Confusing Guildlines from Prairie Schooner

"We prefer that fiction manuscripts be at least 150 pages long and poetry manuscripts at least 50 pages long. Stories and poems previously published in periodicals are eligible for inclusion. Novels are not considered; one novella along with stories will be considered (please don't send single novellas or a collection of novellas)"

Does this mean they want something over 150 pages that isn't a novel or a novella and that they're just asking for a short story that isn't SO short but is long enough not to be a novel or a novella but could be a novella (but not a collection of novellas...people write those?) so long as it has a collection of short stories (but not a collection of a collection) attached somewhere? Or somehow ? Or do they mean to say that previously published manuscripts which are novels or novellas are not considered while unpublished anything in particular is fine so long as it's at least 150 pages?

Or is it early? Or should I drink more coffee before going online?

Happy New Moon Holidays

Groop Holiday Party

Here we are. Where are you?

Books exchanged:

Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn by Harvey Swados (given by Marika, received by Matt)

L'Amante Anglaise by Marguerite Duras (given by Jen, received by Jeremy)

Steppenwolfe by Herman Hesse and Black Dogs by Ian McEwan (given by Nick, received by Marika)

They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell (given by Matt, received by Nick)

The Yellow Dog by Georges Simenon and The Saint of Incipient Insanities by Elif Shafak (given by Ella, received by Jen)

The Average American Male by Chad Kultgen (given by Jen, received by Marika, stolen by Ella)

As you can see, there was only one steal. Goes back to a groop evening long ago when Nick made one of his bookstore employees, the one with the accent, read the first page, over speakerphone.

Ella had to have it.

By the way, did you know that some people like having sex? Yeah. You missed out.

New Episode of AJ Episodes posted

Don't forget to read the latest entry in my ongoing serialized story of passion, betrayal, international intrigue and 'extreme vacation' travel. The tale advances a scintillating 250 words this month into the town of Belen, Nicaragua where I installed a basketball hoop as part of a 'sister cities' project when I was in high school.

Gawk This

From an interesting New York Magazine piece on the Gawker site and its raging bloggers:

Gould published a book last spring, and wasn’t sure if she should write another. “At the end of the day, your ideas in a book have less impact than if you had summed them up in two paragraphs on the most widely read blog at the most-read time of the day, so why’d you spend two years on it?”
And for fun, here is Emily Gould getting served by of all people, Jimmy Kimmel, whom I find dispiriting in every way. Here tho, he does the Lord's work. Just watch her face in action.

utubed

I'm dipping further into the media maze of youtube. Here's an excerpt from my interview with Harlan Ellison as he rants about fools and writing. That day was truly a highlight in my life. As it will be in yours. Forever.

And subscribe to my page so you can join the revolution. Come on.

Blogctivity

Activity on this blog has gotten a bit slow, I've noticed. Not that I'm criticizing. Have you heard from me, lately? Groop hasn't met recently, sure. And it's the holidays.

But there are some things to discuss. First of all: who. Jen has a personal statement she needs us to read. Since it's short, we could also discuss someone else's story, chapter, partial chapter, column, or holiday card missive. Volunteers?

Oh, I know what you're thinking. What about you, Ella? Weren't you in the cafe with Jen while she was writing her personal statement? Weren't you working on the next chapter in your novel?

Yeah. Didn't go so well. Working on it, though. And haven't even started on any sort of holiday card activity.

Okay, so ya'll haven't been writing either. But have you read anything decent? Me? I've been reading blogs about ebook readers. Isn't that the saddest thing you've ever heard? Reading about the possibility of reading?

Okay, I have been reading other things, but I'm not allowed to talk about it. All I know is this: it is very hard to write about grief. In fact, you can't write about it. If you do, it can lean toward the overly-sentimental, embarrassingly so. You have to write around it, or it just doesn't work.

Publishing machine. So far there are six in the world

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMFh5axDKWU

http://www.ondemandbooks.com

Adventure Journey Episodes Updated

So, after a many-month hiatus while the website was updated, Adventure Journey has gone back online. Not only did they keep my serialized fiction as part of the new site, but they even gave me a raise! This month they've published the ninth entry in the ongoing non-linear saga called simply "Episodes." Check it out.

amsterdamned

Because my traveling companions demanded I do something with that footage from our trip last year, here's my first contribution to youtube. It's just a lark, hmmm 'kay? But I expect massive hits. Get it? You know, because...What?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSJKLlG6PcQ

Guerilla Poetry/Writers With Drinks, uhm, Razors

http://www.guerillapoetics.org

is a site dedicated to getting poetry into bookstores around the US. You sign up, they send you slips of paper with poems on them, and you go slip them into random books at the library or Cody's or wherever. Here's a chunk of their manifesto:

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the literary rifts that have separated them from another, and to reverse the unbalanced powers of opportunity, the separate and unequal station to which the laws of publishing have forced them, a decent respect to the opinions of their readership requires that they should declare the reasons for their subversive tactics.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all writers are NOT treated equal; that some are undeservedly endowed by their university or publishing house with a certain level of haughty privilege; and that in the literary world we are entitled to a Byline, Publication and pursuit of an Audience.

And no offense Laura. You don't publish poets anyway.






Writers With Drinks (By Charlie)

At this month's Writers With Drinks, there will be ice buckets located at
strategic points all around the Make Out Room. That's because it's severed
limb month! Whose limb will be severed? It could be yours! After years of
hearing about our "incisive prose" and "razor-sharp wit," we've decided to
live up to our billing at last. Each one of our writers will receive one
package of surgical scalpels, which they will hurl at the audience at
dramatic moments in their readings. Your bloody mary could wind up being a
little more bloody than you bargained for!

When: Saturday, Nov. 10, 2007, 7:30 to 9:30 PM
Who: Kage Baker, Inga Muscio, Jessy Randall, James Calder, Ellery Urquhart
and Samhita Mukhopadhyay
Where: The Make Out Room, 3225 22nd. St. between Mission and Valencia, San
Francisco
How much: $3 to $5 sliding scale.

About the readers/performers:

Kage Baker has written a series of novels about The Company, a 24th century
entity which uses the technologies of time travel and cybernetics to exploit
the past. The novels in this series include In The Garden of Iden, Sky
Coyote, Mendoza in Hollywood, The Graveyard Game, The Life Of The World To
Come, The Children Of The Company, The Machine's Child and The Sons Of
Heaven. She spent many years in the theater and taught Elizabethan English
as a second language.

Inga Muscio is the author of Cunt and Autobiography Of A Blue-Eyed Devil: My
Life and Times in a Racist, Imperialist Society. She teaches workshops on
feminism and anti-racism.

Jessy Randall is the author of A Day In Boyland and the chapbooks Broken
Heart Diet and Other Food Poems, Because Mona Is In The Psychiatric
Hospital, Slumber Party at the Aquarium and Dorothy Surrenders. Her writing
also appears in Mountain Man Dance Moves: The McSweeney's Book of Lists.

James Calder is the author of the Bill Damen novels, which are "crime
stories about genetic engineering and the human future, set in the San
Francisco Bay area." The first three Bill Damen novels are In A Family Way,
Knockout Mouse and About Face.

Ellery Urquhart made it into the final round of the fifth Rooster T.
Feathers comedy competition. He's also appeared at Tommy T's Comedy and
Steakhouse in Pleasanton, and hosts a comedy night at the Listen & Be Heard
Poetry Cafe in Vallejo.

Samhita Mukhopadhyay blogs at Feministing.com and Colorlines' blog Racewire.
She's the training and technology coordinator at Youth Media Council and is
on the advisory board at Wiretap Magazine.


More upcoming events:

Sunday 11/11 from 11:30 AM to 2:00 PM: The Bay Area Bisexual Network's 20th
Anniversary Event, featuring comedian Rob Yeager, Featuring buffet brunch,
juice, coffee, tea, vegan, vegetarian and meat eater friendly menu. At the
Lake Merritt Hotel/Barbary Lane, 1800 Madison St., Oakland, CA. See
www.babn.org/ for details and to buy tickets

Sunday 11/18, from 7:00 PM to 11:00 PM: other magazine fifth anniversary
party and issue #13 release party. Featuring Victor Krummenacher (Camper Van
Beethoven), Hazy Loper, Kelly McCubbin (Ukeapocalypse) and DJ Joel Schalit.
At CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission @ 9th., $7 to $10 sliding scale, $10 gets you
the new issue of other magazine. No-one turned away.

