B dot O dot D dot

chronological age is not a consideration

2012-02-12T14:59:00.000-08:00

Revising short stories is hard, so I'm going to look up fellowships and ramble about art for a second here.

Went to the BMA yesterday and stumbled into their Print By Print exhibit, which the BMA describes as "an epic tour of serial printmaking." I bet that's not a phrase they use very often. In any case, there are some awesome print series on display in there, particularly Piranesi's "Imaginary Prisons," which I'd never seen before. Holy crap. If there was ever a group of images that captured the essence of my upcoming thesis book, it's "Imaginary Prisons." The prints are smoky and dark and distorted, and full of weird, purposeless machinery. The visual effect is very Kafka-esque, or like the menace behind the redundancy of a French farce.

And with all that, what you have are some very cool and inventive pieces of art that challenge you and make you work a little bit, but they're enormously rewarding once you put the time in.

Here's a link to the full series. The website is in Russian, but I think the click-the-thumbnail UI is pretty straightforward. And hey, on the off-chance you can read Russian, what a great time to practice.

shocking pens webs websites

2012-02-07T14:47:00.000-08:00

So today is Charles Dickens' birthday, hence the Victorian Google banner and what I'm sure is no shortage of Facebook statuses complaining about how bad Great Expectations is. I hope that's the case, anyway. That book sucked.

But Channel 4 has a neat article up that takes some guesses at what Dickens would be writing about if he was alive now. Turns out all the problems he was exposing then are still issues today, which is kind of depressing, and some of them (like child poverty) are actually on the rise now because of austerity measures in the UK. I'm sure the same is true for America as well.

It's a good list, but I don't know why they left off things like the Occupy movement and the increased militarization of police, both of which would challenge Dickens' progressive-but-not-radical take on social issues. It would also be nice to see a Dickensian take on the modern entertainment industry, which has thus far almost entirely ignored his ideas about the "little people" being as interesting and attention-worthy as the rich and beautiful. Seriously, Fox should just call Bones something like Hot Rich Supergeniuses and drop the insulting pretense that theirs is still a show based in the same universe as its audience. The same could be said for most stuff on TV. Yes, I am bitter.

Oh, and the Artichoke Haircut reading went well. They've listed some other readings coming up this month on their blog, so you should look at that while I return to cleaning and writing and such. Or you can read yet another polemic about how there are too many MFA programs in the shadow of Penn State kiboshing their writing program due to lack of funds. Up to you.

for printing out or reading on your computer screen

2012-01-31T12:11:00.000-08:00

Oh cool, more stuff about introverts.

Don't have too too much to say about this article other than to applaud their recognition that being an introvert doesn't mean you're a socially awkward misanthrope - rather, it means that you prefer low stimulation environments. That needs to be clarified way more than it is.

Workplaces need to be de-extroverted too, and really, professional life as a whole needs to calm the hell down. It's reaching the point where there's nothing for you in this world if you're not a natural salesperson or a type-A business school graduate, and it's especially frustrating that being an artist now depends on the ability to spend most of your time and energy turning your life into reality television, to paraphrase Bobcat Goldthwait. People claim that writers don't understand that, but we do - we just hate it because it's draining and it takes time away from our craft and it's often a convenient excuse for publishers to not spend money on promoting their authors because they think the Internet equals free money.

Ironically, the preceding paragraph makes me sound like a socially awkward misanthrope, and a bitter one at that. But I will be promoting myself with three readings in the next four weeks, so I think I've got a ways to go before I go completely Salinger and start peeing in jars.

but we need to care

2012-01-23T22:44:00.000-08:00

The final semester is almost upon me! Dear god. On Wednesday, I will begin putting my first by-God book together. Part of me wishes it was a novel instead of a collection of short stories, and another part of me wishes it was being published by someone other than myself for reasons other than finishing grad school, but those parts of me can get bent. This is a big occasion. Besides, I can take what I've learned here and apply it to my novel, which has yet again been shelved so I can work on school stuff.

I'm feeling good about the manuscript. I wasn't before, but I am now. It's not perfect, but it's becoming the kind of writing I want to put into the world; funny when it needs to be, gloomy when it needs to be, moody, atmospheric, all that fun stuff.

I also have some readings coming up. Artichoke Haircut's Spring 2012 issue release party is on Feb. 2nd, and since I'm in that issue, I'll be reading. I'll also be reading at Last Rites again on Feb. 26th, and at the Town Square Reading Series in mid-Feb., although I'm not sure what the exact date is. I want to say the 19th, but I could be wrong. Fun times! I'm trying to get some other readings together for when the book comes out - hopefully I'll be able to attend AWP so I can network my way into a little book tour.

I thought I had more to say, but I don't. To bed with me, then!

rough suggested daily search volumes

2012-01-15T20:06:00.000-08:00

Oh man, I forgot to mention that I went to MAGfest a little bit ago! For the unaware, it's an awesome music and video games convention that, at least this year, took over the Gaylord Hotel in National Harbor. Being something of a music and video games enthusiast myself, I went down there on the 7th to see what all the fuss was about. Turns out I'm as bad at Mortal Kombat and Bad Dudes now as I was when I was in middle school - there was a whole room full of arcade consoles, and an Atari hooked up to an old TV in front of the sort of couch that must have been in every grandmother's basement between 1975 and 1980. The attention to detail won me over immediately.

I also found out that video game culture pretty much means Nintendo games, specifically the Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy series. Being a Sega Genesis/PC gaming fellow in my younger days, I honestly felt a little out of my depth at times, and even the NES games I liked as a kid - Rygar, Chrysalis, The Punisher, all the cool wrestling games, etc. - are outliers. I think what happened is that I played video games in complete ignorance of the culture surrounding them because, as a pre-Internet young person, I didn't know where to find it, or even to look for it. I also played video games to escape from people anyway, much like I do now, so even if I'd known of a larger video gaming community, I might not have wanted anything to do with it.

Extrapolating from that, I think most of my nerdier hobbies developed the same way - without much guidance from other people with similar interests, I kinda went my own way. Which is fine, but it is weird when I figure out that there's an entire shared canon of books/games/whatever that I've missed out on. The one exception is punk rock - I may not have had access to the scene right away, but I knew it was around pretty early on, so my tastes aren't quite as slapdash there as they are for other things.

So that's that, then. Back to the manuscript!

you can't accomplish everything you need

2012-01-09T18:54:00.000-08:00

A picture of Mel Leopold, ostensibly taken during his rebellious years. His neck is huge. Thanks to Andrew Keating for inspiring this.

these things don’t happen by themselves

2012-01-03T09:40:00.000-08:00

Merry new year, everyone! May 2012 be less of a disappointment than 2011. Hopefully we won't all be subject to bullshit Mayan calendar predictions that won't happen.

Chuck Wendig's 25 Things Writers Should Stop Doing was a good article to read at the start of the new year - even though four or five of the entries on his list are basically the same thing, it's all very inspiring. Since I have a manuscript to bang into shape this month, Wendig's list floated across my transom at a fortuitous time. And he's right - writers can get too caught up in outside perceptions of what we should be doing, so we lose focus on what we could be doing. There are many possibilities in this line of work.

And while I'm here, my list of the best books I read in 2011 is due! I didn't get to read as much as in 2010, which is a shame, but hopefully this year will make up for it. Now then, in no special order...

Help! A Bear Is Eating Me (Mykel Hansen) might have the best title ever, and it's a really funny chunk of ranting surrealism in which a high-level executive gets trapped under his SUV in the woods and, yes, gets partially eaten by a bear. The scope of the novel is limited by both its length and the POV of its narrator, and it does fall into certain critical-of-suburbia cliches, but it's a much trippier savaging of pampered middle America than most other books attempting the same thing.

Yellow Back Radio Broke Down (Ishmael Reed) is a jive western about a voodoo-practicing black cowboy named the Loop Garoo Kid, and features anachronistic cameos from Thomas Jefferson and Lewis & Clark (as violent drunks and rapists, respectively). There are also closed-circuit televisions and spaceships, so it's safe to say that author Ishmael Reed plays with time. Too much, actually - his novel is pretty scattered and gets lost in the language sometimes, but it's really funny if you're willing to hang in there until it ultimately makes sense.

Girls and Women (Chella Courington) is a chapbook of prose poetry about the female body's interactions with religion, politics, family, and its immediate environment. Normally, collections like this are hectoring and humorless in tone, but Courington's voice is much more versatile than what I expected, and she's ultimately more interested in analysis than anger, seeking a deeper understanding of the body and why people (i.e. communities of Americans) react to it as they do.

Today and Tomorrow (Ofelia Hunt) was championed by The Lit Pub early on, and I totally understood why about halfway through - the narrator's unreliability is frustrating and funny and a hundred other things, but certainly engaging throughout. I think that comes from the narrator being as uncertain of/creeped out by her own perceptions as the reader is, and is trying to be understood rather than trying to obfuscate for the sake of it.

I Totally Meant to Do That (Jane Borden) is a non-fiction account of a woman transitioning between her cotillion-class Southern upbringing and her current hipsterish lifestyle in NYC. The book's arc is pretty typical of stories like this, but Jane is funny enough to pull them off without drawing attention to them, and it's interesting to watch her regress in sophistication upon moving to the Big City. Jane is also from the same part of North Carolina as me, so I'm connected to her book in kind of a special way.

The Book of Broken Hymns (Rafe Posey) is a collection of short stories by my friend/former classmate Rafe Posey. Rafe graduated from my program last year, and this book is his thesis, for lack of a better term. It's also damn good, and Rafe's gift for poetic language is a rare one. He's also good at weaving humor, baseball anecdotes, and Kafka-esque fawn transformations into stories about his own journey (Rafe is part of the trans community), which is the uniting theme of his collection.

The Disinformation Phase (Chris Toll) is a book of poetry full of addictive word games (lots of "who put the [word] in the [larger word]") and odd/charming images. Toll's work is very experimental, and god only knows what would happen if he brought any of it into a traditional workshop atmosphere, but it's also some of the least inhibited poetry I've ever read. Taken as a whole, this book is a very liberating experience.

alt.punk (Lavinia Ludlow) was my friend's first book, and I jokingly suggested retitling it Love In A Time of Barf and Semen due to the sometimes-graphic content. Lavinia's narrative voice is very charming, even at the most hectic moments of the book's punk rock pace, and her narrator has no shortage of personal agency. Anyone trying to make their protagonists more dynamic should read this.

Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt (Ken Sparling) is another great title, and Sparling knows how to build tension in small, subtle movements; the pressures of fatherhood, the main character's mounting frustration with having to be "on" all the time, his distant relationship with his wife, and his ranting private arguments with the author/himself assemble themselves into a surprisingly riveting narrative.

You Can Make Him Like You (Ben Tanzer) began my love affair with Tanzer's work. Holy crap. As I've said before and will say again, Tanzer makes character creation/maintenance look really easy, and his simple prose is graceful to the point of athletic. I'll be talking about Tanzer's new short story collection next month, so I'll cut off my fawning praise for the man here, but seriously. Buy this book.

walk into my web

2011-12-28T22:08:00.000-08:00

Merry holidays, everyone!

I've been watching a lot of Curious George with my niece, and it has become clear that the show was written by subversive geniuses. A lot of children's programming is written with special over-the-kid's-head stuff for the adults who will be watching these shows over and over and over and over and over again, but the Curious George writing team is especially bold. When 98% of the show is innocuous and helpful and completely free of tension, lines like "George and Jumpy Squirrel played nut hockey all afternoon" and "George couldn't sleep; he kept thinking about Mr. Pasketti's weed problem" come at you like jump scares in a modern horror movie.

I'm also reading The Manual of Detection, which I will post about once I'm done. There are a couple of other books on deck once that's done, but they can wait until I return to Baltimore.

anti-perspirant is different

2011-12-17T23:47:00.000-08:00

Since I've been making it a point to advertise this blog in other projects I'm working on (sound design for Glass Mind Theater, for example), I should also make it a point to update this blog more often. Of course, waiting ten days between posts lets me beat myself up for waiting so long, which isn't a bad opener.

In any case, I'm trying to prepare myself for the upcoming holiday trip to NC by getting as much writing done as possible. I've sent in stuff for Artichoke Haircut, will be writing stuff for TSB and the G'burg Times and Adfreak, and managed to get a reading slot at Last Rites in February. Not bad, considering how crappy my personal life has been over the past two weeks.

I also finished Lauren Groff's The Monsters of Templeton, which is sort of about a disgraced grad student's search for her true father as time and tourism warp her hometown and a legendary monster's corpse is dredged from the lake near her mother's house. I say "sort of about" because the book has ten jillion subplots that don't really go anywhere; it's the classic problem of too many cool ideas struggling for attention, so none of them get it. To quote the New York Times review, “does the town really need a monster and ghosts and eerie family portraits?” My slip may be showing here in terms of what I like to read, but it bothered me that a wealth of surrealism and weirdness just waiting to be explored got passed over for a much less interesting, or credible, slog through the narrator's family tree (one of the novel's many twists is that the narrator's mother knows who her real father is, but won't tell her because she has to find out for herself, which serves no purpose beyond enabling the plot).

Okay look, it's nearly 3am here. I'm going to sleep. I'm going to see Adam Robinson and Joe Young read tomorrow afternoon, so I'll probably blog about that afterwards.

absurd sexuality violence and profanity

2011-12-09T11:27:00.000-08:00

I made it to the end of the semester! Hooray! Now all I need to do is edit my manuscript over winter break and figure out a title and then go about the process of laying out and designing my book and then auuuurrghglkoetoiqerijghkldjfvnmqxwflkjsdnalkkklllll *dies*

Maybe that was a little dramatic, but I have tons of crap still to do before this short story collection drops in May, just in time for my graduate reading/bookfair. I'm also figuring out how to do a little mini-book tour of Baltimore, NYC, maybe DC, and maybe Philly or someplace nearby. Why not? I'll have enough books, so I might as well walk them around. It'll be weird though, because I make it a point to read funny/entertaining stuff at events and so far most of the stuff in my book is pretty grim. That's not automatically a bad thing - those stories need to be what they are - but reading fiction is soporific enough without the added challenge of the stories making people sad.

But! One or maybe two of my telegrams will be in Artichoke Haircut's February issue, and I have a story about being young and stupid and going to an ANTiSEEN show in last week's LOOP. And I still have the clown novel to work on once my MFA book has been put to bed. Somewhere in there I'll have to start sending things out to journals again, but for once I feel like I actually have time for that.

relevant quote of the day

2011-11-29T17:29:00.000-08:00

"The writing workshops that have proliferated in the last 20 or 30 years—and there have been so many of them in universities in America now—that this workshop culture makes it easy to talk about a story if it precedes in a way that demonstrably similar to stories past. If it actually has sort of rising action, climax, emotional epiphany, satisfying humanist conclusion, then it’s really easy to talk about in a workshop and it’s easy to organize the workshop to talk about it. That just means that the story sits right smack in a kind of demographic or intellectual mean. It’s not challenging us in any way. So the really great fiction and the really horrible fiction gets sort of pushed out to the margins in a workshop setting and it’s not easy for us to come up with a vocabulary to talk about them, nor to figure out how to fix them if they need fixing."

--Rick Moody, from his interview at Big Think

there aren’t too many bars

2011-11-15T21:37:00.000-08:00

Hey, so um sorry about the lack of pictures with the latest updates. I like having regular visual elements on the blog, even if I didn't come up with them (which is often the case), but looking for cool pictures that don't look like crap on here takes time that I haven't had lately.

Also, sorry about the lack of updates. I've probably mentioned this before, but my life is really boring most of the time, and I'd rather not update this thing just to do it - I'd like to have something at least vaguely substantive to post, ya know? This attitude is either an example of good self-restraint or bad marketing instincts, I can't decide which. It reminds me of the Bobcat Goldthwait interview I read recently where he denounced social media as a pain in the ass. His specific complaint was that social media, and the excuses it gives various industries to cut back on marketing costs, forces writers to turn their lives into reality television in the hopes of building any kind of audience. He's kinda right. I wish I could find it so I could link the whole thing.

