Christopher Stokum

By Chris Stokum

Despite my one-time intentions of writing a scathing polemic against the Oxford comma, this piece is nothing of the sort. I’ve come to realize that its supporters won’t be swayed by pragmatic, rational arguments, or by my cries of, “But why put one if you don’t need one?” So, here’s my final word on the subject: use them if you like them; leave them out if you don’t. If you choose the first option, I wish you a happy, successful and blissfully over-punctuated writing career. If the second option is more your bag, I invite you to watch your Oxford commatic friends cringe as they read the previous sentence.

I am less willing to give up on a number of other punctuation issues. For while the Oxford comma is something like a bauble – it might dress up an underwhelming sentence a bit, but it won’t help one that’s shoddy to the core – other punctuation marks are frequently used as crutches, allowing defective sentences to hobble along, slowing traffic and stepping on healthy sentences’ toes.

Take the exclamation mark, known in computer programming and typesetting as a “shriek” or “screech,” both of which are apt names. As a reader, I want to come across an exclamation mark about as frequently as I want to hear someone shriek or screech. Any more than that, and I either develop a headache or start ignoring the screams. (As this display of remarkable compassion shows, you probably do not want to get mugged outside of my apartment). It’s essentially a boy-cries-wolf scenario. If a writer uses an exclamation mark once to indicate that a sentence is uttered with particular force or vivacity, I’ll take note. But not every sentence can possibly be uttered with particular force or the author would run out of breath before the second chapter.

If the exclamatory author can’t honestly mean every exclamation mark he includes, then what are all of those marks for? What work are they doing?

In short, they’re used in lieu of sharp writing to indicate when the reader is to laugh, gasp, chuckle, recoil, etc. They are the “Applause!” signs of writing, meant to raise unremarkable sitcom actors to the level of skilled comedians, in terms of audience response. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke,” which, honestly, no one likes.

Worse than recurrent shrieks is the repeated exclamation mark, native to post cards and e-mails and middle school notes. Once introduced to a piece of writing, they spread like the Clap and are just as irritating. Unless the speaker thoroughly ruptures his vocal chords while delivering his line, a single exclamation mark should suffice. According to Terry Pratchett, stuttered shrieks can also be used to indicate looming mental collapses: “Multiple exclamation marks […] are a sure sign of a diseased mind.”

There are, of course, exceptions. Tom Wolfe’s account of Ken Kesey’s psychedelic adventures, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, contains some of the most erratic punctuation in modern literature. He includes repeated colons, for example: “He looks away, out over the Pacific and at the stars – then swings back suddenly toward the bus ::::: IT IS STILL UNPAINTED ::::: STILL VIRGIN SCHOOL-BUS YELLOW.” They might indicate the observer’s dawning recognition of the bus’s potential or the halting cognition of the love-child in question. Later, they suggest dappled light, nervousness and insomnia.

Wolfe even includes some exclamation marks, inverted ones when the speaker is Mexican, regardless of whether the words are Spanish or English – “‘¡Hoy! ¡Pronto!’ he keeps shouting, ‘¡Hurry up! Get your asses back to the store!” – and the occasional repeated mark. He avoids sounding hysterical, however, by attributing the repeated marks to another character or group, always outside of his own authorial voice. Those guys are the pricks yelling outside of your apartment, he seems to say. I’m just the reporter.

Exclamation marks are certainly not the only abused punctuation mark. Semicolons are the most misunderstood and are frequently inserted in place of periods, commas, dashes, spaces and most other varieties of pauses. Kurt Vonnegut calls them “transvestite hermaphrodites,” which admittedly may be a bit harsh, but there’s truth in the notion that it’s difficult to pin down exactly what they are. Some writers wrap scare quotes around “random phrases,” indicating a double meaning where only a twelve-year-old boy could find one. And since the conception of postmodernism, parentheses have been used to fracture words, separate prefixes from their roots and hopelessly complicate how a (cult)ure (mis)reads its own literature.

A rant like this could continue for pages (see Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style), but I’ll wrap it up before I start to sound bitter. I don’t advocate complete standardization of punctuation, nor do I expect every writer to follow my sensibilities. What truly needs to be increased is not authors’ knowledge of any unbreakable punctuation rules, but their awareness of the effects that punctuation marks produce in their readers.

