Underground Medicine

Questions

2010-08-11T23:03:00.000-07:00

I have three fat scatter-shot notebooks that attempt to work out the "novel" I'm working on.

I'm closing in on the end of the third book: a chaotic black journal I first purchased in Santa Cruz on my thirtieth birthday that is one part diary, and two parts working notes for stories and a novel. That was the trip when we caught the dying butterfly, preserved it -- and found, via photographs, evidence of a disturbing trap lain by vagabond criminals in the garbage-strewn woods fringing the dried-out river.

The novel, itself, I realize is a shamelessly hyperbolic novelization of my memories. After all, when asked to write about yourself, you are asked to write about what goes in your head. You are asked, in essence, to write a novel.

Your whole life is a commentary on your own life. A memoir then is twice-removed from the commentary that occurred in the inscrutable heat of certain moments. The actions that accrue to fill your life are forever obscured by the language we enact to describe, expand, and rationalize these actions. Often, language itself -- as in when we say: I love you, or: I'm scared -- are our only actions. This makes writers of us all.

It is my attempt, as a first-time novelist, to ring out a singular cover story for all the paranoias and fascinations and failures of a life up to the point of an early thirty-year old's. For me, the best cover-story is something out of folklore. Of caves, and tunnels, and gardens, and hidden realms. This is best because it is the least likely.

Of course, for better or for worse, I have to take into account the recent calamitious changes in my own life that rest themselves upon daily-shifting plates of illusion and ambiguity. The plate tectonics of love which shift more timorously than any of the earth's bones.

I think the biggest betrayal for the "lad" of the novel is that his abiding love for life, and for the world, must constantly combat the constant dissolution of love and community and transcendence. Now, the latter is a phrase I wonder at. It's a big word used by early American philosophers to denote, well what? That nature will save us? That God is in the trees? I don't know really. But I think it might strive for: better than what we worry we actually are.

If, from the very beginning, you are led to believe that your passion for union will do you well and that, as a life skill, it is the one to cultivate at expense of all others, what happens when this passion is compromised at every turn by alienation, weakness and refusal? Well, that's reality -- in one sense -- and one sense among many senses, I suppose. Mine, this character's, a poor city-dweller's, a citizen of the current recession, a woman living in fear of an acid attack, a homeless man in the park fearing the intervention of a cop or a vigilante, a child fearing the violent appraisal of a failed father, a mother fearing for her general well-being. Amidst all this panic, the sound of a car alarm brings all the banality home to roost.

How do you act like an adult in a world hell-bent on its own destruction? Where are the adults in countries that are drowning in debt, and poverty, and tyranny? Where is maturity in a blind acceptance of ecological decimation?

That is the question, I think. To act like a child would be to acquiesce to a naivete that would be all but renunciatory. But to renounce life would leave you with -- what?

I suppose art strives to pose these questions and, failing to answer them, to pose other questions that are at least more hopeful in their potential answerability -- in life's battered continuance.

Early August

2010-08-06T01:42:00.000-07:00

Three days now I've walked with a full bag of stuff through the city, strung out on bad sleep and bad noodles. My brown pants have mustard or hot sauce stains. I don't know how the things I love have settled in my old, old bag -- I've had it for years now, since I lived on Capp Street back when we lived next to the Buddhist temple which I was always too self-conscious to visit. Who am I, so nerve-stricken to breathe the smoke of a Buddhist space?

Past the garage of the crazed grey-bearded guy who slams his sack against a tree, whose garage is always a shrine to something I can't ever understand: old maps pinned to the trunk of his car with abalone shells, an old radio sounding off between two wilting candles, lawnchairs positioned between a fat, flame-shadowed buddha, friends of grey overalls who speak to him a weird lingo about anger and determination. He sometimes recognizes me, other times he doesn't. It's fine either way because I recognize him and I know I should walk past him and greet him.

"This is the time of the great undoing" -- so my radio goes. I'm in a house where I hear the squeak of a second story mouse and the revving of so many illegal cars and the sky is red and the flags gutter at the bondage castle across the rippling rooftops. And what I am is sad.

Three days now the sky is sodden with shale-grey clouds, damp and thick with heavy blue sadness.

I am sick with sadness -- but about ready to be better.

Hallelujah? Maybe. John Cale's is still the best version.

Memorial For Trouble The Cat

2010-07-30T22:24:00.000-07:00

"Trouble" Behind The Capp Street Curtain

It's been months since I've been here. But I'm back.

An animal I loved died recently, in fact just the other day. My ex-girlfriend called me from the vet's office in tears and held the phone up to the cat so I could say goodbye. I tried the best I could to say farewell. She told me he licked the phone. "Trouble" was old and had eaten poison quite by accident. He is one of two animals that I've ever really loved. Minutes later -- or before, I can't really remember -- there was a tiny earthquake and the house shook and I went outside and talked to the neighbor about the big one. Then I borrowed an ice pack for a bike accident.

Here's some pictures of Trouble.

An Oldie

2010-04-24T23:36:00.000-07:00

I've been scouring my desktop, in an ostensible attempt to clean it up. I have a thousand pages of unrefined prose, 300 pages of a novel here, 200 pages of another there and meanwhile the scraps and scrimshaws of unfinished projects.

What to do? Well, I can plan the rest of my creative life with the detritus on my almost 5 year old MacBook Pro. For starters here's a piece I think I wrote a couple years ago for a theater project for my friend Niki. She convinced me to dance in her piece in a ladies wool bathing suit and to, as well, perform in a burlesque number where I'm given lipstick and dressed up like a woman. That was a high point of my enriching vulnerability. I need more of that.

The following piece has a lot to do with recent conversations. It's very long and unedited but I feel as a short essay it has promise. Might as well. I feel it contains grain of the themes that I've always wrestled with and will continue to, as my weakness is as instructive and guiding as what I misperceive as strength.

A DREAM OF DEATH (IN THE DESERT)

At eighteen, I kept a very embarrassing journal, or at least it appears that way today. It is the only journal I ever saved from my tumultuous adolescent years; I destroyed the other ones because they were mostly free-associating, beatnik wannabe jumbles of sexual fantasies and trivial dream sequences. Some of these destroyed journals included minute-by-minute breakdowns of elaborate autoerotic sessions not to mention photo collages that were snipped from either car magazines or stolen Penthouses. The journal I started at eighteen, however, had the fresh perspective of someone who was suddenly legal in every sense of the word and who had suddenly read a lot of books about mental and physical conditioning. Still, that journal is permeated with my frustrations with girls, with dating, with trying to get laid, only it is less about the things I’d like to do and more about how to get to the point where I can do those things with grace and grit. I am, after all a horny teen who needs to learn finesse. The hows and not the whats. It is infused with human potential theories, occult philosophy and the most obscure self-help rhetoric you can imagine, all in the service of screwing, which rarely, if ever happened to me back then. The love of my life (or so I believed at 18), Amy floats through the pages, short, pale, earthy in her figure with those upsetting green eyes and that heaving Irish bosom and that sort of demeaning, precocious laugh of hers which made her a favorite with her art and theatre friends. But towards the end of the journal she is dating a close friend of mine. Unspeakable rage and jealousy turns my language coarse and difficult. My cursive starts getting frantic, all over the page, instead of in the neat, tightly-packed rows as before. I write poems about the various ways she is torturing me. About how she plucks her own eyes out and distills an acidic broth from them that she drips on my skin, burning me all the way to the marrow. Drip by drip, she stings me with the bright, blinding green of her Irish beauty. She becomes a surrealist fantasy of unattainable desire. In chemistry class, she assails me with hands of zero Kelvin. At Irish club meetings, she undresses my ambitions and guffaws with endless cruelty. I had been reading too much Breton, too much Artaud back then. The body was only good for the hallucinations it produced. The body was only as good as the Muse that enslaved it. So I dragged mine through sleepless nights of overblown poetics and solo wine quaffing. She cornered me one day about my public displays of poetic yearning. She had her arms on her hips, those emerald vessels burning in her face, her skin as thick and formidable as whipped mare’s milk. I feel an atavistic rush—the knowledge that my manhood will be in direct proportion to how much a woman will humiliate me, upset me, turn my life upside down and denigrate me as a pitiful, truly repulsive acolyte. Is it guilt? Is it the Christ martyr complex inherited from my Catholic upbringing? Is it some early blossoming of homosexuality or my current S&M fascination? I bow to her, in faux reverence and she pushes me back with her arm, disgusted. At this level I can see where her sweater covers her bellybutton. Cashmere. Imported. Worn to clubs that she snuck into. Threads of violet fizz around the edges. My heart surges. I want to be enslaved by her. I want. . .I want. . . But she walks away and I slide to the ground, sighing.

Later on in the journal, there is a dream. I’m still in the habit at eighteen of recording my dreams, just not as many as before. In that journal, I write down only the ones that I believe are influenced by the events in my waking life. You see, I was looking for a logic to it all, a music of the inner spheres that would also help me in the sex department. The description of this particular dream reminds me of this weird kid’s film I saw once that was about secret agents: Cloak And Dagger. There is a scene, I believe, where a woman corners a young boy in an alley way and he drops to his knees as she prepares to shoot him. For a long while she just smiles while she toys with her pistol. There is a spirit of play in the air, almost like it’s just a game of hide n’ seek but more highly charged than that. In fact the viewer knows all along that this she-villain can never off the little kid hero because his imaginary friend who just happens to be a trench-coat wearing secret agent is going to prevent her from doing that. This boring foreknowledge makes it a kid’s movie. But when I first saw it, I was spellbound by this scene and more by the feelings the kid must have had, a strange fluttering of adrenaline in his solar plexus that was directly related to his domination, to his near death at the hands of this woman. At the time, I was probably bringing a lot of my own baggage to the table, baggage that I could barely understand or hope to articulate.

