While the “list” claims to be fifteen, his sometimes bitter rambling actually names close to thirty writers. The outrage from those on the fringes of the literary community is sometimes understandable, but it’s mostly driven by emotion and the fact that they’ve been instructed to reassess their literary heroes and their literary palates. Shivani’s article is a two-part piece: the first asks a couple of guiding questions (Are the writers receiving the major awards and official recognition really the best writers today? Or are they overrated mediocrities with little claim to recognition by posterity? ), and the second part absolutely tees off on every well-known writer from Amy Tan to Jonathan Safran Foer to Denis Johnson.

The first part of the article is fair. Who among us has not asked those questions in one form or another? How many times have you heard one of your writer-friends tell you that it’s all about the current market…that the big publishers don’t want good writing…that literary fiction writers are being screwed? Wah, wah, wah…Whine whine whine. I think I’ve whined about it more than a few times.

Shivani makes good points about the state of literary criticism today — how it’s basically nonexistent, then follows that sentiment up with an attack on the politics of MFA Programs:

The MFA writing system, with its mechanisms of circulating popularity and fashionableness, leans heavily on the easily imitable. Cloying writers like Denis Johnson, Amy Hempel, Lydia Davis, Aimee Bender, and Charles D’Ambrosio are held up as models of good writing, because they’re easy enough to copy. And copied they are, in tens of thousands of stories manufactured in workshops. Others hide behind a smokescreen of unreadable inimitability–Marilynne Robinson, for example–to maintain a necessary barrier between the masses and the overlords. Since grants, awards, and residencies are controlled by the same inbreeding group, it’s difficult to see how the designated heavies can be displaced.

There are two items of note here. One: this quote attacks what I like to call the Literary Pyramid Scheme. When you’re a writer looking for recognition you feel is lacking, you make a Facebook page, then accept every Friend Request from here to Bangladesh, including your contemporaries. The idea is to build up a sleazy little mutual admiration society, so when the new book comes out, you know you’ll probably sell at least, what…

Juliana Baggott 2,353 friends… I mean, copies.

Kyle Minor 2,386 copies.

Terese Svoboda 1,368

Neal Pollack 1,863

Rick Moody … Doesn’t list his friend count. (Well played, Moody.)

C.D. Wright 617  (She must be a poet.)

Then there’s the issue with the names Shivani mentions. When I first read this piece, I was defensive. Junot Diaz? Lydia Davis? Amy Hempel? Denis Johnson? All he had to do was mention Dave Eggers and my testicles would have disintigrated. Shivani attacked the writers I enjoy, have emulated, have imitated, are friends with. It hurt me, and I suspect it hurt most of those who are hitting back at Shivani. After my initial wave of paranoia (Whoa, is this motherfucker talking to me?), I got over it and saw through his anger to see his points. What helped me get over it was the ridiculous response from those blogging back. The biggest offender was Publishers’ Weekly, which has done more damage to good writers than The Huffington Post ever will. PW Blogger, Craig Morgan Teicher, started a conversation that asked people to name the most underrated writers by throwing his friend Stephen Elliott out there. I like Stephen Elliott, have read his books, think he’s a good guy, but then he Tweeted this article his friend wrote three times, published it on his (really cool) site The Rumpus, and gave himself the publicity he, and just about every other writer out there, craves.

Here’s where Shivani slips up. Sometimes he’s a bit of a dick, evidenced by these words about Amy Tan, who, according to Shivani “Empowered other immigrant writers to make mountains out of the molehills of their minor adjustment struggles…”

Ummm, what? Yes, definitely. Immigrants have it easy.

Then he attacked Jhumpa Lahiri, stating that she is “Utterly unwilling [...] to write about anything other than privileged Bengali immigrants with PhDs living in Cambridge’s Central and Inman Squares, and making easy adjustments to the top of the American meritocratic pyramid.”

Tough talk from a guy who was privileged enough to attend Harvard (How’s life on planet Meritocratia, Anis?)

Still, I’m a fan of Anis Shivani. I’m tired of everyone on Facebook being “friends” with everyone else; “Liking” the fact that John Q. Narcissist “just wrote 1236 words while listening to Wooly Beaver on his iPod.” It’s about time someone with access to a high profile web presence did something to break up this creepy literary mutual admiration society. You can find more about his literary criticism here.

She: Wears a white wig that covers a bald head.

He: Drives a BMW.

She: Drives a Honda.

