Misdemeanor Outlaw: Jim McGarrah's Path and Some #Boomer Criticism from a Gen Xer #genx

Vincent Francone

Vincent Francone is a writer from Chicago whose memoir, Like a Dog, was published in the fall of 2015. He won first place in the 2009 Illinois Emerging Writers Competition (Gwendolyn Brooks Award) and is at work on a collection of poems and stories. Visit www.vincentfrancone.com to read his work or say hi. 

#BHBW author Vincent Francone reviews Jim McGarrah's memoir, Midemeanor Outlaw

 

In his funny, self-lacerating look at Baby Boomers, Balsamic Dreams, Joe Queenan accuses his generation of navel-gazing and premature nostalgia.  He cites Carol King’s “So Far Away” as being the beginning of the Boomers’ descent into soppy, untimely ennui.  To be sure, 1971 was too soon for this generation to be so goddamn depressed about the loss of time, considering the average Boomer was around 20-30.  Yeah, Queenan’s making a bit of hasty generalization, but for the sake of argument let’s accept his point.  If we do, we can easily see how, though not unlike other self-absorbed generations, Boomers tend to mythologize their heyday, perhaps driven to do so after the utopian dreams of the late 60s gave way to the disillusionment of the 70s and the crass materialism of the 1980s. 

Most of the Boomers I know— hi, family!—tend to agree that the music and culture of their generation represents the pinnacle of human achievement, which always makes me want to smother those aging pricks in the bubbling tar of punk rock.  This boomer insistence that their version of rock and roll is the greatest thing ever, that Woodstock was the event, man, and the agonizing claim that they ended a war (sure took them long enough) via smoking weed and sitting in the dirt playing bongos has always made me roll my eyes.  Which is why I approached Jim McGarrah’s book Misdemeanor Outlaw with a bit of trepidation.  Do I really want to read 180-pages of Boomer self-aggrandizement? I asked myself.  Turns out I was wrong about the book, though not 100% wrong about Boomers.
 

Available here!

(Side note: All writers are self-aggrandizing.  I aspire to be part of the club; I wrote a memoir and asked people to read it; I write poems and get them published in corners of the internet and then ask people to peek into those corners.  I am as self-aggrandizing as the next damaged bastard.  Even those of my generation with the good sense to try their hand at pursuits other than writing are myopic and sentimental.  So yes, we Generation Xers, and certainly the much-maligned Millennials, are equally guilty of the above accusations leveled at Boomers.  And while we’re at it, so are the members of the so-called Greatest Generation.  We’re all human; we’re all flawed and beautiful.  We all suck.) 

But here’s the thing about Misdemeanor Outlaw: it’s a book by a Boomer, not a Boomer book.  Meaning it’s not overly sentimental; it’s not the equivalent of one of those goddamn Facebook memes with a photo of a 45 record adapter and the request to “Like and share if you ever used one of these!”  It’s a damn fine collection of loosely connected essays that jump through time in a mostly linear manner, forming a meditation on the author’s inability to find his place among rules and authority figures.  Along the way, he makes and loses friends, gets married and divorced, picks up a social disease, faces the horror of combat in Vietnam, swallows an apothecary worth of dope, and even tries his hand at the post office (which I, a former mail sorter, was delighted to read about).

The epilogue does, as expected, contain a sort of case for the 1980s—a decade I tend to romanticize—being the example of how corporate culture corrupts true art and beauty, evidenced by the rise of pop songs like “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go” a nauseating tune, indeed, though the boomers would have us believe that their generations’ musicians never recorded anything as soulless and vile.  One need only recall the Ohio Express’s “Yummy Yummy Yummy” to debunk that claim. 

