fiction flashscapes and the carnival is postponed

Posted on August 16, 2012 | 2 Comments

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.

-Brandi Wells.

Damn, check out this new James Salter interview!

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.

-Elysia Smith

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:

1. Seamus Heaney by Nicolle Elizabeth.

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.

3. Monic Ductan has a memorable name and writes about Wal-Mart.

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.
5. Amelia Fucking Earhart is a great title.
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:
I title it INTIMATE ROTEL DIP
*
Velveeta is our long yellow jig
All day we hop
with a wobble impossible by night
kissing one another
like a single pepper
under the blank melting
grease knows where to find grease
bubbles reach for bubbles
we suck the bowl’s familiar curl
and vanish
deep into shrieking stomachs
delivered from the emptiness
of a dip half-eaten
of having to learn
that difficult, cold hardening pause
without a chip at all.
*
And, finally for today, I write about a box of Velveeta for Banango Street.
S

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Less Than Zer000000000000000000000000

Posted on June 28, 2012 | Leave a comment

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."]

(Crazy thing is he meant zombie as figurative. These days, an actual zombie novel would sell like a taco with a shell made of fucking Doritos.)

STRUCTURE?

this is a drone in a state office in hawaii.

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.]

these are bath salts. you use them for bathing. recent bathers have burned their child’s hands for stealing their bible, have killed their neighbor’s pygmy goat and then joined it in the bedroom while dressed in bra and panties, have run from electricity, have knifed their house down since the walls were filled with 90 people, something.

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.

Well…OK.

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Notes on Revision

Posted on June 7, 2012 | Leave a comment

1.     Analogies are like lies.

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.”

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Hallelujah Daniel Bailey! The Interview

Posted on May 21, 2012 | 2 Comments

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.

3. Years ago I asked you about Satan. Now I’m asking you about God/god. What kind of presence does God/god have in this book?

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.

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Disc Golf is an Electrical Impulse, a Word, OK.

Posted on April 23, 2012 | 2 Comments

Got a Chance!!

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.

2. I embed the sport here:

My Identity Was Stolen

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.

These discs include ashes of the one and only “Steady” Ed Headrick. Ed was the father of Disc Golf and an innovator in disc sports. He was also the founder of the Professional Disc Golf Association, and held membership #001 (shown on these discs).

Here is a video of the entire process:

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.

zoom!

s

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awp 2012

Posted on March 9, 2012 | 1 Comment

Hi. My name is Sean. I am at AWP Chicago. This is art right here. I like to sit. You like to sit. This is SITTING. Can’t you tell? This is an “installation piece” titled MAN SITTING WITH BEER. I look shiny and stupid because I am shiny. And stupid.

I would now like to manifest you some AWP style preaching:

Above is a video of Jesus. I know Jesus. Jesus carries a megaphone and a bouncy spirit and a belt made of barbed wire. I bought the book of Jesus, he bought mine. We made beers vanish together. Jesus will disappear into the night. So will I. Anyone who knows me knows damn well I can disappear into the night with the best of them. I have Houdini bones. (I used to also hide in closets during parties, but I digress.) But this was before AWP. At AWP Jesus and I were lost to one another. Why? Life. A mathematical dilemma: people met in relation to people-to-meet carry the one over the prospect of TIME. So many people I didn’t see. They ask me, “Why didn’t we see each other?” I mention the math thing. How the hell did I miss Barry Graham? But I did. Does J.A. Tyler truly exist? Could I lightly touch his collarbone? Don’t ask me. Wanted to finally attack fermentation with Jamie Iredell. Wanted to throw things and destroy a room with Jamie Iredell. Did not. Did I continue to talk Kyle Minor into flash fiction? No. Sarah Rose Etter has a great name. Could I tell her that, to her face? Nope. I wrote about Matt Salesses, so why didn’t I see him? Where was Molly Gaudry? Maybe ill. Steve Himmer I know I saw for a handshake. Roxane Gay I met for a hug. Brian Oliu, we exchanged jackets. I did talk disc golf with Adam Robinson. We like disc golf. We do. OK, there were others that did and did not exist. Life is a snugly fit somersault. Did see Cathy Day! Did see Jac Jemc! Disc golf.