Anyway, I went to a reading last weekend and heard Edward Mullany (who is touring his new book of poems), Barbara DeCesare, and Karl Taro Greenfeld read their stuff. They were all great, and I had a chat with Karl about Japanese youth culture and what really killed American hardcore punk in the 80s. I also asked him if he was in Japan when Antonio Inoki and the Great Sasuke were respectively elected to the Japanese senate, which outed me as a pro wrestling fan, but he was cool with it.

Tomorrow night is Steve Matanle's reading and book signing at my school, and then I need to get started on sound design for And Underneath The Moon, Glass Mind Theatre's upcoming production. Egad. So much to do. No wonder I never blog.

a remarkable fit of understanding

2011-11-08T22:32:00.000-08:00

We've been reading some really cool stuff in my advanced fiction workshop class this semester. My classmates have taste. The excerpts from Lorrie Moore's Swamplandia and Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned have been my favorites so far, but I think this week's selection - a selection from Victor Lavalle's Big Machine - made me think the most about my own work.

Along with the selection, I read this interview with Lavalle about narrative voice, and found it to be very revealing. Lavalle has a Colson Whitehead vibe to his narration, but with more of an earthy straightforwardness than Whitehead (or at least, more of a willingness to use it). Lavalle's definition of voice as "personality" informs his work a lot, I think, and his anecdote about a writer's work not sounding like the writer him/herself is something I struggle with a lot. My personality is such that people often think they can predict what my work is going to be like, and so I try to throw them curveballs and take them places they don't expect. Thus, I'm probably guilty of the "dry third person omniscient tone" Lavalle talked about, that distance on the page.

I'm trying to remedy that somewhat with the short story I'm working on now, which is my way of saying that I need to get back to work.

that's what life is all about

2011-10-31T12:18:00.000-07:00

Happy Halloween! I'll be celebrating America's best holiday by working (sigh) but my advanced workshop professor did send me this Daily Beast article about "respected" literary authors crossing over into "genre" work, specifically horror. It's a good, if short, article, but I'm chuckling at how the literary world is scrambling to reassure people that this is okay. The article quotes editor John Freeman, who reminds us all that "to quarantine horror in a genre is to ignore how much of the culture revolves around things we’re afraid of." And don't worry, "the ubiquity of horror, and the crossover of literary writers into the genre, is nothing to despair over."

Is all that really necessary? Are literary/indie readers that freaked out because writers with critical acclaim might take a break from writing about the dissolution of white middle class relationships? I'd like to give the masses a bit more credit than that. Besides, genre sells these days and none of the writers discussed in this article are stupid - they want to write things that sell (and get optioned for movies, etc.), and I think their readers understand that.

Not that I'm happy about the prospect of yet another wave of goddamned zombie books, but at least guys like Colson Whitehead have enough pride in what they do to not blatantly write pulp for a paycheck - if he's writing a zombie book, chances are it's going to be a really good book with zombies in it and not one of those stupid Jane Austen parodies.

So yeah, don't worry - Joan Didion and Philip Lopate won't be writing lamp monster novels any time soon. Relax and eat some dang candy. Geez.

how we lived, ate and didn’t wash

2011-10-18T21:37:00.000-07:00

I was reading letters home from soldiers at work today (for an official Job Task, no less), and stumbled upon this collection of letters from Paul Hills, who served during WWI. He wrote his mother frequently, and the contents of his letters are some of the best writing I've read in months. Holy crap. Every comfortable first world author who thinks his work is dark (i.e. me) should read through some of these and see what real literary chiaroscuro looks like. Some of his passages go from funny to sad to heartbreaking and back to funny in a paragraph's time. My friend Justin calls that WW1 period "the peak of the highly literate middle class (in the sense of being well read and caring about writing)."

Here, I'll paste in an example of what I mean:

There is certainly quite a satisfaction in locating some Heinie [slang for German army] outfit who has been worrying you, proving exactly where he is and then systematically blowing him up. Sometimes, tho, Jerry [also slang for German army] would get mad and shoot back which was as disagreeable as anything could be.

One morning after we had made a raid he was very mad, shooting up most everything in sight but somehow not us and we were shaking hands with ourselves wondering how long it would last when a great big black one went up right in front of the house about 200 yards away. That was the first in that particular locality and we wondered what was up.The next one was in direct line headed for us about 50 yards closer and so the next one and the next with about 30 seconds between shots. Finally one hit just in front of the house, showering dirt all over the place.

The corporal and I were looking out watching things and had a fine idea just where the next one would hit. For protection we had some high grade tiles and a sheet of first class tar paper.The situation to say the least was tense. The Corp simply kept on looking and said quietly, “and the next one gets us.”

I have had some really narrow shaves during this performance but never did I feel as I did while we were waiting for the next one that never came. Why it didn’t come heaven only knows but I do know that during that 30 seconds and the following two minutes I lived a hundred years. It isn’t the things that happen that scare you. It’s the things that might.

never apologize to fiona apple

2011-10-11T20:32:00.000-07:00

Oh dear god I'm guest-editing LOOP this week. The usual editor, Lauren Passell, is visiting her boyfriend's entire family in Taiwan (where she went to see his brother's jug band), so I was charged with soliciting and editing stories in her place.

I'm also going to be contributing some artwork to my buddy Ian's Lunar State Radio program, based on his experiences at Evergreen State. He describes the show as "a punk rock Prairie Home Companion," which sounds about right. It'll be a good time.

Other than that, I've been focusing on classwork - The Book (the final project/thesis for my MFA program) is peeking up over the horizon at me, laughing as I feebly attempt to reach it with my rough drafts and neophyte design skills. But I did have time to make a telegram for Artichoke Haircut, which they will publish in their next issue. Come to think of it, I should mail that to them already. Time flies when you're stressed to the point of manic insomnia.

some of the drunks at the couch

2011-10-07T14:04:00.000-07:00

So I volunteered some months back to be recorded for the 100,000 Poets for Change project (here's a relevant Baltimore Sun article), and now all the Baltimore-area recordings are up! There are some fine people reading their work here, and I'm honored to be listed among them. I'm not sure if my reading - recorded at a particularly rowdy Artichoke Haircut event - really defines "what it means to be human in an inhuman time," but it certainly was fun. And I like being part of larger-scale projects like this, anyway.

Click here for a full list of the Baltimore-area recordings - I'm listed as, of course, Dave K.

i'm 840 years old

2011-10-03T12:39:00.000-07:00

Two things!

First, I wrote a review of Kimberley Lynne's Dredging the Choptank over at The Lit Pub - go read it. Class issues and my own pirate heritage are discussed.

There's also the matter of this article from More Intelligent Life about writers who drink, and what happens when they sober up. It's an interesting read, especially if you're me and you think that the romantic notion of the frustrated drunken writer is goddamned stupid. To paraphrase Stephen King (a drunkard at one point himself), alcoholic writers don't drink to dull the pain of channeling life's miseries into art - they drink because they're drunks. Whether MIL intended to or not, they illustrate this key point rather nicely.

Maybe it's because I don't drink at all, but it's irritating when other artists claim that, because they're artists, they aren't supposed to be functional or have their shit together. Even when they're joking, it still comes off like an excuse to be irresponsible and blame it on the creative temperament. And since writers are understandably more verbal than other artists, they express their addictions louder and more often, as if being a shambling drunken mess makes one's work more authentic.

Anyway, no sense getting preachy - the article is far more coherent on these points than I am. Instead, I'll leave you with Henry Rollins advising against doing meth.

this is the internet

2011-09-22T09:04:00.000-07:00

Good lord, it's been nearly two weeks since my last update. The workload in my final year of grad school has joined forces with my job to throw me off my schedule for just about everything. At this rate I'll be turning in assignments via throwing them into the street while shrieking obscenities. I'm also applying for new jobs left and right, which is stressful and disheartening for reasons we all know.
But last weekend saw me dressing up like a heavy metal Viking to perform with the Baltimore Rock Opera Society at the H Street Festival in DC. Being a Viking, it turns out, is death on the back and knees, but it was insanely fun and will have to happen much more often. They're an extremely cool group of people, and their creative energy did wonders for my mood.

I also read Michael Bible's Simple Machines, which is literally a collection of sentences. While I don't understand the Cult of the Perfect Sentence that propagates itself through certain avenues of indie lit, it's possible to connect dots in Bible's book and make your own versions of stories with what he provides. Also, some of them are accompanied by illustrations, and I wish the entire book had been done that way. I will also say that Simple Machines ends with one of the best sentences ever. I won't spoil it here, but it's really good and, in an odd way, more satisfying that the endings to a lot of traditionally-written books I've read this year.

Speaking of books, I need to return to Murakami. Ta.

my number's on the stall

2011-09-12T11:15:00.000-07:00

So one of my first assignments in my advanced fiction workshop was to compile a list of 25 books that I haven't read yet, but that I should read to further my craft as a writer. Three of them will factor into my specific class experience somehow. I also finished Michael Bible's Simple Machines recently, which I'll talk about next time, but this should be a good lengthy post to make up for the radio silence on my end recently.

Thomas Pynchon – Against The Day

David Foster Wallace – Infinite Jest

Michael Kimball - Us

James Ellroy – American Tabloid

Michael Chabon – The Adventures of Kavalier and Klay

Paolo Bacigalupi – The Windup Girl

Philip K. Dick – The Man In the High Castle

Jules Verne – From the Earth to the Moon

Matt Bell – How They Were Found (collection)

Walter M. Miller – A Canticle for Leibowitz

Thom Jones – Cold Snap (collection)

Upton Sinclair – The Jungle

Ekaterina Sedia – The Secret History of Moscow

Michael Ondaatje – Anil's Ghost

Colson Whitehead – Sag Harbor

HP Lovecraft – Dreams of Terror & Death (collected stories)

Haruki Murakami – The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Ekaterina Sedia – The Secret History of Moscow

Neil Gaiman – Anansi Boys

Sinclair Lewis - Babbit

Deborah Kay Davies – True Things About Me
Manu Joseph – Serious Men

Gary Shteyngart – Super Sad True Love Story

Grace Krilanovich – This Orange Eats Creeps

Lauren Groff – The Monsters of Templeton

buttons on my lips are popping at the seams

2011-09-02T14:25:00.000-07:00

Well! Last night's Artichoke Haircut reading was a huge success. Got a great response, and heard some really cool stuff, both from the open mic participants and the other featured reader, Marion Winik.

I also started the final year of my MFA program - this semester is the advanced fiction workshop, for which I have to compile a list of 25 books I haven't read. Three of them will factor into assignments during the semester. Once I get that together, I'll probably post it here.

Oh also I read this, among other things, last night:

hey look i'm on a flyer

2011-08-20T08:49:00.000-07:00

a scripted move that failed

2011-08-16T08:55:00.000-07:00

More fan mail!

In response to this Adfreak post

Why am I reading something in "Adweek"? Oh, yeah it was about Kathy Griffin. I'll take her "horrible screech" over this guy's boring prose anytime. At least she's talented!

I'd make fun of him, but if he's white-knighting Kathy Griffin in response to a paragraph-long item on an advertising blog, he's clearly enough of a fan to have made it through one of her excruciating stand-up specials. I can't compete with that.

advertising is rocket science

2011-08-11T17:16:00.000-07:00

In response to this Adfreak post

That's it? Really, [DK]? That's your grand conclusion here? That this 3-minute clip - which although forgettable isn't nearly as insufferable as you attempt to paint it - proves only that Paul Rudd should be a sidekick?

You, uh, you know, wanna expound and perhaps offer some marketing insights here? Maybe some musings on the new ways Hollywood is marketing its movies, juxtaposing successful attempts with their failed counterparts?

Instead, we get an uninspired and utterly irrelevant "Rudd should just be a sidekick"? Guess maybe you got a little sidekick in you as well, [DK]. Though I must commend you for accomplishing one remarkable thing here: You unwittingly succeed in combining lame marketing criticism with lame movie criticism all in one lame paragraph.

Wow. Um. Sorry that Paul Rudd's unfunny commercial for his unfunny movie wasn't funny, guy. Maybe make yourself some tea when you're done crying and try to calm down.

Now then, go read my Christmas story over at LOOP. It's funnier than dudes getting butthurt on the Internet, I promise.

limited to residents only

2011-08-04T12:42:00.000-07:00

An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education has been making the rounds, so of course I only just got around to reading it.

The main point is that long-form reading, i.e. the study of literature that we all remember from high school/college literature courses, is unsustainable beyond "a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class." It sounds snootier than it is, but not by much.

What bothers me about this article, and others like it, is the double-standard it perpetuates. You'd never read something like this about math or science - in fact, conventional wisdom is that students absolutely NEED to learn them, no matter how boring or difficult that process may be. Those skills are important, and they take effort.

And while I don't disagree with that, it sticks in my craw when that same educational culture turns around and declares that literature (and to a lesser-but-still-implied degree, the humanities) is a garnish; that the same rigor applied to learning math and science is both unnecessary and impossible to apply to books. Perhaps this is because we're not competing with other countries over who can produce the best sonnets, but there's still a condescension here that casts a sour light on my entire profession, and I can't just let it sail by without comment.

Besides, if I had to write papers about The Once and Future King, then so should everyone else. I hate suffering alone.

LT'S NT WRT VWLS

2011-08-01T21:57:00.000-07:00

The reading was a success! I may even post a picture from it at some point. I read three short stories, two of which can be found on the sidebar to your right under "Published Works," to about 20 people or so (oddly, very few of them were among the 20 or so people who RSVP'd on Facebook), and they asked some really good and thoughtful questions. One of them said afterward that she felt like she was in a surreal version of Inside the Actor's Studio, due to the set (a comfy cubist chair and a plastic plant on the Spotlight UB circle rug) and the creepy preshow music I put together for the occasion. That, and I kinda look like James Lipton.

Really though, I learned a lot and it was nice to hear those stories out loud. Not even the untimely death of my passenger door's power window regulator could spoil my weekend - the whole thing was quite lovely. Once I take my car to the shop tomorrow, I may bring the new lappy to campus and see if I can get some writing done. If not, I'll bring it down to the local coffee shop and make use of their free wi-fi, since mine can't be counted on these days for some reason. Masons, I suspect.

Up next is the Artichoke Haircut open mic on Thursday, and then cranking down on the sound design for Muldoon. So I'd better sleep now, methinks.

knock me your lobes

2011-07-22T11:14:00.000-07:00

Firstly, to promote myself: I'm writing a new column for TSB Magazine (my first installment is here), and I've got a reading coming up next Thursday, the 28th, at the University of Baltimore at 7pm.

Second item: new laptop is here! I am the proud owner of a new Dell XPS, which is a huge improvement over the last Dell I had. The backlit keyboard is taking a little getting used-to, and some of the keys are in weird places, but it's a welcome addition to the home office, that's for sure.

I finished two books during my computerlessness; Mykel Hansen's Help! A Bear Is Eating Me and Ishmael Reed's Yellow Back Radio Broke Down. Both of them were short but fulfilling experimentalish works that are well worth your time.

Help! A Bear is remarkably straightforward: a high-level executive gets trapped under his SUV during a company wilderness retreat and gets partially eaten by a bear. The novel, therefore, is a surreal monologue from said executive's POV as he pops painkillers and rants about his observations, philosophies, and pain-induced hallucinations. When people I know see the cover, they always ask what the book's about, and are always surprised by my response - there's no winking irony here, only a delightful sort of lunacy that would make George Saunders proud. It's also a satisfying read, as the narrator is an unlikable yuppie asshole who gets exactly what he deserves on nearly every page, and yet somehow his physical endurance and obvious pathology make him sympathetic. Much as you may dislike his hyper-capitalistic misogyny, it's hard to really hate someone who, to judge by what he remembers of his childhood, never had much of a chance to be a decent human being.

Yellow Back Radio is a little more complicated. If Cab Calloway or Lord Buckley had written a western, it would have been this book. It concerns a voodoo-practicing black cowboy named the Loop Garoo Kid and feud with the murderous, greedy white landowner Drag Gibson. The story is told in a combination of black jazz slang and hilarious anachronism - Thomas Jefferson and Lewis & Clark both appear (as violent drunks and rapists, respectively) alongside closed-circuit television and helicopters. It's a little hard to explain. The Harvard Crimson said that the book "works the way a poker game does, depending entirely on the player's tricks, timing, and style," which is pretty accurate, so we'll go with that, but Reed is as witty as he is scattered, and his novel is one that confuses, but that's okay because the payoff is worth it.