By Chris Stokum

At the conclusion of “Rock Springs,” the title story from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Ford’s 1987 collection, the narrator is utterly lost. Frantically trying to regain his bearings, he looks to the east -- to the con-man’s life he’s anxious to escape -- to the dull motel that his girlfriend and daughter sleep in, to the car he’s considering stealing. And finally, in desperation, he turns his eyes to the reader. And the reader chokes.

Ford’s protagonists are tired, tragic and deeply flawed, yet the reader sympathizes with them from the stories’ opening lines. Herein lies Ford’s talent for capturing the humanity of the downtrodden and overlooked: men and women and children whose lives are defined by struggle. And these are no Horatio Alger knock-offs in which the pauper becomes the prince. Ford is much too realistic for that kind of dreaming. Some of the happiest endings that he offers involve the protagonist becoming aware of his own mistakes and character flaws.

That is not to say that Ford’s protagonists never break even. But their gains are made more in terms of wisdom and experience than in material objects. In “Going to the Dogs,” the protagonist is robbed by a woman while her friend lies side-by-side with him in the other room, presumably to ease his loneliness. While he loses his money, he reflects upon himself and upon his plot in life for what seems to be the first time.

The other stories in Rock Springs follow similar emotional lines. In “Children,” two young boys entertain one of their father’s mistresses, a girl not much older than them, for an afternoon and struggle to treat her humanely. In “Sweet Hearts,” a man drives his wife’s ex-husband to jail and is torn between acting sympathetically toward the convict and loyally toward his wife. “Empire,” the longest story in the collection, presents a detached, meandering portrait of a married man’s various experiences that approach, but never reach infidelity. His curiosity draws him into a number of questionable situations, though his intentions hardly seem impure. The difficulties in his life result less from his actions than from how those actions are interpreted by others.

Richard Ford’s Rock Springs is initially as sparse as its Midwestern setting, yet life and heart lie just below the book’s surface. Ford’s authorial voice blends regional dialect with true lyricism, and Rock Springs is, in Joyce Carol Oates’ words, “the very poetry of realism.” Though Rock Springs is at times dark, gritty and somewhat depressing, it is gripping in a way that makes it difficult to put down.

By Chris Stokum

“At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.”

           Thus begins The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, the autobiography of one of the 20th Century’s most engaging and enigmatic artists. A self-portrait in true Dalinian fashion, the book is a paranoiac, chaotic, undeniably brilliant exploration of – as Dalí does not let the reader forget – a genius.

           In the early chapters, Dalí seems to be little more than a highly creative but spoiled child. As Dalí reflects on his young adulthood, however, a new facet of his personality begins to emerge. Dalí’s actions, we find, are never as senseless as they appear, his radical opinions never as unfounded as one might be tempted to think. In fact, Dalí’s reasoning, based largely on his aesthetic sense, is often just as convincing as the common rationale he rebels against. Dalí has a piercing critical gaze that he turns equally on himself and those around him. Even the reader does not escape; Dalí predicts and addresses objections, hesitations and disbelief with surprising accuracy.

           Taken alone, this aspect of the book is somewhat alienating, but Dalí offsets his confidence and independence with a very human element: a love story – at least, his version of one. Dalí reserves kind words for a select group, including Raphael and Picasso, while he is overtly critical of such heavyweights as Michelangelo, Freud and Kant. Above even those select individuals he respects, he cherishes his wife, Gala. His meditations on the nature of their relationship are some of the most emotionally direct and sympathetic moments in the book.

           A translator’s note shows the strength of the bond between Dalí and Gala. The translator writes that the manuscript for The Secret Life was “one of the most fantastically indecipherable documents ever to come from the pen of someone having a real feeling for the value and weight of words,” littered with practically illegible handwriting, almost no punctuation or paragraphing, and “deliriously fanciful” spelling. It was only with Gala’s help that Dalí’s raving notes could be put into a form that the average reader can understand.