Aside from that one paragraph, I was far more engaged, amused, and compelled by Misdemeanor Outlaw than I expected to be.  I was familiar with McGarrah’s work.  (We share the same publisher, which, were we musicians, would make us label-mates; not sure what we are. . . Blue Herons of a feather? A Flock of Herons? Being close to “A Flock of Seagulls,” a 1980s band I assume McGarrah dislikes, I’ll go with that one.)  He is a writer who seeks to recollect things with less tranquility than honesty.  When McGarrah writes of his childhood, he eases up on the idolization of the all-American small town and presents not so much a Norman Rockwell Eden as a confining place of mores and customs that, even as a wee lad, he’s inclined to challenge.  Soon he’s dropping out of college to enlist in the Marines, a decision that sends him to Vietnam, then to a crisis of identity.  Rejecting the scare tactics and justifications of politicians, McGarrah actively opposes the war, grows his hair and embraces the hippie idealism that engulfed his generation the way Techno-solutionism is currently seducing Millennials.  When the limits of commune life are reached, McGarrah seems at his most unmoored.  Plagued by survivor guilt from Vietnam, unable to comfortably fit back into his hometown, and beset by uniformed men seeking to get over on him regardless of the length of his hair and manner of dress, our hero is the true representation of a man without a country, an outlaw, albeit of the misdemeanor variety. 

It would be remiss not to remark on the quality of McGarrah’s humorous, unflinching prose.  I laughed often while reading these pages, though the most impacting moments are the honest appraisals of the injustice done to the young men of his generation and the “true cost of these foreign policy adventures urged on by corrupt politicians and controlled by corporate interest.”  Recalling his stint in Vietnam, McGarrah writes, “On quiet nights, when the dead visit, I greet them with respect and we talk.  They speak of the loneliness of their fate and I speak in awe of mine.”  Though I know the man is writing of a time and place I can never understand, he may as well be discussing what it means to write a book.  Or, for that matter, to read one—we are seeking to converse with the dead, to compare our fates to theirs, to measure our struggle against theirs, to see what insights we can glean.  The result, in Misdemeanor Outlaw, is a book for anyone interested in walking in the shoes of a man on an absurd road toward self-actualization, though not in the trendy way Boomers sought to do as they went from well-meaning young idiots to 1980s sell-outs looking to reclaim their idealistic past.  McGarrah is too raw for that sort of thing.  His self-examination is his own, but in offering it to us, we’re privy to insights and anecdotes that are surprisingly familiar to anyone who’s ever felt mystified at the conventions the rest of the world is all too happy to obey. 

LIKE A DOG by VINCENT FRANCONE available here!

 

The best response to the request for a #love #poem #MondayBlogs

Response to a Request for a Love Poem

by Vincent Francone 

My wife wears her gold earrings in the summer nights

going to dance wearing black looking like the small hours 

her skin the cinnamon of angry skies.

Her eyes match her clothing 

which she wears like fog combing over the skyline.

Her fingers are peninsulas 

her back is a map with rivers from my fingers

her feet hold her to the earth 

her toes are painted like beach-washed stones

her hair falls like empires 

or is coiled like the center of a sunflower.

She wears her hair off her shoulders

and I never fail to lock onto what little memory remains 

of our first careless ardor

while she meanders through our conflict 

taking her time to make up her mind

as assiduously as she works on her make up.

Vincent Francone is a writer from Chicago whose memoir, Like a Dog, was published in the fall of 2015. He won first place in the 2009 Illinois Emerging Writers Competition (Gwendolyn Brooks Award) and is at work on a collection of poems and stories. Visit www.vincentfrancone.com to read his work or say hi.

GET YOURS HERE

Read a review for Like a Dog: 

A Chicago critic once asked Nelson Algren," Why can't we ever read about happy marriages?" Algren replied, "Because there are none."
Like a Dog shows us the same can be said of the average job. Francone leads us from a purgatorial mail sorting job on the South Side to a rat-infested North Side bookstore (where a budding writer can find a kind of happiness), and finally into academia, where so many writers are forced to labor. Well-told stories, original characters, lots of laughs.

Why I Love Vincent Francone #memoir #review @BlueHeronBW

Like a Dog is one of those books--all true and heartbreakingly real--that you're reading along, sucked into Francone's beer-soaked world of private mail sorting--and who knew such a business existed?--when your drink explodes through your nose you're laughing so hard.  Life is absurd and I love Francone for revealing those absurdities with a smart subtle wit. Trigger alert:  don't let your kids read this book, they may think their own life will turn out all right.