So that's that. Back to sound design!

is it even broad-spectrum

2011-07-19T09:05:00.000-07:00

New laptop should be coming in tomorrow! Thank god. Having to schlep over to campus every time I need to type anything is getting old, old, old. And yes I know, first world problems etc., but it's doubly annoying when you need reliable computer access to make a living. I can't exactly send handfuls of scribbled-on notebook paper and coffeeshop napkins over the Mojo Wire in 2011, you know.

Anyway, I've been busy with tech work, first for a one-act festival at Load of Fun here in B'more, then for High Zero's Worlds In Collusion experimental music festival at Artscape. I had a nice chat with HZ organizer John Berndt about how he finds performers to book - he told me that he looks for people who cut through his cynicism and sweep him up into whatever they're doing. He likes being a fan, I think, and I just got done listening to the audiobook of John Waters' Role Models, a volume entirely dedicated to his numerous deviant fandoms - Johnny Mathis, outsider pornography, Tennessee Williams, etc.

But then Max Garner's "Sphere: The Thelonious Monk Story" has a section where Thelonious is laughing at his beatnik fans who thought he was "their Dalai Lama or something." Would he have had more respect for his white, beret-wearing fans if they'd been more detached, less obvious about how much they respected his music? Do all performers look down on their more dedicated fans, even as they feed on their support?

Speaking as an artist and a fan of other artists, I'm with the two Johns (and Patton Oswalt, who's been championing nerdery for years) - I like it when my interests excite me, even to the point where I come off looking like a mark or somehow (gasp!) uncool for it. And I think jadedness as an affectation is boring, really, even if it is considered more appropriate for working artists/writers these days.

Anyway, time to log off here and get back to my book. I finished a couple of books yesterday, and will be posting about those next time.

fish for prizes

2011-07-14T09:57:00.000-07:00

So I got my first bit of screenplay feedback from the Creative World Awards, and they...liked it. I don't think they completely understood it, but I got a 7.9/8 out of 10 on their scorecard and I might have a shot at advancing beyond the prelims. Go me!

I must say, the feedback I got was an interesting mix of bewildering, hilarious, and flattering. I've never gotten any kind of Hollywood insider take on my work before, so it was worth it just for that, but some of their observations were just odd, and really funny due to their neutrality. "There [is] sarcastic banter and some funny lines, which suggest this is a comedy, but then Nora gets shot in the face and this quickly becomes anything but a comedy" is a line I wish I'd written - I've been laughing about that one for days. They did give me some truly helpful advice about what to add (an extra 10-15 pages) and where, though, so I'm not just making fun of them.

My screenwriting prof was more upset than me about their inability to pin down what genre I was writing in (they think I should up the comedy, since "the author clearly has a grasp for writing that genre"), and compared it to studio suits scratching their heads about Pulp Fiction, which could be described as a dark, violent comedy. It was also written by a guy with industry cred, so I think the studios feel like crossing genres is something you need to earn.

But who cares? This was not the brutal rejection I had expected; in fact, they compared it to Smokin' Aces, which I took as a huge compliment. I loved that movie. Let's just see what happens from here.

free printable mailing labels

2011-07-08T12:46:00.000-07:00

Been a while since I updated, eh? In my defense, my laptop died (I'm typing this on a rental from school), and I'm teching a show at Loads of Fun here in B'more, plus I've been listening to Darkbuster non-stop. My mind has been elsewhere.

But! I submitted my screenplay to the Creative World Awards, which I may have mentioned already, and my novel revision is circulating among a handful of carefully-chosen readers. With any luck, I'm not far from hurling it at publishers. In the meantime, I've started a new project that I might have time to actually work on between Artscape next weekend and my big reading on the 28th.

I'm also, sadly, beginning to understand why so much of Hunter S. Thompson's correspondence was about chasing money and settling debts. Sheesh. It's rough out there.

several things happened

2011-07-01T13:00:00.000-07:00

As promised, here's my article about Japanese pro wrestling for Shinpai Deshou, in which my sad nerdery is laid plain for all to see.

Also, speaking of nerds, here's a tidbit from George R.R. Martin in which he talks about editing the enormous books in his current series. He refers to editing as "sweat." As unpleasant as that mental picture is, I found this passage rather useful:

"...I did my sweat. That's a technique I learned in Hollywood, where my scripts were always too long. "This is too long," the studio would say. "Trim it by eight pages." But I hated to lose any good stuff -- scenes, dialogue exchanges, bits of action -- so instead I would go through the script trimming and tightening line by line and word by word, cutting out the fat and leaving the muscle. I found the process so valuable that I've done the same with all my books since leaving LA. It's the last stage of the process. Finish the book, then go through it, cutting, cutting, cutting. It produces a tighter, stronger text, I feel. In the case of A DANCE WITH DRAGONS, my sweat -- most of it performed after we announced the book's publication date but before I delivered the final chapters -- brought the page count down almost eighty pages all by itself." -- full post is here.

Now then, back to my book.

CAPITAL LETTERS YOU GUYS

2011-06-29T11:49:00.000-07:00

I have been guest blogging like a FIEND lately. So much so that there's no need for a picture to accompany this post because it would only distract from how IN DEMAND I am.

Over at jmww, I review Chella Courington's Girls & Women.

I have two articles up at The Lit Pub; one talking about The Chronology of Water's book trailer, and another talking about unreliable narration in Ofelia Hunt's Today & Tomorrow.

And on Friday, I'll be talking about Japanese professional wrestling over at Shinpai Deshou, a blog for both graduate and undergraduate students in the field of Japanese Studies. I'll link that post here when the time comes.

Phew. There's no shortage of me on the Internet, it would seem. There is an absolute dearth of me in the gym, however, so I'mma go rectify that now.

trying to pick out something cultural

2011-06-24T10:54:00.000-07:00

I was going to post about the "life experience" criticism of MFA programs, and whether or not they make writers out of people with nothing to say, but I think I need to organize my thoughts a bit more before moving forward with that idea. But I do want to point out that not everyone in an MFA program is a 23-year-old urban hipster. Lots of working professionals go to grad school. My program (which, admittedly, is something of an outlier) has tons of them; I'm almost 30 and I'm on the younger end of the spectrum. Maybe that's because UB's program is a mixture of writing and graphic design, and the latter element draws from a wider pool of applicants than a place like, say, Iowa, where you're not even allowed to mention Twitter in class. Maybe more MFA programs should offer writing in conjunction with "practical" skills to draw more older people who want to write as much as they need to broaden their skillsets.

Or maybe companies that employ writers should actually pay them what they're worth, so more of us can learn through professional, instead of academic, experience.

Speaking of writing, I've got a novel to finish, so back to it. I'm so close I can almost feel the rejections in my hands, still warm from the printer.

after a detailed presentation

2011-06-20T10:13:00.000-07:00

Wow. I got kinda political in that last post. I guess I had some things to get off my chest. And like any good hypocrite, I shall descend from my soapbox to point derisively at someone who just ascended to theirs - Ruth Fowler just fucking unhinges on the fact that a young MFA graduate's boring novel won the Orange Prize. It's a pretty brutal write-up. Tea Obreht might want to change her locks or something.

The basic gist of Fowler's rage is that Obreht is too young and mediocre and academic to win contests, and that this state of affairs is almost an insult to "writers like Nabokov: those who hadn't spent five years learning how to put a fucking sentence together, but instead wrote with their guts." Uh.

First of all, Nabokov's writing was boring and overly technical and all about engaging the brain, which puts him in direct conflict with the point Fowler is trying to make. Steinbeck is a better example of the gut, if she's looking for writers who probably died before she was born and are therefore permissible appeals to the Canon.

Second of all, how does she know Nabokov didn't spend five years learning how to put sentences together? I've said before that MFA programs have become a popular, if controversial, way for writers to blossom because all the other ways of learning it - advertising, journalism, publishing, etc. - aren't hiring nearly as much as they used to, and in some cases are actively declining. Blame them before you shit on an entire generation of kids who just want to get better at what they love to do. Is Fowler's own MA in English Lit. more valuable or earned because she had to strip for a while in Manhattan?

Not that everything Fowler says is invalid. "Astonishingly pretentious bullshit" and "fawning idiocy" both abound in the literary sphere, and first novels by young authors who've been in school for their entire adult lives thus far are always rocky efforts. Mine probably is too, despite all my efforts in revision to not come off like a know-it-all, and I at least spent a couple of years freelancing in the real world between college and grad school. But that's not even where the focus should be. The Great Novelists of Yesteryear didn't pluck ideas out of the aether - they had to learn through seeking out guidance just like the rest of us, and they often had better ways of doing so available to them. Fowler's either ignoring that or she's too high on her own bitterness to see it.

which distractions of the common man do you enjoy

2011-06-15T09:37:00.000-07:00

David --

Gah! You scared me!

I've set aside time for four supporters like you to join me for dinner.

O...kay.

Most campaigns fill their dinner guest lists primarily with Washington lobbyists and special interests. We didn't get here doing that, and we're not going to start now. We're running a different kind of campaign. We don't take money from Washington lobbyists or corporate PACs -- we never have, and we never will.

No, you just give them jobs in your administration. All the dirt you've been kicking up around Elizabeth Warren has made that painfully clear.

We rely on everyday Americans giving whatever they can afford -- and I want to spend time with a few of you.

...is anyone else getting a sex vibe from this? I half expect him to appear over my shoulder and refill my wine glass without asking.

So if you make a donation today, you'll be automatically entered for a chance to be one of the four supporters to sit down with me for dinner. Please donate $75 or more today. We'll pay for your flight and the dinner -- all you need to bring is your story and your ideas about how we can continue to make this a better country for all Americans.

Pfft, I'll give you those right now. Regulate the banks and health insurance companies (price controls for the latter), forgive student loan debt, allow states to enforce their own usury laws, and roll back the "state secrets" expansion you've been abusing for the past couple of years. It's a longshot to ask you to raise taxes on the obscenely wealthy (even a Nixon-era tax rate would suffice), but I sure would appreciate it since trickle-down economics is total bullshit that doesn't work. Oh, and blowing less money on defense contracting projects that no one wants would sure put a smile on my face. Not that you'd ever see it, because a) you won't do any of that, and b) even if I got to have dinner with you, I wouldn't be allowed to bring up any of this stuff without the Secret Service boxing up my food and tossing me out on my face.

This won't be a formal affair. It's the kind of casual meal among friends that I don't get to have as often as I'd like anymore, so I hope you'll consider joining me. But I'm not asking you to donate today just so you'll be entered for a chance to meet me. I'm asking you to say you believe in the kind of politics that gives people like you a seat at the table -- whether it's the dinner table with me or the table where decisions are made about what kind of country we want to be.

Yep, definitely getting that sex vibe. This is the sort of phrasing you hear from husbands taking their wives out because they feel guilty about cheating on them. Which, honestly, is pretty apropos of the Left's relationship with Obama right about now. He seriously thinks we're all one champagne flute away from forgiving him for jailing all those whistleblowers.

It starts with a gift of whatever you can afford. Please make a donation of $75 today, and we'll throw your name in the hat for the upcoming dinner. I've said before that I want people like you to shape this campaign from the very beginning

Oh really? You could have turned your Team Obama campaign centers into organizational hubs for Democratic community service projects and actually put all that energy your campaign generated to good use. Or you could have kept them all open as campaign centers, since you've spent your entire first term as president begging me for money and giving high-level government jobs to every banking executive in your Rolodex, presumably to shore up campaign funds for 2012. Buy your own votes, you rich asshole.

and this is a chance for four people to share their ideas directly with me.

Hope to see you soon,
Barack

Fuck you. Sir. I'll see myself out.

the purchasing, renting and building of furniture

2011-06-13T22:49:00.000-07:00

So now that I've finished my screenplay, I'm going to enter it into some contests once I pull some submission fee money together. I also made a movie poster for my screenplay, just because. I'm not Saul Bass or anything, but I think it turned out okay.

welcome to the dahl-house

2011-06-06T14:08:00.000-07:00

Interesting discussions going on at The Lit Pub these days - Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water is not only a work of nigh-unprecedented emotional openness, it's inspiring some pretty revelatory feedback from the people commenting on Molly Gaudry's conversations with Lidia. I joined in on a different conversation about pen names, in response to Ofelia Hunt talking about whether or not her pen name is just a pseudonym or another persona entirely (link is here).

My point, which I accidentally posted twice because I'm an idiot, was that names strike a really peculiar chord with people. Using a false name can make them feel tricked, having a "writerly name" (especially if it's a first-middle/middle initial-last name combo) encourages them to take you seriously, and having a non-writerly name (like Dave K., for instance) apparently tells the world that you need to change your name to something writerly, and that they should convince you of this. That's what my experience has been, anyway. And I know people mean well, but (paraphrasing from the TLP discussion here) do I really have to bend my own goddamned name to the whims of marketability instead of just going by what’s comfortable for me? That's a level of opportunism that even I'm wary of, which is saying a lot.

On a different topic, it seems as though Roald Dahl was something of a Jew-hating, racist lunatic. People never react well to the personal failings of children's authors, but my generation seems particularly unwilling to accept Dahl's lesser qualities, to judge by the comments. Frankly, I'm not surprised - Dahl clearly had a screw loose, which is what made his writing so much fun. That and, according to the article, careful editing.

But seriously, have you read Boy? Dahl spent his formative years getting the shit caned out of him by sadistic weirdos in boarding school. Between that and the abysmal social attitudes of the 1920s, it's a wonder he turned out as well as he did. Fact is, deeply screwed up people often produce great art, sometimes for audiences completely at odds with their personalities. That's one of the frustrating and wonderful things about art, ya know? I shake my head at what an awful person he was, yes, but I don't see the point in getting too upset about it otherwise since he's been dead for years now.

All right, enough chatter. Back to work.

now you're on the trolley

2011-05-30T18:23:00.000-07:00

My typically scattershot media intake has led to an unusual connection between David Foster Wallace and professional wrestler/comedian Colt Cabana - cabbaging free food. DFW spoke highly of the practice in his "Up, Simba" essay about McCain's 2000 presidential campaign, and also in his Harper's piece about the Indiana State Fair (the point-proving quote having to do with using his press credentials to stop by the Dessert Tents and eat free samples until he was carried out on a gurney). Cabana, a professional wrestler by trade, lives on the road and is well-known for his money-saving carnyisms, which include selling literally everything he possibly can at his merch table, stealing toilet paper from hotels and airports, and soliciting Subway gift cards from fans of his hilarious podcast, The Art of Wrestling. He brings it up a fair amount with the guys he interviews, and anyone who was on Wrestling Society X with him fondly recalls abusing the neighboring show's catering (pretty sure it was Monk).

I too know the appeal of free vittles thanks to years spent in theatre and A/V support. People in certain lines of work, namely the arts and the low-end service industry, don't get a lot of perks. Lousy pay, no benefits, no real job security, precious little respect from anyone higher up the food chain even if they're depending on your help, and so on. We're made to feel utterly expendable and simultaneously reminded that we're lucky to have jobs at all. Which is true, and sad. It also explains why a lot of artists, especially touring ones, stoop to levels of thrift and hucksterism that are as ridiculous as they are kind of admirable. Not that I support outright stealing from people, but I do understand that unstable jobs require a certain amount of imagination - one must make one's own rewards at times. Punk rock's DIY ethic was built on this very thing, albeit with a stronger moral foundation. And even then, Get In the Van shows how far some guys were willing to go to save money.

I'm rambling, so I'll end here before this post becomes completely rudderless, but I guess the point is that I've been semi-consciously collecting and enjoying tales of undignified thrift, perhaps to lend some credibility to my own. And as research, most likely.

no picture will fit this post

2011-05-26T19:15:00.000-07:00

I wrote another piece for the always-excellent LOOP e-newsletter: this one's about one of my college roommates. I think Lauren's introductions to each issue are getting funnier every week, and it's nice to exercise the ol' non-fiction voice a bit.

And now, a short snippet from the novel:

“I don't read that shit,” the cashier replied.

To be followed by a slightly longer snippet from my roommate story:

Living by yourself is seriously the best possible set-up. If you think otherwise, it’s because you’re some kind of weird mutant extrovert who should be biting the heads off chickens in the circus.