           While the book is a valuable resource for anyone interested in Dalí’s artwork – the origins of his crutches, grasshoppers, ants and soft watches are all explained – it will appeal to anyone with an appreciation for individuality and creativity. Dalí’s narrative voice ranges from playful to violent; he is fanatical, staunchly unapologetic and most of all, honest. As he writes, “it is at the supreme moment of reaching the marrow of anything that you discover the very taste of truth,” and in his autobiography, Dalí casts away the bone and offers only marrow.

By Christopher Stokum

Yesterday morning, the sunlight spread like honey between the clouds. I heard the city move more distinctly than I have before. Voices from the street separated from and rejoined the freeway noise and exhaust rumblings in a loose, hectic harmony. This is a day for writing, I thought. This is a day for a story, a poem or a song, for something sublime and artistic to flow from me without effort or preparation. I stared at the clock at work – even the motion of its hands seemed profound – furiously anticipating the moment I could take advantage of this rare mood.
           I got home, emptied my pockets, sat leaning forward in my chair and turned on my roommate’s electric typewriter, a birthday present from his parents that he has yet to use. It whirred, waiting. My fingers hovered above the keys.
           Two hours later, I held a half-finished draft of a rambling, ill-conceived story. It kicked around in the shallows for the first ten pages, covering far too much too quickly, only to get caught in a sinkhole by the twelfth page. I’d spent the last six pages explaining the origins of my protagonist’s fiery hatred of shopping plazas.
           What happened? What kind of fissure had formed between my brain and my fingers? I set the table for dinner with unnecessary force. I berated my roommate for not keeping his typewriter properly oiled. I sulked and grumbled. Had I somehow wasted my inspired mood, squandered it on fast women and booze and worthless short stories?
           No, I hadn’t. On the above counts, I was innocent. I was guilty, however, of confusing a perceptive mood for an expressive mood, or an influx of data for an outward rush. In terms of writing, my days normally take on one of three temperaments. First, and most opposed to a writer’s work, is overwhelming neutrality. On these days, my writing is forced and dull, but not awful. I have a fair idea of where the groove is, but I can’t quite get into it. There’s not much one can do besides feel remotely apathetic. People who dig these kinds of days are generally drawn to heavy opiates. On the second kind of days, I perceive. I find new vantage points, new ways of looking at the same things. Call it perspectival mobility. These days allow for those third breed of days, the elusive expressive days.
           These second two kinds look dangerously similar at first, hence my confusion. Both are needed to write anything worthwhile, and both seem to be in some sense “inspired,” though I hate to give any of this a romantic air. But perceptive days, days on which I’m concerned mostly with how I relate to the world and how the world relates to itself, don’t lend themselves well to expressive, and vice versa. Days of the former sort provide me with something to say, the latter an opportunity to say it. Imagine the life of a writer as a crossbow. On perceptive days, the string is drawn back. Tension mounts, the bolt shakes with barely-constrained energy, but letting off a shot now would be premature. You’d never hit the target. No – no, to strike as close to the bulls-eye as possible, to make the best use of the bolt you’ve got loaded, you have to wait for a expressive day, for when the string is fully drawn.
            This is not to say that a writer should wander about until inspiration hits. The neutral and perceptive days are for practice. They’re when one runs drills, self-criticizes and undergoes literary enemas that clear fragments  of stories like my meditation on shopping plazas from one’s head. The neutral days are when the author can see the world as close to objectively as possible, the perceptive days when he can interpret the hell out of that objectivity. If a writer chooses to take these days off, he’ll come at the writing days without the slightest notion of how to make use of them. Only constant use ensures that the bolt won’t stick when the string is drawn.
            The sunlight spreads like honey between the clouds. By noon, I’ll have typed a few hundred words of fumbling prose that hopefully will be better than yesterday’s, though it’s hard to say what will come out. My hopes aren’t higher because, despite the tension I feel, I know that there’s still room to pull the string back. Today is not a day for writing. When that day comes, I’ll hardly notice the sunlight. I’ll care only about the target – the stack of paper on my desk – and releasing the bolt as soon as I can.