Writing from the pain

Plucking my unibrow into its proper dichotomous form was cake compared to the slug of fluid I sucked out of my ear just hours before. Here is a link to cauliflower ear:

http://rlbatesmd.blogspot.com/2007/09/cauliflower-ear.html

I had a minor version of it, like someone had stuck a couple of peas just under the outer lip of my damn ear. It often happens during wrestling, or as in this case, Jujitsu. The skin gets separated from the cartilage and a bubble of fluid forms beneath it. If untreated, the cartilage beneath the herniated skin dies, since the skin is how the cartilage receives its nutrients. Dead cartilage shrivels up and becomes hard as regular bone and looks pretty funny. And I already look pretty funny. So I went to Justin’s house, stood in front of the mirror, and turned on all the lights. Justin tossed a syringe into the sink.

“Just stick it in and suck.”

I leaned in close. I would do this on my own. Mostly on the advice of Bon, my large Korean instructor who nearly beat up the last person who helped him with his cauliflower ear.

Just when I’m gathering up the courage to poke my ear, the needle right there, I mean *on* the skin, Justin peers into the mirror and shouts that I have wolverine ears. This means that I have long, wispy, nearly transparent hairs emanating from the rims of my ears, like a wolverine I suppose. You can’t really see them unless you get really close, and turn the lights way up. Which is what I was doing.

“Dude, I’m getting you some tweezers.”

“Shut up. Leave me the fuck alone.”

“You’re not going to get any chicks with wolverine ears dude.”

“I’d rather have wolverine ears than cauliflower ears.”

“But Duuude-"

“Shut up means no talking, as in no sound out of your face!”

I began to stick my ear with the syringe. I cringed a lot. It went in smoothly, after a small pinch of pain. I heard a small “tick” and then another “tick” as the needle penetrated cartilage. I drew out enough liquid to get up to the “1” mark on the needle. It was reddish, pale stuff that seemed a bit thinner than blood.

“Plasma!” Justin hooted. “That’s a syringe full of plasma!”

I’m still not sure how we got around to the fact that I had a unibrow. Anyway, my ear hurts, and so I wrote about it.

Introducing...

www.bridgethoida.com

(Okay, so all the bells and whistles, I mean links, are not completely in place. But the home page with flash is up--and awaiting comments.)

Link me Laura!

Breakfast in Bed

So I was impulse buying. At Starbucks. I know, don't ask. Don't even go there. I mean I'm totally off caffeine so what the f was I there for? The short answer: Diedrichs sold out and a certain two.5 year old need chocolate milk. Anyhow. At the counter. Paying way too much for chocolate milk, even the organic kind, when I just hand to the woman, along with my debit card, the latest Joni Mitchell CD just perched there by the biscotti. Because, let's face it, the Disney Pixar Cars soundtrack is driving momma frickin nuts. So we buy Joni. For $17.95. Plus tax. And well, even longer story short: In addition to where old race-cars retire, I now have the soundtrack of hippy death. No really. I'm sure Joan Didion is working her next essay collection around this. Even the funky--what is it? snare drum, cymbal, synthesized woodland imp retired jazz is included. Lucky me.

So yesterday was a bad day. At least bad in the music and milk variety.

But today?

Oh! today.

Today I was saddled up for a long morning of grading essays on the use of rhetoric in 17th century texts--really I should have just got in the Saab with my stack of papers and a red pen, rolled up the windows, put Joni on full blast and had it out--but instead I stayed at my desk, streamlined Morning Becomes Eclectic and what to my wondering ears did I hear?
Shelby Lynne, live.

But wait, it gets better.

Shelby Lynne live covering Dusty Springfield. Her Dusty record.

(And Nick, don't be too quick to jump up on the pulpit. Dusty's Dusty. Shelby's Shelby. She knows that. In fact, and I quote: "I'm not filling her shoes. No one can. I just set out to sing songs we all want to hear again." And boy does she. Because it's soft. And throaty. And calm. And perfect. And really, when's the last time you heard "Breakfast in Bed" on a Tuesday morning? Because it's enough to melt your heart and send you off to live another life. One where you're not puking and sweeping ash off your sidewalk and grading 17th century philosophy papers and running to the ends of the earth for bad hippy music and pricey organic chocolate milk.)

A Taste of Groop (Nick on Absinthe)

Another Groop night comes and goes. After encouraging Marika to write about dancers, because every thing she writes oozes with movement, we talked about Absinthe. Nick was trying to remember some drink that included absinthe and maybe gin or maybe vodka and some bitters and some other crazy stuff. Here is a link to some possibilities.

In another place and in another time, a member of Groop pulled out a smuggled bottle. We gathered in close while he soaked a spoonful of sugar in a drop of absinthe, then lit in on fire to carmelize it, then poured the absinthe slowly over the spoon into a glass. It was the color of the water of Lake Tahoe, over in Emerald Bay, on a sunny day. And it tasted like it looked.

Slide 12: SKIDOO

While we are basking in the literary glory that is Nami, please people, let's not forget SKIDOO.

A few years back I was interviewed by film historian Foster Hirsch who was writing an Otto Preminger bio for Random House. He heard about my obssession and we met and I waxed SKIDOO for posterity. Lo and behold, "Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King" is out at bookstores everywhere...right Nick? And yes, I get a healthy page to my compressed observations. It's odd to see yourself quoted with such finality as I would have amended some thoughts. But it's all good. And the book is a great read.
The LA Times reviewed it and the reviewer is a SKIDOO fan of course: http://www.killfee.net/

Nick, phone?

1.

Citizens:

I recently refilled my ink cartridge for 11 dollars at a place on Alston way off of Shattuck in Berkeley. You can also do this at Walgreens though they don't offer as large a selection. Here is the link to the place on Alston.

http://www.cartridgeworldusa.com/store3/

2.

This looked somewhat interesting:

MAPP
Mission Art & Performance Project
Saturday, October 20, 2007 at 7:00pm- 12:00am
L's Caffe
24th St. Between Bryant and Florida
San Francisco, CA

Music, Poetry, a Play and Visual Art!
This is the Mission art walk, and Morgan & Mumalo curating
Prose and Poetry readings by Jarrod Roland, Paul Ebenkamp,
Jenny Drai,& Jack Morgan

Art showcases by Helen Tseng, Jack Morgan & V.E. Grenier
Music by Casey Speer
A one act play produced by Diana McCullough

This person's contact info:

lifelongpress@gmail.com

3. 

And so did this:

So we survived Litquake! But some of us had to do things we're not
proud of, to make it through. So it's time to ATONE for our
literary SINS. There will be hairshirts. There will be cats of
99 tails (and a few deformed heads.) There will be wailing and
mortification. And that's just what Tim Maleeny has planned
for you guys at Writers With Drinks. David West and Nomy Lamm
will be way more hardcore. (And scroll down for my upcoming events...)

When: Saturday, Oct. 20, 2007, 7:30 to 9:30 PM

Who: David West, Nomy Lamm, Matthew Jacobs, Katayoon Zandvakili,

Rachelle Chase and Tim Maleeny

Where: The Make Out Room, 3225 22nd. St. between Mission and Valencia, SF

How much: $3 to $5 sliding scale, all proceeds benefit other magazine

http://othermag.org)
About the readers/performers:

David West's poems have appeared in New American Underground Poetry Vol.1:
The Barbarians of San Francisco - Poets From Hell and Pocket Myths: The Odyssey.
His chapbook, Evil Spirits and their Secretaries, is available from Zeitgeist Press
Michelle Tea called him "one of the city's great unsung poets."

Matthew Jacobs was one of the writers for The Young Indiana Jones
Chronicles, and wrote the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie starring Paul
McGann. His film screenwriting credits include Lassie and The
Emperor's New Groove. He's also written for the video games
Outlaws and Star Wars: Starfighter.
Katayoon Zandvakili is the author of The Arrest, a memoir about
her marriage to a man who was posing as a surgeon. Her poetry
collection, Deer Table Legs, won the University of Georgia Press'
Contemporary Poetry Series prize in 1998. Her work has appeared in
caesura, Five Fingers Review, American Poetry: The Next Generation
and Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the
Iranian Diaspora.

Tim Maleeny's novels include Beating The Babushka, Stealing The
Dragon, the forthcoming Greasing The Pinata and the forthcoming Jump.
His story "Till Death Do Us Part" appears in the mystery anthology Death
Do Us Part and was nominated for the Macavity Award.

Nomy Lamm is a zinester and queercore musician. She's published
the zine I'm So Fucking Beautiful and organized a genderqueer
reading series called The Finger. She's toured as part of Sister Spit.
Her albums include Effigy, The Transfused and Anthem. She was
named one of Ms. Magazine's "Women of the Year" in 1997.

