How Can a $101 Million a Year CEO Help "People Get the Care They Need at an Affordable Price?"

In 2005, we entitled a post, "How Can a $124.8 Million a Year CEO Make Health Care More Affordable?"  At that time, we contrasted the enormous compensation given to the then CEO of UnitedHealth, Dr William McGuire, with the stated mission of his corporation.  Since then, we have traced the travails of UnitedHealth and its leadership.  Dr McGuire was eventually accused of receiving backdated stock options (which at one time raised his personal fortune to over $1 billion), and was pushed into retirement.  UnitedHealth was accused of a variety of management and ethical lapses.  The rather sorry story as of April, 2010 was summarized here.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.  The Minneapolis Star-Tribune just reported:
Stephen Hemsley, a serious and studious man, is known for his marathon-like work schedule, which regularly includes Saturdays and Sundays, in his role as chief executive of Minnetonka-based UnitedHealth Group.

Now, he also is known as the highest-paid CEO in Minnesota with a 2009 pay package totaling $101.96 million, six times the amount paid to the next CEO in the Star Tribune's annual survey of the state's 100 highest-paid chief executives at publicly traded companies.

But Hemsley's big pay package is also a vestige of the company's former practice of loading executive compensation heavily with stock options, a practice that changed in the wake of a crippling backdating scandal four years ago.

Those options, granted under a different regime of board directors, accounted for $98.6 million of Hemsley's income in 2009.

The attempts company officials made to minimize Hemsley's outsized compensation were almost funny:
UnitedHealth officials assert that Hemsley's 2009 pay package minus the 10-year-old options was $8.9 million, far less than the compensation paid to CEOs in other health insurance organizations.

But Hemsley did exercise the options, so he did receive the additional $98.6 million.

Hemsley also seems on target to get gargantuan compensation this year too:
Nonetheless, Hemsley has already put up good compensation numbers for 2010 with the exercising of additional options granted after 1999 worth $21 million. He also controls 6 million exercisable and unexercisable options, half of which are underwater or below the stock's current value.

The cringe-inducing contrast is with UnitedHealth's high-minded mission statement:
Our mission is to help people live healthier lives.

* We seek to enhance the performance of the health system and improve the overall health and well-being of the people we serve and their communities.
* We work with health care professionals and other key partners to expand access to quality health care so people get the care they need at an affordable price.
* We support the physician/patient relationship and empower people with the information, guidance and tools they need to make personal health choices and decisions.

Hemsley's compensation could have provided "care they need" to quite a few people at an affordable price.

More to the point, it is hard to imagine that a company that feels the need to pay so much to its CEO, and a CEO that can accept such riches, have the slightest understanding or interest in providing people "the care they need at an affordable price."

In this cynical age, I doubt many people credit the UnitedHealth mission statement with being more than advertising fluff. Nonetheless, I suspect most people believe that our society should try to provide as many people as possible with "the care they need at an affordable price," but realize that we are far from doing so. Health care insurance companies/ managed care organizations that see fit to make their hired leaders extremely rich seem to be part of the problem, not the solution.

"Smoke Detector" - Medical Center Leader (and Former Biotech CEO) Outed as Tobacco Investor

Last year we posted about the seemingly incongruous choice of a wealthy biotechnology executive with little academic or practice experience to run the prestigious University of California - San Francisco, a health oriented university housing a respected medical school.  We wondered whether her corporate background would make it difficult to uphold the university's academic and patient care missions.

In line with our concerns, Duff Wilson, writing in the New York Times, reported:
When Dr. Susan Desmond-Hellmann was named chancellor of the University of California, San Francisco, last summer, she took over a medical institution focused on world health generally and tobacco control in particular.

But she forgot one thing in adjusting to her new role: personal stock holdings listed last year in the range of $100,000 to $1 million in Altria, owner of Philip Morris USA, the maker of Marlboro cigarettes. Altria has been blamed for thousands of deaths and repeatedly criticized by the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the university.

Last week, a day after The New York Times inquired about the Altria stock, Dr. Desmond-Hellmann and her husband, also a doctor, ordered it to be immediately sold and imposed 'values screening' on their personal investments.

Experts on tobacco control were aghast:
Dr. Stanton A. Glantz, director of the university’s tobacco control center, said he was unaware of Dr. Desmond-Hellmann’s Altria stock, which was contained in a university filing but not made public until now, after a public records request by a former student who passed it on to The Times.

“I do find that kind of shocking, but at least she got rid of it,” Dr. Glantz said on Monday, adding that Dr. Desmond-Hellmann had been very supportive of the center.

Dr. Kenneth E. Warner, dean of the school of public health at the University of Michigan and a national antitobacco leader, said, “I find it frankly a bit appalling that the chancellor of a major medical center would have held such stock. It strikes me as unthinking, frankly.”

We should give Dr Desmond-Hellmann credit for selling her Altria stock as soon as its connotations were made plain to her. (And at least she was not on the board of a tobacco company, to our knowledge, as was one former president of a university and large health sciences center.)

However, this little incident underlines the clash between the culture that dominates large health care corporations and the mission of medical schools and academic medical centers. In the last 30 years, academic medicine has rushed to embrace the reigning corporate culture, not to mention corporate money. I submit that this embrace has been at the peril of the fundamental academic and patient care missions.

Academic medical leaders need to promote better patient care, and honest, responsible teaching and research. To do so, they may have to give up some of the glitz, glamor, and cash proffered by industry. If they do not make this sacrifice, they risk losing the trust of an increasingly skeptical, if not cynical public.

Insel Admits His Statements "May be Viewed as Misleading"

Dr Bernard Carroll has posted several times, most recently here, about shenanigans by "key opinion leaders" in psychiatry whose apparently academic writing and speeches have conveyed messages in line with the marketing agendas of drug and device companies, while they downplayed or concealed their financial ties to these companies.  Lately, Dr Carroll noted how the current director of the US National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH), Dr Thomas Insel, has defended Dr Charles Nemeroff, whose recent move to the University of Miami let him shed sanctions imposed by Emory University for his failure to disclose conflicts of interest while he was there. Dr Carroll wrote, "For the past three months, Insel has been trying to put some distance between himself and Nemeroff, but the public isn’t buying it. I have called his statements disingenuous...."

Dr Carroll is on vacation, so in his absence, I note the following from a brief article in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
The director of the National Institute of Mental Health, Thomas R. Insel, has softened his denial of a mutually helpful relationship with Charles B. Nemeroff, a university researcher found to have repeatedly collected undisclosed corporate payments. In an update to his official blog posting, Dr. Insel said his initial denial of job assistance from Dr. Nemeroff 'may be viewed as misleading,' and acknowledged that Dr. Nemeroff served in key positions related to Dr. Insel's hiring by Emory University.

This seems to corroborate Dr Carroll's skepticism. I wonder what other statements by Dr Insel, or Dr Nemeroff for that matter, ought to be "viewed as misleading?"

We have said repeatedly that commercially sponsored "key opinion leaders" are really part-time drug marketers disguising themselves as academics or distinguished practitioners. The deceptions inherent in these roles seem to lead to a certain habitually elastic approach to the truth.

Medical academics and practitioners will need a renewed commitment to honesty and transparency if they want to regain the respect of an increasingly skeptical, if not cynical public.

BLOGSCAN - Deceptive Pharmaceutical Marketing

Perhaps in honor of the recently concluded meeting organized by Dr Adriene Fugh-Berman and her colleagues at PharmedOut.org on the pharmaceutical industry and its influence on continuing medical education, three significant posts appeared this week about deceptive pharmaceutical marketing practices. 
On the Health Business Blog, David Williams analyzed how a former pharmaceutical and biotechnology executive spun the Vioxx case, blaming it all on the public's risk aversion. 
On the Hooked: Ethics, Medicine and Pharma Blog, Dr Howard Brody summarized two significant articles by Kalman Applbaum on complex psychological campaigns, really versions of disinformation campaigns, used to to market pharmaceuticals. 
On the Carlat Psychiatry Blog, Dr Daniel Carlat published a letter about life at a medical school department lead by Dr Charles Nemeroff, one of the "key opinion leaders" most lavishly paid by pharmaceutical companies to help them market questionable drugs for questionable reasons, and giving observations on Dr Nemeroff's new career.

Sasha Fletcher - At that point the water will be right next to the clouds & they will be so close that they could kiss but they will not kiss

Sasha Fletcher, When All our Days Are Numbered Marching Bands Will Fill the Streets & We Will Not Hear Them Because We Will Be Upstairs in the Clouds, Mud Luscious Press, 2010.

"My advice: those who are to read Sasha Fletcher's delightful enjoinder WHEN ALL OUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED should go into an empty house of an afternoon, shut themselves in a backroom closet on a low shelf, & read straight through without stopping." - Jesse Ball

"Fletcher belongs to a new generation of writers who dare to risk language & imagination in equal measure. Every sharp line cuts & curls & the result is a world both familiar & exotic. This novella is part concept album, part epic poem, part twisted fable. A dream & a flood." - Robert Lopez

"Sasha Fletcher, with his dream catastrophes & immense loves, can wand us into a new world. Here is a story that glistens." - Deb Olin Unferth


"In the second chapter of Walden, the nineteenth-century naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau asserted that the ultimate creative act is, fundamentally, an act of self-creation, an act in which the artist shapes not objects in the world, but his own view of the world:
'It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. '
Sasha Fletcher’s first book When All our Days Are Numbered... takes this charge seriously. Its narrator constructs his own vision of the world, portraying it through a flexible lens of creative possibility. For Fletcher’s narrator, the line between imaginary and real is often a tenuous one – one that can be manipulated and crossed almost at will. He tells us, “I kept thinking about it until it was like I did it, which was great”. This is, after all, what the artist, and especially the creative writer, does.
With When All our Days Are Numbered, Fletcher celebrates the creative act and explores the nature of art, searching for the boundary at which the imagined completely – or almost completely – consumes our experience, searching for the ways that art allows us to share our lives with others, but also for the ways in which art can threaten our connection to others, to the world. He demonstrates an intoxicating creative power, magically reconstructing everyday experience through association and metaphor, but in doing so, he also demonstrates the risk inherent in the creative act: that of becoming disconnected from the world. He recognizes the power of language, and he uses it here to find (or, perhaps, to create) a sense of wonder in the world, but he also recognizes that the artist risks losing touch with what is real, risks mistaking the symbol for what it represents.
The book opens with a warning from its unnamed female character to the narrator: “Don’t get carried away out here”. And in fact, the narrator is carried away almost immediately (and quite literally) “by a string of balloons”. Throughout the novella, this pair strikes a balance between the creative possibilities of art and the practical realities of everyday life. When the narrator muses, “Few things are probably outside of the realm of possibility,” she tells him, “Stop thinking about the realm of possibility”. When he creates something, like a pair of trees that form a hammock, and offers it as something magical, she is quick to point out, “You just made that. . . Out of brown paper”. And early in the book, when she reminds him that “There is... A world outside what you can build”, he is not so certain: “I wrote the word waterfall on the wall. I hoped for the best”.
It might not be going too far, here, to say that he trusts the written word waterfall more than he would an actual waterfall–that he trusts the symbol of the thing more than he would trust the thing itself, if it were there.
The narrator of this book is driven by his desire to create, and by the desire to share that creation with another person. He envisions a whale, unloved, and tells his female companion, “If I were the whale I would have hanged myself from that old dead tree over there”, and it doesn’t matter that a whale can’t really hang himself. What matters is the reason he would kill himself: the “Infinite sadness” of being alone.
The creative act offers a possibility for companionship, for connection between people, at least in as much as art allows the artist’s view of the world to be shared with another person. And this narrator wants to share his artistic vision absolutely. Holding his companion’s hand, he thinks “about how if I move my fingers right then we will trade fingers”, and this is his desire, to enter completely into another: ”I wanted to wear you like a skin.”
What he longs for is intersubjectivity: not merely to tell her his vision of the world, or for her to tell him hers, but to enter each other entirely, literally to experience the world as the other.
She, however, is not so certain. In the novella’s conclusion, he calls for her to join him on the roof, to see the world from his perspective, and she pleads for him to join her in reality, to “Come down from there,” promising him, “We’ll just sit & we’ll eat & we’ll be so close that we’re touching”. But he refuses, and his insistence that she join him comes at a cost: in joining him from his artistic vantage point, a place in the sky, she is “covered in bruises”, and she has to admit, ultimately, that “we all of us got a little carried away”.
There is a line here, a space that keeps people separate, a space that keeps what is imagined separate from what is real, a space which is damaging to cross completely but which must be narrowed, if art is to do its work. Fletcher envisions our lives as the intermediary tension of this space, a narrow band between the isolation of water and the expansiveness of clouds, between the dark reality of water and the electrical creative potential of clouds:
'...& at that point the water will be right next to the clouds & they will be so close that they could kiss but they will not kiss, they will both just stand there looking at each other until forever.'
It is important, here, that clouds and water are, elementally, the same. But the form they take is very different, and it is on the tense boundary of these two forms, the edge of the real and the imagined, that Fletcher’s artist tries to balance.
Ultimately, this book strikes me as enamored with creation, its narrator (and, I presume, its writer) very much in love with art and the way that art allows us to see meaning in the world. He recognizes the power of the artist to re-create or re-envision the world, but he also knows that like a balloon, he needs an anchor to the world, to the real. As much as art offers a new, higher perspective, as much as art offers an escape from reality among the clouds, he fears being lost entirely in that vision, in a world where there will be “no one [to] tell me when I was getting carried away”." - Troy Urquhart

