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FIVE QUESTIONS WITH PATRICK TROTTI, "COME TOMORROW YOU’LL REGRET TODAY: COLLECTED STORIES"

6/15/2015

Patrick Trotti's new collection of short stories launches today. Here's an interview with this exciting new writer!

Q: How did you come to writing? Did you always want to do this?

A: I never wanted to be a writer growing up. I wanted to be a professional baseball player. When I realized that I couldn't hit a curveball, that kind of burst that bubble. I stumbled into journalism in community college. It was good, and I was enjoying myself, and then I came across a quote that said, “Do something worth writing about instead of just writing about the accomplishments of others.” It's probably written differently but that was the gist of it. I started with a few creative writing classes, was lucky enough to have incredible teachers, and found myself doing something for school credit that I would be willing to do on my free time.

Q: Your stories deal frankly with the recurring themes of mental illness, addiction, and recovery. Why?

A: I deal with these topics daily. Sadly, drug addiction and mental illness come in pairs. Long story short, I managed to ruin my life by the end of high school. I was always an all-or-nothing personality, and by the time I was eighteen, I'd been through multiple rehabs, detoxes, arrests, and overdoses and seizures. Once I got far enough away from the crack and cocaine and heroin and alcohol, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Later on I was also diagnosed with severe anxiety. I've managed to stay out of trouble for almost a decade. I'm lucky and for me that luck comes with responsibility, because something out there was looking after me for all those years. I guess my way of paying it forward is to find something I love doing and do it to the max. Does that make sense?

While a lot of my writing comes from what I've gone through, I'm by no means a memoirist. Parts of my writing are therapeutic and parts are just a product of my “glass is half empty” life view. I'm not really interested in the feel-good stories where everyone ends up great. That's not life; at least not to me.

Q: What are your main inspirations?

A: As far as authors go--Jack Kerouac, Ernest Hemingway, George Saunders, and David Foster Wallace. The person who inspired me the most was my paternal grandmother. She lived the majority of her life with multiple sclerosis, and did so with a grace and charm I thought only classic movie actresses possessed. She introduced me to Frank Sinatra and always believed in me.

Q: Tell us about some of your recent projects.

A: I've just completed a collection of stories that all center loosely on my childhood. They deal with place and its impact on character, as well as with poverty. I'm also working on a novel about a couple that experiences problems shortly after getting married, and on an epic (only in the sense of length!) poem that I hope will materialize into something book-length.

Q: What are you reading now?

A: Binary Star by Sarah Gerard and Made to Break by D. Foy. Actually, I'm rereading Gerard's. Both texts are lovely.

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Breaking News: "Come Tomorrow You'll Regret Today" by Patrick Trotti Launches Today

6/15/2015

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Patrick Trotti’s upcoming work, Come Tomorrow You’ll Regret Today: Collected Stories, launches today and can be purchased on Amazon and on our website.

In his fresh and subtle collection of short stories, Mr. Trotti offers a brutally vivid glimpse of millennial malaise in the Internet age. A high-school dropout struggles through the labyrinthine college admissions process as he is reluctantly drawn into the breakdown of his parents’ toxic marriage. A recovering addict finds out on Facebook that his best friend is dead; a college freshman accidentally comes across his high-school girlfriend on a porn site. Set against a backdrop of abandoned factories, faceless strip malls, and suburban alienation, these unsettling and deceptively simple stories capture the ambivalence and innocence of a generation coming to terms with a fundamentally stagnant world. Calling Trotti’s newest work “taut” and a “triumph of restraint and invention,” Amber Dermont, the New York Times bestselling author of The Starboard Sea, has praised the stories in Come Tomorrow You’ll Regret Today for their “potential to inspire, bewilder and delight.” She continues, “There are no answers here, only shattering and glorious questions.”

Patrick Trotti is the author of a novella, The Day The Cloud Stood Still (Ever Books/Pteron Press), and a mixed-genre chapbook, Fracture(d) (Bottlecap Press). His short fiction and poetry have appeared in dozens of literary magazines and journals, both in print and online. He lives in Tarrytown, New York, where he is a freelance writer, editor, and avid baseball fan.