When we first moved to this house, he greeted me by letting me know that the tree line didn’t necessarily delineate our properties — that he, in fact, owned the land just past the trees on my side of the trees.

She said hello and brought over a partially-eaten cherry pie.

He decides to clean the yard and ride his tractor whenever they get visitors.

She tends to her flowers whenever she has moments to herself.

His nicknames: Hump, asshole, douchebag.

Hers: None.

He waves; she waves.

He saunters, actually saunters, in retrieving his paper in the morning, stares off into the sky as if surveying his kingdom.

She gets her mail when she comes home from work by maneuvering the Honda as close to the mailbox as possible.

He/She have a future hump son.

He/She have a daughter with cancer in her future.

He practices douche golf stroke.

She practices the breathing that helps her mind fight off the urge to vomit.

He will live twenty more years.

She will live one more.

The hopeful part of me has conjured an elderly woman who must bury her husband. She corrects the headstone guy, the proprietor of the headstone place: “No, no. Not higher anyone else, by God…” or whatever it is that elderly women from Milwaukee might say. “By God” sounds right to me. I actually tried to research this by emailing a couple of colleagues who grew up or resided in the Milwaukeee-ish area. I received no response – not even an acknowledgement of my question. It may have been a bit offensive to ask someone about regional colloquialisms, as if I’m accusing them of some abnormality, so I take the absence of a response as their refusal to believe that “folks” (I know that’s fucking right.) from this part of the Midwest aren’t any different from folks anywhere else, and why are you asking us this ridiculous question when you should be working, maybe planning your next class, or better yet, answering a petulant email from one of your other colleagues? So much happens in the silence, especially when you’re a paranoid Northeasterner. Maybe it’s “dear God.”

The dominant, cynical part of me now forms that same woman taking measures to ensure that her husband’s headstone is two centimeters higher than George Redzinski’s, taking into consideration how the stone might shift and settle over the years, the generations, because “We’ll be back to check, you know.” Even if it’s not any higher than George’s, it must be at least the same height, so just to be sure, let’s make sure it’s three centimeters higher. No, I will not even consider a flush headstone. Our cat has a flush headstone. We want our headstones to impose on the landscape, but not too much.

As I write this, though, I’m remembering walking past the cemetery in Chicago on Irving Park while I came back from the post office. The air was thick with heat, and I remember smelling sperm for about a hundred feet of my walk past the cemetery (Graceland, I think it was called). The air was musky and alive, and it melded with the earth and the weeds, and yes, probably the corpse-enriched soil, and the result was what I swear was a spermy smell for a good hundred feet. I’ll always remember that smell, but I’ll also remember my hypothesis being shot to shit when I saw all those giant headstones – those giant, unassuming, urban, Midwest headstones all staggered, inconsistent, asymmetrical, independent, alone.

Then there’s the terrified part of me who thinks it took no thought at all. His insurance covered this kind of stone, and the elderly woman was told which ones she could choose from. It was all done without thought and consideration other than she loved him like it was a duty, but life goes on and who was she to kick up a fuss over what every other person on Earth has to endure? Just call Don Rembowski at the funeral home on Ogden and tell him that you trust him to make all the arrangements, ‘cause golly and gosh and shucks, he’s been in this business for, what, eighteen years? Burying her husband is something she has no experience with, so she’ll just let go of this responsibility and let the professionals do what’s best.

It’s different with the Army cemetery in which my grandparents rest, though. I’m not convinced it’s any kind of social arrangement there, but more trying to impress with repetition and symmetry. The National cemeteries do impress with this symmetry, too. The stones roll over hills and turn with the land – miles and miles of symmetry. Look at all that dead, it says to us. Look at how they continue to hold the line, stand shoulder to shoulder, march on.

There are at least two other ways to look at headstone theory, though. The headstone could be like the tip of the iceberg, where all of the mass and substance lie beneath the surface. The tip of the iceberg isn’t impressive at all, and those who subscribe to this theory really don’t care about outside perception when observing the size of a headstone. The survivors know that the importance is what lies beneath. Still, others might see the headstone as a tree. I learned rather recently that a tree has a symmetrical network of branches both above ground and underground, almost like a reflection on a glassy pond. Survivors need the big headstone, in this case, because passing observers – fucking strangers – must be able to identify the grandiosity of what lies beneath by observing the size of what exists above ground.

These theories don’t work for mausoleums, however – these fucking houses in which some people are entombed. A mausoleum is a mausoleum. If you reside in one, you’re really goddamn important.

