A bit of what we expect and a shard of something different from America’s Queen of Flash, Kim Chinquee. Found at Corium. Corium is a lively mag and has one of those names–sort of a lit mag trope at this point–where you go, “What in the hell is a Corium?” But I digress.
Choo and Rumble
Another train ride, and here I am with your goddamn strawberry lotion. At first it was fun to pick things out on our excursions to Chicago.
But after a couple times, I got tired of your places, me sitting on a stool while you tried on blazers. I kept telling you it all looked good. I just wanted to get out of there.
The train is loaded and some people are snoring. Some are talking on their cell phones. Some people look dead. I’m not sure where I am, except wondering.
About you. Maybe by now, dissolved in your piano, occupied by the sound of a tic. Though you’d say it was tac. If I told you that, you’d laugh and remind me how I know you.
It has been months. Or maybe it’s been years now. My leaving, the constant drum of the train. No matter what you say, I bet you don’t cry when I leave there.
It’s just an Amtrak. We have to let the real trains pass before we can go anywhere.
Kim Chinquee is a fine example of voice. She pretty much writes in her way (minimalist, direct tone, very few lyrical bells and whistles, a sort of purposeful vagueness at times that often represents a detached narrator. A detached narrator. A detachment.)
So what’s a bit different here?
Not the narrator. This is indeed the classic Chinquee narrator, drifting a bit, walled-off, always this space between the speaker and the events, as if always an observer versus a participant. Chinquee narrators often seem like they are as shocked as anyone by the role they are playing in the text. By the situation/life conundrum.
Not the movement. Very often, a Chinquee flash moves, running, shifting, to somewhere, away from somewhere. Change. Transitions can be subtle, can be huge, HINGE on something. Chinquee will often write that HINGE.
But other things do differ. Let’s see:
1. Title.
Chinquee routinely goes with something simple, a noun, a place name, a hint of context, but little word-play. Choo and Rumble, with its onomatopoeic tendencies, with its focus on feel and sound, is not a traditional Chinquee title. But it’s a strong title. It is odd. Often odd titles make you look, which is one role (of many) of a title.
2.Opening line.
You’ll read a lot of Chinquee before you see a GD dropped in her opening. How does it work here? Well, coming off the tone of the title, it jars. As a modifier for strawberry lotion, it jars. It also represents a narrator who is done fucking around. It establishes. “Another train ride…” Another day, getting moved, in flux, pushed around. The line provides a lot of context. A lot of feel. It winds the text up, like a tight spring.
3. Line Breaks.
There’s a strong emphasis on enjambment here, how the line is cut, how white space presents a thing. I’ve seen it done in other Chinquee flashes, but this text almost wants to be a poem. The text is thinking about the possibilities of the line.
4. Controlling Metaphor.
Again, we’ve seen this from Chinquee. She usually has something (and it IS often a thing) to ground and focus the flash, but here it’s a bit more present, the train (or, really trains). Again, a bit more obviously diving into techniques of poetry. The fade-out metaphor, the comment on the metaphor.
As a huge fan of flash and certainly of Kim Chinquee, I find it interesting to see variations and nuances on her signature style. It shows not just growth, but keen thought about flash, as process and product. All of this technique makes me the reader more active. That’s what we’re trying for in flash. That’s what powers the genre. It’s fun to see Chinquee’s continued grace and skill on the page, and something further to watch for in the future.
In the beginning there was nothing in the universe except a formless chaos. However this chaos coalesced into a cosmic egg for about 18,000 years. Within it, the perfectly opposed principles of Yin and Yang became balanced and Pangu emerged (or woke up) from the egg. Pangu is usually depicted as a primitive, hairy giant with horns on his head and clad in furs. Pangu set about the task of creating the world: he separated Yin from Yang with a swing of his giant axe, creating the Earth (murky Yin) and the Sky (clear Yang). To keep them separated, Pangu stood between them and pushed up the Sky. This task took 18,000 years; with each day the sky grew ten feet (3 meters) higher, the Earth ten feet wider, and Pangu ten feet taller. In some versions of the story, Pangu is aided in this task by the four most prominent beasts, namely the Turtle, the Qilin, the Phoenix, and the Dragon.
After the 18,000 years had elapsed, Pangu was laid to rest. His breath became the wind, mist and clouds; his voice the thunder; left eye the sun and right eye the moon; his head became the mountains and extremes of the world; his blood formed rivers; his muscles the fertile lands; his facial hair the stars and milky way; his fur the bushes and forests; his bones the valuable minerals; his bone marrows sacred diamonds; his sweat fell as rain; and the fleas on his fur carried by the wind became the fish and animals throughout the land. Nüwa the Goddess then used the mud of the water bed to form the shape of humans. These humans were very smart since they were individually crafted. Nüwa then became bored of individually making every human so she started putting a rope in the water bed and letting the drops of mud that fell from it become new humans. These small drops became new humans, not as smart as the first.
But let’s look at a more contemporary flash fiction, “The Moonlit Window” by Deng Kaishang.
Who is Deng Kaishang? All I know is that he is president of the Writer’s Association of Hunan Province. He might like cheese, but I doubt it. He is a good man.
THE MOONLIT WINDOW
The moon, pale as jade, peeked from behind translucent clouds, drifted in through delicate window, and fell onto the small writing desk in the room. The tenant’s exquisite writing brush, breathing in the fragrance of fresh ink, rested on a small, finely-carved wood stand.
Five water chestnuts. No, four and a half, to be more exact: one of them having been bitten in half by the tenant.The remaining half, its stem still intact, lay upright on the small desk. Basking in the pale, pure moonlight, it looked like a miniature pyramid.
A small piece of square-shaped marble, exquisite, pure as a beam of frozen moonlight. Underneath the rock was a stack of manuscript paper, words written in graceful penmanship, its title: “Revision Suggestions for On Spring Vistas in Mountainous Villages (Three Volumes).”
Underneath the stack of manuscript paper was a family letter, which cracked visibly somewhere along the lines where it had been folded; the V-shaped rupture rippled with moonlight, shiny like a dagger. The visible portion of the letter showed words written with both resolve and feminine sensitivity:
Full moon beaming in the sky, stars sailing to the west, but woe welling up in my heart: A full moon is not good as a full family! ‘Once a couple, forever a couple,’ and we had that ‘once’ for 12 years! My conscience , a woman’s conscience, tortures my soul to this very day that we have been washed apart by the currents of life. My soul cried in pain; my soul is bleeding. Oh, let’s get married again! I beseech you. the only thing I will ask of you is to quit this editor’s job. What did you get in return for ‘making bridal dresses’ for others for half your life? Ten years of cold wind and rain, a head of frosty hair. So listen to me this time!
The letter closed with: “I beg you to stop smoking!” In a corner of the letter were two red, bean-sized marks: two drops of blood having soaked deep into the paper. Next to them was a line from the tenant after reading the letter: “Endless will flow this feeling of love!” It was taken from Bayi Juyi’s poem “Endless Sorrow;” only that the tenant had replaced “sorrow” with “love.”
A gentle breeze murmured a serenade. It drifted into the moonlit window, caressed a sheet of manuscript paper, the ink on which was still fresh, and dropped on it a strand of frosty hair. The page number read: 109.
Odd. So many jump cuts, so many ways the writer places your eye then darts your eye, location to location, information to information. Dizzying. Allusions. Writings about writing. What in the hell is page 109 about? Mystery. There’s some deliciously mysterious about this flash fiction. That’s what I admire. More and more, I don’t want answers. This flash seems an immersion. A prime example of mood. Of repetition. Of the agonies of communication, miscommunication. This piece almost seems to me to exist in saturation. It caught a shard of the un-catchable, the unknowable. Exquisite, in its attempt, in its form.
The author is Virgil Suarez, a Cuban born, extremely prolific writer. I point out “Cuban” as a nod to the rich roots of Latin American flash fiction (Junot Díaz, Cisneros, Bolaño, Márquez, Isabel Allende, Borges, Andrea Saenz, Daniel Alarcón, Alicita Rodriguez, etc, etc. BTW, If you are going to rail that Cuba is not Latin American, I would answer it is culturally.) I say prolific as a fact. If you have paged through a literary magazine, you’ve most likely read something by Mr. Suarez.
These Flash of the Day examinations are for anyone, but I’d like to particularity focus on the flash fiction writer. To comment on technique. To create compression is difficult: you must have sharpened tools. Let’s take a look at this flash fiction and then discuss, shall we?
Cuban Dream # 7
I’m on the beach running after a red parasol, each time I get near, a gust blows it down–it goes over German & Italian tourists, tumbling, kicking up sand into their drinks. They shout: “Ragazzo! Achtung!” A red umbrella in the distance, a knotted-tendril medusa of all my dreams–I run after it & step atop dead urchin carcasses. Unseen needles spear my soles, prick deep like lost loves. Puas, as my father called these urchins, these pains, warning me to steer clear. I leave blood tracks in the sand, beaded gems of my passing.
A woman wants to know if I can help her reenact Ava Gardner’s scene in The Night of the Iguana, the one with the two heavily-tanned boys who sandwich the star in the sultry Acapulco night. Pepe shakes his maracas. The other, the nameless one, dances behind Ava, arms linked tight about her waist. So shocking for 50s America. I say she’s got the wrong country. I say she’s got the wrong idea.
The umbrella becomes a speck, a small dot my father’s ghost plucks out of the air & puts in his mouth. I’ve gone deaf. I don’t even hear the waves, then sound becomes possible again. Waves hiss. Sand churns. I hear the roar of the surf. I hear someone behind me, calling for another mojito, this island’s minty, fresh elixir! In the distance my father’s ghost has become a raft in a rough-&-tumble sea: women & children fall overboard, splash in the water. Drown. Nobody notices. I turn to look behind me only to see a beach covered in blue umbrellas & under their shades thousands of naked German women, their waxen skin turning beet red. They are hungry seals. One hobbles over to me & begins to gnaw at my shins. Her bite feels like a clamping down of metal into flesh, the smashing of a finger under a hammerblow. It does no good to shout for help or try to wake up. This is the lost dream of a lost soul in a distant but not forgotten island.