Come Tomorrow You’ll Regret Today: Collected Stories will be available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble (online), and Ingram. For further information, please follow Tailwinds Press on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/tailwinds.press.5) or Twitter (tailwindspress).

Tailwinds Press is a young, New York City-based independent press specializing in high-quality fiction and non-fiction by new and emerging writers.

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Libraried

1/30/2015

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Haruki Murakami, The Strange Library.

The Strange Library is not exactly a book, just as the library in the title is not exactly a library. The young nameless narrator asks frivolously for a volume on taxation in the Ottoman Empire; this mysteriously triggers a nasty ordeal in which he’s lured into a musty basement and imprisoned for three days by a deranged elderly man who openly plans to “eat his brains.”

The Strange Library is of average Murakami weirdness, but unusually bleak. In the standard boy-wanders-into-dark-mansion narrative, the child has usually done something immoral or unwise; one of the most disturbing elements of The Strange Library is that the Boy appears to be guilty of nothing more than a socially upstanding (if casual) desire to read an educational book. The Boy's jailer gleefully uses speech to abuse the core features of culture and civilization: he bullies and guilts (“The real question is, do you value my assistance or not? Why do you think I lugged these three heavy books out here? For my health?”) while taking advantage of shy politeness (the Boy wonders, “Why do I act like this, agreeing when I really disagree, letting people force me to do things I don’t want to do?”). He also lies. The Boy is set to memorize a treatise on Ottoman empire taxation in three days, or else his brains will be eaten; later on, the old man admits that he was going to eat the Boy’s brains in any event. Sustained study and learning will simply make his brains “creamier.”

It is curiously obvious that, even within the construct of a surreally menacing universe, the events in The Strange Library are taking place in a dream. The basement dungeon of the library strikes the Boy as deeply illogical even as he lives in it, particularly as “public libraries like this one were always short of money.” Typical of a dream sequence, during his imprisonment the Boy has a hallucinatory experience of reading a book in an unknown language: “The book was written in classical Turkish; yet, strangely, I found it easy to understand. Not only that, but each page stuck in my memory, word for word.” As he reads, he segues into a secondary dream of actually being a Turkish tax collector named Ibn Armut Hasir, “who walked the streets of Istanbul with a scimitar at his waist, collecting taxes.” Yet when he finally escapes from the library dungeon with the sheep man, there is no cathartic wake-up scene: no questions are asked by his long-suffering mother, and his pet starling is gone. In the epilogue, we find the Boy, perhaps grown up, noting that his mother has just died “from a mysterious illness.” The Strange Library is a nightmare without an end.

The problem with The Strange Library--both qua place and qua book--is that in a Twin Peaks world where the fantastic world of subterranean fear and desire blends effortlessly with mundane everyday life, there’s no room for meaningful language. From a quasi-Lacanian perspective, if the surreal life of the dream-world already exists side by side with reality, speech is either pointless or futile. It’s worth noting that there appears to be no fiction in the strange library; in fact, the books there seem to be nonsensical, if not impossible. Immediately before asking for a book about Ottoman empire tax collections, the Boy was reading “How to Build a Submarine” and “Memoirs of a Shepherd”--books that are barely conceivable, as they relate, respectively, to (1) complex spatial designs and (2) silence. The Strange Library is therefore an explanation of sorts for Murakami’s consistently dreamlike spaces. If we do not dream, we cannot speak. The space that Murakami privileges is the liminal world between the inner and outer worlds. In this narrow band, fragile and elusive as the starling, reside civilization and language.

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Bummed Out, and Living in Cleveland

1/18/2015

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Scott Burr, Bummed Out City. The Artless Dodges Press, Cleveland, Ohio.

Meticulously crafted and a weirdly gripping one-sitting read, Bummed Out City by Scott Burr is marketed as the fiscal and psychological crisis of a twenty-nine-year-old unpublished writer named David Moore who lives a life of quiet desperation on the fringes of hipster Cleveland--a life that, in the words of reviewer Ellison Fowler, is emblematic “of a generation still floundering in the barren echo of its parents’ promise that it is special and talented, that it can be anything it wants to be.”