Maybe the theory does work, though, when you consider that anything you might ever need to know about someone in a mausoleum is superficial and thus (thus?) only exists above ground level. Their intrinsic value only goes as deep as they exist, physically, beneath the Earth.

I start at the patch adjacent to the driveway, because that’s always a safe place to begin. It’s a small area and can be raked to completion in an hour or two. The front of the house is like a grass ocean, and I have this fear of venturing out into the green ocean of grass and not being able to make it to the other side. I’m scared of how different the raked areas will look from the unraked areas, of abandoning piles of raked grass at visible areas, of not knowing what to do with all that dead grass when my trash bags run out, of it not looking any neater when I’ve finished, of not being able to finish before I have to leave my wife and my sons again.

Whenever I’ve been home over the past eight months, there’s been a sense of making sure we do everything we can before I have to leave again. I take David to Starbucks every day before school, for example, and he gets a kids hot chocolate with extra whipped cream and those chocolate shavings on top. It’s terrible that he drinks these things three times a week while I’m home, but I suppose I see it as a way to compensate him for the fact that I’ve abandoned him for a year. The farthest back I can remember vividly is to when I was four or five years old, so David will remember this time I was not with him. The hot chocolates are an attempt to wash this out of his memory.

I rake the grass in small sections, usually in groups of ten strokes. When I finish the ten strokes, I move laterally and to the top of the section and pull the rake for ten more strokes, and I end up very close to previous pile of dead grass. If I don’t make it in ten strokes, I’ll go eleven. If I make it there in nine strokes, I’ll stop and move up and laterally again.

If I do this long enough, I’ll have a nice long row of dead grass, small branches, leaves, and shit if I rake the area where my dog spends her time. I walk to one end of this row and pull the whole row of dead grass together into the nice, round, volcanic pile most people are familiar with. I suppose I could pick up the row and save myself the step up raking it all together, but I like the piles to be isolated. Looking at the mounds all over the lawn assures me that I am making progress.

When I was five, my father was healthy, had more hair, and an impressive mustache. When I am dead, this is the way he will appear to me in heaven. He might have the cowboy hat he wore for a while when I was twelve.

The days went too fast toward the end of my last visit home. There was too much to do, and it felt a lot like preparing for death, or what I imagine preparing for death is like. There was so much ocean to swim, and I knew there was no way I’d make it to the other side.

When I left this time, Jack waved goodbye from the driveway while David and Ben stayed inside. I had forgotten to pick up some of the piles I had raked the day before. I had just run out of time.

Now if I may continue:

I hopped on the 146 to the South Loop of Chicago, where I needed to conduct some business. It takes a long time to travel the three and a half miles from my apartment in Lakeview to the Loop by bus, so there was an opportunity for me to sit at the back and think without worrying about missing my stop. When the bus got close to the Loop, I thought I was attentive in finding my stop, but when I was the last one on the bus and the driver waved to me to come forward, I knew I missed something. I handed her a rectangular card I kept my notes for this trip on. It was an important card, one that had my name and contact information on it. My school made me about a thousand of them, and whenever I need to write down directions, I turn to these cards, for some reason. I like that they’re cards, too, and not thin sheets of paper from a pad. It’s almost like having my own baseball card, only my picture isn’t on the front – my career stats aren’t on the back. I wouldn’t mind the picture on the front so much, because I’m happy with the way I look, but the stats on the back might bother me. I haven’t been the George Brett type – the Cal Ripken, if that helps you – someone who has stuck with one team his whole life. I’ve moved around to different organizations and different towns, and I’m starting to seriously contemplate why I’ve moved so much. I’m pretty sure it’s about not wanting to commit to a final resting place and about fear of death.

The bus driver didn’t really know what to make of my notes at first. There were a lot of numbers and arrows and one of the bus routes wasn’t even hers. The bus drivers of Chicago can tell you everything you need to know about their particular route. They know which restaurants fill up at Happy Hour, where all the careless pedestrians are, and where there always seems to be parking available. If you ask them about anything away from their route, though, even a block outside of their route, they have a hard time giving you any kind of direction. The driver helped me, though. Her long manicured nails tapped and scratched the front of the card while she was thinking of a way to get me toward my destination, the place I needed to conduct business. I kept tried to give her an out, told her I’d just get off where we were, run into Starbucks, and look it up online. She conceded and let me off at a nonscheduled stop, which is something these bus drivers never seem to do. I looked up at the sign at the bus stop, the one that explains which buses stopped there, and the 146 wasn’t on this sign. I felt special.