Elsewhere, Blake Butler talks about music and drinks gin.

of great value to the community

2011-05-21T22:12:00.000-07:00

"We don’t need critics obsessed with the real, or with whether the novel is alive or dead. We need critics willing to look at the novels that are already out there, going about their business, quietly making the future of literature, whether “we” like it or not."
--taken from Jess Row's The Novel Is Not Dead

"In order to prevent the fabric of elite art society from being torn apart by the rampant proliferation of the contemporary artist, a specific modus operandi must be introduced into the institutional framework of art schools so as to control and shape the former’s behaviour and functional purpose. That is, through systematic inculcation of the institution’s ethos contemporary artists are manufactured en masse as purveyors of meaninglessness, instruments of obfuscation that safeguard and conceal the locus of the elite from the bewildered eyes of the vapid, homogenous masses."
--taken from David McGill's The Death of Modern Art

Have fun with all that. I got some very encouraging feedback on the finished draft of my screenplay (and considering what inspired it, that's no small thing), and the novel is humming along nicely. Creatively speaking, life's pretty good right now.

those twin engines of all

2011-05-17T23:10:00.000-07:00

So yeah, I finished Jane Borden's I Totally Meant to Do That recently, and because my own life is incredibly dull and full of apathy and pantslessness/frenzied productivity that I can't put into words, I will talk about this book. I actually bought it from her when she read from it at Atomic Books, and was pleasantly surprised to find that she's from my hometown. My write-up of the event kinda turned into a book review, so I'll try not to pull too much from it.

Jane's book is pretty much a memoir based around the transition from her debutante North Carolina upbringing (where my Catholic family wouldn't have been welcome) to her current semi-hipsterish life in NYC. Books like this get written all the time, but Jane is actually funny, which makes the familiar premise much easier to get into. It's also amusing to me that her parents wouldn't let her go anywhere near UNCG or Guilford College, while I spent a lot of time in those areas as a sullen black-clothes-wearing asshole teenager. Anyway, DigBoston.com's review of this book calls it "a crisis of location," which is exactly what's happening here - Jane spends a lot of time trying to figure out which culture she belongs to, searching for pieces of one in the other, and interestingly presents NYC as a city full of classless hedonists compared to the more elegant South of her youth. Given the South's cultural legacy in this country, that's a nice inversion of stereotypes on Jane's part.

I also, finally, finished The Intuitionist, which I skimmed in college and always wanted to go back and read again. It was Colson Whitehead's first novel, and it's excellent, creating an urban noir atmosphere fueled by the labyrinthine politics of elevator manufacturing and inspection, which are also an allegory for racial uplift. Whitehead's talent is creating a truly speculative setting that feels strange and unreal, but also plausible. In a world where speculative fiction = gimmicky nerd-pandering most of the time, his approach is really nice to see. He also commands a lot of vivid imagery throughout, even in sections that feel a little expository or overwritten - rush hour traffic doesn't always need a metaphor, ya know? But that's a minor quibble, and I think I'll be reading Sag Harbor, his most recent novel, once I get through some other ones.

And, y'know, once I bash my own novel into shape. It's getting there - a few troublesome characters are smoothing out, and I've gotten some good work in this week, with more to come. Progress!

glass under human teeth

2011-05-15T21:15:00.000-07:00

My semester is done! The screenplay is turned in, the final graphic design project has been graded, and now I have the summer to finish revising the novel and get some other projects doing. Finally. I was beginning to think I'd never see this day.

I also contributed some more artwork to The Light Ekphrastic, where I was paired with awesome experimental poet Catherine Maire. I'm not what you'd call a brilliant artist, but I did the best I could and messed around with two different styles - the first image is hand-drawn (and badly photographed), while the second is a digital collage.

Also, I sent my buddy Lavinia Ludlow a .pdf copy of Gouts of Angry Mist - her response-blurb is on my Praise... page with the others. And I might be a featured reader at Artichoke Haircut's next reading here in Harm City - I read during the open mic portion of their last event, and they must have liked me, because one of their editors offered it to me on the spot. More updates on that as they occur.

Now then, sleep! I'll post about Jane Borden's book, which I just finished, next time around.

no photography please

2011-05-07T10:02:00.000-07:00

I attended, by way of teching, my MFA program's graduate reading last night. It was awesome. There were 18 of them reading selections from the books they put together this semester, and not a single time did my attention stray from the stage. Same with the audience - we were all riveted because they're all so good. They've set a high standard to meet, for sure. I also bought some of their books, which I'll be reviewing here as I finish them.

Now then, back to entertaining my mother, who's visiting for the weekend, before tromping into work on Sunday of all fucking days to do lights for the Heifetz Institute. Joy.

just how the fragments work

2011-04-30T12:03:00.000-07:00

Books! I have finished some while procrastinating on editing my own.

The Disinformation Phase, Chris Toll.
Great stuff here. Chris' poetry is full of addictive word games (lots of "who put the [word] in the [larger word]") and odd/charming images. I kept picturing the scenic artwork from Machinarium while I read this book, which is a pairing I don't fully understand yet. Maybe it's because Chris' poems hint at a communicative dystopia without losing the twinkle in their eye. Or something. I could just be weird.

alt.punk, by Lavinia Ludlow
Be warned, there is a lot of barf and semen in this book. Not physically in the book itself, but in the story of a germ-phobic suburbanite whose journey towards independence (for good or ill) means unshackling herself from the various controls over her life - her mother, her job, her fears. Naturally, this process has to involve numerous bodily fluids. Like any punk band worth remembering, alt.punk plays too fast and too hard and exhausts itself at points throughout, but the book's charm lies in all that effort, that sheer cussedness. And the parallel stories of the main character's developing self-reliance and her budding rock star boyfriend's plummet into complete dependence don't get lost in the telling - rather, they shine because of it. I really enjoyed this, and I'm proud of my friend for writing it.

Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt, Ken Sparling
Bought this at AWP and had a couple of false starts before diving in - I think the micro-episodic scene structure intimidated me or something. I also know jack all squat about parenting, which is the focus of this book. But Sparling knows how to build tension in small, subtle movements, and the main character's mounting frustration with having to be "on" all the time, his distant relationship with his wife, and his ranting private arguments with the author/himself assemble themselves as a surprisingly riveting narrative. The ending is a little sudden and flags in comparison to the middle and near-end of the rest of the novel, but this is still one of the most interesting books I've read in a long time, both for style and content.

contrary to the others

2011-04-26T17:42:00.000-07:00

Apologies for the lack of updates - this semester is dragging its belly towards the finish line, leaving me with precious little time to do much more than homework and empty my cat's litter box. But I do have a few random thoughts that I may expand in future postings if I remember/feel like it/am not dead or crazy from exhaustion by then.

People have FEELINGS about memoirs. It's probably a bad sign that whenever I hear the word memoir I think of vacuous celebrity ghostwriter jobs or boring hipsters waxing on about their bad relationships and wacky relatives. Especially because there are a couple of memoirs that I really like, namely Mick Foley's 500-page whale of a book that I bought the day it came out and still revisit today. Good/bad memoirs and good/bad novels share a lot of the same characteristics, so maybe the issue is that I find "memoirists" in writing programs to be extremely off-putting and just project that feeling onto memoirs as a whole.

This future/death of the novel stuff needs to stop for a while. It's just navel-gazing at this point, since no one really has any idea how to answer the question beyond a few limp intellectual poses.

Chris Toll's The Disinformation Phase is a damn fine book of poems. I'll definitely have more on that later, but yeah. Good book.

I thought I had more than this. Oh well. Back to the screenplay, I s'pose.

the decor is almost comically bad

2011-04-16T22:40:00.000-07:00

Yup, another poem. I think it's getting weird too. But I misheard some song lyrics in the car on the drive home tonight, and this came out.

title: kissing is weird

when every pressure point
engages close to your lips
from your toe tips
lifting your heels
off the tile and your
abductor hallucis stretches
medially along the border
of the soul as those
flexors wax and wane
you think we shouldn't
but we do
and we can't
but we do
and we don't
but we do
we do
we do
we do
we do
we do

i love my generic liberal paradise

2011-04-15T22:16:00.000-07:00

Since I have nothing of substance to post right this second, but feel the need to update after a week of silence, here's a little something in honor of Poetry Month, to which I have contributed jackshit up until this moment. Also, no goofy picture this time, since nothing I have will format properly. Such is life.

title: i bet it's hormonal

went downtown on a friday
walking around with my head
hung down eating burgers
like i feel like steve mcqueen
would have: low labor jacket
left unbuttoned, lean stomach
howling like the wolves at
his doorstep.

fleet street's wet. i like
how night light spreads
across water, across the
standing puddles that ripple
to the rhythm of our feet. the
stereo signal indicators of
modern urban living.

walked into a pizza place that
looked like a homeless man's
mouth but their pizza was the
best i'd ever put into mine.

back wandering the halls of the
night time, leaning on a lean railing
over the water. salt presses the air
well and the pier lights form amoebas
in the tide as it projects its winnings.

i caught a quesadilla cart as it was
withdrawing from fell's point and ate
a quesadilla. it had chorizo and
cheese and mushrooms in it. each
mushroom was a balloon bursting on
my tongue.

i watched two blond people
hold hands and
watch the water and
i wondered why i was
so hungry all of a sudden.

like a smudged nose orphan

2011-04-07T09:45:00.000-07:00

Quick update: my good buddy Lauren, who went to Gettysburg with me, has started up an online newsletter/journal called LOOP (the name makes fun of Gwyneth Paltrow somehow), and the first issue went live today. I'm in it, telling a 200-word "first" story about my old car. The story right after mine, written by Nikki Metzgar, was hilarious enough to be the source of this post's title.

In other writing news, I finally made a breakthrough on both my novel and my screenplay, which had each been stalled for too long. The screenplay needs to be done next month for class, so that's the priority at this point, but I've been saying that I want the novel ready to shop around by the end of this year, so it's nice to finally make some progress towards that goal again.

Off to work.

i am trying to connect

2011-03-31T11:59:00.000-07:00

What Weekly's write-up of this month's WORMS reading, in which I participated, is up on their website. Huzzah! I included a very nice thing they said about me in the Praise section of this blog, but do read the whole thing. Rupert, Chris, and Buck are very good writers and readers and people. What Weekly runs a professional ship too, it seems, so hats off to them as well.

I think I promised to talk about why I love Baltimore so much, despite its inescapable numerous glaring flaws, and WORMS gives body to part of what I like about this place - the very real and artistic weirdness that grips the entire city. Baltimore is not a place of false neuroses, so pretense is really obvious here. Artists here seem very keen to start things - readings, showings, galleries, unorthodox living room music spaces, etc. - and give themselves and others an opportunity to display their craft. Which is impressive in a city whose lines between good and bad areas are notoriously abrupt, whose resources in general are scarce, and whose reputation doesn't provide much incentive for other people to take us seriously. There's a lot of art and literature here, folks, and the community behind it is the first anything I've actually wanted to join in years.

So there, that's one reason I love it here. And I think it's a pretty good one.

the definition of ugly

2011-03-28T15:31:00.000-07:00

So it seems that Baltimore is a depressed, ugly, angry city. That is to say, it ranks highly on lists measuring these qualities within cities - we usually lose to Detroit, but once that poor 'burg rejungles itself into marshland, Baltimore will officially be a miserable place to live. Joy.

While I do love this place, I admit that we're not a sterling example of community spirit. Many people who live here are crazy, or scared of the crazies, and there's no shortage of asshole DC commuters who only live here because it's cheap. Many city residents hate the taxes, and I guess I'm with them, but only because we don't see much for all the nickel-and-diming we have to endure. In fact, the only real evidence that our money isn't just being shoveled into a giant hole is road construction that takes forever and screws up traffic patterns for months on end.

A lot of this anger gets channeled into our driving - Maryland has some of the worst drivers in the country, which I again credit to DC commuters who overestimate their own importance and drive like they're chasing the Duke boys across county lines. Lots of aggressive merges, lane changes without signaling, tailgating, coasting in the middle lanes of three-lane highways, etc. It's awful. I've gotten to the point where I slow down in highway merge areas because I'm expecting at least one car to spit out in front of me as soon as the lines breaks apart. This has not made me a popular motorist in states like Pennsylvania, where people generally observe the social contract of driving and don't understand why I'm so paranoid.

None of this has anything to do with writing or literature or design, but I do live here and I do like it most of the time, so I felt like I had the right to throw in my two cents. Perhaps in my next post, I'll explain why I like living in this godforsaken post-industrial carcass. But for now, I have opera to tech.

i just walked in on this

2011-03-24T00:40:00.000-07:00

Spring break is chugging right along. I am sleeping late and spending many pantsless hours working on various projects. Actually having time to catch up with my own schedule is rather nice.

The always-insightful Roxane Gay posted something about self-publishing, which is obviously of interest to me, over at HTMLGiant. She makes the case that a lot of self-published writers go that route because they dislike the traditional publishing industry and, perhaps as a symptom of their distrust, cannot accept the risk of hearing "no" when they submit their work. There's certainly truth to that, and to her later comment that some writers are more impatient in getting a book out there than they are willing to make sure it's a really good one. It's always weird to see people try and figure out largely self-published authors, though, because they're always discussed like some weird species of butterfly pinned under glass. Where did it come from? What did it eat? etc.

There's often a lot of contempt towards self-published authors for not following the rules (though Roxane doesn't indulge that, which I appreciate), which partly comes from the seeming unwillingness to go through the grind of finding the right publisher, editing, and waiting - like they don't take the reality of being an author seriously enough. They also underprice their work a lot, which is pretty annoying. But I honestly think a lot of self-publishers, excluding some of the thinner-skinned genre fiction types, go that way because they're not aware of the indie press community and think that it's either a contract with Penguin or trudging out into the wilderness alone. Maybe they know that smaller presses exist, but I don't think they can always see the community that nourishes them, which is much closer to most self-publishers' ethics than any of the big houses.

I also think that some of them are borderline-insane control freaks who want total control over the production of their book and enjoy the work of it (this is not totally a bad thing). Indeed, 'zines have become a central element of the Art of the Weird, and there's a lot to be found there that doesn't fit into either mainstream or indie publishing's tastes. A lot of my tolerance of, and enthusiasm for, self-publishing comes from that - the punk rock passion of the amateur that saw an established vetting process for getting creative work out there and completely dodged it. People whose drive to create and share is so intense that they don't bother smoothing over the rough patches first. Sometimes the rough patches are the best part.

an aesthetic appreciation for bad taste

2011-03-17T21:58:00.000-07:00

Wednesday's WORMS reading was a big success! The crew from What Weekly were on hand to take pictures and such, and they'll be writing it up soon - I'll link their article here when the time comes. I read "Harrison Ford Is Naked," which was a good foot to put forward. That piece benefits from being read aloud, and a couple of people in attendance thought it was real, which is not an uncommon response, believe it or not. I'm amused by that, but also very complimented. There's a real sense of community at WORMS, which I think is a dual product of the crowd and the setting (the Bell Foundry is an unlikely spot for literature, but a very welcoming one).

I also need to talk about Mike Topp's Sasquatch Stories, since I've read it a few times now and have some idea of what to say about it. Sasquatch Stories is basically a collection of miniature poems, one-liners, and jokes whose components are all dependent on one another. It's kind of like Harryette Mullen's Recyclopedia in that respect; the pieces in Topp's book all need the context of the entire collection to be fully understood.

That said, Sasquatch Stories is really funny, devoid of pretense, and alternately goofy and witty when the situation calls for it. It's fun in a way that literary work often avoids, but still showcases Topp as a guy who thinks all the time and applies that gift to his observations. I'm also a big fan of the cover illustration, supplied by Tao Lin. In the interests of full disclosure, I did the initial layout for this book (Topp and Adam Robinson took it from there), so I have a somewhat unique relationship to the work, but I liked it then and I like it now.

Right. Now to write some and then go to sleep.

a running partner in dog form

2011-03-15T20:02:00.000-07:00

Bolstered by the fact that I didn't get raked over the coals in graphic design class, I post! But not about graphic design. I went to see Jessica Blau read at my school. Her agent, Joanne Brownstein Jarvi, came along to answer questions about how a book gets from a weird itch in an author's head to an actual physical object, with a cover and such. There really needs to be a song covering this process. I mean, half the reason anyone knows how a bill becomes a law is because of Schoolhouse Rock.

