June 18, 2007

I saw Anthony Doerr at the Elliott Bay Book Company last week. He is from Idaho and he has written a book about the year he spent his Rome his wife and just born twin sons courtesy of the Rome Prize. The book is a well written travelogue that shows the mundane life of a writer in a foreign city trying to write while he is also trying to be a dad and a husband. In short, the book is essentially a printed blog. He writes: "A good journal entry should be a love letter to the world." As a winner of prestigious prizes (including the Rome Prize) and "One of American's Best Novelists Under 35" Doerr delivered a reading that I can only describe as writer's porn -- not sex -- but the graphic and glossy reproduction of the nitty gritty aspects of a writer's life. He writes about his writing of short stories. He writes about his reading of Pliny the Elder. I'm sure for Mr. Doerr his writing life is not easy. After all he actually moved to Rome courtesy of the prize in order to write. If his at-home writing life was straight forward I'm sure he could only regard this as a disruption. In turn, Mr. Doerr seemed eager to get the most what is generally the most painful portion of the reading -- the Elliott Bay Question and Answer section. Unlike just about any other writer I've seen read in the bookstore basement, Mr. Doerr wanted to talk about writing. He wanted to talk about writing a lot. I had to shuffle out the basement, because while I enjoyed Mr Doerr's writer's porn, I didn't want to talk about it afterwards.

Anthony Doerr is a startlingly conservative writer and I don't know what to make of his writing. I don't mean politically conservative but in what he writes about and how he uses language. Here is a random paragraph from a story of his that is set in Astoria, Oregon, The Caretaker:

The garden explodes into life; Joseph gets the impressed it would grow even if the world was plunged into permanent darkness. Each night there are changes; cluster of green spheres materialize and swell on the tomato stems; yellow flowers emerge from the vines like burning lamps. He begins to wonder if the large, bushy creepers are zucchini after all--maybe they are squash, some kind of gourd. But they are melons.

I don't know if I believe this is the way to talk about a writers writing they way I am doing there, that is pulling out a random paragraph. Pulled from context, it is bound it seem a bit lifeless. A tissue sample from a handsome man is likely to seem like a blob of gelatin and not a handsome tissue sample. But this tends to be the way it is done. A writer I know will run a test on books I believe he doesn't want to read or books he wants to confirm suck, he'll page randomly through the book to see if he can find any cliches. If he finds ones, he'll shelf the book. No good. This seems like a process that will always result in false positives. I feel a bit more like cutting a writer some slack. Even Homer nods, someone said. We do what we can, another writer said. Even a great oral story tellers clears their throat and repeats themselves. In Anthony Doerr's case his line-to-line writing is completely unobjectionable, conventional, the verbal equivalent of a GMC truck. "yellow flowers . . . like burning lamps" is a purely functional simile, the point of connection between yellow and lamp very close to a literal connection. Nothing false flatter than a simile comparing to like things, i.e., liquid like water, for instance. Doerr's writing does what it is intended to but hardly inspires through a turn of phrase or musical quality or those other difficult to pin-down qualities that say be found at random in, say, The Best American Short Stories 1989 selected by Margaret Atwood.

Uncle Trash rakes everything my brother and I own into the pillowcases off our beds and says let that be a lesson to me. He is off through the front porch leaving s buck naked across the table, his last words as he goes up the road shoulder-slinging his loot. Don't y'all burn the house down. ("Strays" by Mark Richard, page 283)

Sure third person is more difficult than first person, but still…

I had read a story of Mr. Doerr's a while ago in the Best American Short Story anthology which is like a game-preserve for American fiction or a gateway drug for readers of short fiction. Even though there are practically no mass circulation magazines printing American fiction anymore, the perennial best-selling Best American Short Stories contains a comprehensive list of the obscure "little" magazines that do publish short fiction. You can find the web address and editorial address of tiny circulation magazines such as The Green Hills Literary Lantern or ZYZZYVA. I first started reading the anthologies when I was nineteen and read Margaret Atwood's anthology. I don't know if that was a good year. In retrospect it seems like a high-point but that could just be because it was my first exposure to some of the fiction being written by writers who's books were not likely to be found in the B. Dalton at South Center Mall. But in the years since the early 1990s, mainstream literary fiction has become not only conventional but has also become accessible to the degree that it all sounds very similar. Mainstream literary fiction is kind of an oxymoron I guess. Fiction that has some kind of market rather than the vast majority of fiction that may be published but it is by and large invisible to the book-buying public. For instance, Gary Lutz published a collection of stories, I Looked Alive, with Black Square Editions a few years ago. Lutz is widely regarded fiction writer. Taste-maker George Saunders writes, "Gary Lutz is a master--living proof that even in our cliche-ridden denial-drenched age, true originality is still an American possibility." Lutz has been a steady seller at Powells.com. But at a BookSense store is registers as "Special Order - Subject to Availability" (at least it shows up!) Anthony Doerr on the other hand released a book around the same time, The Shell Collector and it is not only on the shelf at the bookstore, but is Available for Immediate Download in three digital formats. (I wonder how that works with BookSense since the program is supposed to be a broker for local booksellers. If you downloaded, does the closest bookstore to your billing zip code get the credit?)

The Best American Short Story series seems to be one of the ways in which this conservative view of American fiction has been propagated. Each year sees the same cast of authors speckled with new authors who write in the approved style. Whoever handles the Best American product line seems aware of this having in the last couple of years begun releasing The Best NonRequired Reading edited by David Eggers. I do not begrudge David Eggers for his successes and hope his press (McSweeney's) pulls through the craziness associated with the collapse of PGW (a distributor who went bankrupt and has sent closures and acquisitions spilling through the small press). David Egger's anthology in contrast, stuffed with Egger's peculiar enthusiasms is at least not as conservative as the Best American Short Stories. He publishes what he likes and what a person likes is, thankfully, a pretty fickle standard. But the current publishing world seems short on writers such as David Egger's and long on the revolving editors and screeners that make up The Best American series, or O'Henry Awards, and Ploughshares, and so on.

I don't know if I believe in progress in literature. Anthony Doerr writes very lucid and clear sentences. Their function is not do be doubted. His stories are all about something and they are peopled with unambiguous characters with clearly articulated motivations. Anthony Doerr has been to school, and in that sense, his writing is well schooled. He is a pleasant person to hear read. Like a Hershey Chocolate bar or Bud Light he represents the best of America. There is something to be said, I think, for industrial consistency. You know what you are going to get.

April 27, 2007

So my business in Chicago was completely virtual, or rather it had been enabled by the virtual although it was going to happen in rooms with other people. Echoes of the virtual would layer over everything that happened. In meeting Bob Archambeau, the first thing he said was, I saw you updated your blog.

Chicago itself was a virtual space layered over a physical space. Even though I was downtown in the oldest region known as The Loop, in what is called a “business district” there wasn't any business visible. The idea of business in the city is one of merchants, business people, writers and artists, tourists mingling together and interacting to create an economy of exchange either for money or ideas or what have you. Jane Jacob’s in her Economy of Cities places “innovation” within the city walls. She argues that even such rural activities as agriculture and herding were formulated within the city walls.
A recent study points out that ideas (like The Plague) progress in the city far faster than anywhere else. Cities create a sort of "urban economic miracle," says study co-author Luis Bettencourt, a research scientist in Los Alamos National Laboratory's Theoretical Division. "When you integrate all these people and all these activities and the struggle to make a living, total productivity increases," he says. it is unclear though what he means by a city. If he means a complex network of social and business contexts, you could easily substitute The Web for this. How quickly do virtual plagues spread compared to physical ones?

I was in the center of Chicago the third largest city in the United States a city whose economy is larger than Brazil, and it seemed physically empty. My understanding was that Boeing's headquarters was several blocks from where I was staying. When I went for a walk, people on the sidewalk were mostly tourists like me. I crossed to the Millennial Park. It was completely abandoned. There were large shiny objects reflecting the skyline. Inside those buildings, people worked. But the work was distributed and even though they were working inside those buildings their interactions with other people were occurring across phone lines and fiber-optic cables -- a layer superimposed on the city and one that was oblivous to geography.

Bill Allegrezza said that bike messengers were a large business in Chicago and I wondered what was transported from building to building that could not be sent across the network? A San Diego blog about bikes says they are doing well, even in the Internet age. For most business documents, paper is an obsolete technology. The kind of dynamic diagrams need to describe complex systems cannot be captured on paper. You need a database, assocations, and rendering engines. Blueprints belong to a bygone era. This doesn't mean the people will not continue to send blueprints via courier, but it is a nostalgic act similar to sending a telegram or riding a steam train.

I walked through the empty city at the end of the day and came to the odd raspberry color of the lake. The docks had been turned over to marinas. I walked alongside a sea-wall that showed no evidence of the working docks that must have boarded the city in the middle of the last century. An old working boat had been turned over to the Chicago Yacht Club. I sat at the end of the pier where I disturbed some Canadian geese. One was nesting in a planter. Her partner zipped up for the lake to begin to hiss at me and wave his neck back and forth. I was going to hold my ground but I wasn't sure what I was going to do if the beast actually bit me or attached his beak and didn't let go. So I scurried on my way and walked along the Chicago River. The river itself didn't flow into Lake Michigan but rather like Michigan floated into the river due to some 19th century engineering work. I wonder I wondered about the river itself getting filled with green dye during St. Patrick's Day. It didn't seem like that would be a very good thing for the river. I still didn’t’ encounter any people. Instead, I encountered feral brown rabbits.

Bill picked me up in the early morning we drove through the traffic out of the city towards the suburbs passing on the outer ring. a business parks and into the farthest ring of the city was on the largest steel mills in the world operated. These steel mills used to employ tens of thousands of people in the Chicago area but in the 1970s they began to automate and lay off the workforce. The raw materials arrived via barge across Lake Michigan from massive mines in Michigan. The steel mills sit on the edge of Lake Michigan where there are massive ponds filled with industrial effluvia. In Gary, Indiana, we parked at the commuter campus where Bill taught English. I was going to speak to a class of seniors enrolled in a contemporary literature class. I wasn't sure what to expect because these were undergraduates who had read my book and most likely they would be required to write a paper on my book. I was responsible for a degree of thier homework. It was kind of embarrassing because on one hand this is the kind of transaction that I wanted when I started writing books and the first-place to command the attention of someone in the way that the novels that I liked the student meant my attention but at the same time I was just someone who'd written a book. While we're waiting for the class to begin we ran into one of Bill's fellow teachers. Her name is Mary Harris Russell, author of Delinquents and Debutantes and a reviewer of children books for the Chicago Tribune. It was her last term as a teacher. My first sign of trouble was her copy of Shoot the Buffalo festooned with Post-it notes and bookmarks. It would've an interesting to read their papers which would have been separate from the standard function of book reviews. But on the other hand also seemed something private tentative about student’s response to my work. They were learning about having reactions to books. The classroom that as a commuter college was full of students who looked as if they heater just come from a job were on their way to a job. They're mostly in their 20s. The most part and talking about the book they were interested in relating portions of the book to their own lives. Sometimes though the student would say something such as “Do you remember that part where you wrote that thing? I really like that.” I would say thank you, and then an embarrassed silence would follow.