Anyway my point is:

I KNOW JESUS.

Stumble outside and birds are coughing up regret and rain off the roof in curls of lizard smoke and someone has run into my car, left a note, all of that jazz you see in books or something and then it happens to you and you’re all, “Damn, I’m going to go back inside.” Ah, you don’t need that car right now. What is a car? But a trick, a disease. And you pack another car with this flesh and that flesh and suddenly there bloom windmills. Look like metallic spiders from a nasty dream. Have you noticed that dreams rarely involve smell? When is the last time you tasted a dream? Windmills can show us something. I see that one is pointed that way, one the other; some spin, some sit silent and sullen. (Q: What is a windmill without wind? Answer: A writer not writing.)

astonished by antlers
by the hemlock tree
by stone fences
by cairns
by stiles
by windmills
by lighthouses

I drive by and say, “We’re in the future now” and no one replies, because everyone is looking down into their handheld futures–beep, beep, whir–and so I face the road. I eat a duck’s bill of Pringles. You’re going to pass Gary, Indiana. It is going to smell like television and the bottom rim of a garbage can and pills for headaches, brainfevers, liveraches, heartaches, birth control, better orgasms, stomach trouble, sleeplessness and panic attacks, who carry neon cell phones, pagers, stethoscopes, bible verses, nail clippers, pepper spray, scrawled phone numbers, airline vodka and Virginia Woolf, recipes for Mai Tais and chicken korma and fancified mashed potatoes, photographs of dogs, lovers, husbands, girlfriends, fathers and mothers, of men in hats and foreign-looking women, of cats, roller coasters, antique toasters, sailboats, cruise ships, Sarasota beaches and African airports and maybe you’ll say, “Michael Jackson was born here,” and you’ll see the farts of factories, the smoke a deep white with pink–is that pink?–edgings…A bird shadows overhead and cuts a melancholy line across the highway or did someone spend their evening breaking into my phone and reading all the stranger’s text messages? What’s the difference? There’s things you want to be and things you don’t want to be, but then so much fucking space in-between. The head is a container for soup. (Mostly I wish I had seen Matt Bell. How could I not see Matt Bell? I wish I had seen Matt Bell and I wish I had seen Amelia Gray at AWP, but that’s my own damn fault, isn’t it?)

A wish is a smell. A wish is a scraped tongue. Something.

No, no, not her!!!

Gray, not Grey!! Lord help us. I would pay money to see Amelia Gray eating nachos with Amelia Grey, above.

Look at this video. How bizarre is this video? How endearing? How can you not want to read this person? But forget all of that. She can write like the screams of flowers. Can’t wait to read Threats!

Jeannie serves me meatloaf at the café.
Jeannie serves me spaghetti and meatballs at the café.
Jeannie serves me pork barbecue and french fries at the café.
Jeannie serves me breakfast tacos at the café.
Jeannie serves me fajitas at the café.
Jeannie serves me onion soup at the café.
Jeannie serves me quesadillas at the café.
Jeannie serves me chicken fried steak at the café.
Jeannie serves me grilled cheese sandwiches at the café.
Jeannie serves me steak and eggs at the café.
Jeannie serves me baked potato at the café.
Jeannie serves me tomato soup at the café.
Jeannie serves me pork chops at the café.
Jeannie serves me cheese crisp at the café.
Jeannie serves me ham and cheese at the café.
Jeannie serves me fish sandwiches at the café.
Jeannie serves me chicken salad at the café.
Jeannie serves me corn dogs at the café.
Jeannie serves me tamale pie at the café.
   Jeannie serves me vegetable soup at the café.
Jeannie serves me macaroni at the café.
Jeannie serves me chili at the café.