Anyway, Jessica read some sex scenes, which sounded like bad/hilarious porn, from her latest book, Drinking Closer to Home, and then joined her agent for the Q&A. One story that stands out is Jessica being invited out for drinks by her publisher, which turned out to be her introduction to the sales team behind her first book. Awkward.

For the most part, people were curious about how much publishers actually read and how possible it is to squirm into the business as a new author, which is the standard line of questioning for events like this. It's good stuff to know, and Joanne was engaging and honest, but the whole process of big-league publishing comes across like a huge NYC cocktail party nightmare (and for the record, so does graphic design). For all of the small press community's warts, I'm really glad it exists to somewhat counteract that kind of atmosphere. Given that the odds of me actually succeeding at this line of work are, uh, slim, I'd much prefer a casual atmosphere in which to fail, instead of the desperate corporatism that major-house publishing inherited from the music industry.

WORMS reading tomorrow night. Working all goddamned day before that. It can be done, amigo.

someone has sent me a bowel movement

2011-03-09T19:00:00.000-08:00

Quick update: I was the projectionist for a John Waters double feature last Friday, and Mink Stole hosted it (for the unaware, she's been in all of John's movies, most notably as Connie Marble in Pink Flamingos). I was pretty sure that Mink was either going to be a real delight, an utter lunatic, or a delusional B-movie superstar, but I did not expect her to be as nice and welcoming as she was. She answered fan questions between films and was just the nicest person on Earth, and very proud of the work she'd done with John and elsewhere. Most people, even the cool ones, would have been embarrassed in Mink's shoes, looking back at some of the stuff she'd done, but Mink totally owned it and was just awesome.

She also, upon seeing the "I <3 Vaginas" shirt* that I wore for the occasion, told me that "oh hey, I have a vagina!" Sometimes my job is great, is what I'm trying to say.

*My alma mater's Women's Center had them made when they put on The Vagina Monologues one year, and I bought one. I kinda had to, ya know?

human centipede was terrible just fyi

2011-03-07T09:17:00.000-08:00

Antibiotics are the best thing about being a privileged first-worlder. My sore throat is gone, so now I feel human enough to let it be known that on March 16th, this will happen:

More info here.

there's a perception of what the writers are

2011-03-04T12:50:00.000-08:00

Siiiiiiiiiiick. I'm working my way through a cold right now, hence my silence - all I've done for the past few days is go to class, sleep, and pack my face full of medicine while begging the universe to kill me. So far, nothing. Damned indifferent cosmos.

Anyway, I also redesigned Weak Creature Press' logo, so go to their Facebook page and sing your praises to Winston, the WCP bison. Also buy their books, because WCP puts out some cool stuff.

On the subject of writing, Dave Lagana's Formerly Creative podcast is a real treasure - Dave used to write for the WWE, and he has a lot of interesting discussions with other ex-creative team members that chronicle the most demanding, stressful writing job on the planet. Despite the specific focus of his podcast (writing for the largest professional wrestling organization in the world/working for an insane out-of-touch megalomaniac), Dave and his guests have a lot to say about professional writing and writing for television, which are two ways for writers to make a living that lie beyond academia. They're not often part of the endless dialogue about the future of American letters, but maybe they should be.

mort, the fern from neptune

2011-02-23T16:53:00.000-08:00

Man, busy busy busy over here. But not with anything terribly interesting, just schoolwork and reading when I can and redesigning Weak Creature Press' logo. I've hit a snag on that last item, so I'm taking a break to watch The Human Centipede and recharge. In the meantime, since I have nothing meaningful to post but still need to show initiative and update, here's a video that has changed my life.

they did at this one

2011-02-13T23:29:00.000-08:00

Finally broke some new ground on The Novel two nights ago, and bought some new movies to inspire this semester's plunge into screenwriting. I got a set of four Steve McQueen movies and a mammoth box set of cheap exploitation horror movies. I also found out that Seven Doors of Death is an alternate title of The Beyond, a legendary Fulci gorefest that I only recently pulled off the shelf and watched. I'll admit to not having a huge investment in horror films beyond thinking they're fun and entertaining and often extremely stupid, so I liked Seven Doors/The Beyond on a much more superficial level than someone with actual opinions about Fulci vs. Argento. At some point I'll have to see The Human Centipede to sate my horrible, horrible curiosity for things that no human being should see.

I also finished teching The Trial of the Catonsville 9, a play written by Catholic priest and peace activist Daniel Berrigan, who poured napalm on draft records with 8 of his friends in (wait for it) Catonsville. It's a weird show, very static and cerebral and talky and almost a vanity piece for Berrigan, but the monologues are poetic in that fittingly Biblical, Steinbeck sort of way, and you do get the sense that Vietnam really shook people to their core, even people who supported it or were prohibited by law or duty from opposing it. My ex-bandmates' mom, who was a hippie during that time, once explained to me that very few people's feelings about Vietnam were absolute, and that most people were just scared and lost and didn't know what the hell to make of it, or any of the other crazy shit going on at the same time.

Part of Trial included a panel of Baltimore peace activists, i.e. crusty old hippies who told awesome stories about getting arrested and were/are really nice, genuine people. They're a font of knowledge about Baltimore activism and how it related to what was going on elsewhere, but one guy they mentioned was Abe Sherman, a WWI vet whose newsstand carried, among other things, every subversive publication you could think of "out of sheer cussedness," as George Figgs puts it. Abe also insulted people who read papers without buying them and from all accounts took no shit from anyone. He is now my hero.

I'm rambling now because it's 2:30am and the sleep madness has overtaken me. But I needed to update this thing and now seemed like a good time. I need to give HTMLGiant a shoutout for being such a damn fine lit. community too, but that can wait until I've gotten some shut-eye.

a variety of services

2011-02-08T11:56:00.000-08:00

It occurred to me, as I was writing up my review of Kafka on the Shore, that I'd forgotten to mention another book on here that I'd finished earlier, and that I have a special relationship with - Mike Young's We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough. I proofread this book, to the extent one can proofread experimental poetry, and snatched up a copy at the Indie Lit Roadshow back in December. It has enjoyed a place of honor in my toilet-side book basket since then, which is meant to reflect positively on its quality.

Young's work can best be described as "goofball poetic rants," composed as if he had so many awesome sentences pouring out of his brain that he couldn't arrange them into any kind of logical order. What I'm saying is that his poems don't often make sense, at least not to me, but I'm also saying that he's good enough at shotgunning ideas to get away with it. As a fiction writer, I try to keep a certain amount of weird abstract poetry around for inspiration, and We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough is exactly the kind of book that does the trick. Since I met Young at AWP, I figured I'd better say something about his book here since I got such a kick out of it.

I also recently finished Ben Tanzer's You Can Make Him Like You, a novel that shares its name with a song by the Hold Steady (I think). I can't say much about the Hold Steady, but I did really enjoy this book, and it reminded me that you don't have to beat people over the head with purposely difficult language to get them invested in/challenged by your work. I do take issue with the reviews mentioning how saturated with pop culture the book is, because it's much more genuine than that. "Pop Culture" books are usually insufferable, brand name-dropping turds that laugh at their own jokes too much, and You Can Make Him Like You is miles above that classification in terms of delivery and content - in fact, it makes the incredibly difficult process of developing and maintaining a character arc look easy and graceful, in the same way that Timothy Willis Sanders does when he's on point.

With those done, I've started Ishmael Reed's Yellow Back Radio Broke Down, which is like a Western told by Cab Calloway, and I'm sure I'll start another book before too long. But before I get carried away, I should go move my car before it gets ticketed.

reading is pretty basic stuff

2011-02-06T10:09:00.000-08:00

So AWP was awesome. I went down to DC with some friends from the program on Saturday and spent an entire day among fellow lit. nerds, publishers, and aspiring authors, to the point of getting both dehydrated and lost in AWP's cavernous bookfair, which took up the entire lower level of the Marriott Wardman-Park Hotel. I did get a lot of cool swag out of it, though, including lots of discounted books from people who marked out over my impressive mustache. I really should have grown this thing out years ago. I also met, and got books signed by, Chimamanda Adichie, Colson Whitehead, and Claudia Rankine, who also got a copy of Gouts of Angry Mist from me since it was partially inspired by her book, Don't Let Me Be Lonely. All three of them were really nice and seemed genuinely happy to be there.

Also worth noting: the first journal that ever published me - Front Porch Journal - had a table at AWP and gave me a free tote bag when I told them who I was. I think both sides of that conversation got warm fuzzies.

I also finished Kafka on the Shore yesterday, and am still processing it. Murakami's style is an interesting synthesis of magical realism and plainspoken slice-of-life routine, and he has said that this book needs to be read more than once to fully understand it. That actually makes sense, and I may pick it up again later because I'm not fully satisfied by it just yet. Murakami is notoriously fuzzy on the details of his books and rarely answers questions about what they mean, which is fine, but in some ways I think that's his way of covering his ass for not always putting much effort into resolving loose plot/character ends. Some of the characters' "ah-ha" moments in Kafka just don't feel earned, like they run parallel when the narrative claims they intersect.

But it's also true that Kafka hooked me on Murakami's voice and tone, which are as approachable as his content is dense and dreamlike. His pacing is slow, but he makes it work by drawing the reader into his characters' routines to the point where we become invested in them, and we care when things change. In artistic terms, he's not so much a precise pen-and-inker as much as a loose, cerebral watercolorist, creating just enough of a distinct image to draw the eye while leaving plenty open for interpretation.

Right then. Time to get myself together in time for tonight's Super Bowl party, in which I shall root against the Steelers and play B-Movie Card Game with my friends.

no stopping in the white zone

2011-02-02T20:23:00.000-08:00

So I finally got an idea for a screenplay. I have to write a 110-pg. spec script for my Screenwriting class over the course of the semester, and I was initially worried because I had nothing to bring to the table. The textbook for this class, The Screenwriter's Bible, wasn't much help, but reading through some screenplays and seeing the formatting put me in the right headspace for it. There's a much greater, more immediate visual element to a screenplay than there is to a novel or a play, and balancing that with more traditional storytelling elements like plot arcs and characters will be a challenge.

Also helping me out is a clear idea of what I don't want to write. I find a lot of creative inspiration in B-movies and cult films, which sounds like a hipsterish thing to say, but hear me out. A movie like Project: Kill, for all its warts, is much more inspiring than Shawshank Redemption (which I also like) because the latter had every advantage going for it - money, equipment, star power, etc. It's hard for me to root for something that has so many blessings. B-movies are made from what's left over; older, has-been stars, veteran character actors, grotesques, and new actors who haven't met the right people yet. It's a much more interesting dynamic than mainstream Hollywood movies where everyone is blandly pretty and often rich to boot. That doesn't make me want to create the way The Warriors or even Surf Nazis Must Die does.

Oh, and I'm closing in on the end of Kafka On the Shore, so I'll post a review when I get there. The book itself is very flawed, but it's hooked me on Murakami's writing.

they are lost to us now

2011-01-26T21:52:00.000-08:00

Apologies for the delay - school and work started up again this week, so my time has been limited. Or was until today, when the snow got me out of a meeting and might get me out of class tomorrow.
Tuesday night was my first proper graphic design class, and I think I'm going to enjoy it. It's a mid-level course, so expectations are higher than they have been, but I think the other classes I've taken (namely Typography) have prepared me to meet them.

Anyway, I finished Flash for Freedom! this week, and overall it was good, but the ending was a little abrupt. A few of the novels in the Flashman series have this issue, but this one was in a huge rush to wrap things up, speeding through what could have been a really funny courtroom scene and depriving the reader of a confrontation between Flashman and his shitheel father-in-law that had been building throughout the entire book. Maybe Fraser was under a deadline or something, but it felt cheap in the way that the ending to Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym felt cheap.

Oh well. Win some, lose some. It's not like I don't have jillions of other books to occupy me this winter. Speaking of, I have to write/edit two of them. Back to work!

one hundred

2011-01-21T09:51:00.000-08:00

Through one of those weird flow-charting progressions that only happen online, reading reviews of Franzen's The Corrections, which I now have no interest in reading, led me to this 1991 Paris Review interview with critic Harold Bloom. Yikes, what an asshole.

It's possible that I'm too dense for higher-end literary criticism, but I've never found it to be terribly useful, and have avoided it like the plague since the day I no longer had to read it for school. That criticism is full of people like Harold Bloom doesn't help matters. I don't know if he's still like this 20 years later, but literally everything he says in this interview makes him sound like an insufferable prick, whether it's lecturing his own analyst about Freud or refusing to use a computer or calling people "my dear" or sayings things like "Emerson is God." Then there's his weird, out-of-nowhere rant about the School of Resentment (i.e. socially-concerned critics) and his contention that minorities and women only get books published because of political correctness, which is both bafflingly stupid and unsubstantiated - he doesn't really explain why Alice Walker is a bad writer or why The Color Purple is a bad book, they just are because he said so, based on the authority he generated from writing about Shakespeare back when we all lived on the supercontinent.

Given that it's 2011, this is probably a stupid thing to be annoyed about, but you see a lot of this lazy conservative thinking in lit. crit. - some people just get infatuated with a "golden age" of literature (i.e. the stuff they read in their formative years) and coast on their opinions of it for their entire professional/creative lives. It's sad, really, but it does encourage me to keep searching out new writers (even if they're just new to me) and diversifying my bookshelf so I don't end up doing the same thing.

pouring boodle in galveston

2011-01-17T13:03:00.000-08:00

I got a flash of inspiration for both my novel and my Fiction Project book (subject: dirigibles and submersibles) last night. My writer's block was such that I was reshelving books out of frustration, but that gave me a chance to flip through some recently acquired poetry collections, specifically Patricia Smith's Blood Dazzler and Li Young-Lee's Book of My Nights. Any struggling writers out there should take heed: it's worth keeping some modern poetry around, if only to grab cool phrases from every so often. Mike Young's We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough is an excellent resource as well, although I might be biased because I copy-edited that one.

Also, now that football is meaningless to me (damn you, Ravens!), hearing the rest of the country raging about teams I have no stake in will be FUN and ENJOYABLE. Oh, I'm sorry - I meant it will be tedious and awful.

drop it drop it low low

2011-01-12T21:01:00.000-08:00

The Novel is slow going. I've decided that forcing myself to update this blog with my progress might force me to actually finish this questionable undertaking. I want 2011 to be the year that I get The Novel into good enough shape to shop around to publishers.

But to do that, I need to crawl back into that world again and fully live in it, which is hard when I have so many other creative projects that need finishing. I've got my Fiction Project book to work on, a 'zine to print, and two more story ideas that are fresher and more exciting than something I wrote back in 2009, cooled by the shade of dinosaurs that might as well have walked the earth, it seems so long ago.

Not only that, but as I revise, I'm finding that this story doesn't want to be told the way I'm telling it. The energy isn't there, and the scenes come out more like static cave paintings than anything real actual people would inhabit. I guess knowing that is a good thing, but I don't know how this story really wants to come out yet, and that bothers me to no end. The only recourse is to experiment until I find some way of getting what I need from my characters and capturing the spirit of the world they live in without boring myself (and thereby potential readers) to goddamned tears. Anyone got any prompts? Anyone?

Really, it shouldn't take me this long to putter through a novel that's less than 40k words (thanks to some much needed cutting). But since I have to keep scaring up freelance work to make a living and keep the wolves off my doorstep, the energy to throw myself into this particular project is sometimes hard to come by.

Still, I've managed to expand the role of one crucial character and tighten up a lot of flavor text, so I've gotten somewhere. I just feel a bit rudderless at the moment.

pioneers of superviolent line-dancing music

2011-01-07T11:14:00.000-08:00

Patton Oswalt's article bemoaning the state of modern nerd culture has already made the rounds, but I just finished reading it because I'm still on winter break and therefore lounging around doing glorious amounts of nothing. But since this weekend will be devoted to The Novel, I decided to catch up on my Internet and read Patton's article, which had been linked to me some time ago.