After meeting Bill's class, we drove through Gary, Indiana. Gary still had a population of 100,000 or so. But the city had been in stark and sudden decline since the 1970s when the steel mill began to automate production. Several years ago Gary and the highest murder rate in the United States. In downtown Gary you can buy a storefront on Main Street for a dollar. Judging from the look of the plywood covered buildings on anyone took them up on that. For the odd things about this be storefronts was that it was probably 30 minutes to downtown Chicago and more importantly it was maybe 15 or 20 minutes to the jobs in the in the industrial belt around Chicago. It is hard to imagine that it will be a permanent condition in Gary Indiana. At the same time looking at the empty shell of the downtown it's hard to imagine it changing.

A few years ago Gary attempted to hold a Miss USA pageant in Gary. This was seen as perhaps a catalyst to revitalize the town. Instead thought participants stayed in Chicago and commuted out to Gary for the pageant.

The Gary website contains this ecstatic recollection:
Miss USA 2002 was a huge success for the City of Gary, Miss Universe Organization, sponsors, and the community of Northwest Indiana. Through great teamwork, organization, and hard work, thousands of visitors came to Gary to take in some of the most exciting special events ever to visit Gary and millions watched the Live Telecast as the drama unfolded, crowning Miss District of Columbia Shauntay Hinton as the new Miss USA 2002

Oddly Gary was the home to Simone de Beauvoir. She lived with Nelson Algren for time in Gary. He had a house on the beach.

In the evening I read at The Hyde Park Arts Center. The art center provides Series A with a free reading space in order to keep the economy of various artists using the space. While you're waiting for the reading one of the building administrators talk to Bill about participation of writers and upcoming art event. It was a natural conversation coming out of the fact that they were writers and artists in the same space. At times, very spaces in Seattle provide for this kind of interaction between disciplines but for the most part it seems that each of the disciplines have their own dedicated space. The Hyde Park Center I don't think it is a common kind of structure. It receives its funding from the artists do to Chicago and University of Chicago but also it seems developers in the area who want to maintain the artistic activity of the neighborhood.

The reading itself was well attended. Bob Archambeau read a poem about glam rock. He read a long string of the names associated with Iggy Pop, David Bowie, and Lou Reed. Kass Fleischer read a portion of Accidental Species. Each part began, “On the day the space shuttle flew overhead--“ At the end of the reading readers exchanged books, a handful of books were sold, and everyone went out for something to eat.

April 23, 2007

I realized immediately after I entered Chicago from O’Hare, that I knew nothing (really) about Chicago. This is what I know about Chicago: I have read books set in Chicago and I’ve talked to people from Chicago. The people I’ve talked to from Chicago often complain about hot dogs in other cities. Since hot dogs hardly seem like edible food, perhaps in Chicago they are good?

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair is set in Chicago. Carl Sandburg has a poem about Chicago. Sister Carrie rises from poverty in Chicago. Stuart Dybek has a very short story set in Chicago called the Gold Coast. But when I hear the phrase, The Gold Coast, this always makes me think of Africa. Gwendolyn Brooks is from Chicago -- there is a suburb called Bronzville which was one of the neighborhoods that grew as a result of the migration of rural blacks from the South to Chicago. I know about the Chess Record label. Muddy Water’s single, I Can’t Be Satisfied, was a big hit with urban blacks since the song is a nostalgic send up to the music from the country, that by the forties was lost or maybe never had. But all of this means I do not know Chicago.

Chicago is also the city in the future where Buck Roger’s lives. And it is also the gigantic green glass city of OZ. OZ, in fact is about as close as I know Chicago. When I stepped off the train -- I refuse to call it the “El” because I haven’t heard anyone in real life call it that here. Everyone talks about stops and distances, and no one I’ve talked to has uttered the word “El.” Chicago feels more like Spokane to me -- although a well-heeled Spokane -- then it does like Seattle, San Francisco, or New York. People in Chicago speak at a medium speed and are very direct it sounds like from listening to people on the train.

I went to my hotel room downtown in the middle of supertall, very old buildings. Some block away there was a massive outdoor space, the Millennium Park, and Art Institute of Chicago. To the north there was a river. To the west there were the modern skyscrapers with exposed metal frames and glass. I slept and woke and when I left for to meet everyone at Quimby’s, the bookstore where I had a reading, it was incredibly hot outside. I wore a sweater because it had been chilly in Seattle and in the morning on the way in from the airport.

I took the train and got off in the neighborhood where the bookstore was located. Everyone was wearing loose, light clothes. I started to get sweat huge amounts. Finally I located the bookstore. The wasn’t any vegetation on the street. It was brick, cement, and terra cotta. I located the bookstore. I’d never been to Quimby’s before. It was full of handmade books, zines, and small press work includes an entire shelf of Clear Cut Books. Logan who works there and who I’ve emailed a few times was at the counter and I asked him where I could by a t-shirt. He pointed me south a few blocks since everyone on Quimby’s street was expensive. I walked through the sweltering neighborhood and tried to find the store he’d directed to me, The Brown Elephant, and instead found myself on an empty block with a K-Mart and a Salvation Army. Inside the Salvation Army, there were wizened old men examining the shirts. A Russian man was at the counter. I found a several shirts of questionable origin that would be cooler than the thick (and now soaked) sweater I was wearing. One of them was a white t-shirt for Ira I. Silverstein for State Senator. The shirts cost four dollars and sixty-seven cents.

“Five dollars even,” the guy said.

“Where can I change?” I asked.

“You want to wear these?” the man asked.

“Yes. I didn’t see a changing room.” I didn’t want to change on the street. Although it was so hot and that hardly anyone was outside.

“Go down into the basement.”

I couldn’t find the basement steps. I walked behind a line that said, “No Customers,” and a man jumped up from his chair. “No. No. No,” he said. He scooted me out of the space by brushing his hands at me.

Finally, I found steps down into a basement full of old furniture and ancient computer equipment and a heap of ink jets printers from the 1990s. A mother and her daughter were looking at dining room tables heaped up in one corner. I found a hidden space and furtively changed into my “new” clothes. I started to cool down immediately, and made it back to Quimby’s before the reading.

Ann Elizabeth Moore, the editor of Punk Planet, was there. And so was the other reader, Patrick Somerville. Ann read a story about North American slave ants which juxtaposed both the trouble of these ants and their ability to make other ants do labor with them but also her own experience dealing with major media and their attempt to make in roads into independent media. She described someone from Time/Warner claiming that while they worked for Time/Warner, they really like “indie work,” and wanted to support it. I think this is a kind of funny problem because most “indie” work is indie not out of an overriding political sensibility but out of necessity. I think the necessity creates a sense of political sensibility and lends itself to a writer or musician or whatever being forced to think about what happens when they make a song or book and how distribution and consumption of the work happens. Perhaps there are musicians or writers out there who demand that the entire chain is “pure.” Maybe Fugazi is like this? But I suspect most writers for instance would be completely happy to “sell out” if they could sell out, and if selling out meant that all they had to do was write their books.

When it comes down it most indie media is pretty cheap to buy if major media actually wanted to buy it. Rebecca Brown, who is published through City Lights, once said she would sell out if anyone was buying.

But at the same time, I think small press writers or musicians who make their own work depend on the channels of independent commerce such as Punk Planet and Quimby’s. It is good to hear that there is a line being drawn by someone. Even though from a production standpoint the creation of independent friendly channels might have stemmed from necessity -- that the doors were closed with traditional distributors and bookstores or record stores -- the creation of these channels is a lot of work. And it requires a degree of work to maintain their economy. So when Punk Planet doesn’t carry ads by Time/Warner, for instance, they are maintain their economic dependence on the health of these independent channels of commerce.

Patrick Somerville read an excellent story LOVE STORY about an Iraqi shopkeeper and his daughter and a young man who was a self-consciously homogenized American.

Also at the reading, there were the Jonathan and Zach of Featherproof Books, a great and tiny small press that published beautiful books such as Todd Dills’ Sons of the Rapture.

When I returned to my room, I listened to a strange hushing noise coming from the vast airspace between the supertall building I am in and the one next door. They were supertall the way building were supposed to be supertall -- they were rebar and brick and the rebar was hidden behind layers of hand set red brick. Not to say that most of Chicago isn't filled with very tall glass and rebar buildings, but I was staying in a region of brick.

February 8, 2007

A couple of weeks ago I read in Bothell at the U Bookstore on the UW/Cascadia CC campus with Eli Moore. He and his friend played a lot of great songs from Eli's new band named "Lake." There were horn parts, for instance, that the two musicians sounded it out with their mouths. They also sang an old song from Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music. For the lit game, I asked people who came to to the reading to write a thank you card to a musician, writer, video game, whatever, that had provided them a meaningful experience somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. Say, they read Lolita in Longview, and it meant something to them. Write a note to Nabakov. They traded their notes and affixed them to a map of the Columbia River drainage.

Here is a PDF of their postcards. (11.2 MB PDF)

December 29, 2006

From October 21 - December 15th, ArtPatch and the Henry Art Gallery presented a survey of past and present The Stranger Genius Award recipients. I took some pictures before my reading last month and the curator, Sara Krajewski, along Matthew Stadler's text. His text was displayed on placards next to past winners of the lit prizes in History and Industry-style cases. I didn't realize I couldn't take pictures, although judging from the blurry nature of the photographs, I think I must have realized I could be booted. Museum guards make me nervous. In the last year I've been to museums in Baltimore, San Francisco, and New York, and invariably I am instructed to move my laptop bag to the front of my person. At the Henry, my furtive shots caused a guard to duck her head in and instruct me: no photographs. So I didn't get a blurry shot of John Olson's interesting box of things. All I have are a mound of his journals. But, here it all is if you are at all interested.

MATT BRIGGS

(Near the open notebook):
Before laptops, Matt Briggs wrote in notebooks at cafés. He kept a notebook “because I wanted someone to accidentally peak over my shoulder and see what I was working on — and I would make things that were kind of interesting to look at.” Many scenes in his stories first took shape in these notebooks, as sketches and conversations, and records of dreams.

(Near the stack of manuscript pages):
In his writing, Matt Briggs has covered thousands of sheets of paper. He remarks that “writing is merely a matter of production. Everyone thinks all of the time, but a writer has a compulsion to put those thoughts in some kind of form on paper. Blogging has perhaps changed this problem and in many ways resembles thought in a better way than paper.”