"With When All Our Days Are Numbered... Sasha Fletcher has distinguished himself as a writer of great imagination, a careful craftsman of sentences, one attentive to tone and rhythm, to the visual dynamics of the page, to a profluence not beholden to the unbreakable chain of this-follows-that, a profluence sensitive to the reader’s inherent capacity to fill in the mortar between the bricks of text. The novella’s unnamed narrator, a bemused creator who, traveling to and from a kind of dreamland, performs many magical acts like walking into telephone lines and out of phones, like “building” a garden, steamboat, window, river, meadow, fridge, table, stove, sink, and even a well on the roof. At one point, he even tries “so hard to make lightning come spilling out of the clouds.” And that “so” is one signal of the narrator’s earnestness. If there is any single theme to Fletcher’s novella it is acceptance, not a bored resignation but a surrendering to life’s absurdity, its whimsy, even its flimsiness. The narrator, after disbelieving that his “stories are getting sadder & sadder every day”, asserts: “There are lots of things on this earth not worth questioning.” And toward the end of the novella says, “There are some things we know & there are some things we don’t & for everything else just close your eyes and go to sleep. Tomorrow is another day.”
The narrator is also a promethean figure of sorts:
'I had some fire in a bowl. Where did you get that fire she asked. I can show you if you want. Whatever she said. She said You probably just poured lighter-fluid in the bowl & set it on fire. I shook the bowl & the flame fell up into the air & right back into the bowl. Where did you get that fire she asked. I set the bowl down & I showed her.'
After hiding lunch “inside a special pocket” kept “for things to forget about”, the narrator says, “Few things are probably outside the realm of possibility.” That adverbial modifier gives the sentence an even greater degree of uncertainty in a world where everything seems possible. Though certainly whimsical, this world is not as innocent as it first, on the surface, appears. At one point, the narrator hides from “the vast encroaching unknowing.” he gets his head “popped” off and then “stitched” back on again. He also threatens to grind a cop into a beach if he doesn’t build him an ocean. Cops split open the heads of garbage men with billy clubs, “seagulls & seashells & little baby ducks & a giant wind that made enormous waves and sunshine & hot dog carts & you” flying out of their opened skulls. A fireman cuts his own throat with an axe and a bird flies out of his neck. A sex-deprived whale inadvertently jumps into a ship’s propellers and is “chopped into a million pieces.” The narrator, suffering from “infinite sadness”, wants to hang himself from an “old dead tree.” You’ll also find a great deal of shooting at the wind. Later, in one of the book’s most engaging passages (of which I speak more about below), the narrator shares: “I was thinking about being lonely.” And one of the creepiest exchanges occurs toward the end of the book:
'I decided to shoot sleep until it was dead.
You cannot kill sleep she told me.
I decided to kill waking up until it was dead.
Why don’t you just kill yourself she said.
One of these days I will go to bed & I will wake up & everything will feel the way it’s supposed to feel.'

Because they’re embedded in such a strange context, the few references to pop culture pop out from the text and seem even stranger than the very strange world that Fletcher creates:
'I put a picture of Clint Eastwood’s face over my own so you could be more comfortable around me.
[….]
We were watching The Weather Channel. It seemed to show the future. It was as though it was raining inside the TV. We watched a thunderstorm eat the sky. The TV was a window.
[….]
No I saw it in Pinocchio. [It’s the Disney film that’s being referred to here.]
[….]
How do you know the chimney will not get us home she said. I said because I am not Dick Van Dyke & you are not Mary Poppins & neither of us have any umbrellas.
[….]
and there are wild salmon that when you cut them open they are redder than kool-aid…'
Another thing I enjoyed about When All Our Days Are Numbered... are the incantatory repetitions, especially the anaphoric cascades:
'I wanted apples to grow. I wanted flowers to grow. I wanted balloons to grow. I wanted very tall trees to grow & for balloons to grow from them. I wanted something incredible to rise up out of the ground & straight into the clouds & for it to devour us all.'
The intensification of emotion reaches fever pitch in the following passage:
'I was thinking about being lonely. I was thinking about feeling lonely. I was thinking about worrying about loneliness. I was worrying about loneliness. I was worrying about worry. I was worried. I was worried the thunder would wake her up & she would not go back to sleep & she would be cranky & I would have to deal with that. I was thinking about how I could always walk away when things got hard but I would end up walking really far down the road & suddenly every house I walked into was mine & all my teeth were gathered on the walls all nailed up like my mouth and smiling.'
The shifts between the repetitions are artfully handled here. Notice how the first three sentences, the first anaphoric sequence, transitions to the next four sentences; how the last sentence of the second anaphoric sequence is tweaked to take the last word, “worried,” as the kernel of its repetitive clause; and, lastly, how the last sentence in the passage acts as a kind of voluble coda that once again cycles back to the first anaphoric sequence.
There’s also an awkwardness to some of the phrasing in the narrative that would not be smoothed out with punctuation:
'I am I said Listening.
[….]
Did you she said See my bird last night?
[….]
There is she told me A world outside what you can build.
[….]
We are they said Building you a beach.
[….]
What I asked Did he think of that?'

At first, I found the clunky placement of dialogue tags annoying, but I slowly began to read it as an intentional reflection of the novella’s refractive narration.
There is one wrong note here, however. I’d call it a minor quibble if it weren’t for the overall pristine quality of attention to the crafting of the text, a text where any misplaced jot or tittle will stick out like a blemish on newborn. Considering the narrative’s forgoing of most punctuation save periods, apostrophes, and occasional question marks, Fletcher’s intermittent use of commas (e.g., “This is, I decided, the big deal about heaven,”), especially after having been trained from the outset that they weren’t necessary to convey sense, jarred my reading of the text. And there are some usage consistency issues with question marks (e.g., “Are you listening she said?”; “Who she said Were you talking about earlier.”) Perhaps Fletcher would have benefited from another look at one of his blurber’s books, namely, Robert Lopez who, in his most recent novel, dropped commas, colons, semicolons—actually all punctuation save the period, hyphen, and apostrophe—and produced a text marked by its eccentric rhythm, its collision of thoughts, produced a spigot pouring out thoughts, shutting itself on and off. With a quote from Frank Stanford used as an epigraph (“it wasn’t a dream it was a flood”) to adorn his novella, it’s possible that Fletcher was influenced by Stanford’s epic poem The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You which is devoid of punctuation (not to mention its absence of stanza breaks).
Sharing an affinity with such writers as Jesse Ball, Aaron Burch, Lily Hoang, and Shane Jones, Fletcher’s When All Our Days Are Numbered... bubbles with a fabulist sensibility and glows with light; and there is a pervasive lightness and a glassine quality to its prose; and with its use of anaphora sometimes achieves a kind of prophetic, almost invocatory voice:
'One of these days she said You will stand on a roof & not come down.
[….]
One of these days she said I will break all of your bones & use them as a tent & you will always be there.
One of these days marching bands will fill the streets & they will be far off & then they will not be anymore at all & they will be upon us like so many things have been visited upon so many other things over the course of history, which is a vast & varied course, with all sorts of openings & closings & things going in & things going out, much like the tide, but also things other than water
." - John Madera


An excerpt :

"I heard a cop come through the faucet this morning. I sent him on outside to grow me an ocean. I told him that when he did I would grind him into a beach.

There was a cop in the back yard again. He was building us a deck. But he didn’t have any wood. I had no idea what he was trying to hammer together back there. HEY I said. SCOOT.

Failing that I told him to grow me an ocean. I told him I HEARD YOU WERE BUILDING US A BEACH. What I asked Did he think of that?

*

I buried the bathtub today. She went to go run a bath, & a cop came out of the spigot & into the tub. WHAT HAVE YOU GOT TO SAY FOR YOURSELF she managed to finally ask. Out of his mouth tumbled little pink seashells.

*

WHAT’S UP WITH THAT the cop asked. He meant the yard. The mound of dirt where the bathtub was buried. I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT I said. & WHAT ABOUT THIS BEACH BUSINESS. YOU CAN’T HAVE A BEACH WITHOUT AN OCEAN he said.

I am going to grow an ocean in my heart. I am going to drown in it.

DIDN’T I TELL YOU TO GROW AN OCEAN IN MY BACKYARD I said. The cop said NO. He said THAT WAS ANOTHER COP. YOU WERE GOING TO GRIND HIM UP INTO A BEACH WHEN HE WAS FINISHED. WHATEVER HAPPENED TO HIM I asked. He told me THAT COP RAN AROUND & HE RAN AROUND. HE DRESSED HIS GUN UP LIKE A BIRD & IT ATE ALL THE TEETH RIGHT OUT OF HIS MOUTH. HE RAN AROUND & WHEN HE RAN AROUND HE RAN AROUND YELLING. HE BUILT A TENT IN THE STREET & IN IT HE MADE A HOLE IN THE GROUND. I DON’T KNOW WHAT HE WAS DOING. HE KEPT ON EATING SEASHELLS. OR PUTTING THEM IN HIS MOUTH. WHATEVER.

LISTEN I told the cop I NEED YOU TO FIND OUT ABOUT THIS BEACH FOR ME. I NEED TO KNOW IF THIS IS REAL HERE. PLEASE I said.

*

THERE’S SOMETHING IN THE GARDEN she said. OTHER THAN PLANTS I said. OTHER THAN THE DRAWINGS OF PLANTS YOU CUT OUT & PUT ON STICKS & PLACED IN THE GARDEN. & THAT OTHER THING. RIGHT I said THAT OTHER THING. YEAH she said. She said I DON’T UNDERSTAND THE THINGS THAT HAPPEN AROUND YOU ANYMORE."

WellPoint: Don't Know Much About Computer Programming; Aetna: Don't Know Much About Mathematics

Big US based health care insurance companies have not been covering themselves in glory in the last week.

Aetna's Math Errors

First, there was the case of Aetna's mathematical prowess, e.g., as reported by the Los Angeles Times:
A second insurance company in California has killed plans for double-digit rate hikes for individual policyholders because of errors in its filing that would have inflated premiums, state regulators said Thursday.

Connecticut-based Aetna Inc. had sought an average 19% increase in rates for its 65,000 individual customers, but pulled back after multiple math errors in its paperwork were found by its own staff and by an independent consultant working for the state.

Aetna's decision follows a similar move by Anthem Blue Cross, which canceled a rate increase of as much as 39% for many of its 800,000 California policyholders in April after the state consultant found calculation errors in its filing with the California Insurance Department.

Of course, Aetna tried to minimize the story:
An Aetna spokeswoman said the company found 'a miscalculation not previously detected' when it conducted a third round of internal reviews.

'This was a simple human error,' said spokeswoman Anjanette Coplin, who did not elaborate.

However,
'There were multiple errors … in the way [Aetna] annualized premiums and in the compounding of the rate increase,' said state Insurance Department spokesman Darrel Ng.

Of course, somehow the errors all were in Aetna's favor:
Even with the new disclosure requirements, regulators have limited authority to block rate increases. They can do so only if insurers fail to spend at least 70% of their premiums on medical claims.

In Aetna's recent rate filing, the insurer said its plan met the 70% minimum. But once the errors were identified, medical-claim spending fell below the 70% requirement. The proposed rates were higher than they should have been, officials said.

WellPoint's Computer Errors

A few minutes ago, the Associated Press reported:
WellPoint Inc. has notified 470,000 individual insurance customers that medical records, credit card numbers and other sensitive information may have been exposed in the latest security breach of the health insurer's records.

The Indianapolis company said the problem stemmed from an online program customers can use to track the progress of their application for coverage. It was fixed in March.

Spokeswoman Cynthia Sanders said an outside vendor had upgraded the insurer's application tracker last October and told the insurer all security measures were back in place.

But a California customer discovered that she could call up confidential information of other customers by manipulating Web addresses used in the program. Customers use a Web site and password to track their applications.

Note that this security breach was potentially serious:
WellPoint's security breach doesn't crack the top 10 in terms of number of people who may have had information exposed, said Paul Stephens, the [Privacy Rights Clearinghouse]organization's director of policy and advocacy. Even so, he labeled the breach 'very serious' because it possibly involved both financial and medical information.

This is not the first time WellPoint's computers and software have violated the privacy of its applicants or customers:
Two years ago, WellPoint offered free credit monitoring after it said personal information for about 128,000 customers in several states had been exposed online. In 2006, backup computer tapes containing the personal information of 200,000 of its members were stolen from a Massachusetts vendor's office.

Summary

Of course, everyone makes mistakes.  However, one would expect that at least health insurance companies/ managed care organizations ought to be able to do the math necessary to support their rate proposals correctly, and keep their policy-holders' and applicants' personal information confidential.  These would seem to be fundamental competencies that such organizations ought to display.  Of course, one can find other examples of lack the lack of competency (and worse) displayed by both Aetna and WellPoint

Furthermore, anyone can make mistakes, but in the real world, those who preside over such mistake-prone enterprises often do not do too well.  However, in the bizarre world of large health care organizations, the executives who preside over the ongoing bumbling just make more and more money, under the pretense that their continuing brilliant leadership just leads to one triumph after another. 

As we noted here, WellPoint CEO Angela Braly's total compensation increased in 2009 to an outsized $13.1 million, with the executives just underneath her paid proportionately well.  Per its 2010 proxy statement, WellPoint's
Total Rewards compensation program is designed to attract, engage, motivate and retain a talented team of executive officers and to appropriately reward those executive officers for their contributions to our business and our members. We seek to accomplish this goal in a way that is closely aligned with the long-term interests of our shareholders and the expectations of our members and health care providers.

I suspect that WellPoint's members' expectations did not include the three computer security breaches noted above.