Rachelle Chase is the author of Sex Lounge and Sin Club. She has
stories in the anthologies Dreams & Desires and Out Of Control.
She co-hosts the Chase The Dream competition for unpublished
romance authors.
Upcoming appearances by Charlie Anders:

Thursday 10/25 Charlie Anders features at the Babble
On reading series at Dog Eared Books, 900 Valencia St.
@ 20th,. SF, at 8 PM.

Friday 10/26 Charlie Anders features at Queer Open Mic at the
Three Dollar Bill café, LGBT Center, 1800 Market @ Octavia,
SF, at 8 PM. Open mic signup at 7:30 PM.

Sunday 11/04 The Kvetsch anniversary show, featuring
Charlie Anders and a whole bunch of other amazing writers.
It's an all-feature extravaganza. It's at 9 PM, at Sadie's Flying Elephant,
on the corner of Potrero and Mariposa.

Weds 11/28 Charlie Anders and Beth Lisick at the RADAR Salon,
hosted by Michelle Tea. A two-person panel discussion and reading.
With cookies! At the Eureka Valley/Harvey Milk Memorial Branch Library,
3555 16th. St., SF, at 7:00 PM.

Meatpaper: The new print magazine I wish I'd invented

Meatpaper is a new San Francisco-based quarterly dedicated to "the ideas, artistic excursions and bone-deep emotions" inspired by meat. Yes, I've already introduced myself to the editors. No, they haven't asked me to write for them ... yet. For those of you in the area interested to find out more, the mag is hosting a meaty cocktail event this Sunday at Slow Club in SF's Mission District. I'm planning to attend, anybody want to go with?

Congratulations, Nami!

And of course, the absolutely outstanding news from the Gus & Nami household:

Writer's Group: Faculty, Alumni, Emeritus

Seven and a half years in the writing, and in thirty-six hours it was over: Nami's book, Miles From Nowhere (working title), will be published by Riverhead sometime in the first half of 2009. I've never seen anyone work so hard on anything as Nami worked on this book, and this is truly one of the most beautiful works of prose I’ve ever read.So let's hear it for one more of our own... First John, then Shawna, now Nami: our little collective is putting itself on the map.

(GR's note reprinted without permission...)

Tomashi, RIP

Sad news in the Gus & Nami household: Their cat Tomashi (the fat one, also known as Tea Bag, UPS Man and Costco) passed away on Friday, Oct. 6.

National Book Awards Announced

Hey, so turns out I wasn't the only one who liked Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End. See the other lists of finalists here. I'm also happy to see Robert Hass is up for poetry.

How to Start a Fire

Okay, so this is my first post . . . And you guys can lambaste me or whatever for this, but I've actually been dicking around with--egads--memoir type stuff. Below is the intro passage to an essay I've just finished. I was wondering what you knuckleheads might have to say about it. I'm pretty sure I've got a whole book of these type babies in me, but I don't know if I'd be wasting my time (and, more importantly, yours). Just curious to see what you all think. Feed back appreciated. All comers invited, no holds barred! If anyone wants to see the entire thing, let me know and I'll be glad to oblige.

Hope all's well in everyone's neck of the woods . . . Spect.

How to Start a Fire

On the evening of October 31st, 2001, I stood before the dilapidated Queen Anne Victorian where a costume party from which I had been banned was shortly to begin, splattering kerosene over the boxwood hedge that lined its yard. I had nearly a quart of bourbon in my bloated gut, and more back at the house, just a block away. I had a Gerber jack knife clipped inside my left hip pocket, a broken heart, a head full of fuck-yous, and this much shy of nothing left to lose.

In short, I was a lonely man, a shattered man, angry as a Republican and confused as a rat. Over the last two months I had undergone a series of operations for a brutal case of kidney stones, the final one of which — while I was still conscious, no less — entailed cramming a tiny metal claw up my penis to seek-and-destroy the rotten stint floating somewhere in the chaos between my bladder and my kidney. For almost 60 days, whacked out on so much Darvocet, Percocet, Percodine, and Delaudin that my doctor refused to give me more of the stuff for fear that she would kill me, I ate nothing but root beer floats made from A&W and Häagen-Dazs. Prior to this, for nearly a year, I had functioned like one of H.G. Welles’ troglodyte morlocks, doing the Thorazine shuffle to and fro between my ramshackle apartment in the old town Duck Pond of this swampy Floridian town and the tenebrous cubicle in which I spent eight hours a day describing Windows XP. Meantime, my wife — now my ex-wife — after drunkenly carousing the night away with the pack of jerks she absurdly referred to as her “colleagues” — rose each afternoon to write stories featuring such lovely sentences as, “I am being stalked by two men: one carries a brick, the other a wrench named Pierre.”

So there I stood, a 240 pound drunk with more than three-quarters of his body covered in tattoos, garbed in a pair of thrift-store flip-flops, raggedy, cut-off jeans and a wife beater tee shirt stained with macaroni-and-cheese, pecan pie, barbeque sauce, and the grease from a recent bucket of deep-fried chicken, my face still smeared with the make up I had donned in preparation for a night of festivities I was no longer welcome to attend. Regardless of the early hour, merely imminent dusk, a phalanx of costumed kiddies had already taken to the streets. As if from hidden pods, a duo had manifested across the way, a clutch down the block, a gaggle more on the porch three homes down — super heroes, clowns, bunny rabbits, and angels, the whole prancing, heartwarming bit. And yet despite what must have been my own blasphemous prominence — was I not, after all, here in this quaint little neighborhood with its Greek Revival mansions and Tidewater homes, its ancient oaks festooned with oozing tassels of Spanish moss, its verdant, manicured gardens replete with magnolias, dogwoods, rhododendrons, and camellias — was I not to the bliss of this antebellum paradise what the blister is to a pretty foot, the scum is to a crystal pool, the maggot to a rose? — no, despite my evident peculiarity, not a single one of these sprites or their grown-up chaperones had seemed to care about me, much less to see me. How that was possible I will never know. It must have been that, obscene as I was, I had somehow managed to blend in for the day, just another ghoul raised from the crypt, an overzealous reveler making final preparations to his terrifying funhouse before the onslaught of trick-or-treaters commenced.

Whatever the case, the fact remains that once I had emptied my red two-gallon can of its precious kerosene, I held a lighter to the glistening leaves and flicked it. Immediately a flame appeared, and then again, with a great swelling rush, the entire hedge and sidewalk before it erupted into a wall of dancing flames. Fire, as Canetti so keenly observed, is the same wherever it breaks out. It is as sudden as it is contagious and insatiable, and yet its appearance, though cause for alarm, is never a surprise. But most of all, fire is possessed of an ancient splendor to which all people find themselves compulsively attracted. There they were, now, tongue after tongue of relentless flames, in all the colors of the rainbow, the colors of the sun from dawn to dusk, instantaneously consuming everything they touched, uniting in a moment what had before been separate, branches and leaves and trunks. I had seen many fires in my life, but none that I had ever started were of this magnitude. What I had besmirched with kerosene was the dullest of hedges. What emerged from that monotony, like some exquisite moth from its muddy chrysalis, was a kaleidoscopic salamander, living, breathing, pulsing, writhing as only fire can. Until the instant before its appearance, I do not believe I had known what to expect. Now that it was upon me, however, I understood at once that it could never have been otherwise. It was as though I had been under a spell, cast not by the fire but by the fire that longed to be.

My monster brought to life, it dawned on me that however much I wanted to admire it, to do so would be the act of a man more foolish than even I had become. I picked up my can, therefore, and started for home. “That’s right,” I thought, “I just lit your fucking yard on fire. Now what are you going to do?”

Amazingly, not a single head had turned, not a single voice was raised. It was as if I had been operating from within some crazy invisible cloak. I wondered whether my drunkenness had anything to do with it. Was what I perceived what others perceived, as well? Had I truly done what it appeared I had done? The terrible dreamlike quality to each successive moment was almost more than I could bear. The absence of guilt, the absence of fear. The purity of satisfaction, the sense of inviolate power. It was simultaneously lovely and horrific, all too much and all too little. Once again I took stock, and once again I saw what I had seen: innocence on the rampage, innocence immersed in its own naïveté. That was all. And then I had reached my house, and then the sirens began, two at first, then three, then four, all of them rushing toward those great black plumes of smoke spiraling into the deepening sky.

Continued . . .

Joan Didion, Part Two

So I have finished the two books I purchased or, rather, described purchasing, in an earlier episode of this blog. I did not realize, at that time, that it was appropriate to follow up Madame Bovary with Play It As It Lays. They are along the same continuum. Maria and Emma reflect upon each other as characters. I would say that Joan Didion made me like Emma Bovary more than I did when I read her. I would say that Flaubert made me like Maria less. Is it the difference between Flaubert's time and Didion's? Between their genders? Or is it the fact that in the concluding pages of the book, the action is Emma's, while the inaction is Maria's?