(Near the computer):
Despite a full-time job (technical writer) and a family (wife and six-year old daughter), Matt Briggs has always written a lot. He produced 700,000 words on this 1991 Mac Classic computer. That’s about 10 novels of average length (230 pages) or 4 Matt Briggs novels (Shoot the Buffalo is 520 pages). But, he cautions, “these 700,000 words resulted in one collection of short stories (60,000 words) and a draft of a 100,000 word manuscript that was still being revised in 1995, when the computer was replaced.”

(Near the copies of Shoot the Buffalo and Personal Archaeology):
Shoot the Buffalo, Matt Briggs’s first novel (winner of the 2006 American Book Award) was published in fits and starts. Begun in 1992, the novel was completed in 2000. Shortly after that, an earlier version of the book, titled Personal Archaeology, appeared for sale on Barnes & Noble’s website, from an Irish publisher using print-on-demand technology. The publisher turned out to be a former literary agent who had converted the manuscripts she could not place into a list of available books. Briggs, who had never been advised of this plan, ordered one. A lawyer advised him to threaten a lawsuit, and the book was withdrawn from the market. Clear Cut Press acquired the finished novel, now called Shoot the Buffalo, in 2002 and published it in the summer of 2005.

(Near the note with directions to a lake):
This note from Matt Briggs’s uncle, Fred Briggs, contains directions to a secret lake from a secret cabin in the Cascade Mountains. Fred Briggs killed himself in 1981 on Capitol Hill. He gassed himself to death in his station wagon.

(Near the family photo album):
The Briggs family, with father Fred Sr. and wife Laura (Matt Briggs’s paternal grandparents), moved west from Maine in the late 1950s. They traveled from town to town, kiting checks and skipping rent until they finally arrived in the Pacific Northwest in the early 1960s, where Fred Senior worked as a carpenter building the suburb of Lynnwood. These are photos of this period. Fred Senior drank heavily and often disappeared and lost jobs. In the late 1960s, Laura left him and the children in Spokane. His oldest daughter worked as a go-go dancer. His oldest son joined the US Army and left for Vietnam. Laura moved to Ephrata, Washington, where she worked as a cashier at Sprouse Rite. Fred Senior died in 1969.

JONATHAN RABAN

(Near the ashtray):
Of the cigars Raban comments, “how I wish I didn’t, but I do.”

(Near the notebook):
This notebook was a gift from Raban’s daughter Julia, who also decorated it. Raban says that “most of [the novel] Surveillance is roughed-out in it. I get intensely attached to my notebooks, or rather sketchbooks (can’t write on lined paper); the more battered they get, the more precious they become. I can’t think how I allowed this one to leave the house.”

(Near copy of A Handful of Dust):
Waugh is among Raban’s favorite writers. As Raban explains, “Waugh had no ear at all for music, but the best ear of anyone writing in English in the last century for the music of the language. I love Waugh for his pitch-perfect linguistic craftsmanship, his sheer lucidity, his ironic grace, and there are always Waugh novels scattered around the house. Funnily enough, I used to hate him: he was a—very distant—relation (I think his mother was my great-grandfather’s sister… a Raban). He used sometimes to show up at our house, a village vicarage, to settle the wills of my father’s cousins, aunts, and uncles. As a teenager, I thought of him as a monstrous right-wing reactionary hyena and used to absent myself from the house whenever he came to tea. I became a convert when I was 26 and heard an actor reading Put Out More Flags in daily fifteen-minute installments on the radio. After listening to two episodes, I bought every Waugh novel that was out in Penguin and read them all within a week. I must have read A Handful of Dust thirty times at least, and each new reading brings fresh pleasure and fresh admiration. As a soldier in World War II, he was the officer from hell, but wrote wonderfully about that war. Writing Surveillance, I kept on asking myself what on earth EW would have made of the ‘war on terror.’”

(Near copy of Our Mutual Friend):
Jonathan Raban lived most of his adult life in London. Among his favorite writers is Charles Dickens, the great chronicler of 19th-century London. Raban calls Dickens’s 1868 novel, Our Mutual Friend, “another book I keep on going back to; Dickens’s greatest single novel, I think; a created world so ample, lavish, intricate and funny that it makes the real one seem tame by comparison. Half my dreams seem to take place inside Dickens’s London.”

REBECCA BROWN

(Near manuscript pages for Danger Signal):
Book defacing is an important art. Rebecca Brown does it with friends as a kind of group craft project and as way to make new books: “I started doing ‘cut N paste’ books many years ago, inviting friends to my house for defacing parties. It was all done in the spirit of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell, altered texts, etc. Danger Signal is by Phyllis Bottome (a pseudonym!), who was a prolific writer from the early mid century. Interesting ideas in her work – and dreadful, awful prose. I collect her work and ‘revise’ it significantly into my own work. I ‘edited’ her book The Mortal Storm into The MortalS after my parents died – during a time when I couldn’t write, but I could deface books – and did so to find therein the story of my own loss of my parents.”

(Near copy of I Want a Lady):
Rebecca Brown also defaced a novel from the 1930s called I Want to Be a Lady. “I bought it to give to a somewhat male friend of mine because I thought it would, uh, speak to him. But I became selfish and kept it to turn into an autobiography of a doomed love affair I had with someone I fell in love with when I was 17.” The result is Brown’s cut N paste book, I Want a Lady.

(Near origami crane and homo bottle cap):
Rebecca Brown writes in a small studio building behind the house she shares with her partner Chris. The studio brims with art and kitsch, a mix of icons and images, precious things and personal ones. Among them, an origami crane (“an 8-year-old friend made this for me…Having friends like him makes my life very good”) and a plastic milk bottle top. About the milk bottle cap, Brown explains: “I am a homo and virulently so. I hate closeted artists. I think they are liars and cowards and I hate it when they get goodies in their career. I won’t name names but all of those wimpy closeted or discreet lesbos should be ashamed.”

(Near dog eraser and dog statuette):
Dogs, represented here by a handful of objects, also appear in her fiction, notably in an intense volume of prose called The Dogs. She explains: “I wrote The Dogs from about l986 – l996. Part of that time I lived in Europe and went around to look at images of the Dogs of GOD, as the Dominican order were called. There are lots of images of these mean, nasty, toothy black dogs devouring people and sheep and stuff. I felt like those dogs were biting and pursuing me so I got all these little dog toys to try to diminish the power of that image. I think it worked.”

(Near postcards of saints):
Catholic imagery, especially its gore and the refiguration of the body, have played an important part in Rebecca Brown’s writing and in her imagination. She describes herself as “a kind of wannabe catholic. I love the stories of the saints and really need the story of the Resurrection — redemption and second chances and ends to suffering. That whole Christian myth is very important to me in deep, serious way. Plus Christianity is so full of great kitsch and cheesy gross things too.”

JOHN OLSON

(Near a stack of John’s notebooks, with one opened up):
This is a small sample of John Olson’s notebooks. By his own estimation, he has filled “3,345 notebooks written in a special ink developed in Reykjavik using the gall of a eucryphia glutinosa." Olson explains that “the notebook is where I do my initial writing. I need a space where I have permission to be as stupid, daring, playful, outrageous and ridiculous as possible. The notebooks provide the raw ore which I can later smelt into metals and metaphors.”

(Near the feather quill):
“Writing implements fascinate me,” John Olson says. “I have always pictured Shakespeare writing by candle light with a quill such as this, but he was probably more apt to use a pencil, which allows for quick revision, particularly when working with actors. The pencil came into use in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, shortly after a deposit of graphite (pure black carbon) was found at Borrowdale in Cumbria in 1564. I bought the quill at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire in Novato, California, in 1972.”

(Near the glass paperweight):
Almost anything can become a space of thinking, a place for the mind to enter into and occupy. John Olson keeps this paperweight, not to hold down papers (“for that I prefer accordion folders and paper clips”) but to stare into. “The yellow flower frozen inside fascinates me. It is like a fetus for the birth of repose.”

(Near the glass axe):
Sometimes writing — applying language to the wordless stuff of living — is like using a glass axe to split wood. “This was a present from a friend, David Piasecki, who got into glass blowing in the early 70s. He built a furnace in his backyard. He had a wonderfully earthy, Rabelaisian sense of humor, which is apparent in the testicular bulges of the glass, and the phallic shaft. David has always been a very generous man. I first met him in 1966, at San Jose Central Community College, after he had left the seminary. He had wanted to be a Catholic priest, but after wrestling with the issue of celibacy, decided to become an artist instead.”

(Near Kandinsky poster):
The Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky is an important influence on John Olson’s writing. “I like to call him ‘Inkandinsky,’” Olson says. “His wild abstractions have a spiritual basis. In Concerning the Spiritual in Art, he remarks: ‘The more abstract is form, the more clear and direct is its appeal... As every word spoken rouses an inner vibration, so likewise does every object represented...There is no “must” in art, because art is free.’”

December 23, 2006

When I left Seattle on Thursday heavy rain was falling and my father-in-law had told me that hundred a mile an hour winds would be coming. When he began to talk about the rain and the wind, my wife and I had a plane to catch and we didn’t listen to him, much.

My father-in-law dwells on the prudence in any situation, the need to be careful no matter what. He spends much of his time winterizing his cars, weatherproofing his house, removing troublesome limbs from his trees, having his car checked, a nearly endless routine where he has designated specialists for each part in his car. His undercarriage shop in Totem Lake, about thirty miles to the house. His muffler technician, Erwin, works from a cinderblock garage on the banks of the Cedar River in Renton. His brake’s men work on Pacific Highway South in Federal Way. As he makes his rounds, he stops at Indian Food Buffets and bakeries. The recent influx of immigrants from Russia has resulted in some great new bakeries. My father-in-law is from the East End in London and grew up near the Arsenal Field and hates cinnamon but loves apple and can rarely find apple pastry in America without cinnamon.

He shares his largess and prudence with his family in compulsory lectures on household maintenance.

At the airport the routine of passing through security and getting the gate, the removing of the shoes, the double-checking of liquid, the removal of all objects into little grey trays was now so routine that the line quickly moved through the check point and then we were on our plan the plane shook in turbulence as we passed out of Seattle.

We arrived in Oakland and it took us longer to get to our hotel from the airport than it did to get from Seattle to Oakland. We rode on a bus and then from the bus we rode on the Bart and then from the Bart we took a Taxi. By this time the wind had grown very strong in Seattle. The power had gone out at our father in law’s house. Our daughter informed us that this was “the baddest Christmas ever,” taking a perverse delight in how poorly things were going for her.

Seattle had been inundated with rain water during the night. Portions of the state highway system were underwater. CNN reported that one million homes were without power. A woman attempting to rescue her microphones from her basement drowned.

My father-in-law discovered a cedar tree on the roof of hour house. One limb punctured the eves of the house. The tree growing at the edge of the property, covered in moss had a rotten core, split into two halves. Our house essentially floats in a swamp. At night there is the sound of frogs and toads. Sometimes when I mow the lawn, a half dozen frogs jump from the grass. During any rain at all a sump pump forces water from below our basement into a drainage ditch under hour deck. When it rains it sounds like there is a creek outside. But our basement was dry. A tree had just hit hour house.