Here’s one of my all-time Gray glows, if you want to read something. OK, enough Amelia Gray already. Sorry. I’m a fan.

“Never mess with Mr. In-between,” a screen writer told me over dry beer and saponaceous fries. We were in a fake Irish bar, that one connected to the hotel. A bunch of damn writers in a fake Irish bar. Can someone get me a guillotine martini, shaken not stirred?

“Well said,” I responded.”

“I’m about to give up,” he said. He was referring to screenwriting. He gotten very close a few years back, close enough to move out to L.A. and that had pulled a number on his skull-space. He had caught the odor, as they say.

I said, “Don’t give up,” but I don’t know if I felt it. There’s some truth to hope setting up all the pins. Dark ball of the future rattling near.

A bowling metaphor? WTF? A bowling flash:

The Honeycutt’s 30-year-old son Daniel is a contestant on Bowling For Dollars and all the neighbors have been invited to a party in their backyard. My mom is standing in the doorway of my bedroom picking her fingernails and waiting for me to put on my sneakers.
“I forgot it was this afternoon. And we have to go. The kid’s autistic for Chrissake,” she says.

So. I paid my tab by signing it to a room in the Hilton. Problem is I wasn’t staying in a room in the Hilton. That was a mistake. I later corrected the mistake. I said to the bartender, “That was in good faith, my error.” She said, “I never doubted you.” I don’t know; sometimes I feel OK. I keep thinking about buying beers and my money eventually winding up in the pocket of Paris Hilton. It makes me happy. Paris Hilton is so ridiculous as to be sublime.

My room was with my family and made of glass. Stones, stoned, a few thrown? AWP round-up thing here with a ton of writers.

They say don’t live in such places, but I don’t throw a lot of stones unless rather drunk. Later I can say, “Well, I was drunk.” It sometimes rebuilds walls, oddly. Still, I don’t throw many stones. Why would I? There’s very rarely a fault people have I don’t own a segment of myself, somewhere inside me. Trying to be decent, I guess, but it’s hard. There were actually only two people in the entire AWP I don’t care for. One, he was mean to me, professionally mean, several times. Fuck him. The other is a person from the past who treats people badly, in their hearts. That’s not right. So fuck her. But two isn’t bad, now is it? Ah, crows and chicken nuggets to it all, I suppose. Sometimes you think about how other people live, and maybe they think about you. You see things and they make your body itch. Words and lips and glass. What am I looking for? Anyway it’s a big-ass lake right across the glass, the sixth largest in the world (not the glass, the lake). There’s a lot of empty corner condos. I think it would be great to play Nerf basketball inside one of those. (My son has been REALLY getting into Nerf basketball and it makes me glow. Nerf basketball is such a good thing for the soul.) Look there! There’s a big-ass park where I think Oprah leaned on some white dude’s shoulder and cried when Obama had finally won and our nightmare seemed over (I emphasize seemed).

I should get my pal Sarah Wells to write a poem titled OPRAH CRYING BEHIND MAN. One time I asked Sarah to write a poem about Jesus walking into a bar and she did it in like a day! She can write poetry on demand.

Is it sadness or happiness the day a U.S. president leaves office? Depends, I think. Must be some serious self-reflection. It seems to me you have so much blood on your hands. There should be a chart for each president: the amount of blood on their hands. Maybe there should be these giant laboratory beakers alongside the monuments in Washington, a beaker for each president, giant glass clear gleaming beakers–full of blood. Frothy rich red blood. Wars, drone assassinations, policies and programs for the poor, for health care, for bridges and roads, for…ah, it baffles the mind. But enough. Enough! The dog nudges its leash and dark birds swooping over highways all across America.

This video is sort of amazing. I found it over at THE DWARF, where AD Jameson was riffing on it. I listened and watched several times. It made me low and high.