In this dream, I died. I died while asleep but contrary to the urban legend, I didn’t actually die. I woke up shaking, my vision pixilated. From a black car, I was kicked out onto burning sand around the hour of twilight. I’m not sure which twilight it was, whether the dusk or dawn variety but the desert was vermillion and indigo, the cactus and the canyon walls slightly orange and jackals lurched in the distance, coughing. The driver got out too, a woman with long hair and sunglasses and wearing a leather jacket. She dragged me by the hair across the sand. It was cold and massaging on my kneecaps. I was groaning to myself; she was silent. Finally we arrive at no remarkable place, just more sand, more dying reds and faint purples of twilight. Brandishing a long black, greased-up gun, she looks down at me through her sunglasses. I cannot tell if she is beautiful but she is certainly tall and limber. She points it at me. I feel helpless, distraught, not at all like the kid in the movie must have felt, not the cold, hormonal agitation, not the male Andromeda complex. The barrel is as cold as the sand against my forehead. It clicks, the bullet enters the flesh of my head. No explosion, just a mute entry. A slight crack and it brakes through, like a splinter in a peeled egg. I slope down on the ground, still conscious, still watching her, even as the bullet is swimming around in my brain, counting down the seconds until I die. Then in my dream, it goes black and I’m counting backwards to zero. The closer I get to zero the darker it gets. The numbers slow down. It is almost absolute night and finally we arrive and I have one last bit of commentary: “So this is it then. I’m dead. It’s a lot like sleep.” Four seconds or so of darkness, almost entirely quiet, then my eyes snap open. Brightness. Awake. Time to write this all down. Before something else happens. . . .

April's On The Out

2010-04-22T22:13:00.000-07:00

Panic in the air, a spice from the place where tax money goes, where hospital bills accrue, where lengthy introductions to bad people are made.

A T.S. Eliot April saturated with panic-spice.

Bad air, hazy, raw around the edges, and going from hot to cold within hours and people are having trouble breathing. Everyone is asthmatic and pale, encumbered by neuron storms of private worry and fret.

I climb the red hill beyond my house and mentally map the quadrants of the city spreading out before me. The view of the docks, and the Bayview and Hunter's Point is strangely gorgeous. The slow crawl of freight ships, permanently anchored it seems. I wondered: what if a freight ship was painted orange? What if the freeways were painted blue? What if they hung heraldic banners from the tops of the white cranes? All these wonders, not real now are being piecemeal inserted into the novel which will be a realist science fiction erotic shaggy dog story.

Distraction. I need to go somewhere and use this map there. Tropical countries paint their cities crazy pastels because no one cares. The verandas and porticoes of Vietnam look lovely in a South American jungle town.

I'm 230 pages into the novel and will have to go back endlessly and tweak and improve and slash and burn. It will be a monumental task of humility which I look forward to. I keep sending stories out and receiving promising rejections. I keep writing rambling asides for The Rumpus but so far this year has been like last year but with more rough spots. What will happen to make it different and more smooth?

By accident I got How To Read And Why by Harold Bloom, the notorious, lauded while at the same time loathed literary critic whose read EVERYTHING and thinks, interestingly enough that our country is a Gnostic one, not a Christian one.

I basically skimmed the whole book last night, which resulted in the fact that now I need to read some more things that I don't have and don't now have the time to read: like The Charterhouse Of Parma by Stendhal and the entirety of Leaves Of Grass and Middlemarch and I need to re-read Moby Dick and the strange sequel Pierre. And oh yes, more stories by Chekhov, and by Nabokov.

But you can read forever and feel like you've never read anything. Language is a good hiding place with many hollows and tunnels and caverns. It compels more hiding. I'm not sure what we're hiding from except for the fact that things never turn out the way we thought they would as children. Disintegration feels like it starts earlier than we thought it would. But decaying things can suffer a positive sea-change too.

Oh, and for fuck's sake, it's time I read Proust.

At least Swann's Way. Now I'm of to gallivant in the sun of Friday, my last day off before my work week, before we get a new housemate and have to buy new kitchen furnishings and learn how to live on even less than we have now.

Sideways Motion In The Middle

2010-04-11T20:05:00.000-07:00

THERE's one really mean-spirited crazy woman in the neighborhood, all decked out like a frantic church-goer in crosses and crucifixes who loves to rifle through our free box and who, unconscious of her own actions, loves to verbally abuse people but ends every tirade with the website of the evangelical organization that she somehow supports: holylove.org.

SHE came in the store today because it was pissing rain so we haul the free box in. I have to say she emanates a pathetic, angry negativity that at once I want to make go away while at the same time I abhor the conditions that made her so crazy and angry in the first place. Within five minutes she had suggested to a young girl in line she read a book about rape, because "that's what this world has in store for her", and ended this, of course, with the almost ironic tag: "holylove.org."

AND then I saw a two year girl in the rain, on her knees, bawling and choking on tears for almost twenty minutes while the woman she was with, also sobbing, tried to make her calm down. She didn't calm down; she wailed and railed and everybody looked and commented and the rain came down and my stomach knotted up from something sour I hate earlier in the day.

AND the plaza in Warsaw where all the Polish citizens gathered to mourn the deaths of their leaders looked like something out of a dream.

I listen to "minimalists" a lot lately, people like Arvo Part and Gorecki (sic) -- so-called "sacred minimalists" -- a harrowing backdrop of choral repetition is good for words to come up, makes the moment swell like a funeral march, or the slap of water against a sad, old cliff.

I feel caught in a web of trying, caught and flailing and haggling with my own motives, and remembering only one alibi which I would prefer to keep secret. An alibi I can hoist up when all goes sour and grim, and say: at least this makes the days digestible.

Notes Of Early April

2010-04-06T23:13:00.000-07:00

April has proved the accidental rule of March and February. . .which is to say, a human like myself expressing abiding strength in the face of transitory reality, nonchalant cruelty, blows of fate that are almost anti-climactic because what else can fate do, being transitory, than strike at less than a moment's notice?

And when it strikes, you don't run, you fortify in the heat of the moment with the very heat that the moment provides. Which is hard and which is weird and which you have to do because that's what life is.

Tis been a year come May I've been a rugged worker at a small bookstore in San Francisco. What I love about this job is the constant face time with innumerable books I haven't read or even heard of until I find out about them from some enthusiastic customer. What I admire about the job is the multiplicity of tiny tasks that all coalesce in making the bookstore exist in the first place.

What I love, too about the job is the easy stance I find I'm taking, standing behind my old wooden counter, with folded arms and a gracious grin and with the patience of a favorite bartender as I hear countless and varied tales and asides from the regulars and the non-regular droppers-by who come by for some odd tome or some tall tale of San Francisco of yesteryear. I have collected many business cards, many the paper trails of cult allegiances. I have spoken to well-weathered folks with strong affiliations with fringe botanical fan clubs, historical societies, magic shops as well as the former employees of sheet music stores when the local economy was graced enough to honor such specificity who have now turned to dog walking businesses.

I have shared minor anecdotes with people en route to Haiti and Africa and Spain and the Maldives, with folks intent on preserving the local murals, with tattooed lesbian punks, with children who hate the murder of guinea pigs, with queer families who want nothing more than to raise their child as a progressive, poly-lingual visionary in a world that is, at the very least, downright terrifying.

It is an honoring job, at its simplest. In its essence, I know I am dispensing things that make people happy in the most edifying way. They can get overpriced food wherever they want but books this good and this well-priced are hard to come by in the city and so is the joy of discovering what you have wanted all along but were too conscientious to know it.

And part of the joy of doing this comes from the fact that the bulk of the used books that we sell, I, myself have purchased for the store from similarly enthused customers who read and read and sell back books for credit, hoping to find gems therein that I too may have purchased from their own unknown kindreds.

In a day's time I can watch with awe the tactile channeling of a history of ravens from an old Irish woman into the hands of a banjo-playing bird-watcher all because I made a decision to purchase and price the book according to the needs of the store as well as the needs of the customers. You'd be surprised how comfortably those needs fit together. This power is less than power; it's a humbling privilege that links me to other readers who themselves are champions of other worlds that are out there in dense city streets where people might slave away only to own a piece of written reality that they can put in their backpack and open with glee in the sun-drenched park.

Ides of March

2010-03-15T21:43:00.000-07:00

This year I did not dress up in a wedding dress and go barhopping. I took photos, trying to figure out how to illustrate certain novel segments, i.e. the sinister "Monica Barrett" character. . .

From the top of Bernal Hill today and yesterday, the city was all polished quartz and shining corridors. The breezes tasted good. I didn't have my camera.

But today was dreadful despite the "fine weather." No moon tonight. People out gathering in weird places, in large numbers, in dark outfits. The air tastes of sawdust and charcoal shavings. Everyone acts like I used to act and might still be acting. A strange loop? Am I stuck?

I've been reading dark and uncanny authors again, like Thomas Ligotti and Brian Evenson: initial impressions: the former I think has profoundly unsettling ideas that are executed somewhat hastily while the latter creates subtle, but unnerving miniatures that are executed with subdued perfectiveness.

I like the off-the-charts weirdness of Ligotti almost more than Evenson, but I think Evenson might be more of a writer's model. I think his sentences are slightly more exquisite. These are early impressions only and subject to change. I'm eager to find more weird fiction written by women. Shirley Jackson I'm getting back into. And I heard Kelly Link is good to.

Briefly: some of my writing on The Rumpus has gotten a little more exposure.

For instance, a rather rambling ode to the Poetic got the attention of The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan.

And some people are weighing in, despite initial confusion, on where they were during certain blackouts (i.e. power failures), especially the Santa Cruz blackout.

And lastly, because I'm now becoming more an active volunteer member, I did a celebratory write-up on Artist's Television Access, the experimental film art space in San Francisco: A.TA. for short.

Now back to figuring out what voice to use in the novel.

March Hail

2010-03-08T23:30:00.000-08:00

This March day brought hail stones and insomnia and constant chatter about the weather which no longer feels like small talk but real talk that is about impending disaster. I learned first names finally and felt hands warm in my own.

All these earthquakes, the people say. A man with booze breath looking for puzzle books for his son. It was early and he was drunk. Later I found a stamped out cigarette by the kid's section. It smelled harshly even before I reached to clean it up.