Description: Vincent Francone’s “Like a Dog,” as in “Work like a dog,” is a great read. A working class guy who comes up on the South Side of Chicago and moves north in a quest a better life, Francone takes us on a dazzling tour of minimum wage America over the last couple of decades. He’s has done it all; “I’ve tried telemarketing, copy writing, editing; I managed a courier center, I conducted background checks on potential healthcare employees, and worked in a stock room. . . .” And that’s before he goes to university and winds up, like so many other academics today, as a part-time instructor in a string of economically stressed public colleges. Francone’s descriptions of boring and soul-destroying work, the places where it’s done, and the people who do it are beautifully written, wildl entertaining, deeply poignant, and mysteriously inspiring. This is what it’s like to be alive in these times, “Like a Dog” insists, this is the battlefield of everyday life. These are your adversaries: mindless repetitive work, bored and boring co-workers, feckless bosses, plus your own inclination to work as little as possible, spend every penny you earn right away, and escape from bad job to bad job, without ever climbing any ladder that might lead to better paid if equally meaningless work. Best of all, this post-industrial odyssey down mean streets and corridors to mean offices and classrooms, dingy apartments, and dead end bars is full of gritty life. Francone is a gifted story- teller with a great, street smart voice. His protagonists and characters are brilliantly drawn.. And in their bafflement and self-destructive resistance to the work regieme that claims them they press back in an utterly realistic way against our recession-bred equation of employment, almost any employment, with salvation. Studs Terkel would have loved this book--John McClure, Phd

Vincent Francone is a writer from Chicago whose memoir, Like a Dog, was published in the fall of 2015. He won first place in the 2009 Illinois Emerging Writers Competition (Gwendolyn Brooks Award) and is at work on a collection of poems and stories. Visit www.vincentfrancone.com to read his work or say hi.

#BHBW author Vincent Francone: #reading poetry is a spiritual quest #MondayBlogs

“Why I Read Poems When They Are Often Quite Bad”–guest blog post by Vincent Francone

I just finished Rosemary Tonk's posthumous collection of poems, Bedouin of the London Evening.  I wanted to read Tonks ever since I saw this quote: “The main duty of the poet is to excite – to send the senses reeling.”  I quite agree.  Sadly, I disliked the book.  The poems have some flashes of brilliance, but Tonks’s work is a bit callow and ultimately dispensable.  The experience left me bummed.  I’d been looking forward to these poems for quite some time, had searched for them in bookshops in Chicago and San Francisco, only to be very disappointed.

But here’s the thing: I don’t regret the money I spent on the book ($26.00 plus tax).  I’ll likely not read any of the poems anytime soon, but the day I spent laboring over lines like “My gutter—how you gleamed! Like dungeon floors which / Cobras have lubricated” and “Those evenings you were mutinous / Against the tyranny of kitchen tables where / The flat iron cools its mirror of blue ore” was not wasted.  I take a lot of chances on poetry, and most of the time they don’t pay off.  Poems should, indeed, blow the top of your head off, but often they are dull, affected, over-wrought or, worse, dashed off and trite.  Yet I still search through them looking for the one poem—hell, the one line—that will remind me that the effort is worthwhile.

Writers often speak of the struggle to produce one goddamn line that is close to good.  Hours spent in front of the computer, booze within reach and eyes near tears, all in vain when nothing much comes.  But when it clicks—oh, what magic!  What a thrill.  There’s nothing like it.  I know full well what writers mean when they rhapsodize about their specific form of self-abuse.  But the same can be said of reading poems, which requires a level of focus rare in today’s tech-obsessed culture.  I’m often left feeling empty and unengaged by the poems I read, but when I do stumble on that rare wonderful creation, the search is more than validated.

I liken this process to what Dostoevsky seemed to be up to in many of his works: the struggle to understand what it even means to be a soul in search of god.  Reading poetry is a spiritual quest, a meditation of the unnamable entity that fortifies us against the collection of absolute crap accumulating just outside the door.  How to sustain sanity against it all?  Some look to god.  Others look to poetry.

This is not to say that I find comfort and meaning in Yeats on par with what the average Christian gets from the New Testament.  But I do see something beautiful and mysterious in his best work that does suggest a force greater than my understanding.  I am probably not anywhere close to explaining it here, but I am often invigorated by a poem to the extent that I can face whatever hell awaits the moment I set foot out of the apartment.