Is below flash or prose poem? Don’t know or care. It’s easily the most devastating thing I’ve read in a good while. It speaks to the power of few words–a power I strongly exist in. It can be done:

A Story About the Body (Robert Hass)

The young composer, working that summer at an artist’s colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, “I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy,” and when he didn’t understand, “I’ve lost both my breasts.” The radiance he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity – like music – withered very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, “I’m sorry. I don’t think I could.” He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl – she must have swept them from the corners of her studio – was full of dead bees.

I brought venison chili

and my friends made venison chili nachos.

OK, one writer friend of mine seems so sedate, so off the rhythm I know. Finally someone tells me, “He has a new girlfriend.” Ah, got you. Went to readings (I write a smidgen about such matters here…) I gave readings about Velveeta and kind people came up after and said they really liked Velveeta. Thank you, kind people. Velveeta!

Opening Paragraph:

You were my birthday present; you came to the door–no one else was home. You said, “Let’s celebrate.” We dropped acid and went to the friend with the nocturnal monkey-like animal and made Velveeta for hours.

At the book fair I was given books and wine and bourbon. I’d turn around and someone would say “Here Sean” and I’d be holding one of those little plastic cups. John Wang (Juked is the shit, as you know) would say, “Hi, Sean, you want some wine?” and I’m all “Sure, John” then I spill the wine all over my jacket but neither one of us really care. A good friend let’s you spill wine. I like John, period. At readings, people bought me beer (thank you, Roses!). It’s pretty easy to get a drink, but, you know, it was my birthday on Friday and friends are friendly. The bartender liked Memphis and Velveeta and bought me drinks. I gave her a copy of my book. Seems a fair trade. Thank you, bartender. And then the day/night is all gauzy dice thrown across a felt made of tongues lapping. I’m OK with all of it, except for the swooping birds. WTF? 1. A fish with a head like a human, very expressive. (Found out later this was a hog fish. I don’t think it’s head looked like a hog. It looked like a monkey or a form of a monkey, a human.) 2. This video installation of a woman and a man repeating lines. The lines were like, “You like to shit. I like to shit. This is shitting.”

or “You’re a bad girl. I’m a bad girl. We are bad girls.”

It was odd and affecting. I felt a bit mesmerized and wanted to steal the thing and watch it inside my shed. I wanted to sit in my shed with a beer and my foot up on a raccoon trap and just watch the video for hours. I think love is a shed.

My friend actually filmed the video and then the museum peeps walked up and said, “Sir, don’t video the video.” One room we go into and it’s just white canvases, the entire room. OK. Sometimes I don’t get it. I’m OK with not getting it. 3. You can eat a Chicago veggie dog and that made me like life just a tad bit more than the seconds before I noticed. I went to the Alabama cocktail hour thing and the young writers were so nice to me and also I felt old. That’s OK. I’m OK with feeling old around all these eager writers. Hell, I was them once. The energy was good. I met Charlie again and I like Charlie. I met Jenn and who else? Oh, Doobie. And Pablo! Man, I miss Pablo. Professors Robin and Wendy and Martone–oh, oh, Martone–were there. You realize how much they meant to you back in the day. Back then it was like, “Professor. Whatever.” Now it’s like, “Wow, they really changed my life.” So that was very good, the Alabama cocktail party. Well until Martone tried to give me an Alabama “Roll Tide” pin. Umm…Go Vols? 4. On my birthday I got to see Caitlin Horrocks read. She is just a pro, and I think her debut collection has a range that is outright outstanding. I kept reading it and thinking, “Can she sustain this?” Yep. We are going to host her at BSU soon, and we are all the better. Here’s At the Zoo. Read it. 5.  So this one poet is pretty dern Poet, I mean this shit is serious thing, etc. and John Jodzio gets up there and starts talking about shooting diamonds out his penis. Good to see you again, John. Then we went to a dive, the Rainbow Room, I think it was. It met the dive bar requirements:  

Windows.

Dive bars do not have windows.

Ceilings.