And they ponder, are you east coast, or are you west coast. Have you known or have you not known? West coasters know nothing about weather. Real weather. I met someone from Olympia, Washington today and she had tattooed knuckles and pennies on her bracelet and the ardent desire for a part-time job. She had done indie publishing and micro print making. She was hectic and enthusiastic for every little thing. Have I not become that, I wondered silently.

My insomnia made me slow to explain but it was also bad dreams that made me slow. The kinds with private deaths in them, told by old flames, over unseen countries.

She said she wanted thunder and lightning, a dance-step of upset airs to keep her on her toes. Would we deliver, she asked. I wasn't sure, I didn't know. I covered up not knowing by hammering with my price gun at a stack of books.

People from other cities are excited to be here, I declared. And I would be too.

Fragments From A Dark Night

2010-03-04T23:52:00.000-08:00

I don't know what's been in the water these last six months but I feel contaminated by ill omens. I feel like I've been stuffed with graveyard well water. I'm not sick at all and presumably healthy, despite my nerves but life has a way of veiling itself in the most alienating of unrealities.

Which is funny because, when not busy with the dogged errands of living I myself deal in unreality, in fiction, in the poetic, the vague, suggestive and liminal, in the linguistic pyrotechnics of a feverish imagination which is my solely defining function. I believe in the power of its uselessness. I'm old enough to call it my only sustained faith. Yet I know that I am reverent of other functions too: sleeping, eating, loving and taking care of the bills and my loved ones, sometimes in the same hurried breath.

But the ravens are thick in the trees, familiars of a season that adheres to no timetable.

Based on my friend's experiences I don't think I'm alone. On the surface life couldn't be better and this colorful, teeming city I've called home for many years now is as loud and vibrant as ever.

What amazed me the other night were the ramshackle markets in the bad part of the Mission where the Chinese checkout women speak to their male underlings in an exhilarating mix of Mandarin, English and Spanish. I feel cursed for not needing to achieve that kind of necessity. It was musical and necessary. I guess I'm tired of what I want and more interested in what I need, insofar as said needs are directly piped into the needs of a burgeoning, liberated culture. A culture I create in my own fictional unrealities, that I idealize through words, thus cursing its potential to ever be real .

I'm afraid of our serfdom to the Internet. Our allegiance to the virtual, the instantaneous, the layered. I see beauty everywhere but it ceases often to serve a purpose. The ugliness, when I see it, is more utilitarian, forward-thinking and radical. The walls of my cheap temple quake.

We will, with the persistence of hypertrophied data, forsake the material that is the bones and enzymes of culture. I don't kowtow to words like civilization because there are plenty of those in existence where real life has been replaced by brute survival. No, a people is defined by what they express, what costume they wear when they go into battle. A people is also defined by their sufferings yes but more the songs they make in the midst of such.

I have now cultivated what an idealism of necessity might look like. I pay it lip service. I sign up for the classes and get the necessary books. The tools look good on my mantle. In keeping with my nature, I dream big dreams about it. We will all garden and have easy access to salads at a moment's notice. We will speak a pidgin of mixed dialects. Our art will be made and shown spontaneously without concern for money or advancement. The good guys will be the ones who, vigilante style, go and arrest the crooked bankers, the insurance company CEO's, the military mercenaries, the corporate whores, the sexists, the would-be rapists and the earth-cursing fundamentalists of any creed or currency.

What gives me hope is the pure noise of children in the playground, of cats roaming the streets at night. Of forgotten books revealed. Of accidental feasts entered into. Of schoolchildren taking to the street, as they did today, to protest their impoverished educational opportunities.

The feeling you get

2010-03-02T21:53:00.000-08:00

The feeling you get from wanting to flesh out hundreds of pages of words until they make a certain amount of sense to you is of turning your back, forcefully, sensually and in some cases regretfully on what living is, which is hearts and mistakes, cavities and unmade beds. When you turn the aforementioned into words, you tend to perfect them with more lavish imperfections, or tone them down with more subtle parsings. Sometimes I mistake it all for adolescence but that's when Big Brother Super Ego has the upper hand.

Nothing quite brings you round to the glorious irrationality of your decision to play with words than reading the letters of writers.

In this case the letters of one of my favorite living writers, Samuel R. Delany, appropriately called 1984, the year the bulk of them were written and a deliberate homage to Orwell's timeless dystopia. Just got it in the mail today from a small bookseller somewhere out there in the bookseller cyberspace.

Published by the unusual small press Voyant Publications that apparently has a website only in Chinese. Flipped through only a few of the letters but it was humbling to read sentences along the lines of, although I shamelessly paraphrase and even, to some degree, invent: "Today I wrote for fifteen hours, drank coffee, went out walking looking for fun and then came back and wrote this letter around dawn. . .meanwhile the tax man is hounding me and all I have to eat is week-old chow mein I filched from the downstairs neighbor. . ."

Notes On The Inward City

2010-02-19T19:25:00.000-08:00

I've been away from the blog, no doubt dispensing tidy tidbits elsewhere, none of which I can remember, but more than that, I've been laying pen to paper, in a big black book (not moleskine!)

for continual threads and bits and ejecta for the long fiction I'm working on. The long fiction is taking on the contours of a city in my head, full of more and more colorful and capacious denizens, especially as the parameters of the city I live in seems occasionally to shrink by the day.

I walk the pleasant five blocks to work, where I am five, six days a week, up a slight hill to a peaceful little crown of parkland with its view of industrial docks to the east and a red bald hill above my store and the downtown on my north west side. . .more often than not places of caffeine and cheap eats are also within walking distance. . .or we eat garlicky peasant food at home. I know people by name and face and their tendency to be drunk at noon, or just generally mute and peripatetic, like the old lady who just walks Bernal in aimless circles, occasionally stopping to smoke.

The shrinking outward city opens up the interior kingdom to more and more fevered immigration.

Sometimes the outward city looks exactly like the inward ones, like the other night when the fog seeped up from the ground like a B-movie and draped the struggling cypress, contorted like dancer's limbs, a vision of Hecate.

Living can seem a seldom-achieved balance between imagination and doing, even though the former is still doing and the latter can often be unimaginative.

The Long Fiction: the Uncanny is infecting it to an alarming degree, thanks to this really really invigorating "theory" book I re-found and am only reading now for the first time: The Secret Life Of Puppets.

A silly and misleading title, maybe, but its contents are just so wonderfully suggestive, almost as if the author Victoria Nelson is using criticism not to foster a comprehension of existing forms but to foster an exploration of nascent forms, or at least malleable forms, like the short supernatural fantasies of Bruno Schulz.

(More on him later. . .)

V-Day brought to you by Nick Cave

2010-02-14T21:02:00.000-08:00

The Ship Song

"Come sail your ships around me
And burn your bridges down
We make a little history, baby
Every time you come around

Come loose your dogs upon me
And let your hair hang down
You are a little mystery to me
Every time you come around

We talk about it all night long
We define our moral ground
But when I crawl into your arms
Everything comes tumbling down

Come sail your ships around me
And burn your bridges down
We make a little history, baby
Every time you come around

Your face has fallen sad now
For you know the time is nigh
When I must remove your wings
And you, you must try to fly

Come sail your ships around me
And burn your bridges down
We make a little history, baby
Every time you come around

Come loose your dogs upon me
And let your hair hang down
You are a little mystery to me
Every time you come around"

Lime Tree Arbour

"the boatman calls from the lake
a lone loon dives upon the water
i put my hand over her
down in the lime tree arbour

the wind in the trees is whispering
whispering low that i love her
she puts her hand over mine
down in the lime tree arbour

through every breath that i breathe
and every place i go
there is hand that protects me
and i do love her so

there will always be suffering
it flows through life like water
i put my hand over hers
down in the lime tree arbour

the boatman he has gone
and the loons have flown for cover
she puts her hand over mine
down in the lime tree arbour

through every word that i speak
and every thing i know
there is hand that protects me
and i do love her so"

Noir Effect 2

2010-02-02T13:29:00.000-08:00

Suspense and The Gangster at the SF Film Noir Festival were unforgettable. . .both starring Belita and Barry Sullivan. . .sitting in the dark balcony seats of the Castro Theater with the people who just want to be alone. . .stretch their legs out, settle their dreaming eyes on the ruby-glowing chandelier husk. . .drink their flasks, far from the suffocating pettiness of other people.
Fatalism looks so good on the big screen, in those long shots, those huge, looming shadows, the fast talking, the risque amorality.
Living beautifully and dying with panache.

Zinn

2010-01-30T11:41:00.000-08:00

"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic.

It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacriﬁce, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.

If we remember those times and places--and there are so many--where people have behaved magniﬁcently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future.
The future is an inﬁnite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in deﬁance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."

--Howard Zinn

The Noir Effect Part 1

2010-01-26T23:34:00.000-08:00

The last few days have been weird, in not exactly constructive ways.

Which falls way short of the urgency I want to express.

A word I loathe, because it lacks any sort of specificity and is aligned too maliciously with cliche: drama. Beyond drama, an encroaching wave of unreality that is dubiously indistinguishable from the weather.

And not just the weather we talk about because we're too tired to talk of anything else. The weather inside. The inner meteors. Clashing and fraying the nerves, exiting the skin in spoors of unease, not like breath but what we breathe when we're not breathing.

The gray-ribbed skies, the blustering wet winds have surrendered to general blandness, not even a condition but a general lack. And the psyche is rendered faceless, without affect or charge. I saw the hill-topped park, and the mutant-green bathroom light, a beacon for hybrid undoings, and wondered whether, despite the recent surge of cops in my neighborhood, I should walk that park in the circle it describes, every revolution of which I'd have come to a new half-hearted conclusion.

But no, such compulsion is an old urge.

Tonight, after closing down the shop, I walked the dark hills with the garret-crowned houses that are always yellow-bright and naked, towards a place where live jazz can be had for free, and you can eat a simple spinach salad digested with ginger beer. It's an old tired place I haven't been in for a while.

To hear it from the employees, you work 8 hours straight there without a break. Many a strong soul has been forced out to sling barbecue or pour coffee elsewhere. But they can't argue with the wine or the tinkling music or the occasionally-inspired soup or salad inspired by the bistro aesthetic.

