The Saint of 3F - THE DOCK: July 2014

HFR is pleased to introduce Mark Dostert and his essay, "The Saint of 3F." This is the first installment of The Dock. Look for new online content next month.

HFR: Who has had the greatest influence on your writing?

MD: I was finishing the first draft of Up in Here: Jailing Kids on Chicago’s Other Side about the time that Anthony Swofford published Jarhead, his marine sniper’s account of the Persian Gulf War. In revising my manuscript and starting various adapted personal essays like “The Saint of 3F,” an interview comment of Swofford’s proved instructive. He spoke of a breakthrough when realizing that his task with this genre of nonfiction was to “turn the pen on myself.” From then on with each chapter of my book and any excerpt, I strove to expose and thus examine, for better or worse, some part of me—something that a reader might relate to despite never having worked in a jail. In turning the pen on myself, perhaps I could even turn the pen on a reader. A writer I admire this way is Andre Dubus who, while an icon of American short fiction, was a marvelously engaging essayist in his two collections:  Broken Vessels and Meditations from a Moveable Chair. [Norman] “Mailer at the Algonquin” is Dubus’s chance encounter with the famed post-war writer at a New York restaurant where the young Dubus and his first wife were meeting the editor of his first book. His resistance to his editor’s proposal for a major setting change while yet using his editor to meet Mailer and then stay the night at his place rather than back at the hotel with his wife becomes Dubus’s seduction of the reader—married or not, figuratively adulterous or not, divorced or not—into his own guilt and struggle for spousal integrity.  

 ________________________________________________________________

The Saint of 3F

Mark Dostert

On various college mornings, I awoke to bloodshed. My alarm clock radio was set to WMAQ—Chicago’s flagship news station, which announced (sometimes by name) those bludgeoned, stabbed, gunned at, or gunned through the previous day. Dressing myself to 670 A.M. instead of music or sports talk became compulsory during Chicago’s crack cocaine’s heyday when reported crime happened in more terrifying concentrations before the city began dozing subsidized highrises like Cabrini-Green, walking distance from my dormitory, and the Henry Horner Homes and row houses like the Ida Bees. As much as possible, I listened on, specifically for children:  injuries suffered by the latest gang-beating kid victim, the number of youth police arrested during school hours at drug dens on Larabee Avenue or South Langley, and to which hospital an ambulance ferried a once-armed teen into whom a liquor store owner had buried bullets. Not being from Chicago or even Illinois, these facts evolved into matters of strange contemplation for me, as if an outsider keeping mental inventory and imagining the depressing details of all those young wasting lives somehow mitigated the waste. Four years later I wanted more than awareness. I wanted to meet such wasting lives and try to stop the waste, so I applied to be a Children’s Attendant at the city’s 500-cell juvenile detention center and eventually moved back to Chicago for a position that was actually:  jail guard. So I had to process a lot more of the city’s bad news.

I still tuned in WMAQ on my off time though, yet the afternoon my car radio announced the murder of two boys at 50^th and Paulina Streets near the Apostolic House of Prayer Church, I numbly dismissed such violence to thugs and cliché. I’d already met too many kids whom I fathomed easily playing either role:  the killer or the killed. But when the Chicago Tribune published what looked to be school pictures of the victims, Delvon Harris, fourteen, and Robert Owens, fifteen, next to half-inch headlines, I pored over their story and their faces posing somewhere between laughs and smiles. They were no thugs and, embarrassed by my flippant assumption, I was no longer numb. Below them in a separate photo, Delvon’s older cousin, Angel, crouched over the muddy curb where the two had dropped and pressed her face with both hands. A yellow Police Do Not Cross ribbon lay rumpled in the gutter’s muck and trash. The feature offered no likeness of the suspect. Police had him nabbed dashing from the death site carting a .38-caliber snub-nosed pistol with five spent rounds and one live. Someone jogged up to the squad car and fingered Patrick, ten days from his thirteenth birthday, as the trigger puller. According to police, the boy confessed he had “wanted to go out and shoot somebody” as part of a gang initiation. The Tribune quoted Teddy, an admitted Latin Saint, explaining that Patrick, who lived with his father, disabled by a stabbing, and younger brother, had tried “to prove he is down. He wanted it for the longest time.” Administrators from Seward Academy, Patrick’s 94 % Hispanic public school, disclosed his five weeks of suspension for replicating gang symbols on his folders and raving about joining the Latin Saints. I’d pegged the killings more black gang-against-black gang bloodletting.