Title: Like in poetry, titles are very important to flash fiction. This one implies a series (7 of…). The speaker doesn’t have one troubling dream, but many. For how long? or: How many per evening? A suggestion of recurring nightmares, or recurring repressed emotion (in a story set in contemporary times–a Freudian take is allowed). This is an interesting flash technique (and it is that, yet another way to get more across with fewer words), the layering involved in a series. It implies a rumination on the subject. It means a continuum. There is no actual need for a Cuban Dream # 6 or a Cuban Dream # 8, but they might exist, off the page, from Cuban dream # 1 to Cuban Dream # 294, etc. They might be infinite, the visitations of the father’s ghost (don’t ghosts walk forever?), these tourists (tourism seems eternal to me), this island (Contemporary Cuba. Changing, yet fixed in time…)
Object:Red umbrella. One thing I admire about flash is the way writers find so many creative ways to “thread” together a narrative, ways that deviate from Freytag or some more traditional plot structure. The image of the tumbling umbrella get the narrative rolling, a conflict, and a question: will he catch the umbrella? Once the umbrella is sent on its way, Suarez can leave it (though it’s still in the readers mind, a sort of “hold”) and then return at his wish. The umbrella (especially if referred to as a “parasol”) also seems to harken back to flash as a modernist form, a homage to the modernist eye of observation, the beach or park or picnic scene (think of all the paintings), flash fiction (like the prose poem) often concerning itself with what critic and writer, Margueritte Murphy calls, “looking” and “looking itself is an activity, a dynamic art.” The Parasol can also act in many other ways than plot thread. It’s antiquated nature might be commenting on Cuban/U.S. trade restrictions (you should see the cars of Cuba). It might provide levity (think Charlie Chaplain). It is red (symbol alert!). It does a lot of things. Again, in flash, you are looking for techniques of compression. An object needs to echo. The parasol does.
Allusion: Another common flash technique: Allusion can add additional layering to the actual words. What an odd one here: The Night of the Iguana, a truly loaded film based on a truly loaded play: desire, loneliness, longing. Besides the ridiculousness of the tourist (and this piece does have a lot to say about tourism and the tourist mind), I think the allusion hints to the troubled relationship between speaker and father and then finally, Cuba–pre-revolution versus post-revolution. If only the speaker could view the country like a tourist. A tourist has no national memory–they just drop in and start sunning and drinking. The speaker knew a before, his father’s time, another island all together.
Dream: I like how Suarez couches all of this under a “dream.” As a writer, it allows for a lot of technique that would appear forced in other situations. Note how sensory based, how full of movement this flash, and then the way the juxtapositions morph so quickly into each other. As a teacher, I sometimes see student writers using dreams as a crutch. (Anything is possible now, yippeee! And then he awoke…) Here, Suarez uses the dream as a device, a style almost, a way of writing to allow memory, hypersensitivity, rapid transformations of place and situation. In a dream, this fluttering (nausea?) is default. In a dream the nonsensical makes sense.
Why do you wear your hair in horns? Why did you sell to the slicks? Had to make a living, dear boy. Well, you broke the code, never break the code. Ha, ha. Go and fetch me a gin, that’s my code, you mayonnaise snuffler. Why don’t you go set your head on fire? Why don’t you go make love to a muzzle loader? We can’t all spend our days shooting ostriches and bicycling through trout streams while riding water buffalo over the roofs of Mexican ski cabins, now can we? Look, bloated is no way to look big. You wrote a perfect book and it drives me crazy. Where in the hell is my cat?
HA HA HA HA HA HA. Somebody bring me a drink the size of Jupiter. Somebody light this cigarette. Somebody take off my glasses, clean them, hand them back to me. Holy claptrap. Why am I in this photo? You know one time I went to see Walden Pond (not so long a drive from my residence in Harlem) and at the bottom was a beer can. Take note. Take note.
Your books are absolute rubbish. Run along, sonny. Run along to the mall or the disco or wherever it is you get your information. When I see a V of swans I follow the V with my eyes and think about your collected works. When I see a crane walking along the rooftop (nesting in chimney–yes, they actually do that [Why not get outside yourself?]) and a little boy shoots it with a BB gun I think of your collected works. When a lager is flat, a woman stumbles into the street, a group of tourists are chasing down a goat with a stick…wait a bloody minute! Terminator Two is on the telly! I’m out.
OPEN your fucking eyes.
Don’t want to.
Dear, open your eyes. We’re not going to have a staged photo and you closing your fucking eyes.
Don’t want to. Why should I abdicate my free will?
Open your eyes. How does my pipe look, the angle?
Can’t see it.
Open your eyes! Look at my pipe!
No. We’re all going to die, very, very soon.
Open your eyes!
Don’t want to. I am abandoned on this earth in the midst of my infinite possibilities, and, I for one, would like to shoot this little gun with my eyes closed. This is my destiny. I don’t ask for help. Later I’ll have a sandwich, with onions.
Open your eyes. Open your eyes, dear.
I am free.
We’re exhausted. We just came in from chopping trees on the farm, you know, for firewood. Brett here owns several farms. We got blisters and like leaves in our hair. I almost hit my knee with the axe, the left knee, this one here. Brett caught a fish and built a fire and cooked the fish’s tail and told me it would be crunchy like a potato chip. It was nothing like a potato chip. Winter will be hell. Brett noticed a squirrel with an extra bushy tail and says it is sign, a sign of a hard, hard winter. We did some coke and shot the squirrel. We ate its brains. Winter is going to be hell.
You took out the herd of elephants?
I did. It was ridiculous.
But you left in the haunted house, right?
Of course. The house is there…boarded up, OK. Not really like a haunted house, more abandoned. I took out the vampire.
Dude!
Sorry. I put the house in yesterday and took out the vampire and the elephant herd. You don’t want an elephant herd in there, trust me. What else? Is anyone going to live in the house? Jesus, give me something. When is this thing due? You’re angry about the vampire now, aren’t you? God, my eyes are hurting. At least go get me some water.
The bear puts both arms around the tree above her
And draws it down as if it were a lover
And its chokecherries lips to kiss good-by,
Then lets it snap back upright in the sky.
–Robert Frost.
I once penned a flash fiction about Robert Frost standing atop a TV while wearing hot pants, though I’m not sure why. Possibly it was because I was sitting (or shall I saw sprawling like an octopus?) in a room (probably yellowed and mildewed or smelling like cheese) and heard a teacher glare to me “Robert Frost was the first poet on TV” and I had this sudden concrete image “ON the TV” and I just coagulated. My desired object is an empty TV with flowers inside the fractured shell, but have never been motivated enough to go ahead and create the damn thing. Back in Alabama I held prayer with fire ants and took a Dante class and walked into the room and the professor started speaking to us, in Italian. I walked out the room. That’s a tip: eject the class, OK? Don’t gurgle an F. An F FOLLOWS you around like a cheerleader’s debt. Did I mention I had a student faint last year? Like a gelatinous flower to the floor. It can be rough in academia, I know that. Yesterday I graded 400 papers about Facebook, bioengineering, treacle addiction, and the pseudoscience of experiments on happiness. It was interesting. I can read really quickly like a door. I used to teach Robert Frost waaaayyy back in the day when people used balloons for travel and the world was basically either a dog or a car window and people would allow me to teach literature and students would plagiarize their papers on Frost and it would be the FIRST THING I Googled, like LAZY plagiarism, and I would stomp my little foot and print it out and staple it to their assignments all sideways and crinkly with coffee stains and hand it back with a big fat ZERO and one time this young lady cried and cried and cried. Young lady who is not near as young anymore–I am sorry I made you cry. Shit does happens, though, when you plagiarize. Think about if you tried to plagiarize a whale, for example. I would staple your plagiarized whale onto a real whale, and contemplate that, the potential consequences of a beached, bloody, stapled whale just leaking all over your fabulous green sweater. When I think of Frost I think of people lying to horses and riding trees or back in Memphis when I used to swing on grapevines all over the forest. I would also smoke grapevine like a god. Grapevine is basically a very useful plant for kids. I penned again about Frost last week. I said something about liking to play tennis without a net. You know, Frost lost his father and his kids (one to suicide) and had to commit family members to mental institutions and was generally well acquainted with the night. I think this is why he wrote about nature. Nature is nature. Humans are nature, but we stand removed from its essence. We are anti-nature and nature. Nature is nature. The hawk is the hawk is the hawk. Humans…well.
The mother told about the time she’d seen a bear. A bear the size of several men, she said. There in the woods behind our house, when I was still a girl like you. The mother had stood in wonder watching while the bear ate a whole deer. It ate the deer’s cheeks, its eyes, its tongue, its pelt. It ate everything but the antlers. The mother had waited for the bear to leave so she could take the antlers home and wear them, but the bear had just gone on laying, stuffed, smothered in blood. The mother swore then—her eyes grew massive in the telling—the bear had spoken. It’d looked right at the mother and said, quite casual, My god, I was hungry. Its voice was gorgeous, deep and groaning. The mother could hardly move. I didn’t know bears could talk, she said finally, and the bear had said, Of course we can. It’s just that no one ever takes the time to hear. We are old and we are lonely and we have dreams you can’t imagine.
-Blake Butler
That’s an excerpt from Scorch Atlas, still my favorite book of Blake’s. I like Blake Butler, I do, as an author and a human being. As is my way I once shot his book (I only shoot books I admire) and I know for a fact I set it on fire and maybe even detonated an explosive nearby can’t remember and was drinking, my head like a wobbly hog. Who knows? My heart is oft a drowsy box. But one thing you might want to ponder is putting a bear into your brain bucket. It is wise.
Here’s a little piece I wrote for my book, Fog Gorgeous Stag. Like much of the book, the text is utterly senseless, but I did add a bear (carrying a cross) to sort of tidy up the logic. Without the bear, the piece had all the gravitas of decaffeinated coffee. With the bear included, the words now have a certain savage indignation, a flavor of tormented loves and guarded epiphanies alongside the obvious aesthetic statement defining the project entire. Here, let me show you:
Chilly and Feeling Weak
A glass bowl of disposable lighters. A bowl of fireworks. A little wind-up dog. An altar made of still-warm meat yet hung. Glass stains. Bears with crosses. Curtains ironing the waxes out of candles. In the words of all: “The prayer of continuing any act simply because we started the act, Amen.” A gilded sling shot. Fact: Not one person saved. Fact: I enjoy the swish of rain sweeping a roof, most any roof, and so attended gloomy days. Fact: Velvet is a tangled clod. Fact: All over the world. Fact: Relentless and horrible rain. Fact: A philosophy of quietism. Fact: Ugly contrasts. Fact: Urns and earns, a form of learning. Fact: Instability. Fact: An old-fashioned coward. Fact: A walk now and then, a falling forward. Fact: An underwater house. Fact: A neon sign above the two bowls. Fact: It read SHARE.
[technology is lonely
a properly folded flag impossible to unfold
without major damage]
One time the writer Tao Lin said, “In my room I have a bearsuit but I haven’t done anything sexual with it. I like looking at a pretty face when doing something sexual. I don’t know if I would feel aroused if I looked at a fish head or like a donkey’s mouth while doing something sexual. I do understand and believe that people are able to “get off” on those things though. I don’t doubt their arousal or pleasure.”