Similarly, according to its 2010 proxy statement, Aetna CEO Ronald A Williams' total compensation in 2009 was a mere $18,058,162. Other top executives made proportionate amounts, from more than $1 million to more than $12 million. The rationale underlying executive compensation includes:
We seek to implement a pay-for-performance philosophy by tying a significant portion of our executives’ compensation to their achievement of financial and other goals that are linked to the Company’s business strategy and each executive’s contributions towards the achievement of those goals.

To me, avoiding mathematical errors in calculating policy premiums ought to be part of the company's goals linked to its business strategy.

An old rock song that starts with "don't know much about history," may have a certain charm.  Health insurance companies that cannot accurately calculate premiums or protect the confidentiality of policy-holders' computerized data has none. 

As long as "imperial CEOs" can continue to get extremely rich while presiding over incompetence and stupidity, if not worse (see here), we can expect the foolishness to continue.  Meanwhile, the foolishness drives up costs and drives down quality of health care for the poor suffering patients, let alone the physicians and other health care professionals who must deal with it.

To really reform health care, we need to provide incentives for competent, honest leadership, and make that leadership accountable for its shortcomings.

Professional Integrity for Sale? “Sure,” Says Medscape!

Some chiropractors also practice homeopathy. According to Frank King, D.C., many more should be doing just that:


Homeopathy is an energetic form of natural medicine that corrects nerve interferences, absent nerve reflexes, and pathological nerve response patterns that the chiropractic adjustment alone does not correct. The appropriate homeopathic remedies will eliminate aberrant nerve reflexes and pathological nerve responses which cause recurrent subluxation complexes.

Not only does homeopathy correct nerve interferences, it empowers the doctor of chiropractic to reach the entire nervous system. What this means is that we can now better affect the whole person, and all of the maladies that affect us. Homeopathy’s energetic approach reaches deep within the nervous system, correcting nerve interferences where the hands of chiropractic alone cannot reach. Homeopathy is the missing link that enables the chiropractor to truly affect the whole nervous system!

But that’s not all:


Financial Rewards

Homeopathy means a multiple increase in business. Personally, I have been able to see and effectively help more patients in less time. The additional cash flow from broadening your scope of practice, increasing your patient volume and selling the homeopathic remedies is a wonderful adjunct. Better yet are the secondary financial benefits:

  • Homeopathy is like an extension of you that the patient can take with them to apply throughout each day in between visits. The actual therapeutic benefits of homeopathy along with the inner comforts of the patient as they connect you with each dose they take.
  • The dynamic broadening of your effective scope of practice multiplies the number of patients you can help and the multiple problems that each patient usually has. As you correct one set of problems, there are commonly other problems most patients don’t even tell their chiropractors. This doesn’t have to be the case anymore. Homeopathy empowers the chiropractor to correct conditions ranging from allergies to warts with incredible effectiveness!
  • Obviously, the rule of multiples will exponentially increase when a homeopathic procedure is properly implemented into your practice. Many of the conditions people are suffering with have no viable solution without the dynamic duo of chiropractic and homeopathy.
You can be the doctor people will seek out, travel long distances to see, and pay cash for your valuable services. Take it from someone who has experienced it first hand, it’s a great position to be in.


This is no surprise. Most chiropractors relinquished whatever ethical integrity they might have had when they bought into the “subluxation” myth, and the field as a whole has a fine tradition of “practice building.”

Naturopaths, likewise, don’t mind winking at practice ethics in order to make an extra buck. Nor do MD quacks, of course. Hey, it’s getting harder and harder to make a living just by slogging through the morass of needy patients, onerous third-party billing requirements, diminishing payments, increasingly cumbersome practice guidelines, next-to-impossible-to-keep-up-with (nothing to say of tedious and technical!) medical literature, and all the rest. Why not sprinkle your practice with a little ‘diagnostic’ sugar that will appease those clingy patients—for a while, anyway—and that you won’t have to find billing codes for (because there aren’t any)? Heck, why not check out this offering from “bio-pro, inc. Amazing Anti-Aging Solutions (Healthier Patients, More Patients)”:


HOWW TOOOO ….

The “must do” seminars for those who own or are managing a Complimentary [sic]Medicine Practice.

Three day course teaches you:

How to relate to the patient, evaluate, test and diagnose

How to use solutions, mixtures, methods, supplies and equipment

How to protocol administration for Chelation, Oxidation, Chelox, TriOx, Ascorbates, UVBI

How to design and organize your office

How to hire and fire staff and to computerize

How to use public relations and marketing

How to manage compliance with Medicare, State Medical Boards and governmental regulatory agencies

Manuals included…

Each attendee receives one set of training materials, including:

Protocol Manual

Physicians Manual

Office Procedure Manual

Forms Book

Marketing Manual

Patient Results Manual

Employee Manual

Audio tapes

and other related material.

Bio-pro was founded in 1978 by the late Charles H. Farr, MD, PhD, the self-styled “father of oxidative medicine,” who was also a founder of the American College for Advancement in Medicine, the Mother of All Pseudomedical Pseudoprofessional Organizations (PPO). But none of this is surprising, right? After all, quacks quack.

What may have come as a surprise to beleaguered physicians who still play by the rules was this offering, just a few days ago, from Medscape Business of Medicine:


Six Ways to Earn Extra Income From Medical
Activities

You’re chasing after claims but watching reimbursement sink.

It’s a common story, and primary care doctors and even specialists are keeping their ears to the ground for other ways to boost their bottom line. Luckily, doctors have some fairly lucrative options that can help them maintain their income — and perhaps even increase it.

We looked at 6 avenues that physicians have taken to earn extra revenue. None of these activities require a tremendous amount of time. Participating in just 1 or 2 activities can put enough money in your pocket to allow you to breathe a little easier when the bills come in.

So what are those ‘6 avenues’? Let’s see:

  • Work with Attorneys
  • See Nursing Home Patients
  • Serve as a Medical Director

So far, so not necessarily bad…

  • Team Up with Pharmaceutical Companies

What??! Team up with pharmaceutical companies? Couldn’t that mean, like, just doing legitimate research and trying like hell to do it right? Uh, nope:

Drug and device companies spend billions of dollars each year to discover and promote new medicines and treatments, and they rely heavily on doctors to participate in these endeavors whether through clinical trials or serving as a speaker or consultant. It’s not uncommon for physicians to earn a minimum of 5 figures a year either speaking or doing clinical studies within their medical practice. Some doctors make in excess of $100,000 annually — on top of their income from seeing patients.


O’course, you gotta watch out for those pesky ethics killjoys, warns Medscape:

Although some extra money is nice, too much can turn heads — and not in a good way. In late January, The Boston Globe reported on an allergy and asthma specialist who was issued an ultimatum by his hospital, the prestigious Brigham and Women’s Hospital (Boston, Massachusetts): Stop moonlighting on behalf of pharmaceutical companies or resign from your staff position.

What it all comes down to is this:

Pros: With typical payments running about $1500-$2500 for a single talk, there’s substantial opportunity to supplement your regular income…

Cons: These arrangements are coming under increasing scrutiny from hospitals, legislators, regulators, and the media. In fact, some of the doctors whom we contacted for this article declined to talk about their involvement with drug companies.

Uh, no kiddin’. Funny that the “increasing scrutiny” doesn’t seem to come from organized medicine, medical schools, mainstream medical journals, state medical boards, or doctors in general. A couple of years ago I lamented the publication of a couple of book reviews, in the lofty New England Journal of Medicine, that celebrated trendy pseudomedicine. Shortly thereafter I received this from an emeritus editor:

I think the incursion into the bastions of medicine has to do with the fact that everything nowadays—absolutely everything—has become a market. If quackery appeals to the readers of the NEJM, it will be there. ”Is it true?” is no longer the question anyone asks, but “Will it sell?” And I think that applies to the editors of most major journals, as well.

True, dat. As for Medscape, this isn’t its first ethical gaff, and I agree with Bernard Carroll that it seems to have “a right hand – left hand problem.”

Oh yeah: what were the other 2 “avenues”? Those would be:

  • Become a Media Personality
  • Consult for Wall Street

Gyula Krúdy – Night shatters like a worn-out curse. At the call of that crazy bird, the sluggish, motionless curtain of darkness begins to stir

Gyula Krúdy, Sunflower (New York Review Books, 2007)

«Gyula Krúdy is a marvelous writer who haunted the taverns of Budapest and lived on its streets while turning out a series of mesmerizing, revelatory novels that are among the masterpieces of modern literature. Krúdy conjures up a world that is entirely his own—dreamy, macabre, comic, and erotic—where urbane sophistication can erupt without warning into passion and madness.
In Sunflower young Eveline leaves the city and returns to her country estate to escape the memory of her desperate love for the unscrupulous charmer Kálmán. There she encounters the melancholy Álmos-Dreamer, who is languishing for love of her, and is visited by the bizarre and beautiful Miss Maszkerádi, a woman who is a force of nature. The plot twists and turns; elemental myth mingles with sheer farce: Krúdy brilliantly illuminates the shifting contours and acid colors of the landscape of desire. John Bátki’s outstanding translation of Sunflower is the perfect introduction to the world of Gyula Krúdy, a genius as singular as Robert Walser, Bruno Schulz, or Joseph Roth.»

«Summary of the book: Gyula Krúdy's 1918 novel, sets turn-of-the-century Budapest hustle and the timeless, "peacetime" mode of the Hungarian countryside as backdrops for this sensually observed episode in Womanhood's ongoing, ever-variable encounter with the male principle. A richly quintessentialized cast of characters offers a fivefold bevy of females, variously engaged with a trio of males. World-weary, proto-feminist Miss Maszkerádi sojourns at her friend the introspective ingénue Eveline's country estate; the provincial hetaera Risoulette assists as they confront the amorous, cantankerous hunk of Magyar manhood, Mr. Pistoli, flanked by a duo of younger men: the dangerous, entrepreneurial gambler Ossuary, and the hermit-like country gentleman Álmos-Dreamer. But this is also a novel of the land, a paean, to the primal powers of Mother Nature as observed and worshipped in the birch-studded marshlands of North-east Hungary, a land teeming with sites and relics of the Old World Goddess. This powerful ancient Deity illumines the women in Sunflower and so becomes the major character in one of the roundest and most fully realized works of Gyula Krúdy's commending oeuvre.»

"A reverie on love and death, countryside and city, this gothic fairy tale from Hungarian Krúdy (1878-1933) was originally published in Hungary in early 1918. Spooked by a midnight intruder, 22-year-old Eveline leaves her home in Budapest and returns to her Hun-garian riverfront estate. There, Eveline is haunted by the memory of her ex-fiancé, the dissolute Kálmán Ossuary, and is courted by a patient local bachelor, Andor Álmos-Dreamer. The meandering plot takes a turn upon the arrival of Eveline's best friend and opposite, Malvina Maszkerádi. Malvina is 'the wealthiest heiress in Budapest: somber, frosty, intrepid, and miserable,' and she proceeds to stir things up considerably. The book's only acknowledgement of WWI is, perhaps, through its celebration of what is being lost: 'old Hungary, silent with the sleep of the blessed, the humble, the poor.' Given to expansive lyric digressions, Krúdy is now recognized as a great prose stylist, but an English equivalent proves elusive here. The story, however, rewards patience: the last chapter, where the year has circled back to autumn and an opportunity opens for Eveline, is surprising and moving." - Publishers Weekly

"Krudy, a well-known early 20th-century Hungarian author, produced a prolific body of 60 novels and 3000 short stories before dying in relative obscurity. In this novel, appearing in English for the first time... Krudy eulogizes a way of life already disappearing as the work was being written and presents a glimpse of rural Hungary that is at once comic, nostalgic, romantic, and erotic. The introduction by John Lukacs provides insight into Krudy's life and works. Recommended for academic collections or large public libraries." - Library Journal

“Gyula Krudy… a Hungarian Proust.” - Charles Champlin

"[Krudy's] literary power and greatness are almost past comprehension... Few in world literature could so vivify the mythical in reality... With a few pencil strokes he draws apocalyptic scenes about sex, flesh, human cruelty and hopelessness." - Sándor Márai

“Krudy writes of imaginary people, of imaginary events, in dream-like settings; but the spiritual essence of his persons and of their places is stunningly real, it reverberates in our minds and strikes at our hearts.” - John Lukacs

“There were few outside, actual events in Krudys life… he was always conscious of his landed gentry origins yet he preferred the company of the poor, the simple, the dispossessed… he spent most of his life in the capital…He knew every street, every inn, almost every house. For him Budapest was Paris and London, Rome and New York; I dont think he spent more than a few months of his entire life away from Hungary.” - Paul Tabori

“Gyula Krudys luminous and willful pastoral, people with archaic, semi-mythical figures–damned poets and doomed aristocrats, dreamily erotic hetaerae and rude country squires–is pure fin-de-siècle, art nouveau in prose for which I cant think of a real Anglo-Saxon or even Celtic-English literary equivalent… approach him and his Sunflower as a happy stumbling on an extraordinary attic of the rambling house of the European imagination, strangely lit, and crammed with richly faded dreams.” - W.L. Webb