On Friday night there was a reading and ceremony thing for the American Book Award at the African American History Museum in Oakland. The American Book Award goes to a small stack of books every year and just about all of the authors of these books had come to get awards.

Several of the books were self published and the majority of books released by small presses or self-published. The woman running the table with books complained that she didn’t like print-on-demand books. She said, “Librarians don’t like print-on-demand books.” Several of the winners of this year’s award were print-on-demand books. For the most part all of the print-on-demand books were on hand whereas the publishers at the university presses and main stream presses hadn’t sent any copies of books. “I don’t think most authors are choosing print-on-demand over traditional publishers. They are just doing what they have to do, and I can’t imagine that print-on-demand is going away. I’m not sure how librarians are going to deal with the future of books. I can’t see how print-on-demand is going to go away.”

In fact I’m thinking about doing my next book as a print-on-demand publication seeing is how I don’t exactly have publishers banging down my door asking for my next manuscript. But this response to her saying, “Librarians don’t like print-on-demand book,” just brought an awkward silence. “But at least my current book is printed the old fashioned way,” I said trying to change the subject, but the damage was already done.

I wasn’t sure how long the reading was -- but it became apparent after McKenzie Bezos read, after I read, after David Díaz that just about everyone had come to pick up their prize were going to read and it was going to be a long night. The readings were all pretty good. Thomas J. Ferraro spoke so quickly it was like listening to spoken microfiche. He talked about navigating ethnic roles -- either as an African-American or from his own experience and research into Italian -Americans, and there was something about a jazz, comedy record he’d first heard in San Francisco.

In introducing P. Lewis, Ishmael Reed began to unwind about the state of popular African American books and then introduced a writer who he made comparisons to Richard Wright and Chester Himes. When P. Lewis began to talk he lacked the any poise and polish at all and seemed instead earnestly interested in his work and how to get it into the world. It took him five years to write his book and then no one would publish it so he published it himself. P. Lewis was not trying to create a kind of commodity of his work delivering the smooth pleasures of what you want to hear.

[Profiles of the 2006 Winners - PDF]

October 10, 2006

Stacey Levine, Corrina Wycoff, and I read at Orca Books on Sunday October 8th. Kick(KickBall) who was going to play vanished between our correspondence earlier in the week and the day of the event. We delayed the reading. Emily at Orca smiled and warned me that things often start late in Olympia. There was fine drizzle on the street. I had coffee. I looked at books. I contemplated buying a book by John Ruskin afraid its presence on my shelf would oppress me because I wouldn't read it. I wanted the book, but if I had the book it would just nag me that I hadn't read it, and I wouldn't read it. After about twenty minutes Emily said we had better start if we were going to finish. Sam Lohmann who contributed an excellent poem to the Clear Cut Future anthology was there. He said he was starting a new magazine called Coyote Mint. which looks to be a thoughtful production. He said it will be a hand-sewn xeroxed booklet with a letterpress cover and there will only be several handfuls of copy sold in Olympia and Portland. I don't think Seattle has a place that can sell a book like this left. Perhaps Open Books could? We started reading, and the band had not arrived. Someone asked whether they should call them? They called -- and then left. We finished reading and began to play a fairy tale game that Stacey had created. And then, a woman who lived in the forest with my family in the 1970s arrived with her husband who she had lived with then. They lived at the top of the hill. Their names were Farr, and they had a wooden sign at that said "Farr Out." My parents spent many nights at their house listening to Shine On You Crazy Diamond and JJ Cale. She left. The reading was over. And I left as this was the only thing left to do.

July 17, 2006

What the Heck Fest is already laid back and in fact it was so laid back this year that everyone was laying on the grass staring up through the trees into to the sky at Causland Park on Sunday in Anacortes. I missed what was reported as a great show with Anna Oxygen, The Blow, Karl Blau, and Yacht at the town hall. Someone said to me, “Everyone was good. They all seemed on.” Instead of seeing any live music, I drove to the top of the rocks around Anacortes and looked at water. I watched Syd Barrett videos on YouTube.

On Sunday, I read in the park. Jay Chilcote read from his newly republished book, Ratcheting Down the Melancholic Afterbeat, a funny novel about a young man who falls in love with a woman who rides his bus, and because of the decorum required in mass transit (in Seattle at least) must scheme to reach her. Sam Lohman read his poetry. Rich Jensen discussed Beat Happening’s "Bad Seeds," the irony of youth-movements turned old, and played fragments of pop songs between readers. Matthew Stadler read from Allen Stein. Claire Evans read a funny story from her laptop--a paperless reading seeming not out of place or affected anymore but a matter of practicality.
Phil Elverum read textual fragments such as the grocery lists let by his family, odd notes left in the middle of the night by departing friends, and the lyrics unsingable songs.

June 29, 2006

Report from San Francisco Museum of Art, Thursday June 22

The city of San Francisco was hot, and it was clear from the lack of air conditioning and the complaints of people on the street that they were not used to the heat.

I slept long and wrote in my hotel room and wasn’t aware of the heat until I stepped outside, and even then it wasn’t clear it was hot. The sidewalk held the heat and sent it radiating up so that the heat came from both directions from the sun and from the cement. When I caught a bus, the front billboard with the bus number displayed a random scattering of lit points. “Is this the 45?” I asked. “Yeah this is the 45,” the driver said. The fare box was covered with a blue tarp. At the next stop, the driver had to explain the number of the bus. People tried to set their money on the tarp. “It’s clean air day,” the driver said. “Free ride.” The bus quickly became packed with people. And like everything else in San Francisco wasn’t air conditioned, so I got out and walked on the hot pavement. I waited though until the bus had passed over the last hill. The day before I had walked from the Bart station to my hotel. A homeless woman helped me with the directions and when I explained I planned to walk she said, “There are hills in this town.” There are hills in Seattle, too. But, Seattle we washed our main urban hill, Denny Hill, into Puget Sound. At one point struggling up Knob Hill I wished they’d washed it into the bay.

I waited in front the San Francisco Art Museum until I dried off, and then I went inside where it was air-conditioned. I am always drawn to the story of Impressionism, to the year zero of Modernism or at least this idea that there was the academic quality of French painters and then the outsiders of Pissarro, Cezanne, and Monet blew things open. Punk is sort of like this, too, the story being there was the Prog Rock and then in 1977--but it’s a story and no more less real or false than anything else and the collection in San Francisco seemed almost to grudgingly engage in this narrative. Instead, they had rooms full of Dutch painting that celebrated the technology of making pictures that looked real. They looked more real than photographs.

There was also an exhibit of three painters, Tim Gardner, Marcelino Goncalves, and Zak Smith. Goncalves had painted masculine scenes, a father teaching his son to shoot a bolt action rifle (a memories), swimming hole swimming, a police office removing his boot. What I enjoyed about these paintings is that they implied how cultivated that signifiers of manliness -- and yet these painting as depictions of men were not merely portraits of men but rather seemed to imply that a man is just a boy in man-drag.

Marcelino Gonçalves
Smalltown Boy, 2005
Oil and graphite on panel
Collection of Nowell J. Karten, Los Angeles
© Marcelino Gonçalves

Report from Pegasus Books, Berkeley, Thursday June 22

Pegasus Books sits directly across the street from Barnes and Noble. Cody’s on Telegraph, just up the street, was closing. Now Pegasus Books didn’t seem to be a thriving concern, but it did seem be a vital concern with a clear function that Barnes and Noble lacked. I could find, for instance, the 3rd Bed reprint of Gary Lutz’s book Stories in the Worst Way. I could not find this in the Barnes and Noble. Clear Cut Press, Mount Eerie, and We Two and the Universe would perform at Pegasus. There was no space between Barnes and Nobles ten thousand books for such activity. Carla, the host for the reading, said for the most part they hadn’t noticed the Barnes and Noble. They had their own customers who didn’t go there. But, she said that sometimes it sucked. When they had a Harry Potter party for the last book, Barnes and Noble was packed. At first, she thought no one was going to come her party, but after while a ton of people did, so it worked out.

Matthew Stadler read the opening to his great novel Allen Stein about a schoolteacher who runs off with/stalks a teenage student. “I have loved boys even when they despised me. This boy did not despise me, but that is perhaps because we had so little in common.” The audience was oddly unresponsive to his work, and I was unsure as he read if it was because they didn’t understand what he was reading -- the beginning has a lyric density takes a second to adjust to -- or if they thought it was a confession dressed up as “fiction.” Or perhaps it was the whiff of directly sexual content in the work. In Philadelphia, I read a story that has been seen as humorous in other contexts about the strangeness of teenage erections. It was an audience similar to the one who had come to hear Mount Eerie. No one laughed, and afterward I was accused of choosing contentious material. I thought I was telling a funny story, I said. I am a bit tone-deaf to the tribal codes, or perhaps this is a cultivated deafness.

In any case, Mount Eerie played his understated and tuneful songs. Stacey Levine read her story about The Bean. I read short and more gross than sexual stories. Claire Evans read poems about an artic explorer, and Jona Bechtolt discussed the problems of creating music for corporations and the audience seemed oddly willing to sell, sell, sell. If you’ve got it, they seemed to say, sell it.

So perhaps it was less about sex and more about passion? The story of a passionate young man who loves shoes would perhaps have been greeted with incomprehension. I don’t know. It was a hot day. And leaving the great, tiny bookstore making culture happen despite or because Barnes & Noble and corporations, well, don’t, the city had cooled off. I needed a jacket.

Report from The Attic Theater, Friday June 23

My friend Skip who I more or less grew up with more or less and who was letting me sleep in his place in North Hollywood was in a production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle. If you haven’t seen this play, it is about motherhood, warfare, and mock trails. In other words, it has a lot to say about our current mess.

June 27, 2006

Ayah posted the report of the reading at Pegesus Books, as did Kitchen Sink. I will have more in a day or two once I get my feet from returning from California. On Sunday at 4 p.m. I was in the Mojave Desert. On Monday at 8 a.m. I was within ear shot of the Renton S Curves.

June 22, 2006

When I arrived at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, the host Peter Maravelis, showed me the room where the reading would take place, a mid-sized room containing a large collection of poetry.

From the window the poetry room, I could see the house across the alley where an old man was in the process of hanging his laundry to dry in the 96-degree heat. He only wore his underpants, so I suppose he must have been washing all of his clothes. He had plaid shirts, herringbone shirts, brown trousers that he’d hung from the metal work on the building, from fire escapes and the various rusted metal rods and hinges attached to old building. I was the only reader who had arrived. Matthew Stadler had called earlier to explain that his plane had been delayed in Portland, OR. Across the street from City Lights is a hand painted sign that declares “we are not in Portland, OR.” Stacey Levine was in transit somewhere. Robert Gluck lived in town and presumably would show up and so I went to internet café to drink very cold coffee and connect to the web, but the café charged three dollars for twenty minutes which is three dollars more than I am willing to pay for internet access. I have been paying two dollars of bottles of water. But I have also been able to find taps to drink water and I do not have pay three dollars for a drink of water. Very recently I could find free wireless ports but now it seems as if they have all been locked up. When I returned about half of the readers had arrived and Peter Maravelis had brought watermelon, cider, and water. Phil Elverum/Mount Eerie/The Microphones looked through his notebook for new songs to play. Stacey Levine called to say she was on a slow bus in Chinatown. We Two and the Universe called to say they were somewhere in California that was not San Francisco.