It's good to know that the human heart continues to hurt in the same way no matter when or where. I'm not sure why I think so, but it makes me feel better. There is no such thing as progress, just change. And there is company, lots and lots of company, for all of us. And some of that company is really crazy and a little stupid and a lot reckless and this is why I try to live my life as a rational person and not a character in a novel. Sometimes it's fun (and even useful) to be the character in the novel, but most of the time I prefer not to drive to Vegas after doing too many drugs and having too much empty sex.

Anyway. I will interrupt this train of thought to say that I really liked the following few lines, in which Didion manages to reference both Plato and The Godfather:

"BZ shrugged. 'I think of him more as a philosopher king. He told me once he understood the whole meaning of life, it came to him in a blinding flash one time when he almost died on the table at Cedars.'

"Larry Kulik's not going to die at Cedars. Larry Kulik's going to die in a barber chair.'"

And there's a line of dialog I plan to steal and use as needed in my daily life: "I hear you had a rather baroque morning after."

Just in case you were wondering, Bridget, my toes ached specifically on page 171, in the description of Hoover Dam: "All day she was faint with vertigo, sunk in a world where great power grids converged, throbbing lines plunged finally into the shallow canyon below the dam's face, elevators like coffins dropped into the bowels of the earth itself. With a guide and a handful of children Maria walked through the chambers, stared at the turbines in the vast glittering gallery, at the deep still water with the hidden intakes sucking all the while, even as she watched; clung to the railings, leaned out, stood finally on a platform over the pipe that carried the river beneath the dam. The platform quivered." I can understand why you're a fan, Bridget, and why you write the way you do about all of the different Californias and the Californians who live in them.

Okay, so I've read his bookshelf now and I wasn't with him that long and he didn't die, but loss is loss is loss and so, to conclude, a few final lines from The Year of Magical Thinking:

"I have never written pieces fluently but this one seemed to be taking even longer than usual: I realized at some point that I was unwilling to finish it, because there was no one to read it."

and

"In fact the apprehension that our life together will decreasingly be the center of my every day seemed today on Lexington Avenue so distinct a betrayal that I lost all sense of oncoming traffic."

Thanks to those of you who held my hand while I crossed the street.

Into The Wild

I've never read the book. Never read any Jon Krakauer. As a rule I don't like books about people fighting the primal forces of nature. I'm doing that everyday in Los Angeles and I'll stick with THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. But I did go see the film of INTO THE WILD. And y'all should too as it's one of the best movies of the year. Great performances, especially Hal Halbrook in a heart tweaking role. Sean Penn doesn't completely romanticize the story, altho it's infused with the love of travel and adventure until things get out of hand. I think the film is overdirected in places, and a little Eddie Vedder goes a long way, but it's well worth the three hour running time.

Now quick, tell me if Penn's credit is grammatically correct:

"Screenplay and Directed by Sean Penn"

straight outta brooklyn

Here's "Wonder Bread" a little literary sideswipe that's sure to generate writerly controversy from here to there...

"To achieve this miracle, certain writers produce Brooklyn Books of Wonder. Take mawkish self-indulgence, add a heavy dollop of creamy nostalgia, season with magic realism, stir in a complacency of faith, and you’ve got wondrousness. The only thing that’s more wondrous than the BBoW narratives themselves is the vanity of the authors who deliver their epistles from Fort Greene with mock-naïve astonishment, as if saying: “I can’t really believe I’m writing this. And it’s such an honor that you’re reading it.” Actually, they’re as vain and mercenary as anyone else, but they mask these less endearing traits under the smiley façade of an illusory Eden they’ve recreated in the low-rise borough across the water from corrupt Manhattan."

http://www.theamericanscholar.org/au07/wonder-bukiet.html

For the Record

Nick, via email:
"I forget, is there an official chronicler of Groop, or does that change everytime we meet? Ella, if you would like to pen a wrapup of last nite's shenanigans, I for one would be grateful. And if you do, could you add my favorite exchange?

"Ella, all hot and sultry: 'Ok, I have a terrific idea, I think this could really work because I love these characters so much. You have these four people locked up in a sleeper car, and it's so claustrophobic and I want more of that, and we're trying to figure out how to get more out of it, so why not try writing it from their points-of-view, or, ok, as a start, why not write the whole thing from Rosa's Point of view, because I miss her so much?'

"Ben: 'No.'"

---
Ella replies:

"uh, you are going to need to chronicle that one yourself. In fact, I think YOU should do the summary this time, Nicky. But don't forget this quote, from Jen:

"Jen, all hot and sultry: 'Weren't you attracted to the characters, you know, like when you see a hooker and you're Hugh Grant?'"

[photo by Your Girl In Milwaukee]

Joan Didion

By now Nick knows that the mysterious woman who came into the bookstore and bought two books by Joan Didion from his hunky and oh-so-young clerk is me. How old was he, Nick--like, 17? He had biceps the size of a bread loaf and he probably sells you lots of books on the night shift. You know, lonely women looking for some smut to take to bed with them. Anyway...

I could easily say that I bought two books by Joan Didion because Bridget mentioned Play it as It Lays a few entries ago. I could easily say that. I could say that it is because I studied creative writing at UC Davis. I could say it is because Joan Didion wrote about California, and I am from California. I could say it is because The Year of Magical Thinking received an ungodly number of reviews, mostly in the publications that I read on a regular basis. I could say that it is because it is about time I read Joan Didion; everyone else has.

But that's not true. Not everyone has. Just a few have. It's one thing to walk into a man's apartment and find Nick Hornby and other quality dicklit on an open bookshelf next to his wool sweaters and baseball caps. But when he opens up some secret closet and you realize that not only does he have a couple anthologies of Romantic poetry, but that there are several books by, of all people, Joan Didion, well...

You can see why a broken-hearted, lonely girl might wander into a bookstore at 9 pm at night and buy two books by Joan Didion. Not because she needs something to read--by god she has about twenty unread novels sitting on her shelf--but because she isn't quite yet ready to let go of the boy with the Joan Didion. Can't call him. Can't ring his doorbell in the middle of the night. (Well, she could, but...) All she can do is buy a book on grief and a book on loneliness, both by Joan Didion.

Nicky, I'm afraid that the hot clerk with the sourdough biceps didn't even know who Joan Didion was. "Oh, just someone who wrote on California," I said. He seemed surprised to see that this little-known writer had a National Book Award sticker on her cover. Alas. He's only, like 17. He has years to gather a devastating collection of novels.

Random Thoughts While Listening To Mama Cass

- There are giant billboards around Los Angeles for the show DEXTER with his smiling face dotted with blood next to the tag line, THE RETURN OF AMERICA'S FAVORITE SERIAL KILLER. This image towers over the corner of Hollywood and Highland and greets children from all over the world next to the Disney theater. I am offended.

- I am watching many episodes of THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW on youtube that some prince has been posting. Possibly the greatest tv show ever next to SCTV. I said possibly. THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW might beat them.

- I arrived home cranky only to find a package stuffed in my door that I knew could only be one thing: the long awaited soundtrack to PUFNSTUF - THE MOVIE from 1970, which I saw in the theater and never forgot. Especially the catchy songs and the one by Mama Cass called "Different." You can't help but feel good listening to the soundtrack to PUFNSTUF - THE MOVIE.

- There is a stunning woman in sweatshorts and heels sitting across from me. I hope she's writing about me too.

- I like the word "September" because it means the word "October" is coming. And that means Halloween.

- Rush is truly a great band.

Vitamins help

Because I took two today and felt great, really fantastic, coffee fantastic. Plus ONE egg salad sandwich from trader joe's. I felt great, good enough for kickboxing. Then I went home, and drank coffee. At seven o'clock at night I drink this coffee, because I've decided that I WILL finish the story that's been giving me thought cancer for the past two weeks. It's kind of an amazing experience, well not so amazing really, pretty drab actually, to gear up for an evening of writing. Coffee, dinner, kambucha, shower, Pink Floyd's Echoes, repeat, text two people, one of them a woman, the other who might as well be, chess, stare out window, stare out door, check email, repeat. Four hours later. Blah.

So I'm not sure how all that connects to my question, which is: is there a best time to write? I mean, for each individual, do we have a peak time? For instance, doing kickboxing at six AM is a really bad thing. My kickboxing will be bad at six AM. I get these anxieties that I'm not *supposed* to be writing sometimes, as though I'll make better choices in my stories if I write at this time, as opposed to that time.

Please note that I'm not complaining. Having the ability to set aside an entire evening to write is a big deal these days. They don't happen too often. And as school and life gear up, I see them happening less and less.