There’s been a lot of bad press about millennials lately, partly because they happened to be unemployed during the Occupy movement and are thus blamed for either starting it or quitting it, and partly because--for essentially similar reasons--they now mostly stick to doing thankless, dreary things, like posting pictures of themselves on Facebook and fighting in Afghanistan. Witness the notorious viral high school graduation speech where some malcontent teacher, no doubt sensing that this was the last time he’d be able to lord it over a bunch of future Merrill junior analysts and their cardigan-wearing wives, told his students in no uncertain terms that they were “not special.” If millennials didn’t think they were so damned special and wised up to the truth that they’re just basically insignificant specks of dirt, everything would just be better: cars would emit sunshine, the Dow would hit 19,000, and everyone would pay their subprime mortgages on time. More importantly, seventeen-year-old David wouldn’t have bet the farm on the bleak life of an unrecognized writer-cum-blogger, which is unquestionably wearing thin as he progresses in age:

“I didn’t go to college. I couldn’t really afford it, for one thing, but I also didn’t think I needed to. …I thought my life was going to be all meetings with publishers and phone calls with my agent and negotiations over the movie rights and book tours and parties in Brooklyn and L.A. and so while everyone else my age went to college or joined the military or went to work at their family’s company and then graduated from college and got jobs and got promoted and bought houses and had kids I was waiting tables and serving drinks and slowly writing forty one short stories and five novellas and three novels that nobody ended up wanting to publish, or even read.”

Two key themes hang over the plot of Bummed Out City, which is intricately formulated as a guided tour of a life in a chaotic downward spiral, the voyeurism so strictly controlled that you barely even notice the guide is there. The first issue is commitment. Obviously, David has problems with commitment--he can’t cope with his loudly-suffering girlfriend Carol’s incessant mind-numbing pleas for a dog, a house in suburbia, and marriage--but his world also seems to require way too much of it. It’s like the Seinfeld episode where Jerry gets an invitation to a ménage à trois but turns it down: he’d have to get new carpets, change his facial hair and generally adopt the life of an orgiast (“I’d have to get new friends! I’d have to get orgy friends!”). Everything in Bummed Out City is like Jerry’s orgy. You can’t just get married; if you’re like David’s more worldly friend Brad, you have to get married in a sweltering 200-person production with special silver-embossed floral stationery and matching bridesmaids. And, like Brad, you can’t just have a stable job: a real career also means a mortgage, a leased van, a “forty-dollar haircut,” and the obligation to propose to your girlfriend because marriage is “just kind of this thing you do at some point.” You can’t even just work part-time in a supermarket: you have to be Facebook buddies with your boss who tags you several times a week (“Someone should tell him that Facebook is for bitching about your problems and stalking your exes”) and spend your spare time reading about “the growing seasons in the different hemispheres and average rainfall and industrial farming.” And, worst of all, you can’t just write. You have to go to college so you can get into an MFA program so that you can go to school with someone who reads the slush pile for an agent (“Tanya Manz”), who might stand a slim chance of getting it published with a Big Six. Then the book can be stocked in a bookstore that gets most of its revenue from Starbucks lattes.

The second driver in Mr. Burr’s novel is a supply side problem relating to books and readers, best characterized by Ludacris as “too many players, not enough hoes.” David’s vision of the writing career, typical of the SAT generation, is that of a double-blind test situation where “if you’re talented and you work hard then one day people notice and you get, you know, you get the gold star.” David, who set out to be “the next Hemingway, the next Michael Chabon,” wants to emulate the great modernist giants of the twentieth century, but he’s by definition a little late to the party: the very fact that these people have become iconic--Henry Miller nailing Anais Nin and writing about his ex-wife in a dingy Parisian flat, Hemingway chomping on a cigar and going to bullfights--means that their myths can never be replicated. The glut of people wanting to be the next Hemingway or Chabon has caused the entire profession of writing to be commodified out of existence. Hemingway’s estate in Key West is now a killer wedding venue; in thirty years we’ll be paying people to read books. In other words, if everyone does it, it’s like nobody gets to do it--think of what happened to all the real-life restaurants in American Psycho.