«MAYBE I should just write, "Read 'Sunflower' " and leave it at that. Otherwise, I might lose control; fans of the great Hungarian novelist Gyula Krúdy (1878-1933) tend toward gibberish when trying to explain his unique appeal.
Here, for example, is one of his translators, the usually sober-minded poet George Szirtes, describing Krúdy's Sindbad stories (no relation to the Arab sailor): "The language comes to pieces... leaving a curiously sweet erotic vacuum, like an ache without a centre." Besides whetting your appetite for some sweet erotic vacuuming, does that make Krúdy's literary power clear to you? No? Well, perhaps this old jacket copy will help: "Krúdy's verbal / shamanistic trance-and-dance translates historical reverie into a vision that transcends national and ethnic borderlines." Not quite clear yet? Historian John Lukacs, probably Krúdy's greatest promoter in English, finally nails it: Krúdy "is translatable only with the greatest of difficulty - in essence hardly translatable at all."
Krúdy has been compared to his great contemporaries (Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Joseph Roth) and his great successors (Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez). Other comparisons come to mind. His work purrs with the fin-de-siècle urbane eroticism in Arthur Schnitzler's stories. His shifting viewpoints and streams of consciousness recall Virginia Woolf. Like Kafka, he's willing to let dream and reality mingle. He's ironic and wise about the human heart and life's futility, like Chekhov. His fond portrayal of rural life evokes the Levin scenes in "Anna Karenina." Yet these faint resemblances leave most of him in shadow. Moreover, as Lukacs notes, "No one has, even remotely, written like Krúdy in Hungarian." Given that Hungarian is utterly unlike English, a writer who is unique in that language poses a profound challenge, which may be why there is so little of him here: only three volumes of fiction and one of journalism, though he wrote more than 50 novels and 3,000 short stories, starting when he was 13. So it's cause for celebration that New York Review Books has reissued this 1997 translation, introduced by Lukacs, his champion.
"Sunflower" (1918), written toward the end of a world war in which Hungary was losing, is set in the demimonde of Budapest and the birches and marshes of northeastern Hungary, the countryside of Krúdy's origin. It is not a realistic novel: The dead recover, ghosts cuckold the living, and love affairs persist in the afterlife.
The innocent Eveline loves Kálmán, gambler and hound dog, who sponges off her and other women, with whom he repeatedly betrays her. Andor Álmos, a lonely country gentleman, loves her and dies for her - though when she weeps over his corpse he comes back to life. Álmos' mother (also named Eveline) has lost three husbands, the first two in duels and the third because she vowed to sleep with him only if he promised to kill himself afterward. Mr. Pistoli, an aging Don Juan, sent three wives to the insane asylum; one night they all escape and turn up for a farewell foursome. When Miss Maszkerádi, a brassy feminist, reverts to men, she sleeps with Pistoli; the pleasure kills him, apparently permanently. Eveline and Álmos consider marrying and settling down to a passionless life in birch country. That's it.
"Sunflower" is an erotic carnival. Respectable noblewomen are "familiar with the notorious Marquis's book of recipes." Rakes devour the maidens of Budapest. An infatuated lover's eyes are "a hair's breadth away from madness." But references to death are just as pervasive; the carnival is held under stormy skies and in the high winds of passing time. By turns smutty, nostalgic, slapstick and tender, cynical and hopeful, the novel's real subjects are the futility but unavoidability of passion, the pain and pleasure of memory, and the grave that awaits us all. One character scolds another, who's sick with love: "[Y]ou went and climbed up on the high wire at the traveling circus and now you can't come down. Why go in for this goggle-eyed torment when you can live your life painlessly. . . ?" That is the book's main question, answered differently by dozens of characters; this novelist examines his specimens through a kaleidoscope.
The plot and big ideas are easily summarized; "Sunflower" is a great novel not for these but for Krúdy's images, insights, twists of language, portraits of Budapest and the countryside and their inhabitants. Here's a womanizer you won't forget: "Mr. Pistoli's favorites were women prone to hysteria, whom he would sniff out seven counties off... He capered like a billy goat when a woman confessed to him that she had swallowed her child." Slow down and dig in. Krúdy's style is built of imagery that halts you at sentence's end to ponder what it reveals about the subject: "Her face was unapproachably severe, like a façade with shuttered windows, where no crimson-clad girls ever lean out over the windowsill." Wait, one more: an old woman, dressed up in feathered hat and finery, "on parade like some superannuated circus steed that, come tomorrow, might be harnessed to a hearse."
The sheer richness is overwhelming. Krúdy's trademark is the linked comparison - one extended simile or metaphor stacked upon another, with magical impossibilities sprinkled throughout: "The mirror's reflection grows faint, or perhaps the face itself does, taking on an acrid, fastidious look like that of a cobwebbed old daguerreotype set by sentimental hands on a headstone. In the pupil of the eye tiny, swimming dots appear: they are rowboats steered by melancholy boatmen conveying luggage and traveler - departing life - from the shore to the vast old bark awaiting." Such writing, grumps will say, "draws attention to itself." But, grumps, that's the point: the storyteller captivating you. Listen to him. His voice is as important as what happens to his characters. The imaginary people are introducing you to a real one.
So who is this writer I have come to love? Is it Krúdy by way of translator Eszter Molnár?
There used to be an old painting in the monastery of Podolin - a grey-haired man thought to himself one night towards autumn, while outside the mist curled into shades of chimney-sweeps walking the rooftops in the damp moonlight - a painting of a shaggy-haired man with bushy moustaches turning up at the tips like a gallant's... ringed eyes that were almond-shaped and of a very light blue, and a ruddy face the colour of wine sparkling on a white table on a sunny winter day. This was Prince Lubomirski. Or by way of Szirtes?
Once upon a damp and moonlit night a man with greying hair was watching the autumn mist form figures of chimney-sweeps on the rooftops. Somewhere in the monastery at Podolin, he was thinking, there is, or was, an old painting, showing a shaggy-haired figure with a wild upcurled moustache... two big round eyes with elongated pale blue pupils, and a complexion as ruddy as the colour of a white tablecloth when light passes through a full wine glass on a sunny winter noon. This man was Prince Lubomirski.
Surely Hungarian isn't as subjective as all that. Molnár produced two sentences; Szirtes three. Molnár's prince has a face the color of wine; Szirtes' the color of light passing through wine and projected onto a tablecloth. Molnár's prince has almond-shaped blue eyes -- plausible enough, though "ringed" makes me think he's a raccoon. Szirtes' prince has elongated blue pupils, suggesting either a painting by Modigliani or severe cataracts. And what happened to the gallant? "Once upon" sets a fairy-tale tone - is it Krúdy's? Or did he intend the casual "There used to be an old painting"? The translators cannot even agree on the story's title. Precision matters especially for a writer such as Krúdy, for whom dreams, memories and desires blend like rivers converging. Still, two translations are better than one.
John Bátki, translator of several Hungarian poets, makes some strange decisions that mar his extraordinary work in "Sunflower." He anglicizes some names but not others. He translates the names of some streets but not others. He translates a district of Budapest (Józsefváros) not into English (the Joseph district) but into German (Josephstadt). He translates one character's surname literally and sticks it onto the Hungarian as a hyphenate ("Andor Álmos-Dreamer"). The novel opens with 19th century diction ("The young miss lay abed") and ends rich in 1950s-era slang. Whether the original similarly relaxed I cannot say, but I doubt any Hungarian can aptly be translated as "Hot diggety-dog."
But Krúdy-Bátki, Krúdy-Molnár, and Krúdy-Szirtes are enough to win this reader's heart. The more translations of this untranslatable genius there are, the closer we'll be to his shimmering, melancholy world.» - Arthur Phillip

«Mostly it's about the love affairs of a handful of characters living in and around Budapest in the early 20th century.
Eveline, the 22-year-old woman who flees the city for her house in the country, to escape thoughts of her former fiancé; Kálmán, said lover, who is gambling her money way; Álmos-Dreamer, a 40-year-old bachelor country aristocrat who pines for Eveline and is quite literally wasting away with romantic longing; Malvina Maszkerádi, a friend staying with Eveline, who outwardly appears modern and worldly, but who fears engaging in life — her ideal love is an ancient, calmly virile tree, to whom no man can compare; Pistoli, patron of village Gypsies, whose three former wives ended up in the madhouse, now determinedly wooing Miss Maszkerádi, much to her consternation.
We encounter their lovers, former lovers, the lovers of their former lovers, their ancestors, their ancestors' lovers, ghosts, and fortunetellers.
There's not much by way of plot speak of. The narrative shifts focus often and with such intensity that it seems unlikely to return to a character once it's moved on, but we do achieve a sense of resolution regarding those people we come to care about.
Sunflower reminds me of the Russians: the lush tone with which Turgenev paints his scenes, the portraits of aristocrats (in particular I'm thinking of Dostoevsky's wry touch in The Gambler), and Tolstoy, well, I'll get to that.
Beyond all the romantic intrigues, Sunflower is about the meaning of life and death. Krúdy sets out to tackle the issue of "Why bother to set out in life when it was over so soon?"
There are sufficient tales told throughout the novel to show that death in itself should prove no obstacle to achieving romantic (or sexual) fulfillment. While Eveline in her confused state of mind clings to life's sidelines, Kálmán grabs life by the balls (with mixed results), Álmos-Dreamer straddles both sides of death's divide (proving its inconsequence), and Miss Maszkerádi is paralyzed by some combination of fear, boredom, pointlessness.
"I can't resign myself to the fact that I live in order to die some day. I'd love to step off this well-trodden straight and boring path. To somehow live differently, think different thoughts, feel different feelings than others. It wouldn't bother me to be as alone as a tree on the plains. My leaves would be like no other tree's. [...]"
While Sunflower often flirts with morbidity, it is deeply fecund and organic.
There's an episode that stands out as the heart of the book, to my mind, serving much the same function as does Natasha's dance in War and Peace. In this sense: the scene doesn't really match the rest of the book and yet seems to be the book's whole reason for being. Natasha's dance sings her Russianness, the Russianness of all of them, peasant, servant, or aristocrat, whether a traditionalist or someone with modern views, it strips that all away to allow something organic to manifest itself. And here in Sunflower is this Gypsy serenade, unacceptable to the Miss Maszkerádi's urban attitude, her sense of social decorum, clashing with her modern views. Mr Pistoli, a rustic bon vivant, breaks down her defenses, with music, wine, words. And Miss Maszkerádi rises to his bait, gives herself over to it, which gives way to revelry, each of them playing a trickster while fully enchanted, for a few hours at least. It's a lovely scene, full of erotic potential, where something gypsy and Hungarian and human is being realized. Sadly, the moment passes.
The comparison of Gyula Krúdy to Bruno Schulz is a valid one (at least, what I've read of Schulz), both in subject somewhat preternatural and how the language feeds the senses.
Krúdy's language is dense with images and, it seems to me, secret meanings — that is, it manages to create an aura of the surreal, the otherwordly, and the erotic, without contrivance. The opening pages have the feel of a gothic romance, but this mood rather quickly congeals into something much thicker, pervading the very air these characters breathe, often in a disconcertingly creepy way.
How quickly some images (at first even banal) can take a sinister turn. For example: "Miss Maszkerádi's steely-glinting eyes appeared as serene as an idol's or a maniac's." Or (my favourite sentence of the book): "Meanwhile Risoulette stood in the door, bewildered, like a woman who has spilled kerosene on her skirt but cannot find a match."
Many pastoral scenes meander in and out of dark crevices.
'But cock's crow signals the arrival of those never-glimpsed vagabonds who stand stock still under your window in the dead of night, with murder in their hears, guilt and terror in their eyes. Come morning, they regain their original shapes and turn into solitary trees at crossroads or hat-waving, curly-haired young travelers with small knapsacks and large staffs, humming a merry tune and marching bright-eyed toward distant lands to bring glad tidings, fun and games, new songs and youthful flaring passions to small houses that somnolently await them. There they sit down at the kitchen table, earn their dinner by telling glorious tall tales, help pour the wine, chop the wood, nab the fattened pig by the ear; they also repair the grandfather clock that had not chimed in forty years and leave in the middle of the night, taking along the young miss's heart as well as her innocence. How enviably cheerful the lives of these vagabonds who pass your house at cock's crow after a night of sleeplessness . . . As if their knee-deep pockets contained some seed they drop in front of the window, to sprout into a yellow-crowned sunflower; no sooner are they gone than it is already tall enough to peek through the window pane. While, inside, the young lady of the house is already fast asleep, like Aladdin in the enchanted cave.'
The sunflower, of course, turns to follow the sun, turns toward life. We are the sunflower at the window, gazing in. Eveline watches the sunflowers, while being one much of the time herself, rooted in her place and rotating to seek out a life source outside of herself. By autumn, she comes to bask.
Sunflower is a wonderful but demanding novel. It serves as the perfect bridge between 19th-century Russians and 20th-century surrealists. If you give yourself over to it, it is magical and profound.» - Isabella Kratynski
Gyula Krúdy, Life Is a Dream (Penguin, 2010)

«Life is a Dream (1931) is Gyula Krudy's magical collection of ten short stories. Creating a world where editors shoot themselves after a hard day's brunching, men attend duels incognito and lovers fall out over salad dressing, Life is a Dream is a comic, nostalgic, romantic and erotic glimpse into the Hungary of the early twentieth century. Focussing on the poor and dispossessed, these tales of love, food, death and sex are ironic and wise about the human condition and the futility of life, and display fully Krudy's wit and mastery of the form.»
Gyula Krúdy, Adventures of Sindbad (Central European University, 1998)

«In these marvellously written tales, Sindbad, a voyager in the realms of memory and imagination, travels through the centuries in pursuit of an ideal of love that is directed as much at the feminine essence as at his individual lovers. Whether the women he seduces and loves are projections of his desire, or he of theirs, is a moot question.
These short stories flow without a strict narrative framework Sindbad journeys between the past and the present and is merely a ghost in many of his adventures. Although Sindbad can move through time, it is time that proves his chief enemy, and youth that remains his real love. This deeply autumnal book, full of resonances and associations, is an erotic elegy to the dying Habsburg empire.»