The ceilings of dive bars are low. Most are constructed of fiberboard tile, sagging, mildewed, often stained into fascinating patterns: there Alaska, there the Milky Way, that one a cat caught in the elbow of a tumbling train. A minimum of three absent tiles. Black holes, missing teeth. Exposing asbestos-crusted beams, duct-taped pipes, electrical wiring that hums.

The ceiling of a dive bar descends as the hours pass. By midnight, everyone is hunched over, morphed into hobbled, squinting creatures. But not unhappy or alone. Slouched together.

Collapse is imminent.

Doors:

One in the front, one in the back. For passageway, either is appropriate at any time.

Often painted red.

Floors:

Concrete. Drainage hole optional. Washed once in mid-summer, with a garden hose.

Then we went dancing. Where? Down some alley and past a woman grilling sausages and weaved through some other grass alley/hipsters smoking thing down a basement OK. Danced with Madison Langston and Mike Young and Adam Robinson and Matt Mullins and Jimmy Chen. Did I forget someone? Sorry. It looked like:

My hero, Jimmy Chen. Definite highlight of AWP for me! Below is Jimmy on Guitar.

6. I went through a secret door, around a hallway, up 19 floors in an ancient elevator, past a workout center, laundry room, down another hallway, into a living room/pool room space something and there were writers, writers, writers, writers. Matt Mullins throwing down the saw, bzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Interview with Matt here. Matt and I keep thinking of ways to destroy his book. The obvious is chainsaw. Video coming soon, I feel.  7. So a couple pool sharks show up and my friend and I take them right down. One of the pool sharks has the shortest miniskirt I have seen on a human being. Thanks for the beer, sharks. 8. Mark Neely book is here! I’m reading it now and it be glow. I used to really like Neely’s stuff but now I sort of love it. I’ve had beers with Mark once, I think. I forget. 9. Run with Mark under The Bean mirror thing all round The “L” all around the Lake Michigan pier all around The Loop and wow a touristy run never seen this or that run makes miles flow by and running so like a dream-way a transportation and there goes a city rabbit crossing the street! An actual cottontail rabbit in the city. That’s a badass rabbit, I feel. 10. Eating with family and friends. Sushi. Roe. Salty roe. I suggest the South Coast sushi. Roe. 11. Someone handed me a T shirt that said, SEMIFINALIST. Ah, writer jokes. 12. Bought Elizabeth Ellen’s book. Looking forward to. Now that, that, that is an author photo!

Read EE

here

here

here

Good to see EE and Aaron again.

13: Met XtX, I think. I’m still not certain there is an XtX…I’m cynical that way. Is she for real? Don’t know. Do you hear me, Andy Devine? 14. Boys girls women men, oh my. What else? I don’t know. Life is weird. I sold some discs the other day. I used to buy hundreds and hundreds of disc. It was an illness. I had to keep them all. I am maturing? It could be. I think so. Hey. I can let a few things go:

(they sold for $56, BTW)

Don’t video the video!!

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Genre is a minimum security prison of knees

Posted on February 1, 2012 | 1 Comment

Timmy, timmy

Essay about blurbs.

Let’s be clear: blurbs are not a distinguished genre

*

Here are some funny poems at elimae. I have been collecting literature that responds to preexisting works. I will add these to my secret files. Well done, Alex Sheppard and Marshall Mallicoat.

Sierra Mist and Sprite

Some say the world will drink Sierra Mist,
Some say Sprite.
From what I’ve tasted of Sprite
I hold with those who favor Sierra Mist
But if it had to drink Sprite,
I think I know enough of pops
To say that for refreshment Sprite
Is also tops
And would be all right.

