Justin Sirois, MLKNG SCKLS (Publishing Genius, 2009)"MLKNG SCKLS is a short collection of Salim Abid's deleted Word documents written during his escape up the Euphrates from Fallujah to Ramadi. These texts could have been included in Falcons on the Floor, which is the novel Salim wrote about fleeing from his war ravaged city, but for sensitive reasons he chose to remove them. That metanarrative provides the conceit of this chapbook, lushly composed by Justin Sirois and edited by Iraqi refugee Haneen Alshujairy. MLKNG SCKLS provides a bristling and necessary look into the realities of living in Iraq, complete with dying laptop batteries, knock-off sneakers, and carnage-lined roadways."
“Sirois’ MLKNG SCKLS reads like what might happen if you crossed Gus Van Sant’s Gerry with the parts of an Iraq war documentary that the Bush administration had censored. A tight, spare and quietly tense gem of a book.” - Brian Evenson
"Sirois' masterful creation is not just a travel narrative, not just an epistolary, not just a war story. This is desert madness made universal, a coming of age rendered apocalyptic in language as sparse and beautiful and ultimately perilous as the desert passage it describes." - Matt Bell
"A book about Iraq. War-torn Iraq. It provides such a complicated narrative and emotional system that the didacticism inherent in political literature falls away. But, this book has great political potential. Justin leaves his characters bare to the reader so as to create an emotional connection and shift in values in the way we see an abstracted political conflict. The balance of power and our role in it will necessarily shift after reading this book." - John Dermot Woods
"Excerpted from the novel Falcons on the Floor, Justin Sirois’s MLKNG SCKLS is ostensibly the story of a road trip across a war-torn landscape. Actually, these aren’t excerpts but excised texts, deleted Word documents from narrator Salim Abid’s laptop intended for the novel Abid wrote while escaping from Fallujah to Ramadi with his friend Khalil. Salim’s epistolary accounts are composed on his laptop and are sectioned off by how much remaining battery power his laptop has. It’s a striking metafictional device that evocatively suggests that time may also be literally running out for Salim and Khalil. As Salim’s laptop’s battery power percentage decreases, the characters’ uncertainty increases. At any moment, you think that Salim will get the pop-up balloon saying: “Low Battery: You should change your battery or switch to outlet power immediately to keep from losing your work.”
And, in another symbolic turn, with only “44% Battery Power Remaining,” Salim describes a tender moment where he cooks and then “uncooks” a meal for his beloved. Why? “To show Rana how much I love her, I’d uncook an entire meal, the whole thing, just for her. Anyone can cook, but uncooking – that’s hard. That’s really hard. But it’d be so worth it.” It’s one of this short book’s many imaginative moments and may reveal Salim’s unconscious desire to turn back the clock, to somehow undo what was done to him, his family, his community.
And what exactly was done? Other than mentioning that these entries were written in April, 2004, while fleeing from Fallujah, nothing else is explicitly written. Salim and Khalil’s escape from Fallujah was presumably precipitated by the First Battle of Fallujah, codenamed “Operation Vigilant Resolve,” the U.S. Military’s disastrous attempt to capture the city of Fallujah in April, 2004. While 27 American soldiers were killed, hundreds of Iraqis including many civilians were killed in the offensive. It was later reported that the U.S. Military was guilty of using incendiary devices like napalm and white phosphorus in their offensive. Perhaps this is what Salim was referring to when he wrote “Now black skies burp fire and the water boils poisonous.”
While its rendering of fear and uncertainty is precisely and captivatingly drawn, MLKNG SCKLS opens up into much more. Lyrical evocations of loss abound as do reveries on desert life:
Windless as an aquarium, the night stretches itself from rim to rim with no beginning or quit. Forward past the darkened shoreline, beyond scrub brush and burr, the horizon is replaced by the river and only the river. North to south, it feeds the desert. Black water inks seaward across the prairie. The outstretched wingspan of water is endless with tributaries feathered into marshland. No one rides or floats. All night the water’s calm. The glassy black flows placid and quiet, and I stare hoping no one comes. No one has and no one will. Across the calm, at the river’s edge, palm trees and poplars poke the sky like crude weaponry.