Patton isn't much different from the herds of other aging suburban counterculturalists who don't like change - things were cool and fun and unique when he was into them, and they lost all those qualities the instant he outgrew them or, more likely, they outgrew him. His disgust at seeing normal people wearing Boba Fett shirts or hearing Rocky Horror songs on Glee is almost exactly like old punks whinging about punk being dead because of Good Charlotte or AFI or whoever they want to blame for not being relevant anymore.

Where Patton diverges into headier and smarter territory than the rest of the I-Remember-When Club is his realization that "everything we have today that’s cool comes from someone wanting more of something they loved in the past," and that our cycles of nostalgia aren't creating people who are obsessive and weird and interesting - they're just creating hordes of consumers who are essentially buying an identity for themselves instead of creating one. Granted, comic book nerdery required a certain amount of cash on the barrelhead back when Patton was a kid, but being a nerd was really defined by knowing things. Being required to hunt and peck for the things you loved meant you had to like researching things that took time to find, which meant you had to be, by and large, a curious person. Even if you were curious about things with no immediate social or practical value - foreign films, weird music, medieval history, literature, etc. - you were still invested in some part of the world with more than just your wallet.

Unfortunately, marketers figured out that nerdy obsession is a pretty sweet plum, financially speaking, and over time, being a nerd became less about knowing stuff and more about buying it. Being a nerd is as simple as buying the totems of nerdery - computer, Firefly DVDs, anime wall scrolls, t-shirts of old cartoons, Taun-Taun sleeping bags, a copy of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac laying around - and suddenly it doesn't matter whether or not you know, or even care, about any of this stuff beyond what it superficially reflects about you to other people. That kind of consumerism is harmful to any culture, let alone a subculture that didn't originally have the numbers or social standing to resist it. So really, it's less about people being stupid and weak, and more about marketers being evil and reducing cool and interesting things to their monetary value.

Of course, now I sound just as old and paranoid as Patton, and his ranting probably made a lot more sense than mine, so I'll stop here, but getting involved with communities and fandoms (which, as a steampunk guy, is something I should probably be doing) is immensely unappealing to me because of stuff like this.

almost as long as the dinosaurs

2010-12-30T17:31:00.000-08:00

Readers, make a note to yourselves to never, EVER be sick over Christmas. Given the choice, I would have preferred coal in my stocking to the sinus infection I got this year. On the plus side, the forced downtime made me read a lot more than I would have, and I'm within 100 pages of finishing Kafka On the Shore. This is big-time stuff, and I'm definitely going to read more of Murakami's work after this. I'll have a proper review here once I'm done, though.

I also got some new books to kick off 2011 with style. Here are some of the highlights

-Two more books in the Flashman series (Flash for Freedom! and Flashman and the Redskins)
-Ishmael Reed's Yellow Back Radio Broke Down
-Volume one of Gordon Dahlquist's The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

I also got Night Heron, my buddy Danny Glenn's newest volume of poetry, and fellow MFAer Joe Sheehan gave me a copy of his chapbook, Reflections In a Crystal Riot, that I already like because I got to read his work every week of the fall semester and he's great.

I've also got a new chapbook in the works for a January release, which will hopefully precede me reading at Last Rites at the end of that month. In fact, I should be working on the chapbook now. Sigh. No rest for the wicked.

technology crusader formation

2010-12-21T14:34:00.000-08:00

Since my November column for the Gettysburg Times got lost in the shuffle last month, I got their permission to repost it here. The column is basically an excuse for me to research obscure historical trivia, so I'm awfully fond of it, and I think this was a good one. Enjoy!

Now that I'm officially down from the sugar high I've been riding since Halloween, it's time to sit down and write this November column. But where to start? November's a weird month, hosting both Thanksgiving and American Indian Heritage Month, which makes for some awkward holiday mingling on the calendar. Like, middle school dance awkward. And speaking of sexless misery, November is also National Impotency Month and National Novel Writing Month (colloquially known as NaNoWriMo). I participated in the latter event last year and, the way my health is going, will be eligible for the former at some undetermined point in my life.

But that's another column altogether. We're taking a different tack this month; since winter is fast approaching and, for all I know, it'll be another exceptionally cruel and cold one for the Mid-Atlantic region, let's steam up the Times a bit by taking it back to November 18th, 1915, when the movie Inspiration was released.

You've probably never heard of Inspiration (which is hardly your fault, since no prints even exist anymore), but it was the first non-pornographic movie to feature a fully-nude woman. Curiously enough, censors equated the film's nudity with what they saw in Renaissance art and passed on banning it, which means that people who were old when my grandfather was a baby were more progressive than contemporary society. Fantastic. The critics were more of a mixed bag – the film was a hit, but succeeded amid sternly polarized reviews.

Anyway, Inspiration follows a young sculptor who finds the perfect model in a poverty-stricken girl played by real-life model Audrey Munson. Unfortunately, the movie somewhat parallels Munson's life, as she was often the infatuation of unstable men. The most chilling example of this is Dr. Walter Wilkins, who owned the boarding house Munson lived in and killed his wife to pursue Munson. The negative publicity surrounding the whole thing ruined Munson's career and nearly drove the poor woman to suicide. As it turned out, she was sent to a psychiatric facility in 1931 and stayed there until her death in 1996. Can you imagine? Being paranoid and miserable enough to kill yourself and then living until 104 is like something out of Chekov. Call it insensitive gallows humor if you must, but her life unraveled in the shadow of a much greater cosmic irony.

And in some way, Munson isn't really dead at all. While the film that set landmarks for cinema has dwindled into obscurity, she was the basis for at least 15 statues around New York City. She might be standing in your local art museum right now, in fact. And the movie she made after Inspiration, titled Purity, was recovered from French archives in 2004. It's basically the same movie, too, complete with nudity. So when you're giving thanks for things in two weeks, keep poor Audrey Munson in mind. All the college sex comedies you've ever seen would have been way less interesting without her. (originally published in the Gettysburg Times, Nov. 18, 2010)

drug-addled antisocial dickheads

2010-12-19T16:16:00.000-08:00

Questionable Content's Jeph Jacques made a list of his favorite albums of 2010, and it's interesting reading. Jeph's a music nut and his comic began as an excuse to make jokes about indie rock (it has since become an excuse for jokes about anime), and while I don't share his tastes for the most part (Salem and GRUM excepted), he's good at explaining why he likes what he likes. So even if I hate, say, Fang Island (which I do), I can at least sort of respect his reasons for liking them because I think they're filtered through how they affect his artwork, at least to some degree.

So with that in mind, I'd like to present my list of the best books I read this year. They weren't all published this year, but they are books that I read cover to cover between Jan.1st and right now. They were chosen based on how good I thought they were in terms of plot, character, and observation, what I learned from them, and the effect they will have on my own work.

NAME, Joseph Young - Just finished this one, and it's #10 because I haven't had time to really ruminate on it, but holy crap did it deserve a spot on this list. Joe's a friend, and his book is a real story about vampires and not just a laundry list of tropes to satisfy. Most vampires in vampire novels already know the basics of vampirism and spend their time wading through arcane undead politics or indulging Mormon housewife sex fantasies, but the new vamps in Joe's fading tourist town setting have no idea what to do with themselves. I liked that a lot.

Don't Let Me Be Lonely, Claudia Rankine - It's an attempt at epic poetry that wanders a bit, but the good parts are really good, full of plainspoken emotion without any winking hipster awkwardness, and the integration of photography and text partially inspired Gouts of Angry Mist.

Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon - Pynchon's source of nostalgia is pretty well mined at this point, but this novel is localized in California and set just as the counterculture toppled over from optimism into paranoia. Pynchon's gift for complex language is still here, and his observations about the cash cow that California hippie culture would become are more insightful than most takes on that era. Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas is still better, but this is really good.

A Jello Horse, Matthew Simmons - A story told in second-person POV that isn't masturbatory garbage is rare enough to earn a spot on my list, but Simmons has a really sharp sense of humor and a good balance of weirdness and storytelling, of when to be abstract and when to be genuine. I wish this book had been a little longer so all the loose threads could have been tied together, though. Parts of the story still feel unfinished.

We Tear Me Apart, Molly Gaudry - I was reading this book in Penn Station and, as I turned a page, an old lady behind me asked me to slow down because she wasn't done yet. Yeah. Molly's another friend, and she wrote a wonderful story about what an actual fairy tale stepdaughter would be like - emotionally fucked up beyond all belief. It needed to be a little longer and a little less passive in the telling, but it abstracts fairy tale cliches very well, and in a way that isn't done often enough.

The Best of (What's Left of) Heaven, Mairead Byrne - This book showed me that one strength of modern abstract poetry is how fun it is to read out loud. Some poems fall short and just sound like arbitrary lists of things, but many of them are awesome in the same way elementary schoolers are when they're all hopped up on sugar. I often tell people that my poems revel in their own stupidity, and my comfort with that style comes almost directly from this book (which is not stupid).

We Can Build You, Philip K. Dick - Simpler and more readable than Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but it covers some of the same topics (namely the question of what defines humanity v. mechanics). Dick was a writer who, because he had to crank out novels almost non-stop, seemed a little too consumed with topping himself. This book seems outside of that pressure, and it's one of my favorites of his.

The Alienist, Caleb Carr - I'm a sucker for good period pieces, and this is a good one. Some of Carr's plot theatrics are a little ridiculous, but it's a page-turner with solid characters and Teddy Roosevelt battling corruption and screaming at people. Aspiring steampunks, myself included, could learn a thing or two about how this book manages to capture the grime (and burgeoning scientific advancements) of the Victorian cityscape without becoming a depressing morality play.

Other Electricities, Ander Monson - Whether it's a novel or a collection of interconnected short stories that might as well be a novel, this is a winning experiment on all fronts. Monson has Vonnegut's gift for managing multiple characters without burdening the pace, and he expands upon that gift with an incredible atmosphere that considers multiple definitions of electricity (inner quality that brings things to life) and how communities are shaped by death and loss.

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Michael Ondaatje - Blazing Saddles' infamous campfire scene was the logical extension of cowboys in old westerns eating beans and drinking coffee all the time. It was brilliant. Ondaatje's book goes well beyond that, expanding upon cowboy tropes with humor, elegance, and real rustic poignancy. This novel also mixes up traditional prose with poetry, fake dime novels, interview excerpts, old photography, and comes together as a complete and powerful story. This was another influence on Gouts of Angry Mist, and it's one of the best books I've ever read. Here's my full review from earlier in the year.

how characters react to their environments

2010-12-13T18:24:00.000-08:00

Lots of talk about genre fiction lately, by which I mean two people are saying words on the Internet about it. Charles Stross' harsh appraisal of steampunk is here, and Beth Woodward's defense of genre fiction as a whole is here. Stross joins in the drum-beating about steampunk not doing enough to acknowledge how nasty the Victorian era was for people who weren't white property owners (a topic which the steampunk community itself is fiercely discussing) and Woodward makes the case that genre fiction and proper big-L literature are blurring together much more than either side of the argument cares to admit.

I like both posts - Stross (who designed the lovely image in the left hand corner up there) is a little harsh on the steampunk community (and doesn't mention that Blaylock's work is as ignorant of class as the stuff that followed him), but it is easy to get caught up in the trimmings of the genre and ignore the nastiness behind it, which is often more interesting than yet another story about brass-goggled inventors killing zombies from the observation deck of their airship. That grit is something my work needs to be more attentive about, actually, so Stross' griping served as a good reminder. Of course, his own' work, namely the Laundry series, has its own issues with trope satisfaction (I thought The Jennifer Morgue was underwhelming because it took the government techie protagonist I liked and turned him into a less interesting James Bond homage), but Stross is a solid writer and generally knows what he's trying to do, so I trust his observations most of the time.

Woodward's post provides a welcome return volley against the hordes of whiners who use literature as a pedestal for their own perceived enlightenment. Her strongest point is that the best of genre fiction and big-L Literature should be compared, instead of holding up carefully-chosen Nobel Prizewinners to sci-fi/fantasy authors picked at random and declaring the superiority of the former. She's also absolutely right about genre fiction and literature holding hands a lot these days (providing examples like The Road and Never Let Me Go), and reminding us that even shitty pop-fiction proves that there's still a market for fiction itself, which may very well broaden as e-reader technology takes off. Granted, access to that market requires a huge marketing engine and other intangibles that are by no means easy to get or fairly distributed, but that's not the argument she was trying to make.

Interesting reading, for sure. But enough dawdling - back to work!

i am the busiest bee

2010-12-08T19:32:00.000-08:00

I just signed up for the AWP Conference and Bookfair next February, meaning that I need to get those business cards made and also print up some CVs and chapbooks to hand out. I'm hardly the best or most willing networker out there, but I am a carny at heart and will submit to shameless hucksterism without much hesitation. Plus, there are going to be some cool people there - Chimamanda Adichie, Colson Whitehead, and Claudia Rankine are just a few writers who will be on hand. I will try to contain my awkward enthusiasm.

I am also signing up for The Fiction Project - since I like fusing text and visual art, this is right up my alley. And, y'know, I need something ELSE to do on top of all my other responsibilities. My theme will be Dirigibles and Submersibles. Awesome.

And I will also be reading at Baltimore's Indie Lit Roadshow on Sunday, which will be a good time. I may make a sign for the 'zines I'll be selling, but that will depend on time and energy.

That's all for now, I think. Oh, no it isn't - I stole a wall clock from school today. Machines, I rage against them.

here in my yellow house

2010-12-05T18:43:00.000-08:00

Just a quick note that there's an interview with yours truly up at !?Y-Art?! - Kimberley Lynne sat me down in a very comfortable piece of modern furniture to ask me heady questions about writing and art and the importance of both. I fear that I babbled like a cretin at the poor woman, but I'll let you people be the final judges of that. Enjoy!

the rolling hills and vast skyscapes

2010-11-30T13:49:00.000-08:00

Man, look at me being all Posty McPosterson over here. But I have to promote the newest issue of The Light Ekphrastic, because I'm featured in it: my stories "The Experiment" and "Bohemia" are paired with artwork by Karen Steele. It's super cool and a direct link to my entry is under Published Works.

TLE is a journal that pairs writers and artists up to collaborate on new stuff, which is a really cool idea that I wanted every part of. It's based on the concept of ekphrasis, which I'll let the website explain:

Ekphrasis, or ecphrasis is the graphic/dramatic description of a visual work of art. In ancient times it referred to a description of any thing, person, or experience. The word comes from the Greek -ek and -phrasis, verb ekphrazein, to proclaim or call an inanimate object by name.

Cool, huh? Now go ye forth and read.

we can control how we ride

2010-11-27T19:23:00.000-08:00

My food coma seems to have lifted, at least for the moment, so I finished Timothy Sanders' Orange Juice, a collection of very short stories that shamelessly begs to be judged by its cover (there is a cute kitten). It's a pretty good read, though - some of Sanders' work is "indie" to the point where it comes off as an annoying affectation (awkward dialogue pacing, repetition of characters' names, lots of brand/pop-culture references, etc.), but he is startlingly good at characterization. In fact, he makes it look really, really easy in "Cat Stuff," the third story included here; Jared's kleptomania, which is mentioned almost passingly but often enough to factor into how readers perceive him, totally works as an earned element of the character and doesn't seem like a random flailing attempt to rivet-gun a personality onto him. A fair amount of indie/alt-lit is guilty of the rivet-gun effect, so I'm glad Sanders avoided it.

I can learn from this. Again, Sanders (at his best) makes the tedious and frustrating process of developing characters and making them interact seem effortless. Steve Matanle talks about using chance during the creative process and just trying things, just to see what they do to one's characters and settings. His theory is that, when it's done well, it creates suspense by piquing the reader's curiosity and defying their predictions. I think Sanders pulls this off more often than not in Orange Juice.

i will be reading at this event just fyi

2010-11-26T15:22:00.000-08:00

i do get the sofa

2010-11-23T13:58:00.000-08:00

Currently reading Syrup, Maxx Barry's first novel. Recently finished Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? by Thomas Kohnstamm. I'm beginning to realize that the words "hip" and "scathing" and "biting," in conjunction with "funny," are semi-subtle book review codewords for "every character is attractive and witty and sarcastic." Occasionally the protagonist lacks one of those traits, but never more than one.

