Category: Other Writing
Your introduction to the Crypto-Jews of the American Southwest
Some readers are thrown by a reference in my latest story to the protagonist, home inspector and minor-TV celebrity Sadie Espinoza, who describes getting bullied in high school, noting that:
Jewish Espinozas weren’t remotely “wetbacks.” They weren’t even “immigrants”: they’d been in New Mexico—where her dad and his brother grew up—since before it was “New Mexico.” The only thing calling her “wetback” did was make it clear how stupid those girls were, like a house cat strutting around thinking it caught a snake when all it had was a shitty old lizard tail.
Some folks are confused because they had an American public school primary education east of the Mississippi (as I did), and thus don’t know that Santa Fe is the oldest state capitol in the US, having been establish 150 years before the country was founded.
A much greater portion of readers are confused because they think of all Jews as European shtetl folk who came here in the late 19th and early 20th C (as mine did), and thus know nothing about the extremely long history of Jews in the New World (short version: we’ve always been here, and you’ve never liked us).
Anyway, if you’re curious about any of this, the graphic novel El Illuminado is a good introduction to Crypto-Jews and the impact the Inquisition had on world Jewry. Maybe more importantly, it’s really fair in how it illustrates the divisions and discomforts within and among Jews of different traditions/colors/descents, as well as the way that even established, assimilated, respected, modern, “White” Jews often find themselves alienated no matter where they try to stand or sit.
To be clear: I am in no way suggesting that IKEA may pose an existential threat to the fabric of reality
My latest horror story, “The Nölmyna,” is now officially published and free to read on Reactor: https://reactormag.com/the-nolmyra-david-erik-nelson/
A few months back I hung out with Ann VanderMeer, who edited this story for Reactor, at a conference in Florida. We ended up talking about Grady Hendrix, and I mentioned that this story sort of arose out of my frustration with Hendrix’s first book, Horrorstör. It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with that book—which I really liked—just that it wasn’t the story I would have written about IKEA. This one is.
I’ve spoken before about how much of my writing (and, I believe, much of art in general) arises from frustration that some artist Isn’t Doing It Right, Dammit!™. That’s certainly the case here: I wrote “The Nölmyna,” in part, because Hendrix hadn’t Done It Right, Dammit!™, and so I’d better just jump in and take care of that.
But it wasn’t until this morning that it dawned on me how deeply unreasonable it was for me to pick up Horrorstör and expect it to be the story I expected, because I have deeply weird feelings about IKEA that are simply not the norm:
Almost 20 years ago I was diagnosed with panic disorder with agoraphobia. This is well managed now, but I continue to struggle with certain public spaces, especially those like IKEA: cavernous places that have poor sight lines, lots of people, no windows, and obtuse wayfinding. I can function in these places, but I experience dissociation and depersonalization, intrusive thoughts, a free-floating dread, and pretty much would rather be anyone or anyplace else. If you’ve ever been too stoned on too much edibles, you’re in the ballpark.
IKEA is the seat of cosmic horror for me. This morning it dawned on me that maybe other people don’t experience this. Like, when I say “I hate IKEA,” what I mean is “When I’m in IKEA, I often feel like it would be better to stop breathing and being alive anymore.” I’m beginning to suspect when other people say “I hate IKEA,” they just mean “it’s crowded and weirdly stuffy” or “that furniture only holds up half the time” or “my partner and I always get in arguments there about lamps.”
Anyway, the publisher’s legal team very nicely asked me not to call the store “IKEA” in this story. But it’s IKEA. This story is about the true nature of IKEA and the distinct possibility that, through no fault of their own, they are creating the conditions for the absorptive annihilation of All of Everything by an Eminent and Imminent Immanence. You’ve been warned.
This might be an extremely important short story to read right now
“In My Country” by Thomas Ha in Clarkesworld magazine.
As an aside, and totally unrelated to why this is an important story (and especially so right now), this piece both explains and perfectly epitomizes why I love the stories I love, and what’s missing from those I don’t love, for whatever that is worth.