Read it at books.google



Gyula Krúdy (1878-1933) was born in Nyíregyháza in northeastern Hungary. His mother had been a maid for the aristocratic Krúdy family, and she and his father, a lawyer, did not marry until Gyula was seventeen. Krúdy began writing short stories and publishing brief newspaper pieces while still in his teens. Rebelling against his father’s wish that he become a lawyer, he worked as a newspaper editor for several years before moving to Budapest. Disinherited, Krúdy supported himself, his wife (a writer known as Satanella), and their children by publishing two collections of short stories, found success with the publication of Sinbad’s Youth in 1911. Sinbad, a ghostly lover who has only his name in common with the hero from the Arabian Nights, became a signature character and figured in stories written throughout Krúdy’s life. Krúdy’s novels about contemporary Budapest proved popular during the turbulent years of the First World War and the Hungarian Revolution, but his incessant drinking, gambling, and philandering left him broke and led to the dissolution of his first marriage. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Krúdy suffered from declining health and a diminishing readership, even as he was awarded Hungary’s most prestigious literary award, the Baumgarten Prize. Forgotten in the years after his death, Krúdy was rediscovered in 1940, when Sándor Márai published Sinbad Comes Home, a fictionalized account of Krúdy’s last day. The success of the book led to a revival of Krúdy’s works and to his recognition as one of the greatest Hungarian writers.



Read also: «Gyula Krúdy: Intoxication and Seduction»
http://televisionisfurniture.com/?p=33

Matt Bell punctures relationships, bleeds the surreal, threads gut-punches through needles

Matt Bell, Wolf Parts (Keyhole, 2010)

"Told in a number of very brief fictions, the reader is introduced to Red, the Wolf, the Grandmother, the Woodsman and all the usual players, but Bell takes these familiar constructs and adds a dash of the visceral, the macabre, the erotic, and a simple elegance that would make the Brothers Grimm proud not just for following the tradition of their cautionary tales (of which many readers are only familiar with the watered down, Disneyfied versions), but for taking a step beyond what they might have ever envisioned and creating something special that stands all on its own." —Erik Smetana

"Bell paints Red’s alternate histories with precise brushstrokes that map viscera and chart the rocky (and sometimes paradoxically abstract) landscape of a victim’s psychology. The aptly named Red... is alternately innocent girlish victim, initially unaware of but forced to acknowledge her sexuality, and then heroine, who prepares reprisals following the unwanted lessons that have sharpened her edges to points as fine as the knife concealed in her goodie basket. Other times, as in the opening story, she attempts to empower herself by stopping the destructive cycle she is trapped in... The stories themselves are both intimate and elliptical, giving just enough information for readers to vicariously experience and also extrapolate beyond the boundaries of what’s told." —Savannah Schroll Guz

"When I found out Bell was releasing a minibook retelling the story of Little Red Riding Hood, I knew this story would not be one for my mother's 1st grade class. Rather, Wolf Parts is a collection of fragmented flash fictions that took me to sights I wish I wouldn't have seen, but at the same time, feel like a different man for seeing. Stories, I believe, should do something to me. These flashes frighten me, enliven me, rage me, touch me with their haunting metaphors and visual descriptions.
The image I can't get out of my head is Red laying naked on the skinned fur of the Wolf, after her dad has killed him to prove a lesson about protecting his daughter. When Bell writes, When she howled, it was with her mouth against his unhearing ear, her lips close to his stretched and taxidermied jaws, full of the teeth she had just once felt so lovingly against her skin. , I was at once disturbed and also moved by Bell's ability to capture such haunting moments with his pitch perfect language.
My mind is full, I said, in a previous post, from processing images like these: predatory, daring, truthful. In these stories, the predator changes: the Wolf of course, but also the grandmother as the wolf, the woodsman as a killer, Red and other girls as wolf-slayers. We are all wolves, it seems, or we have the chance to be.
I can't quite say enough about this collection as a whole. Each story shouts with a such ferocity and diversity that I will have trouble sleeping tonight, not from being afraid of the Wolf, but rather from being afraid of language and all its power." —Tyler Gobble

"The epigraph to Wolf Parts comes from Kate Bernheimer, editor of Fairy Tale Review, who writes that "Fairy tales see things as they are. To be real is to know the consequences of becoming. Never to own, and always to die." Bernheimer's words could not have been selected more carefully, more particularly, speaking as they do to the reality of fairy tales, which so often acknowledge the persistence and finality of death; Never to own, indeed—nothing, not even the body, is ultimately, finally, one's own.
Here, the tales themselves are wolf parts, literal fractured fairy tales, written and rewritten and splintered and pieced back together to reflect the myriad possibilities of story. Wolf Parts is the quintessential fairy tale dissected. The characters that traditionally accompany the wolf are those he is linked to in endless, circular inevitability, an inevitability as certain as death. These are parts, episodes, and retellings, that indicate both an attempt to break the cycle and the characters' enslavement toward it; there is the resulting failure to escape the binds of story and myth, which ironically, refuse to be broken. Story proves itself stronger than its players:
'After Red cut herself out of the wolf's belly [...] she again found herself standing on the path that wound through the forest toward her grandmother's house. [...] Afterward, she went to her grandmother's, where she again discovered the wolf devouring the old woman, and where he waited to devour her too, as he had before. Once again, she was lost, and once again, she cut herself out of his belly and back onto the stony path.'
The retelling over generations of fairy tales, and how the story lives as such, is made real by its countless retellings and generational re-readings: It is through this that the story, a reflection of reality, is made real and given voice and life, a life that human characters cannot take with them in the end—and there is always an end. Story itself, as made evident in Wolf Parts, represents the persistence of death in the human life cycle and yet captures an immortality that humanity will never be able to achieve, but that its representatives do. It is story as art, as immortal, a signpost to humanity that states, This is who we are/this is who we were. Bell writes of Red that "she trusted her grandmother, even though it hurt worse than anything that had come before": the power of story is evident in the ultimate trust it draws from us.
The episodic structure lends itself to the mincing and dissection of the fairy tale, and with each page (the tales are never more than a page in length), Little Red, the wolf, and the grandmother all turn and return to their natural capacities, at the beginning of every tale existing simultaneously in both their pre- and post-horror states: the wolf is always ready to engorge himself on the flesh of the women, and they always climb, scratch, bite, or knife their way out of his stomach or the bed, ever-fated.
Even beyond the book's episodic structuring, the rhythm of the syntax points to the fatedness of its characters, to the rhythm inherent in the retelling and in the timelessness of the fairy tale. For instance, Bell writes, "And then on the third day, a knock, and on the third knock, a voice." In this particular episode, the grandmother lies in her bed at the mercy of the tale: "Raise the latch, she cried, before she'd fully heard the voice, and certainly before she realized how deep it was, and how terribly unlike a little girl's." And so the story goes, and there is no hope of escape from the narrative.
The wolf remains the villain, as he is also at the mercy of story, even when the narrative twists and the women turn against him. The tales evolve thematically over the course of the book, holding on to a thread for several episodes, and then suddenly turning everything on its head. Through this, Bell not only distills the essence of story, but also of narrative, which itself becomes nearly a character, one that is mostly invisible, but powerful as story. When it is Little Red who wields the knife, it is she who is positioned as pack leader, teaching in one particular instance the young girls sent out in sacrifice to the wolf in the forest how to assail their attacker.
As with the evolutions and introductions of variables that tend to occur with fairy tales throughout generations and across continents, every episode represents a possibility, a branching off of the tale in a universe of alternates, but most importantly, these nuances represent interpretation. There is room for variation, as Bell seems to indicate: "I say wolf, but of course there are various kinds of wolves." Even aside from the presence of variability, there is the persistence of roles. Every character has an essential role that (s)he does not veer from. The wolf is always the fanged, slavering beast, the representation of all that is cruel and unjust in the natural world, and Little Red is always Little Red, always a figure of the feminine, even when she is perpetrator rather than victim.
When, one time, the wolf commands Little Red to strip off her clothes, she removes everything but the cape: "she wore only her red cape and hood, which she would not remove, no matter how urgently he pleaded." Her refusal to remove the cape indicates not so much an unwillingness as an inability to step outside her role: after all, who else could she be? She can exist as none other than Little Red Riding Hood just as she will always be female, just as the wolf will always be the wolf. Their roles are fixed, even when a sort of thematic turning point occurs: Little Red becomes an adult and incites the feminine revenge against the tormentor who has not only consumed her and her ilk, but who has raped her time and again.
Identity is also questioned through the interchangeability of roles. What could it mean, such fluidity of identity? Bell writes, "If the wolf had always been the wolf, and the grandmother always the grandmother, why did Red so often struggle to tell them apart?" Sometimes, when the wolf has control over the girl, he bids her to consume the grandmother, and she is turned ravenous beast, transformed into an insatiate carnivore: "Clenching her fork and knife in her tiny fists, she searched the empty platters, and when she found nothing else to eat, she clambered quickly toward the yawning wolf, hungry for more." Transformation, when it takes place, does so at the level of story and character: what ascension is there, after all, beyond that, if not into the realm of theory and rhetoric?
And the moral of it all?
If I told you the wolf deserved this lonely end, that his slow, struggling starvation was justified, then that would be one kind of tale. But he was not a moral wolf, and this was never about to become a moral story, no matter how it ended.
The moral is that sometimes there is none. Sometimes, a wolf is just a wolf." - Cynthia Reeser

"I’m going to try something different with this review. I often find that an author’s own words, perhaps selectively chosen, are a better summation of a text than any review. However, I do understand that the point of a review isn’t merely in summary, but is meant to judge a book as well. Here, I will give a bit of both modes, though with a heavier weight on quotes taken from the text. Here is my first “Mostly Quotes Review.” Let me know what you think.
Wolf Parts is vicious fairy tale excursions:
Pg. 7: “…she laid across the stones and, with the knife her mother had given her, gutted herself, quickly, left to right. She cried out in wonder at the bright worlds she found hidden within herself…”
Wolf Parts gives metaphor to the ambiguity of adolescence, turning the cautionary tale of “Little Red Riding Hood” into a predatory one:
Pg 14: “The wolf’s breath smelled of chalk, and his paws were covered in flour. It wasn’t enough to trick the girl, but she allowed herself to pretend to be fooled. She opened her cloak and invited him in, so that he might do what he came to do.”
Wolf Parts turns the morality lessons of our established fairy tale and turns it inside out, sometimes literally:
Pg 15: “From inside the wolf’s stomach the grandmother could only hear every third or fourth word her granddaughter spoke…She bit down hard, first on lung and heart, then indiscriminately, casting about in a great gnashing, devouring all she could until the wolf she was inside was also inside her..." - Caleb J Ross

Here's the beginning of the book:
"After Red cut her way out of the wolf’s belly—after she wiped the gore off her hood and cape, her dress, her tights—she again found herself standing on the path that wound through the forest toward her grandmother’s house. Along the way, she met with the wolf, with whom she had palavered the first time and every time since. Afterward, she went to her grandmother’s, where she again discovered the wolf devouring the old woman, and where he waited to devour her too, as he had before. Once again she was lost, and once again, she cut herself out of his belly and back onto the stony path. Over and over, she did these things until, desperate to break the cycle, she laid across the stones and, with the knife her mother had given her, gutted herself, quickly, left to right. She cried out in wonder at the bright worlds she found hidden within herself, and with shaky hands she scooped their hot wet flesh into the open air, where with a flick of her wrists she set them each free."



Matt Bell, The Collectors (Caketrain, 2009)

"The tale of compulsive hoarders Homer and Langley Collyer so shocked 1940s Manhattan that the brothers and their Harlem brownstone live on today as one of the most notable American case studies of acute disposophobia. With a nervous energy and obsession to match his protagonists, Matt Bell’s prose burrows, forensically, into the layers of the brothers’ lives, employing a multilinear narrative structure and a frenetic plurality of perspectives to reach a core of despair that is both terrifyingly primal and distressingly familiar."