And so we ate watermelon and waited but soon the room was full and so we began to read waiting for various people to arrive as we did. Phil Elverum sang new songs to open the show, and then he played some very old songs from his first couple of records. I read from my Clear Cut book, Shoot the Buffalo . Robert Gluck read chapters from a novel and a story about innocent sex in the Tacoma woods he’d published in Butt Magazine. Stacey read several short metaphorical stories including the "The Bean" that appeared as an illustrated story in The Stranger.

And then Matthew Stadler arrived and read from a new story, "The City of Wool," written for the Amsterdam 2.0 project. However, he explained, the story wasn’t what they were looking for. And as he read, We Two and the Universe arrived to unreel an audio record of their trip from Portland to the site of the we are not in Portland sing across the street from City Lights Bookstore.

June 21, 2006

On June 21, I woke at three o’clock in the morning to the sound of music from my computer playing something “I had last played.” I woke early enough that I wasn’t groggy exactly, but rather had that jittery edge I used to get when I woke in the Army at four o’clock for four-thirty muster.

I made coffee and packed my bags and I’m still unsure if I packed when I need to pack. I do need to get a new suitcase because it is beginning to split. This is the suitcase my mother bought for me in 1988 when I went to Bellingham for a drama conference and it is the suitcase I’ve used ever since. I used it in 1989 in June when I flew to New Jersey to go to Fort Dix for basic training. It’s not an expensive suitcase, but there have been many improvements in basic luggage function in the years since '88. My suitcase doesn’t have wheels or a long extendable handle. I believe these are now standard features. Other features that I can see are going to be important due to the security of the airports that will be needed will be handles and straps that can be folded into the bag.

I took the bus to the airport because it was only a dollar twenty-five compared to twenty five dollars for the airport shuttle for thirty dollars for a taxi. I left the house with my bags on my back and walked down the street. I have always liked leaving the house this way, on foot, walking through the quiet neighborhood and then down to the gravel path passing alongside the arterial, empty at this time of the night. The street lights hung over the five way intersection. I could see Puget Sound through the trees, a greenish sheet of water and clouds over the Olympics, the faint beginning of light. The birds were busy making noise.

I usually leave the house in my car. At first living in the suburbs, I would try to walk places. But there aren’t any places near my house. There is a vast, feral field abutting a sewage lake where a wild man lives. I have gone there in the daylight to pick blackberries, but it isn’t a place. At a further distance there is my daughter’s school, a track, a playground, a cinderblock barn with crumbling asphalt floors and peeling paint on the outside. At even further distances there is Saltwater State Park. Gradually, I have accepted that I have to drive to get anywhere and by car. In my car I am close to many things -- but it feels like I am moving myself out of my natural self into something else when I drive in a car. A car for instance has drink holders, which I utilize. I put coffee in travel mugs in the drink holders. A car for instance has a stereo, which I use.

On foot walking to the bus, which would take me to the airport, I could feel the cool air welling up Puget Sound as the land cooled during the night and warmed the air, carrying it up. I could hear the half dozen species of birds that live in the green belts and wild margins between lots and subdivisions make their early morning calls.

I stood at the bus stop and could see from a mile away the bus coming. The bus was full of day laborers. The official uniform of these workers of people on their way to work on a bus passing through the suburbs at 4:30 a.m. was a cotton jumper with a hood, baggy blue jeans, and paint splattered work boots. The vast majority of these people had dark skin. If they were white, their skin had tanned into a kind of deep rusty brown. If they were Hispanic their brown skin had tanned into a kind of deep rusty brown. A woman in a nurses’ blue scrubs sat next to with the morning’s paper that I had already read Tuesday online as the stories were posted to Seattle Tiimes.com -- two American soldier’s brutally murdered the story said. When a soldier is at war with a country, the enemy does not engage in murder. The killing of the enemy is an expected and even required act. To not kill the enemy if I remember my military training correctly is not an allowable option in war. As horrible as it is, it is difficult to apply the standards of humane treatment when we have discarded the basic covenants of the Geneva Convention.

But I was far removed from this conflict, although the people on the bus where were half asleep were perhaps far closer to the war than I was -- since they had the possibility of actually having to go to it sometimes.

Security at the airport had improved even since the last time I was there several months ago or rather because I had to deal with lines on a Wednesday morning I was aware of the increased efficiency both in the virtual aspects of the airport and the security. I had a tiny slip of paper printed from the computer. I checked my bag and showed my ID and that was it.

Passing through security, everyone had their ID out, their shoes off, their cavities prepared fro the probes and the line passed through the metal detectors. The awkwardness of stepping into a sphere where we were being examined as a potential threat was gone. We assumed we could be a potential threat and that everyone around us could be a potential threat. The man in front of me who was Middle Eastern said to the security guard who was black as he checked his ID, the middle eastern man said, “I am one of those guys.”

The security guard smiled and waved him along.

While I drank my coffee for the flight in an over lit, primary color space of red and blue and yellow associated with the airport gate Burger King, a man in dilapidated snake skin boots sneezed. The sound echoed in the empty space. Bless you a man said from the other side of the room.

April 25, 2006

I was able to sleep in my publisher’s house before Wordstock. My publisher, Matthew Stadler was in a great mood and busy preparing for Gore Vidal. Vidal was going to speak at one the dinner’s Matthew holds for RIPE as the restaurant’s writer-in-residence. Matthew had tiny booklets for the event of a handsomely produced, original essay by Wayne Koestenbaum on Vidal. While Matthew and I talked Saturday morning, a man came to the door and offered to mow the Clear Cut lawn. The man had his own gasoline in a red plastic jug. He offered to cut the lawn for fifty bucks. Matthew said that was a deal but that was more than he could afford. The man gradually dropped his price down to twenty-five dollars. Matthew turned him down because the man's labor was worth more than that, it was worth more, Matthew said, then he could afford.

Wordstock was smaller this year than last, but people were buying books. At least that was the census. The weather I suspect kept the ne'er-do-well book rubberneckers out. The only people who came where those who were compulsive enough book types to forego the sun and unseasonable balmy sky.

Kevin Sampsell maned the Independent Media Center table armed with artifacts of small press production including a galley of Eric Spitznagel’s new book from Manic D, Fast Forward: Confessions of a Porn Screenwriter and the Sampsell edited issue of Spork.

In the writer's hat check room, I met a blogger whom I read regularly, The Moorish Girl. She was very self-effacing and pleasant. Her blog which is pretty matter of fact and sometimes starry eyed about the literary world is also heartening to me because of the faith Laila Lalami and the writers she writes about place in the importance of narrative. It is always strange for me to meet someone whose affect varies from what I think might be their interior monologue. I like to think I am like this. But most likely the affect of a coffee swilling insurance salesmen matches my interior monologue, the secret ranting of a coffee swilling insurance salesmen.

I read on the Emerging Writer’s Panel again this year. Provided I am allowed anywhere near a book festival again, I suspect I'll bypass emerging and go directly to "washed up."

I always learn something from doing these things and I learned that I am not a publishing-industry type. I had suspected this before, but now I know this.

Evidence 1: I met Garth Stein, a Seattle writer. Have you head of him? He seemed to assume I would know all about him and when I didn't, he spent the rest of our short time in close proximity staying as far away from me as he could. To be fair, I have heard of him, but only because I have been obsessively following any potential coverage for my own book. Although he’s lived in Seattle since 2001, I’ve never run into him at any literary event. But then The Seattle Weekly recently ran an article that mentioned eleven writers who are writerly enough that I’ve never heard of them, either, except Stein and Doug Nufer who has run several long-standing reading series in Seattle including the much missed Titlewave series on lower Queen Ann.

I failed to do the obvious thing. I failed to even feign a knowledge of Garth Stein’s work, perhaps egged into this by his clear lack of having heard of my work. His work looks fine, judging from Garth Stein dot com.

Evidence 2: I read too long in my panel, which was bad form. I had my part marked out, and then as soon as I got up, lost my place. But I erred, I guess when I suggested that MFA programs are nearly a complete waste of time and money and perhaps hinted that under this was a rant that had more to do with the function of MFA programs to exert federal hegemony over the freakish beauty of provincial culture.

My two fellow readers were gracious about my reading long.

They were both brand new writers, with thick hardbacks from famous New York publishing houses. They were both new enough that they probably still had money from their book advances. Justin Tussing was featured in The New Yorker’s debut fiction issue last year, and scored one of last year's eighty odd tenure track creative writing job openings. Cheryl Strayed was fresh off a national tour for her book. They both MFAs. Someone in the audience asked about MFAs. Of course Tussing and Strayed, lottery winners both were very up on the whole MFA thing.

Cheryl Strayed said she’d been in a waitress in Portland. She went to Syracuse, which covered her expenses for three years, sold her novel, and had just returned from a national book tour. This kind of support didn’t happen to her in Portland.

And then I spoke.

All I said at the time was that a person who lived in Portland didn't need to go graudate school to find community or support as a writer. Portland was a great town in which to be a writer.

But I think I somehow conveyed what I was really thinking.

I was a writer in Seattle who had a day job. And then I went to Baltimore, which covered my expenses. I returned to Seattle and was a writer who had a day job. And I kept writing and sometimes publishing.

Naturally I am bitter since I bought my ticket and I didn’t win. Everyone else I went to graduate school also bought their ticket and didn’t win. The fact of the matter is, Justin and Cheryl, no matter the merits of their work which sounded great to me but no less great than the majority of work produced by writers in my workshop at Johns Hopkins University in 2000, that the vast majority of writers who pass through graduate programs do not meet with success. As of this writing, I’m the only writer in my class who has continud to publish books of my own work. The thing is, I had a book out before I even went to school. My class was not full of laggards. John Stinson, one classmate, won the Glimmer Train Prize and finally published another story, five years later, in Other Voices. Another, Jane Delury, has had excellent stories in StoryQuarterly and The Sun. One, Meri Robie, wrote and published a book during the nine months of the program. And a fourth, Ava Chin, edited an anthology published by McGraw-Hill. But no one in that class won the lottery in the way Cheryl or Justin has, nor has anyone going through JHU done so since. The fact is that the vast majority of graduate students don’t become productive writers. The vast majorty of writers who actually continue to write after graduate school don’t see success resulting from their experience. Rather the entire experience of graduate school, like working for a living and finding enough money to get by, becomes for most writers just one more thing to overcome.

