the solitary thing.



the dog thing.

the pete thing.



fuck forever


(the song, not the sentiment, as in not with pete, but even as a mess p.d. is a majestic mess.)

Possibly Visiting the City of Nostalgia

I've been invited to read at the Bookslut Reading Series in Chicago, in July. And this amazing honor (I did a Sally Fields), made me think more about the early-to-mid 20th century, of which Chicago has always towered as a kind of windy noir city, where nighttime is coffee shops, an apple pie picked at by a distracted woman in a brown pinstripe jacket and trousers, men walking with one hand holding onto their fedoras against the lake gusts. And scotch in a sweaty glass, amber lqiuid kissing down the ice cubes. And a pitcher in knickers, kicking up his leg as he hurls a fastball. Jazz juke joints, the quick swish of bopping skirts. The optimism of the early skyscrapers. 35 East Wacker. Louis Sullivan making every row of windows another lyric. Chicago is a city of survivors. Long history of that. The Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

The riots. Capone. A mass of nerves and glass and concrete rising up like a fist in the middle of the heartland. Or maybe that's not Chicago at all. Maybe that's all that's left in the synapses after watching a bunch of movies which either take place or refer to Chicago. Your Chicago is anything but my Chicago.

Maybe that's what M. Doughty (I mean Mike Doughty) meant
singing--more like intoning-- Is Chicago! Is not Chicago! in that self-same Soul Coughing song, back when everyone was friends and we all lived within about 5 blocks of each other and noone was upset and everyone hung happily on the big record deals they seemed to be handing out and didn't we all turn out to be survivors too. And I loved that song because the hook was repeated and repeated and contradicted itself every other line and we loved it as if it was the key to happiness, at least for a moment in the mid-90s at a pajama party at a loft in the East Village before the rents rose and the rehearsal space place turned into a fancy grocery store.

Remember?

Might as well come clean about it. Here's the formula:

Here is a photo of Mike McGonigal
who stayed in my apartment in that selfsame east village and at the time sported a nervous tic and a tiny brown leather jacket. Here he is in Portland I think, photographed by M. Doughty at a Yeti event, the selfsame M.Doughty who is also publishing a book with Yeti Books/Verse Chorus Press and the same Yeti who, with Steve Connell from Verse Chorus press, branched into a publishing house that is also publishing me and Luc Sante, who now lives 15 minutes away from me, apparently and who I have as of yet never met.

But due to some circumstances regarding other entanglements which drew all of us closer into the net, at least until the bands broke up and the rents rose and the artisanal bread rack was right about where they used to keep the sticky cables, this 6 degrees of separation diatribe is temporarily suspended for the purposes of walking with one foot in front of the other.
And yes, Bookslut Reading Series in Chicago in July, I would be honored to read.

I know we're not saints or virgins or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes, and most of the dirty people; we can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don't know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don't care that we don't.
—Dylan Thomas

Department of Instastories, continued

Picture Number 30
For a while she drove long distances, stopping roadside to take a photograph of her own shadow. It was a way of making sure she was still there. She’d twist herself a little to the right, or crouch, or stand up on her toes, and make sure the shadow was doing the same thing. That was during the season of her escape. There was hardly any snow that winter, except for the night she drove off. Then, the snow had been falling softly over the hollow for hours before she took off, and the tires skid over the pale velvet of 10 pm. That night was the first night she’d drive aimlessly, for hours. Somewhere, about 50 miles north, she’d gotten out and stopped to take a picture. That was picture number 1.

Marcus Leatherdale, Sultana - Khumba

Department of Instastories

Picture # 32
She drove herself 45 miles south, 5 miles west, for no particular reason. Then she moved over into the passenger seat. She sat there for a while. What was she doing here? She watched a green pickup roar by, watched a crow pick at a little mass of feathers of dust at the edge of a field. She turned on the radio and landed on a throaty country singer, a woman with a hoist the beermug kind of voice, a wise cracking voice, sing I'm a git on the road gal. That's what she was doing here. The sun streamed in. Godrays fell into her lap. She moved back into the driver's seat, and drove them back, 5 miles to the east, 45 miles to the north.

