Fast is Slow

Operative metaphors learned while running through the woods in the dark: fast is slow. If you run too fast, you'll snag your hat on a branch. If you walk instead of run, you can avoid the branches to begin with. But sometimes you just have to run.

Mijami book fair

At the Miami International Book Fair we ate arepas (corn cakes with mozarella). On Sunday I read and therefore fell in love with 2 writers I hadn't known, T. Cooper (Lipshitz 6 or Two Angry Blondes) and Felicia Luna Lemus (Like Son). In the author's lounge we sat around wondering why we'd been put together. They, it was clear, have long been in love with each other. They're a tight pack of alpha two. I sat on the edge of the campfire, edging closer in as we talked.

Some of my book takes place in Russia, and your book is called Russian Lover, T. Cooper speculated. Hm, we all said. But in that way that confluence happens accidentally and is recognized as closer kin than happenstance, we all read sections of our books dealing with assimilation in one way or another. We all push the edge, though differently. We all have dark hair. We all think of photographs as diving boards, as stories. In Felicia's case she's got the subject of the Edward Weston photo on her book cover tattooed on her wrist.

That must be it. The photos, the dark hair.

Whatever it was the audience thought the trio made perfect sense. Book fairs are wonderful. The writers are like the chocolate, the audiences hungry, the end of them--back to the world--can be bittersweet.

Bios of The Ulster Country Three

We are reading this Friday, 11/2 at 7 pm at the American
General Store in West Shokan, New York


Luc Sante's books include Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, Evidence, and The Factory of Facts. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and has written about books, movies, art, photography, and music for many other periodicals. Sante has received a Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Grammy (for album notes). He teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard. His new book, KILL ALL YOUR DARLINGS, is just out with YetiBooks/Verse Chorus Press.


Jana Martin's new volume of her short stories, RUSSIAN LOVER AND OTHER STORIES was published by the great small press YetiBooks/Verse Chorus Press. The book has received much critical acclaim. Her fiction and nonfiction appears in The Mississippi Review, Five Points, Spork, Yeti, the Village Voice, Cosmopolitan, The New York Times, Chronogram and Willow Springs, among others. She also writes regularly about design, architecture, the decorative arts and fashion, most recently on moli.com. Her fiction column, is mink hollow, appeared regularly on sporkpress.com, an awardwinning magazine and website. Her story "Hope" won the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers. A graduate of the MFA program at the University of Arizona, she lives in Ulster County and is working on another book. What you can't see here is that she is wearing those sunglasses over her eyeglasses.


Frank Boyer tends to undercut his own brilliance. He has published poems in a number of little (changing that to small) magazines and anthologies in Wisconsin, New Mexico, and New York. He is a master of the prose poem. He also writes fiction and drama, and does performance work, directing plays and doing his own solo performance/installation works. He teaches art, literature and performance-related subjects at SUNY-New Paltz and at SUNY-Ulster, and lives in Ulster County.

Mea Culpa

Why has it been so long? Isn't that the question you never want to have to publish? Because I was hired to write a blog, and although it's not about books and it's not about Russian Lover or Luc Sante or Vanessa Veselka or what Valerie Martin said today on the Bookshow on WAMC, which I listened to while driving south from Albany after meeting with the ear doctor who performed a tympanoplasty on my ear (and said we had a good result, which from a doctor is like a war whoop of joy, isn't it), and although it's not even about bookcovers or design, or about the wonderful painter Steven Schwartz, aka SAS, whose home and family the fires in Southern Cali missed by the geographic, ember-strewn, ashen equivalent of inches, or about why sometimes I don't want to read fiction and then suddenly run into it somewhere, and sit down and have the longest most delicious conversation ever anyway and wonder why the heck I ever thought of keeping myself hermetically sealed away from all those words, all that craft, all that wild writer's brain stewing and tangling and untangling the messy data of our hearts, it still requires a certain kind of writerly discipline and impulse.

That is why.


[technoviking]

But the wordy world keeps turning.

Darlin Neal curated the latest issue of The Mississippi Review online: The Hyperextended Family. There are great stories here, including a story by Claudia Smith, "Jennies," that has this great line: "She likes me to make the dolls alive." My story, "Painter," really a trio, a 3-part blue fugue of before and after, is in there too. Honored to be in such good company. Kind of a way of closing a long and wobbly circle that started in about 1984, when I worked with Mary Robison, who counted among her best friends "Rickle," who turned out to be Richard Barthelme, who is the editor of the Mississippi Review.

Mike McGonigal in the Green Room at Bumbershoot

I'm Making a List

On the eve of surgery I have this urge to make a list of all the outstanding things I have left to do and all the people I have left outstanding. Lately, it's the ones from years ago coming back into the fore. It's like a trip on the merry-go-round--there's that wonderful prancing horse again, there's the yellow steeds pulling the winged chariot, there's the dapple gray. Or maybe the cycles are comforting because however many changes I've undergone, there they are, my old friends, still willing to listen and still willing to talk.

I can almost hear you

Having lived with a perforated eardrum for a few years now I am finally scheduled for surgery. What they do is called a tympanoplasty. Do not hit that link if you are squeamish.