After the panel, Cheryl and Justin smiled wanly at me and then stayed as far away from as they could.

February 26, 2006

My trip to the lands in the east was incredible and for me too brief. Rich Jensen, the publisher of Clear Cut Press, operated as a small press impresario. He organized a traveling show that included two novelists, a photographer, and the band/multimedia projectionists of YACHT, aka We Two and The Universe. We had accommodations, transportation, and on many occasions food.

Our party included: novelists Stacey Levine and me, an immersive laptop video lecture from We Two and The Universe (Jona Bechtolt & Claire L. Evans), laptop computer dance/sculpture/community rite from Lucky Dragons, and impromptu photo shows from Daniel Peterson.

Space 1026 was grubby and the audience small and attentive. It was in an art space plastered with posters, silk screened images, and stencils. An iron wall safe from previous eons was used to hold buckets of paint.

We arrived at PS1 about a half-hour before our show. In Astoria NY a traffic officer refused to have his picture taken but patiently figured out where we were and where we were going and confirmed our trajectory. At the gallery where we were going to read, more than a hundred straight backed wooden chairs, sat empty and waiting to be filled. It was a vast hallway. In such a space a normal reading sized crowd will feel dwarfed by the empty seats. This was the not the case. A bustling line of people appeared minutes before the reading to gain entry. Several people actually had to stand along the sides of the room. Stacey Levine read and the unlike the attentive audience at Space 1026, the P.S.1 audience felt free to laugh when she surprised them. I read, and I imagined I could hear people listening. Jona and Claire did their show/music. It was all great.

The following day I had to embark on a quest to find pork buns for my wife (there is an east coast/west coast battle over the quality of bow, and from my estimation the east has us beat.) And then I took the strangely long trip West-- the plane was delayed for no explicable reason and I arrived mere days before it became it March.

February 25, 2006

I left in the middle of the night to arrive in the middle of the morning in Philadelphia, a city I have never been to before. I half slept on the plane. I’m certain my snoring on the plan sounded as though I was desperately trying to breath through a thin swizzle stick stuck in a tub of jello.

I’m certain no one slept near my fitful, fetal position, within a five-foot radius. When I arrived at the airport, I felt like a piece of chewed gum.

I wandered the airport until I found a train that would take me toward my destination for the day, The Philadelphia Art Museum where I planned to find refuge in their cafe and division in their collection of modern and contemporary art. Riding in the train I passed through the vacant areas of at the edge of the city. The train passed through a swamp filled with tangled trees where some agency had secured hundreds of birdhouses.

Along the chain link fences edging the back of the USPS parking lots the wind had blown colorful trash, bright red and purple garbage bags. Much of the trash was anchored by discarded car tires.

Finally, I got out of the train at the 30th Street station. I was still groggy and somewhere in my transit from the baggage claim area to the interior of the train station, I lost my iPod. These small devices have often slipped from my pocket, and usually I find them lodged there. I lost my iPod once in a gap in my seat. I might wait to get a new one when they have a version I can just have implanted.

After coming to terms with this loss on the cold, wind swept streets of Philadelphia, I walked to the museum, which wasn’t far, but in the cold, and lugging my bags it seemed like a great distance. Part of this is that as an East Coast city there are vast distances between buildings. In the west, the city might be large, but everything is efficiently compressed together into a grid. Here, there was a vast parkway filled with forests and streams and swamps and gigantic Calder sculptures. There was also the vaguely neoclassical style with North American touches. Near the Museum was a gigantic sculpture of George Washington on a horse surrounded by various animals: beaver, mouse, and bear. It was both hilarious and to me seemed to clearly connect the national spirit to the Roman Empire. American’s are good at engineering but our engineering feats are things like highway overpasses just as the Roman’s accomplishments were aqueducts and sports arenas.

January 23, 2006

I read/performed with Eli Moore and Grant Fairbrother at Isadora's Books and Cafe in Snoqualmie at three o'clock this last Sunday.

They had good coffee. They provided us with a lot of space. And the barista on hand managed to rope in a very modest audience. However, she dickered with them on the sidewalk while they nervously glanced at Eli and Grant's amps. They came in despite the potential in the amps to make more noise then they wanted to endure while they are their late lunch. The audience ate their late lunch and listened. So along with the entire Clear Cut Press sales force (aka Daniel Mitchell), the band, the cafe staff ... we had an audience. Eli played his plaintiff songs. Grant squeezed various sympathetic groans from his 1980s analog synthesizer. And I read from my book set in the woods not far from the cafe about people slipping around the mud, and getting lost in the forest and drizzle.

December 7, 2005

I had been apprehensive about the trip to Spokane for some reason. Even though I have been over the Snoqualmie Pass hundreds of times, I have never driven myself, and this driving myself with my less than brand new car through a region of ice and snow suggested to me the dreadful possibility of something happening. Indeed, something dreadful did happen.

The majority of my trip (while I was in motion) involved traversing a frozen landscape at a numbingly fast speed. Passage over the Snoqualmie Pass was simple. The road was clear. I covered the stretch of roadway where boulders had dropped from the decaying granite cliffs. I hardly noticed that I had come to and then passed this location. The gradual drop down to Easton was free of ice. Once I passed beyond Ellensburg, the asphalt on the freeway froze, frigid vapor welled up from the empty canyons, and the tone of the tires changed from a kind of faint whir to a hard grind. When I stopped at a remote passenger rest area, a cinderblock house on an empty plain filled with the massive irrigation tractors draped with beards of frozen fog, I became aware of how far beyond anywhere the middle of Washington State was -- not that it was empty but rather like the periphery of a mall parking lot the only people eking a living at the edge were the types who did not desire company or the squash of bodies or the company of people to whom they could share their ideas. The middle of Washington State has an industrial vacancy.

I finally arrived at Auntie’s Bookstore and they had my novel, Shoot the Buffalo, lined up in the mass paperback rack alongside the latest Michael Crichton and Ann Rule. I've always fantasized about having a rack-sized edition of my work.

The event curator had failed to list my co-reader, Polly Buckingham who I was reading with and as a person local to Spokane the only one likely to attract an audience. In fact, all of the audience had come to see her. I kept reminding the event curator there were two readers. "But where are her books?" the woman asked. "She hasn't published a book, but she has published stories," I said. "Listen to her." The woman rolled her eyes. The woman then introduced Polly as poetess, unpublished, and the curator mused the audience would be guinea pigs for whatever Polly was going to read. I was miffed. I said to the curator that I was glad to be reading with her. I was glad to be a guinea pig or any other rodent. The woman scuttled off the stage and then Polly read. When Polly finished, the woman had me sign books, a man collecting photographs of authors for the Spokane Museum had me pose in a variety of poses, and they they kicked out of the store as they were closed, thank you for coming.

As we were going across town to get a drink, an overworked girl in her early 20s who was eating a gigantic cookie presumably large enough that it impaired her field of vision failed to stop at a red light. Polly who was gingerly driving on the ice through a green light failed to notice the car. It clipped the front of the truck. I screamed I think. It wasn't a bad accident due to the fact that the streets were frozen and both drivers were moving at barely perceptible speeds.

We pulled to the side of the road and some drunken Spokane man yelled from one of the pubs, "You better call the police." So we called the police. The officer arrived and had us loiter on the ice for an hour while he filled out paperwork. While we waited, the overworked girl produced a plastic ice scraper crowbar from her car and tried to pry the lid open on her car light. The plastic ice scraper crowbar threatened to snap, so she stopped.

The next morning I left early. While cruising through the desert in the middle of Washington State, which was about 10 degrees below freezing, both my brake and battery light came on. “Funny,” I thought. In Ellensburg (thee hours of driving at 80 miles an hour on ice) I stopped and then my car wouldn't start. I bought coffee. I prepared to call a tow truck, and tried my car one more time and it started. So I kept on my way thinking I would get it looked at first thing after I got home. But just outside of Roselyn the power to my car died and I coasted to stop on the ice-crusted median, managing to pull into the safety of a truck weighing station. I spent 24 hours in Cle Elum wandering around the frozen streets while the service station installed a new alternator.

I talked to a man who had grown up in Preston, a tiny community in the Snoqualmie Valley about five miles from the tiny community in the Snoqualmie Valley where I’d grown up. His town has since disappeared, absorbed into the suburbs, the tiny downtown vanishing when the the mill was torn down in the mid-1980s. We looked around us at Cle Elum as it was and as it wasn't going to be soon. "Where's a bookstore?" I asked.

"They don't have one," he said. "But they are going to need one."

My unease over the trip was warranted.

November 10, 2005

I left from Seattle at dusk and by the time I arrived in Tumwater, Stacey Levine who was riding with me to Portland, asked, “Is it midnight?” It was only six o’cock, but once we passed beyond the ambient light of the streetlights, parking lots, and public storage compounds skirting I-5, the world was dark. At the Rest Area just north of Centralia, a man asked the people running the Comfort Station, “Is this coffee?” Stacey discovered a cat.

I would have not seen this cat even if I had seen it. I would have thought to myself, “Oh a cat out here in a Rest Area in the middle of the dark netherworld beyond Tumwater, how interesting.” I would not have allowed myself to make the connection: “What is that cat doing here? That cat will starve until dead.” But Stacey noticed the cat, understood it was starving, and immediately began to investigate.

The cat mewed. The cat raised its tail. Stacey was able to pick the cat up. The cat purred. The bones of the cat stuck out like silverware in a velvet bag. Stacey left the cat in my care. I talked to the cat in my talking-to-cat-voice while Stacey consulted the people running the Comfort Station. She returned with a massive box. And oddly Stacey’s luggage for the trip wasn’t actually human luggage but was feline luggage, a geniune cat carrier. Stacey removed her traveling items and placed them into the massive box and placed the cat into the cat carrier and then we were back on the dark highway headed south. It was as dark as if it were midnight. The cat purred.

But now we had the cat in my car and we didn’t know if the people who were going to allow us to sleep on the floor of their enormous, empty home were allergic to cats or had dogs that would eat cats or perhaps hated cats and would forbid the cat entrance into their enormous, empty home. We were going to be stay in the house near Reed College. Stacey plotted how she might rescue the cat and find an owner for the cat and prevent the cats probable death.

Stacey called her friend called Steve in Portland who runs a press called Verse Chorus Verse Press and also has a soft spot for cats. She was hoping he might volunteer to pick up the cat. But he didn’t. She called our friend Matthew at Clear Cut Press and he seemed perplexed by the cat and also didn’t volunteer to rescue the cat. Her friends in the normous, empty home would, though, allow Stacey to have the cat overnight.

When we arrived at the home, a man in his very early twenties, maybe he was even 19, opened the door. The house was empty and smelled of the convivial, musky smell given off by a great deal of smoked marijuana. He smiled lazily and tried to pretend he wasn’t stoned as I would have done at one point before old age and paranoia set in to the point where I would have no faith in playing off being stoned or not stoned and so wouldn’t get stoned because it would be a very poor time wondering if I could pretend not to be stoned or not. “A nice smell,” Stacey said and waved her hand through the smoke and he smiled and seemed relieved that he didn’t have to pretend anymore even if he was only pretending so that we could pretend we didn’t smell anything although that would just be a sheer act of pretend becuase the smell was really strong.