Wow, people talk a lot of shit about Tao Lin, but you know what they hardly ever talk about? He used to be really, really funny. Is he funny now? I don’t know. I have not read any of his current books. But back in the day, glow funny. Here you go:
(BTW: Tao Lin’s syllabus, if you are interested in the contemporary short story or want a site with some glow links to stories online.)
what if i wore a bullet proof vest during hunting season
i’m a bear; i walk in the forest and look at the river and the river is cold
i saw campers today and they ran away and i was alone and i destroyed their tent
let me go scratch my paw on a tree
let me go eat a salmon
last night i cried onto my salmon
the salmon was sad but it still wanted to live
it wanted to swim and be sad and i ate it under moonlight
i saw a moose scream the other day
it screamed quietly under a tree
i felt embarrassed and sad and i thought, ‘oh, no; oh god, oh my god’
sometimes i climb a tree and sit there and sing very quietly
sometimes i want to go to a shopping mall and chase the humans and claw them
i’ll ride the moose into the shopping mall and ram the humans
the moose and i will ride the escalator and i will hug the moose and the moose and i will cry
i will eat the moose
i don’t care
i will scream and throw the bubblegum machine from the second floor to the first floor
i felt compassion for the salmon and now i don’t care anymore
i’ll walk into a parking lot and chase a large human and hug the human and cry
i’ll walk into a house at night and push the humans off the bed
i’ll stare at the bed and i’ll feel fake
One of my favorite bear stories gnashes a sense of place with excellent characterization. It is over at Smokelong Quarterly and is titled, “Imagines He’s a Bear.” Ryan Dilbert. Dilbert matured on an island and I actually know someone who let Ryan Dilbert give them a tattoo. That’s trust. I had an ER patient once at Denver Health Medical Center and he had, in GIANT letters, exactly this numeral tattooed on his forehead: 666. That, my friends, is questionable judgement. I had an ER patient who called me (I was working the midnight phones) and asked for directions to the ER. He was angry at a nursing assistant and wanted to come shoot her with a gun. I had an ER patient once who attempted to open the doors of a passenger jet while in flight. I had an ER patient once who…oh, never mind. I’m writing about bears! I have a tattoo of a blazing sun on my shoulder. The sun is the source of all life. Maybe. Three strong drinks later.
See how Ryan Dilbert constructs a little world here? See how HE USES A BEAR!? I’m asking you to listen to me. I’m asking you to understand the effectiveness of bears. Bears will make your prose something to be worshiped from afar, like a mountain range or a spicy, adulterous affair, for example. Your poetry, if immersed within bears, will most likely shine like a mini-skirt. Place a bear within your argument for the legalization of marijuana and we’ll all be very high, very soon. I’m offering you a chance to improve your writing. This is a writing blog, sometimes. A bear is your chance to say, Fuck decorum. A bear is subversive. A bear is like inviting an angel into your house for pizza and then beating the angel in UNO. A bear is fresh. I’m trying to give you a writing tip here, but I get the distinct feeling you are not listening. Are you on Facebook? I bet you are! I could be wrong. Maybe you’re actually listening. OK, sorry. That was presumptuous of me.
Over at bearcreekfeed, we have a magazine with the word “bear” embedded within the title of the magazine. There is also work by some strong authors.
Write a story in which your character has a problem:
“Henry, there’s a bear at the door.”
The problem should be significant:
“Henry, it’s huge.”
The problem should be pressing:
“Henry, I think it’s trying to get in.”
The story begins by establishing not only that something is wrong, but that your character has to act. ….
…. If Henry is to deal with the problem, he has to find the bear within himself:
“Henry! Do something!”
The tension in the story comes from the battle between the challenge and the character’s need to face the problem. What will Henry do?
Here is a little poem for you:
Although Hopkins admitted to smoking
marijuana before arriving at work, I cannot
conclude based on the evidence that the major
contributing cause of the grizzly bear attack
was anything other than the grizzly. It is not as
if this attack occurred when Hopkins inexplicably
wandered into the grizzly pen while
searching for the nearest White Castle. When
a grizzly bear is sighted on a trail in Glacier
National Park, the trail is closed to all hikers,
not just the hikers who may have recently
smoked marijuana. When it comes to attacking
humans, grizzlies are equal-opportunity
maulers, attacking without regard to race,
creed, ethnicity, or marijuana use. Hopkins’s
use of marijuana to kick off a day of working
around grizzly bears was ill-advised to say the
least, and mind-bogglingly stupid to say the
most. However, I have been presented with no
evidence by which I can conclude that Hopkins’s
marijuana use was the major contributing
cause of the grizzly bear attack.
A few days ago a person commented that Jim Harrison was a poor poet. That person can kiss my ass. I hope a bear eats his mother’s bras. Jim Harrison is a very good poet, and I consider his “Letters to Yesenin” to be one of my all time glow books. Today, let’s look at two poems Mr. Harrison wrote about bears. In the first poem, the speaker releases a kept bear; in the second, the speaker eats bear and then dreams of bear (a repeating motif in Harrison’s work–characters who eat bear often have bear dreams). To Harrison the bear is always holy. Although Harrison himself is a hunter, he clearly see hunting bear as absurd, or simply as the wrong thing to do. I would have to agree. Go ahead and read the poems. Go. Right now.
I met Steve Himmer at a tire store once. The tire store was converted into an artist space and Steve Himmer and I (and way too many other people) were reading that evening. You know lately people have been inviting WAY too many fucking poets to readings. Chill on that, OK? Invite four tops, not 14. Jesus. Who wants to hear that much poetry? Or have to be near that many poets? Poets! We have to stand here alongside all these poets? Steve was a nice guy, BTW, and he’s not a poet, so what am I even talking about? It makes you wonder. We ran out of beer that evening.
So I was alone in the house when I walked into the kitchen to hunt down a snack and nearly tripped over a bear. He was sound asleep like a mountain, his humped reflection carrying into the distance of the oven’s glass door. His fur shivered in a breeze from the back door he’d left open and dry leaves skittered like mice on the tiles. The lower cabinets were emptied of pots and pans as if the bear had been looking for something and exhausted himself in the process.
Big Cages by Kim Chinquee
She sleeps with the tiger. She rests on his shoulder and touches his fur. He is meaty and gentle, with big teeth he only shows with a yawn. She wakes from a dream and feels the tiger’s paw on her arm, and she wonders if there is a boy, her boy, in the next room. Not really a boy now. A man with a stuffed bear, and the bear is getting up to use the bathroom. She looks at her husband—in her dream there is Discovery, that mirage, the circus, tigers in big cages, a man, a bear, a trapeze artist. She hears flushing from the bathroom. She starts to get up to check if the bear is real and is her son a boy or man now? She moves closer to her husband. She pulls herself under him, like a blanket, hearing his heart thump evenly.
One time I was trout fishing in the mountains (the odor of wet stone, tall grass stirring in the breeze, trout “sifting like silt in the green dark”) above Knoxville and I just had this odd feeling and I looked behind me and there it was, a large black bear. It was crossing the creek. It paused midstream and stared at me. My god its head was the size of a tomato farm. I looked right into its face and thought, “It’s cool, bear.” And it looked at me a moment and thought, “It’s cool, human. I suppose.” Then it faded into the forest.
Yeh, I haven’t blogged in a long time. Why? Because I didn’t feel like blogging. To blog when you don’t feel like blogging is Bad Faith. Am I a broken necklace of vowels? Am I a mechanical plug of radishes? No. Also I’ve spent too many weekends in hotels. Too many weekends eating vegetable burgers from BK since most other fast food outlets will not offer a veggie burger, the bastards. Backyard Burger in Mississippi had a good veggie burger, but that’s was it. BK. BK. Chili’s has one, but that’s not fast food, it’s just shitty food. The best veggie burger was in St. Jospeh, Michigan, right alongside the beach and the carousel and the hard, cold rain. I forget the name of the place. But it was good. In New Orleans I didn’t eat veggie burgers. I ate shrimp and fried green tomatoes and oysters and tuna and octopus and vodka and hot sauce.
Did I mention someone put a giant shark in my glass of vodka?
The first few days the hamburgers only grew. But eventually they became a new sort of thing. They were small statues of people and then these people were equipped with weapons. Handguns, rifles, lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows and even tiny daggers. Then the tiny people began to grow real flesh. It looked painful. They all writhed and twisted, but eventually the flesh was grown. In the days after, they continued to tremble and eventually began to weep and I ascertained that they had grown tear ducts. And probably other organs. Hearts, lungs, spleens, kidneys and any of the other necessary organs.
But now I’m back in fucking Indiana. Here‘s an Indiana poem for you by Jeffrey Bean. BTW, Indiana looks like this:
Anyway, I did write a prose poem about supermodels for xTx. She is having a “Supermodel Summer.” XtX is ALWAYS up to something, as you know. I met xTx at a dance once and she was very nice and said, “I’m xTx” but I still don’t believe that was xTx. Not at all. I think xTx is a mystical force and most likely only takes human form when convenient. Xtx might also be a flower, a barn, a bathroom mirror or a hornet. The walls shook. Music. There were so many Internet writer people at this dance that I can’t believe the ceiling didn’t collapse and kill us all. That would have been a good day. A good day indeed.
I’ve give this prose poem of mine a solid 4. While it’s instructive formally, I also feel it’s forced and in need of revision. It is scarcely larger than a muskrat. It reminds me of irrelevance and hitting a large nail with a lawnmower. And while obviously many of my later poems bring us all up against self enclosure of some variety, the lines here resemble a plate of overcooked spaghetti locked inside a can of flat Dr. Pepper thrown off a cliff into the sea. Then again, you have to know when to maintain control and when to lose it, correct? Ever seen a cloud? Well, there you go.
Hey, here’s a better one. This is flash I wrote and sent to elimae. Thank you very little.
Anyway I was in a hotel, a Super 8 a few days ago. It was awful, awful. It smelled like a crypt. It smelled like a crime scene, a ragged spleen, like something moist but then coated in a layer of smashed fireflies, a goo, a yellow goo, and then a tint of bird bones, some paste, no not bird bones, fuck all that poetic blar, I mean it smelled badly, like above (minus the bird bones) but maybe add a lump of Play-Dough like when you mold Play-Dough around a light bulb as a kid and then your dad says, “Get the fucking Play-Dough off the light bulb!” and you get a wet rag and SHOCK! Bad idea the wet rag. I stuck a nail in a light socket once and it threw me across the room! I of course grabbed onto an electric fence. Teeth! I forget the other times I have known electricity. It makes me sleepy.
Is that even how you spell Play-Dough? I have no idea and I’m not going to look it up. Sometimes you have to not look it up. I’m not a shadow over here. I move, the shadow moves. I have a higher ratio of window in my life than of walls, I think. I’m still standing. So I’m not looking it up.
Hours later, maybe days, we will wake to ribbons of melted wax, the room still except for breath. In those small morning seconds, everything is realized in stone. There is patched clothing in the closet, the dented radiators, the faded curtains, the cracks in the wall. Then there is the stink of the dumpster outside, only masked by lingering sex.
The Super 8 I’m saying. There was an empty indoor swimming pool. No water. That’s a metaphor. Expectations unrealized. The uselessness of a giant empty pool. It rained. Could the kids swim in the pool? They could not. They could leap in or fall in and die there, but no cannonballs, no look-how-long-I-can-hold-my-breath, no I’m Michael Phelps! etc–no JOY. Just an empty swimming pool, a giant sore, a toothless mouth, a stink of nothing.