If there’s a moral to Bummed Out City, it’s that looking backward is lethal. David is exhorted continually by everyone around him--his girlfriend, his dying mother--to “move on.” But move on to what? The breaking point of Bummed Out City is not a millennial crisis; it’s the existential crisis of every blasted bag-holder who was moronic enough to believe in the real estate market, CDSs, or meritocracy in general.

A faceless plasticity makes Bummed Out City almost sensuously readable. In restrained and impeccably constructed prose, the story flows from the first ripples in David’s stagnant life--Carol’s sudden obsession with buying a dog, which “would always be there, needing things, and I just don’t think I’m up for that”--to the gradual disintegration of his minor blogging career and his personal relationships. The pleasurably stylish first-person detachment in Bummed Out City is reminiscent of early Judy Blume or parts of Geoff Dyer, the kind of lobotomized monotone that was first debuted in Camus’ The Stranger and then turned out to be really useful in serial killer scenarios. As infuriating as David’s slacker behavior may initially seem, as a vicarious experience it grows to be strangely liberating. The deliberate flatness of the prose happily means that we witness, instead of viscerally experience, his self-pity and his shame. In a world of endless disappointment, the anaesthetized feel to Bummed Out City is a relief--perhaps itself an anodyne, in the end, for the pain of getting on with a crappy shelf-stocking existence.

*

Honoré de Balzac is actually quite accessible, even fun, and would be immensely popular around a lower-brow crowd if less of his oeuvre were structured around impossibly complicated debt issuances. This is not a joke: whole chapters of Lost Illusions and Cousin Bette read like poorly written dealbooks on multimillion-dollar transactions. Unless you’re a banker or (possibly) a lawyer, basically every half-literate nineteenth-century French peasant out there is apparently better at negotiating the French Civil Code than you are. It's pretty much impossible to understand Balzac fully without having taken a class on secured transactions.

Bummed Out City is in some ways a Balzacian project, an ironic but sympathetic portrait of how individuals react--often with surprising grace and resilience--to fundamentally economic stressors. Yet there’s a disturbing trend of overly complex financial transactions in Bummed Out City that, unlike those in Balzac, cannot be precisely explained. Every interaction with the larger machinations of capitalism brings an unspoken confusion that no amount of online research can remedy. For example, at the start of the novel, David’s main source of livelihood comes from blogging for RUSTic, a vague-sounding “local arts foundation” that hustles enough cultural grant money to give David “the best-paying job I’ve ever had, and I only got it because I’m friends with Lewis, the guy who started and runs RUSTic.” Signs of financial trouble are obvious to the reader (but not David) throughout the book: paychecks start coming in late, the organization’s staff get “furloughed,” and Lewis explains ominously, “We’re still waiting on some grant money…Some things went under the radar over the holidays that shouldn’t have gone under the radar…I think I told you about the intern.” By the time the organization officially goes under, Lewis has gone off the grid. No clear explanation ever materializes.

One of the most powerful scenes in Bummed Out City involves Carol’s burning desire for home ownership. David, put upon by the collapse of RUSTic and his deadbeat dad, is forced to borrow money from her; shockingly, she uses this sign of David’s insolvency as leverage to force him to go house-hunting. Once a house is chosen, however, Carol’s parents enter the scene and insist on handling all of the pricing negotiations and bank discussions. What follows is a nightmare of labyrinthine ritual to which Carol and David are entirely superfluous:

“So we go over to the bank and we meet with Drew but there’s a problem, because our previous application came back and we weren’t pre-approved for the loan we would have needed for the first house we liked. Pam [the realtor] and Drew get into the technical details about bank ownership and Carol’s dad interjects and offers hypotheticals about a higher down payment and different collateral on the loan and then he turns to Carol and he says, ‘There’s a coffee shop around the corner. Do you guys want to run over there while we sort this out?’”