Sirois’s prose glistens with precision. Its sparseness mirrors the parched desert through which Salim and Khalil travel, its lyricism one proof of how resilient we can be in the face of disaster. Clocking in at fifty-five pages, this novelette manages to pack dreamy reveries, juvenile taunts, gorgeous descriptions of landscape, gothic depictions of vultures circling, lapidary views of blood, and doses of humor (like Khalil’s tall tale about a man with a crippled hand whose life was saved by a cigarette) that spell the reader through a harrowing trip to a place that’s, with any luck, safe, or, at least safer. If MLKNG SCKLS’s excised texts are any indication of the quality of Falcons on the Floor, then, as readers, we have much to look forward to." - John Madera
"MLKNG SCKLS documents two young men, Salim and Khalil, on their journey through the desert as they flee Fallujah in April 2004. The narrative is told through Salim's brief diary-like entries which are demarcated not by a date, but by how much battery power remains on the laptop. With 91% batter power remaining, Salim recounts what it was like when leaving Fallujah: "Now black skies burp fire and the water boils poisonous. Boot heels collapse the necks of doorknobs. Men go and go missing." While the language is sparse, Sirois is still incredibly detailed, capturing the tone and mood through his careful word choices.
Salim is an engaging character whose wry humor shows up time and time again. He describes trying to sleep at night: "The night has no soundtrack but creaks and snaps. Every bird chirp could be a radio squawking attack; every splash becomes boots rushing us blind. I've sat up so many times I probably have a six pack from paranoia -- it could be marketed as The Ultimate, 480 Minute, Don't Stab Me in My Sleep Workout." Salim and Khalil give a human face to the Iraqis suffering in this war. They joke, laugh, love, are frightened, frustrated, angry, and they are not so different from us. In one particularly imaginative and touching scene, Salim recounts uncooking a meal for his girlfriend, Rana: "To show Rana how much I love her, I'd uncook an entire meal, the whole thing, just for her. Anyone can cook, but uncooking -- that's hard. That's really hard. But it would be so worth it." He then goes on to describe the process of cooking and then uncooking chicken curry while Rana waits. This scene in particular plays with the reader's desire to know more. Is this a flashback or a dream? Who is Rana? What happened to her? Though the reader most likely knows the answer to this last question.
If the purpose of this book is to build anticipation for Falcons on the Floor, the larger puzzle these pieces fit into, then Sirois is successful. These fragments are almost sure to engage the reader and leave him or her wanting more. MLKNG SCKLS is a smart and compassionate little book." - Gina Myers
"I’d say this book is probably the best thing I’ve read about Iraq – which isn’t to suggest that I’ve read all that much about Iraq, I’m sorry to say. Sadly, I’ve become sort of dull and deaf to the whole of what’s going on there, and this book coaxed me out of that numbness. There’s so little in news stories of the war in Iraq that makes me feel anything. This book made me feel sympathy for the main character, Salim, mainly due to all that was familiar and at the same time strange about him, the way his experience is at once unfathomable and very mundane. During his exodus, Salim is deeply attached – as I am – to a personal computer, and the book is structured as a series of documents Salim has written on his laptop. Salim dreams of posting his homemade films on the Internet. And he’s angry at the man-eating birds circling the sky and annoyed at his traveling partner – like it’s traffic or some other quotidian annoyance we’re talking about here. Justin does a great job of capturing what it’s like to be a refugee in the modern age or rather what it’s like simply to be living in the modern age.