For me, raised in a Texas suburb, Chicago offered additional surprises. Patrick was a non-Hispanic white. Had he been thirteen, prosecutors could have petitioned the judge to transfer his case to criminal court and arraign him as an adult—a Presumptive Transfer. Caseworkers feared that knowledge of his charge would endanger him in our jail’s vastly black population, so Patrick began his detention in medical isolation where he stayed barely two weeks before being transferred to a real cellblock, 3F. The week of the shooting I was in scheduled training with my new-hire group, enjoying the quiet of our basement classroom but wanted to see Patrick. I wanted to see a twelve-year-old murder suspect. “Yeah, we got him,” an attendant regularly assigned to 3F soon told me outside the five-story steel and glass facility. Coincidentally, he then used vacation days, headed for Tennessee, and I filled his shifts. Despite being average 3F age and height, Patrick outweighed his cellblockmates. His buzzed head seemed round as a globe. With hair light and skin paled like someone growing up under the perpetually cold leaden skies of the former Eastern Bloc, Patrick hardly passed for a common Hispanic. I wondered if this had been why he might have killed someone—the Latin Saints wouldn’t trust him until he did something vicious and exhibited himself more than a mascot-like groupie. Inmates on 3F couldn’t intimidate Patrick, but integrating elsewhere was problematic. The boy’s mother then conferred with administration, which ordered us to hold Patrick out of school. With his peers in class, Patrick idled upstairs, lolling at a circular fiberglass table outside the TV Area. Weekdays when I arrived at 2:00 P.M., he was flipping through magazines or sketching. Often he laid his head down on the pages and papers waiting for the cellblock to return from the School Area. Later I overhead my coworker accepting movie requests from Patrick, offering to rent the boy videos to watch during his sedentary school days. This man, a black man who in my first month on the job warned me not to make Attending Children my career, knew of Patrick’s indictment. We all did. “Again?” he’d said when Patrick answered with Scream 2. Evidently, staged on-screen slaughter could not repulse Patrick. Perhaps witnessing real carnage neutered the mock gore of gratuitously staged carnage. At best, Patrick watched two boys take five slugs. At worst, he performed the slugging himself.

Patrick’s mother further requested that her son not mingle with the general population during Recreation or Church, claiming that other inmates plotted to hurt him. When Patrick’s twenty-something cellblockmates marched off to the chapel with one of us, he remained on block. If Recreation scheduled 3F for basketball or softball, Patrick couldn’t participate but rather watched more television, drew, or cleaned. I complimented him at least once for maintaining one of 3F’s more spotless cells. Intellectually, I should have hated Patrick for what he likely did to Robert and Delvon, for heaping up more white/black animosity in America, and for how differently every black inmate at that jail must have viewed me. Patrick had reminded them that whites continued to kill blacks, right there and right then in Chicago—not just a million years ago in grainy lynching stills of the Jim Crow South. Black inmates would link me to this contemporary racial assassin and to those cinching nooses around the necks of their ancestors. Yet no fiery rage at Patrick welled inside me. I didn’t see him shoot Robert and Delvon. I didn’t step around their blood on the sidewalk. I shared no wake room weeping space with their families. So far Patrick hadn’t rendered my job difficult. He never called me “Opie” or “white bitch” like some black inmates had. Racist as it seemed, not hating Patrick was effortless.

“His mom requested it because she feared for his safety. But if you look at all the reports, it was Patrick doing all the fighting,” 3F’s regular 8-4 shift Children’s Attendant told me. “He’s been written up at least eight times and he’s only been here two weeks—all for fighting and gang-banging,” another said. According to one caseworker, Patrick also instigated “a gang fight” in the gym one Saturday afternoon about a month after his arrival.

“Yeah, he’s a Saint,” Father Kelly, the detention center’s Catholic chaplain, explained to me after one of his sessions with the double-murder suspect when I mentioned media reports of Patrick’s gang membership.