Cyberpunk is Gen X’s “populuxe”—or using aesthetics to predict the future
Burning Chrome was a favorite of mine in the mid-1990s, when I first read the title story in an Oxford sci-fi anthology I found for a couple bucks at a used bookstore.
Before that decade (and century, and millennium) was done, I’d read every one of these stories more than once, fascinated with the future Gibson painted, one I could see just around the corner. Some of these stories (like “Johnny Mnemonic” and “Burning Chrome” and “Dogfight”) I read over and over and over again. The best of these (esp. those last two) are really solid, tight, classic noir tales (albeit ones modeled after Jim Thompson’s The Grifters more than Dashiel Hammett’s gumshoes). The rest are, at best, stylistic sketching exercises; they more often have punchlines than plots. Gibson wrote all but three of these stories before Neuromancer, his debut and breakout novel (published in 1984.) Prior to 1982, Gibson doesn’t appear to have precisely known what a plot is. I’m not sure he’d argue with me on that; he’s said himself that although he’d been writing “stories” since the 1970s, the first one that was actually a proper story was ”Burning Chrome” (published in 1982, and basically a prototype for Neuromancer).
Cyberpunk is a future that looks an awful lot like the past, especially now (although even then, Gibson was firmly rooted in the past, sometimes formally—as with “The Gernsback Continuum”, other times more subtly, as with the noir plots he gravitates toward, and which become the heist/resistance themes that seem to form the skeleton of most cyberpunk stories still).
I’m old now, and Gibson, it turns out, is to me what Hugo Gernsback/1950’s “Populuxe“/Frank Frazetta/“Googie”/Eero Saarinen were to him. I think it’s appropriate that these are primarily visual artists and movements: Gibson has always been more of a visual artist and stylist than a writer, despite how culturally and politically prescient his writing has been. I’m given to wonder if that is why he’s proven so upsettingly accurate in his predictions (which I don’t think he thought of as predictions at all): the “Deep Pilot” might express itself in words, but runs its pattern matching on a purely aesthetic basis. We may be talking apes today, but at heart we will always be the monkeys that first daubed paintings of the world we hoped—or feared—we’d soon see on French cave walls.
“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
William Gibson
The bravest and most horrifying book I’ve read in ages
Before this year, I had no clue The Power or Naomi Alderman existed—despite the acclaim the book met when it was published in 2016, and the fact that its apparently been made into an Amazon mini-series starring Toni Collette, who I absolutely love. A colleague in a crit group read a story I was working on, and recommended I read this. She was absolutely right.
When I say this is the bravest and most horrifying book I’ve read in ages, I’m not exaggerating. I actually had to stop about 10 minutes from the end because I was in a Thai restaurant in Orlando and was on the verge of bursting into tears, and didn’t want everyone staring at me. This book is easily better, and darker, than Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale (both a book and artist I hold in hella high regard).
One clarification: when I told my wife that this book was the bravest and most horrifying thing I’d read in years, she totally misunderstood what I found horrifying in the book. She assumed I was upset by the rapes. There are several very graphic and traumatic rapes of men by women in this novel, as well as broader sexual subjugation of men.
Frankly, none of that really bothered me. I’ve read fictional depictions and non-fictional accounts of the rapes of men and boys that I’ve found more upsetting. Talk to anyone who’s worked for child protective services and you’ll hear an earful. Humans are, on balance, awfully creative when it comes to being awful.
What got me about this book is that, evidently and despite it all, there was some small part of me that had continued to really and deeply believe that “everything would be better if women were in charge.” Alderman meticulously dismembered and violated that foolish, optimistic child that was still hiding inside me.
Highway Gothic (and its “Eldritch Serif” variant)
“Highway Gothic” is the informal name of the sans-serif typeface you see on American road signs:
It’s formally known as the Standard Alphabets For Traffic Control Devices or the FHWA Series fonts. It was originally designed just after WWII, and optimized over time for legibility at a distance while traveling at high speeds.
I sorta love Highway Gothic. In part, that’s because I sort of love basic, sturdy industrial design; I’m the one guy who sorta loves the low-rent Brutalism of poured-concrete parking structures. But a big part of my love of that arises from the unintentional aesthetics that arise, for example, from the decay of that concrete smoothing to nubby rubble and rebar, or the way you can often see the grain of the plywood forms used to pour those Brutalist slabs.
