two for one

I'm excited to announce that this fall, Rick Harsch's Corona\Samizdat Press will publish as one volume the corrected version of Fight for Your Long Day and the sequel to my debut novel. What further adventures await Cyrus Duffleman? Is our adjunct hero even alive?

syllabi and student assignments

"There’s something confusing about the consensus around [Cyrus Duffleman]. It has to do with the way [his] critics begin by asserting [his] goodness, [his] greatness, [his] majorness or [his] bestness, and then quickly adopt a defensive tone, instructing us in ways of seeing as virtues the many things about [his] writing that might be considered shortcomings. So [he] writes only [syllabi and student assignments], but [these] are [weirder] than most novels."

~~ from "Poor Rose" by Christian Lorentzen

once more. . .

Fight for Your Long Day is again compared to Joyce's writing:

"In a review of Fight for Your Long Day, William Pannapacker
judges Kudera’s “depiction of the life and psychology of an
adjunct teacher” to be “realistic.” But Pannapacker balks at the
repellent quality of Kudera’s protagonist: 'Fight for Your Long
Day is not without problems. The sexual and digestive
preoccupations of the protagonist seem like distractions from
the larger message of the novel. One could argue that they
relate to Maslow’s hierarchy; in any case, they are revoltingly
described," which "undermines any sympathy the reader might
have for him as a representative of adjuncts.' Perhaps it is the
rare artist who can craft gastrointestinally challenged
characters with high literary merit — James Joyce, Samuel
Beckett, and Monty Python come to mind. Pannapacker
recognizes that Kudera’s novel participates in a significant shift
in the representation of faculty on the contemporary campus,
but he misreads its 'sexual and digestive preoccupations' as
distractions. On the contrary, they are the abject essence of the
novel.

"Duffleman’s musings on and fantasies about bathrooms, bowel
movements, and farts parallel the abject conditions of his
employment as an adjunct who moonlights as a security guard.
His search for a clean public restroom at the close of his
evening security shift at Liberty Tech is, as Pannapacker
complains, a bit of a slog. The nearly 30 pages through which
Duffy carefully considers his routine evening toilet break — its
time, location, and stall — also signal his “overworked adjunct
state” and his equally routine shame that he “hasn’t written
anything beyond email in several years.” Soon the reader, too,
begins to long for relief from his digestive issues. Duffleman’s
lack of gastrointestinal and professional movement reflects
another common quality of the Adjunctroman — neither the
protagonist nor the narrative progresses."

Comic Duffleman

Inspired by the Joseph A. Domino book review posted at the end of this exclusive interview with Cyrus Duffleman, H.E. Whitney, in The Disposable Adjunct, included some of Joe's text and rendered this graphic interpretation:

Post by Disposable Adjunct.

willing to work? able? qualified? the usual questions remain

Here's another article about American companies recruiting overseas to find capable workers--in this case, in manufacturing jobs. Together with all the article's comments below, you a get sense of the strongly divergent discourses surrounding the issue. Are Americans being ignored? Is the pay too low to attract "qualified" Americans? Are we sending too many of our teenagers off to colleges and universities and not enough to trade schools? Are we unwilling to work? Do we blame corporations, our government, or ourselves?

I don't know, but I do know that during economic booms in America, such as the late nineties, urban school districts routinely recruited abroad because the college educated Americans who would be qualified refused the work. The teachers would come countries like India, Austria, and Romania-- places where English is not the first language, but you can find a math or science teacher who speak it well enough. I suspect that the school districts were grateful to have these teachers, and yet, it could still be the case that Americans with educational certification felt ignored.

And now, we're hardly in boom times from the perspective of most Americans. We have the usual mush of positive and negative economic indicators, and from the hog slaughterhouses of North Carolina to Silicon Valley's rewarding tech economy, the multiple questions and perspectives remain, and not even a Cyrus Duffleman can offer a unified thesis.

Yeah, you had to bring that guy into it. You've got nothin', Kudera. Go back to your hole and grade papers.

LATE BREAKING NEWS: 227,000 jobs added in February and January numbers revised upward! Unemployment stays at 8.3%, gas snuggles close to $3.50 a gallon in SC, and everything remains the same, and yet will be fine.