Throughout the book there’s the sense that Salim is being watched or potentially being watched, whether by some sort of ominous army in the dark with lasers or light beams or or by a Western housewife nursing her child and watching Salim’s Internet video. And yet, while he seems to be constantly on the verge of being spotted, you wonder if anyone can actually see him. Salim and Khalil seem desperately alone in the land through which they are traveling, the last living humans in a world that doesn’t care about them, ignores them, wants to devour them – I’m not sure which. Technology presses down, heavily. It’s a connector and a compressor but also a separator – offering the illusion of connection where it doesn’t really exist, ultimately leaving Salim isolated. What exactly are Salim and Khalil running from? It’s left unclear. This is not about politics or battles or states or boundaries or anything so clearly defined but about people moving through the world, looking, longing for something, wanting to be seen, wanting to be unique. The writing is spare, beautiful and descriptive. Vultures are hungry “turkeys” with ruffled rear-ends, suggesting the US or perhaps some other parasitic, opportunistic presence. A woman’s hair “glistens like frozen Coke.” Scary and lovely.
When did you start writing the book?
- I started writing MLKNG SCKLS right after finishing the second edits on Falcons on the Floor. That was February ’09. I’d built up all this momentum and was in love with the characters and I just needed to keep going. After combing through the notes and sketches I took/made, routing through all these photos I’d collected online in preparation for the novel, I found ideas and scenes that didn’t make the final cut. These shorts stories in SCKLS came out of that wanting to expand the narrative.
Publishing the “deleted scenes” before the feature is a little backwards, but it’s been helpful in getting the word out about the larger project. Publishing Genius of Baltimore did a perfect job producing and promoting the book.
Can you tell me about the nature of your collaboration with Haneen Alshujairy? How did you meet her and how did this all work? Did you talk to her and then write your story? Or write your story and then talk to her? What was the process?
- I found Haneen after soliciting about 60 Iraqis on a language exchange website. I was honest and said I speak no Arabic and really just wanted to interview people about their experiences in and around the war. Three people replied and Haneen was the most responsive and curious. Even though she had fled the country in 2003, she was from Baghdad and has extended family in Fallujah. Her father was born there. We instantly became friends. After interviewing her for a few months I got up the courage to ask her to take a look at the first draft of Falcons. Reading 30 pages at a time via email, she gave me feedback and criticism, made some suggestions, and all of a sudden we were collaborating. We used the same process with MLKNG SCKLS.
How does a guy in Baltimore decide to write a book on Iraq, from the perspective of an Iraqi?
- That’s the big question. Who the hell am I to write a story like this? I was definitely motivated by the lack of news coverage in the US told from the Iraqi perspective. After learning more about the events in Fallujah in April of 2004, I was completely absorbed with the conflict and drama, the people and the places (Fallujah and Ramadi). If I could have traveled there, I would have, but it still isn’t safe for Westerners and working from the Green Zone would have been like working in any city in America. Isolated and detached from the reality.
When I was doing my research – reading as much as I could, watching every documentary I could find, and talking to Iraqis on the net – the thought of an American writing from an Iraqi perspective became more and more reasonable. SCKLS and Falcons is more of a story about people and friendships rather than a “foreign war” story. The more I realized how similar Americans are to the Iraqi people the more confidence I had in starting the project.
Haneen obviously adds an authenticity to the project that is vital. I wouldn’t have completed it without her.
What’s the connection between MLKNG SCKLS and Falcons on the Floor? Why did these scenes get deleted? What’s Falcons on the Floor like?
- Falcons is a bit different from SCKLS. It’s darker in some ways. The threats are more concrete and violence is everywhere. The reader sees exactly why Salim and Khalil are fleeing Fallujah, why their relationship is strained, and how desperate and confused they are. The landscape in the novel becomes a character in a way. That’s one large difference between the two books. There’s also perspective shifts in the novel that you can’t get in SCKLS as SCKLS are sections picked from a section in Falcons that is written on Salim’s laptop. The rest of the novel is told from a third person perspective.
Some of the scenes or ideas weren’t included because they distracted from the rhythm of the narrative. A few of the shorts were written after the novel was completed, but were based on themes or ideas that were edited early in the drafting process.