A man I see always on the cafe circuit, because both of us like so many of us, are prone to linger in cafes where there's free music and decent coffee and not-bad edibles, was there, with his insightful bifocals, his non-descrepit black clothing, his usual glass of wine and bowl of soup and we nodded and talked briefly about cafes.

And then realizing we were talking about cafes, even comparing them in half-whining tones we kind of started, half-humorously to hate ourselves. To hate ourselves in front of each other. Surely, we said, laughing, we have nothing, nothing to complain about. And it was true.

A bowl of soup, a glass of wine, a dog-eared book of art history: this, I believe is his usual evening spread. Hearty, I think. Vivifying. The kind of triple-pairing that can bolster you for a long night of braving harsh lake-winds en route towards a distant outpost where questionable rewards are housed. In this I remember Oakland autumns, alone, with unsung songs inside of me when I thought the lake was a piece of rippling black silk.

Tonight was different. I hope it was because certain essential illusions have been pre-shattered. It's not a guarantee though.

The jazz was mild, and calming distraction as jazz, which has no acid inflections often is. The musicians took breaks to eat expensive sandwiches and talk about their varied cosmopolitan roots. One of them, red-faced and white-haired and charmingly gaunt, claimed both Scottish and Dutch ancestry, which meant he was prone to many excuses to travel to Europe and take the trains and boats there which take him to family and beyond.

The other, a Frenchman spoke of his alienation from his father. And then the American spoke, somewhat self-congratulatorily of being able to suffer any rodents for having lived in Thailand. Any conversation you happen to overhear, if you overhear it with your whole self, offers parts of the whole fiasco we are all implicated in. It's nice, in a way. Not distracting but focusing.

But I was busy writing a letter about my spiritual failings which, having said it here, sounds absurd. The man I wrote to is a Catholic. He knows I'm still a Catholic, if only in birthright. He is an old, old friend. He's worked the food circuit at the university, lost it all in Reno, hitch-hiked, begged, been betrayed and forlorn for longer than I have. Now I believe he is happy with a good woman, a good job, a good house. His faith is strong and buttressing. It's a live thing. The liveliest faith I've seen from a friend in a long time. I've seen his bedroom altar, I've heard his devotions on days of obligation.

And I wrote him four pages about the current weirdness, describing it not explicitly but in roundabout ways until I exhausted the letter with groundless aphorisms that point only to invisible places.

And I left him with a question, I left myself with it too: "If it's not the Invisible you're drawing from, then is it love?"

I don't know, however, what kind of question it is.

Repository Of Dream Shards

2010-01-24T09:56:00.000-08:00

Could be the influence of Women And Men's delirious, fugue-like structure, cascading sentences that don't necessarily ramble but rush right along through their own memories (as if sentences can have memories of previous sentences?) but my dreams are less deep immersions in images that just scudding the surface of the deep, riding on a wave of endless words. . .

I wake with the echoe of long, disconnective paragraphs in my head. It's a breezy form of faux-delirium, something that might make the day feel louder, weirder. Even in my dreams I'm dictating the world's most unnecessary novel.

Could also be the copious pesto pizza eaten late at night washed down with a hot whiskey, ginger, cinnamon and bitters concoction after experiencing a butchered screening of the delightfully macabre and demonic 1920's Swedish silent film about witchcraft set to live, wonderfully eerie and dissonant music by a group called Dr. Prisoner: The Brain!

Here's another description of what I saw/experienced last night.

Put on by the wonderful people at Artist's Television Access.

Notes On "Women And Men"

2010-01-22T10:20:00.000-08:00

This might not be the year where I blog that much. Too many longer projects.

But a few things to say in the interim.

Women And Men by Joseph McElroy, of which I am only 200 pages in and which is 1300 pages long, might be the strangest, sustained piece of writing I've ever encountered. . .notes pending...but one image jumps to mind: broken circuitry of consciousness as if it's not a stream per se but composites of broken machines. . .

Some major "scenes" so far:

--a rocket launch in Florida during which a rogue newsman finds inspiration from a Chilean economist.

--another Chilean, but this time an opera singer, has a doctor that loves her so much that he smuggles, via a medicine man, a certain tapeworm for her so may she lose weight.

--a very formative Grandmother who tells stories to her grandson but not her own daughter who ends up committing suicide.

--various incarnations of inventors and fringe weathermen and hermit scientists, and generally a sense that the margins of society hold untold knowledge.

--a woman, the heroine of the novel, Grace Kimball, who is a part Native American, is thinking about her day Molly Bloom style (full of various asides, tangents) while masturbating in her Body Room in which she holds women's workshops.

--oh and the first scene, or chapter of the book, is a wonderfully empathetic description of a woman giving birth. However, so far this character has not made another appearance.

--a recurring image of the uncrated parts of the Statue Of Liberty sitting in the grass while a little girl, the heroine's grandmother is being serenaded with a Longfellow poem.

More Later. . .

Local Paradoxes

2010-01-09T15:07:00.000-08:00

To pretend you're immortal and lead the contemplative life, and think through things that can't be untangled without centuries of inquiry; but also to take action, to engage, participate, be enraged (as we should), and urge joy in spite of cruelty.

To urge mortality onto yourself and others. And in that limiting light, things done and undone shine harder for being rarer. Are harder. Are rarer.

To love selflessly; but while erecting fortresses that are yours alone; to be psyche and society; to embrace while fleeing for your life; to escape into the arms of the one you can't live without.

To be alone with the images in your head, to discipline them, to play games of domination with them; but then to make words centrifugal, even a force forgotten so you may dirty your hands with the uselessness of living.

These are some of my local paradoxes they I just now wanted to put on the page.

Things Early January

2010-01-05T16:19:00.000-08:00

January is certainly off and running.
6 hours of writing and revising yesterday. After a 7 day, 50 hour workweek!

Watched the disturbing, audacious, brazenly over-done, but surprisingly not morbid film, Tideland (not morbid despite scenes of human taxidermy, and potential pederasty.)

Everyone's getting colds again. Others are quitting vices.

Still others are meeting and falling for one another.
Inciting jealousy, excising old illusions.

A funny line from a self-help book, "Mourning the life you thought you had. . ." Such things only make me laugh, cruelly and sadly maybe.

I'm arming myself against it all. Especially the colds: raw garlic helps.

I have a desire to spend one week in New York for no reason at all this year.
My eyes are sort of puffy.

My spirits are high, and getting higher. ()
It's 2010: it's already the FUTURE. This novel I'm reading, Women and Men is wildly difficult.
I'm augmenting it with a little research here and there.
I'm working on my on novel, hitting about 130 pages of rough shite.

Hmmm, this year I might makes this blog more concise, sharper, less updated so I can finish some big things.

Here's a good book I'm leafing through, written by my father's former English Professor at U.T. Austin and one of the finest exegeses of Blaise Cendrars in English.

Last Post '09 99th blogpost Of 'O9

2009-12-31T10:25:00.000-08:00

I began the year, all at sea, broke, barely-working, living in a weird part of town.

I began the year beginning this blog.

I began the year finishing up 2666. And having nightmares.

And thereby, after thinking hard on it, I devoted myself to forging an equally ambitious, sloppily elegant beast. Or two of them. And convincing myself every day that it is important.

That the stories I tell myself will be ones that people will want to read. And that will be important too.

Learned much this year from reading Carson McCullers, Samuel Delany, John Berger, Stephen Elliott, Paul Bowles, Carol Queen, Iris Murdoch and Steve Erickson, among others.

A couple books I didn't get around to talking about that I read this year, books that are almost too difficult, too "transgressive" to comment on (actually I was just lazy):

The Leather Daddy And The Femme by Carol Queen
334 by Thomas M. Disch
Evil Companions by Michael Perkins

And now, as I slip into what calls itself 2010, I'll have one more big, monster of a book I'm going to be starting.

Clocking in at about 1300 pages, and verifiably a neglected novel, if not a neglected masterpiece: Women And Men by Joseph McElroy.

Besides that there is the usual list of things for the new year:

finishing the first novel
submitting more stories and essays
something political
something philanthropic
expand my cooking repertoire
that one yoga class
that one horticulture class (actually signed up for)
exploring and documenting
a trip? camping?
health. . .
savings. . .
fellowships. . .
cameras
embraces
ink stains
letter writing
conspiring
propagating useful fictions

making play in the ruins.

good night 09!

A quick beginning to the 2nd Novel.

2009-12-31T09:53:00.000-08:00

Although I'm struggling to not only start, work on and finish the first novel, the opening passage, or some variation of that for the second novel in the projected series has just come to me. So I've decided to spit it out here.

"In the Times before ours, that is to say before the Miracle-working Gangstresses and Lunatic Medicine Shows terrorized and defamed us, before the country became a spitting black cauldron of war, chicanery and depletion, a boy with a peculiar deformation was born to a pair of young singers, a man and a woman who were hellbent to make it to San Francisco in time for a very famous poetry reading.

He was born on the road, in a motel parking lot, under a patio umbrella, next to a drained pool. The Haitian maid happened to be a midwife. Percy's mother wept in her arms for hours. Percy's father spent his own tears in a biker bar.

They named their boy, in fulfillment of some unconscious omen, Crispin Percius and alternately called him Crispy or Percy depending on their moods, which were often drug-induced and subject to the passing winds of some unknown threat. In no short time, this young man would grow to be among the country's most hunted treasures not entirely for reasons of his own.

He also grew to be one of our country's most famous poets, whose masterpiece: Ariadne: Her Urinals became a very common souvenir left at crime scenes of all varieties. Including the more notorious slayings of noted financiers which you might remember from your history books. . ."

Mythopoetic Site Study San Diego Part 2

2009-12-29T11:14:00.001-08:00

Writing some of the semi-fictional back story of the narrator of a fictional memoir. . . so traversing some more visual references from my "hometown."

Memories of things lived and things dreamed and things read all get mixed together and coagulate until you can't separate one from the other.

This is part of the crux of the memoir-novel.