“Fitness Center” is one hell of a word for a tiny glass cube with one broken stair climber, once broken bike/bird looking thing, one functional set of weights. No TV, no water, no towels, no nothing. I pushed some weights about, did some crunches. The floor stuck to me.
The bathroom had scratched painted walls. The shower wouldn’t drain, so you stood there in several inches of wretched memory water. The memories in that water, the hair and hope cells and vomit and blood and razorblades and screams and devil semen and GOD KNOWS WHAT of that fucking Super 8 hotel bathtub water. I complained and they fixed the drain while I was out eating perch. The tub was the color of knuckles.
They had this lonely basketball goal, but see below the goal was a giant puddle of water. You can’t play basketball in water. The ball will not bounce, see? No bounce, no basketball.
The room has a spider and a giant can of Coors Lite behind the bed. A crypt, I’m telling you. This was the Super 8 in Stevensville, Michigan. A SUPER crypt. A sad, bad place. I felt like a failure to have even brought myself, myself and my family, to such a wretched den of fools, a back-road to hell, hulking, hollow tree leaning so precipitously over our heads and souls. For awhile I thought we all might be murdered. Why not just throw my life into a volcano? Sleep was jagged, a crossed knife and fork, a tangle of thin sheets and barbed wire. I had mad dreams. The eyes of spiders, blue forests, I felt lost in a corridor of pure black bone marrow, some shaky cage, a carnival ride night of screeches and tumbles, sounds of trucks farting in the parking lot, children screaming, blickers of light and darkness, some great, wounded bird falling like an unhinged jet engine onto the roof…also the coffee sucked.
*
Hey, here are some flash fictions I enjoyed today:
I like stalking. Ever read the lovely Stalking Dave Eggers by Elizabeth Ellen? You really should.
In the Dallas-Fort Worth airport bookstore I hold up Dave’s book, show his picture to my six-year-old daughter.
“This is mommy’s new boyfriend,” I tell her. She glances momentarily at the picture but doesn’t say anything. She is clearly not impressed.
“Isn’t he cute?” I say. “Look at his hair. Isn’t that cute hair?”
Ah, now I’m getting sidetracked. Way leads onto way, Frost told us, the gorgeous fart. Fart is a word not often used in literature. It’s a silly word, isn’t it? A few weeks ago, I dropped into a poetry workshop and the instructor (the most glow Kathleen Rooney) gave us a big-ass poetry prompt and you had to put a word into your poem not often seen in poetry. I used the word fart.
Can I say something about Dave Eggers? Once, on my birthday, I drank a lot of sake and yelled out to Dave Eggers, WHERE IS TOPH?! He stopped his reading and said, “What is this, an insurrection? Toph is fine. He’s in the coast guard.”
I recently had a student faint while discussing Dave Eggers. Not a great situation, though it worked out fine, in the end.
I shit you not.
Can I say something about writing prompts? Yes, yes I can. It’s my fucking blog. I always thought prompts were bullshit. I think now I was wrong. All of the prompts I used for that poetry workshop worked out just fine. I actually wrote several decent poems. In fact, I went out and bought the very book containing the earlier prompt. The book is The Practice of Poetry, by Chase Twichell (have no idea who that is) and Robin Behn (Robin is a wonderful poet and was one of my MFA professors at Alabama.)
So I might try some more prompts. Or the book might just sit there like a muskrat eating an apple. If I was a muskrat I would secretly move through your backyard, leaving long meandering trails in the grass. The next morning you would see these odd trails and think, “What is that?” I’d be hiding in the nearby tall weeds and I’d giggle and think, “It’s a muskrat!” I would then go home and listen to Rumours by Fleetwood Mac, over and over and over…My record player would be made of a boulder and my record needle would be a pine needle…I think.
“Trauma, Trau-ma. The sessions were like a cocktail party every night—people everywhere. We ended up staying in these weird hospital rooms … and of course John and me were not exactly the best of friends.”
—Christine McVie, on the emotional strain when making Rumours in Sausalito
Ok, back to the flash fiction by Nicolle Elizabeth. It’s creepy. No, it’s eerie. I like eerie. Whispers in the night, clammy things, the weight of dreams, etc. This flash is a great example of control of tone. With tone, in a brief work, you need to stay consistent. This is a process of accumulation. A dune of sand is really just many individual flecks of sand. One day you go, “Damn, that’s a dune.” Note how Elizabeth ‘stacks’ certain sounds, images to control tone. Very technical, and reminded me of another master of tone, Robert Bly.
Snowbanks North of the House
Those great sweeps of snow that stop suddenly six feet from the house … Thoughts that go so far. The boy gets out of high school and reads no more books; the son stops calling home. The mother puts down her rolling pin and makes no more bread. And the wife looks at her husband one night at a party, and loves him no more. The energy leaves the wine, and the minister falls leaving the church. It will not come closer the one inside moves back, and the hands touch nothing, and are safe.
The father grieves for his son, and will not leave the room where the coffin stands. He turns away from his wife, and she sleeps alone.
And the sea lifts and falls all night, the moon goes on through the unattached heavens alone.
The toe of the shoe pivots in the dust … And the man in the black coat turns, and goes back down the hill. No one knows why he came, or why he turned away, and did not climb the hill.
2. The second flash fiction I admire today is by Arron Teel, capturing that odd moment (that seems like years [or is?], that odd age of transition, from kid to adult, all of the odd stirrings, the painful misunderstandings and painful understandings…the wonder of life. And what a final line! Ending lines always matter, but with less words, you really need to zap out, like a poem, like a poem…Glow dat. Here, Teel catches the blue, he contains it and compresses the blur. Like a poem.
Did I ever tell you about when I was like 14 and shot bottle rockets up into a bee hive? Yeh, it set the entire forest on fire. Smoldering hive of bees. That was a bad day. Later I would shoot out a giant, glass door with a slingshot. Not sure what I was thinking back then.
The thing about Wal-Mart is you don’t want to be there, really ever, and then you find yourself in Wal-Mart. Everyone I know hates Wal-Mart but we don’t really do anything about it. There’s a lot of things that way. It makes me feel pretty empty sometimes.
Hand reaches across breast, elbow to nipple.
Oh my god! Excuse me, m’am.
It’s just a titty, sir, whispered between painted lips.
Excellent flash, and really contains some of the chaos of family, relationships, the things that just happen, the things we can’t always communicate clearly about…It’s a strong work, and structurally inevitable, the lines cascading to the end.
I’ve pretty much enjoyed all Catherine Lacey. Personally, I’m in the “No one knows what they are doing” camp, and, like anyone, I enjoy reading literature that validates my view. Lacey really mines the terrain of confusion. Confusion. Confusion.
This is the first I’ve read of Angela Allen. It’s an odd one, wonderfully odd little tale, leaning to metaphor, twisting and snapping, moving us along–over here, over there–always grooving the imagination. The imagination is hope, isn’t it? I don’t know. I enjoy the cliffs of tension. This piece made me smile.
*
Ok, so there you go, I blogged, in my own way. I said to the world: I AM NOT A TARRED TELEPHONE POLE!! I’d like to end today with a muskrat dream and some advice to AVOID Super 8 Stevensville, MI, and, here, a little poem for you:
For Father’s Day I received a hammock. Here it is, down by the creek, a most glow location for a hammock, the water gurgling by as I sway, the leaves rustling, the calling of various birds, some animal thumping or digging or rolling about a bit in the weeds nearby (should I be worried?), the dappling–yes, dear poets, dappling–rays of light and shade and all those wonderful in-betweens shards/slivers/tongue/sizes and shapes of. I have a little green table for my beer and other necessities (a bowl of nachos, for example). I believe my hammock will act as elevator of the soul and a dragonfly of the mind. Also as a type of wine made of cotton. The key belief is there.
(Ancient Mayans invented the hammock, using fibrous bark from the Hamack tree.)
[[Actual Reader Comment: I was willing to overlook the dullness and amateurishness. But it just got duller and duller and duller.]]
Installing the hammock took a great while. I dug two unnecessary holes and one necessary hole. I had to purchase concrete twice. Using two different hammers, I hammered two giant nails into the tree, both unnecessary. At one point I was digging with a post-hole digger and my back suddenly went POW!! as if I was shot in the spine! Later, a candelabra of pain. Then a simmering lump of coal. That hurt for four days. I bought bolts, chain, chain attachments, some form of curly screw, 4 “S” hooks, most of this unnecessary. For a while I thought the hammock hung too low. This nibbled at my mind. At night, over dinner, during my daily aerobic training, my thoughts were, “Is my hammock hanging too low?” I adjusted the hammock and felt it was then too high. Is it too high? I’d stand and stare at the hammock for a long while. This cycle went on for many days, too low, too high, too low…just right? I hope now it’s just right. (Is that even possible?)
[Aside: I bet there are several hammock camps/cabals: those that like a big saggy C type of hang to their hammock and those who like a taut, thrumming more ___ type of hang. I bet some aficionados like their hammock to embrace their bodies in a giant ball, like a cocoon. Some like the buttocks to touch the earth while in hammock, while others like to swing free (like a memory) many feet above the soil. Cloth or synthetic? Spreader, Mayan, Jungle, Military, or Travel? I bet we got some hammock purists out there, some people with some really strong opinions. Some hammock freaks. Like uptight about hammocks, which is sort of against the very nature of the hammock.]
[[Actual Reader Comment: The text drifts much more than I recalled, and is deliciously paranoid. But there’s a pining at its core, an almost sentimentality that jumped out at me.]]
A hammock like this one is meant for reading or napping. As a rule, I do not nap, so let’s discuss reading. What was the first book I read in my new Reading Hammock? Well, purposefully, I’ve been reading a series of literature I call Books-U-Should-Have-Read-Already-Most-Likely-While-in-Your Twenties. For example, I just finished The Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test. Why am I doing this? Because I’m curious. Because I think it’s my professional responsibility. I’m a fiction professor. I’m a writer of fiction. I should know these books. If you say Chekhov to me, I should be able to say, “Read him.” If you say Flannery O’Connor, “I should be able to say, “Read her.” Hell, same with Sinclair or Franzen or Moore (Lorrie) or Wright or Murakami (yes, even him) or Chopin or Carol Oates. Or even Vonnegut or Kerouac or Pirsig (Robert M.) or other Books-U-Should-Have-Read-Already-Most-Likely-While-in-Your Twenties authors. I tell my students all of the time, “Look, if you’re serious about writing fiction, you have to know these people. Not like them or dislike them or mimic them or distance yourself from them or respect them or disrespect them or any of that bullshit…but you MUST KNOW THEM!!”
Know
Them
It’s your responsibility, people. To at least know.