As much as I dislike western Massachusetts, and as disappointed as I am in how Pittsfield never did bounce back like everyone said it would, I miss our house. Since I left my parents’ when I was twenty-four, there’s not been a place I settled down in for as long as I’ve been in that house in Dalton. I miss the things that make it my home. There’s no way to properly write how much I miss my family, so I won’t even bother. Instead I’ll tell you that I miss my dog, and I miss my garage door, the one on the right, with the hole in one of the panels. I miss the precariously stacked pile of firewood on the right side of the garage, miss watching my neighbor, the hump, walk out to get his paper every morning. I miss looking out the living room window and onto the porch, where our porch rockers are, and hearing Molly’s paws on the floor, and I miss the screen door Jennet found who knows where but restored it to a soft, middle-class luster.

I’m never going back there, though, because it’s a stale place inhabited by stagnant, mediocre people – little fish in a little pond – and I’m getting my sons out of there.

I made my way west across West Lake Street, which crosses the Chicago River and runs directly underneath the EL, following its path for a few blocks. It wasn’t raining at all, but it was damp. Maybe it was snowing. As I walked west, I had to stay to the right, really close to the buildings, because water was coming off the tracks in a steady stream, as if the trains were swollen gray clouds that finally reached their saturation points. I like to think it always rains here, like some kind of anti-oasis, but I imagine it’s dry when it’s sunny…

Let me edit here, because I hit on a cool image of the EL as a long cloud: Let’s change “clouds that finally reach their saturation points” to “pouring rain on the street below.” So,

It wasn’t raining at all but it was damp, cold. It may have been snowing, I don’t remember. As I walked west, I stayed to the right, really close to the buildings, because water came off the tracks in a steady stream, as if the train were a long, swollen, grey cloud, pouring rain on the street below. I love to find the poignancy in every little scene, so I convinced myself for a second that it rained there all the time, like some kind of anti-paradise – poured down on the homeless people who made their homes beneath the bridge. It’s not realistic, though, to think the water pours down when it’s sunny.

Then the EL roared over my head with such a thunder that I didn’t know where I was, as if everyone under the bridge were tossed into the air, and we were not coming down to regain our bearings until the thunder stopped. The Loop is home to just about every EL route in the city, so the thunder is constant.

So when I walked further and saw makeshift cardboard homes tucked rather permanently into the catacombs under the bridge, it made sense to me. At least poignancy and metaphor began to fuse together, which is what we want in our clever little essays, right Meghan Daum?

The homes were tucked in the side slots of the cement, the catacombs under the bridge – equidistant cement beds where cardboard boxes nestled perfectly. To seal off the walls of these homes, the cardboard was overlapped. Plastic sheets and worn blankets covered the walls, and what I want to get at here is that there was a kind of doorstep, a section of plastic grass, that indoor/outdoor carpeting, where someone might wipe his shoes clean before going inside. These men sleep in their shoes; never have the comfort of removing their shoes in their own homes because you have to be ready to move when the proverbial Billy club taps atop the roof of the temporary home. Who was moving this home, though? It seemed too permanent to be able to pack up, even fold up, and move to a different location. It’s possible that these homes were permanent and that the inhabitants were the ones who changed. That wouldn’t make sense, though, because if the Chicago Police wanted them out of there, there would be no house to begin with.

So maybe the man did remove his shoes, occasionally, when he knew he’d be in for the night, when there may have been an understanding that he wouldn’t be bothered, because the rough, smoking, bundled, and brawling Chicago Police have hearts and better things to do (There are murders being committed, for chrissakes and you’re arresting me?) The Chicago Police know this line and protect the men who make their homes under the bridges – the busy, thunderous bridges.

I wish I had the skill to describe these catacombs correctly. They were shielded from traffic on the left and open to pedestrian visage on the right. I wish I had the smoothness of working the screen door into this scene because in front of one of the homes in the catacombs under the bridge of the EL on W Lake Street, a splintered and forgotten screen door rested horizontally. When the great trains: the Blue, the Pink, the Brown lines thundered above the home, the screen door shook, the teacups rattled in their cabinets, and the man inside the box slept.