By: Christopher Stokum

When J.D. Salinger died back in January, I couldn't help but feel guilty. Same with David Foster Wallace in '08 and Hunter S. Thompson in '05. It wasn't any latent sense of responsibility for their deaths that brought the guilt, though I suppose if the sense was latent, I wouldn't be aware of having it. It was rather the notion that perhaps I felt a little too badly about their dying, considering my relationship with them. That perhaps, given that they were survived by mothers, fathers, wives, siblings, children, friends, acquaintances, even pets, none of which categories that I was even remotely a member of – that perhaps out of consideration for all of these folks with legitimate claims to sadness, I should get a grip.

But I did fit into a category that obituaries couldn't possibly list the members of in the allotted space. I was a reader. I am a reader, one who cares intensely for those he reads. So much so that I spent the day Salinger died wondering if I had had some sort of bond with him in a past life – also, of course, wondering if there were such things as past lives to have such a bond in. It seemed the only scenario that could explain the weight that had settled uncomfortably in my stomach.

The reader-author relationship is rarely explored. The converse, the author-reader relationship, is standard turf for writing classes and manuals, but the rhetoric here focuses more or less on how to keep the reader's interest, not waste their time, convince them that you're being forthright when you're lying unabashedly out of both ends, etc. Please take a moment and note how remarkably similar the author-reader relationship seems to be to a hell of a lot of romantic relationships. The closest one ever gets to covering real personal connections between authors and their readers is when discussing how to avoid betraying one's reader-directed loathing in one's writing. Again, note how this is pretty much like every relationship you've been in up to this point.

Reader-author relationships are noticeably sweeter. They're characterized by trust, reverence and forgiving, and thus there are few relationships that one can honestly compare them to. When one of your most beloved authors dies, you feel, above all else, betrayed. You feel as if you've lost a confidant, one of your few true comrades, and you feel as if that comrade should have told you that he was planning to leave back when he booked his ticket, not with a postcard from the other side, especially not with one that reads, “You can't visit me; I can't visit you. Do not respond. The mail service here is shit. We may meet up again, depending on who's right about the cosmos.”

How seriously you take all of this betrayal and sadness hinges on readers having relationships with the authors they read that resemble friendships. If they don't, then the situation is more like receiving the above letter from, say, a friend of a friend – essentially, someone you don't know, only know of. To feel badly about their leaving would be strange and presumptuous. It would assume some kind of active communication between the departed and yourself that had never actually taken place. Hence the guilt.

The analogy crumbles, however. There is active communication between the reader and the author. Regardless of the effort that an author puts into his novel, he will never complete it, not until the novel is purchased or found or borrowed or whatever and read. If the author is responsible for laying the groundwork, for selecting the proper materials and arranging them in some comprehensible fashion, then it is the reader who constructs the story. The reader must build the world of the novel mentally; he must give the characters faces and voices, and he must fabricate the scenery. Film, for sake of contrast, doesn't hold the same potential. Actors come with faces (generally); sets are built to look precisely how the director wants them to. While one simply takes in a film and interprets it, one must complete a novel before interpretation even becomes a real option.

Instead of friends, we'll call our favorite authors our co-conspirators. They're the ones who hatch the plans, and we're the ones who carry them out. My depression over Salinger's death didn't stem from an unfulfilled desire to meet the man, nor was it the result of some unhealthy obsession with his work. The latter is almost unimaginable, for his work is, in a sense, my work. No, this is nothing more than the sadness of an crook who has lost one of the few fellow criminals he trusted. Before he completes his next heist, he'll have to find a new thief to get behind.

Or he'll have to find some thieves who will get behind him.