When a young man's marriage comes to an end for no discernible reason,

he is beset upon by memories he can neither confirm nor deny. Each new memory unlocks an old one.

His head feels like a flooded prison. Getting more flooded by the day.

Suddenly the people around him, the women and men he gets involved with all seem to be trying to help him unlock something that may or many not have happened to him.

Even his own hairdresser plays the part of some kind of "revelation-pimp" where with every six weeks, he bestows upon the hapless narrator some kind of password or evolving insight as he hacks away at the wild silver and black foliage on top of his head.

One of the garden-holes he plummets down involves an encounter at a rickety old Victorian arboretum many years back

in that twilight period between his late boyhood and early adolescence, when a dark woman with ice blue eyes in a long dark coat, (or maybe it wasn't a women at all) hands him a briefcase, but before he can accept it he is whisked away by his parents.

(But the smell of her. . the rare-earth spices, rotten humidors, ships. . .so reminiscent of how his twin sister smelled when she came back late at night from the ravines and fields near their house. . .)

This encounter happens inside the dim, pungent causeways of the arboretum.

A place I was at a few days ago in real life.

Where I was fascinated by the Ecuadorian blood leaf. Imagined a room adorned with nothing but thousands of bunches of blood leaf and how one might go mad inside such a room.

The young man needs to understand which memories actually belong to him, or which ones are actually important in deducing the course of his life. He has his hair-dresser as a guide. He has other guides: lovers, friends, guys who sit on stoops, old ladies who deal drugs in empty churches, etc.

He remembers one of his first "revelation-pimps": a shadowy man at his high school who demanded information about several students and student organizations.

And how they met at an incongruous corner, in a little Arabic-Turkish-Basque tea house set like an oasis amidst the parched depots and overpriced fishmongers of a desert downtown.

And how there was a tango instructor there named Jill Solomon Miller who was one of the first truly beautiful women he remembers meeting in person.

Cafe Bassam is no longer at its original location on this wonderful corner where you can melt into the backdrop of the loud, expensive nightlife, on wooden chairs paired with marble-topped cafe tables, obscured by thin, leafy trees. Where my friends worked and spoke of conspiracies and arguments and secret backroom deals and secret backroom staircases leading to locked rooms that emanated a pulsing blue light.

And where. . .many backroom deals were made in the darkness of the sidewalk-trees with students and teachers and insiders alike, all masquerading as one another. . .over countless espressos and Gitanes Blondes and revelation-scandals.

The place was open late, later than bars, until three or four in the morning and you could smoke inside and play chess with men who didn't really speak your language. And here the mysterious owner, a man with a steely smile and a differently-colored beret depending on the day of the week, sold me an antique cigarette case. . .made from the bullet-casings of a pistol fired during the Hundred Year's War. . .

or so the owner's friend insisted. . .

That very shadowy man, not the owner nor the owner's friend, but the shadowy man who paid us to spy on our fellow students,

he got me a summer job running a rickshaw through the night streets of coastal San Diego, a shady, unlicensed operation if ever there was one. . .and its base of operations was through the dark porticoes and arcades of Balboa Park. . . . past all the museums, or at least most of them until you reached
the basement of the Museum Of Natural History. In the basement of a museum, a glum, unfurnished, windowless room, a plywood desk

and a single light bulb hanging over it, dangling, faint pearly conspiratorial light. . .

Myths Of Place And Setting

2009-12-28T10:19:00.001-08:00

As I make my way through Steve Erickson's books, while inevitably taking breaks, short and long to dip into all the other unread masters I have heaped around my life,

I'm thinking about his 8-plus novels (only 2 of which I've read), most of which have to do with the cinema, or Los Angeles, or alternative surreal histories of America to some degree, and how they all supposedly constitute one large oceanic novel.

Sort of like Proust, or how Kerouac's novels were all one "Visions Of Duluoz". . .

I've always liked that idea. Which is why short stories, when I write them, tend to share common denominators, common settings, or variations on the same setting.

And why I'm drawn to a project now, a series of novels and "memoirs" that all interconnect and reflect and draw from each other. Featured warped visions of me and warped visions of not-me. False memoirs and true novels.

(A project that is not unlike what people as diverse as John Berger, Jeanette Walls, J.M. Coetzee are doing now. And in terms of the memoir craze, I'm completely of the moment even if, at one point, or many points, I have been ashamed of and/or afraid of the seductive life-writing impulse for reasons that were silly, short-sighted and completely illusory.)

When I think of connected books and how each book is part of a larger book, it's kind of like that saying, not sure who said it, but that you usually only have ONE IDEA in life. . .which isn't exactly true. You have many ideas, many motifs but maybe, just maybe they tie into a larger, more cosmic motif that defines you, often without you knowing it.

Which is like that saying, "The fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing. . ."

In my case, and for this prospective project, there is perhaps one thing: The Missing Beloved, which is like The Missing City.

Or the Sister That Ran Away To The Forgotten city.

Which is part of that relentless lineage of books that all feature someone who's searching for a mysterious other person, and in cases of male protagonists often the missing other person is a woman ((a theme that also reoccurs in Erickson's novels)). . .

But never mind that now. What I wanted to talk about was one of the recurring settings that is deeply rooted in my life.

I was down in San Diego for the holidays,

a city that I grew up in, lived in for many years and go back to for short intervals during the holidays, and I'm always, each time I go down, succumbing to different torrents of memory, often of varying intensities and warring degrees,

and the consequence of this can be a sometimes disorienting see-saw between comforting melancholy and uneasy exaltation.

I like the brick and the verdigris of my parent's place. The downtown sea winds. The hot dry brightness and the quotes by Martin Luther King on the stones that lead down to the port. The seascapes down here, perforated and punctured and defined by military prowess are dazzling and somewhat terrifying.

And I always smell the summer I worked on a tour yacht that did rounds of the bay past all the grey ships and the ship builders and the submarines. A summer enjoyed on many levels but wasted on one: pining for a missing blond.

Now, navigating through the Bourbon Street-feel of the Gaslamp Quarter,

you find Broadway where things start feeling dingier and more gutted, and the signs of a few archetypal holiday dives that are featured in a few tales I've told begin to show themselves near the stained bus shelters and the liquor stores and the check-cashing places.

I find parallels between downtown San Diego and downtown Oakland even if these parallels are a stretch. Or are just elements common to any city. What really connects them is the warehouse feel of their downtowns by the water.

The sense that some fundamental, browbeaten history is being obscured.

Chee-Chee Club on Broadway had, in the past and this last holiday, shown my friends and I some of that history. . .

But just being a voyeur never entirely helps.

The idea of a city whose old skins go to recreate its citizens. . .

More later. . .

Christmas Days Off

2009-12-27T11:20:00.000-08:00

I'm thinking of doing, if not a Top Ten, at least a semi-list of memorable "events" (of mind, of life) that happened this year. . .got a few days left.

In the meantime, I've been plunged into the watery dreams of another Steve Erickson novel, Rubicon Beach.

Although I don't have the above copy, I do appreciate the 80's aesthetic of it.

More to say on Erickson later, but as I've been reading Rubicon Beach I've also been succumbing to tiny little wine-induced cat naps all of which have been wracked by dreams wrested from his own visions of a submerged, swampy Los Angeles peopled with buccaneers, vengeful prostitutes who live in flooded hotels, beautiful Indian girls from shipwrecked forests, etc. etc. He' s a writer who verily invades your dreams and mangles them. Good, strong, unique stuff.

Erickson is a writer preoccupied with a vision of America, but not the America of Sarah Palin or Barack Obama but the America that exists somewhat in a subterranean state beneath all the official decrees, histories and prophecies.

So it was great to find him included in a giant, hodgepodge of a book I'm also leafing through and just came out recently, the Greil Marcus co-edited A New Literary History Of America.

Cendrars For Christmas

2009-12-25T11:59:00.000-08:00

This Christmas I remembered a Cendrars book I had forgotten (see above), one of a few in English I don't have, so I promptly ordered it from alibris.

Meanwhile, warm dry brightness of Southern California and sea glare, a stark contrast to the wet wild darkness up north.

Much in the way of old-time merriment with old friends, esoteric jokes, games of wit, obscene toasts, life-affirming blasphemies, strong ales, brazen innuendos, sweet potato fries, a huge bar tab, vodka and ginger ale, a trip through the dingy part of downtown, stockpiling research, Muscovy duck, abandoning plans, reassuring ourselves, finding old keepsakes and contemplating lists for the new year, as well as all the qualms and tiny dreads and large joys that go with the aforementioned.

Have a great day everyone.

Garbled Year End Disjecta Thesis

2009-12-18T19:53:00.000-08:00

2009 is
making its way to an end,
which means that this blog, begun on or around January 1st of this year, is a pretty accurate chronicle of all the things that have "happened" in '09,

at least in the head of this one avid reader, writer and

obsessive personality who made the pilgrimage, in life-terms, from part-time clerk's clerk living
in the stony plains of the Excelsior to full-time book peddler living

in the red and gold highlands of Bernal.

What it has tried to record is wherever life has bled a little from its own unwritten pages, wherever narrative and poetic maps have stenciled themselves in unlikely corners of these often hastily forgotten 24 hours.

That's just experimental fancy talk for saying: it wasn't really about life, but life through the filter of words and ideas.

Considering life from the perspective
of what I want to write about and what, inextricable to writing,
I want to read is a good way to make my head explode.

If truly the printing press was the single most important invention of Modern Times than its acolytes, or at least some of them, have become a perverse band of day-dreamers and spiritualists and table-knockers.

Because I want to read and write about everything. So what does one do? Except talk to the spirits in the head.

Or install interesting filters I think. Saying No is liberating. Censoring is liberating. Blockage and congestion and dams are freeing. Saturate every atom, yes, but only the atoms you need.

The Massive World Books keep trying to be written, have been written, will constantly elude being written, but that's because the Massive World already exists, so Tiny-Massive Worlds must suffice in ink-tones, like one of my favorite novel's titles, Little Big.

Adhere to new angles, to the hidden geometries of the same story. Writing, for all its hard talk of being hard, is only fulfilling if it absorbs you like love does. And love, for it to last, requires sniffing out new angles.