During a tympanoplasty, they make a patch. It may or may not become part of the body, but if it does—if the body accepts it—then I will suddenly be thrust into a very different kind of world. For all the time the eardrum has been absent, there have been so many sounds rushing in: air, ringing, hissing, clicks; I hear worse according to the audio tests but far better in terms of what's in the atmosphere. I hear everything and the air around everything. I say "What" a lot. I am looking forward to saying "What" a lot less. It has never been a favorite word of mine, though it is a favored concept: the what of everything matters a whole lot more than the why at times, and when you really get the what, you'll get a better why.

Portland, Seattle, NYC

Joan Wasser of Joan as Policewoman at Bumbershoot




































Stacey Levine, author, at Bumbershoot in the green room.

Come and Set a Piece: NYC Reading

Sept 18th: Reading in NYC with Luc Sante at 6:30. Here's the blurb from the New Yorker:

knitting factory
Luc Sante reads from his essay collection "Kill All Your Darlings:
Pieces 1990-2005" and Jana Martin reads from her short-story
collection, "Russian Lover." The two books are newly published by
Yeti, an underground arts magazine from Portland. (74 Leonard St.,
between Broadway and Church St. No tickets necessary. Sept. 18 at
6:30.)

Heading to Bumbershoot

I'm writing from Holocene, the 3nd night of the Halleluwah Festival, listening to a group hum. Tomorrow it's up to Bumbershoot, where everyone from Steve Earle to Joan as Policewoman are playing, and I'm reading:


Seattle. Sept. 3rd. 12:30-1:45

Have been thinking, all this time, of the amazing Grace Paley. RIP. Something tells me even to say that with her is to start a conversation, so — I'll hold up my end when it quiets down —

Portland

No better way to return to life than listening to Califone do a soundcheck at a club in Portland, Oregon. I'm reading here today. Part of the Halleluwah Festival.


The past 2 months have been all about raising $ and hacking away. And so here the guitar wails and here the girl types and here the air swirls happily around the lively room.






Luc Sante's book, Kill All Your Darlings, is out on YetiBooks/VerseChorus: disparate essays from recent years bound together. But disparate in a great way. A luc way, which is to say they all work together; they all make sense as one.



Brother Luc, kudos. The Yeti children are growing up.

Went to the Ulster County Fair. Ate a corn dog, walked through the 4H poultry house.

New beloved writer: Sonia Rivera-Valdés. Beautiful stories.

And new question: what is acceptable risk? In any field? In any realm?

Tammy Faye as Ghandi

I Geniunely Love You

The mess and scandal of Jim and Tammy Faye had always left me wondering about her. How much can someone convince herself that what she witnesses her husband doing is right? However oblivious she might be to her own mechanications, it's hard not to notice a mate's actions--and, with the veil-lifting effect of time--judge them.

But Tammy Faye, having divorced Jim after 30 years of marriage, married another ex-con. She explained that her mother had always told her life wasn't fair. This can be interpreted in so many ways. In her world view--often obscured my clumping mascara applied liberally to that fake fringe--perhaps Jim didn't really do anything wrong. Nor Messner. Handed lemons, you make lemonade, extoll the media reports, as if that had anything to do with it. But seeing her on Larry King, 65 pounds, eyes done in the same mask, hair brittle and fritzed from chemo but still a reminder of her salonified style, she did seem to be--content. She said, directly to the camera (this is on the last day of her life) I'd like to say that I geniunely love you. And I genuinely care. And I want to see you in heaven someday. I want you to find peace, and I want you to find joy. So maybe it wasn't all an act after all.

Lantern slide of Waterfalls in Woodstock, NY, ca. 1904

Coffee and Paper

The Literary Gazette (its own glossy-covered tabloid section in the Hudson River Reporter) is not online. This is sad for 2 reasons: 1. RSOL is reviewed. Since I wrote the book I can't use adjectives like astute or sensitive or enlightening. But if you can find the LG, get it: there are adjective-deserving reviews scores of new books in it; it feels like the NYTimes Book Review around Christmastime and makes you want to buy them all.

You can find copies of the LG at The Golden Notebook in Woodstock, NY, another healthy independent bookstore that makes writers as well as readers feel welcome. (Whereas in certain stores, it's a bit like, Oh, you wrote this? Well, can you go away so we can make some money?)

This Saturday, July 21 at 5 p.m. the Golden Notebook is hosting a book party and signing for RLOS. Actually, the event itself is down Tinker Street at Joshua's Cafe upstairs. Thank goodness for all these upstairs sections or writers would never have anywhere to read.

Jessa Crispin of Bookslut

Pancakes and Sausage

A few more words about Chicago: The Book Cellar, which handled sales at the Bookslut reading, is one of those thriving, robust independent bookstores that just will not be overcome. Which makes a writer very happy.

Over dinner at the Hopleaf--a vast sandwich made with fig butter; giant paper cones of french fries--I asked Jessa if she also considered herself a writer. She shook her head, but with no rue or self-effacement. Just grace. Certainly she's a reader, a great reader, and she knows how to make one good party after another, whether in a beer-poster-clad upstairs room at the Hopleaf or Bookslut. She's a hostess for all of us, a sundress'd impressario. In that way she belongs on the same hearty category as Mike McGonigal: self-made, peripatetic, generous but with standards and boundaries. The other thing is that, like McGonigal, she gives off a slightly timeless vibe: a bit San Francisco 1950s, a bit Chianti in Greenwich Village, a bit rockabilly, a bit Christina's World. Makes me think we should all mix vintage into new, as it strikes our imaginations, is like brain candy, and certainly fits into the re-use edict of living in this heating world. She keeps it a bit cooler to be sure. Someone give her a giant grant.