Not that Syrup or Travel Writers are bad books, mind you. They're both engaging and full of wry observations, and Syrup delves into the marketing industry with smirking enthusiasm. But they're both cinematic to a fault, in that each story is paced like a movie and contemporary Hollywood aesthetics are maintained throughout. It's numbing after a while, and abrasive in the same way that watching Van Wilder was abrasive - none of the "underdogs" are risking anything in terms of social capital. There are real moments in each book where the narrators experience real uncertainty, but those moments don't linger. Which is unfortunate, because it's hard to maintain what's supposed to be a suspenseful, roller-coaster plot if there's no energy in the plummets.

Since I'm editing a novel as we speak, this is all good to keep in mind.

his heart had resumed its normal frenzied pattern

2010-11-19T10:45:00.000-08:00

God help me, I'm finally editing the novel.

As we all know, I wrote a novel last year and have been avoiding it ever since. I just didn't have the time or energy to fix everything that was wrong with it, and I had no idea where I wanted it to go. Well, now I do. Sort of. I'm chopping out all the dead wood and focusing on the three most interesting characters (according to reader feedback). I'm also simplifying the plot as best I can, and I might cut out some of the interludes until I have a chance to actually lay them out properly. It's a bit like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, only I had to throw half of it away and make new pieces myself.

What inspired me is the fact that local Baltimore writer/flash fiction genius Joseph Young wrote a vampire novel, titled NAME, in a month to pay his rent - I plan on getting a copy pretty soon, and it reminded me that I have what could turn out to be a decent novel if I got off my duff and put some time in. So I am. Once it's worth showing to people beyond the small core of advance readers I assembled, I'll shop it around to see if anyone wants to publish it. And if absolutely no one does, I'll do it myself.

Speaking of, I'm also assembling the new poetry/short fiction chapbook, which will probably make landfall in January. The extensive winter holiday will interfere with me getting to readings and such. But since I'm reading at Last Rites in January, that'll time itself rather well. Projects, ahoy!

Hodges had lost all comportment

2010-11-15T15:18:00.000-08:00

Just (quite literally, just) finished Larry Doyle's Go Mutants! and enjoyed it immensely. I'll get into more specifics of plot and so on in the next paragraph, but the key to this book is what a progression it was from I Love You, Beth Cooper in terms of language, content, and risk. From what I understand, there's a movie in the works for this book too, but I hope they don't change too much of what's here for the screen adaptation. It's too good for that.

I don't want to bore people with exhaustive details about a book they have or haven't read, but Go Mutants! exists in a world where B-grade horror and sci-fi movies are actual history, the aliens/mutants/monsters they brought to the horny and stoned elements of our parents' generation really do exist, and their children are old enough to attend high school. Doyle plays fast and loose with the conventions of genre fiction; his focus is on justifying the weird and improbable setting enough to give his characters a heartbeat. Or beats, depending on how many hearts they have. In this way, Doyle forced himself to take much greater risks with language, both pseudo-scientific and conventional, and the result is a sharper, funnier, and strangely denser read than I Love You, Beth Cooper, which was a sharp and funny read in and of itself.

Humor is hard to do in writing. It's an art of the immediate, and most literary humor isn't dry so much as parched. Still more of it is toothless and absurd, which gets tiring in the wrong hands. Doyle is skilled enough with wordplay to keep his exposition interesting, and much of his humor has an angry-nerd bite to it that I really like. Being an angry nerd myself, I suppose that's natural. But disregarding all that, this book is funny and observant, and takes a scattering of pop-cultural musings to their logical extreme.

Still to read: The Wraith, Do Travel Writers Go to Hell, Cold Snap (short fiction collection), The Intuitionist (second, more attentive reading), and about 100 other things. Egad. I'd better get back into my garret, then.

the staff watched the birds in their eerie meditation

2010-11-12T10:51:00.000-08:00

In honor of NaNoWriMo 2010, I am working on a new fiction project. I'm not really trying to get to 50k words this time around, since I don't think this story can support it, but I am trying to finish within the month. This November is much more complicated than last year's - I'm working more (in fact, I began this month in tech for The Laramie Project) and have been dealing with some health problems. Nothing serious, just expensive. And unlike last year, I didn't outline or prepare in advance for NaNo this time around because I had/have a few story ideas swimming around the ol' brainquarium and didn't know which one to pursue. I've got some idea now, and so far it's extremely rocky, but I'm hoping my newfound appreciation for transgressive/bizarro literature will breathe some new life into this project. Actually, it's odd that I'm trying to explore that John Waters-esque celebration of weird now, since this project is the first thing I've ever written where I had any kind of social commentary planned out ahead of time. That's normally not my style, but I wanted to try it just this once because I've been thinking rather a lot about two things:

1) People have this weird idea that terrible, sensationalist media is a new thing. It's not. We've always been like this. The only reason it's worse now is because the news is literally a 24-hour medium. That's one thing I'd like to explore with this project - another is the jumble of progress, how innovation is never neat and orderly. It all comes crashing out at once and it takes years to properly make sense of it and apply any kind of discipline to its use.

2) With the rising importance of social media; people are being encouraged to "sell" themselves in an incredibly obvious way to others, and alter their identities based, in part, on similarly obvious public opinion. Not that people don't do this anyway in smaller, unconscious ways, but I think marketing oneself as a commodity just to engage in the public sphere is kinda dangerous for our culture longterm. Sadly, it's not a new concept by any means. It's just become more direct and focused with new technology.

Now, how I'm going to fit ANY of that into a western is beyond me, but by thunder, I'm going to try.

i'll give you certain specifics at a certain time

2010-11-07T11:20:00.000-08:00

Ah, MST3K. I'd almost forgotten how funny you were. Conversely, I'd completely forgotten how dorky and awkward all of your skits were.

Anyway, I have to possibly expose my own pretentious fuckwittery here by admitting that I hate it when people ask me to make my work easier to understand in workshop. One reason for this is because I really do try to keep the reader in mind when I write, so it suggests that I've failed in that mission. Given my unreasonable standards for my own work, that's kind of a downer. Even if a piece I'm working on is supposed to be irrational and incomprehensible at points, I want it to at least be interesting enough to keep the reader engaged until it ultimately makes sense.

The other reason why I don't like hearing people demand that my work be easier to read is that it never comes off as a genuine criticism. Especially if that's the only thing they have to say about it. Now, I will accept that suggestion if it comes along with other observations, because that means the reader at least made a go of it and just couldn't get a foothold. That's something I can fix with careful editing, and it says to me that the language or structure I've employed is getting in the way of potentially valuable content.

But more often than not, phrases like "this is too hard to read," or "this needs to be more understandable" stand alone. Which, in a workshop full of other writers, is weak sauce. To me, that sounds like "I'm lazy, do my work for me," and I refuse to enable that bullshit. In fact, my natural write-from-spite instincts usually tell me to make my work even more difficult, just to annoy people with shallow complaints. But that's not a good use of my time, or theirs.

Just had to vent for a second. I feel cleansed. Now, back to television.

a tribute to the great legs

2010-11-02T12:12:00.000-07:00

a) I've added a new page onto this thing for testimonials, aka people who love my work and bask daily in its wisdom...aaaaand here's two quotes in it so far. Literary stardom is JUST over the horizon, I swear.

b) I linked "Harrison Ford Is Naked" in my Published Works column because, uh, it is a published work. Thanks to ULA for running it! I'm glad it has a home.

That said, here's a lightly edited cross-posting from the Comm. Design wiki about Dr. Steve Matanle's lecture about intention v. chance.

...I've had Steve Matanle as a professor for a couple of classes, and while his lecturing style can take some getting used to, he's a brilliant man with a lot of knowledge to pass on. Fun fact: he drinks maybe a billion cups of coffee a day. His caffeine intake is truly heroic.

That aside, I liked what he had to say about the differences between craftsmanship and artistry, and his support of chance and coincidence in the creative process. I've heard him touch on those topics before, but not in this much detail. His definition of artistry as an exercise of skill that isn't rigidly goal-oriented makes a lot of sense, and is one of the more concise divisions between art and craft that I've ever heard. It also generated quotes like "mastery is a dead end," which is still funny to me days later.

The photography and eyes-closed drawing exercises were fun, and liberating, and a form of experimentation that I think more designers need. One thing I've noticed about the design community (not specifically at UB, but in general) is how finicky they are about method: you have to use the Adobe suite, you have to have a Mac, etc. There are a lot of rules. Not suggestions, flat-out rules. Which makes a certain amount of sense - marketing or corporate design has to be consistent and sharp - but it's also stifling and inhibits their drive to try new stuff just to see what it does. Of course, I'm not a designer and I work largely on impulse, so what do I know, but it's fun to experiment. And really, what's the point of an artistic career if you're not having at least some fun with it?

Just my two cents, anyway.

i don't think there's any way to get away from these facts

2010-10-27T21:02:00.000-07:00

News! I am getting published in two e-journals next month - The Light Ekphrastic (in which my writing will be paired with visual art) and the recently-restarted ULA. Literary stardom is surely just around the corner; this time next year, I'll be lighting cigars with other, more expensive cigars. Seriously though, both journals are awesome and I'll have the respective links up here when the time is right.

Second item! Not sure if anyone's been keeping up with the Juan Williams controversy, but he was let go by NPR, where he was apparently an independent contractor, for anti-Muslim remarks he made during a conversation with Bill O'Reilly on Fox News. All sorts of pondwater has been stirred up about whether or not NPR was justified in kiboshing Williams' contract, but the funniest part to me is, given how much pro-management legislation Republicans have pushed through wherein employers can basically fire people for no reason, how much the right is bitching about someone they like getting shitcanned for violating the terms of his contract. Ha ha ha. As an independent contractor myself, that made me chuckle.

As for what Williams said, I think he came off like an asshole bigot. It's one thing to admit prejudicial thoughts/opinions with the admission that they are irrational and unfair, but it's quite another to bask in them and fall back on one's own racial identity to deflect criticism. Fox's response to the whole thing has been typically classless - they are Fox, after all - but for once they aren't alone in handling it badly. Just one big *facepalm* all around.

unbelievable but it works

2010-10-21T22:14:00.000-07:00

Missed a reading at school tonight to read at the Moaning Pipe Open Mic, which went well enough. I was workshopping some new stuff by judging crowd response, and hung out with a couple of the other participants afterward, which was nice.

My buddy Angela Horner announced her website, which is linked in the sidebar, and was almost embarrassed by having one at all. I kind of understand that, since self-promotion is awkward and makes one feel more like a carnival huckster than a genuine artist when done to excess. But any marketer will tell you that people don't buy products, they buy a strange jumble of intangibles radiated by that product. The same goes for artists, albeit not as blatantly. I've probably mentioned before that the wisdom now is to develop a camaraderie with readers - reach out to them, establish your personality, communicate with them for reasons other than outright begging them to buy stuff from you - so they will cozy up to your brand, as it were, and support you of their own accord. Of course, since the pressure is on to be cool and interesting, this often means crafting a persona that you'll need to slip in and out of for any and all interaction with the public, which means exaggerating an aspect of your personality that you think will attract people. Not all writers do this, but a lot of them do.

If I had my druthers, I'd opt for the Thomas Pynchon approach of reclusiveness to the point where everyone thinks I'm dead until a new book comes out. There's much less pressure there, and it's also kinda cool to know an author primarily by their work instead of the bajillions of social networking tools they use to spam your life for their own roundabout gain. But I wonder if his being able to disappear is even possible, let alone personally or financially wise, in today's media landscape. It was a lot harder to keep track of people back in the 70s, after all.

Anyway, I'm starting to ramble, so I'm going to shut up and go to sleep, but I might continue this a bit later.

a radically different concept of success

2010-10-17T09:08:00.000-07:00

Cross-posted from my Comm. Design class blog:

I've had Jane Delury for a couple of classes, so I know her and her tutorial on submitting to journals pretty well. I started submitting to online journals right after I graduated from college, so I know the process, but I still learned something from Jane's lecture. I also appreciate her honesty about literary journals, how they're edited, and how, shall we say, tight their readership is.

She also gave the class a chance to interact in small groups, which was a neat idea. Given that this is a lecture series, we don't often get to do that, and it's nice, speaking as a writer, to commune with designers every so often and see things with their eyes. I'm still very much a novice when it comes to determining how things look, and there's a whole vocabulary to design that I'm missing. Besides, picking apart the numerous layout and typeface errors in literary journals is fun! There's definitely a "look" to lit. journals that I've never liked, but I'm learning to explain what it is I don't like, and how I would change it if given the chance. Hopefully the designers in the class won't roll their eyes at my obvious questions too much.

The writing exercise was also fun - I generally give stories more of a chance than the first paragraph (in fact, when I edited a journal in undergrad I read everything all the way through), but Jane's right about grabbing people from the beginning. And pooling minds to rewrite opening paragraphs badly is both a great way to bond with classmates and a reverse-osmosis method of learning what makes a good sentence and a good paragraph.

Like I said, I learned a lot. Jane's a good representative of the CWPA program, and I'm glad she was able to share her time and knowledge with us.

the relative importance of price and environmental virtue

2010-10-13T22:38:00.000-07:00

Went to a pretty awesome reading in midtown Balmer tonight - the Artifice Magazine folks were in town on their book tour (they're based in Chicago), and brought fun with them, plus all the readers were fantastic. Being around people like them always fires me up, because they're very good and very involved in what they're doing, and that lights a fire under my ass to keep working and getting better. Tonight was also just what I needed after a somewhat lackluster poetry workshop. Not that my classmates aren't smart and perceptive, or that my poem for this week was a gem, but no one really had anything to say about it, which was weird. One would think they'd have come up with something. It was a letter poem that I wrote as a telegram, and I may post it here sometime. I don't think it was that odd, all things considered, but it clearly wasn't effective if it didn't engage any readers. I dunno. Maybe I'll try it out at a reading or two and see how it's received.

At some point I need to cross-post my response to Jane Delury's guest lecture from last week's Comm. Design class, because she talked about literary journals and the submitting process, which are perfect topics for this blog. But it's also 1:30am and I need to sleep, so it'll have to wait for another time.

let's get down to some SERIOUS poetry

2010-10-12T08:33:00.000-07:00

hey you guys you guys you guys by Dave Kiefaber is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

ah my public. how they love me.

2010-10-06T08:21:00.000-07:00

Re: my take on a kinda fucked up and unappealing Snickers Halloween commercial. (here's the ad itself)

"[DK], when will you understand advertising? The fact that the kids are 'not right' is because, 1) it's Halloween, 2) it's the odd humor of Snickers, 3) I'm guessing you'd rather have formulaic sit-com comedy. 'Who let the kids in the store like that?' Did you really ask that? Really? No, serious, really? You'll make a "great" client someday.
And what you failed to notice is that the only thing wrong with it was it wasn't funny enough. Maybe it was bad casting. Or bad writing. But being 'not right' wasn't one of the reasons. Sorry. You fail on so many levels."

Wow. You'd think I called his mom fat or something. But this is a prime example of why UB's uber-supportive writing atmosphere still takes some getting used to - out in the real world, there are plenty of crybabies who want to punch holes in your boat over trivial crap.

he's the best in the world at listing things

2010-10-02T21:56:00.000-07:00

Looks like I'll be part of the next issue of The Light Ekphrastic, which pairs writers and visual artists for the betterment of everyone involved. Good times. Karen Steele will be creating a new piece of visual art based on a short story of mine called "The Experiment," and I will write a new piece based on something of hers. I think I've got one picked out, so we'll see how that goes. Good times.

Now then, here's a cross-posting from my Comm. Design class wiki about a presentation on historical photo fakery by Dr. Nicole Hudgins:

Dr. Nicole Hudgins' lecture on photography was, on the whole, rather illuminating. I didn't know photography was such a point of contention within the historical community (although I should have assumed, because everything else is), so the squabbles over why and how certain photographs were staged, or straight up faked, interested me. Her grounding in different methods of photography was very solid as well, and added to the discussion - subjects were chosen by the available technology as much as the photographer, it seems.

Her main point was that photography can be an agent of state control, using the parallel development of visual propaganda and the camera as a guide peg, and that the assumption of cameras plainly documenting the truth without embellishment is often just that. The latter statement led to the most interesting part of the evening: the discussion of whether objective journalism is possible, or even necessary, and the underlying question of whether or not objective truth really exists. Many philosophers smarter than me have died on this hill, so I'll stick to offering my opinion on objective journalism.