But again, this is rare.  Most poems are bad or dull or good in a sense, sure, but nothing that really stays with me.  My tastes are fairly specific.  I am all for ambition and experimentation, but the trend today seems to be toward coded poems that rely so much on their playfulness that they fail to convey anything worthwhile and, thus, seem hallow. Keeping in mind that the primary audience for poetry in the USA is other poets and academics, I understand why so much poetry written today is full of turgid, dense language. (Though I’m aware every generation has produced good and bad poems.  Surely there was a lousy, pompous tale being told by the campfire alongside Beowulf.)  This is why I’ve been gravitating to Yeats and Kavanagh and a score of more contemporary Irish poets who value the felicity of language but rarely at the expense of a worthwhile subject.  Content is as important as language in a Seamus Heaney poem.  Ciaran Carson never sacrifices either.  The balance is impressive; the effects astonishing.  I’ll take that over whatever John Ashbery is up to.

If one is going to write a poem that is more concerned with language than content, fine.  Sometimes these are the poems that are so intriguing they border on the rhapsodic.  But they are few compared to the majority of obfuscated, image heavy curiosities. Sifting through them requires patience and faith.  The search is worthwhile, even if it’s never ending.  Maybe in death we will understand the secret of poetry.  Maybe the afterlife waiting for us is built on rhyming couplets.

Who can write challenging, obscure poems that are simultaneously engaging?  It’s a tie between Medbh McGuckian and Cesar Vallejo, though they can come from E. E. Cummings, Joyce Mansour, Mina Loy, William Blake, Guillaume Apollinaire, Vicente Huidobro, and Coral Bracho as well.  All of these writers have penned at least a few visionary, bizarre, compelling poems that have consumed a good amount of my days.  I spent most of a plan ride from Washington DC to Chicago trying to get my head around Paul Muldoon’s “The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants”; much of June 2012 saw me puzzling over Huidobro’s book length poem Altazor.  Still, I usually return to Philip Larkin when I wish to be reminded of the daily truth on which poetry can, and should, focus.

Today, I read a poem that awed me: “Aubade” by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.  I read it once, then paused at the end, unsure of what I’d just encountered, then reread it and saw the simplicity of it leading to a conclusion that floored me.  Go look for it—it’s really grand, as is much of her work.  This is why I pore over poems, in the hope of finding one that takes me to a place I couldn’t have imagined before.  Ironically, poems like “Aubade” do it best, poems lacking testing, obvious ornaments.

Vincent's memoir is available here: Like a Dog

Vincent Online: VicentFrancone.com

  

#BHBW Hello those who don't know me... #authorinterview

 

...my Name is Vincent Francone

(Reblogged from Scott Mullin's This is Writing Blog)

My book is called Like a Dog. It’s a memoir, but I also write poems, which have been picked up from time to time. I’m trying to get a book of the poems published. I may publish it myself if the wheels of the publishing bus do indeed finally fall off.  

You can connect with me via my website and Facebook.

When and why did you start writing?

I started writing seriously in my late thirties. Prior to then, I was playing with poems and dashing off Bukowski and Kerouac parodies because I was a twenty-two year old white male. I quit for a while, then started writing record and book reviews for small online journals.  I had a decision to make when I finished my BA and was heading to grad school: study English or Creative Writing. I decided to give being a writer one more try, so I chose Creative Writing (Poetry) and have been pushing the boulder uphill ever since.  

What inspires your writing?

These days, small things. My dog. A train ride. Chicago. A glass of really good scotch. The smell of morning after rain. Little things seem big to me now, so I try to write about those when I approach poems. When I wrote the book, I was obsessed with work: why we work, where we work, how our jobs begin to take on something bigger than we may have initially intended. I dreaded having a “career” and, as I saw one beginning to form around me, I decided I needed to write about what it means to work, or, I should say, what it means for me to have been employed at a number of places, often to the mutual determinant of me and the employers.  

How would you define creativity?

Creativity is nebulous, malleable, and a lot of other nice 50 cent words.  But truly, I do feel that it something different for different people, which I find liberating. My creativity is my own. It comes out in my way, with my voice, and it would totally not work for someone else, just as my friends—many of them writers or musicians—exercise a form of creativity that I envy. If only I could write like that! But once I accept that creativity is a subjective, odd thing, I can put aside envy, fear, doubt, and let the work begin.

Do you have any writing rituals to get you in the mood for writing?