[Aside: While in the hammock I flipped the "off" button on a device labelled OFF, the mosquito repellant. It's like this weird clip-on fan that repels ( I guess?) mosquitoes. I got this sweet glow from turning off, OFF. OK, I'm a word dork.]
So. Here’s what I know–or think I know–about today’s Books-U-Should-Have-Read-Already-Most-Likely-While-in-Your Twenties:Less Than Zero by Brett Easton Ellis.
[[Actual Reader Comment: There is some talent in places, but I cannot believe the blurbs on the back cover of the edition I read. If these reviewers really meant those words, I think they were as coked up as the characters this book.]]
[Factoid: Less than Zero was sold in 1985 to Simon & Schuster for five thousand dollars.]
[Factoid: Less than Zero named after this song:
]
[Factoid: Apparently, via Paris Review, one not so enthusiastic editor said, "If there's an audience for a novel about coke-snorting, cock-socking zombies, then by all means let's publish the damn thing."]
This book is one of those “nothing happens” books, you’ll hear some say. This is usually noted as a criticism. An eye-roll, especially if the book was written while the author was young (Ellis published Less than Zero at age 20). I would disagree. Plot does exist here. There are two types of plots, right? (Wrong!) Man leaves town, man enter towns. This is man enters town, Clay, back from the east and now to the west, Los Angeles. The structure is his arrival, the repetitive events of his life with LA friends (drugs, MTV watching, sex, put on repeat), a slight rising action as the events get nastier (though I’m sure these events appeared more extreme in 1985), and we end with his departure (a rejection of sorts by Clay to the LA life?), back east, back to school. Cyclical, you could say. Or framed. I mean you know he’s going back home as soon as the book begins with his arrival. (One move [of several: Clay refuses to use extremely hard drugs, Clay doesn't join in on a rape {he doesn't do anything to stop or report the rape, BTW}, etc.] that attempts to make him sympathetic as narrator. I stress attempts.)
People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles. This is the first thing I hear when I come back to the city. Blair picks me up from LAX and mutters this under her breath as she drives up the onramp. She says, “People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles.” Though that sentence shouldn’t bother me, it stays in my mind for an uncomfortably long time. Nothing else seems to matter. Not the fact that I’m eighteen and it’s December and the ride on the plane had been rough and the couple from Santa Barbara, who were sitting across from me in first class, had gotten pretty drunk. Not the mud that had splattered on the legs of my jeans, which felt kind of cold and loose, earlier that day at an airport in New Hampshire. Not the stain on the arm of the wrinkled, damp shirt I wear, a shirt which looked fresh and clean this morning. Not the tear on the neck of my gray argyle vest, which seems vaguely more eastern than before, especially next to Blair’s clean tight jeans and her pale-blue shirt. All of this seems irrelevant next to that one sentence. It seems easier to hear that people are afraid to merge than “I’m pretty sure Muriel is anorexic” or the singer on the radio crying out about magnetic waves. Nothing else seems to matter to me but those ten words. Not the warm winds, which seem to propel the car down the empty asphalt freeway, or the faded smell of marijuana which still faintly permeates Blaire’s car. All it comes down to is the fact that I’m a boy coming home for a month and meeting someone whom I haven’t seen for four months and people are afraid to merge.”
(I suppose you notice this opening reads very Catcher in the Rye, and that’s fair. I’m sure you’ll detect Great Gatsby here and on and on. Ellis studied literature and writing. It’s a first novel by a young writer. Nothing in this book is really original, or even that unexpected [especially not in 2012, where most of this material can be found daily on CNN], but that’s no reason to dismiss the entire text. First novels are a genre to themselves, and it’s interesting to see how each writer recognizes [and bends] the expectations.)
[[Actual Reader Comment: The novel is harder and less hopeful than the flawed film. It's a stunning read.]]
What else drives the text, plot-wise? Finding Julian. We need to find Julian, a strung out addict and friend-of-Clay’s who owes him a lot of money. Where is Julian? What’s he up to? How bad has he fallen? Etc.
here’s an image from a paris hilton video (which one?). in a few moments paris and her pals will be snorting the cocaine off his chest.
But let’s put these structural interests aside, and address this idea, the concept of “nothing happens.” You hear this about a lot of books, Tao Lin, for a very contemporary small press example, or certain French writers (Jean-Philippe Toussaint or Muriel Barbery or Raymond Queneau [I hope you've read the excellent Exercises in Style] come to mind among others), etc. But then you have to question what keeps you “hooked” into a book–is that plot? Or can all of the innumerable other things a book can do snatch you into turning its pages? Could you be hooked purely by aesthetics? Characters, tensions, objects, social situations, lyricism, satirical comment, on and on–what if these keep you reading? Is that plot? Visual artists realize narrative in a painting/sculpture/diorama/film/whatever-the-fuck can move a viewer (reader), but so can a lot of other, more abstract, more exciting (my 2.4 cents) things…and then all these other things spring from that epiphany (see contemporary art). PLOT! PLOT? That which drives you forward? I think so.
[[Actual Reader Comment: I think that this book has influenced a lot of contemporary fiction. I can see its fingerprints.]]
What does the author have to say about the structure of Less Than Zero?
And to the extent that there’s a plot, that’s my least favorite part of the book. In the first draft, which was much longer, the plot was less relevant. But in the course of being condensed, the plot took on more significance than I realized at the time. I look back at that book and think of the plot as having imposed itself on the material.
This interests me, in that Ellis seems to have had his “plot” emerge in revision. I think this happens a lot in writing, and it one of those magical–and weird–things about creating art. Sometimes threads just emerge during the creative act, especially in the revision of. These are pleasant surprises and make the act of writing somewhat mystical. A structure appears as if conjured. As if always there, but out of sight. (This might be one definition of spirituality, BTW) This is one reason writing a heavily pre-plotted piece of text much really be a sodden experience. To have the plot emerge as you work is fascinating. To see what will happen.
LANGUAGE:
There’s a lot of it that I wish was slightly more elegantly written.
Ellis
Some have attacked the prose of this book.They say Ellis ripped off some of Joan Didion’s L.A. writings, or they say the deadpan nature of the prose is too Raymond Chandler, etc.
[[Actual Reader Comment: This giant city is terribly claustrophobic and I hate Bret Easton Ellis for capturing it so perfectly.]]
[Aside: For a really great book on LA, why not try this one from Bukowski's muse, Fante.]
I don’t get these attacks on the prose. Of course the prose resembles others. Ellis was 20! Also, The Didion thing is bullshit. Didion could write circles around the prose in Less That Zero. It’s not even close. And Chandler works figurative language in a very focused way, a different eye and rhythm (and certainly emphasis on simile) than Ellis ever attempts. Again, I think these observations are because Ellis was young and people get the idea he dashed this thing off. Wrong. The book was actually written and revised for years (Ellis says five). It was shaped with creative writing instructors and editors. And I think the language is attempting several things. Let me briefly discuss two different ways: tone and in brand naming.
The tone is one of white noise and repetition. Form=function. The sentences, mostly unremarkable as far as lyric nature, pile up and pile up, like day after day after day. In Clay’s world, one day is the next day: cocaine, alcohol, marijuana, nightclub, restaurant, hangover, empty conversation, empty sex–repeat. Over and over, Clay has no idea how long he’s been in LA. Over and over, these characters lose track of week, day, location. (Everyone gets lost while driving, but it doesn’t really matter. One place is good as another.)
‘Rip does three more lines. Rip throws his head back and shakes it and sniffs loudly. He then looks at me and wants to know what I was doing at the Cafe Casino in Westwood when he clearly remembers telling me to meet him at the Cafe Casino in Beverly Hills. I tell him that I’m pretty sure he said to meet at the Cafe Casino in Westwood. Rip says, ‘No, not quite,’ and then, ‘Anyway it doesn’t matter.’
You have to admire how Ellis knows his sentences must do the heavy lifting. A lot of and work. And. And And. And we did this and this happened and I said ______ and some girl said _____ and I smoked another cigarette. And, and, and–one thing leads to another, all connected by and, all in the same sentence, of the same worth (less than zero, basically) and then you wake up and do it all over again. And again.
[[Actual Reader Comment: The book was a quick read and I could barely put it down except at certain points where I had to clear my head and thank God for the normalcy that is my life and the life of my kids.]]
(BTW, there are odd, scattered moments where Ellis shifts into a more intensely poetic prose, usually when discussing the wildlife of LA, coyotes and lizards, or when writing about the sun and the torrential rain. [This is where he leans most Didion.] Things not human, basically, things outside the encircled, narcissistic concerns of these characters. It’s a juxtaposition of language that shows some control by the author and adds an extra charge to the text.)
this is clint eastwood’s daughter. she’s eating, burning, chainsawing a hundred thousand dollar alligator skin purse.
The brand identity thing is overdone. WE GET IT, already. Lives soaked in brand, lives immersed in commercialized identity, to the point where no one even sees it, recognizes it anymore. It just is. The shoes and cars and clothing and sunglasses and music/music/music are these character’s sun and rain and plants and scenery…This is their world. But Ellis doesn’t stop. And again, in form=function, we, as readers, get suffocated by brands. There are points in the book you just want to stop reading, to like come up for air, to see something in your brain besides Mercedes, The Go-Gos, GQ magazine.
(Aside: And this is pre-Internet!! Jesus, look at us now. The Internet is the biggest fucking brand machine in the megaverse.)
THEME:
[[Actual Reader Comment: Not a long story but one that is chilling and demands that you read it consecutively because of the eerie rhythm of language it possesses.]]
[Aside: I drank a lot of Sprite Zero while reading Less Than Zero and this might have heightened all effects.]
I think this a great example of a “mirror” book. Or maybe a mural. Look, here’s a subculture in 1980s America. The book reminds me of television, a device that is filler between commercials. And what do we see? Here, here’s what you want and therefore are. I read almost everything as metaphorical. Drugs are all of the things we do–repeatedly–to move the heart and eye from one place to another place. What is a reality show? What is celebrity? What is a car, a billboard, a desert, a highway, boredom?
I come to a red light, tempted to go through it, then stop once I see a billboard sign that I don’t remember seeing and I look up at it. All it says is ‘Disappear Here’ and even though it’s probably an ad for some resort, it still freaks me out a little and I step on the gas really hard and the car screeches as I leave the light.
u recognize this, don’t you? It’s the kim kardashian sex tape. this image is right before the sex but right after the long while in the bathroom applying makeup.
Some “theme” moments are forced, primarily near the end, where things get too quickly compressed and the pace of the book fails. We quickly move from activities that only harm one person, the user–example drugs–into more ominous terrain. A graphic murder-porno film. A dead man’s body in an alley that these characters see as almost a prop, as something to view and laugh about. And then a gang rape scene (of a 12 year old) that reads as forced (as in too overt) and hastily presented.
(Not to be redundant, but in 2012 these scenes appear almost everyday. Porn? Insensitivity to human dignity? Must be a Tuesday.)