Dr. Hudgins posed the question of whether or not it's possible, and to be honest, it really isn't. Plain, unvarnished truth is an ideal, much like equality and justice and world peace, and the parameters of the human mind limit us to, at best, an asymptotic relationship with objectivity. Plus, it's really hard (and maybe beside the point) to be objective about things like Vietnam, or Iraq, or health care, or corporate scandal.

Unfortunately, the resignation that journalism can't be truly objective is one cause for the media downshifting into punditry, in which opinion is presented as news with no real framework for fact-checking or correction. People like to blame it on blogging and the Internet's sudden wide distribution of information, but it had been happening long before either of those took off, and if people read the news based on whether or not they agree with it, it's because television had already set that standard.

All this leaves photojournalists in a tough position - how do they capture something that may not even exist? My opinion, which took a few days to congeal in my brain, is that they should try as hard as they can to be accurate and factual, allowing for their individual biases. Whether or not they reach The Truth is almost irrelevant; it's one of those Greek ideals that, while ultimately unattainable, is worth trying for because the pursuit betters us all.

Or, failing that, go into satire. The Onion has some of the best journalistic writers in the field, and their photo fakery improves with every issue.

GIT R DONNE

2010-09-29T09:15:00.000-07:00

Busy week so far, and I have precious little energy to spare for some reason, but I ended up attending Last Rites at the Baltimore Hostel on Sunday, and good times were had! Laura van der Berg read, and she apparently taught at my alma mater not too long after I graduated. She teaches at Gilman now, where my dad went until he, ahem, left for greener pastures at Boy's Latin. Smalltimore, indeed. Anyway, the Last Rites crew are a fun bunch, and they invited me to read in January, so hopefully I'll have something half-decent prepared by then.

I also read from Cat's Cradle at a Banned Book reading on campus, which was sparsely attended but still fun. It's not often that I get to use the phrase "wide open beavers" in a public forum (I was referring to a different book of Vonnegut's, but it still seemed appropriate), and I need to do so more often. I'm going to make a real effort to attend more open mics/readings in the future, as well; I'm not normally a joiner of things, but there's a weird energy in parts of Baltimore's literary community that I like, and I need to put my work out there more than I do. I keep saying that, I know, but that's because if I don't constantly remind myself of my promotional failings, I will continue to spend my free time watching Netflix in my underpants instead of making a name for myself. There are a couple of readings this month that I'll do my best to make, schedule permitting, and a rare Buzzov-en show on the 1st that I'm rather excited about.

But before all that happens, I've got homework to finish. Ta.

2×f 3×f 4×f 5×f etc.

2010-09-25T17:35:00.000-07:00

I braved the heat today and took in the Baltimore Book Festival, which clots downtown with literary ephemera and street fair grub every September. I'll be heading back tomorrow, most likely, but today was notable for hearing Larry Doyle read from Go Mutants! (which I recently started and already like), hearing Kimberley Lynne read from Dredging the Choptank (I make a cameo in the promotional vid), and meeting Goodloe Byron, whose free books pop up all over Baltimore, The Wraith being his newest one. Goodloe's a literary weirdo in the finest Bawlmer tradition, and I like his work.

I'm also, as today's picture suggests, reading at a Banned Books event next Tuesday (the 28th) at UB's Langsdale Library. It starts at 11 and runs until 2, and is basically a handful of UB staff/faculty reading excerpts from controversial books. I picked Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, so I'll be reading from it and explaining why it was banned. Cat's Cradle has to be the most innocuous book Vonnegut ever wrote (not intended as an insult), so I'd really hate to meet the article of weaponized anti-fun who found something in it to ban.

That said, I'm going to go watch Silver Streak and write poetry. Back later.

if i'm not X to everyone, they will stop liking me

2010-09-19T19:46:00.000-07:00

Cross-posting this from my Comm. Design class wiki because it fits the scope of this blog nicely, and because I have enough to do without writing two separate posts on the subject.

Jim Astrachan's lecture on copyright, though information-dense and not nearly as cursory as he implied it would be, was fascinating stuff. I realize how much that statement makes me sound like an apple-polisher, but it's true - I learned a lot from him and appreciated his candor and attention to detail. Copyright is a divisive issue thanks to how quickly people can access (and steal) information with the Internet, and it's usually reported in very square, monolithic terms, often from the point of view of miserly entities like the RIAA and Disney and their Congressional supporters. Astrachan's lecture was more specific and, obviously, geared towards what we as creators could do with our work.

His digression about working as a freelancer was also quite welcome. I've been freelancing since I graduated college 4 years ago (and it turns out Jim wrote a column back in the 80s for one of my steadiest contracts, Adweek), but I'm still in the larval stage when it comes to finding work and building a name/reputation/career, so his comprehensive approach to contracts and what separates a freelancer from an employee, and what rights each party has, was really helpful to me. I feel better prepared to keep from getting screwed down the road - sadly, freelancing means you spend as much time harassing people about money as you do actually working.

Finally, it's good to know that Creative Commons licensing is recognized under copyright law. I use CC a lot for my creative work because I like advancing the notion of making art for everyone, but I did occasionally wonder if I had any legal recourse against people who abused the terms of my license. I do, as it turns out, which makes me a very happy man. Jim is a little too mercenary to use CC (his words, not mine), but I admire their aims. Plus, I'm still young - there's plenty of time for me to age into rapaciousness and demand that copyright protection on all my work be extended into perpetuity throughout the Universe.

on the next episode of...

2010-09-15T20:42:00.000-07:00

Made some changes to the BoD Publications! page, mainly because I settled on a title for my next project and, while I don't know the exact release date yet, I do know the season. So there's that. Skate on up to that page to find out a little more info.

Tuesday brought a very interesting lecture on copyright law from Jim Astrachan, who's something of a bigwig in the field, and tonight's poetry class was fun enough to shake me out of the terrible mood work had left me in. All the positivity in that class will take some getting used to, but that's another topic for another day. As is everything else I've mentioned here, sadly, because I need to get some real writing done and go to bed. I'm OLD. But I will go into more depth on these topics when I have the time and energy to do so. But since it's bad form to let the blog stand idle for too too long, I figured a general update was in order.

ruiner is breaking up

2010-09-10T18:21:00.000-07:00

Just returned (a little early) from the unofficial SPX pre-party over at Atomic Books. I was the awkward guy there by himself because people flake out whenever I invite them to anything, but it was cool to people-watch as some of the indie comics glitterati read their work, accompanied by Powerpoint slides of their comics. I don't remember who any of them were, sadly, but they were all good. SPX will be a fun time this year, although sadly I'm not going because a) I'm working all weekend, b) it costs money, and c) driving to/being in Upper Marlboro is the pits. So I think I'll skip it this year. Besides, Netflix just sent me something fun to watch.

But before I run off to watch that, I'd like to announce that I HAVE FEELINGS ABOUT POETRY. Specifically, that I don't care for the "disregard the reader" attitude currently in favor among poets these days. Frankly, not considering the reader is part of the reason why no one reads poetry any more - to paraphrase David Foster Wallace yet again, reading poetry feels like being a little kid with adults having a conversation over your head. Coming from a fiction background, that's inexcusable. Readers can be frustrating, of course, and shallow, and demanding, but they're also important (and not just in terms of sales, either). Poetry is a way to really converse with readers in a way that fiction - since it has characters and plot and such to navigate - often struggles with, and yet a lot of poets prefer academic navel-gazing, or passive-aggressively yelling at ex-lovers, that turns off everyone but other poets.

Granted, I'm new to poetry so what the fuck do I know, but I'd like the stuff I churn out this semester to be more than just a smart guy jerking off. I'd like reading it to be a rewarding experience for people. So while I don't have a methodology more complex than "consider the reader" going in, maybe that'll be enough.

it's been a long time since somebody read to me

2010-09-09T12:28:00.000-07:00

Working again, so this'll be a short post. My birthday was the 4th, and celebrations continued into the 5th, followed by a glorious amount of doing nothing on Labor Day. Tuesday night was my Perspectives in Design class, where Citylit founder Gregg Wilhelm gave a talk about the industry and his role as a publisher/editor. He's more optimistic than most about the future of the business, and the point he often came back to was that content is king. No matter how one interacts with literature - be it actual books, hardbacks, audiobooks, e-readers, telepathic projection, etc. - the format doesn't affect the quality. If the book sucks on the page, it'll still suck as an e-book or .pdf file. That's an important message to get across, because writers and designers are so afraid of tech advancements that they forget how useful their skills really are. Not to mention, as e-readers grow more sophisticated, things like varied typefaces, margins, and good illustrations will retain their spot in the marketplace. Hell, they might even revitalize alongside the new technology. Now, the question of whether anyone will be able to make a decent living at it is still unanswered, and publishing is still on shaky ground, so don't think I've completely given myself over to optimism. But it's nice to meet someone in the business who isn't a doomsaying sad sack.

Okay, enough slacking. I'll share my thoughts on modern poetry, and maybe even one of my terrible new poems, next time.

people send me away

2010-09-02T10:20:00.000-07:00

Welp, looks like my poetry workshop is going to be fun, too. I'm at work, so I can't unleash my scattered and uneducated opinions about modern poetry (lucky you), but those are on tap for a future posting. So are a few of my poems, if I deem them not-terrible enough to make public. You've been warned.

In the meantime, my short story "Trail of Sawdust" is up at 5923 Quarterly - the link is in my Published Works sidebar. And I have a new Banners of Death project to get excited about - a friend of mine over at Kent State wants me to publish an edited, abridged, and salacious version of her doctoral thesis once she's done with it. The world will soon discover just how many dirty jokes she and I can squeeze out of liquid crystal research. And yes, there will be illustrations. The idea of a literary physics text is just the sort of weirdness I like, and I think putting it together will be fun. A challenge, certainly, but fun. The sciences have a rich vocabulary that's added a lot to fiction. and literary writing in general, so I'm looking forward to seeing what comes out of this.

All right, time to make the donuts.

is it fall yet

2010-09-01T13:16:00.000-07:00

There. Never let it be said that I can't be nice when I want to be.

So another semester has begun, which means more scintillating academic jabbering from me over the next few months. Most of it will come from my Tuesday class, best described as a lecture series on various ephemera of writing and publishing. Should be a good time, and the copyright and branding lectures are worth taking this class all by themselves, in my opinion. Once the class blog is set up, we'll all be writing responses to said lectures, and I may republish my entries here if time permits. They'd be topical enough for this blog, and it's an easy source of updates since, as I'm sure any remaining readers have noticed, I don't update unless I have something specific to impart. Facebook and Twitter can encourage us to broadcast every mundane occurrence in our lives all they want, but I'm not doing it - my thoughts are directionless enough when I'm trying to make a point, so God only knows what would happen if I started wasting everyone's time with what kind of sandwich I ate today or how I can't ever find hats that fit.

Luckily, I'm not that desperate to brand myself yet, so I'll end here and get to class, since I've got a bus to catch. More later.

truth is like the sun

2010-08-26T12:53:00.000-07:00

Well, the impossible has occurred - my grandmother asked for a copy of GoAM. I had some misgivings about actually giving her one, but I relented and left a copy with her last week. Do other writers have to go through this? There's some pretty fucked up stuff in there, and the poor woman's almost 90. Good thing I'm almost 30 or she'd probably have me committed to some delinquent home for Satanic teenagers or something.

Anyway, the radio silence here is due to me taking a short vacation to TN, where my lifelong dream of visiting Graceland was realized. I've seriously wanted to go there since I was 10, and it didn't disappoint. Say what you want about Elvis, but he put together the most ridiculous house in Christendom; shag carpeting everywhere, themed rooms, a racquetball court with a bar and no actual racquetball court, animal print furniture, you name it. All told, it looks like a schizophrenic bordello. But I found myself admiring Elvis' horrible taste, not laughing at it. As tacky as everything was, Graceland still felt like someone's home, like it had been lived in. As I went through the exhibits, which included a showroom of his cars and a display of his many hilarious outfits (and silk pirate shirts fitted at the elbows), it dawned on me that Elvis was insanely wealthy from a very early age and just surrounded himself with things he liked. I can respect that. I'm pretty sure I can even understand it.

I brought a souvenir back, too - a black bowling shirt with blue paneling and "ELVIS" written across the back in glittery capital letters. Awesome.

caterwauling flibbertigibbet

2010-08-15T20:35:00.000-07:00

Welp, Gouts of Angry Mist is printed up and I've been assembling copies like mad all weekend. I got more pre-orders than I'd expected, so I might have to do a second printing if it's well-received at readings. Here's hoping. This being the era of Etsy stores and Paypal, I'm sure my 'zine process sounds low-rent and quaint, but I'm fine with this approach for now. Call it my first stumbling steps into outsider art, or something.

Hey, that almost sounds like a segue. I've been thinking about outsider art a lot lately, probably because Baltimore is a hub for the stuff. Weirdo/folk art is big here - we've got everything from 'zines to painted screen doors to John Waters movies to AVAM, not to mention how many writers/students/hobbyist poets there are in this town. There are a lot of open mics around here, some of them weekly. A lot of the more active writers are more conventional, yes, but there's nothing wrong with that. A lot of them are quite good, in fact.

What interests me, though, is that outsider art still has a stigma attached to it. Even though it has taken on more prominence in the past 10-15 years than ever before, in almost every artistic medium (visual arts, music, etc.), it still unnerves people. It's almost slotted in with anime, punk rock, and heavy metal as something that only freaks and losers and antisocial manchildren can enjoy. Hipsters may think those attitudes are dead, but they really aren't - I see them crop up a lot in my interactions with the local literary community, anyway.

Hell, even I catch myself holding those attitudes from time to time, as if to say that something is only as valuable as it is respectable (thinking specifically of anime stigma here, since the stereotype is that everyone into the stuff is a fat, awkward otaku with poor hygiene). And that's not really true. Even if it was, the freaks and losers and antisocial manchildren of the world need some element of society to speak to them. Denying that is effectively saying that only certain elements of society deserve to be entertained/represented, which is horse shit. Of course, all this leads into a huge discussion about how outsider art is co-opted and made safe for general consumption, one that I don't have the energy for right now, but luckily the Internet provides a nice end-run around that familiar cycle if you're patient and willing to dig up some fun on your own.

Anyway, Christ, I'm rambling. Is this what I sound like when I talk? Half-smart gibberish bubbling out of my mouth like sea foam? Clearly I need to get back to work, or read Charles Stross' blog more often so I can see what happens when someone organizes his thoughts instead of just shitting them out through his fingers. Ta.

caramel corn for president please

2010-08-11T08:24:00.000-07:00

Zine update! Yesterday's test printing was a success (eventually) and copies will be made tomorrow or Friday to be assembled over the weekend. I've got a couple of open mics to attend next week, so maybe I can unload a few copies on Baltimore's literary scene before school starts.

The 'zine, as you may recall, is Gouts of Angry Mist, and I have some photos of the prototype, which needed larger print and lighter photos (some of the pictures in the second piece smudged during reproduction). The cover is still the same, though, and the basic layout hasn't changed much. It's just easier to read now. I should probably paste my author bio in there somewhere too, now that I think about it, but for all intents and purposes, it's done. Hooray!

I'm actually putting together another 'zine as we speak; the new one's a more traditional mix of poetry and short stories, but it'll be a while yet before that one's out of the formative stages. Besides, I'd like to take a minute or two and bask in the completion of Gouts. Summer projects are great when they actually turn out the way you want them to, aren't they?

brace face i love you

2010-08-08T21:00:00.000-07:00

"Don't take this the wrong way, but your poetry is really...strange."

Best review I've gotten in weeks, courtesy of a fellow reader at Minas, a vintage clothing boutique and art gallery on the Avenue that hosts poetry readings from time to time. The first part of it was an open mic, so I read a couple of newish poems. I don't write much poetry - I'm not very good at it and it's not a form I particularly like - but some ideas are stubborn and won't come out any other way. I'm sure you all understand.

I've had a lot on my mind lately that, when I have the time and energy to write it up, will make its way here in due time. Until then, uh, here's part of a Weyes Bluhd set that features her creepy-yet-beautiful balladry.

WEYES BLUHD @ ART DAMAGE LODGE - 3/5/10