Off the cellblock, he counseled Patrick in a rare group of one. Maybe Father Kelly thought the boy needed confidentiality in case he decided to talk about that .38-caliber pistol in his jacket. Attendants on 3F then mentioned Patrick bragging to other juveniles that he did kill Delvon and Robert. No lethal needles threatened Patrick but Father Kelly, a white man from Ohio with a taut brown mustache, who unlike me didn’t shelter himself in the suburbs where everyone looked like him and spoke like him, but rather lived “in the community,” still objected to the death penalty. Even if Patrick had been seventeen, much less thirteen, that day racing away from 50^th and Paulina, our jailhouse priest wouldn’t have demanded that he surrender his life if guilty. I learned this in Father Kelly’s newsletter, Making Choices, which he passed out during chapel services and delivered in stacks to the cellblocks. Along with juvenile-penned essays and poems, one edition recounted his trip to a suburban penitentiary to protest the approaching executions of Durlynn Eddmonds and Walter Stewart. Eddmonds was convicted of molesting and murdering a boy of nine whose body authorities recovered from a dumpster. Stewart was judged liable in two slayings while robbing a jewelry store. Father Kelly finished his editorial:  “Pray that the people of Illinois and the people of the United States demand that the government quit killing. It makes no sense to kill in order to teach that killing is wrong.” As a child and teen in Texas and then a younger adult becoming a Bible college student at an institution founded by a Great Awakening tent revival preacher, I believed capital punishment to be good, holy, and just. Grownups had forever told me that the Bible said it should be so—a living body for a once-living body. Back then the idea that the death penalty contradicted itself had yet to jar my cerebrum. Twenty-seven years into my own life, Father Kelly had my sympathy. We didn’t pin down a rapist and ram a broomstick into his rectal cavity or pummel bloody those guilty of assault and battery. Poisoning to death Walter Stewart or Timothy McVeigh or Joe Blow nudged us no more human. Every human life, vile killers impossible to rehabilitate included, deserved more dignity than syringes of sodium pentothal, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride.

Patrick’s misbehavior persisted and 3F staff cell-isolated him over and over. The often six hundred-inmate facility employed two mental health professionals—one was part-time—and I never saw any inmate scheduled for regular therapy or counseling. Meetings with Father Kelly never converted Patrick to a 3F Saint. Days and weeks of detainment soon warped Patrick’s story into him only “holding the gun.” The Tribune then reported two teenage female witnesses. One claimed that a twenty-one-year-old male had ripped off the shots. The other echoed the man being with Patrick, but said she didn’t see the shooter. The accused adult confirmed accompanying Patrick to the scene and providing him the gun, while claiming to have departed before rounds rang out. The state’s attorney refused comment. Patrick’s public defender alleged a set up because both girls provided her a different tale—the man fired the shots, shoved the pistol into Patrick’s hands, and fled in a car.

Curious if the boy would corroborate his own life story from the Tribune, I approached Patrick on a day he wasn’t in trouble but rather doodling at a table because all his cellblockmates were in class. I meandered over from the guard desk.   

“So where’d you go to school before you came here?”

“Seward,” Patrick replied as he looked up, and without prompting, named the school that had expelled him before he attended Seward.

Nothing on why the previous school kicked him out. I didn’t ask.  

“You goin’ back to Seward when you get outta here?”  

“They probly gonna keep me ‘til I’m twenny-one. I wish I could beat the case but they got too much evidence on me.”  

Patrick was correct that guilty Illinois murder defendants younger than thirteen during their crime could not be incarcerated beyond birthday twenty-one. Right then I could have queried this particular murder defendant about who had fired the murderous gun. I didn’t. Our interactions were amiable. No point risking Patrick not shutting up at my next order, merely because I’d harassed him with everyone else’s question. I’d felt indulged by that foray to 3F after recent assignments on a far more challenging cellblock with bigger and older inmates. The longer I worked at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center, the higher priority smooth and simple shifts became. My Children’s Attendant existence had morphed into saving myself, instead of, as I’d once idealized, saving the kids.

*

“Hey, make sure you guys clean this off,” I said to three juveniles instructed to swab 3F’s Bathroom Area floor and sinks. I figured someone had inadvertently brushed soap or toothpaste against a steel divider anchored to the tile floor between two toilets, creating a white splotch. I moved closer to the chest-high steel fence. Instead of any abstract art, a capital S and N flanked a cross. Each letter hovered below the rung. I summoned a cleaning designee and pointed.

“That’s Patrick’s. That’s how he makes his set,” the slender boy answered.

S for Saints. N for Nation. Evidently excused to the Bathroom Area by himself, Patrick had soap bar scrawled his Nation onto the toilet partition, the way unincarcerated gang-bangers all across Chicago inscribed tenement breezeways, alley walls, El train girders, and the sides of parked eighteen-wheelers. Patrick just hadn’t wielded a magic marker or can of spray paint.