The issue here is not so much helicopter parenting as a more profound problem, which is that the increasingly treacherous debt markets have infantilized an entire generation. Post-2008, any plot line involving the word “mortgage” has a sinister and ghoulish ring to it. Carol’s father remarks, “I wanted some more information about the kind of loan they’re trying to set up for you….Typically they can do things like give you a break on the interest rate if you’re able to put more money in for a down payment.” It takes a moment to realize that he’s probably talking about one of the mortgage strategies--possibly an ARM--that brought down Lehman. David’s dream of being the next Hemingway is starting to look comparatively sensible; for one thing, it seems less likely to increase the regional foreclosure rate.

*

Bummed Out City, though ostensibly about a writer, contains almost no information about David’s unpublished novels. Nobody reads them and he refuses to talk about them. It isn’t a coincidence: from a refreshingly cynical perspective, the fundamental value of David’s serious work just isn’t particularly relevant to anything in a story about his failure as a writer, similar to Carol’s physical desirability (“Your ass looks fine….Your ass looks great.”) or the exact nature of his best friend Brad’s despised grown-up job.

Being a failed writer has no particular correlation with being a failed partner. David has to be both because his drive to be the twenty-first century Hemingway mirrors his girlfriend’s drive to attain the American suburban dream of domesticity. David can publish his own book; Carol, with her doting affluent parents and college degree, theoretically can work on her own career and buy the house herself. The difference is that being published by a Big Six press, like marrying a breadwinning male who can provide a comfortable Pottery Barn suburban lifestyle, is prestigious. It’s a sign that your talent is real and that your ass is just the right size.

And if prestige doesn’t matter, then what does? Why is David even getting up to work in the morning, much less giving one hundred and ten percent to a three-month stint as a produce manager while his estranged father’s ex-girlfriend’s son is waiting outside to kick his ass? Being special isn’t just a platitude that the baby boomers fed to some spoiled brats who’ve never had to sit through no-save Nintendo games, Gremlins, or a single episode of Mama’s Family. It’s a survival mechanism. Bummed Out City is one of the most painfully honest books about the writing life that we’ve seen, and it’s a credit to the technical skill of Mr. Burr that it’s done with incredible grace--a bitter but surprisingly gentle picture of the constant quasi-Nietzschean revaluation of all values that is necessary in order for people in our day and age to function and thrive.

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All Happy Families

12/26/2014

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Patrick Trotti, The Day The Cloud Stood Still. Pteron Press (Ever Books), Helsinki and Palermo.

It begins with the Cloud--a gigantic gray cloud that surreally hangs over the backyard of the Hart family and brings a spell of unrelenting and “indestructible” snow. “Each individual flake had hit the ground and failed to melt away,” the teenaged narrator Wilson observes, “It refused to vanish; it wanted to make its presence felt.” In the face of a mysterious and silent calamity like nonstop snow, deplorable things happen: uninsurable property damage, unemployment, infrastructure collapse. And people start thinking about their lives and their relationships with their nearest and dearest. That’s also bad.

Superficially, The Day The Cloud Stood Still is a nuclear family drama--the banal account of the still more banal decline of the teenaged Wilson and his mildly antipatico parents--that unfolds as a spell of uncommonly bad weather sends them into a downward spiral of alcohol-fuelled financial destitution, musculoskeletal injury and mutual loathing. Contrary to Tolstoy’s cliché, it’s all pretty standard--a well-crafted specimen of a novelistic sub-genre best explained as capitalizing on our profound emotional dissatisfaction with subprime mortgages, Fed policy, and the real estate market in general. Think Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, but poorer and without all the weird Francophilia. At the beginning, Wilson lives in a working-class two-income household with a dissatisfied, protective mother and a passive-aggressive father. As the novel and the storm progress, both parents lose their jobs, the father breaks his leg, and all hope gradually erodes. It isn’t that you can’t go home again; it’s that home sometimes jumps up for no reason and punches you in the face.