"‘Even a book can be a door,’ suggests the narrator of Matt Bell’s The Collectors. What you’ll find behind this particular door are two shaken and shaky brothers losing their tenuous grip on reality, slowly filling their house with decades of booby-trapped detritus and precious trash. The Collectors is a compelling portrait both of the way a heated mind can come to recreate the world and of how fascination with such a mind can end up being its own sort of trap. A wonderful, obsessive novella." —Brian Evenson

"Matt Bell makes of the pathology of the miser, hoarder, or packrat an emblem of the obsessive life and makes his reader understand how the compulsion to collect may be only the mind’s seeking to construct for itself a refuge from an intolerable and otherwise inescapable reality. Bell’s fiction excites pity for those who live, as though walled up, in ruins of their own necessary construction. I admire The Collectors for the certainty of its prose and its unflinching observation of a most profound alienation—envying the first; fearing the second; and unhappily aware that artifice—no matter how splendid—is inadequate to ameliorate the despair." —Norman Lock

"In the 1950s, Samuel Beckett brought out his groundbreaking trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. These were stories of renunciation, as in the brilliant central novella, when the bedridden Malone gives up the scrap he's carried this far and lets his consciousness fade into a story. Beyond that, Beckett renounces the culture in which he came up, the High Modernism of his mentor Joyce. He insists on a new field of discourse, primarily by means of doing without. So as I read these two latest challenges to what we expect of fiction, stories stripped of their vestments, I couldn't stop thinking of Beckett's trilogy. Bell's novella does have a setting and a history, mid-town Manhattan during the same period when Beckett was bringing out his trilogy. To establish this much, though, takes digging - and that's precisely the word. The abode of these "collectors" is a garbage heap. The bachelor brothers Langley and Homer Collyer were packrat-psychos. They occupied (boy did they) an Upper East Side brownstone, and died crushed beneath their own cram: "three baby carriages, rakes and hoes…, several rusted bicycles, kitchen utensils (including at least four sets of china…), a heap of glass chandeliers that had been removed to make room for the piles and the tunnels." And this is just one list, from one of the several short chapters that Bell labels "Inventory."
The Collyers, in his reimagining, don't live in a place so much as a passion. The Collectors, keeping things in-house, burrows deep into the mind. Most of the two or three-page chapters deal out imagined snippets of the brothers' dying days, the point of view shifting between two men beyond help: Langley crippled and Homer blind. The latter's name and disability are another fact of the history, but they suggest of course the famous first storyteller, and so add an intertextual irony. Both war and odyssey stay within the city walls.
Bell visits one or two other perceptions as well, in chapters set after the brothers' demise, but the feel remains claustrophobic. The style tends to lists and compound-complex constructions, such as when we get an inkling of psychology, regarding the father's abandonment: "Every stray hair clinging to a shirt collar, every scrap of handwriting left in the margins of his texts, all of it is him, is who he was. It's all that's left, but if you keep it safe then it's all you'll ever need." Hard feelings have calcified, leaving everyone pretty well paralyzed even before the accident to the (slightly) more mobile brother. That accident's the only event; the rest is inventory, including the death rattle.
Yet such a description violates the story's sprightliness. The brief volume has almost thirty chapter breaks, and these are arranged in an outline of numerals and capitols, pleasantly confounding while it's reliably repetitious. More than that, each "Inventory" embodies, in its archeological slice of the home, some smaller tragedy. The dolls in one room, uncovered at what would be the climax point of an ordinary fiction, amount to "no more a family than anything else." So while the madness of the situation remains beyond our ken, the sorrow's brought down to human scale.
The reader, you could say, becomes both cleanup crew and Author. These are the two other perspectives that turn up, again imaginary; the Author isn't the historical Matt Bell, no more than Homer and Langley are the historical Collyers. But a few of the passages here speak with re-animating force, amid the wreckage. The Collectors suggests, ultimately, that there exists no better form of renewal than the accommodating art of story." - John Domini

"The Collectors is a small story, a puny story, a little story, a big story, a huge story, a big, big story, a narrow story, a dank cave. Matt Bell wrote it. It was published by Caketrain. Brian Evenson picked it as a runner-up for their contest. It’s 64-pages long, but spatially it spirals upon itself and throbs back out because of the peculiar way Bell structured it, and also because of the ordinary way Bell structured it.
It’s about two brothers named Homer and Langley who live in a house filled with tons of junk. Newspapers and stuff. 120 tons of junk. They’re real, I guess. It happened, something along these lines actually happened. Matt Bell did not make this up. It was probably in the newspaper. Matt Bell researched the source material then wrote it differently. The story occurs in the third person, but there are portions in the second-person and a framed story told with an I-voice, which covers the discovery of the larger framework and I wonder: what’s Matt Bell trying to pull?
Bell could well have written this after reading Endgame by Beckett and whatever book is the opposite of Endgame by Beckett – maybe Krapp’s Last Tape by Beckett.
Endgame is always called “Cartesian” because the set, a barren room with two windows, represents the interior of a skull. Clov, hardly mobile, cares for Hamm, who is completely immobile. Homer is chair-bound (like Hamm) and Langley assists him (like Clov). The story about Homer and Langley is cerebral too, but it isn’t brainy. Also, it isn’t not brainy. It’s a little nugget, a walnut. If Endgame functions as a cogito, then The Collectors works as a cluttered one.
Thus the cluttered comparison to Krapp’s Last Tape. There are disorderly piles of boxes and old archival reels in Krapp’s room, where he’s listening to that recording he made about his lovely boat ride or whatever. There’s only one person in this story, Krapp. There’s a thing with a banana, with the peel.
In The Collectors there’s a thing with orange peels. When Langley’s self-set traps pin him under a boulder of sewing machines outside the master bedroom, Homer is left stranded on his own. He tries to find his brother, but gets lost among the labyrinthine stacks. Dejected now, Homer tries to make it back to where he keeps his chair and realizes he’s arrived when, with exhausted fingers, he touches fruity detritus.
Homer, blind, eats lots of oranges to cure his eyesight. That was Langley’s idea.
There’s a lot of stuff in the house. This is a big story, one “[s]upported by scraps of lumber and stacked newspaper or cardboard” – (which is how Bell describes the house). The whole thing is like a maze, and the story matches that framework. Even the chapter headings are jumbled. The chapter headings have all gone awry. The Collectors doesn’t walk the line of Ch1–Ch 2–Ch 3, it goes 1A–3A–2A–4A– 3B–1B and so on. It’s cool. On page 52 comes chapter 5A.
First I read straight through the book. Then I read straight through the A sections, then through the B sections, like that. Someday I plan to read all the 1 sections. Why not? You can choose however you want to read The Collectors. You can read it several times and be fooled into thinking it’s several books. Having written several books and then collapsing them all into the same story, Matt Bell’s The Collectors is a jaw-dropping achievement.
Naturally, you can choose however you want to read any book, but with The Collectors (and Nabokov’s Pale Fire), it makes sense to mix it up a little. Because the story’s layers, like the packing of Homer and Langley’s house, are so dense, even fans of convention can enjoy the innovations here; even a glossing of the rich depths makes for an enveloping read." - Adam Robinson

A voice comes to one in the dark.” So begins Company, Samuel Beckett’s dense novella from 1980. Company concerns, perhaps, a man recollecting his youth. There are scenes from a childhood, at least. A boy recalls one of his father’s romantic affairs. That same boy, ostensibly, recovers a box from a shed in which he left weeks earlier a mole, now rotten and flowering with mold.
Matt Bell’s new book, The Collectors–released this summer by Caketrain–is likewise a compact novella about deterioration and recollection. It begins, not dissimilar to Company, “How long has Homer been sitting here in the dark?” The parallels to Beckett do not end there, by any means. In fact, The Collectors often reads like a thematic distillation of Beckett’s oeuvre. The protagonists of The Collectors, the Collyer brothers, live alone in a dark mansion where they spend most of their time wasting away amidst disintegrating piles of newspaper. They’re the sort of men—sexless, and solitary—one finds in Beckett’s mid-century work. In Endgame, the blind Hamm wakes and sleeps in a wheelchair. In The Collectors, where there isn’t room enough to move, Homer Collyer, also blind, sits on an old leather chair in his reading room, eating only oranges. “After Homer lost his sight, his brother [Langley] put him on a diet of nothing but oranges, convinced that the fruit would restore his sight.” This is a marvelously absurd prescription, and one Beckett might have applauded. At the beginning of Krapp’s Last Tape, in one of the play’s few light moments, Krapp, perennially constipated, eats two bananas.
Though no more teleological, Bell’s work is more immediately accessible than Beckett’s—and despite some brutal passages, less cruel.
Wherever Langley is, he’s quiet now too, or else something worse, something Homer doesn’t want to think about. He feels bad enough for not hurrying, for not being able to find his brother and save him. His lungs ache and his ankles throb… He centers himself in front of the piano and starts to play, then stops when the sound comes out wrong. He sighs, starts over with more realistic expectations.
Beckett is devoid of so many things, not least of which is recognizable remorse. One cannot imagine Moran, in that more conventional half of Molloy, feeling guilty about abandoning his son; Molloy himself, in that ninety page second paragraph, may regret his compulsion to move, but of killing a stranger in the woods or having sex with his mother, he isn’t exactly penitent.
Oh well, I may as well confess it now, yes, I once rubbed up against [a woman]. I don’t mean my mother, I did more than rub up against her. And if you don’t mind we’ll leave my mother out of this. But another who might have been my mother, and even I think my grandmother, if chance had not willed otherwise…It was she made me acquainted with love.
Bell’s characters, conversely, seem to long for each other. The Collyer brothers, as inept as they may be, attempt to help each other. Abandoned by their father, they’ve spent the entirety of their lives attempting to reconstruct the home, and the family, that the patriarch discarded. Even in this passage—certainly the most enigmatic in a book replete with mysteries—one finds a desire to recapture the past, rather than eradicate history:
Now you have [your father] trapped, boarded behind the doors of the second floor, and he will never escape, not as long as you live. Every stray hair still clinging to a shirt collar, every scrap of handwriting left in the margins of his texts, all of it is him, is who he was. It is all that’s left, but if you keep it safe then it is all you’ll ever need.
Last week I wrote to Matt Bell to tell him Flatmancrooked would be posting a review of The Collectors in High Horse. “I’m a big fan of Beckett,” I wrote, “and I love to see this generation of writers reacting to his work in their fiction.” To my surprise he responded by saying:
You know, the funny thing is that I’ve never read Beckett until right now (I’m reading the Three Novels at the moment). Yet, he’s come up in discussion after discussion about my work, in blurbs and in reviews and in writing group and so on. As soon as I started reading Molloy, I saw why, and I saw how he had influenced so many of the people I’ve been influenced by. But there hasn’t been any direct influence on me to this point, although I’m sure there will be going forward.
To have engaged unknowingly in such an exact dialogue with Beckett is astounding. That alone is worthy of note. One can’t help but think of Pierre Menard composing word for word the Quixote, having never read Cervantes. It’s exciting to think what Bell will tackle next. He may abandon the subjects of solitude and decay, or he may improve the canon." - James Kaelan

"Matt Bell's The Collectors is a lovely and elegant fictionalization of the final days of the tragic Collyer brothers. The Collyers were reclusive hoarders who filled their Harlem brownstone with junk for decades before finally being found dead - Langley Collyer crushed under a mound of debris, the blind and helpless Homer starved - in 1947. Their story has been heavily explored by writers of both fiction (including E.L. Doctorow, who recently published a widely-exposed novel on the brothers a few months ago) and non-fiction, but Bell brings a fresh perspective to their sad tale. His novella consists of several dozen ultra-short chapters, many of them only one or two pages, which are divided into five interspersed groups: one for Homer, one for Langley, one for descriptions of the possessions which clog their home, one for the narrator, and one for a couple of outsiders (the policeman who first enters their home, and a city sanitation worker who later labors to clear out the house).
Homer's chapters poignantly show him as a helpless dependent of his older brother, one whose days are spent confined to an armchair drinking brandy and consuming a diet of oranges and pipe tobacco as Langley putters around him. Langley's chapters, in contrast, present a man of action who accumulates all of the junk on nightly excursions through the city and, once the junk begins to overwhelm the house, tries to organize it all to some extent in a hopeless effort to make the squalorous house remain liveable. The author admirably resists any outright explanation or rationalization for Langley's actions, though he does subtly suggest that the hoarding represents Langley's obsessive urge to fill a major void that has existed in their lives since childhood.
Most interesting of all, however, is the role of the narrator, who is the writer of the story itself, looking back from the modern day over the intervening decades. The narrator - every bit as obsessive as Langley Collyer - imagines himself in the Collyer house just before the brothers' deaths, trying futilely to help them. His inability to change the Collyers' fate is an insightful metaphor for a writer's inability (in the narrator's estimation) to effect genuine change and have a meaningful impact on society - especially one who writes about the distant past.
The Collectors is a very thoughtful and well-crafted meditation on loneliness, belonging and the writer's role in society, one which I know I'll be returning to again and again in the coming years." - Pete Anderson

"Now, this guy has gone and written one of the most amazing things I’ve read in a very long time. I read The Collector’s twice last night, it was so good. I’m going to read it again today. Then, I will contemplate fatwa. When I read the description, while awaiting my copy, I thought, okay, Grey Gardens, with brothers instead of a mother and daughter. I love movies. My natural instinct is to make comparisons between anything and a movie. This has nothing to do with that.
The Collector’s, much like Sam Pink’s book, is relentless. The way the story is told creates such an aura of claustrophobia that you are in that house trapped in the detritus of those lives. You can feel the slick surfaces and the humid stench. You can hear the scurrying of creatures, the floors groaning beneath the weight of things seen and unseen. In the mid 20th centur, a guy name Hans Laube developed a system that would release odors while a movie was playing called Smell-O-Vision. It never took off, but it was a grand idea, the idea that you could add an extra dimension to the movie going experience by associating visual images with certain smells. While reading both of these books, I thought about Smell-O-Vision, because using words, both writers were able to add that extra dimension to the reading experience.
The Collector’s was heartbreaking and heartwarming. To think of these two brothers, living in their own world, one trapped by his body, both trapped by their minds, and the ways they cared for one another, surrounded by a bewildering inventory of things. I don’t want to give too much of the story away but the most painful and beautiful part of the story is the aftermath, when we, as readers, are forced to witness a sort of betrayal as strangers breach the perimeter of their home and excavate their things and their bodies and their secrets and then take it all way." - Roxane Gay