*

This David Shields on Colbert Report is pretty glow. I find this the type of video ripe for re-watching. For re-thinking about issues I am working in my writing and in my teaching. (Remember, the optimum professor model actually has your teaching interests and artistic as one. I use to scoff at this idea; I now embrace it. My recent flash fiction and structural inquiries are now saturating my teaching, and for the better.) I couldn’t get this damn video to embed and started researching why and suddenly I’m on all these pages with a bunch of computer wonks and I need to run, run, run today and go prep for class and so on, etc., so am not hanging out at computer wonky pages weird hats whatever black jeans to learn HTML code today. OK. I used to, I used to catch a buzz off solving computer riddles, and I was pretty good at that sort of thing, I could hunt and mind-press and reevaluate my click or clacks, but I can’t do it now. Why? TIME. Solving computer conundrums will spill broken necklace beads of Time–ping ping psssssssssssss–hours settling into the cracks of the floors of my day. Can’t do it.

[Computers are a jangling leash]

a 3 legged fox hops along the backyard and makes me think of spoonfuls of my life passing

Satire meets manifesto. I mean it’s a perfect video, in that Colbert is so intelligent in how he ‘plays’ the straight man and attacks the Shields book (and, really concepts of ‘writing’). Colbert plays the old school, the black and white, the “Isn’t it like you are breaking down my door and stealing my belongings when you ‘plagiarize’”? (Amazing how many quotation marks I have to employ to talk about the work of David Shields.) And Shields–who ‘wrote’ the book, lectures about these ideas, etc.–is sending Colbert’s softball questions and ‘concerns’ waaaayyyy out of the park.

[Who owns outer space?]

Have you ever read the essay where David Shields only uses Bumper Stickers? Is that online? Well, it is now. This should make you coffee your T-shirt, etc.

Life Stories by David Shields:

First things first.

You’re only young once, but you can be immature forever. I may grow old, but I’ll never grow up. Too fast to love, too young to die. Life’s a beach.

And yet can not the same yard in another time act as lovely fumes of fatherhood?

Not all men are fools; some are single. 100% Single. I’m not playing hard to get; I am hard to get. I love being exactly who I am.

Heaven doesn’t want me and Hell’s afraid I’ll take over. I’m the person your mother warned you about. Ex-girlfriend in trunk. Don’t laugh; your girlfriend might be in here.

Girls wanted, all positions, will train. Playgirl on board. Party girl on board. Sexy blonde on board. Not all dumbs are blonde. Never underestimate the power of redheads. Yes, I am a movie star. 2QT4U. A4NQT. No ugly chicks. No fat chicks. I may be fat, but you’re ugly and I can diet. Nobody is ugly after 2 a.m.

books can be lovely, can be light on a salt cube i suppose

Party on board. Mass confusion on board. I brake for bong water. Jerk off and smoke up. Elvis died for your sins. Screw guilt. I’m Elvis; kiss me.

Ten and a half inches on board. Built to last. You can’t take it with you, but I’ll let you hold it for a while.

Be kind to animals–kiss a rugby player. Ballroom dancers do it with rhythm. Railroaders love to couple up. Roofers are always on top. Pilots slip it in.

Love sucks and then you die. Gravity’s a lie; life sucks. Life’s a bitch; you marry one, then you die. Life’s a bitch and so am I. Beyond bitch.

Down on your knees, bitch. Sex is only dirty when you do it right. Liquor up front–poker in the rear. Smile; it’s the second-best thing you can do with your lips. I haven’t had sex for so long I forget who gets tied up. I’m looking for love but will settle for sex. Bad boys have bad toys. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but whips and chains excite me. Live fast; love hard; die with your mask on.

leaping too…

So many men, so little time. Expensive but worth it. If you’re rich, I’m single. Richer is better. Shopaholic on board. Born to shop. I’d rather be shopping at Nordstrom. Born to be pampered. A woman’s place is the mall. When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping. Consume and die. He who dies with the most toys wins. She who dies with the most jewels wins. Die, yuppie scum.

This vehicle not purchased with drug money. Hugs are better than drugs.

You are loved.