            “Patrick, who told you to come over here?” I asked the next evening while monitoring inmates stacking extra mattresses in vacant cell number three during 3F’s weekly cell-straightening time. My coworker and I couldn’t assign that cell to anyone because a jagged piece of metal protruded from a back corner where a steel beam and brick column met.

“No one,” Patrick looked away, knowing that he broke a rule. “I just wanted to see if my writing was still there.” Cell three was near the Bathroom Area. Patrick’s behavior had improved enough to merit him a cell closer to the TV Area where he could see the screen from his bed.

“Go back to your room and keep cleaning,” I said. Patrick meandered off down the cell row with no guff. A boasting potential double-murderer accepting my directive like rain on a parched lawn surprised me. I swung back and forth on whether if in a dissimilar environment, Patrick might also follow different command—a command to shoot two people. I waited for the mattresses to be organized and stepped into Patrick’s former cell. High on the wall above the steel toilet and sink almost to the ceiling, etched in four lines of white chalk, was his “writing.” Patrick must have pilfered his chalk stick from a classroom before Mom put the kibosh on him going to school, or he’d traded a dollar bill or twin-pack of chocolate chip cookies for it at dinner without us noticing. That night he mounted his sink and scripted away. Each written line ran four or five consecutive bricks and contained:  Almighty Saints—the gang’s trademark halo symbols, more S’s and N’s, Joe-Joe (Patrick’s nickname cited in a Tribune article), and inverted Gangster Disciples pitchforks. To blaspheme other gangs, kids drafted their symbol upside down.

*

            A year later, Patrick, his left eye bruised, attended his verdict hearing. By mom’s account, other juveniles had beaten him. Patrick was guilty in both killings and a judge sentenced him to five years at the Illinois Youth Department of Corrections. Patrick wasn’t as bad off as he feared—just wrong about being held until he was twenty-one. In my closet I found the Tribune front-page section with Delvon and Robert’s pictures. I’d saved it. I held up the unfolded paper and studied the two soft faces and four curious eyes, Robert’s angling off to the left away from the camera as if discomforted by even the most basic attention. Their faces inches from mine, I tried to conjecture what force had intersected their lives with Patrick’s. At Patrick’s age, I played backup linebacker for the Harwood Junior High Blackhawks and counted months until Christmas in San Diego where my cousin and I would execute our annual blockbuster baseball card trades. Anticipating my aunt’s peanut fudge shortened the drive through cardboard bland west Texas and southern New Mexico. My parents were together. No one had knifed my father. I never stressed about impressing gang members. Food filled our fridge. Mom’s scratch bran rolls graced the dinner table. Now the minutiae of Patrick, Delvon, and Robert translated meaningless. If Patrick did it? Why Patrick did it? Two guiltless kids were still dead. And a boy whom I’d known, a boy who always did what I told him to, would be warehoused away for five years. By then the death count might be three.

________________________________________________________________ 

Mark Dostert is the author of Up in Here: Jailing Kids on Chicago’s Other Side, forthcoming from University of Iowa Press in September 2014. He holds a Master of Arts in History from University of North Texas. His narrative essays have appeared in Ascent, Cimarron Review, Houston Chronicle, Southern Indiana Review, and The Summerset Review, and been cited/listed as Notable in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011, The Best American Essays 2011, andThe Best American Essays 2013. He holds 33 hours of graduate English credit at University of Houston and has studied creative writing at Inprint in Houston and the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop in Portland, OR. 

You can find Mark's new book, Up in Here, from Brazos, University of Iowa Press, Barnes and Nobles, or Powell's.

Missouri Review's Editor Prize gives big bucks!

Our friends at the Missouri Review are currently hosting  the Jeffrey E. Smith Editors' Prize, which is open for submissions of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. They are offering $5,000 each, plus publication to winners in each of those categories. The deadline is coming up soon: October 1st. (This Saturday!)

The contest guidelines can be found here. And they are currently offering a free digital version of last year’s contest issue.

When Claire, at The Missouri Review, was telling us about this contest, she brought up an interesting point based on something Forrest Gander once mentioned to her. “He said that he is in favor of submitting to contests because when you consider writing as an art, in comparison with other arts, the costs are quite low. Painters spend hundreds of dollars on canvas, paints, brushes; musicians have expensive instruments and sound equipment to maintain; dancers have to buy special shoes; etc. But writers only really need a paper and pen. So he never feels bad about setting aside a little money every year towards journal subscriptions and contest submissions; these are just some of the tools of the trade.” At HFR, we appreciate that sentiment as much as Claire does.