Come to the conclusion that you'll never read everything, not even close and that reading isn't actually the most important activity in life, only a part of it.

What is then?

Well, it is something that subsumes reading under its vague umbrella: I think the most important activity is something that cannot quite be defined: which is a sort of mutually-shared idleness that masquerades as work,

a labor of languor that borrows nothing from the

indexes of tension and resentment, a vastly fulfilling and absorbing non-doing defined by laughter and gratitude that sweeps away the dictates of time, hierarchy, and anxiety.

But actually the most important thing might be empathy.

But you can only empathize when you are idle in your heart. When you are relaxed, freed from the tension of being sized up, or taken down, or minute-by-minute stripped of your dignity which can happen minute-by-minute even if nothing seems like its happening.

I feel I write to empathize. I create characters that I want to empathize with. I create situations that I feel like I can step into. I might not want to step into them. In fact, it's crucial that many of them I don't want to step into, but that I will step into them because I can.

The most important thing about empathy is that, as a feeling it always falls short of accuracy but that accuracy doesn't matter.

Which is to say, in writing to empathize I really write to relax.

I want to feel idle in the world and in normal life, life being what it is, absolute relaxation is impossible or it's fraught with all the tremors of mortality.

Desiring to empathize already joins you with those that don't give a fuck about you. And you're expected to fail because you must.

But I meant to write notes about the year.

The year had a 9 in it, so it started off propitiously, and where there were hard times, which were few, these were softened by the oxygen of inspiration, or as William James calls it, the oxygen of possibility. Imaginary possibilities many of them.

And many the time I ca e up against the discord of Art and Life, the latter which isn't work or art or art-work but something that embraces yet repels all of those things. So easy to just plug in to imaginary apparatuses and let others cavort and carouse. To do both requires living up to extremities.

Looking at yourself from the point of view of a Challenge or a Duel or some Unknown Bond. Which isn't self-inflating as much as it can be self-flagellating.

As for the year I don't have any best-of lists, or highlights; maybe at the very least I'll try to recap some of the books I read that I didn't afford adequate mention yet.

But tonight is going to be delivered Cambodian food and a Ken Russell movie and reading more Steve Erickson.

I've sat down lately to compile some many working notes for a longish essay/appreciation of Blaise Cendrars, as well as try and articulate my thoughts about Paul Bowles and The Sheltering Sky, the last novel I read.

What I couldn't say in a rambling, free-associate manner here, I tried to distill more pithily, or at least more blog-friendily at

The Rumpus on Thursday, with the addition of mentioning Bowles' travel essays.

I wanted to say something else, about the title I picked for the blog that January day so long ago.

It refers to a song by the great and unusual band The Fall, which also has something to do with an upcoming part two blog about Cendrars and another Fall album.

But yes: "Underground Medecin" is the first song on the second side of The Fall's debut album, Live At The Witch Trials. Here's the lyrics:

(Your nervous system, your nervous system) (Underground medicine, underground medicine) A spark inside [Covers up what I hide] And when it clicks There's no resist Every time I hear a new baby cry I thank my spark inside And you get underground medicine Underground medicine [I'm full of] nervous system Underground medicine I found a reason not to die A reason for the ride The spark inside When you hit some [mind] you get Underground medicine Underground medicine [I'm full of] nervous system Underground medicine I had a psychosomatic voice And one time it might come back Underground medicine Underground medicine [I'm full of] nervous system Underground medicine On my pants I spilled expectorant And the colonel [...] They took his cup away Take it away, take it away [...] medicine [...] medicine [...] medicine

So yes empathy and writing and intense idleness is about that spark inside, the flint in the nervous system releasing underground medicine. . .

Yeah...something like that indeed.

Notes Towards A Blaise Cendrars Project 1

2009-12-16T20:48:00.000-08:00

The man, the myth, and the man-made man-myth.

As I bit by bit add skeleton, flimsy as it may be to an experimental novel I'm working on, I have to occasionally slip back into hopefully shorter projects and feel like I might complete them.

Like short stories I suppose. Or short blog posts. Or letters. Or impassioned emails. As if writing is something that demands quotas. Sometimes that's how it is though. You need to keep in practice. You need to count your words.

But for now, I'll stick to a lyrical essay I'm working on about the effects and resonance of Blaise Cendrars on my youthful, wholly naive imagination (then AND now.) I find it best to work on this by just spewing out my impressions which are many and varied and dovetail with my own mishaps and misadventures.

Starting when I was, oh about my late teens well into the present, Cendrars has been something of an "exemplary example."

Now I tell myself, the overarching reason that I must learn French is to read Cendrars in the original. (And Tournier, and Perec, and Rimbaud, and Apollinaire, and Baudelaire, and Flaubert. . .ad infinitum.)

In the meantime, I have combed high and low these many years to acquire all of his works that are in English translations, many of which are considerably rarer than the originals. Searching for these books has led me on many circuitous goose chases and I can't now remember how I first acquired my first Cendrars book but I suspect it was by accident after I heard his name mentioned by Henry Miller. I have reason to believe however that the first book I had was a copy of his magnificent, sprawling and multi-layered autobiographical novel Sky.

(I remember that for a while the other book in his autobiographical series, The Astonished Man, was as rare and hard to come by as anything on the Internet.)

Cendrars, the intrepid, one-armed seaman.

But Sky, the book is so like a season that catches in my mind and had everything to do with being an idiotic young man in moth-eaten clothes, of attending cognac vigils on starlit balconies and high night meadows during meteor showers and walking past weirdly angular buildings arm in arm with a girl with a certain Peter Pan look on her face and having every day feel like spring with petals falling and few obligations except Galousies and books and dreams. . .

. . .it's a book utterly devoted to its title, whether it deals with his son being killed in the sky during World War 2, or the often admittedly tedious history of levitating saints, or his descent into the pitch-black depths of the South American jungle to talk about mysterious constellations and odd light-sucking patches in the evening sky and old, noble recluses in love with Sarah Bernhardt.

Cendrars' captivating romanticism is paradoxically yet nobly infused with an ascetic's sense of the void, a mystic's grasp of absolute non-doing and non-being and while at the same time, always being reverential of life, Cendrars at the drop of a hat can, as he likes to say, "sever all ties and retire from the world", shutting himself away in some impromptu hermitage with his books and cigarettes and old reels of film.

His insomnia. His day dreams. His books that he will never write.

What amazed me from the first time I read him was how adroitly and effortlessly, like no one before him or since, he forges a rough marriage in words between high involvement and seclusion, adventure and bookishness, the grinding life of the daily man and the florid life of the day-dreaming artist, and, most importantly between the facts of a man's life and the truths of a man's life.

His Modernism is both machinic and spiritual and is all about the essential tension of consciousness that can allow us to be both monad and cosmos all at once. His vision of the Modern is a place where near and far collapse, and another zone, more sidereal, at the Antipodes as he likes to call it where consciousness itself transcends terrestrial coordinates. . .

Really? I'm not sure yet. I'm working on it.

He, more than anyone, if only with unacknowledged, stellar influence, seems to have predicted our own era of "the false memoir", the "fictive autobiography" and the "libellous true story."

Which, not surprisingly, is the "false genre" I'm working in now with my first novel. . .

So Cendrars' stellar influence is as strong and radiant as ever. . .and my nights are longer again as I remember his nights that he brought to life to me as an unworldly, utterly bookish boy, my head in the mists of an interior sky, my hands soft and puny from handling nothing but soft pages all day and dealing with only the pettiest of juvenile indiscretions.

Night as seen and breathed in South American jungles, aboard ships, on top of cliffs as he is about to drive his Alfa Romeo down to a deeply nestled fishing village where he will be greeted like a troubadour with a hearty stew and red wine and the kind of conversations that old travelers inns used to teem with.

And Cendars the fervent mariner and explorer and solitary man of the night writes the most lyrically of the nocturnal, and the blank, and the black beyond black spaces. . .night and solitude and cigarettes and books and adventure: these are his mainstays.

In my next post perhaps I will include a photo of this stack of 12 or 13 books that I own, or that own me, if for no other reason than photos are good ways to break up the text. . .

A "simultaneous" poem by Cendrars, illustrated by Sonia Delaunay.

The Sheltering Sky: Briefly

2009-12-12T23:13:00.000-08:00

Been reading Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky, and about half way through it, while combating rain and long holiday shifts at the store and other blog devotions and cooking and being broke devotions. And there are myriad end of the year lists out there to comb over for books I haven't read and need to if I want to know what my peers are doing.

(Look for me at The Rumpus tomorrow as I'm filling in for Seth Fischer. (He's busy graduating!)

As with his stories, Bowles has this way about him of economical straight-shooting mixed with lyrical, intensely tangible flights of language. He is a place maker and with him even the psyche is more landscape than anything else. Like a cluster of stones in the chests. Canyons that open up in the blood.

His whole written output was the most carefully thought-out tight-rope walk. And his psychological probings are complex and ardently, intricately described. In this case, three people enter into a land that is not like their own and the foreignness of their experience only magnifies their original foreignness to each other. The hyper-magnification of both keeps escalating until you feel, as I do at the book's midway point, that the worst possible thing is going to happen to them. To all of them.

And I'm dropping from fatigue right now, as is Katy getting adjusted to her new bakery work which thrives on pre-dawn labor -- but I'm in the cross hairs of some creative essays on the idea of travel and journey and not-going places and making life a map that combines landscapes with memories and falsehoods.

I need to expand on all that. And I shall. For now, I rest weary legs in a heated room.

Introducing Centipede Press

2009-12-05T18:54:00.001-08:00

I've discovered an exciting new press that republishes out-of-print horror, crime and sci-fi classics.

It's called Centipede Press. Well worth checking out, also because the art-work is exceptional too.

Here's a couple of their titles that we just got in at our store: Some Of Your Blood by Theodore Sturgeon and Here Comes A Candle by Fredric Brown.

Thanksgiving, Dogs, Blessings, Books

2009-12-04T10:08:00.000-08:00

The mighty, heroic, holiday-fatigued Luigi!