Expectant mother on board. Baby on board. Family on board. I love my kids. Precious cargo on board. Are we having fun yet? Baby on fire. No child in car. Grandchild in back.

running words

I fight poverty; I work. I owe, I owe, it’s off to work I go. It sure makes the day long when you get to work on time. Money talks; mine only knows how to say goodbye. What do you mean I can’t pay off my Visa with my MasterCard?

How’s my driving? Call 1-800-545-8601. If this vehicle is being driven recklessly, please call 1-800-EAT-SHIT. Don’t drink and drive–you might hit a bump and spill your drink.

My other car is a horse. Thoroughbreds always get there first. Horse lovers are stable people. My other car is a boat. My other car is a Rolls-Royce. My Mercedes is in the shop today. Unemployed? Hungry? Eat your foreign car. My other car is a 747. My ex-wife’s car is a broom. I think my car has PMS. My other car is a piece of shit, too. Do not wash–this car is undergoing a scientific dirt test. Don’t laugh; it’s paid for. If this car were a horse, I’d have to shoot it. If I go any faster, I’ll burn out my hamsters. I may be slow, but I’m ahead of you. I also drive a Titleist. Pedal downhill.

the political season

Shit happens. I love your wife. Megashit happens. I’m single again. Wife and dog missing–reward for dog. The more people I meet, the more I like my cat. Nobody on board. Sober ‘n’ crazy. Do it sober. Drive smart; drive sober.

No more Mr. Nice Guy. Lost your cat? Try looking under my tires. I love my German shepherd. Never mind the dog–beware of owner. Don’t fence me in. Don’t tell me what kind of day to have. Don’t tailgate or I’ll flush. Eat shit and die. My kid beat up your honor student. Abort your inner child. I don’t care who you are, what you’re driving, who’s on board, who you love, where you’d rather be, or what you’d rather be doing.

Not so close–I hardly know you. Watch my rear end, not hers. You hit it–you buy it. Hands off. No radio. No Condo/No MBA/No BMW. You toucha my car–I breaka your face.  Protected by Smith & Wesson. Warning: This car is protected by a large sheet of cardboard.

I miss something concealed, the watery error of my hand and mind

LUV2HNT. Gun control is being able to hit your target. Hunters make better lovers: they go deeper into the bush–they shoot more often–and they eat what they shoot.

Yes, as a matter of fact, I do own the whole damn road. Get in, sit down, shut up, and hold on. I don’t drive fast; I just fly low. If you don’t like the way I drive, stay off the sidewalk. I’m polluting the atmosphere. Can’t do 55.

I may be growing old, but I refuse to grow up. Get even: Live long enough to become a problem to your kids. We’re out spending our children’s inheritance.

Life is pretty dry without a boat. I’d rather be sailing. A man’s place is on his boat. Everyone must believe in something; I believe I’ll go canoeing. Who cares!

Eat dessert first; life is uncertain. Why be normal?

stop trying so hard

Don’t follow me; I’m lost, too. Wherever you are, be there. No matter where you go, there you are. Bloom where you are planted.

Easy does it. Keep it simple, stupid. I’m 4 Clean Air. Go fly a kite. No matter–never mind. UFOs are real. Of all the things I’ve lost, I miss my mind the most. I brake for unicorns.

Choose death.

Interesting in the video that Shields calls Colbert out as a persona. Naturally, Colbert knows this (though he does have a brief, flustered pause); it’s the core of his satire, yet Shields makes me think of WJFSHD, or WHAT JAMES FREY SHOULD HAVE DONE.

wwweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

["This affair  is much ado about nothing," says EARLY Oprah.]

James Frey, in his public beat-down by Oprah–a situation that reminded me of some grotesque Roman affair, hissing and Christians thrown to lions, etc–should have said a lot of things (this might be a whole other post–already I feel my blood thrumming up), but certainly he should have said, “Oprah, you of the one name, OPRAH, YOU are creative nonfiction, YOU are a persona, YOU are a assembloir of narrative, YOU are a trickster, barker, ‘writer,” WRITER named HARPO.”