Steve arrived with a cat box, litter, (which he called cat sand because he was British), canned cat food, and dry cat food. The cat gobbled up the food and then lay completely still on one of the plush couches.

We went out to eat and while eating and drinking discussed with Steve the perils of small press publishing which exist in opposition to the perils of big press publishing. Neglect by the publisher is hardly the problem with small press publishing, but neglect is often the case with big press publishing, I’ve heard. With small press publishing there is exhaustion in the publisher. Every small press publisher I’ve worked with suffers from periodic bouts of collapse after working two or three jobs. Steve as a small press publisher seemed to have experience with collapse but right at that moment was carefully balancing his book production and freelance gigs so that he could sleep some, spend time with his wife, and play hookie (at ten o’clock at night) to go out and get something to eat. There is the economy of scale as well. Small publishers are calibrated to publish a certain number of books and have difficulty moving money around. There are issues with having a wholeseller rather than a proper distributor shilling the books so that while books may be published they cannot be found at bookstores. The current Clear Cut Books, for instance, or only available right now at a few bookstores: Powells and Elliott Bay and through their online web site, Buy Olympia. But elsewhere, such as Amazon, they are for some reason not ready until December. A small press book might be well published, just not well distributed.

The next day before the reading at Powell’s Worlds of Books at Burnside, Stacey and I walked around the Reed College Campus. Many of the male students wore beards. The students were busy going about their day and in the library Stacey and I found a stack of faux-Magic cards created by Reed students. Darren “mother” Platt. Position: hungry. Gear: face. Favorite: crispy stuff. Superpower: imagined self with boobs. Restrictions: lukewarm. Etc.

Stacey plotted how she might get Matthew or someone at Clear Cut to take the cat. Matthew used to have a cat, Stacey said, that was the spitting image of this cat. The cat’s name was Ms. Perfect. Miss Perfect had a dismal end. Matthew gave the cat to his mother after his child was born. Matthew’s mother lives in a forested region north of Seattle and Ms. Perfect was not pleased at her exile to this forested region. In a demonstration of displeasure, Ms. Perfect shit in the middle of the dining room table. Shortly thereafter, she made good her escape into the forest in the forested region and was never seen again. “She was probably eaten by a raccoon or something,” Stacey said as she finished the story about Ms Perfect. “Matthew probably would like this cat if he saw her.”

Steve showed up again to lead us across Portland to the Clear Cut complex in a neighborhood called “Mississippi.” Matthew was busy working on a laptop while actually playing with his son and then we all went to the park to watch Matthew kick the ball at his son while I waited for Daniel, the Clear Cut intern, to arrive from downtown Portland.

The Clear Cut house, or rather Matthew’s house, is bright aquamarine (an Army surplus color that was common after WWII but seems to have fallen into disfavor) and sits on a corner. The grass is long and uncut. The interior is filled with books on every flat surface, various editions of Remembrance of Things Past, The Sexual Politics of Meat, runs of old magazines published in Vancouver or Corvallis. The place smells of wood smoke from the poorly ventilated fire place.

Stacey asked Daniel if he would like the cat.

"I would love a cat," he said. "If I could keep a cat here, I would keep a cat here, but I will have to ask."

We drove to the reading at Powells where the Watery Graves of Portland had set up. Powells is a prosperous bookstore many stories tall, with vastly tall wooden shelves with new and used books mixed together. It has made the transition to the Internet age very well and seems like an important and well-used node in the civic brain of Portland. The stage was on the top floor, a long wall with tiny painting arranged to look a butterfly. There were drawing of stumps, a diorama of Douglas Fir trees, the podium was designed to look like a pile of lumber. There was a willingness to address the iconography of the Pacific Northwest that is carefully hidden and steadfastly despised in Seattle.

After Kevin Sampsell introduced us, after we read, Matthew, Stacey, and I talked to the audience. It began in a kind of questions and answer format that, thankfully, quickly dissolved. The first questions were ones such as: “How do you choose manuscripts.” This isn’t a worthless question, but conceals the real question in a kind of unobvious way: how can I get my book published by you? Matthew talked about the fact that the books he has published were pretty much from manuscripts he had already read and knew about and that for the foreseeable future the books would be ones that had come out of conversations he’d had with writers over the years: Bruce Benderson’s book about North Pacific America, for example being one of the books in the second “season” of Clear Cut. But it seemed to me that small presses are an example to any writer that if someone isn’t publishing your work, publish it yourself. Find other writers you like and publish their work. It is possible, just not easy. But I suppose this isn’t the answer to the question. But the answer moves from the "how can I get you to publish my work," to "how can I get my work published..." which has a much wider variety of answers. Getting to a spot where there are more answers seems like a useful way of reframing the question.

Matthew agreed to allow Daniel to keep the cat. He was concerned, though, that the cat smell might compromise the overpowering reek of wood smoke in the house. Now there is a cat in the Clear Cut house. Daniel is said of the cat: the cat's name is "christopher robin" right now and she is excellent on all accounts.

October 28, 2005

My household ran out of toilet paper. We purchase many of these staple supplies from CostCo, mainly because I hate going to the grocery store, my wife does not drive, and the ritual of procuring palettes of staple supplies produces in me a sense of well being and ease. To know I have enough toilet paper and rice to last a typhoon puts me at peace.

For some reason many of the household chores in our house have been divided along classic gender lines. I take out the garbage. I run the odd chores to the store because I am male. We had run out of toilet paper.

In the morning I went to purchase toilet paper. I was to return promptly with the toilet paper. Our house is encircled by construction and by the time I had penetrated this maze of road construction I had to rush to work or be late and so I left the house and an hour and a half later called home to inform my wife be no toilet paper until I returned home that night after my reading at the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle where I was on the bill with Stacey Levine, The Watery Graves of Portland, and Tom Blood.

I had not heard The Watery Graves play before and enjoyed them very much and then promptly e-mailed them about my scheme to somehow incorporate music into a reading in way that maintained verisimilitude (rather than descend into the variety show transition of “and now we will have some music.”) They politely said it was a good idea BUT they were too busy for such things. Good form on their part to compliment me, and then say no.

After the reading after the drinks after the reading after the drive home I returned to the region of the suburbs where I live, which is all under construction. Late at night the ripped up asphalt lay behind bright orange cones difficult to make out in the darkness of the blacked out streetlights. The Safeway on Pacific Highway was lit up. Construction crewmen worked in the store updating the store with many of the contemporary innovations such as an in store bank, an in store Starbucks and so forth. Safeway is open 24 hours. It was twelve-thirty or something and I had to get the toilet paper after having left that morning and failing to return with it. I had to, as a man, procure TP. The automatic doors were wide open. People ran machines building things in the store. I found the paper and then discovered that all of the registers were dark. I loitered at the line of the registers waiting for some sign of a clerk. Construction guys ran back and forth and then I stepped into the line of construction guys to get out the store safely with my TP.

An exhausted man covered with white plaster, a man with a mustache, asked me where I was going. I had almost made it out of the door with the TP.

“I would like to pay,” I said.

“We’re closed.”

“Safeway is open 24 hours,” I said. I gestured at the sign.

He didn’t look though. “We close at eleven,” he said.

I read the sign to open, “Open 24 hours.”

“We have closed at eleven for the last three years,” he said. And then he grabbed the TP out of my hands.

“Can’t I pay?”

“We’re closed,” he said.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I’m the manager here,” he said.

“But do you have a name and a business card?”

“My name is Dan,” he said.

“Dan, do you have a business card.”

“That’s all you need to know. My name is Dan.”

“That’s not very professional, Dan,” I said. I was delaying, trying to figure out how I could get the TP. Could I just grab it and run? Would Dan follow me? Would Dan call the police? Is stealing TP even illegal? “Don’t you have any form of identification?” I asked.

“You can talk to the day manager. Ken starts at seven,” he said.

“Why are all of the managers men,” I asked. But I started to leave already. I wasn’t going to get any TP out of that store.

October 17, 2005

I enjoy these things. As a writer I think I am supposed to eschew them and complain about how they distract from the work of writing novels and short stories.

The event took place in a massive stairway. The drinks were at the top and the presentations were at the bottom. When I went to fetch a drink, I found myself getting pushed further and further toward the top of the stairs because there was much circulation and agitation toward the drinks and not much movement at the perimeter of the presentation at the bottom. At one point I attempted to work my way down to the bottom of the stairs but a man in a 1970s leather jacket turned right into me causing me to spill my drink and apologize profusely. And then I had to work my way back up the stairs to get another drink. So I spent a great deal of time climbing up and down the stairs between first and second Avenue.

The reason I enjoy these things is there is a physical crush of bodies that are drinking and talking about various arts world things that have nothing to do with writing. I get to listen to filmmakers talk about film making and publishers such as Thatcher Bailey from Copper Canyon Press and Centrum talk about the strange species of copyeditors who excel at copyediting. Copper Canyon employs a legendary copy editor whose name escapes me. Matthew Stadler, the editor of Clear Cut Press, suggested their be an award for copyeditors, but Mr. Bailey pointed out that copyeditors are demoralized animals living in an age when error in printed matter is a matter-of-course and their passion of lexical accuracy and specificity are seen as a bit musty. They would never stand up to such public scrutiny.

Chris Jeffries and Walt Crowley cornered me at one point to ask if I thought there was a curse on the award. Mr. Jeffries has a long bout of bad luck in terms of his music and work and now works at a nonprofit job that is leaving him penniless and drained. Mr. Crowley didn't seem so put upon by this curse. He seemed a bit giddy about the idea that there The Stranger had invoked supernatural forces on the artists of Seattle and was crushing them with thousand dollars bills. I like the idea of a curse. You could say that shortly after receiving this prize in 2003 I was imprisoned in the literary bastille of Richard Hugo House. I used to hold my office hours there and look out at the desolate field of mud that has since been transformed (with my freedom) into a pretty, restored civic space.

October 5, 2005

Although I only lived in Baltimore for about nine months at the turn of the century the city has remained lodged in my subconscious.

The entire city of Baltimore seems like it froze sometime in the 1960s when the city began its decline. In the mid-60s the city has a million people living there and now it has something like 650,000. The majority of the town was built at the turn of the last century. Entering the city, you enter a space that has merely been used for living and dying and leaving and not much else for forty years. This would seem to the logical use of a city: living, dying and leaving. The only industry in the town, universities, medical centers, and banking are all concerned with this primary activity. It would seem a wonderful thing for a city to be merely concerned with these activities. Rather than growth, there is decline. Rather than ambition there is making due. Nothing seems better then wander a neighborhood were people have been neglecting their yards and house paint and erecting bird feeders for forty years. I arrived at an internet café and drank coffee and ate a sandwich while I surfed and googled myself in the attempt to reassure myself that this trip east from The Oregon Territory was not a waste, that it was casting off some kind imprint in the various mechanisms that pay attention to reading and books. I should swear off googling myself but on this trip it has become so habitual that I know the scores of the various permutations of my name and various keywords that when the number increases I have to hunt down the new link.