But these forced scenes are the exceptions. Many “theme” scenes I feel are nuanced and carefully written, with an exact eye and a precise sense of tone. One scene in particular, when Clay joins Julian and an out-of-town businessman [He's actually from Muncie, Indiana, I shit you not!] in a hotel room, is written with incredible craft and control.
In another scene, Clay goes home with a young woman he’s met in a nightclub. They have “sex,” but it’s an odd and alienated dance. They might as well be in 2 different rooms. It’s clinical, sad sex, and another example of skill by the author.
[[Actual Reader Comment: After reading this book, I felt hollowed-out and dead inside.]]
Mostly the book just asks you to view. Look here. Do you see any of yourself here? Do you see your world anywhere? I discuss this idea a lot to students (often writing students are a bit theme-eager): just show the thing. Get the narrator out of the way. Ellis has a 1st person narrator but oddly very little internal monologue. Mostly it’s just show. Here, see this. See this. See this. And this approach, to me, is why people like and greatly dislike the book. One popular approach–valid or possibly not–to this technique is to say I see nothing of myself. I couldn’t even finish the thing, etc. How could I? The people here are too disgusting. I don’t recognize them at all.
2. The hospital smelled like a sweaty, lost coin. No, like a broth of soggy jigsaw puzzle pieces. No…Oh, fuck it. Someone beeped something. My Nursing Instructor loomed above me. Giant, white crow, wings outstretched, talon pointing to my forehead: “When you give an injection, be absolute certain it’s right med, right dose, right time, right injection site, right patient. It’s like a bullet. You don’t ever get it back once you push the plunger. There is no do over.”
3. James Thurber had a glass eye. (He lost his sight by playing “William Tell” with his brother.) In fact, he had many glass eyes, in a small case in his coat pocket. At cocktail parties, as the evening wore on, as he drank more and more, he would occasionally visit the bathroom and switch out his glass eye with another one more bloodshot.
4. “The order said B.O. but I thought it said B.Q., so I made it barbecue, not black olive.”
My Pizza Hut Instructor’s head was in the shape of a luffa gourd. Long, stringy hair, like something clogged in a drain, etc. His name was Hassan Hassan. He smoked a lot of marijuana. He shrugged. He said, “Fuck it, man. Just eat it for lunch and make a new one.”
5. Just as one is good, another is bad.
6. Thurber would draw on cocktail napkins, to flirt with women. Most of these napkins were wadded up, tossed away.
7. How do you think the backside of a mirror feels? Think about how lonely that is, to be the backside of a mirror. Or maybe not at all. Maybe it’s a relief. It must be such pressure to be the front of a mirror.
8. They pitched watermelons off the truck, big, looping, spinning arcs of watermelon. This was in July, the afternoon sun. Big-ass Memphis sun, humidity all puckering. Sun like a fucking orangutan. It was hot. I was sixteen and very eager. There I am, below the truck. My hands all sweating. My job was to catch all of the watermelons.
“Everyone you drop comes out of your paycheck!” my Produce Store Instructor shouted.
9. Thurber rewrote all of his New Yorker essays (he called them “Casuals”) a minimum of twenty-five drafts. (He eventually lost all his vision, and developed this process: think out the words, dictate them to a secretary, she types them and reads them back, he corrects the text out loud, she reads back his corrections and retypes them and says them aloud, he then…Oh, you get the idea. Maddening for the secretary, I’d bet.)
10. I cannot stand when people say they have no regrets. “I’d do it all the same again…blah, blah, blar.” Well, fuck you.
11. One time, rather hungover, I drove a forklift directly into a chemical containment pond. The forklift weighed 4,000 pounds. It suuunnnnnnkkkkkkk.
My DuPont Instructor said, “Now, how we going to get that forklift out of that pond?”
I said, “I don’t know.”
He smiled the smile of those full-time employees conditioned to working with dumbasses from summer help. “I do. Go and get the bigger forklift.”
So that day I got to forklift out my forklift with another forklift, a thing I enjoyed as meta. (The pond was illegal, so don’t pass on this story to anyone working with OSHA. Thanks.)
12. ‘Nothing in excess,’ professed the ancient Greeks.
13. Thurber would stand in his kitchen and think a moment and then run madly down the road after the retreating postman. Muttering, he’d lift his essay from the mailbag. Muttering all the way home into his study, muttering.
14. “You can’t wall bricks worth a damn!” my Construction Instructor told me. A red-faced man named Chester. (We meanly called him Chester the Molester though we never witnessed him molest anything larger than a half pint bottle.)
“Want me to take them out and do them again?” I asked.
“No, I don’t.” He reached out and took off my hardhat. I felt small without my hardhat. I felt like a chipmunk or a cigarette butt. Something. He pointed a meaty finger at my Woody Allen safety glasses and my naked forehead. “I want you to get the fuck off my worksite. And don’t ever come back. You’re done.”
1. Years ago, when I had you as a student in a class, I thought, “I could see him writing drunk sonnets.” But I never thought, “I could see him writing Hallelujah Giant Space Wolf.” So that probably shows my limitations as a person, but enough about me. I mean to say your new book is expansive, jam-packed, full. It seems to be totally different from your first book, in form especially. Can you compare and contrast the two projects, Drunk Sonnets and Wolf?
I remember that class. You had to address the class as a whole and tell them to stop writing stories about bros that drink and do drugs in their apartment before ultimately killing themselves while listening to Elliot Smith (not an exaggeration). Maybe that’s why you could see me writing The Drunk Sonnets, because I was the only one capable of overcoming the excessive nights in a way that allows the speaker or protagonist or what-have-you to move forward in life. JK. That was a fiction 1 class. I think I wrote a story about a couple dudes who kidnap another dude, but the kidnap victim doesn’t really care about it, and then they end up driving to the Grand Canyon and dancing and just really believing in themselves and experiencing God. The Grand Canyon part came after your class. I don’t think that story exists anymore.
As for the two books, Wolf is bigger. Wolf is time. The Drunk Sonnets came about over two or three (I think two, but, at this point, I can’t remember) nights in late 2008. Wolf happened over a period of about three years, from mid 2008 to late 2011, and I think that space of time shows. There are possibly gaps in the story, if there is a story. The Drunk Sonnets are compact, they let you hold them. I don’t think this book can be held or read all at once. I don’t think the same can be said for Wolf. Wolf doesn’t let you see itself all at once. I’d like to think that each poem is like a close-up view of single strand of fur on Wolf’s body.
2. What is your writing process?
I don’t really have one. I just say things. My fingers say things in their own language or something like that but that sounds dumb. Most of the poems, maybe all of them were written on couches or at kitchen tables in four different apartments that I lived in from 2008-2011. I don’t have a specific time of day that I write. I simply let a poem happen when it needs to. I use Microsoft Word much in the way that Quakers run a church service: just let it speak. I don’t subscribe to any advice from writers about how to approach it or how to be disciplined about it. I don’t have any discipline except to only write when something needs to be said, when the throat is full and its time to gurgle, when the words are ready to out their way out of my fingers. Which sounds dramatic or high energy, but it’s usually not. I like to put my feet up on the table and try to channel the Lord.
I don’t know if I can answer this question without spoiling what the book does/did for me, which is to move myself away from the past and toward a newness of belief.
I could probably go through every mention of God in the book and try to explain it, but it wouldn’t be useful. All I know is that God or whatever you want to call it, “the mystery of the universe,” I don’t know, is the most important thing we can write about or think about. Ultimately, everything we do points toward purpose or purposelessness, exaltation or non-worth, joy or despair. It maybe points at those “or’s.” Maybe “and’s” would be more appropriate.
4. What was the submission process like for individual poems from the book? Did you send individual poems out?
Many of the poems were published by bearcreekfeed as the ebook east central indiana. I sent those to Colin Bassett and he was way into them. That was my first “major” publication. It was very exciting. Other poems from the book that have been published were published because an editor solicited poems from me or I met them at AWP and they said I should send them something. One of the poems is on the SPD website because they had a promotion where you could send them a poem and get a free book or something like that.
I don’t really enjoy sending poems out. It just feels like a distraction from the writing itself.
5. A lot of these poems use asides, fugues—they begin a subject, then leap off somewhere tangentially, then usually return to subject. Was this a purposeful structure?
It was something that seemed necessary for me to be able to say what I mean. I could have a beginning thought or image, but I need/needed to move away from that. I didn’t want to make sense, necessarily, or I didn’t care if I made sense. It’s more than the thought itself. Poetry is more than its inception. I wanted to find all the possible tributaries of thought and emotion and language in these poems, for each poem to create its own landscape, little areas of garbage and glory to explore and walk through. I wanted a poem to be more revealing than Google Earth could ever be. I still feel that way. A huge concern I’ve heard about my poems is that there is too much in them, that certain parts fail a central theme or overall togetherness, but I don’t know if there is such a thing. This criticism causes me a lot of stress because I often feel like there can never be enough in a poem. I can see a river and its tributary and I can feel a tributary that isn’t physically there wanting me to speak of its not being there, of its wanting to give tribute in one way or another. That’s the way that I feel about asides. And as for fugues, I want every molecule to sing its song at once.
6. What do you think Colorado has done to your writing? Is that a valid question? Does place affect your poetry?
Colorado has mostly just given me a different space to write in. I don’t feel obsessed with the place physically. The culture of Colorado is nothing I’m interested in. I simply live here. I write poems while living here. The apartment building I lived in while in Fort Collins had a strange and transient feel to it, which felt right to me at the time. There was a tension between college students and the older locals and immigrant families. I would often stare out the window at night into the pool, which was always lit up but too murky to see to the bottom of. I think Colorado has mostly shown me a new weirdness. In that same apartment building I befriended a man called Danny the Cowboy and his wife Glenda. Danny was an alcoholic who was on house arrest for multiple DUI’s. He used to be in the military but was discharged after he got in a fight and was thrown out of a third story window. I used to get drunk with Danny and listen to country music. He loved Johnny Paycheck. We played Scrabble and Glenda always won. I was supposed to teach Danny to play the guitar, but that never happened. They moved out before I did and I have no idea what happened to those two. Danny was sort of a strange guy to hang out with. He would get really drunk on Jack Daniels and throw a guitar painted like the flag of Texas at me. He would give me the tablature to “Danny Boy” and Glenda would sing as I tried to remember how to from chords. Danny once breathalyzed me with his own breathalyzer that he used to make sure he was below the legal limit before going to get his breath tested every day. I blew way below the legal limit. The Fort Collins that I knew while living in that building was a weird world. Now I live in Denver. It’s better living here. It’s not so removed from the reality of 2012 the way that Fort Collins was removed from the present day. Fort Collins is probably what it felt like to live in a large Western city in the early 20th century or so, except with a college and lots of white people who think they’re Rastafarian. Living in Colorado has definitely alienated me from the overall poetry community and poets in general because of how cliquey it is here. That’s ok though. Poetry is a reflection of the poet’s relationship with the universe and life. I don’t think scenes or movements are an important thing to seek out unless you’re new to poetry and need to find a voice or need to learn or something, I have no idea. I was much more engaged when I was living in Muncie, and I think that had to do with being younger and newer, just wanting to stir shit up. No one sees willing to stir shit up in Colorado, and I get the impression that nothing in Colorado has ever been stirred up, which explains all the “Native” bumper stickers and the weird condescending attitudes that people have about being from Colorado, the weird Colorado pride over simply living near mountains. If people hadn’t moved to Colorado, creating a population boost, the state would be nothing more than South Wyoming. It’s almost daunting to figure out where to begin stirring. I’ll probably just do nothing as I wait to move elsewhere in the country.