[Shields says he wasn't disappointed Frey was a liar. He was disappointed Frey wasn't a better liar.]

my next book cover

And a lot of other things. He could have confronted the complexity of the issue right there on Oprah, but he didn’t. Why? because he couldn’t. That wasn’t what he was there for. That wasn’t the story. Oprah doesn’t work in the genre of push-back. (That’s why she flip-flopped in days after defending Frey.) He was there to spill blood, and damn it, Oprah would have her blood. It was time for a Frey sandwich. Any other narrative would not have done at all, at all, at all.

["James Frey is here and I have to say it is difficult for me to talk to you because I feel really duped," says A FEW DAYS LATER Oprah.]

ha, ha, you feel this big now, punk.

Ahh memories…Today my classes read the essay “Assembloir: That Which is True of Others is True of Me,” by Ander Monson. They are reading this version, first published in The Collagist. My class probably doesn’t know it today, but Monson’s essay contain none of his own words. These sentences were appropriated from various memoirs. In The Collagist, Monson does not cite the sources. In this version, he cites every source. What is the difference? Well, we know there is one. Shields wanted to cite no sources, and his publisher insisted he do, attaching an appendix to Reality Hunger. Shields (as you can see in the video; Colbert of course takes a comedic turn with this notion) adds a dotted line to the appendix and wants the reader to excise the thing with a box cutter.

Interestingly–and I suppose predictably, since the quote “Genre is a minimum security prison” appears in the book–it seems Shields most likely subverted even this compromise. The appendix seems less than reliable, some citations are maybes and many omitted and we aren’t certain the quotations match at all, at all.

BTW, I like that quote. Genre might be a prison, in academia, in bizness aspects of writing, in limited minds, but its a minimum security prison: we can escape, if we try.

Monson says:

memories of glimmer of a glimmer

This assembloir is one of several that I wrote—or perhaps assembled, though I’m not always sure there’s a difference between the two—for the forthcoming book Vanishing Point (April 2010).

[though I’m not always sure there’s a difference between the two]

[though I’m not always sure there’s a difference between the two]

[though I’m not always sure there’s a difference between the two]

and:

With the help of Dolly Laninga, a writer I contracted to help out with this project, I read (or she and I read, or in some cases she read) something like 300 memoirs. Mainly we just looked for anything interesting that we could find.

And:

Those represented in this assembloir are things that are true of me, that tell my story. Really our stories are all not so different, though the particular events of our lives are.

Indeed.

Tomorrow, my students will write their own essay. But they are not allowed to use their owns words.

They are not allowed to use their own words.

allowed to use their own words.

own words.

words.

*

exactly

[The state owns the wildlife, the birds. But when they are in the air?]

Here is my system for wagering on horses over at Hobart.

My “system” (every gambler has a system) has nothing to do with the actual horses. And now you’re thinking, That doesn’t make any sense. Indeed. My system strives to avoid the making of sense. I rely on the dispassionate senselessness of numbers. Of luck, really.

*

Just bought three chapbooks by Tyler Gobble, THE NEWG, and Brian Oliu over at Tiny Hardcore Press. You should do the same.

*

My plan at AWP is to take $100 in cash to the book fair and spend only that. Does that sound legit? I want flash. I want hybrid. I want meta. I want stolen, appropriated structures. I want weird.

[I want Chicago nachos]

*

I switch perfumes all the time. If I’ve been wearing one perfume for three months, I force myself to give it up, even if I still feel like wearing it, so whenever I smell it again it will always remind me of those three months. I never go back to wearing it again; it becomes part of my permanent smell collection.

Warhol

*

Okemos by Avram Kline is lovely odd.

*

*

You should read this flash by Sarah Levine:

I jumped onto the kitchen chair and said, “Have you lost your mind? Are you threatening me over a fucking cheese slicer?” at which point D put down the knife and wept, having scared himself a little.

the fuck you looking at?

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