Nathan Holic

I first learned of Nathan Holic as Lavinia Ludlow's partner in alt.punk, so this guy must be versatile. He can write fiction, edit and coach others, and draw shockingly handsome and svelte adjunct instructors with one arm tied behind his back and two fingers stuck in his mouth. But I suspect the fingers belong to his little bundle of sunshine, all he has to keep him going in this cold, relentless, backbreaking world!

Okay. Enough is enough. Here's Nathan's artistic rendering of some of the first chapter of Fight for Your Long Day. The plan is for new drawings to appear once a month at Dan Cafaro's other joint, Atticus Review.

Fight for Your Long Day, Nathan!

the saddest story i've listened to as an audiobook

Cyrus Duffleman finds himself in good company over at Iambik sharing space with arguably the greatest overlooked novel of the twentieth century, Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier.

Okay, so Ford may be the canonical genius, the great one I just mentioned as the most overlooked--yeah, but you know better to listen to what I say, and all that, but I would suggest that Cyrus's sloppy, sad-sack routines can give Ford's narrator a run for his sadness. Unless you find his troubles to be amusing.

Virginia Festival of the Book, Saturday afternoon

Thanks to big, bad Dan Cafaro of Atticus Books, Cyrus Duffleman will be making a surprise, guest appearance at the Annual Book Fair at the Virginia Festival of the Book. Look for Cyrus in the Omni Hotel, 235 W. Main Street in Charlottesville, Virginia. If he stays on task, he'll be pounding doughnuts and moving product off the Atticus table into your satchel, book bag, brief case, or hands. If not, who knows where he'll find himself?

European Horizons

Don Riggs's review of Fight for Your Long Day can be read in Romanian and English at our favorite bi- to trilingual literary blogspot (and print journal).

At the end of his journey, perhaps Cyrus Duffleman will rest easy, sigh aloud, but in a pleasant way, acknowledge his great debt to not just Romania but all of Eastern Europe.

Dr. Daniel Daniel, you are floating in a most mysterious way--with the Flying Duffler!

free lunch

In Greenville, South Carolina, we stumbled upon a free lunch at the grand opening of the new Carolina Ale House. There was so much tasty pub food we didn't have to pay for that I left almost certain something bad would happen later in the weekend. I'm not sure of why I believe in such balance, and hey, perhaps the bad thing has already happened?

After lunch, we found a free ounce of wine and French bread with olive oil in the kitchen store. The give-aways reminded me of the precarious economy, how it still seems like we're a couple months removed from revisiting a bottom or creating a new low. Still, it was impressive to see how one restaurant could instantly create 100 jobs or more, and the regional chain has plans to open up several more locations in the Carolinas, Florida, and Georgia. (To the best of my knowledge, Temple U. Freshman English isn't paying to bus their unemployed adjuncts to the next Carolina Ale House career fair.) Our server told us she had five children, and the general manager of the location introduced himself and said he has been on the payroll since August.

With all the worry about saving and the future and everything else, at home in the evening, it wasn't too difficult to decide that all the lunch leftovers would make for a fine dinner. Cyrus Duffleman would not be disappointed in me or in the hot wings we tasted.

homeless and poor

And Duffleman has the nerve to think he has problems! Is he a homeless man breaking into and reopening a bar? No. Is he earning over $10K and thus not classified as poor? Yes. So what a whiner this Duffy must be. Don't talk to me, Duffy, about your aching arches and tension headaches. Enough!

Can I get an "amen"?

Itasca Books in St. Paul, Minnesota

I'm a bit worried about Duffy's toes growing pink and numb at such a Northern storage facility and distribution center, but they sound like a nice operation. I believe they are somehow involved in shipping Greywolf and UMinnesota Press product as well.

Well, Duffy has exposure at amazon, barnes and noble, ingram (according to an email I was forwarded); he does indeed feel like a legitimate paper product packaged as a novel and intent on blowing your entire worldview to the Southern hemisphere and back because the laughs are so long and the writing so fucking good. At least in a few paragraphs.

Here is the most direct route to Duffleman as of September 1, 2010:

http://www.itascabooks.com/index.cfm?page=Detail&isbn=978-0-984510-50-4

Feel free to spread the URL if it's tax-free in your state. And, of course, until next time, Fight for Your Long Day!