Cheers.

Nick, sweetie, Wednesday?

Adventure Journey

I'm very excited today because the online publication that had been putting up with my serialized, non-chronological thought experiment, "Episodes," is back online. Adventure Journey had stopped publishing in January and I was worried it was gone forever. In the interim the editors have completely re-imagined it from an online magazine format to an online community (like MySpace). And it actually looks very cool. Check out my episodes of Episodes at http://www.adventurejourney.net/depscols/episodes/.

I'm also excited because I just found out they're making my favorite Stephen King story, "The Mist," into a movie. All I can say is finally. Speaking as someone who taught a DeCal class on Stephen King ("as horror author and pop-culture phenomenon"), this story sums up what is best about King, i.e. his nihilistic/apocalyptic yet homespun sense of American culture in the age of malls and the military industrial complex. Check out the preview.

i'm reading engleby and not writing, you?

Ouch - I can't do Wednesday, I have an author dinner (anyone read anything by Sebastian Faulks?) But of course, if everyone else can only do the 19th, go right ahead.

As far as start times go - I think y'all should start when you're there and ready, and I will try hard to get there as early as I can, but I'll just pick-up mid-critique. And no, I don't want to answer your question, Jen, about potty training, and how it's impacted by Elizabeth starting school, and how we had to yank her from the early-age preschool and put her into the older-age preschool with 12 hours notice - all because of autistic kids and ornery, short-sighted parents. And how the evening hours are alas still precious and how it's really hard to write and have a job, like all of you, and how it's really hard to write and have kids, and how it's really hard to put food on the table if you're a single mom with no job prospects, and how it's really hard if you're a prostitute to accuse a man of rape, because hey - you asked for it, right? And how it's really hard to run a country when most people think you're an idiot, and jesus, what if you're not? And how it's really hard if you lived life as a gay-liberal-new-yorker but had an epiphany that the life you were leading was bad - very bad - and so now, 10 years later, you're straight, more conservative than Dick Cheney, and just spent the morning of September 11th, 2007, waving a flag for three hours from an overpass above Interstate 880. Or how it's really hard to be part of a wedding when the bride, your friend, fired everyone just before the nuptials - the food guys, the flower guys, the cake guys - hell, she even fired you, and when she's pathetically bemoaning the fact that forevermore the only penis she's going to know is her husband's, and that's just wrong, isn't it? you're left thinking, um, no. And how it's really hard that you didn't get yesterday off, because it was, after all, Admissions Day, and both your daughters got the day off because they work for the State of California and so of course they received Admissions Day off, and by the way they can both retire in 8 years, when they're in their 40's, and receive a pension of about 80% of their pay - a pension that will be given to them until they die, 40 years down the road, and that makes perfect sense, doesn't it? Well doesn't it? And how it's really hard when your Bookstore Boss scheduled you to work on a Friday night, and doesn't he know that it's your girlfriend's birthday, shouldn't he have intuited that? And how, okay, it might not be hard to take the preteen to the Met, because you are being paid $50/hour to do it, because you tutor, and this is kind of a tutoring gig, just different, just that the dad wants the preteen to get culture, even if he has to pay for it, because of course he doesn't have time to take the kid to the Met, so yeah - that part of tutoring might not be hard, but how about your latest kid, the dwarf, who's in excrutiating pain because of the surgery he's undergone to lengthen his legs, that part is hard, ok? And oh, how it's really hard because you know the bus driver cares about you - all your friends tell you it's true - but how he won't give you the time of day, and how now he's not on his usual route, and you'd know cause you're kind of stalking him, and I realize that I don't know you, that you're just a guy who sells books, but can't you look past the fact for just a second that yes, I smell, and yes, my dress is dirty, and yes, I'm sill friends with my ex, is that such a big deal? Can't you see past any of that? Can't you give me some advice, even if I don't know you? Because even though the dress is dirty, the flower in my hair is fresh, cut from the garden this morning, and that should count for something. Shouldn't it?

Isn't it hard when people can't look past themselves to the trials of others? Isn't it hard when we can't admit we've made a mistake? Isn't it hard to just say, I'm sorry. To just say, I love you. To just say, I don't know how we got here. Isn't it just hard?

Jane Austen Must Die

...or at least be shot out of the canon.

Because how is it, at 8:17 on a Sunday night I'm up trying to figure out a way around my "Oh my god I have to teach Jane Austen" panic. (And not even Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility or Emma, but Persuasion!)

The current plan is to teach Play it As It Lays and hope, that since they were both written by women and have titles that start with "P," no one will notice.

No one will notice, right?

And maybe it's not so much all the adorable warm and amiable naval families, or the Sirs and Somersetshires, but all those grad school girls, who were constantly winning fellowships due to their dissertation devotion to dress styles or dance styles or how Bridget Jones is merely an updated Emma Woodhouse from Jane Friggin' Austen. And if it had ended there, fine. A little squabble over how the Department chose to squander their research funds (sending white women to England to pour over letters in libraries!) that would be fine as well. But it never ended there. No there were the panels, sometimes lasting entire sessions, and gulp, days, at academic conferences, and the societies and the--oh no really--"merchandise": Nightshirts in lavender and hot pink and yellow that read:"Most unwilling was she to awaken from such a dream of felicity"; license plate holders: "I'd rather be reading Jane Austen." Tea towels, counted cross-stitch, Christmas cards, I heart Mr. Darcy buttons, and that damn: It is a truth universally acknowledged that an avowed Janeite must be in want of:____________ (fill in the blank with any one of a number of cute quips).

And ohmygosh, yes. I forgot to mention that they call themselves Janeites. And that, even now, writing this I'm probably inviting a fury of hate mail directed at this blog for publishing such ruddy filth about Madame Jane, but I digress...I have to teach her and I hate her and if I had tenure I'd teach Joan Didion instead.

Writers With Finks, I mean Drinks

On Saturday I went down to check out Writer's with Drinks http://www.writerswithdrinks.com hosted at the Make Out Room on 22nd near Mission. Just to watch someone read by the mottled light of a disco ball made the experience more than worth the risk 0f a parking ticket. I got there a little late, and the place was packed with at least couple hundred people. Above the heads I could see a shapely, stout blond reading from her confusing, a little bit interesting treatise on sex and politics. This was Mellisa Gira. She said the word "Cock" a lot and talked about George Bush a lot too. Oddly, her last line of the evening was a total knock out, "I'm a good mistake to make" and I wondered if I hadn't missed something in the circuitous rant that led up to it.

My friend, Trevor, ( I couldn't go alone, I just couldn't) stared hard at me. We're staying, my eyes said back. I wanted to find out if this was my crew, my people. I'd read a lot about cadres of writers who lived together or knew each other, like Virginia Woolf who had her Bloomsbury Group, but what existed today? It was comforting to think that I might be surrounded by a bunch of people parading as writers. Think of all that loneliness and unrequited artistic juice filling up such a small space. Just look at their lost, introspective, pensive expressions. And whatever wasn't showing up emotionally was definitely compensated by true-to-form writerly accessories: I've never seen so many button up t-shirts and thick, dark frames in my life. The frames were especially popular with Asians for some reason. And petite white girls in summer dresses. Well, actually, this one petite white girl in a summer dress who was hanging out with the stout, shapely blond writer and probably knew a lot about George Bush and cocks and what it took to get into bed with a woman like Miss Gira.

The host was a man parading as, (or simply being) a badly dressed woman. The coolest part about him were his flesh colored leggings, and not tattoos, sadly, covered with action packed comic book panels that I almost got close enough to read in the floor space I had carved out for myself by the stage. At one point, the host's high heel just missed my sidecar. Next time, I should probably get there early.

Jennifer Solow read from her book, The Booster, and totally upstaged the host tranny with her bloo hair and shiny black pants. She wore tank top with the words "famous author" across her chest which she claimed she had printed up before her book on shoplifting became a national best seller. (ironic but generic references to "Steal This Book" come to mind) Even though her reading really bored me, I decided she was cool. Her delicate, deft prose did a great job of setting the scene for an idea that didn't interest me in the slightest. This is normal since I'm pretty picky. However, Jennifer Solow, you write really, really well. So kudos to you, Ms. Solow. She's the same woman who had each word from a short story tattooed on about fifteen hundred different volunteers. The host tranny tried to make a joke about how Ms. Solow had lost the hard copy to the piece and was busily lining up all the volunteers in naked repose. A few people chuckled. It was a little bit funny. I wonder though, do these tattooed people know each other? Do they talk? Are they writers? Do people like Solow and Gira actually hang out together? Or do they just communicate via email? As I looked out over the crowed, the same question kept coming back to me: who are these people, and how many of them are sleeping together? In other words, is this *the* group of writers in SF? And if so, how do I break in? Aside from Groop, and an MFA, I've always written in a vacuum.