I love the scene in which Salim uncooks the meal. It’s very strange but not overtly so. Where did this come from? Have you attempted uncooking yourself? After reading this sad, tense, romantic scene, I kind of wish my husband would uncook for me.
- Oh, if only I could uncook for someone I love. Sadly, I’m not that skilled. It takes years of careful practice and a strong stomach for reanimation. I simply don’t have it. I wish I could have used a less commonly known dish, but the story is so exaggerated I thought it would be easier for the reader if the recipe was familiar. I think it unworks well enough.
The idea came out of wanting to taking a common act and reverse it, but still keeping it endearing and loving. Cooking made sense. I think everyone can relate to either Salim or Rana; i.e. cooking or being cooked for.
What does “milking sickles” mean?
- I really don’t know. I love the sound of it – the rhythm – the icky-ness.
Imagine idle men, unemployed men in the Jolan (a market in Fallujah) gripping the blades of sharpened sickles and milking them, expecting sustenance, but producing only blood.
I also hate cliché titles of books and wanted to name the collection something anti-informative… much like the stories themselves." - Interview with Ginny Parker Woods
Justin Sirois, Secondary Sound (BlazeVOX Books, 2008)"As soon as any new gadgets are invented, artists stand ready to appropriate the thing and bend it for critique. In his exciting and danceable new book, justin sirois dabbles with the idea:
Technologies, they go:
development
marketing
immersion
adaptation
obsolescence
art
Accordingly, there's a land rush on literary innovation, a race to spike a claim on the newest forms. The epistolary novel worked out well, who can do the same thing with e-mail? Who's going to trick out Amazon's Kindle? Who will publish the first book comprised completely of IMs? Poets have been revising spam as poetry since spam became randomly sublime, and one of the most far out and successful experiments is Douglass Rushkoff's open source novel, which made it into print in 2002, five years before news broke about the role audience input played in Snakes on a Plane. And, thus, the fact that some attic trendsetter has done it better already is always the problem.
Secondary Sound, justin sirois's new book of poetry, brilliantly subverts all of this while exhibiting a keen awareness of it. It's natural that a book about a trend-savvy consumer-activist named (oh the savvy) "Pirate," who is commissioned to develop the greatest of all possible ringtones by a media conglomerate named the Grope Group, would include some graphical reference to text messaging. And so it does, but in a blithely noncontiguous, impossible way:
if you text::
I don't understand
to the number::
phenomenologically speaking, it's no longer about you, it's about the Tesla of palms collectively pressed to the prism of colliding idiom
you'll Katamari every dream in the Eastern Ameropean market . . .
Boxes are printed around the text messages, which is a suggestive way to separate the text message from the rest of the poem (most of Secondary Sound can be read as a series of individual poems, but it works most effectively as a comprehensive story, an epic poem). This delineation serves as inquiry about the relationship between "text message" and "text." It's a prescient line of questioning, considering that text messaging is, in a real way, an entirely new form of communication. It's the form that disregards formal rules in the service of meaning, that operates unmediated by teachers so that what the 11-year-old writes is indistinguishable from what her mother scrawls off of her BlackBerry.
You know—they go like this: "where r u" "at strbks"—text messaging strips from language its concern with grace, so that all that's left is meaning. This is Husserl's dream (he got on the phenomenology bandwagon early; it was his idea to "bracket" distracting phenomena and in this way to approach the ground of being), so—phenomenologically speaking—sirois is nailing all the right questions. Does he care? Nope, and who does, and who should? The philosophical underpinnings of Secondary Sound are tenable and fun to think about—but, but
but the thing that sirois gets best, and what makes the book so convincing, is the liquid language he uses to outline the story. Comprised primarily of instructional memos from the Grope Group to the Pirate, with a couple short story interludes, the book has a way of enticing the reader with sparkles of plot and sharp tropes while simultaneously befuddling any concrete assertions about what, exactly, is going on.
