure I’m even getting that right. It’s based on something I heard Matthew Zapruder say far more eloquently.)

Maybe that’s what I was feeling in that Starbucks: the pressure of the real. Maybe I was afraid that it was too late for America, that election night 2012 would go down as little more than a twitch of conscience in the twilight of a wasteful empire, the fundamental malaise was too deep, the distractions too profitable, we would remain zombies to the end, unwilling to stanch our profligacy, to face the burdens of our historical moment, devoted instead to the spiritually empty pursuit of sensation.

Or maybe that was my fear talking. Maybe the pressure of the real can mean something else: that we love some people so much (and are therefore so afraid of losing them) that we have to create vessels of beauty to contain our terror. That our politicians fail us and the cherished among us die but that love and imagination, as commemorated in our words and our deeds, survive. That these human gestures form the invisible thread that binds the mighty to the meek, the wicked to the good, the living to the dead.

Maybe this can be taken as our proper work for the next four years: summoning the faith to see our nation as partly ruined, full of delusion and wrath, and still to wish for, and work for, and believe in, its resurrection.

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