After the intermission, Guillermo Gomez-Pena read. He also did a lot of talking about sex and politics, and managed to make the one really good joke of the evening, with apologies to Mr. Pena, (well, not really) has been dumbed down due to my questionable, drunken, memory: "The government censors everything these days, TV, Radio, poets--" at which point he stopped talking to make the point. I suppose he liked the reception he received because he then went on for no fewer than ten minutes starting and stopping in the middle of his prose, eventually reducing his language down to a few audible grunts.

At this point Trevor made eyes at the door. But I want to stay, my eyes said back. Five minutes. Okay, five minutes. Fine. Then we're going to the Elbo Room to meet some straight women. These women are straight. His eyes shot over to the large ape-like thing in the corner with her arm draped over two blonds in torn jeans. Okay, five minutes. We waited for a break in the action and left. Still, I'd go back. It's nice being around my crew, my people, even if they have no idea who the hell I am.

Off the Grid...

Hey you people - TinHouse wants us to send them our stories. For those of us (me) who've been needing a deadline, here it is. And for those of us who have insane asylum stories rotting in the recesses of our roll top desks...it's time to drag 'em back out...




Hello All,

Tin House's Spring theme issue is OFF THE GRID. We're looking for fiction, poetry, and nonfiction by or about people or institutions that function (or don't function) out of the bounds of "normal" society. For the "Lost & Found" section we are looking for brief appreciations of texts written outside of conventional publishing--prison, exile, mental institutions, in secret. The deadline is November 1, but please submit before then as the issue will get crowded early. Feel free to email me submissions or queries, or see http://www.tinhouse.com/mag/mag_submit.htm for further guidelines.

All best,
Michelle Wildgen
Senior Editor, Tin House Magazine/Editor, Tin House Books
www.tinhouse.com

Groop discusses war on drugs, drinks wine

My neighbors should have been taking notes rather than complaining about the noise, because Groop was in fine form last night. Everybody did a fantastic job breaking down my story and then giving me the directions how it might be built back up again. There were delicious roasted veggies and red wine, and I got to use my martini shaker for the first time in months. (Thanks, Ben, for being the only one brave enough to sample my home-infused ginger vodka).

Critique was superb. Even though it made me see how much more work I have, it also made me fall in love with the story all over again. And when you can see something you've been tinkering on for a decade with a fresh perspective, that's golden.

Not all of it was sunshine and flowers, of course. Some of my favorite bits were pinched on the cheek and sent off to that orphanage of the mind where are housed all good ideas that don't yet have a home. For example, Laura had this to say while reading lines: "I'm going to read this line even though I deleted the paragraph. ... It's a good line, you can use it in some other story."

Ah, the cold, double-edged steel of an honest opinion.

Take a break from writing

and discover that Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything is the best thing since CNN went to septuple split screen. Higher echelon thinkers will direct themselves to "Fall Conspiracies" parts one, two and three.

http://toeradio.org/

And here's a quick read for further proof.

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_2229686.html

Happy labor day?

Yes, or course.

Get a Fire Extinguisher - Nick on the hot seat

Groop met amongst a wreckage of LSAT books and Zachary's pizza on Monday to roast Nicky using a lighter, carpet scraps, and a jack-o-lantern.

Nick's really got something with this novel of his. As always, we loved the distinctive and cool narrative voice. We asked for a rise in temperature at the beginning of the piece to bring it up to the fast burn of the last few pages. Other than that, we're looking forward to the adventure. His three mismatched heroes are about to head out into the night, and we are ready to be right there with them. Make it weird and nervous-making, Nick!

Ben brought up an interesting writing question. Nick's been working on this novel for more than ten years, I'm hitting year seven with mine. What keeps us coming back for more? I'll leave Nick to reprise his response.

My response is this: I read novels, so I know I would be writing novels (as opposed to short stories). Turns out it's harder than it looks. I've changed from third person to first person to third person omniscient to third person quasi omniscient. I started three or four subplots that will probably end up mostly in the trash (but will inform the characters that stay on stage). I tacked an old short story to the beginning of the novel (turns out I was writing about the same character but didn't know it at the time).

But it's not just the sheer amount of writing one has to do in order to find enough gems worth knitting together. I had to go back to Italy two more times. I had to read a few more Sommerset Maugham novels. And I had to fall in love, disastrously in love, a few more times.

I'm still not sure what the sum of all of this writing and experience will be, but I'm determined to finish this damn thing. I know it's probably going to deserve that garage treatment the Bridget mentioned--the book of who I was, the thing I needed to write before I knew where I was going.

Georgia Review

Hear ye hear ye. It has come to our attention that D. Foy has a new piece in the Summer 2007 issue of Georgia Review . If you aren't already a fan of the crazy wacky up and down and inside out writing and ruminations of D. Foy, no matter. Buy the mag anyway; it's an excellent publication.

Skinny Bitches and What I really *really* want

We all know the story...
Middle aged black woman with a sing-song middle-west accent picks up a book,
takes it with her to work,
says a few words,
gives a few copies to her studio audience,
and whammo, the author buys 4000 sq feet of porches
and the New York Times Best Seller List adds a new #1.
That story.

But here's a new twist that even Anne Sexton hadn't the foresight to Transform.

Two angry, underfed, skinny chicks bemoan their waistlines and their lives.
One's an ex-model who ate nothing but chili dogs and peanut M&M's.
The other an ex-modeling agent who ate nothing but double bacon burgers and beer.
They are sent by their angry ex-employers into the woods where they are forced to survive on nuts, berries and greens and realize, fuck! There's something to this foresting for food, and really now that we can stuff ourselves with carrots we are *so* much happier. So vowing to "change the world" they decide to...publish a book. One researches and the other pens witty phrases like: "Soda is from Satan" and "If you eat crap you are crap." They sell a few copies and go on with their berry picking lives. Jump forward to 2007.

A middle-aged white woman, with a sing-song British accent, picks up a book,
Placed decoratively on a table of designer jeans, while shopping, in Los Angeles.
She looks at the title, notices that it describes her to near perfection,
holds it near her gaunt face and smiles, cameras flash.
This is major.
She sets the book back on the table,
or gives it to her overweight personal assistant to put back on the table.
She doesn't even buy the book.
And yet in a week the book sells out on two continents.
It's reprinted at 200,000 copies and the ex-model and the ex-model agent get a three book deal (not to mention 4000 square feet of Porsches).

The first story I kind of get.
In fact, I secretly hope it will one day happen to me, but the second story? The one about the bitches and the berries...Now what the fuck is up with that?

As our resident Angelino I'm just asking, because in the past six weeks THREE of my seven suburban neighbors have got the posh spice bob, and again, I'm just saying, a bob that severe is no Jennifer Aniston shag. A bob that severe only looks good if you're one super skinny bitch.

Lessons in Flight

I was at my mom's last week and she forced me to clean out the closet. Like I was twelve. Granted the closet was filled with my stuff--and not clothes mind you--no, the closet of my childhood was filled with books and letters and boxes upon boxes of photos and snippets and bumper stickers and quotes cut and gleaned from the pages of other people. Which is probably what most childhood closets are filled with. Which is why the task of sorting them, and organizing them into some kind of logical semblance is daunting and unmanageable and when asked to do so produced a twelve-year-old-esque protest. But because my mom insisted, and because I had happened to drive up in my Saab Stay-Way (south shore slang for station wagon), I eventually did it (I mean after she threatened to recycle all of it if I didn't). And I found something. Okay a lot of somethings. And I'm not talking about notes written on pink paper penned in silver ink passed in the seventh grade, carefully folded into hearts and arrows and houses. I had those, and they now sit stacked in a plastic crate in my garage, much to Jesse's horror. But what I found in addition to all that, in the sifting and sorting, were seven things that all amount to someone I used to be, whom I very much want to be again.

First up: an e-mail from Jenn Stroud, back when she was still Stroud and wrote e-mails from a "minnow.ME.Berkeley.EDU" address Dated Tuesday April 6, 1999 with the quote:

"Fredrick Exley's talking about an English professor and 'an observation he had made on Hemingway in Paris during the twenties. He said that while he and others tried to talk their novels out in sidewalk cafes, Hemingway was locked up in a room getting on with the business of his life, that although he did not know Hemingway, he knew of him, as all the young Americans in Paris did, and that Hemingway proved a constant provocation to them, like a furious clarion that books do not get written on the Montparnasse."