Thanksgiving came and went with dogs and food and champaigne. Inexplicably, it's now early December and tonight is my work party.

There is one particularly heroic bulldog (see above) who, Katy and I agreed is basically the Henry Miller of canines with his unfettered zest for life, no matter what holds him back. To aspire to the rough and tumble optimism of the bulldog. . .

I've been reading Miranda July and trying to start The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. But instead, feeling particularly forlorn a few weeks back I started a desultory re-reading of the radical text, The Revolution Of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem that meant so much to me as a naive college student.

I also remembered that I never really finished it because, at the time, the life-changing demands it asked of me were overwhelming to ponder. It wasn't just what he advocates but it is also the fiery and poetic way that he slays every taken-for-granted concept, icon and tendency in our Western Culture.

Not to say I'm any more prepared to accept his words but at least I'm more sufficiently disabused of some pretty dopey notions.

Actually what sparked the re-reading was the very recent interview with Vaneigem that was trenchant, lyrical and unrelentingly idealistic. There is lot to that interview and I'm thinking about writing more about it.

I've been trying to force myself into a routine that's hard for me. Probably hard for most: switching between projects, maintaining individual focus for each. The early darkness and the California cold (relative to the rest of the country) has made it easier to stay home and focus and force the blossom of inventiveness under a spell of domestic tranquility.

On my days off there is nothing better than a quick, hot shower and putting the coffee to boil and french-pressing it and making toast and oatmeal in our large, multi-nooked sunny kitchen which, with its big herb-garden window overlooking a wind-swept garden down below, bears the resemblance to the prow of a glass air ship. I spend hours there with my notebook, my computer until I get antsy and then it's time for a revitalizing walk.

But the challenge is working on short stories, editing, honing and re-drafting them and then going back pell-mell into my ongoing memoir-novel which is about a hundred, sloppy pages. The challenge is to embrace the quotidian pleasures to create marvelous adventures. In this, I'm very blessed.

Food, shelter, love, family, friends, inspiration, livelihood: these I have and I give endless thanks. Or at least I try to. I hope my writing conveys it.

Last night I spent several hours on Duotrope navigating all the literary magazines out there and submitting a much-edited, highly-mutated short story of mine about Oakland to three of them. But what intrigued me was the variety of genres out there, sub-genres, literary fetishes, weird things. There is possibility, that much I realized.

Meanwhile, the unread books keeps growing and I suffer reader's panic. Alternating with writer's panic. And so I eat and read the news. We've been eating so many pungent, warming feasts that we've made from a hodgepodge of recipes.

Vegetarian sheperd's pie. Homemade hot and sour soup. Lentil stew. Homemade chicken and noodle soup. Borscht. Homemade chicken tortilla soup.

All containing copious amounts of ginger and garlic, all of which help to combat the germs and sicknesses that seem so ubiquitous this winter.

Lastly, I have signed up for an Introductory Horticulture class.

Good day.

Reading/Listening/Beyond

2009-11-26T02:28:00.000-08:00

Tonight has been superb.

I spent rich, fertile hours reading Miranda July, handwriting notes for stories and listening to live classical music, all while feeling very alienated from humanity and depressed about the old general human condition. The physical sense of alienation had no real root in any pertinent example so I was pretty dumbfounded and instead of thinking about it I sunk my head into a book, sucking in the words of people I respect.

Longing for an interesting night I would suggest this combination:

Carson McCullers

While listening to Mark Lanegan.

Recent Research Photographs

2009-11-24T23:25:00.000-08:00

Day's beginning objects as brightness overtakes

The red church at noon

1970's pasta experiment installation. . .today

Bright kitchen prow light early afternoon

Ex-Funeral Parlor

Melancholy stairs, New Orleansian

Recently On The Rumpus, Etc.

2009-11-20T10:17:00.001-08:00

Lately at The Rumpus:

I ponder the scandals that must have gone down in the February House.

I share a wonderful interview I found with a personal hero of mine, the Belgian radical Raoul Vaneigem.

I try to make heads or tails over Hitchens' forays into pop culture criticism.

I praise Black Sparrow Books.

Just a random sampler.

And as always, the Rumpus has other great features too like, for instance an interview with Paul Auster and an interview with Colum McCann who just won the National Book Award.

AND! Great new stuff at The Splinter Generation too!

Other things I'm obsessing over:

Carson McCullers in general

Interviewing my friends about their most personal secrets, jumbling it up and creating new characters out of the information.

Writing a travelogue about what happens when you travel just to distance yourself from your loved ones.

Writing a long essay about the year 2001 when so much happened.

Night blooming plants.

Politics.

Farming.

My bookstore which today was so BUSY! And I was in the zone meaning I felt no fatigue until right this moment.

Katy (as always)

My family -- writing them long overdue letters that strive to explain myself!

Crafting my contentious memoir.

Doing interviews with people: Kate, the owner of my bookstore and then maybe this famous Beat poet, Bukowksi biographer and writer Neeli Cherkovski who comes into my store and chats with me now and again about books and poets and Heidegger.

In the winter time all I want to do is eat, read and sleep.

My 6 day workweek is almost over, and then the holiday season will begin and I'll be working 40 plus hour weeks and wrapping more presents that even Santa can fit in his sack.

Late November

2009-11-18T10:05:00.000-08:00

Aside from having some kind of cold-like symptoms most of the month, I've just been up to my ears in paper and ink, wallowing in trying to perfect the most nuanced fantasies. Failing that, I'm just going to say what I want and what I think might help others enjoy themselves better.

I'm gonna try to stand outside a lot today and get some Vitamin D because I just read it might be the miracle vitamin of our early Millennium.

The rain came yesterday but not for long. I longed for a voice like Mark Lanegan's to keep singing as I sat out an hour in a vacant store, as the sidewalks grew slick, as everyone I knew felt far away, enclosed in hermetically sealed houses, drowning in their own fantasies.

Perhaps whiskey chais were in order? Or bad movies?

But instead I curled up with a laptop and peppermint tea and kept revising things that I think I've been revising for at least a year. Maybe longer. I realize my stories are often past that fabled 5000 word mark that so many magazines adhere to. Which makes me suspect I have the promiscuous, enthusiast's heart of an undisciplined novelist.

I also had a creative revelation walking back in the rain last night. But these revelations, when they're creative ones, feel more like a long-delayed raking of the mind's coals, uncovering volatilities that you wanted to shortchange, delay, or quench. But you can't. It's why writers write, because they can't do much else.

Which reminds me of the interview with Paul Auster that the Rumpus ran a few days ago.

Oh but the revelation was that the two prospective novels I've been plotting are actually too similar in plot and are actually like mirror narratives to each other -- and so what I need to do, in all integrity, is combine them in the same book. Which will make for a huge, fun, sloppy project.

Reading:

I'm reading and almost finished with The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. Which she wrote at 23. Which is beautiful and wonderful and radical in ways that few books are. Her life is no less intriguing than her books, mostly because of the almost unimaginable pains and setbacks she faced, both phsyically and emotionally.

But just as interesting is her wily Bohemianism, her revolt against the conventions of the South, and her embrace of subterranean beliefs and passions. The aesthetics of the black-listed, the black market, and the dark recesses.

Along the same lines as McCullers, I watched a movie called The Little Foxes written by Lillian Hellman, a black listed film director. Quite captivating and upsetting.

Gonna Hit The Road Cause Of A Lucky Coin

2009-11-12T01:18:00.000-08:00

The inspiration has struck like a cheap punch to the jaw.

I found a 1935 Indian-Head Nickel tonight, and I said, fuck, I work full time, I have no normal ambitions, I write almost full-time, I'm constantly broke and it's time for "unpublished" authors like myself to undertake "book tours" -- so if you read this blog, consider myself coming to your town, to your little house, via Greyhound sometime next Spring and reading "unpublished" portions of a Novel In Progress in your living room. . .

I suppose I'll soon be asking for very nominal "donations" ?????? We'll see how that plays out!?

This is the kind of hackneyed thing that will pay for itself, I suppose. . .

Thanks for your anticipated help!!!!!!#@$%@#%@#%

More details to come!!!!!

Love,
Michael

The Journal Of Albion Moonlight

2009-11-08T22:37:00.000-08:00

I was pleasantly surprised to find at Tin House Books Blog this stirring appreciation of Kenneth Patchen's The Journal Of Albion Moonlight.

J.C Kallman, the author, refers to Moonlight as a "pivotal" book for him. As it was for me. And for many I've given it to. Because it used to be I would find copies of it and give it away. I'm not sure if they all loved it, but I'm sure most of them did.

I think it's an important book, a unique and maddening and ponderous book all at once. But utterly beautiful and imperfectly honest, a vision wrenched from the soul, a shrapnel stew of vexation and bloody passion. You can pluck hundreds of sentences from it that are among some of the most moving sentences you've ever encountered.

It was written in 1941 by a working-class pacifist poet, the son of a Youngstown steel mill worker.

But tonight my loquaciousness is at a minimum because I'm drugged on heavenly homemade borscht.

I'm not sure I've quoted this paragraph here before, but I think it's something of a miracle and acts as a template for all journeys.

It's on the second page of Albion Moonlight:

Very well. We knew we had no other course but to get away with all attainable speed. A light rain had fallen in the night, and morning brought the drizzle to storm proportions. Our coats were wet through as we sogged out of New York on the first leg of our trip. That a great distance separated us from our goal we knew; that we were in danger of destruction at any hour of the day and night we knew; what we did not know was near madness we would be; how alone; how defenseless: how beset we were with what we had heard, with what we had been taught -- this especially we did not know.

As with many authors, it was Henry Miller who first led me to Patchen by way of an essay he wrote about him that you can now read here, albeit with an awkward background photo pattern.

Good night now.

City Walking: A Misplaced Travelogue

2009-11-04T17:46:00.000-08:00

I always wanted to attach photos to words and location names that weren't factually accurate. It was part of my project, DecoVerite, which I'm trying to revive as a methodology, a mythology, a poeisis. I wanted to send postcards that were total lies: local venues, streetcorners, San Francisco locations masquerading as locales from distant lands. Assemble tourist guides for areas where nothing, conceivably was happening. All of these ideas happened the day I lost my architecture assistant job. And recently I found photos, randomly, in my computer that I've culled for the notes below.