Because what's going on is that Pirate, by his existence and quirky day-to-day, is cataloging everything that needs to be included in this new chime. And every salable thing needs to be in there; the chime is an Hegelian endeavor to incorporate all history ("and film history because" it's pointed out, "film history is a separate history"), so we can expect a little vertigo from the narrator's perspective. In fact, the most dizzying abstractions are preferable. Writing sensory overload, sirois has nailed the dazed tone most capable of sensibly addressing the subject of our modern situation. This piece closes the first section, concluding the introductory memo from the Grope Group:
when the day is done their ears will ring & this is how they'll judge how the night went, wet with sounds dripping from drums, kettles of letters steaming like tea. In cabs they'll croon, make nookie in the books of napes & grapple with new text that tent chests
the night will be done because their ears are ringing
Apparently, the Grope Group aspires to develop more than just a ringtone, but by using the ringtone they will exert power over the consumers and over time itself; they'll ring in the night. And Google is taking over my life because I'm letting it—I use Google Docs to write, CheckOut to shop, their search engine to look up my friend's address—so the hegemony of the Grope Group is not implausible. What is more horrifying is that they have made Pirate complicit in their ambition. They will reach full power on the strength of what he creates, and he seems to be one of the conscientious few with the ability to resist their goals. As the hero, he is the other between the two modalities in the book, the business world and the daffy punk resistance. This latter group, like punks in the real world, seem to have given up serious protest and now take "antipolitical political action," like arranging zombie parties aimed at repealing the Estate Tax. Good times, sure, but not really fueled by the same urgency that their forebears had when they took issue with, say, the Stamp Tax.
All of this isn't a terribly difficult metaphor to pull out of the book, or to decipher. Take away his commission to create a ringtone and Pirate becomes practically every US citizen alive today—a person subject to the myriad imperatives of corporate marketing; Pirate just has a more involved role in the game. But sirois masterfully describes the principality of the powers not by vilifying any of the players (there is no clear Big Brother), but by highlighting the qualities of the ringtone. It's something that can't be escaped, and that's okay, because
when the chime is going for a run
or standing on the train
it won't annoy other passagers or pedestrians...when your favorite draught is being poured at an airport lounge, each bubble of foam will have this chime swirling inside...
The ubiquity of the chime is matched by sirois's ability to cross reference different sections of the text, which instills an equally vertiginous feature to reading it. Several pieces are called "echo"—that's a good gag, especially bearing in mind the books title. And at one point, Pirate takes exception to having to say "Private SNAFU" as a code. A later poem takes that acronym, expanded, for its title. Grope Group opens every memo with "Ahoy," a quirk that sirois knows might get old and which he addresses by way of apology: "Ahoy!/I hope that doesn't get annoying," and "oy vey! I mean ahoy!" There are so many links from page to page that the reading becomes blissfully hypertextual, and finding selections of the poem to excerpt is a simple task. There are two scoops of noteworthy nuggets inside this book, plenty at which to laugh, marvel or cringe.
I am enthusiastic about this book. I have rarely been more enthusiastic about any book." —Adam Robinson
"It’s a short book. Like 92 pages. The page count @ BlazeVOX is off. I only took one page of notes. It was my favorite passage from the book, which was this:
“& when I speak
I speak about every
bucaneer from Baltimore to Tehran
& the Group texts
someone stop this fucker
before he disassembles
everything we stand for”
I thought this part was funny. But the book was often funny. It boils down to a satire of modern inter-connectivty culture while it whole-heartedly embraces it. I don’t think he actually meant sailing the open seas pirates, though the imagery for that is too rich to not use, and so I think it makes a certain amount of sense that he did use it. He’s talking about intellectual property pirates, a group which I think we are all part of. The one clear theme in this madness is that the pirate is told to write music for a ringtone, but a ringtone is never just a ringtone. There was also a funny scene where he scores free tickets into a club. Like he’s always trying to score free things.
