On “The Ephiphenomenon” by J. C. Hallman (5830 words) ***

The opening story of J. C. Hallman's collection The Hospital for Bad Poets pits the "average man" against less-than-average circumstances. He feels that something is wrong, that he is sick somehow. He goes to a clinic for average men, housed in an office building with odd businesses. There, a doctor plies him with various messages about how sickness is actually what established normality and averageness and so on. The piece seems like sort of an ode to Emile Durkheim's theories of deviance, with regard to how our definitions of normal are established by the abnormal, which in turn draws into question the very idea of abnormality. Read the story here at InDigest.