Which brings us to why I have an especially tender spot for Highway Gothic:
I live in Michigan, where harsh weather and a poorly funded road maintenance program conspire to create an organically emergent “Eldritch Serif” variant of this sans-serif typeface. Here are a few choice examples from around town, where nature chose to add spidery tails and flourishes where man had specifically shaved them away, giving the letters subtle little horns and roots. The remind me of the tagin—little decorative flourishes or “crowns”—added to Hebrew letters in sacred texts, and signs of unrevealed truths; they are letters that are written, but we don’t yet know how to read.
We put up street signs; enthalpy and entropy add further signs of unrevealed truths buried in them. It takes brutal corners and straight lines, and grows roots and branches and tentacles from them.
The “Eldritch serif” variant of Highway Gothic is sort of my favorite thing, especially in the cold and gloom of Michigan winter.
This is an especially gnarly one:
Merry Xmas! Please beware of “suicide cables”!🎄🔌🙅♀️
ANNUAL REMINDER:
‘Tis the season to hang your Xmas lights—and, for many people, to hang one strand backwards and instead of pulling it down, head to the hardware store in search of an “adapter” that is colloquially referred to as a “suicide cable.”
DO NOT DO THIS!
I’m not kidding around. If you don’t kill yourself with such an arrangement, you can easily kill some hapless person who stumbles across your work later.
Our Most Important Thanksgiving Traditions 🦃💀
I repost this (or a variant of it) every year. This is a year, and so I repost. QED. After all, without our traditions, we are as shakey as a fiddler on the roof.
1. “What do Jews do on Thanksgiving?”
I wrote this essay a few years back, as a little bonus for the folks kind enough to have subscribed to my newsletter. A good friend, Chris Salzman, was gracious enough to make something pretty of it. I relish the opportunity to reshare it each year, and I’m doing so once again. Every word here is both true and factual—which is a harder trick than you’d think.
You’ll be 15 minutes into that Lesser Family Feast in Michigan when your mother-in-law will turn to you and ask:
“What do Jews do on Thanksgiving?”
You should be prepared for this sort of thing in Michigan. But even though I’m warning you in advance, you still won’t be prepared.…
(read more: IN MICHIGAN: A PRIMER, A TRAVELOGUE)
2. “As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!”
THANKSGIVING TURKEY GIVEAWAY! (WKRP in Cincinnati) from Tony DeSanto on Vimeo.
I repost this every year, because I love this gag, and because watching this on TV—and rehashing it with my mom and sisters each year—is one of my fondest holiday memories. But it is, in my humble, a damn-near perfect gag. That’s saying something, because I find single-camera laugh-track situation comedies almost entirely unbearable to watch. If you wanna read more of my thoughts on this specific gag and what it can teach writers, you can do so here.)
3. “…your people will wear cardigans and drink highballs; we will sell our bracelets by the road sides…”
4. ♬♫♪ “Caught his eye on turkey day / As we both ate Pumpkin Pie … ” ♬♫♪
5. The Alice’s Restaurant Massacre (in four part harmony)
I’m a child of the 1980s, so most of my nostalgic holiday memories are TV-related. 🤷♀️
I hope your T-day is good and sweet. Gobblegobble! 🦃💀
We’ve Always Been Here, and You’ve Never Liked Us: Exploring Michigan’s First Jewish Burial Ground
It’s my town’s bicentennial year, and the local library graciously granted me the opportunity to write about The Old Jewish Burial Ground here—which was, in fact, the first Jewish cemetery in the state, despite being a fair distance from the Detroit Metro Area (which is where most Michigan Jews have lived).
SPOILER ALERT: the old Jewish burial ground is mostly underneath a big university building that was built in the 1930s, long after that first Jewish community had mysteriously left entirely of their own free will and not for any unpleasant or embarrassing reasons.
Kudos to the library, who agreed to go forward on this endeavor, even though the working title I pitched it under was “We’ve Always Been Here, and You’ve Never Liked Us.”