Now get submitting! Think of all the literary journals that prize money could buy you!

One Writer's Life

I've been reading this 2009 commencement address at the Whidbey Writer's Workshop from Tess Gallagher. Gallagher apparently inquired about what the class might like to hear and "...was told that perhaps a few practical survival tips would be helpful." Thus charged, she launched into a description of an artist's life filled with dedication, sacrifice and diligence. And subterfuge. There is this account of a conspiracy between her and her late husband, short-story writer Raymond Carver, to get their writing done:

"I’ll offer one example to encourage your ability to dissemble and to create time in simple ways. At the holidays in Syracuse, N.Y. in 1984, I suggested to Raymond Carver, my late husband, that we tell everyone we were going away. We would then not have to accept invitations and be fully engaged with other people’s households, especially unruly children. After we had announced we were going away, I proposed we would just not go away. We could simply hide out in our house and get our writing done, saving the expense and inconvenience of travel. This worked fine until someone spotted Ray bringing in the mail. He managed to wave them off, saying he’d forgotten something and would soon be away again. We drew the blinds and hunkered down."

If you've read about Gallagher recently it's probably because of her status as Carver's widow, speaking out for his work. But now she speaks for herself, invoking Carver only as part of a writing life that was concerned with her own work and endeavors. So many writers writing or blogging now seem devoted to debating the Kindle or obsessed with marketing (I'm counting myself here as well), so it's good to read a message from someone who was poor sometimes, who was blocked sometimes, and who had a husband die at 50, but was happy in the fact she chose words as her life.

Why Do You Do It?

I’ve been rereading Jonathan Franzen’s essay “Why Bother?” in his collection How To Be Alone. I’d specifically picked it up again because I’ve been asking myself again why I want to write. Despite the increasing proliferation of MFA programs and conferences, it’s a profession that seems to promise obscurity and a second, ‘real’ job to most who attempt it. In fact, you could argue that MFAs and conferences have made a life in writing more difficult as everyone struggles to make their voice heard despite the ocean of people who call themselves writers. What’s one more drop in this sea? Why struggle forward in this calling when the future is so uncertain?

The answer for me may be partially in this essay. Franzen talks to Shirley Brice Heath, now of Brown University, about how people grow up to become readers. Heath says that for most people having one or more parents that read is enough to encourage a life-long passion for reading. But for others (the so-called social-isolate reader), the child feels himself different from everyone around him, so his/her conversations tend to be with the authors he or she reads. It suggests reading as a palliative (though not a curative) for the particular social condition of isolation. Heath also says that these kinds of readers usually grow up to become writers, because this type of communication is so important to them from a young age.

I grew up in a small town where everyone mostly worked with their hands, either as a farmer or a tool maker. There seemed to be no need for reading and writing; I might have just as easily been born with an extra head. I spent most of my time with books, and the connection was emphatic and could not easily be broken. My father used to drive the dirt roads at 50 mph, spewing gravel and dust in his wake, surging down hills and sliding around curves. I would be bouncing in the back seat, oblivious to anything else but the slow progression of hobbits toward Mordor. Neither my father nor my mother was literary-minded. But reading seemed to me as important as eating, and I often combined the two, linking sustenance with sustenance.

You cannot write for anyone but yourself. Once you close the door, it’s just you in there. But sometimes I think I could write for myself at 14, a hapless target walking through the hallways of my school, the streets of my town, the rooms of my home desperate for someone like me. I think I must still exist out there somewhere, maybe in Nebraska or Cleveland, that I’m still frustrated by how hard it is to communicate with the humans around me, but I love to read. The chance to talk to myself at that age, in that dire predicament, is part of why I want to write.

Except what do I say to myself? Many times I greet the blank page with dread. I think that after two decades I don’t have anything he needs to know, or if I do, I won’t be able to say it correctly. But I’m learning to try. I’ve met many writers in the past year, and the thing they seem to have in common is an elementary courage. The courage to face the typewriter or the computer day after day. The courage to make it something that has never been said before but something everyone will recognize. The courage to keep on when nothing seems to be working, the courage to take a stack of manuscript and put it in a mailbox, email it or hand it to someone and say: “Look at this. I made it.” I have borrowed this courage in small bits from these writers and sown it together into a coat that is ill-fitting but serves my need to go into the room and close the door.