And so frozen in time Baltimore is immediately nostalgic. Unlike a replica of a place, say a copy of a Baltimore-style neighborhood in a modern West Coast city, the buildings and structures and function of the actual Baltimore remain stuck in the world as it was in 1960 which means that many of the things actually date from the turn of the previous century. The pipes often contain lead. Buildings are roofed with slate. The streets are made for walking and not driving along with a car. I think about Herman Melville finding himself in Tahiti. He finds himself outside of the ongoing rush of life, outside of time really, in a pre-industrial Eden. There is plenty of food and company among the natives. The days are long. They can sleep. They can swim and do what people like to do when they have long hours of the day before them and nothing really pressing taking it up: gossip and hanging out.

In the middle of the day on Tuesday, another friend came and saw me read in a park in Baltimore. So there were two people. I kept the reading short as a result. And then I went to have coffee at my friends house, in the middle of the day. Jennifer, his wife, was home, working and tinkering around and we drank coffee and ate cookies and talked until the conversation wore down. It was the conversation that played itself out in the middle of the day. There wasn’t any immediate pressure exerting itself like the end of a lunch break, an upcoming meeting, anything really. Time existed but in a kind of fuzzy way, in the way that the sun sets, dusk comes on and finally it is dark. I left the house and went to the Baltimore Art Museum, which was closed on Tuesday, just as it was closed on Monday and I didn’t mind because I would just visit it the next day.

I highly recommend then living in a city in decline. Housing is cheap. And time is warped and put into its proper place.

But everyone here is like Melville as well. As soon as he had stepped into this perfect place outside of time he couldn’t wait to get himself back into time. Everyone I met talked about what they were gong to be doing even though they were already doing things in Baltimore. Many of the people I went to graduate school had children. Their brood ran around the house while we ate dinner. Two girls dressed in princess dresses, and then fairy wings, and then firefighter outfits, each custom getting thrown on top of the other. Babies chewed on magic markers. People had written and published short stories, had written novels and put them away into drawers. And yet it seemed even though they had lived in this city whose only business was living (Baltimore) they were all making plans for when their lives really began. Like Melville they couldn’t wait to get the hell out. And I suspect as soon as they leave, they are going to find that the city with its humid and dripping tree-lined boulevards, crumbling brick buildings, and vacant lots will have entered their subconscious and they won’t be able to return and they won’t be able to really leave it behind even when they ware living in the bustle of an expanding city like Portland, Oregon, or New York or wherever else time is being compressed into logical fifteen minute chunks.

October 4, 2005

I read around twelve-thirty on Tuesday October 4th in a small park under the startlingly well-kempt monument to the Confederate Women of Maryland. Much of Baltimore is crumbling. Pedestals throughout the city are missing their busts. But this landmark has been polished. I read to two of my friends, writers Jane Delury and John Stinson, showed up to humor me and enjoy my brief reading from Shoot the Buffalo. The traffic was some distance away. It didn't rain. The police remained unconcerned about the potential of unlicensed economic or possible cultural activity.

October 2, 2005

I read on Sunday with Robert Bausch, the brother of the amazing short story Richard Bausch at The Writing Center in Bethesda. My understanding is that they are twins. Robert Bausch is a great writer as well and in talking about his brother freely worshiped his brother writing. If my brother was a writer I don’t know if I could handle this. If my brother was a writer who wrote amazing short stories I would throw myself off a bridge. My brother, luckily for me, does other things than write short stories.

For some reason I thought I could sleep on the plane. I flew from Seattle to Atlanta in the middle of the night only sleeping when I nodded off. I would wake without realizing I dozed off. My head was lodged between the headrest and the window. I woke when the stewardess passed down the aisle handing out crackers and cheese which I ate despite not being hungry because it was the middle of the night. Still in the middle of the night the plane landed in Georgia where I found a Seattle’s Best Coffee, a chain that has essentially disappeared from Seattle. The only store I know about in Seattle is in the Public Market. From Atlanta I shuffled out with the line of passengers across the tarmac to a tiny jet that would take me to Baltimore. The Baltimore airport was completely under construction and empty. The man behind began to mumble something about zombies. “Have they eaten everyone?” We waited for a bus to take us to the rental car place and slowly the confusion I always feel in the wilds of the east coast began to settle in. In the west we live in urban areas defined by grids. Every city is a massive grid and if you understand where the point of origin is, First and Main for instance, then everything is located in relation to this spot. The cities in the east are by comparison organic blobs. There is no sense and instead I would find the highway that would take me from one blob to the next. I drove to the outer edge of the DC blob on the beltway where I was going to stay.

The following day I went to teach a class on the short short story at The Writing Center in Bethesda. The Writing Center is just over twenty-five years old and is one of the oldest community writing centers in the country and as similar to The Loft in Minneapolis and Richard Hugo House in Seattle. Hugo House, perhaps as a newer institution is a bit confused about its purpose. The Writing Center belongs to an older mind-set that I found comforting in its familiarity. The center supports writers who don’t have a wide audience and who are creating work that is specific and expressive of the artists take on the world. These places support literature as a kind of fine art. People are concerned with the idea of quality over utility even if they have a pretty fuzzy idea of what they mean by quality. The fuzziness in the definition is I think a source of vitality. It provides friction and room for dissent. And so the writers, such as me, who end up going to a place like the Writer’s Center do not have a wide audience and are unsure really of who even reads their work. Hugo House on other hand anticipates I think a writing center such as David Eggers's admirably utilitarian 826 Centers. There is a social mission of literacy and access for underserved populations rests at the core of these places. They are less concerned with fuzzy terms such as “quality” and more concerned with function and process. I can’t help but think it is Hugo House’s flirting with the idea of quality has created for some of the frictions at the place.

One of the interesting features of The Writing Center are the accumulated works on the shelves that are organized less like a library then the cast off casings of a massive insect. There are tiny books of poetry from the early 1980s bound with plastic rivets alongside the collected short stories of Richard Yates.

I read on Sunday with Robert Bausch, the brother of the amazing short story Richard Bausch at The Writing Center in Bethesda. My understanding is that they are twins. Robert Bausch is a great writer as well and in talking about his brother freely worshiped his brother writing. If my brother was a writer I don’t know if I could handle this. If my brother was a writer who wrote amazing short stories I would throw myself off a bridge. My brother, luckily for me, does other things than write short stories.

The only problem was that Robert Bausch was stuck in traffic south of the blob of DC on I-95. Here is Sunil Freeman, the assistant director of the center, on the phone with Bausch while Bausch is trying to shout a hole with expletives through the line of cars on I-95.

My job was to filibuster and read from my work until he showed up for the audience that had arrived to see him and were kind enough to let me keep reading until he showed up. I read what I’d planned to read from Shoot the Buffalo and didn’t have to keep reading because Robert Bausch arrived and even laughed at a bit and then he read from his excellent and brutal new novel, Out of Season.

September 3, 2005

I drove from Seattle on a very warm Saturday to read at the Catch that Beat 2 pancake breakfast. I was sorry to leave so late because I was going to miss several bands that would have been good to see such as The Watery Graves. On the drive I noticed that many of the strip mall stores along I-5 employed massive balloons to attract visual attention. The balloons trailed long flag covered stalks that tethered them to the ground. They looked like massive weeds, and most of them were so far above the parking lots of the the strip mall stores they lost any connection.

A summary of the events at Catch That Beat 2 can be found here on YACHT's blog. Alas no mention of Rich Jensen's talk about the Five Things he learned from Hippie-Americans nor the reading by Tom Blood. But the pancakes were hot, the blackberries were semi-frozen, the coffee copious, and the site of the event -- the Astoria Yacht Club under the Old Youngs Bay Bridge -- splendid.

July 15, 2005

My new novel, Shoot the Buffalo,was released at What the Heck Fest 2005 in Anacortes on Sunday July 17th, 2005 at 2 p.m. The book will be sent to Clear Cut Press subscribers over the summer and will be available in bookstores in September. Stacey Levine's new novel, Frances Johnson, was also released. Publisher Rich Jensen and editor Matthew Stadler initiated the release of the books into the world with a ripping of the packing paper and the pop of a champagne bottle. He used his mouth to loosen the bottle. A woman in front of me, worried I think that the editor of Clear Cut Press would meet his end on the grass with a fizz-propelled cork penetrating his brain pan, muttered, "oh no." Stadler, escaped his death, and the cork propelled safely into the trees.

My family and I spent the weekend in Anacortes which has been noticeably altered since my last visit a year ago. Developments have replaced the outlaying farmland on Fidalgo Island. But luckily whoever is charge of such things has left the community forests. We drove to the top of Mount Eerie (the mountain that does exist rather than the band that both does not exist and is playing tonight, somewhere). On the drive to the top, an arduous trek for our fifteen year old Toyota, we passed a pregnant woman carrying her two year old child. And then we passed her overheated truck (and felt like heels for not being gentle-folk and offering a ride).

The community forests contain many lakes. The water was warm enough that it was more comfortable to sit in the lake then out of the lake. These lakes are all about a ten minute drive from the confines of the main town grid of Anacortes.

In the evening I went to see music in the echo-y confines of the Town Hall, where Karl Blau, The Blow, Laura Veirs, and Mecca Normal played. I was a bit disappointed by the music. What had seemed kind of fresh and earnest last year had faded in just a year of listening to it. This could be that there was a change of personnel in terms of the bands or because of the obvious improvements in polish and showmanship on part of the musicians. Mecca Normal isn't in the vein of the Anacortes/Olympia thing -- I had never seen them play before and they belong it strikes me to an older vein of local music that was pretty much destroyed between the grunge-thing in the early 90s and the effects of the dot-com rush in the late 90s. David Lester plays a kind of wild but studied lead classic rock lead guitar (referred to somewhere as free guitar) while Jean Smith sings in an ancient folksy whine. The incongruous mix, Lester's studied and nearly academic mastery of something intended not to be academic nor mastered alongside Smith's wailing is the kind of incongruous experiment that used to seem par for the course. They played a very solid show even thought the cement bunker of the Town Hall made it almost impossible to hear anything in the lower registers. Is this right? The space made something wrong with the sound and I don't know what it was. But for me the off-putting thing about the show was the affected nature of Karl Blau and Laura Veirs juxtaposed to the unabashed rockstar show put on by The Blow. All of these singers share the speech-singing intonation of older Olympia acts like Some Velvet Sidewalk. The tunes, such as they are, are sparse and mainly acoustic. This places a great deal of stress on the lyrics of the songs, and more on how these songs are f