By Christopher Stokum

He was soaking in a blue inflatable kiddie pool in the back yard when Susan came to get her things. He heard her car in the drive, and getting out and drying off seemed the proper thing to do. Plus, he’d run out of cigarettes, and there was another pack in the house somewhere, so getting out was bound to happen soon.
“How long have you been out here?” She had come around the side of the house before he could move.
“Hour or two, maybe,” he said.
“I’ve got some things inside I thought I’d pick up,” she said. “I was around, so I thought I’d stop by and do that.”
He considered offering to help but couldn’t reconcile helping her move out with his wanting her to move back in. He stood up and picked up his towel. It’s still the proper thing to do, he thought, regardless of what either of us want here.
“Is Paulie home?” she asked. They walked in through the back door. He wondered if he should’ve gone in first, since it was all his house now, but then she might’ve gotten the idea that he saw the house as being unquestionably his, that there was no possibility that it could be even partly hers again. Which may not have bothered her or changed anything, sure, but it may have.
“I don’t know,” he said. He sat at the table and listened to her move around the house. It had thin walls, the house, so he didn’t have to talk too loudly for her to hear him, for which he was thankful. “I don’t know if Paulie’s home. I haven’t seen him outside today, but that doesn’t mean anything.”
“I might stop over there before I go back home.” He rubbed his thumb over the patch under his chin where his beard had never fully grown in. She paused in the kitchen doorway with two cardboard boxes that he didn’t know he’d had. “I want to make sure everything is square between the two of us. And the two of you.”
“Between all of us,” he said.
“Right, between all of us.”
+++
She really did have a lot of things at his place. There was some kind of order that she collected the things she had at his place in: expensive or sentimental or otherwise valuable things first, then mass-produced but nonetheless cherished things – e.g. the Fiestaware from her grandmother, the inflatable bed that she’d slept on when they’d stopped sleeping together, which he supposed held some kind of odd nostalgic value for her – then general things that there wasn’t much of a reason not to take, cooking pans and utensils and the combination VHS/DVD player that he hadn’t realized was hers. He couldn’t decide whether the order was conscious, but he guessed that it probably wasn’t.
He went upstairs and changed out of his trunks and put on some cologne in the bathroom. When he got back to the kitchen she’d carried everything to her car except for a few things that wouldn’t fit in the boxes that he figured she could get without his help, just a stack of books and the big broken clock that had been in the closet that she had absolutely fucking refused to put in the trash.
“Hungry at all?” he asked when she came back from her car. “I could make some sandwiches.”
“Coffee will be fine,” she said, “if you have it.”
He tried to remember how strong she liked her coffee and if she took cream and was surprised to find that he didn’t know. He was sure he had known at some point. She didn’t take sugar, at least; he was sure of it. She couldn’t taste it well. It was something to do with her taste buds that was the cause of it, maybe, or a problem with her neuro-connections. He’d been smoking a lot when they went to the doctor to have it looked into. The whole memory was hazy. Still, he was sure she couldn’t taste sugar well, like cats, so it wouldn’t make much sense for her to want it in her coffee. She sat down at the table.
“Where’s this apartment again?” he asked.
“Ulster Ave.,” she said. “Off of Lincoln, by the magistrate’s office there.”
“Nice place?”
“Nice place.”
“I’m happy for you,” he said. He wished that the conversation seemed stilted, but it wasn’t much different than the ones they’d had before she had moved out.
“Are you?”
“Of course. I’m glad you have a nice place. Setting makes all the difference.”
“It’ll be nice to get something on the walls,” she said. “I took some pictures down. I took the one from above the fireplace. I don’t know if you remembered that it was covering that hole because I didn’t.”
“Neither did I,” he said. “It should be easy enough to find something that will take its place. It’s a small enough hole.”
He found her a clean mug and filled it and left the coffee black, which she didn’t seem to mind. They sat sipping the coffee and looking at the things on the table. He wanted to reminisce since she was there. Not with her, out loud, just to himself or maybe for himself. He’d thought that seeing her would help bring it back, but it was the same as before. He could recall the facts just fine, but they didn’t carry any weight. No more weight than anything else he could remember did. Being introduced to her at the botanical garden was about on par with taking a bus the day before, making the coffee. It hadn’t been at the time, of course. Looking back, though, he couldn’t tell what had made meeting her any bigger than anything else. He didn’t know if there was a word for temporal parallax, but he felt that there should be.
“I still don’t know what you bought this clock for,” he said. “It was practically broken when you got it.”
She fingered the clock’s hands gently. He rubbed the patch under his chin. “It used to be really grand,” she said. “I knew that when I saw it. Its grandeur has just sunken down a bit. Or maybe the sediment’s just gotten stirred up and made it hard to see. It still is grand, kind of. It’s funny what time will do to things, even clocks.”
“What’d you want to see Paulie for?”
“I thought he should know why I moved out of here,” she said. She watched his eyes, like she always did. People don’t do that much anymore, he thought. It makes it disconcerting as hell when she does it.
“I told him,” he said. “You remember.”
“I remember that you told him to stay away from me. I remember you told him that moving away from here would be the smartest thing he could do.”
“Safest thing, I said.”
“Well, I wanted to explain what you were trying to say.”
“You love him?” he asked.
“Since the fourth grade, alright?” she said levelly. That was absolutely not a question, he thought. “I’ve loved him since I met him.”
“Don’t get snarky, Suze.”
She shrugged and set down her coffee. “I’m going over now to see if he’s there. Please take care of yourself.”
“You know I will.”
“I know.”
+++
He followed her to the door and watched her pack the last few things into her car. The sky was dotted with clouds, and he hated it because it wasn’t clean, because it was fragmented by the tufts of moisture, because it wasn’t together in the way that he felt it should be.
“Do you love him for his scars?” he asked. He appeared calm. Susan had told him once that a dog bit Paulie on the face when Paulie was a kid – eleven or twelve years old, probably, because it was after Susan knew him. She’d visited him at the hospital and Paulie’s brothers had laughed and said Paulie had a girlfriend, which Susan had apparently been alright with.
“Drop it,” she said and turned to face him.
“Or do you love him for his meth? Because he can’t remember your name most times you see him?” He wondered if he was being cruel. He didn’t want to sound cruel, just frank, but sometimes the two are hard to distinguish.
“I love him because he’s not what he’s got,” she said. “And because nobody understands that, I have to love him.”
He nodded and watched the kids down the street play catch. The fat one never caught the ball, never, but the other kids liked him anyhow. Behind the kids, the sun was setting, and her rays exploded into the sky with compassion, and he wished that he had worn sunglasses, and his eyes ached and he closed them.