Couple the will for a dialogue with your reader (who is really yourself) with the determination that creating and saying out of thin air aren’t going to be easy, and you have Inspiration for your Art. A reason to sit in the chair because you’ve found the way to the rich ore of what William Faulkner called “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.” It won’t be obvious all the time, but at times your vocation will seize you and you will feel a rightness, a neat slotting of yourself into a gap in the world that needs filled. No workshop will give you that. No conference will give you that. It is yours alone. However, they will give you opportunities to meet others like you. Strange isolate beings, half-not-there, some vital part of them always gone fishing in fantasy’s watering hole, but willing perhaps to stay and talk to you about writing. To lecture a bit, commiserate, and buck you up. And then at some point you’ll see a mad light come into their eyes, and you’ll start to really listen up, because you know what you are about to hear is the big secret. They’re going to tell you why they do it.

Why do you do it? Reply to this post or email Aaron at acfalveyatasudotedu.

Best American Essays 2008

Congratulations to Bethany Tyler Lee, whose essay "Sex and the Single Eight-Year-Old" was listed as one of the "Notable Essays of 2007" in the new volume of the Best American Essays, released last week from Houghton Mifflin. Bethany's essay was published in HFR #39, as part of our Works of Witness special section. Read Bethany's whole essay here.

The new anthology has essays culled from countless publications including lit journals Swink and The Pinch. In his introduction to this year’s edition, Adam Gopnik finds that great essays have “text and inner text, personal story and larger point, the thing you’re supposed to be paying attention to and some other thing you’re really interested in.”

Renaming the Earth by Ray Gonzalez

Ray Gonzalez's collection of personal essays, Renaming the Earth, will be released tomorrow from The University of Arizona Press. Part of Camino del Sol: A Latina and Latino Literary Series, the essays reflect on the American Southwest where Gonzalez was raised. From the publisher: "It is a place that tugs at him, from its arid desert landscapes to its polyglot cities - part Mexican, part Anglo, part something in-between - always in the process of redefining themselves."

Says Annie Dillard, "Ray Gonzalez's essays have given me a new view of the Southwest. While delightful and full of surprises, his journey is heartbreaking as it evolves into a ritual of redemption."

Ray Gonzalez is the author of The Heat of Arrivals (1997 PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award), The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande (2003 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry), Consideration of the Guitar: New and Selected Poems (2005) and the forthcoming Cool Auditor (2009). Turtle Pictures (Arizona, 2000), a mixed-genre text, received the 2001 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry. His poetry has appeared in the 1999, 2000, and 2003 editions of The Best American Poetry. His poems "To Tell" and "The Shortest Poem" will appear in the upcoming issue of HFR, #43.

Book Blurbs, Blurbing, Blurbers

Blurb. It's one of those words that, if you say it many times in a row, begins to lose its sense of word-ness.

If you take a look around the internet for opinions about blurbs, you'll find they run the whole spectrum. From being essential to the sales of your book to not mattering at all. (The site MakeYourBookFamous.com puts quite a bit of emphasis on blurbs, guiding you over to its parter site, ContactAnyCelebrity.com so you stalk famous people to get endorsements.) Regardless of where you stand on the blurb spectrum, the fact remains that books continue to sport as many positive blurbs as possible, provided they say something nice, and most especially if they use the phrase "tour de force." So obviously publishers and marketers think blurbs are working to a certain degree, which means the blurb question - to blurb or not to blurb - rages on.

This week, The New York Times Sunday Book Review featured an essay called "He Blurbed, She Blurbed" by Rachel Donadio, which looked at the role of blurbs in the lives of a number of authors and books - from David Sedaris to Zadie Smith to Dave Eggers. And last week's essay "Why won't you blurb me?" from first-time novelist Rebecca Johnson on Salon showed the blurbing problem from the I-wish-I-knew-more-famous-writers point-of-view, ending with the conclusion that "So much of blurbing process is a corrupt quid pro quo."

Kind of depressing. For a blurb-related laugh, consider this sentence from blogger Max Ross from The Rake: "I've been taught to trust blurbs about as far as I can throw them, which is roughly about as far as I can throw a book, which is not very far, because I am quite weak, my muscles having been described as sauce-like." You can read his great blog post about blurbs (say that five times fast), "Judging a Book by its (Back) Cover." The post ends with a short quiz which asks you to identify the famous book by its blurb(s). Perfect for book dorks. Let us know your score!