7. You write, “I am thinking in terms of biology.” This seems to be central to the book. We eat, shit, drink, sleep. Repeat. Discuss.
It really fucks me up sometimes that we’re forced to exist within a body. What a crappy and limiting way to exist. I have no specific beliefs on the afterlife due to my lack of experience or exposure to any such thing, but it really does feel like life in the physical is just to give us some exposure to what might happen after death, like everything that happens on earth is simply to prepare us for some next level shit when we die.
8. When writing, how do you know when a poem of yours is finished?
I don’t know that there’s a way to analyze what makes a poem finished. I guess when I feel like I can’t go any further with it, when I feel satisfied in what the poem achieves, what feeling it creates. I want every poem to create an experience. Basically, I know a poem is complete when I read the poem to my dog and she goes and passive-aggressively licks her empty bowl because she’s hungry.
9. There’s so much energy in this book. Momentum. Did you have to really think about how you were going to order the poems in the collection?
I did think about it. I knew I wanted the long, title poem to be the centerpiece. And I knew I wanted the poems from east central indiana to come at the beginning. I did that thing where you spread the poems across the floor and then try different orders. That process is incredibly beautiful to me. It’s like rearranging a life to try to give some sort of meaning to it. In terms of thinking, it was more of a thinking through the gut. What would feel most powerful? How can I best sustain the feeling that I’m longing for? The book begins with a prayer. Then there’s sort of a debauched despair, which leads into destruction of the self, and then an attempt at the destruction of the world. I could only talk myself down from that attempt, however. The rest of the book is sort of an attempt to take the world apart in order to study the beauty of the parts, as well as an attempt to relinquish my personhood. This is, more or less, the philosophical journey I went through over the period that these poems were written. And the poems are, more or less, arranged in the order that they were written. There are a few exceptions to that, but mostly that’s a true statement.
10. There’s a wonderful time wherein the speaker throws hammers at the sun and sort of asks himself, “WTF? Why I am throwing hammers at the sun?” But then the poem ends with the speaker sitting there, with a “hammerbucket” clearly prepared to once again throw hammers at the sun. Discuss.
Any moment of clarity is temporary. We, as human beings, are basically babies who grow more insane every day. We can try to pretend that we are rational, but really we just assimilate more and more into a society that is not exactly perfect or anything close to perfect. Fuck the sun. Fuck the way that it sustains life on earth. But moreover, fuck everyone for not working together in a more meaningful way to make it so we can be amazed by the sun at every moment that we feel its presence in our lives. Human beings should be constantly amazed at how insanely beautiful everything is, how miraculous life is, but instead we’ve become addicted to our own impermanence. I have spent way too much time on the internet today. I’ve spent way too much of my life in my own head. I think this is universal. Maybe the Dalia Lama has overcome this, but I doubt it.
11. What do you think about poetry readings?
I mostly feel bored with them. No one ever does anything worth remembering or telling a friend about. Just hearing a good poem read aloud is not enough. I’d rather stay home and read the poem in a book if you’re just going to stand there and read words. I feel done with poetry readings, or maybe just bored to the point of not caring. Attending them, giving them, whatever. Elizabeth and I will probably continue to do parties/readings in our apartment where we encourage everyone to do whatever they want. I want people to throw bags of feces at me. I want someone to ride in on a horse and make damn sure we don’t get our damage deposit back. That’s way better than hearing a poem read out loud. Another thing better than hearing a poem read out loud is having a conversation with someone at a bar instead of being forced into silence while someone reads a poem. Let the poems be the background to a night with friends. Don’t shove poetry into the foreground. Audiences need to be obnoxious or just do whatever they want at a poetry reading. I hate etiquette. I hate it so much that I’m not even going to learn the proper way to spell it. Poets also need to realize that their thoughts are never as beautiful as they think.
12. Is poetry a sport?
If it is I want to be the Greg Oden of poetry. Or maybe the Metta World Peace. I would love to throw an elbow or two.
13. Who you been reading lately?
Lately, I’ve been really into Ariana Reines’ new book. I also just read and loved William Bronk’s Death is the Place. Bronk is a next level kind of poet of thought and possibility. Also Eileen Myle’s Different Streets/Snowflake. Also, I’ve been teaching poetry to fifth graders, and one of them ended a poem on the line, “I triumph in absolute baby glory,” which is an awesome line.
14. What’s your favorite burrito?
Lately it’s been the chorizo breakfast burritos from this place in Denver called Bocaza. It’s a Mexican restaurant that never has any customers, yet somehow it stays in business. I mostly eat burritos at breakfast, and when I get breakfast burritos from Bocaza, I always get two of the chorizo, which they grind up into a sauce, so the chorizo is all over every bite.
Sometimes the rain will begin. Sometimes the rain will shrink and spleen and cease. Rain talks to me. Or possibly I mean the flapping wind. The wind, something realized through its push on others…tumbling Burger King bag (thank you, BK, for making a veggie burger), leaves rustling their televisions, the dandelion seeds off on their busy assignations. And then the wonderful disc. The wind and the disc. The disc and the wind. I will feel sort of gray blar inside, sort of, I don’t know, kicky or such-and-such or my life a hazy network of lines intersecting, paralleling, crossing (that wonky sound of light sabers hitting–actually two power lines being thwacked with wood) and so I’ll drink a beer (or 3) and slide on my belly from the kitchen, along the garage (hello, shovel, do you dig me?) and into my Man Room (now oddly organized and clean) to lie on the floor two feet from the treadmill–on my back–with my hands folded under my head and, as some would put it, ponder my life. I’ll stare at the disc golf wall. What do we have here? Let’s reflect. Let’s 450SL ourselves. Let’s whoop-de-whoop my disc wall, in segments:
In this shard? Well, some significant glow. A throg, a mind-nog, a roar of memory. First, two newspaper articles about McCulloch Park, a disc golf course in Muncie, IN. I had a hand in establishing McCulloch (along with many others) so am always glowFace to see the park, the rolling fairways, the mature trees, the stumps where some city bastards cut down some of the better mature trees, and especially the disc golfers. College kids, families, older gentlemen, vagabonds and hippies and businessmen. (What line of business? Now isn’t that the question?) I remember when McCulloch was only a glorious, precarious idea, then I remember walking off the distances, visualizing; writing and editing the grant (the park was funded by a Delaware County Grant [this was before the recession]); playing the holes before actual holes existed (with a temporary basket). We had to negotiate with the concrete contractor (I wish we’d made the pads longer, but live and learn) and call the people who survey before you dig (we were about to dig about 54 holes, minimum, on 40+ acres), and on and on. But man was it worth it! The course stands up to time. It is consistently a challenging round. If you shoot under, you’ve done very well. And its secret weapon? The WIND. McCulloch is windy to very windy about 89% of the time. A headwind lifts your disc but might also stall it and turn it over; a tailwind might carry the disc further, but you will also lose lift. Wind will cause rises, revolts, falls, skips, soars, textbooks, caterwhomps, tumbles, FBI craziness. This makes for quality disc golf. Disc golf is a thinking man’s game–you are always calculating, calculating, and the wind ups all the antes. A really windy day can make your skull buzz and clank and shank, but in a good way. McCulloch stories?
1. Time we found enormous purple dildo jammed into the rafters of the shelter on hole one. It was like someone left it there for short-term storage, or like maybe we were supposed to rent the thing. Or maybe it was like the red bicycles in Madison, WI. You can take the dildo and use it, but be sure to return the device for others. You know, the golden rule, as applied to dildos. I’d like a world where dildos just appear. Hanging from trees, as thick bookmarks, maybe attached by a chain to the gas pump; I don’t know, something. Dildos!
(I think dildo is a funny word, just on its own. Like Fresca. Would the Caddyshack scene even work without the term, Fresca? It wouldn’t be as funny with Coke or Pepsi. As a writer interested in comedy, I love to stumble upon these odd terms. [Thurber was excellent at this; or even just making up his own funny term, if none existed for the situation.])
2. Many times I have seen my friends wading the creek alongside holes 3, 4, 5, 6. That creek is sort of like plutonium meets Heart of Darkness meets Walmart runoff. Not a great place to wade. I’ve been in there many times myself. It smells like a dead body. You squint, and there’s a slithering carp, a kitchen knife, several tires, a headlamp, a finger, a green condom, a beheaded Ken doll, and, hey, your disc wedged beneath the bloated carcass of a opossum. Nothing throws off a round like entering that fucking creek. You get–or do not get–your disc, then you have to put on your socks (now wet) and your toes all slimy and grainy and your friends snickering and it’s something to get over or not get over and then, well, there goes your round.
(Hi, Matt Mullins. [get his book!] Welcome to McCulloch Park. Note various debris in water. Note how bad Matt must want that disc…)
(99% of discs sink. So, you enter the water to get them, or, in deeper or nastier waters, you kiss that disc goodbye. I’ve lost [and found] many, many discs. To lose a disc really hurts. Why? Well, a disc is relatively expensive and a particular disc is a personal, nostalgic, and practical thing. It is valuable to the individual disc golfer. It might be an ace disc. It might be your favorite driver, the one you know EXACTLY how it behaves in the air. It might be new. Or very old and “beat in” so perfectly, like a finely aged wine, an instrument, an oiled baseball glove, a ‘fit’ for your game. As I told Mark once, “In disc golf, you don’t lose your ball like regular golf. You lose your CLUB.”
(Photo actually of a blar course behind a church in Marion, IN. I lost two discs in this pond, a Roc and a Valkyrie. Actually, the holes in this photo are good ones, but much of the course is open, in fields, with little challenge. The layout makes no actual sense and the baskets are basically practice baskets. But it happens. You stumble across these sort of courses. Fortunately, not that often. Most disc courses are good to very good to holy-shit-what-a-course good.)
3. Time I aced hole #10. Big, loopy wind-drenched Sidewinder. Mine was a no-witness ace, which is bittersweet. But I’m not complaining; most of my aces have been heavy on witnesses. I later lost the disc forever. Did I mention there’s a creek? Time Mark Neely (get his book!) aced hole #11. That disc hit the chains like it was magnetized.
(Here’s a photo of Mark with his ace.)