On reading with a poet

I'm reading with the poet Iris Litt at the Woodstock Poetry Society (6/9, at 2). Aside from the question on regional writing (still avoiding that one), I get asked whether or not I identify at all with poets. The question is levied, sometimes, after I've read a shorter piece, and the reader/listener is forced to make the same leaps as she might in certain poems. The answer is kind of yes. The truth is that I love poets. For one thing, some are very good at adding that reverent "w" sound into the word poet or poetry: so it sounds like poe-wet, or poe-wet-tree. JJ Wilson does that as smoothly as she mentions another remarkable moment, her darlng, literary repartee that makes her guests all feel part of our own marvelous moment. The "w" gives the words a shamanistic, native-esque kind of resonance. Maybe it's from living in Tucson, where poetry filled the air, and listening to a poet like Joy Harjo, or Leslie Marmon Silko (and thar goes regionalism on its strawhatted way), and feeling, Now here is someone who really does know the importance of the dust, the bush, the laugh lines in the sky.



For another thing poets are sometimes experts at economy, and allowing their imagination only certain roads: like an exclusive gps system, and for another thing they often seem to be able to merge work life and poetry life very well. Even the grand edgy conundrums take 10 words, not 140, and that is a model for living in any ilk, at least to me. But I use the use "seem" because these kind of generalizations, of course, are really, really wrong. Poets seem better at sipping, not gulping whiskey (with a nod to Dylan Thomas,

who gulped so that others could sip). Poets seem better at small talk. Maybe poets are just more fun. Everything does not seem like a terribly ironic, disturbing, enervating situation; an occasion where a bad mood might trigger that golden first line of that remarkable story about chucking it all and going to work in a cannery and falling in love with the foreman.

Or maybe that slightly distracted manner some of us have is just the awareness that time is clutching at our sleeves to sit back down and get back to work. Because writing fiction takes a long time.

The way poets treat language may have to do with it: bending rules to make language swing, refuting morays of copy style for the urgencies of line music, rhythm, that mental beat, the mindset or the narrative or narrator. But many fiction writers do this anyway. Many--the ones I love.

We're not as far away from each other as you might think, I'll say next time.

Just got asked if I thought of myself as a regional writer.

Note to Harley

Harley, the lines you were looking for were from Why I Got Fired (p. 71 in the book or online at sporkpress):

Stopped mid-dip just staring out at the voice in the room. Stopped and let myself think. Amazed under the lights. Thinking, there it is. What I've been missing. My launchpad, my gatecard, my carkey, my doorbell. A reason to fight.

Russian Lover and Other Stories

That below, as well as in proximity, is the book cover. The book is out--very soon. It's collected short stories. They were collected, but that sounds as if they were tucked here and there in a tidy old house. They were more like rounded up, some just needing some grooming and a good meal, others a whole new way to go. Some are very short (Tremor), and others quite long (Russian Lover, the title story, written as a series of letters). For an interesting review of Tremor, see Dan Wickett's litblog, Emerging Writers Network.

I previewed the book with a reading and symposium in California to about 100 students and assorted devoted reader people at NorthLight Books, a great indie bookstore in the tradition of such institutions. To all my wonderful ginea pigs, smart as they come, thak you. Thank you Sonoma State, and Hutchins School, and Barbara Lesch McCaffry with no e. And marvelous JJ Wilson, the Virginia Woolf Scholar, who laughed at the jokes and later, had a dinner, and made the most astounding, intelligent salad. The greens seemed to want to bite back--but playfully. I have never seen my father, veteran of 2 wars, enjoy bean soup quite like that.

JJ, by the way is heavily involved in the Sitting Room, a remarkable center for reading and women writers. Worth a visit, and I'm due for one myself.

The cover of the book is a painting by Steve SAS Schwartz--the other half is on the back.
and the design is by Patricia Fabricant.

Both great talents and wonder to work with.

There are blurbs on the back: one by the great Sam Lipsyte, one by the indomitable Lydia Millet. Thanks to them. Beyond thanks. I have been compared (see the VerseChorusPress page) to writers like TC Boyle and Margaret Atwood. Someday everyone wants another writer to be compared to them, not the other way around. Or not. How I wound up in such amazing company is like pondering the great primordial blessing, the proverbial horse's mouth, like looking at the teeth of Blue Hors Matine. More on that, the wondermare, another. SAS has always used mare as in nightmare, one of the best shorthands I've ever heard. I retain my faith in people to concoct their own language. I remain a convert to the written word.