Exhibit Two: a note punched through with a whole, written on a "Bradbury Press" pad that says: "It's like I breathe the air first to see if it's okay for her."

Three: Yellow legal pad page, folded a gazillion times with the title: When Water Misbehaves.

Four, Five and Six: photos of me at a pay phone in Europe. Shouting. (pre cell phones); a photo of me in a leopard print hair scarf doing laundry in Barcelona; a photo of me at twelve, taken by my cousin and then developed in a high school photo lab, so it's grainy and lopsided and perfect.

Seven: a poem called "Character" by Taslima Nasrin

Character

You're a girl
and you'd better not forget
that when you step over the threshold of your house
men will look askance at you.
When you keep walking down the lane
men will follow you and whistle.
When you cross the lane and step into the main road
men will revile you and call you a loose woman.

If you've got no character
you'll turn back,
and if not
you'll keep on going,
as you are going now.


In short, the closet at my moms house is clean and can be filled with clothes again. And my south shore garage is full of who I used to be. Which is good, to have her so near, again. But maybe is also why I should fly when visiting my mother.

Flaubert, Concluded

As promised in my earlier entry, I slogged through my mass market edition of Madame Bovary, snapping the spine at several stops so that I could read what was hanging out in the gutter. Monsieur Homais was certainly there. Rodolphe as well. And, I'm afraid, Emma had been dragged in, too—but we knew that's where she was going to end up. Otherwise, why read?

Indeed, I have determined that it was her affection for housewares that put her in such a gummy situation--even moreso than her affinity for stylish but insipid men. Let this be a lesson to all of us who open our Pottery Barn catalogs before tearing into our Visa bills. Adultery goes hand in hand with the Montego Dining Collection on page 51, not to mention the iPhone, iPod, and digital camera on the front cover.

(By the way, does anyone know any stylish men looking for a date to a gala? I have a silk gown in the closet that's just dying for an airing out...)

But where was I--oh yes, Madame Bovary. A study of innocence and naivete. Both Charles and Emma have a brand of both; the interest comes in watching their paths diverge. I wonder if I want to possess the same blend of contempt and sympathy for my characters as Flaubert has for his. Living with it could be difficult. Even the purely innocent (Hippolyte and the blind man) are deformed on the outside for Flaubert. Indeed, it's Hippolyte's surgery that remains most vivid in my memory, emblematic as it is of the flawed ambitions of the book's main characters—Charles, Emma, and Homais. Flaubert also does an excellent job of having Hippolyte limp through the edge of certain scenes when his reader most needs a reminding. Too, I appreciated the short, staccato sentences that Flaubert employs when Emma is at her highest level of panic.

Then there is, of course, the ambiguity of whether Emma is, like all women, simply spoiled and foolish or whether Emma is drawn helplessly toward her fate by the cruel world ruled by the lustful men who have objectified her. I'm afraid I'm currently too cynical to take that one on with any fairness.

Can someone say something about the character of Justin? I was caught up too much in the last pages to understand his purpose.

And would someone else please blog? Anyone else reading anything? I know Nick is. Nick's always reading something.

Today is Bad Poetry Day

Bad Poetry
Oh Noetry

I did not write this poem. It is on my favorite weird t-shirt.

Everyone else should celebrate by writing a poem. After all, if it is good, great. If it is bad, then you are simply celebrating the holiday.

Severe Thunderstorm Warning

Ella, here, writing in from Lincoln, Nebraska. I join our distinguished list of far-flung correspondents, at least for five days. The Villager Inn is stylish digs. Musty smelling, with one of those shower heads that spits. It is here that we've set up our operations room. Yogurt, beer, cashews, and Goldfish crackers. My four-year-old nephew has plenty of crayons and fruit rollups. I have a wireless connection and my copy of Madame Bovary.

The crickets are going crazy and the wind has quieted. The sky is dark, thick, low. It's probably about 100 degrees outside. We're prepared, if needed, to go into our bathroom with pillows and, of course, the beer.

I agree with the dine well write well philosophy, Ben. Also: dine badly, write even better. Come to Lincoln, Nebraska and try to find a vegetable. The adventure is worth 100 lines of prose.

Tastee Inn & Out is a classic run-down drive in. The Tasty sandwich is a loose meat (cooked for hours) burger on a soft bun. The meat is rich and oniony, with a hint of mustard cooked into it. The sandwich would be nothing without the pickles. Onion chips are fried dark crisp. When you order, the counter gal pushes your order slip through a vaccuum tube back to the kitchen, and the trays rattle around on a conveyer belt when your food is ready. There's a keno machine in the corner, an out-of-order juke box, and formica-topped tables with red diner chairs. Tasty has seen better days--part of the ceiling is coming down and outside, car parts rust in the parking lot, under the old metal overhang, but mom said that it hasn't changed much. "The atrium is new," she says, pointing to an enclosed sunporch that has been slapped onto the side of the building. "New?" I ask? "Oh, you know, within the last thirty years or so," she says and we laugh. We've been looking forward to our Tasty since we arrived.

Dine well, write well

Hemmingway once said that we write better on an empty stomach. On the other hand, in “A Room of One’s Own” Virginia Woolf suggested something along the lines of “dine well, write well” (and the procurement of a rich aunt.) In “The World According to Garp” John Irving’s main character discovered that writing after he masturbated was not a good idea. I write well when my energy is high and I’m feeling good. And while depression destroys my writing, I know that many writers seem to do quite well with it.

What helps you guys write? When do you write well?

Shock...SKIDOO

there's nothing going in here in la but SKIDOO.
my career interview with austin pendleton in my fave film magazine SHOCK CINEMA just hit the stand.
five bucks at cody's...wait. oh yeah. shit.
get it elsewhere. strike a blow against corporatist media.
nick, uh, er, mr. bookstoreman, why don't you carry SHOCK CINEMA?

xxxtian

Reading Flaubert

Jen and I are reading Madame Bovary (right, Jen?) and invite others to join us. Why are we reading Flaubert? Because so many damn people have made such a stinkin big deal about it. So fine! We'll read it. We'll try to figure out how we feel about Emma Bovary. And maybe, if you're really nice to us and don't give us a hard time about taking THIS LONG to read this CLASSIC BOOK, we'll blog about it.

So far my biggest complaint is that I'm reading an old mass market edition that I probably picked up from my sister, who probably had to read it in high school and anyway, the damn type bleeds right into the gutter and practically falls off the page and so the reading experience is so BAD that I'm actually thinking of ordering another copy from Books, Inc. (unfortunately, since I'm leaving for Nebraska tomorrow, I won't have time.)

So, yes, when reading a novel, the reading experience IS important. Take that, iPhone, and figure it out.

What no one knows

Is that the actual reason I'm quitting my drudgerous paralegal job is not because I want to do 60 hours a week at my internship towords the 3000 I must accrue towards MFT licensure. No, you motherfuckers--you my parents, you my classmates, you, George, my boss, you my chess students, you my coffee house baristas, in Marin County we shall burn together in hell like group therapy--it's because if I do 60 hours a week, and continue to cost George thousands in court sanctions due to my incompetence (or lack thereof. what?), my writing bone will be sucked to a dry crisp and I will start turning in laundry lists and prescription labels for critique.

I'm not being a hero for my writing, I just know when I'm about to dry up and crumple out of existence. This is the thing: writing is not, any longer, at least it better not be, some measure of my need to express myself. Expression is yucky. My ability to write things has to do with how much of me actually exists. Every month I pay a tithe to God, or 2,000 words of a 10,000 word document. If I'm not writing anything, the ten percent goes anyway and soon I get used up and I'm mister dry crisp (hi there). This month, for example, I'm up by about twenty pages. And since I wasn't writing for months before that, I am currently eighteen pages out of the whole, for those of you who feel like doing that math. I am eighteen pages. Unfornately it compounds, so next month is ten percent of eighteen, not twenty. ouch. And screenplays don't count for some reason. I tried working that in but got laughed out of the office.

This is a big fat thank you in disguise. Groop rocks. You really do. I can't express (ew) how much it means to me that a bunch of people actually get together to read my stuff and read each other's stuff and just have a good time and know that writing is a good thing and not a waste of time like Marin County. I exist when we hang out. I don't feel like I have to pay my tithe and I always sleep well when I go home.

*kiss*

You are all cordially invited to George and Martha's for an evening of fun and games.

Okay, so I’m going to save the sappy I love you all like homemade peach ice cream on the porch in July (but I do) and just get straight to the point of things…Potter.