Sort of. I write early. I used to write at night with a cigarette and a drink, but that only got me so far. Now I get to it in the early morning with coffee and quiet. I write better when the apartment is still, before the dog wakes and needs his walk. After 10:00 AM, there are too many demands on my time.

If you could, what would you go back and tell yourself as a writer starting out?

Make a schedule; make a plan; stick to both. I used to assume I would just sit down whenever inspiration struck and make something great. I didn’t understand the importance of deadlines, especially those that are self-imposed. 

What do you believe make for great writing?

I am a fan of humor, and mine can be dark—or, as one former employer put it: “caustic”—and think that humor is underrated in so-called serious literature. I look for writers who understand that the world is pretty sad and, thus, the need for laughter is among the most important things there is. Kafka is hilarious in this way. Vonnegut. Sergei Dovlatov. G. Cabrera Infante. All laugh riots, even when they are writing about deadly serious subjects. And I think poetry is the superior form of writing. In an age when we are beset by political spin and buzzwords passing as commentary and discourse, poetry is the most crucial thing we have.

Which writers have influenced your writing?

See above, but I would add to the list: Ciaran Carson, Italo Calvino, Reinaldo Arenas, Ernesto Cardenal, Mikhail Bulgakov, Jeanette Winterson, and Nicanor Parra. I don’t write like Faulkner or James Joyce or Samuel Beckett or Paul Muldoon or Seamus Heaney or Medbh McGuckian, but they have also been tremendously important to me.

How do you measure success as a writer?

Finishing a manuscript. I was unable to do that for a long time, so it became my measure of success. Publishing a book was also nice, but I realize, a year after the book has been out, that writing and revising something you’re proud of is itself a huge feat.

Have you ever hated something you wrote?

Only everything. 

What’s your biggest fear as a writer?

Rejection, but I get over that quickly. Then I build up the fear of rejection again, submit anyway, get rejected, get callus, laugh at the fear, then it comes back, then I begin the process over.

What traits do you feel make a great writer?

Courage.

Describe your latest book to our readers

Like a Dog is a memoir of my life in Chicago as a working stiff. I document my time as mail-sorter, clerk in a used bookstore, and adjunct instructor getting exploited by academia. There’s plenty of booze, slacker quasi-philosophy, literary references, and curse words

What would you like readers to take away from your writing?

A sense of who I am and how I see things, which may or may not be how they see things, but in comingling our worldviews we may collectively grow. Or laugh.

Do you have any tips for aspiring writers?

Be open to criticism and stay determined. Giving up is too easy.  Remember what Beckett wrote: “Try again. Fail again. Fail Better.”

Can you give our audience a writing prompt to help get them writing?

You have to live a year of high school over again, but you spend it all in detention. A hierarchy develops—who would be the de facto leader? Or another idea: You go back in time and interview your parents before you’re born. In fact, it’s the night of your conception. You have to explain everything that will happen to them, who you are, what all of your lives will become. They plague you with questions. What do they ask and do they decide not to have sex as a result of your discussion? 

Like A Dog

by: Vincent Francone

Vincent Francone’s “Like a Dog,” as in “Work like a dog,” is a great read. A working class guy who comes up on the South Side of Chicago and moves north in a quest a better life, Francone takes us on a dazzling tour of minimum wage America over the last couple of decades. He’s has done it all; “I’ve tried telemarketing, copy writing, editing; I managed a courier center, I conducted background checks on potential healthcare employees, and worked in a stock room. . . .”

Why I Love Vincent Francone

Like a Dog is one of those books--all true and heartbreakingly real--that you're reading along, sucked into Francone's beer-soaked world of private mail sorting--and who knew such a business existed?--when your drink explodes through your nose you're laughing so hard.  Life is absurd and I love Francone for revealing those absurdities with a smart subtle wit. Trigger alert:  don't let your kids read this book, they may think their own life will turn out all right.

Chicago Writer Vincent Francone on WGN RADIO TONIGHT

All you insomniacs out there:  Vincent Francone will be talking shop, i.e writing, lit and his favorite cocktail, tonight on WGN RADIO 720 in Chicago at 2:15 AM to 3:00....that's when the cool people meet in case you're wondering.  Listen live or on the web here.  I'm pretty sure he's going to talk about his new book, LIKE A DOG.