"In both of the recent New York Times reviews of E.L. Doctorow’s new novel, Homer & Langley, which is based on the lives of the Collyer brothers, the reviewers go out of their way to point to other artists whose work has been drawn from the lives of these eccentric, hoarding bachelor shut-ins. Michiko Kakutani notes that in addition to Doctorow’s book, their story “reportedly inspired Marcia Davenport’s 1954 novel, My Brother’s Keeper, and Richard Greenberg’s 2002 play, The Dazzle.” Liesl Schillinger adds to this list by mentioning that “A few years ago, Franz Lidz wrote a riveting, fact-filled account of the brothers, Ghosty Men, interwoven with reminiscences of his uncle (also a compulsive hoarder).” And to further underscore their influence as artistic subject matter, she goes on to say that “the peculiar pair have also popped up, by name or reputation, in plays, television shows, and films, as well as in the horror and crime genre—from Steven King’s Salem’s Lot, in 1975, to Linda Fairstein’s Lethal Legacy, published last February.” In short: we are obsessed with the obsessed.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Matt Bell’s The Collectors, which is also based on the lives of the Collyer brothers, and deserves to be added to this canon. His novella, published in book form earlier this summer by Caketrain press, explores the final moments of the lives of Homer and Langley. Though even time itself is bent and distorted here—by blindness, by pain, by the elusiveness of memory. So that we proceed in a tactile fashion, feeling our way through the story just as the blind brother, Homer, maneuvers his way through the maze-like halls of his house.
Yet unlike Homer, we never feel lost here. The narrative is ordered, numbered, and categorized according to its various threads. As such, we experience the pleasurable slowness that accompanies being attuned to the sensory (the texture of old orange peels, the scent of molding newspapers) while still feeling there is momentum and urgency propelling us forward.
Part of this urgency has to do with a third voice that accompanies those of the brothers: an unnamed writer, who grows increasingly infatuated with and even protective of his subjects. In the opening lines of his first section, he says, “I came in through a history of accumulation, through a trail of documents that led to you, Langley, and to him, Homer.” It is an old trope, of course: the writer as unhealthy obsessive, disappearing into the work, agonizing over the fates of the people in his hands as he narrates to his readers. Yet Bell manages to make this new. Not only because in this case obsession is at the core of the Collyer brothers themselves, but also because of the honesty of the narrative voice. The directness of his language. Coupled together, these qualities are what give the book one of its greatest strengths: compassion.
Because, ultimately, The Collectors is as much a confession as an investigation, action and apologia braided together. For despite our greatest attempts at authenticity as fiction writers, we cannot help—in fact, we must—alter the histories and pasts we seek to animate, which is a kind of ruin. Even the most rigorous attempts to dignify and understand the lives of our subjects will eventually distort them, if for no other reason than they are a means to an end: the writing itself. And this side effect of the process is something that Bell’s narrator, the unnamed writer, is keenly aware of. Near the end of the book he even says, “I want them to see you as I saw you when I first came to this place, before I started telling your story to my own ends.”
But at the same time he understands, as we do, that this is ok. That preservation is not the only goal of writing. That facts alone can’t capture the essence of what it feels like to be alive. Yet by taking the time to legitimately recognize the tension that exists between what the art needs and what the life that’s been lived deserves, Bell manages to honestly grapple with the dilemma we all face, rather than simply pulling out the old cliché about “emotional truth” superseding “factual truth” that we often use in our profession to justify our actions when we sit down at the desk.
In the end, though, the reason that The Collectors deserves to be read—and the reason it also deserves a place alongside these other texts that have explored the lives of Homer and Langley—is not simply because it illuminates the pleasures and dangers of being a writer, but also because it’s a good story. This is what matters most, right? It’s certainly what’s kept us coming back to the Collyer brothers and their sagging brownstone for the last sixty years. " - Jeremiah Chamberlin

"This house is a body, and you move within it. Rooms like cells, floors like organs, and you two—like what exactly? Pulses of electricity, nervous messages, the tiny sparks that one day might bring this place to life? Listen— Somewhere Homer is crying again, isn’t he?
You probably know the story of the Collyer brothers, the compulsive hoarders Homer and Langley who not only never threw anything away, but obsessively sought more stuff to hoard. How they were found dead in the Harlem brownstone where they lived reclusively among literally tons of belongings for several decades. Tell me that doesn’t spark your imagination. Tell me it doesn’t make you want to know why. If not why, then at least more. Tell me you will read Matt Bell’s The Collectors if these or they are on your mind.
But what is The Collectors? It’s not exactly fiction and it isn’t biography and some of it’s so sublime I claim it as poetry. It reminds me of something Graham Greene wrote in his A Sort of Life about referential texts:
As opposed to all forms of fiction, biography and autobiography are referential texts: exactly like scientific or historical discourse, they claim to provide information about a “reality” exterior to the text, and so to submit to a test of verification. Their aim is not simple verisimilitude, but resemblance to the truth. Not the effect of the real, but the image of the real.
Here is where The Collectors exceeds “simple verisimilitude” but departs from biography: it provides “the effect of the real, but [not] the image of the real.” Although, sometimes, it provides both:
The thin biography tells me nothing, doesn’t help me penetrate past the birth and death dates, the one extant photograph, the mere facts of your father leaving you. ...The only way I feel close to you is when I read the list of objects you left behind, because I know that in your needy acquisitions, there is something of me.
Bell gives us confessional glimpses of an authorial presence, in this case actually (really) reading the biography of the brothers and “the list of objects” left behind, identifying with their “needy acquisitions” and frustrated by the immensity of what’s left out. And what’s left out, necessarily a fiction, is the obsession of The Collectors. This play at hybridity is particularly interesting in contemporary fiction, where realist traditions and the empirical structure of the bildungsroman, for example, are appropriated and destroyed, rather than modeled, as theories of identity and self become increasingly fragmented, subjective, and even absurd. And while forms of biography, as historical documents, are typically considered less elusive, less mysterious, and more real than fiction, the evolution of the postmodern “self” necessitates mutations of both.
For instance, part of what gives The Collectors its fictional skin is the very nature of the relationship between the authorial presence (the writer/narrator of the text) and the subjects of the story: they are to some degree a unified fictional identity. This “unification” permeates not only the matter of the text, but its mock-scientific structure. Chapter titles such as “4B Where I Am in Relation to Where You Are” suggest a cataloguing or presentation of text and character as “exhibit.” Bell curates these specimens out of linear order and incomplete, teasing at what is curtained-off from the “gallery.” All of this illustrates failure in the experiment, where even the unified identity fails to be a whole self. This identity, then, is “re/collection” or memory, an involuntary bodily process of our puny subjectivity and reality.
The weighty and material insistence of memory, and its ever imminent decay, are parallels Bell taxidermically stuffs in his pairing/trapping of spirit and body, brother and brother, author and obsession. We fixate in The Collectors on things so holy they become Body, or bodies so holey they are stuffed with things, or a house so stuffed it becomes timeless, everything not alive but lifelike:
No brother without a piano, without a bathrobe, without a chair, a pipe, a mouthful of oranges and black beard. No self without these ghosts. No ghosts, without— No. No ghosts, or rather: No ghosts, no ghosts except in things.
This possibility of reality in fiction is a (crucial) part of the genre from the beginning. Throughout The Collectors, a dialogue between the fictional and biographical is spoken, interjected, presented in the very texture of what the characters seek/avoid: definition. There is a sense in this text that writing-the-real, that defining-the-real, is no longer an endeavor towards reality. That Greene’s “image of the real” can never truly succeed. That classifications, collections, issues of public and private in terms of perspective/exhibition, and issues of what is inherited/kept/collected (or isn’t) in terms of identity and definition, always serve to undermine and flaw reality, fracturing any whole image of what is, in part, presented, because “there is so much to see here, but only in fragments, in peripheries.” That is, there is a tenor of failure in The Collectors, a vibration throughout of deficiency:
Homer didn’t understand—of course he didn’t—but that didn’t stop you, because you knew that what you were doing could work, could solve the failure of your family, if only you gathered enough. Of course, in all the stuff that is kept, the defect persists, because “despite my whispered assurances you will know that I am not real enough to save you or him, and then it will be over.”
We are told: “I am conducting an investigation. I am holding a wake. I am doing some or all or none of these things.” What is achieved then is more than just fiction, more than just referential, and more than just real. It is simultaneously a comment on each of these ideas, which is even more effective at communicating a sense of these characters. The authorial “I” who is making this, a testament, to “you Langley and to him, Homer” makes these characters most fragile, most human, most identifiable to the reader in a shared search for answers, a persistent questioning. The characters in The Collectors may not be Real, but they’re real enough. Maybe even more than real in their very human “defect,” their indefinable and changing subjectivity, and their inability to even define themselves, no matter how much stuff belonged to them, or them to it." - Kim Gek Lin Short

"Close your eyes for a second. Remember Faulkner's Sartoris family? Now imagine the last two men of the Sartoris clan are now old and living together as their lives dissipate. Imagine they are hoarders. Worse than anything you've seen on Oprah. Think of decay, the kind that only time can make a person and their belongings suffer.
Got it? Now you're on the way to understanding Matt Bell's The Collectors. Bell's language is as obsessive as his characters in this novella, and that's what really makes the story churn. The story is presented in short chapters, vignettes about the miserly Homer and Langley interspersed with inventories.
Where Bell really shines is when you find him in dialogue with his own characters, such as in the section, "How I Came In." Bell writes, "After you are both gone, I am afraid that I will still be here." Of course, I am not saying that Bell is writing himself into the story (no more than any other writer does), but in effect this third voice is Bell. It's authorial, it's the voice of discovery, of historian, of antiquiter. And it is in these moments where the voice lights upon the characters and the story, frees it up for the reader to be welcomed into the museum of Homer and Langley, to experience first hand their decay.
"How long has Homer been sitting here in the dark?" The story begins, and by the end the reader is left wondering the same thing, but not just about Homer, about themselves as well. Homer's darkness is not just the physical lack of light, or the depressing state in which we discover his life, no, it is the nature of growing old. Homer and Langley have grown old together, clutching their disappointments, the way they hang on to their posessions. In this way they are a cautionary tale, one the first person narrator affirms when he says, "Once, I wanted to be just like them." - Ryan W. Bradley
Matt Bell, How the Broken Lead the Blind (Willows Wept Press, 2009)

"Matt Bell does something to me, something altering, chemically altering, that makes me feel like I've come face to face with something ungodly beautiful, still partially obscured by my limits of comprehension, each time I finish one of his stories. He finds a depth beneath his stories that, at times, seems limitless, unknowable, perhaps more efficiently, more effectively, and more consistently than any writer currently stitching together words." —David Peak

"Matt Bell is a beautiful contradiction, a romanticist who wields his pen without mercy. In How the Broken Lead the Blind, Bell's eye for the small details that bind is undeniable. His collection of short-short stories wastes no time with extraneous prattle, delivering instead characters and tales that rattle the senses with stark surprise. In an uncompromisingly good gathering of fiction, Bell gives us worlds upon worlds through the imagination and observations of a gifted new talent.
Steven Gillis

"Matt Bell writes startling stories about personal connections, how they break under the slightest pressure, how they mend—all stories in which occur fantastic little twists: a severed hand appears, a piano gives up its secret, disoriented geese tumble from the sky. How the Broken Lead the Blind is a useful relationship manual for those of us still waiting to receive our very own hair box." —Ryan Call

"There is an insistent rhythm in everything Matt Bell writes. Not the thudding hammer blows of fraudulent drama, not the drip of leaking satire, certainly not the jolly click and tap of a story that could be--ought to have been--texted. It's gentle and enormously powerful: the beating of a heart. It's hard not to think of Bell's work as a living, breathing thing--which is in fact what it is, holding us in its ebb and flow, consoling and inspiring us the way real, true art always has and always will." —Gary Amdahl

"Like a perfect rock album, Matt Bell's How the Broken Lead the Blind both celebrates and explodes the form. The form here is flash fiction, and while there may be others who are doing it as well, there is certainly nobody better than Bell. Like the songs on Sgt. Pepper or Odelay or Paul's Boutique or [insert name of genre-busting, wildly inventive and eminently satisfying album here], each of these stories offers a jump-cut into the pain, fear, hope, joy, and questions of everyday life. Which is to say, Matt Bell does in 500 or 1000 words what it takes most writers - if they're lucky, talented, innovative, and soulful - about five times the space to accomplish." —Dave Housley

"Matt Bell's short-short stories gush with intricate details of love, loss, and sorrow. Each story holds a miracle waiting to be unearthed, as if this young writer was in all our lives, recording those subtle, key moments that pass quietly but speak to us forever. He is a writer with so much to say, but like with those moments, he understands they don't have to be loud, or long, to bestow their greatest impact." —Michael Czyzniejewski

"So many short shorts veer toward willful absurdity for its own sake, but Matt Bell’s How the Broken Lead the Blind manages to get beyond that stereotype in ways that will reward the reader. Bell does not veer toward pyrotechnics, as so many practitioners of this burgeoning subgenre do, but maintains the authorial discipline to give us thick, complex insights into human wants and confusions.
Many of these stories take place in a personal limbo, on a razor’s edge where things could turn out well or turn out badly. We don’t usually stick around to learn the result, but Bell gives us enough to go on. In the title story, a blind woman whose seeing eye dog has been spoiled from too many treats goes running and experiences a delicious loss of control before her inevitable crash. On a sentence level throughout the collection, Bell finds moments like these and uses propulsive, almost metrical language—often with skillful short sentences—to create from them the sense of foreboding and imminent surprise we have come to expect from flash fiction.
It is all too easy, in the tiny spaces the subgenre provides, to succumb to its temptations: relying on foreboding, summing people up, dismissing them, or ridiculing them for their lack of self-understanding. But Bell, to his credit, refrains almost entirely from easy potshots and maintains respect for the unknown lives of his characters. (The Present, a bit flippant and out of kilter with the rest of the collection, is the lone exception). He creates a sense that his characters are stuck in a murky purgatory and waiting—mostly with a resigned but edgy patience—to see whether the next day holds an opportunity for clarity. When we get to the end of their stories we feel we’ve been given a snapshot of the moment that most clearly exemplifies their struggles, yet that leaves us with something left to explore in their inner lives. A quote from The Trophy Wife exemplifies this approach well:
"Each statuette is frozen between one motion and the next, a pose that tells you nothing. It is impossible to know what will happen next when you only see the middle of the story. This is the moment right before victory becomes failure, or when a sure strike turns into a gutter ball."
This territory is becoming traditional—and perhaps even hackneyed—for the short-short, and I am happy to say that in How the Broken Lead the Blind I learned more about Bell's characters than the surface tension of this frozen pose would suggest.
Bell tills the soil of flash fiction well, with great awareness of the subgenre's capabilities for peering efficiently into the lives of his characters. But we learn considerably more than nothing about them; from the well-rendered contours of their silence and their stuck-ness, we learn enough to yield a probing, satisfying literary." - Steven Wingate