Now, sadly, I wasn’t there to here the police in Alameda story: Shame on them, [I will be up north August 12-16 (fishing for invites? Yes.)] but having just returned from the tropics, I have a thing or two to say about Potter....The FIRST thing: is that 9 out of every ten readers were reading Potter (and no, sadly, the tenth was NOT reading Shawna Ryan's genius book as we all are, they were reading about Lindsay Lohen’s bracelet or Paris’ beaver) and what’s even more shocking was that probably, and perhaps I’m prone to hyperbole, but I was on a lot of aeroplanes, and beaches and sat and sipped poolside more than my usual and just maybe I’m right when I say every 7 out of 10 people were reading.

So here it is…nothing new…the old yah, but they’re reading / but Oh! What they’re reading debate and I’m not going to comment exactly, just toss it out there and let it dangle and sigh. Because they were all reading it. And not just the young and sunburned ones. The leathery old ones and the dolce-gabbana-clad pretty ones too. Really, with their Dior glasses and their Smart Water, they were turning pages of a book fatter then their waists—an orange one that clashed, at that—with their manicured nails and that’s it. That’s what I’m dropping onto groop. Discuss.

Or maybe really what I want to say is, and this is the SECOND thing that can be chalked up to my novel, now titled THIRST, being shopped for an endlessly LONG time, with toes crossed eating wood, only two rejections thus far and everyone else tossing out words like “adore” and “fantastic” and “on the fence” and the second thing I want to say is: why does it have to be the Meg Ryan character? I mean, love her hair, but aren’t we all ready for an Elizabeth Taylor? Or a Mia Farrow? Or a Joanne Woodward?

Don’t we all want to be cordially invited to George and Martha's for an evening of fun and games?

Groop Hug

Groop tonight was very filled with advice. For example, Rotta has this advice to Ben on dating a married woman: "She's going to suck you in and spit you out like a ... like a vacuum cleaner ... in a power outage." Fortunately, her story, which was the subject of critique, was gentler on its metaphors.

In the context of the critique, we learned that a flasher is what you call a man who takes his clothes off in public. A woman who takes her clothes off in public is called a stripper.

We also learned that these things are good: figs, Italian coffee with a cube of sugar, and Rotta's novel, which everyone agreed is improving as a result of the ministrations of groop.

Now, about Nick. First of all, the police force in Alameda should be roundly slapped for being rude to the parents and children on the street outside Books, Inc. at midnight on the night that Harry Potter went on sale. Crowds of readers should be accommodated and cherished.

More Nick: So, you're sitting in a bar and you've had a bad day and someone has put MacArthur Park on the jukebox and then Deitz and Rotta walk in and you're thinking... (no, you just can't quite capture the moment--the way Nick rocks his hand against the table and his voice rises a couple octaves and he gets that look, that preacher Nick look...you know the one I mean...)

Even More Nick: "Six years after groop formed, my mother asked me where it was that we rode when I met with my riding group."

Ride on.

Six Degrees of SKIDOO

i can't...stop it...anymore.

cad on skidoo on huffpo

xtian

Lettuce and other distractions of the moment

Last night, I dreamt that I bought lettuce, and a moment ago I was going to make lunch with it, but the making of lunch is happening in the realish world while the lettuce buying happened in the dreamish world. Perhaps I am sleeping too much.

In the dreamish world, I also finished the piece I am due to turn in for our meeting on Monday. In the realish world, it is a pathetic thing. My to do list is full of ephemera: catch up on work email, clean the toilet (which is analogous to writing), watch three hours of reality television, cry over ex-boyfriend, read backlogged New York Times magazine, make steak salad, write blog entry.

But the question is: how can you create David Lynch-like noise in 2D black on white? What does Florence smell like at dusk? How does your female narrator describe the chalk line between a man's welcome attention and the aggression that sets her overactive imagination toward the irrational?

Any help would be welcome.

Ranting in the Electric Church

A couple things to keep in mind if you’re lucky enough to get published. Ready?

1. Author photos: in your author photo, don’t touch your face. This is stupid and affected. Also, no pictures with your pets. I don’t care about them. So don’t tell me you live with three llamas and a Peruvian Parrot – I won’t read your book, you freak.

2. Acknowledgments: yes, please, if you get published, thank those that helped along the way – just remember that acknowledgments go in the back, not the front. And tone down the self-congratulatory bs. If your book is a work of genius, let other people tell me that. If you tell me, I won’t read your book, you freak.

Speaking of freaks – Jeff Somers has a new book coming out in the fall, a little rehashed cyberpunk tome called The Electric Church. The acknowledgments (which begin the book – steeeeriiike one!) start like this:

“When I handed my gorgeous wife, Danette, this manuscript….”

Ok. If this is how you begin your acknowledgments, if this is how you begin your book – if the first words that I ever see are the words “When I handed my gorgeous wife, Danette, this manuscript” I’m thinking to myself, why do you have the qualifier "gorgeous" before the word "wife"? Is your marriage in so much trouble that you have to suck up to her, using the first words in your book to do so? Because it's not cute, or sweet, it's off-putting.

(If your wife is gorgeous, let other people tell me that, ok? Please see Rule #2, above.)

And – if you think it’s not fair that I’m trashing the gorgeous wife, please wait. I’ll come back around to it. Trust me.

Anyway, that all amounts to steeriiike two!

Now, if you read past that first bit of Mr. Somers acknowledgments (most people won’t), then you’ll read that the gorgeous wife pronounces, “This is the one that’ll make you famous!” And while we can be agreed that it’s ok for spouses to enthuse, overly so, about the things we do and write, it’s unseemly if you have the hubris to agree with the spouse. Which, of course, is exactly what Mr. Somers does, for he concludes, “as always, my beloved and cherished wife was right.”

Have you heard of Mr. Somers or The Electric Church? Neither have I. So I’m just scratching my head, thinking, what was she right about? She said The Church was going to make Mr. Somers famous, but if that’s the case, where’s the prepublicity buzz? The snap, crackle and pop? I’m cupping my hand behind my ear and I’m hearing…crickets.

It’s at this point that the acknowledgements take an even more obnoxious turn. Mr. Somers thanks his agent. That’s all well and good. But then Mr. Somers informs us that his agent had the tools “to raise the book from a mere work of genius to a work of immense genius.” The italics are the author’s own, not mine. Makes you want to read the book, doesn’t it?

Oh wait, I forgot – you’re supposed to let other people tell me you’re a genius.

You freak.

And then, towards the end, Mr. Somers writes, “When, from time to time, I have suffered the cold sweat of self-doubt and thought, momentarily, that perhaps everything I write is not instantly a classic of literature that will be celebrated by future generations.…”

That’s a terrific line, no? I especially love the “momentarily.” Without it, you might not appreciate the fact that Mr. Somers is indeed asserting that, fleeting self-doubt notwithstanding, his words will be celebrated by my children’s children.

Steeeriike three!

Of course, I could just not be getting the joke. Perhaps Mr. Somers is trying to be wry. If that’s the case, Mr. Somers fails. Fails in his attempt, and thus fails in his writing, for I didn’t get the joke, nor did my immediate circle of friends.

But then perhaps we are all stupid. Perhaps this is an example of droll, New Jersey wit that we are unaccustomed to reading.

If you believe that, then consider this: the first words on the page were “When I handed my gorgeous wife, Danette, this manuscript....” Even though I’m not supposed to assume anything, ever, I will assume that Mr. Somers was not being wry here. But if the voice was attempting to be funny, if he was kidding later – just joshing you, folks! C’mon, lighten up! – then I would have to read the voice as funny at the beginning, also, because there’s never a change in tone, no neat writerly device tipping me to the fact that the frivolity has started. And that can’t be right, Mr. Somers must want/need us to believe that his wife is gorgeous – unless, again, he was joking, but then Mr. Somers would have to be involved in divorce proceedings, which I doubt.

And here's the important bit. If it didn't look like shouting, I'd put this all in caps. But that'd be shouting. So, understated, and not in all caps: if the first words I read are joking and droll, if they make me imagine a hipster sipping dirty martinis with a fedora rakishly tilted, swaying side-to-side as Frank croons in the background, if that's what I see, right out of the gates - then that's going to color what I expect out of the book. What I envision the words inside the Electric Church to be. But the Church ain't funny and sarcastic, not overall - its tone is dark, often electric, yes! But not cutesy. Sharp yes, cutesy no. Yet the acknowledgments read almost like a first chapter, and it reads cutesy. So don't - please - give me one tone and then rack off a bunch of words in another. Tone.

And so, again, please, stick the acknowledgments in the back. By that time, I'll have decided how electric the real words are. Before I ever see those other words.

To sum up – don’t touch your face in author photographs. If you're trying to be funny in your acknowledgments, then be funny. Finally, if you believe your own press, you have more trouble than I can hope to correct here.

Happy reading.