I don’t read a lot of poetry, I won’t lie. I like my words cohesive, clear, and more the conveyance of emotion than emotion on the page. But I read this because he gave it to me. And I’d have probably enjoyed this otherwise. I think BlazeVOX does an awful lot of work, and people like Justin Sirois are not appreciated enough. I think fourteen dollars is a small price to pay in support of those things, but I’m pretty sure the pirate himself won’t care much if you don’t. He understands your culture and takes part in it at the same time that he sees the joke and parallels of it. This I loved about the book. It wasn’t hard to read. It was worth the time I spent on it. And the least I could do to repay him for just giving it to me was write a short review, however shoddy it may be." - P.H. Madore
“the more I share, the more capital I receive. You’re a copy
of a copy, you’re a file rife with fire – in the ownership
society – in spite of normative code
let yourself be free & collect the monthly allowance
think about meme
copying youyou” —Justin Sirois “paralysis by analysis”
Secondary Sound, Justin Sirois's first full length collection of poetry, is a fun read through our current cultural situation in which new media technology and information gathering and distribution is constantly growing and changing. Comprised of three sections, the book defies the simple label of "poetry" through its use of multiple genres. Largely composed of poems in verse, there are also prose pieces that read more like short stories than they do prose poems, text messages, lists, and company memorandums. Like a walk through the city where one encounters flyers on street posts, advertisements on subway walls and the sides of buses, overheard bits of conversations, chants yelled by protestors, music overflowing from an open window, and text messages straight to your pocket, information comes from every direction, and for sirois, this experience of information is a valid and vital source for poetry.
The page marking section one introduces the character Pirate and his mission: "One: Bell -- in which a Pirate is hired to create the most alluring ringtone known to man." From there we follow Pirate through his journey as he develops a ringtone for the pervasive media conglomerate Group Grope - a journey that leads us through an organic grocery store to purchase tea (choose from HonesTea, RealiTea, IngenuiTea, BrutaliTea), past zombie performance artists calling to "Kill the death tax," into a folk psych-rock club in search of tickets to a secret show, and ultimately onto a ship called The Embarcadero whose destination is Stolen Kitten Island. Though it sounds far-fetched, Pirate's voyage is very easy to relate to and is very much a story of the present time.
In addition to the average poetry reader, the clever details throughout Secondary Sound will also appeal to theory jocks, pop culture fanatics, and tech junkies. Sirois masterfully documents the world in all its absurdity and glory as Pirate’s hero, the Well-Balanced Buccaneer, text messages his friends on his new keyless iAye, and the Grope Group board “Nikes this Converse sound into commercial licorice.” Topical and hip, Secondary Sound exploits the language of marketing and advertising in a period of time where workers have been transformed “from cashiers and bartenders to information workers nearly over night."
The book also offers a commentary on piracy, from DJs who are arrested for underground mixtapes to individuals being sued for downloads by major recording companies. Sirois seems sympathetic to the idea of free information and sharing: "It's not thieving if you're copping a copy of a copy," and admits to a past growing up “recording the sounds of ourselves, then traded each other inside cassettes decorated with highlighter, glitter, Sharpie, petrochemical wonder.” In this world Pirate is both critical and complicit, “a necessary evil in the gift economy” who is “just trying to work here.”
Generation Web 2.0 is user-generated, hypertextual, and backboned by social networking. Pirate advises to “Google yourself to make sure you’re good / both in quotes & without quotes.” Even though death lies ahead of Pirate, he knows his profile and homepage and avatar will wander forever. A book this concerned with new media is sure to have an online presence. You can become MySpace friends with the Grope Group or visit their website (www.gropegroup.com) for internal memorandums and job opportunities.
In conversation with his friend Jim, Pirate comments “Ridiculous.” Jim asks, “What part?” That seems like an appropriate question. It is all nonsensical, ludicrous, and silly, but we wouldn’t have it any other way." - Gina Myers
Thank you for this, sir.
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