The greatest works of classical existentialist literature are represented by two key storylines--that which is expected but doesn’t show up, and that which shows up and stays way too long. The Day The Cloud Stood Still invites obvious parallels to both. The general plot echoes the poker-faced so-real-it’s-not detail of Albert Camus’ The Plague--also another large-scale disaster that engulfs a geographic community and penetrates into all aspects of everyday life. Yet the emotional core of Mr. Trotti’s work is drawn more from Waiting for Godot, whose Vladimir and Estragon compose essentially the same unhappy family as the Harts: people bound together in mutual aggravation and primal need as they wait. The Day The Cloud Stood Still, incidentally, also has a lot of waiting: there’s waiting inside the house for the Cloud to leave, waiting in hospital rooms after Wilson’s father falls off the roof, waiting to sell their house at a crushing loss, waiting to leave town. Wilson remarks, “My days had morphed into one long, continuous event.” Like the Camusian Plague, the Cloud is fetishized so aggressively--its mystical “deep, sharp color” scrutinized by national news media descending on Wilson’s small backwater town--that it must be code for something; possibly, one speculates, some other unending storm, and so on.

*

Mr. Trotti specializes in a special kind of low-grade misery, made bearable by a relatively upbeat assumption that deep down we’re all sorry sons of bitches and kind of had it coming. The comparatively positive social experiences in The Day The Cloud Stood Still--scattered periods of intimacy between Wilson and his parents, for example--are blighted by a kind of blameless ugly mean-spiritedness, the kind that you associate with long stretches of dingy highway, terrible roadside salads, people watching Montel. Wilson’s father, for example, shows an unseemly eagerness to bond with his son when he hears that Wilson has seen a fatal accident caused by the storm. Wilson confesses, “Never saw him like this, so curious, so empty and in need of something to fill him up”--a maintenance worker falling on his chainsaw being just the thing. Even the quasi-mystical arrival of the Cloud is cause for casual injustices: “Boys positioned themselves against the smaller girls, boxing them out of a good seat.” In point of fact, Mr. Trotti is at his most polished as a cynical observer of the selfish underlying pettiness of life. As the danger of the storm becomes more apparent, Wilson’s main emotion is merely that of relief. He explains, “This time it wasn’t my fault. In a way, death and this thing had gotten me off the hook. My actions were hidden within the darkness and confusion.”

It’s one thing to feel the visceral immediacy of Mr. Trotti’s writing; it’s another to express exactly why it works. He resists the usual urge to overwhelm us with poetry. Rather, in keeping with its general aesthetic of brutal realism, The Day The Cloud Stood Still is dotted with the devastating platitudes of therapists and kindergarten teachers. “The nice weather allows us to be whoever we want to be, like play time as a child,” Mrs. Hart declares in one toe-curling moment, “The sun is the audience in a grand game of make believe.” Such jarring vocabulary conveys with awful immediacy the sense of a self-aware stasis. In the middle of his family’s ordeal, Wilson contemplates his mother’s misery with a refreshing artless honesty: “Had her expectations of happiness dropped so low? Had life sucked out all the joy? Both of us had taken a piece from her, chipped away each day to the point that her life was work, clean, cook and repeat.” The book’s most complex and gory realities are expressed deftly in the everyday tropes of TV shrinks and books you find at malls:

[Mom] had no doubt fallen in love with another man, a younger, mythological image of my father. He was big and healthy, full of charm and self-confidence. …Mom had been sold a bill of goods and now with me as the result of their marriage she couldn’t refund it. Her expectations hadn’t been met. This sense of unspoken regret bounced off every corner of the house. It grew with every small paycheck, served as a reminder of what the man of the house could have been.

Wilson’s depiction of his father is distressingly pitch-perfect in its melodramatic register, which falls somewhere between Celebrity Rehab and Hemingway:

Dad internalized his feelings. He was able to get out of the house and go to work. As the snowfall strengthened, he drank more. Each drink he finished, each belch he let out, reminded me of the dad that he wasn’t. The one that never played catch with me. It was irrelevant that we didn’t have a big enough yard. It was the thought, or lack thereof, that mattered most to me, and least to him.