• Where does J.D. Salinger live?
• Did Frank Tempone really move to Chicago? If so, why did he go? What fucking happened? (Answer: None of your fucking business.)
• Is Junot Diaz married?
• Is Junot Diaz gay?
• Is Junot Diaz an asshole?
• What’s Amy Hempel up to?
• What does it mean to have a 120/96 blood pressure?
• Does anyone contemplate dialogue about ‘building a fire’ from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road?
• Is Sherman Alexie as terrible as I think he is?

The day J.D. Salinger’s death was reported, I received 1,619 hits. The next day, January 29, I received 1,543 hits. January 30? 747. The numbers are dwindling, and soon my blog will return to its near-anonymity, but before that happens, I want to use my little moment in the sun to take a shot at an oh-so-irreverent writer named Shalom Auslander.

Actually, to have fifty people read your work – think about you – per day, isn’t too bad. Think about who pays attention to you on a normal day. How many people call you, for instance, or visit, or read anything you’ve written? How many of these people are strangers?

This fifty-per-day number is excluding the students who listen to me every weekday. Fifteen years as a teacher, all those student-listening sessions – I’m a lucky person.

I regret that I have nothing to help me parlay all this attention into big book sales. You know: someone shows up to look at the photos my wife took of Salinger’s house, see I’m selling a little book, and they consider buying it if they like my writing.

When Salinger died, some media outlets scrambled to cover his death and secured interviews with a few supposed experts to get their reactions to Salinger’s passing. NPR put together something decent, but had two writers, people meant to give a special kind of insight on Salinger. The first one to offer commentary was Rick Moody, whose writing I kind of like after reading it four or five times, but the pretension in his voice, his demeanor, his gait, sicken me. That’s really all I have to say about that.

The other guy was Shalom Auslander, someone obviously influenced heavily by Salinger. He has the irreverence down, but none of the talent Salinger had. My problem with him in this program happened in a span of like thirteen seconds. Host Robert Seigel, in introducing Auslander’s commentary, said “…as for Salinger’s final journey, writer Shalom Auslander was a bit concerned.” Auslander then says:

“I hope he’s being left alone. I hope God is leaving him alone, but I doubt it. That guy is probably a bit of a nag, probably chasing Salinger around for autographs…”

You might think it’s completely psychotic, but this upset me. Yes, I hunted down Salinger’s house and posted the photographs on my blog, but what this guy did to Salinger was worse.

Here’s some of Auslander’s work, fresh from his website:

Three sentence fragments in one paragraph, an annoying voice, riddled with cliché, and the words “Bling bling.”

Me? Photographs. Him? Copied his style, rendered it into unreadable garbage, then got on the radio while Salinger’s corpse was still warm, concerned that God wasn’t leaving Salinger alone. You know who should’ve left Salinger alone, Shalom? You. You should have.

Piccadilly Notebooks don’t have this problem and they are 50% cheaper than Moleskine notebooks. Piccadilly, Inc. needs to know, though, that in spite of being a Borders exclusive company, the Moleskine display is way more prominently placed than the Piccadilly one. You walk into a Borders and the Moleskine display is right there in your face. The Piccadilly display is nestled in a ghost town section of my Borders, upstairs and buried on a shelf next the cookbooks.

Still, I’ll not buy one of these notebooks, nor will I buy a Moleskine ever again. Couple reasons: I have a few blank ones left from a Borders Outlet going out of business sale, where I got a bunch of lined Moleskines for three bucks a piece, and these Mead Composition books, the ones that were apparently good enough for my writing habits before I decided to lean toward being trendy. Mead Composition books range from $1 at Target to two or three dollars at CVS or Walgreens. It still looks cool, too, to walk around town with a Mead Composition book.

Kurt Cobain committed suicide during my first year as a teacher. I was 25 and my students were 13, 14, or 15. I always resented them for all their skulking around, the crying, the t-shirt wearing, the candlelight vigils, because I always thought Kurt was more mine than he was theirs. All I could do was sit there and watch what I thought was false grieving for someone only I had seen in person.

But maybe Kurt Cobain provided some kind of a small piece of a foundation for these kids, and they were completely surprised by the small hole his death left in their lives.

So it’s sad to lose people like Salinger, Howard Zinn, Farrah Fawcett, Ed McMahon, Tim Russert, Dick Schaap, Michael Jackson, Ted Kennedy, and Walter Cronkite, even if they weren’t necessarily important in the grand scheme of things, because they occupied a small place of stability in our lives.

Who are the people that hold small pieces of the foundation of your frame of reference? Maybe none of us knows until he or she is actually gone.