"In high school I read a Zen Koan about finding a horse. This rich guy sees a black stallion or something and hires an old master to retrieve it. He returns with a spotted mare. The rich guy is like, “Wait, what?” and the master says, “Oh no, it’s cool, this is a horse.”
It’s like that with the very short stories in Matt Bell’s collection, How the Broken Lead the Blind. They aren’t just great because of what they are about on the surface, but because of the tension between what’s on the surface and what accumulates behind the words. Bell’s work manifests Susan Sontag’s notion from “On Style,” that “the subject is on the outside; the style is on the inside.”
Accordingly, many of these microfictions work as conventional, plausible narratives, like “Once She’d Been a Brunette.” This one begins with a man shaving his head to support his cancerous lover and ends a year later when, giving his stubbly scalp a rub, she thinks about the springtime she’ll die before seeing. Bell encapsulates that whole drama in the first sentence: “They shave their hair together, before she even starts to lose hers.”
Meanwhile, other stories invert the question of narrative belief admirably. They would probably work as allegories if they had some distinct second meaning, but the second meaning isn’t distinct at all – at least not in what we have come to think of as a meaningful meaning for meaning. Like, take “Player Piano.”
In the first few sentences of this piece, a man who seems like he’s been lifted (masterfully) from a John O’Hara story boasts about his full head of hair. Life is great for him. “My wife and I were blessed all right,” he says, until the piano repairman unfolds the secret to their happiness from a scroll wedged into their upright. Supposedly this will put an end to their luck. But instead of bearing this out, the story ends with their terror at the possibility of unhappiness.
In “The Present,” a wife gifts her hand, severed, to her husband. This one is really absurd. The man is delighted with the gift, especially the surprise of it, but when his wife comes home from the hospital, she’s displeased to find that he’s using it for an ashtray.
Then another straight story, “The Trophy Wife,” begins with a gift too, this one from a man to his married lover. It’s a bowling trophy, representing her alibi and also their infidelity. And bowling represents their dilemma: “There are four hundred and fifty-nine combinations of possible splits. She said, It’s hard to pick up after a split.”
Regardless of the logistical framework of any story, my first judgment of each is simply that it is interesting. This is a rare feat in a genre which prioritizes mood and ingenuity over coherence and occurrence. It’s canny of Bell to tip off his authorial focus early, in “Ten Scenes from a Movie Called Mercy.” He writes, “Resist denouement, resist the solving of mysteries and the revealing of truths, because it is in these things that you may be judged.”
The point is almost cynical – don’t try to do much, because you might fail – but Bell is exceptionally good at writing in such a way that nothing ever seems to be lacking. This is what I’m most fond of in Bell’s writing, what continues to strike me each time I read it: in abstraction, it is never alienating. Complete from every first sentence, How the Broken Lead the Blind is always unresolved, always resolving." - Adam Robinson

"I read this chapbook from Willows Wept Press twice. I generally don’t read things twice. I don’t watch movies twice (except Woody Allen films [early ones] and Caddyshack—I watch them over and over). I know a lot of humans post about how they read books two, three, fourteen times a day, etc., in between screenings of black and white Swedish indie films (gulls and waves crashing) and writing their memoir(s), and DJing off their Ipod, but not me.
I got disc golf practice.
[I am hungry now. What should I eat?]
A mortgage (implies a house).
Why does the kitchen drain guffaw and sputter? Why does one bathroom smell like mottled banana, and the other like a waterfall? [Why can’t I eat that pink cotton candy that covers my attic?] Does anyone know how to make a flower live? I’m close to done with flowers. I’d rather landscape my mind with Dos Equis. My throat hurts like an economy. And: How do I use my programmable thermostat? It looks all neon and modern, but just blinks at me green, like E.T., or some bored cashier at a health food store.
A crushing existential crisis on my hands. Lots of night-thoughts. Dogs howling, or is that a siren? Etc.
So.
How the Broken Lead the Blind is obviously a drug.
No. You can not trade me a Cornish hen for that cough syrup. Get a hobby (I suggest bocce, or parkour.)
The title glitters and pulls like “a present wrapped in purple and gold.” I keep teaching my fiction students about titles and here is Matt Bell summarizing all I teach. Make your title a drug, people. Make it grab me by the subtropical Wendy, the rumbling Atlanta. Make it a metaphor umbrella, eclipsed and reddening. I went to the mailbox slightly drunk and pulled an envelope out of the mailbox and ripped open the envelope and Matt’s chapbook appeared. It bloomed there.
On the cover (by Christy Call) were two fucked up cranes. One of them looked like it stuck its neck into an episode of Will It Blend? Here is the one where they blend an Iphone.
I read the title of Matt Bell’s book and thought:
1.) This reminds me of a quote, I think Auden, wherein the evil of the world are motivated, speak out, actually act—as opposed to the peaceful, the good hearts, who keep quite, and therefore useless, in the big picture. Dictators as great speech-makers. Jim Jones. That idea. Or maybe that no one really feels or speaks with real conviction anymore. When is the last time you heard a speech with real conviction? Or gave one?
2.) Who are the blind? A Flannery O’ Connor (To the hard of hearing you shout, to the almost-blind you draw large and starling figures.) feel to the blind. Are we, as readers, the blind? Will our eyes be opened?
3.) This is the second time a Matt Bell story made its way into my skull and classroom. I have preached and preached for years to my students to GET-A-JOB! That’s the best advice for a writer. Get past the reality of the situation, behind the counter/the swinging door, into the kitchen, the stock room, the office, where all the insanity takes places. Get a job. Grab material and 34 bread sticks. Bring a notebook, or a memory cell.
An aside: Do all chefs smoke weed? I have worked in 3 restaurants and all the chefs smoked weed. Anyway.
[I wonder what is in my fridge. It is 11:30 and I am hungry. Do I have hot sauce?]
Matt wrote this gem about work, about PLACE: Alex Trebek Never Eats Fried Chicken.
This book can levitate.
How the Broken Lead the Blind has blurbs (see all here) the way War and Peace has characters (600 of them, if you are counting).
Matt must have many friends. Or at least compromising photos of many people. Also the writing is good, so that helps.
(If I gave a blurb I would have mentioned detachment. Characters seem to float. They want to communicate more fully, but cannot. Example (pubbed in Night Train). Very Chekhov in this way. I would have also used the word fuck in my blurb. I would just want to see if the word fuck could make it into the blurb, as genre question. Also I think I would have mentioned the obvious: this fucking book can levitate.)
William Walsh says, “Matt Bell is a maker of fine fictions.”
I like that: Maker. Fine Fictions. A fiction being fine as whole, complete, every word in its place, every sentence, to create a sensibility in the reader, to move me place to place, to hinge the text open, to work. Flash fiction as art, as science, as intricate machine.
When I say art of flash fiction I mean just this, a done thing. As in the right words. As in recipe—one more grain of salt, too much, one less, too bland. I think some of these flashes out-delect the others, out-born them–as if arrived formed and complete (all connotations), that word.
Example:
Surely, “How the Broken Lead the Blind until They Both Become Something Else Entirely” (Jesus, what a title!) is the best work in the chapbook. It flows, it blooms, runs forward like the endearing and rather remarkable blind woman, her seeing-eye dog, both on “new found running legs,” both “accidental artists” in their running free, acceleration and verve, embrace of possibility, of crash, of actual free-will-ness—finally.
Everything about this story is surprising, yet inevitable. A well-wrought thing, this art. That’s what I mean.
A close second in pure skill and quality is “Once She’d Been a Brunette.” Again, the words lead to their own world, create it, and the ending line (“She touches his hair with both hands and for just one moment she swears she can feel it flourishing, can feel the new cells pushing through the skin, like a springtime she’ll never see.”) is a fine example of epiphany (not an attempt, but the actual thing: the character brought to a state of enlightenment, a realization of significance).
Well done, Mr. Bell.
I am always one with an eye and admiration for structure, especially the organic form, the forms and functions of the world. Martone selects a travel guide. Mcphee uses a Monopoly board. Lorrie Moore an entire genre of pop culture writing as scaffolding for her fiction. Etc.
Matt does several interesting structural things here. “Ten Scenes from a Movie Called Mercy” uses the language of film, footage and jumpcuts and candlelight and tracking shot and wardrobe and high-angle somethings and symbolic use of music and/or guilt and frames-per-second and cellulose nitrate as highly flammable (note: there are many factoids scattered throughout this text, and I wish more writer’s would follow Bell’s example—I like to learn something new while I read [besides theme]).
In “Her Ennead” the author uses the technique of repetition to convey the utter absurd surprise of pregnancy, the awe and disequilibrium.
“Excerpt from Volume H-HN: Hair Boxes” (surely the strangest and freshest text in the entire chapbook) appropriates an encyclopedic voice, a hint of Barthelme (or do I dare say Borges?), as it weaves a human tale of odd construction. As the author writes, “In the end, an urge always proves too strong for the maker to resist.”
Sounds like writing, eh?
Chapbook as box of hair?
[I need nachos now, that’s it]
Yes. Images. Poetry.
Words. I said WORDS…“touching us one at a time until finally all of us are healed.”
Fuck yes.
There you go. “A laying on of fucking hands,” that’s what I would put in my blurb. Hey. You.
Consume." - Sean Lovelace


"In Bell’s The Broken Leading the Blind, most of the stories depict a disruption or break from routine, such as a blind woman allowing her seeing eye dog to run unrestrained while she is dragged along behind knowing full well how their unchecked motion will end. But those endings, however inevitable they seem in the story, don’t actually come — there’s a sense that consequences will follow the disruptive moments, but the stories tend to end with the disruptions instead of reaching their aftermaths. The characters tend to be only aware of the moment they’re in, with suggestions of how they got there, as in “This Showroom Filled With Fabulous Prizes”:
She says, “You don’t drink anymore, but you used to,” and he nods without looking. “She says, “Are you quit for good?”
He thinks for a moment, says, “I’m trying to be.”
It’s not specific, it’s not full exposition, but it’s enough to give the character complexity and history within the quick, focused moment of the story, and that restraint makes the stories feel complete even if the lives of the characters aren’t." - Steve Himmer

"Matt Bell’s How the Broken Lead the Blind seems deceptively simple at first, consisting of 55 pages, with only ten stories, of length ranging from a sparse page and a quarter to nearly seven pages in length. The ten stories, though, are carefully arranged, their trajectories minutely adjusted and sent to spin and crash together with a precision that would seem cold if it didn’t have beneath it a true concern for the human condition.
This seems to be characteristic of Bell’s writing, and the first unifying theme that stands out is that of convergence and inevitability. Bell sets his characters into seemingly intractable trajectories that challenge the reader’s notion of fate and control. The first story in the collection is “Ten Scenes From a Movie Called Mercy.” Here we have the convergence of an (unstated) murderer and a child, told through the metaphor of scenes from a move. The metaphor does allow for an escape from the perceived inevitability, though:
“Off camera, pray for editing, for the rearrangement of film. The editor could remove the first scene, just cut it out. With a pair of scissors, he could let the second scene tumble to the cutting room floor in a clatter of 8mm frames. Cellulose nitrate is highly flammable, so pray for the fourth scene to be cut short by fire. Pray to keep her safe from the person that wants to hurt her… Resist deoument, resist the solving of mysteries and the revealing of truths, because it is in these things that you may be judged.”
I love this passage; it is lyrical and reads almost like a lament, unexpected in its sudden sympathy.
As the collection progresses, these ideas of convergence become more and more complicated by the idea of communication, and a true struggle over how it occurs, if it is truly possible, and what danger it might have. One interesting piece in this is “Player Piano” In which a couple, living an idyllic life, choose to tune their piano, because the wife, “claimed it had always been the slightest bit out of tune and now she was finally tired of just living with it.” The repairman finds it is out of tune because a powerful prayer “was hidden inside. That’s why you’ve been happy your whole life.“ Unfortunately, “prayers only work if they’re secret. Now you know, you’re finally on your own.” The idea here, of this secret source of happiness being a secret sour note that must remain unplumbed is hauntingly powerful and evocative. Here we see that full communication does indeed have consequences, often dire.
The last piece in the collection was my favorite: “Excerpt from Volume H-Hn: Hair Boxes.” Here, Bell takes a step back in narrative distance, setting the piece as a backward looking encyclopedia entry. He describes a ritual that seems to be compelled, again these trajectories, of constructing a box, filling it with one’s shorn hair, burning it, and sending it to someone else. Perhaps because of the narrative distance, this story becomes not an inevitable trajectory, not an exterior compulsion, but a powerful metaphor for the persistent human need to communicate, to be understood, even if the matrix of that understanding is often sacrifice and loss.
I said at the beginning of this review that the trajectories of each of these pieces are carefully calculated, and they are, but in a way that eschews collision. In the end, the parts dance around each other with the persistence of a Swiss watch, meshing together with geared teeth. And I think that while those teeth do draw real blood on occasion, this collection has a true heart and belief that we can reach out to each other, even as it challenges us to examine our ideas about the way we communicate and interact." - Todd B. Stevens

How the Broken Lead the Blind can now be read on Issuu or downloaded as a PDF for free

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