By: Christopher Stokum

I entered my first college fiction class clutching my story proudly to my chest and radiating confidence. Fifty minutes later I emerged confused, panicked and not a little embarrassed. I had thought that I could write, really write; I thought my words flowed from the muses, through my heart and out of my pen uninterrupted and pure.

While reading my story aloud in class, though, I’d choked on those words. My sentences were awkward, my characters static and my plot convoluted and contrived. The story was missing something essential, which means that as far as my skills went, I was missing something essential. In short, I learned the first lesson that any good writing class should teach a budding author: humility.

The second lesson came a few classes later. The professor passed around a sheet that listed the “Don’ts of Fiction.” Commandment-style, they forbade using more than two exclamation points in four pages, beginning a story with “And then I woke up,” ending a story with “And then I woke up,” and so on. What’s this? I thought, Writing doesn’t have rules.

I was partially right. Writing doesn’t have rules beyond those of grammar, syntax and the like. The point of the class, however, wasn’t to teach me to write – they assumed that I had learned that in approximately the first grade – but to craft. It’s crafting that the rules are for, and it’s crafting that makes strong writing of all kinds.

It’s hard to imagine the literary giants of the past writing according to a rulebook. It seems that Twain and Faulkner and all the rest were made to break rules, not abide by them. Something a guitar instructor of mine once said comes to mind here. He told me to practice the modal scales until I memorized them, and then to practice more. I worked until I could start on any note of the scale, anyplace on the neck, and find the rest of the notes without hesitation. And then he told me to forget every scale I had learned. Good guitarists, he said, know the scales forward and back. Great guitarists forget that they know the scales.

It seems that crafting a piece of writing – be it fiction, nonfiction or poetry – works in much the same way. My professor didn’t intend for me to write-by-numbers or eliminate all experimentation from my writing. Rather, he wanted me to learn the rules and to write with them in mind, and then to forget the rules ever existed and just write. For if a writer learns the rules well enough, they’ll show up in his work whether or not he or she remembers them.

What am I to do when I’ve learned the rules and forgotten them, when I’ve integrated them into my craft so that there’s no longer a need to make them explicit? The answer is, I find more rules to learn and forget. There’s no convergence to a writer’s craft. Hemingway said that writers are apprentices in a craft that no one masters. And if we’re willing to see ourselves as craftsmen instead of artists, as learned instead of divinely inspired, we can do just fine as perpetual journeymen.