It’s not graceful--nor is it meant to be.   In the rarified world of show-don’t-tell craftsmanship, this family purgatory would have been revealed slowly through an evolving tissue of surly conversations, facial tics, hand gestures and smoke signals. Yet there is no question that Mr. Trotti’s version is more emotionally pure. His cloying seriousness is perhaps the best visualization of how things really go down in the harsh greyness of the Harts’ world, where all culture has been reduced to tired self-dramatization. Left to their own devices, Wilson and his mother put on their best clothes and pretend to be--what else?--famous actors at the Oscars (“It’s great to be here. I’m wearing a suit from a world famous Italian designer. He’s blind in one eye and wears an eye patch.”). When Wilson’s father spouts gems like “Hope is made up. Don’t exist, at least not in this town,” and “No good comes of kids fucking around with grown up shit,” it’s clearly something he learned from watching some kind of discipline-and-punish vehicle set in the Wild West and starring Peter Fonda or Tommy Lee Jones. There’s an ongoing sense in The Day The Cloud Stood Still that the observable social world is, Fight Club-style, a copy of a copy of a copy. When describing the chainsaw accident to his father, Wilson describes it as “like a movie that wasn’t cued up properly”; when he watches the storm being covered on national television, the news anchor seems indescribably superior to the local reporters for no clear reason--“He was good at his job. He enunciated every syllable, took his time. He put our local news to shame as he reported the few known facts about the storm.”

Mr. Trotti as a writer is intriguing because he isn’t above conveying this linguistic impoverishment. Perhaps his most courageous innovation is to depict with unswerving honesty the comforting phrases with which we use to make the humiliation of everyday life bearable (or at least less messy). Real people actually live real-time in phrases taken from broadcast television, and that’s okay. The Day The Cloud Stood Still is about the masks that we put on and how stupid they are--not from any notion of inner truth, but because we’re not fooling anyone. In the dead-end universe of Mr. Trotti’s characters, it’s best not to pretend.

*

In the opening pages of Ten Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, Manuel de Landa puts forward the theory that the same “historical” themes are replicated across all aspects of reality--“mountains, animals and plants, human languages, social institutions.” Put another way, all stuff operates on certain principles, the same principles. Thus, for example, the formation of igneous rocks (e.g. granite) out of different magma components with different thresholds of crystallization is an incident of “meshwork,” or “self-consistent aggregation,” which in turn characterizes the formation of medieval European decentralized economies. It’s tempting to view this historico-philosophical approach simply as a type of relativistic truism. Under that theory, all branches of history, science and literature inevitably derive from the same Western tradition (Aristotle; Galileo; some Germans). It isn’t that we are the weather, or that we are like the weather; rather, it’s that we impose our intellectual order onto the chaos of society and nature in the same way, with the same tropes and paradigms. But what if we were to believe that there is something more? What if there is a universally discernible principle that binds human society to the workings of nature?   The mainstream acceptance of such a cosmic code would shake our human worldview to its core, for it would mean that we are finally in sync with a forbidding and chaotic universe.

This brings to mind the issue of the Cloud and why it is somehow relevant to the story of the Harts, who seem perfectly capable of failing at the American Dream even under optimum weather conditions. What is the mysterious relationship between humans and the Cloud? The unspoken hope and fear, never alluded to but always present, is that the Cloud is a true event--that Wilson’s town, which last made the national media due to a college football game, is part of a moral narrative of meaningful suffering. In keeping with this undertone, Mr. Trotti’s story is about the path to resignation: to the journey away from desire and towards a new conception of self. It ends, like many such journeys, with homelessness. Is it good to be homeless? Probably not; as a matter of fact, on any metaphorical level, it’s probably pretty bad. But, as Mr. Trotti implies, it is our true condition.

Patrick Trotti's forthcoming book of short stories, Come Tomorrow You'll Regret Today, will be published by Tailwinds Press in 2015.

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FIVE QUESTIONS WITH PATRICK TROTTI, "COME TOMORROW YOU’LL REGRET TODAY: COLLECTED STORIES"

Breaking News: "Come Tomorrow You'll Regret Today" by Patrick Trotti Launches Today

Libraried

Bummed Out, and Living in Cleveland

All Happy Families

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