4. Time Mark and I played McCulloch in about 14 degree weather while the wind blew piles of snow at 40 MPH. We were actually laughing the entire round. Discs were flying BACKWARDS. I detest playing in the cold; my fingers turn into blue corpses and I can’t grip. One time Ander Monson (read his most excellent, ODE TO A BADASS DISC GOLF COURSE ) took me playing in Michigan and it was so cold my beer froze. I couldn’t even talk; my lips were frozen. I felt dreadful. Ander seemed impervious to the cold. He was jolly. He laughed and skipped around and told me some story once wherein people tied colorful ribbons to their discs so they could find them when they enter and disappear into large banks of snow. OK…
Did I mention the time Ander took me up a fucking mountain to play disc golf? We had to take a ski lift to the first tee! Well worth this ride. Take a closer look at the wall photo. See where it says LEMMON DROP? That’s a golf tournament we played on Mount Lemmon, in Arizona. I accidentally “kept” the course map they gave us. I think it was by accident. Look, I was at altitude and my head was fuzzy lolly.
wow!
Or the time he took me to the desert? I lost a sweet purple Valkyrie into a giant pile of cacti…Animals scurried around, the heat made me panicky. There was a lot of dust. A lot of dust.
5. Time someone I won’t name here flung his disc into a nest of birds. Explosion of birds! That’s not right, not a right thing to do, but actually I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often at McCulloch. The park features geese, squirrels, hawks, men, carp, raccoons, more geese, etc. I mean it’s statistics–plastic and animals will eventually meet.
6. Time pit bull rushed us. Time goose rushed us. Time (s) caught in thunderstorm (s). Times thought we were going to die on a disc golf course (not a bad way to go, actually).
7. One time I wore a mini-skirt to McCulloch Park. Now this is a very embarrassing and involved story, so I won’t tell it here. But it did happen. Ah, memories…
But there are other items in this wall photo.
Two ribbons. These are from the epic summer tourney of THE JAGS. WHO the fuck are The Jags? I can’t tell you that. I tell you that, buzzards circle. There is rumor of a rarely updated blog. There are whispered hunkerings about rituals, restaurants, odd diseases, high intensity lighting, Mexican food in Peru, bowling shirts, pranksters, espresso machines, movies involving J Lo, baby elephants, golden binoculars, other nonsensical things. Something.
I won one of the ribbons when I was not so good at disc golf. It was one of those “most improved” ribbons they give children and ridiculous people. I think it was 7th place or something. I took the ribbon and slinked and clinked home.
I think the second ribbon is actually for 2nd place. So I’ll take that. Like a filled glass of bourbon (wait, I don’t really drink bourbon [though I am trying]). I say bourbon because that year the “Cleveland Prize” (always awarded to 2nd place) was a bottle of Makers Mark. So, yes, I got second.
“There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn’t fool with booze until he’s fifty; then he’s a damn fool if he doesn’t.”
Faulkner.
There’s a big ol’ pink disc on the wall:
Why pink? Pink is the easiest to find when it enters the stikemups and the thunk. Why this design? Why, it’s Diagram Magazine! Diagram has their own disc golf discs, didn’t you know?
I already linked the Ander Ode to Disc essay. Ander Monson introduced me to disc golf. I thank him. Back then, I would throw it in the air and it would cut so hard left to hit me in the ass backwards. What is this game? I didn’t know plastic, wind, release angle, weight, beatness, none of that beauty. Disc, disc and literature?
1. Ander with another longer essay, “The Long Crush.” This used to be online, at American Nerd. What happened to American Nerd? I do not know.
By a group of poets. Drugged with cinnamon, bound in silver cloth, flown low and slow in a coughing Cessna, over treetops, under radar—to Guam. With all the noise, my Identity could just detect a discussion on the smell of camels (or possibly candles); the delights of a dancing girl named Sheila; and then a fervent argument over the optimal term for treading lightly: tympanum vs. flower. The airplane corkscrewed to the earth. And the silver bag unfurled. The poets laughed; offered a strong cappuccino, the real Italian, oily and earthy, with clouds of spun sugar. The next three days a blur of disc golf. Pogo sticks. Offshore fishing. Then a guided tour of the Territory’s mentally ill, a hilly land of crumbling asylums, sitting bedside for hours with those forgotten souls who never once had an unpaid visitor. The rooms smelled of almonds and dripping rain. My Identity sat silent, listening. Felt a surge of genuine goodness, the first in a long while. Felt like it was no longer just rowing upstream in a leaking red canoe. Something fluttered by. Thunder spoke; lightning lashed out on hinges, a rainfall of rat terriers! Excitable, head-shaking, running in loopy circles of verve. My Identity leapt up, ran after, to capture what makes rat terriers hum with joy. But you can’t catch a satisfied dog. So my Identity felt regret. The itchings of self pity. So asked directions to the nearest casino. Binged on breadfruit and saltwater taffy at the buffet. Drank nine mojitos. Stumbled outside, into a flooded river, and was swept with broken sighs and brushed-aluminum trees down, downstream, out into the riptide, to drift away…to be cast ashore, to lay curl humped and bleeding, below the left rear tire of a Subaru. I walked outside to my Subaru. Bent to my knees and peered beneath. Saw who was back and said, “Damn.”
John Jodzio (here’s a sampling of his words) has a story wherein he trains a wolf (I believe he uses mustard pretzels to do the training) and other such glim and gloop, but he refers to the sport as Frisbee Golf. We don’t do that. That’s like calling running, jogging. Which is funny. Because I have a stupid-ass sign in my Man Room. It looks like this:
Overall, I find this sign banal, obvious, un-clever, and then it uses the term, FRISBEE GOLF. I mean you could probably purchase this sign at Cracker Barrel. Fucking Cracker Barrel. Fucking Cracker Barrel. Fucking Cracker Barrel. Fucking Cracker Barrel. Fucking Cracker Barrel. Fucking Cracker Barrel. Fucking Cracker Barrel. Fucking Cracker Barrel. Fucking Cracker Barrel. Fucking Cracker Barrel. Fucking Cracker Barrel. Fucking Cracker Barrel.
Speaking of, a few weeks ago I meandered off Highway 40 and went to a little cafe, a cafe that unfortunately misspells my name but fortunately serves REAL Southern food, the Loveless Cafe. I had
Fried green tomatoes that made me wanna slap _______. Taters. Maters. Peach iced tea. Flappy catfish. Hot sauce. Blackberry preserves, man, made me want to do that dance now. (I didn’t eat the gravy–I don’t eat gravy.)
Now that be Southern food. And disc golf is not Frisbee golf! (OK, OK, same dude that invented the Frisbee did invent disc golf, the baskets. Without the baskets, you have no sport. They ‘catch’ the disc, OK? But still, Frisbee golf? No, no.)
Why don’t you take the sign down, Sean?
I don’t know. Lazy?
Yes, yes, for $200 you can buy disc golf disc with the cremated ashes of Steady Ed Headrick inside the plastic. I shit you not.
What else is on the wall? Score cards. Stickers. A beer coozie. (Do people still use the term, coozie? It sounds vaguely slang and sexual.) I have a lot of disc golf beer coozies, and I rarely use them. My beer doesn’t get warm. I drink my beer well before it gets warm. Coozie.
What else? Well, discs. I do have discs on the wall:
For example…or:
Some I bought during my Disc Addiction years. Ah, Ebay. Ah, even worse, the dreaded affliction: DRINKING AND EBAYING. But, oddly, those days have passed (the disc addiction, not the drinking). I finally had my fill (OK, almost…I do pick up something shiny once in a pink moon) of very expensive discs. But back then I loved the glow, the flow, the beauty, potential of a disc I didn’t yet own. Sometimes I would purchase discs just for the disc–I knew I’d never throw that disc! I still think it would be cool to have a disc in the design of a Pumpkin Seed sunfish.
(This fish caught yesterday, White River, IN. Rainbow! Rainbow! Rainbow! And we let the fish go.)
Heck, now I even SELL discs! Today I sold these two, in fact:
BTW, my toes look marvelous and good luck to the man or woman who throws a Zebra disc. I remember once I had a black disc and my friend said, “You will never find a black disc.” I lost it in two throws, beneath the leaves at JC Park, Grand Rapids, Michigan. A zebra disc!? That’s going to last one throw, maximum.
Other discs on the wall caught my eye in some way, or are retired (too beat in to ever use again), or my “snap” got too large for the design (I’d explain this but trying not to be too wonky) or the disc is a collector “beer” design or simply done, done/done/done, and nostalgic, and most excellent. Examples:
A workhorse Roc. This disc is both an ACE DISC (2006) and a SPLIT DISC, very rare combination. I’m getting weepy.
Ah, the years I played Valkyries. Another sweet ACE DISC, circa 2007, on Old Farm. Old Farm is a quirky course and rated too low here, IMO. Old Farm is a great example of not needing very much acreage for a glow course. What you need is good design.
Look, I love this disc. Why? My first TURNOVER ACE, another ACE at Honey Bear Hollow (epic course alert!). One day, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, I threw this disc into a canal. I went in after the disc, slipping on a mud bank and ending up in the canal, up to my neck. I thought, Alligator, alligator…as I searched the murky bottom with my bare toes: sticky limbs, slippery mud, turtle shell..no, not a turtle shell–my disc! That day I soaked my phone (ruined), my wallet, a key chain, my jeans and shirt, but I found this disc. I have my disc. You know, priorities.
These two disc are here because Ander played a joke on me (top disc) and also Ander knows I love beer-themed discs (bottom disc). Good people, and good disc golfers give each other discs. It’s the right thing to do. A disc golfer glows to receive a disc. And to give one. It’s called heart.
Not every disc belongs on a wall. A disc golfer should have discs, you know, just around…
I once had many, many more…yes, many more. In the car, on the floor, over in the corner or whatever. Whatever. Whatever. So now you’ve seen my disc wall. It was something, I suppose. I mean I woke and felt down today (Mostly residual from a marathon I ran two days I go, I’d surmise. You feel down for a few days after marathons.). But I now feel OK, people. I’m glad I did something (wait, blogging is ‘doing something’? WTF?), and outside a plumber is banging on pipes (a copper pipe froze this winter) and I’m going to wait until he’s finished then go do something else, like work, most likely, or some type of fixing my car (have you noticed EVERYTHING FALLS APART?) then, then…then throw a disc? Well, I’d like to, I would, but my legs, my ankles and thighs, they feel like bricks on fire, and my mind–it is sore.
Kim Chinquee is a fine example of voice. She pretty much writes in her way (minimalist, direct tone, very few lyrical bells and whistles, a sort of purposeful vagueness at times that often represents a detached narrator. A detached narrator. A detachment.)
As a huge fan of flash and certainly of Kim Chinquee, I find it interesting to see variations and nuances on her signature style. It shows not just growth, but keen thought about flash, as process and product. All of this technique makes me the reader more active. That’s what we’re trying for in flash. That’s what powers the genre. It’s fun to see Chinquee’s continued grace and skill on the page, and something further to watch for in the future.
a properly folded flag impossible to unfold 
