The Future, Clarified
It’s like being halfway through a field. I’m 255 pages into The Clear Cut Future. The dead center. A station of experience and expectation: Robert Glück is behind me, Charles D’Ambrosio is ahead. The anthology is a kind of territory and, having half traversed it, I’m slowing down. To take it in.
The word “territory” appears on the book itself: The Clear Cut Future “maps a territory of interest to Clear Cut Press,” reads the back flap, and so far as that’s true, Clear Cut Press is interested (among other interests) in money and in men. It’s a man at the center of Stacey Levine’s fractured but fully imagined “The World of Barry,” about an attorney with “absent-minded largesse” and an undying taste for creamed chicken. It’s a man, an older lover, whose actions drive “Hermosa Beach,” Wesley Wehr’s able if somewhat overdetermined memoir of mentor-protégé love (the piece ends with Wehr standing at a window looking at the ocean, coming to conclusions about time, tides, erosion, and so on). And it is a young man, a son, whose disappearance overwhelms the lives of his parents, Vivian and James, in Emily White’s “The Runaway” (a short story strung with unnervingly still sentences like “Sometimes she sat there for hours, until her fingers grew cold and the birds seemed to turn into bats” and “The problem was the boy had grown so vast”).
Elsewhere, money and its tendency to disappear figure strongly: In Pravin J. Jain’s “Capitalism Inside an Organization,” an essay about his impressions of Enron (where he worked for a time); in Patrick Bissell’s “The Sweet Gift,” a trying story about a man near homelessness; and in Corrina Wycoff’s uncommonly accomplished “The Adjunct,” about a woman coming to terms with her salary.
(Perhaps unrelatedly, Clear Cut Press’ editor Matthew Stadler and its publisher Rich Jensen are both, as it happens, men, and this venture might make them–it’s possible!–some money. The Clear Cut Future is their first release.)
Having nothing to do with finances or phalluses, but with themes of obsession, vacancy, and agency, are poems by Frances McCue (first line: “Like cows, we gathered to the artifact”) and Howard W. Robertson (a great line: “the puzzling ineluctability/of our thrownness toward death”), plus photographs of deforestation, a report on blackberries, and an excerpt from a novel about a Vietnamese manicurist.
And, again, that’s just the half of it. It’s an impressive object, this book: fat and small, beautiful and unboring, rangy and contained. A fine book to behold and to be holding.
Stacey Levine, Wesley Wehr, Corrina Wycoff, Nhien Nguyen, Casey Sanchez, Grant Cogswell, Charles D’Ambrosio, Matthew Stadler, and Rich Jensen read from and discuss The Clear Cut Future at Elliott Bay Book Company (101 S Main St, 624-6600) on Thurs Dec 11 at 7:30 pm.
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Next week: The answer to last week’s contest!