I took unnecessary side-streets the other night.

I was reviewing October derelictions, autumnal missteps. I also wanted to remember everything that had happened to me in the City. But mostly I was in a meditative mood and I believe solely in meditation in action, mostly on foot or by the pen or the bottle.

Moments when, at the sun-stroke of morning when the sky was pierced with nearby children's cries, I held my stomach and wondered whey I did those things the night before. I'm like a wedding planner who always shows up at funerals.

The beginnings of a fever started pulsing behind my ears. But it wasn't anything except the cabin version.

I had a rendezvous, but it wasn't for an hour. My route always begins the same, down the flat street, to the corner of that mysterious and beautiful warehouse with the tawny bricks and the stained windows and then downhill on the edge of the roaring, Mission-penetrating traffic. From the top of the hill, downtown looks like a whole other city away, a place where things are long and straight and made of green glass reinforced with million dollar steel. Where you can't even imagine how the flotsam must heap in the thin streets that race between the tall and long structures.

The shoeshine guy has closed up shop.

The Indian pizza smell dominates everything.

The Outer Mission has become my galaxy, for better or worse, going on a few years now. Which means I eat a lot of cheap Chinese food, Thai food, Indian food and Cambodian food.

I wonder at the chain-link fences guarding grassy lots, fences that have multi-colored twisty-ties on them.

I wanted to be out there, a helpless satellite under the yellow moon, walking on wide, unlit sidewalks that pedestrians don't much care for despite the cleanly-cropped houses with their clearly-demarcated edges.

Once, I find myself on the backside of a familiar establishment, like the grocery store, but the back is all broken mortar and stinking vents and little fenced-off alleys where all the carts are corralled like pigs. Clearly, I'm on a sidewalk that isn't favorable for most walkers. It feels like it's the wrong end of something, an access road, a backdoor, a trapdoor.

It was the same in the Excelsior, but more extreme: for instance, the Safeway was next to the Mortuary, and instead of shopping carts, there were rat corpses, abandoned cars and men in the bushes hunting for lost needles, as the pink neon flickered in the red fog.

I find places to photograph the moon.

Of course, it doesn't look like anything. Just a ball of hot butter above the cracked ramparts of crowded apartments.

The other day I walked to work as I always do. It takes five minutes.

I make the same left turn. I see the same dogs, the same happy people. This time, and for the second day in a row, inside of a second-story, street-facing window, a woman was singing opera while a man played the piano. Thin, aqueous curtains obscured them. I couldn't tell if there was an audience. There was an amber, archival light suffusing that room. It was comforting, even more so by the fact this was at least the second day in a row they were performing. And all the stoops were strewn with rotting pumpkins as the opera wafted out in the night, loud enough to be mistaken for a radio turned to eight.

And not just because of the heat I wanted to be out.

It was more the smells that drag me to certain parts of town, that unearth undying memories. Smells that make me think of being freshly landed in this city with all the excitement of a virgin or an astronaut. Walking down Capp Street, on the part where it's just a dark, shallow canyon flanked by docile Victorians and a perpetually unused parking lot and a stoop where businessmen sit and drink beer and talk on the phone, I always wonder what I might be stepping in, but actually it's clean and then suddenly it's bright.

It's 22nd street where old businesses congest even as new chains are emerging.

I walk to the corner where I used to live, I am full of scenes and intimations from Erick Lyle's book, as well as a surge of memories from that interesting year and a half I lived on that house on the street flush with the piss-stained sidewalk, the people fucking in their cars, the men smoking drugs in my doorway. The frozen yogurt store is still there. And so is the Latino bar, El Trebol. And the Buddhist temple that long ago took residence in the old Gothic-looking Episcopalian church.

I realize I never went inside the temple. I never felt reverential enough. I always felt like a tourist.

I did used to walk passed the temple, to the corner of 22nd and Valencia and admire the weird things that always ended up on the window ledges of the boarded-up Driscoll's funeral home. There was something there I grabbed once and I think I've since lost it. I can't remember what it was except that I was reading Jean Genet on the toilet that morning and thinking about how my landlord was going to turn that funeral parlor into an overpriced hipster bar. Since going to press, the mortuary remains closed.

The other thing I remember, and also lament never actually getting documentation of it, was that there was a sign next to the door of the mortuary. It was an oval-shaped porcelain sign inlaid with a flowery mandala in the center of which were the words, Tomorrow Farm.

How appropriate? How morbid? How Honest? Who knows, but I neither photographed the sign nor swiped the sign, even though both were viable options.

But that night I went walking, I saw everyone sipping wine under extinguished heat lamps at a place that used to be called The Last Supper Club and is now called Beretta. The beauty of everyone's arms, probably still warm to the touch even as cobalt dusk rubs away to a total black.

The other night we were in costumes, just the two of us. She was the missionary, I was primitive man. And after fetching candy, we found ourselves on top of a mountain, alone, one that is parched and red and lunar and toasted a sleepy Halloween without anybody in sight. A bench on top of it provides an unimpeded night view of the dark and sparkling city, all the rows of candy houses, splashes of shiny water far away, and shiny forest even further.

It's a challenge to the landscape to be the only two people in costumes for miles around. Or if you happen to find costumed people staggering down the unlit sidewalks, stragglers from some long-dead party, you have to wonder what brazen mishaps they've gotten themselves into, just to be so far from the conventional circuits. On that cool night summit, nothing could see us so we could do what we wanted, we could say the strangest things about things we've accidentally remembered that have no bearing on the lives we have now.

Being lost in San Jose, dragging my luggage in a shopping cart from one forlorn depot to another.

Being alone in an empty church on a rainy day in Buenos Aires, thinking about love I had given up on, and pages I wanted to fill with all the details of my loneliness.

The candy was gone fast; the night was cooling; I found I was talking aloud about things she had never known.

All Soul's Day Night Tidbits

2009-11-02T21:24:00.000-08:00

I'm drinking a coffee float at nearly ten at night and listening to Dead Moon's Dead Moon Night-Thirteen Off My Hook. In a little bit, we're gonna go climb the hill with its hidden garden staircases, its parched lunar landscape and admire the All Soul's Day full moon. What we did on All Soul's Day was active, sun-lit, muscular.

We went down to Alemany Farm and spent part of the afternoon constructing a road of mulch, an activity that required lots of pitchforking, wheelbarrowing and raking. Seemingly simple, seemingly tedious but then we got to harvest the last tomatoes of the season -- orange-red bombs of tart sweetness -- while our muscles thrummed in the dying light.

Update: we didn't climb the hill, we went to Alamo Square Park and stared at the moon and heard bats in heat surrounding our heads and talked about communes until 3 a.m.

This is the legendary and amazing Dead Moon.

I woke up with a bad taste in my mouth from October, so I ran in the dry, November heat -- an odd phrase to say -- until I coughed up party gunk. Gunk from Chicago, from Halloween, from pre-Halloween, from the compulsion to only live in festival-time. How to break habits in favor of adventure? Constantly asking myself that, constantly asking myself the same questions and wondering whether they are worth asking or better worth shelving.

I've been slipping in and out of fevered note taking but cannot confine myself to one river of thought. The novel I'm etching out is slightly halted after my excited reading of Erick's Lyle's punk-pastiche-history-memoir of S.F. pre and post dot-com bust: On The Lower Frequencies.

Really it's about a time when people still wanted San Francisco to be for the working class, the artists, the punks, the squatters, the poor, etc.

I'm remembering thanks to him, that most of what I want to do in my novel is to tie in personal history with the larger mystique of Bay Area history, and not that I need to drown in research but just discuss simple things, like the history of Cayuga Gardens, or the high crime rate in McClaren Park or the fact that underneath 6th street there are tunnels, or the fact that if you look at old footage from the '89 earthquake you can see, despite the surrounding wreckage, the dirty windows of my old Oakland warehouse still intact and gleaming in their sepia-wash glory.

When you come to live in a city, how many ghosts do you inhale without even knowing it? That's the question of October.

If nothing else read Lyle's book for a completely raw look at what cities are like when you extract all the suburban pretensions, when they become places where people just want to live, where ruins are habitable and where, when it comes down to it, what matters is not having to spend your life paying off for basic necessities like coffee and friendship and music.

Dreams briefly:

I don't like talking about dreams but lately my subconscious has been in upheaval. Today I woke up with sickly dreams of guilt, not just your usual guilt, but something I prefer to call "wisdom-guilt": guilt about not trying to be wise enough.

This philosopher I've been reading compulsively, Cornelius Castoriadis enjoys contrasting in many of his works how the Ancient Athenians viewed the world compared to the Modern West. One of the distinctions he makes is how the purpose of life by Athenian conceptions was for wisdom and beauty and today the purpose is happiness, both collective and individual and usually based on prosperity, excess and financial surplus.

Perhaps, an over-simplification but he backs it up with compelling scholarship.

For instance, I admitted in last night's dream that I was stealing money from the store I'm working at. Why? To fund a trip by camel to a magical lagoon that has pearls at the bottom of it that are worth more than most human souls.

Who was to join me on the trip? Many of the guys I spent cavorting with a little over a week ago at Al Capone's old nightclub, The Chevy Chase, in the Chicago English countryside region. At least to me, it resembled the English countryside. But inside it was like a German dance hall with a polka band in the balcony and rumors of smuggling tunnels that burrowed all the way to the Chicago River.

And then even before that dream: some volatile, vinegar concoction that you pore into aquariums in order to change the colors of the fish, merely for fleeting entertainment.

I remember a phrase from that dream: "Look my love, blue and white are the colors of control, always remember that."

I woke up with the urge to run. In the odd November heat.

John Berger, Tears and Dead Moon

2009-10-21T22:18:00.000-07:00

The day I turned 30, I was in Santa Cruz with Katy, already a well-documented trip, and went to my old place of employment, Logos Books and said what the hell, maybe they'll have something I've been looking for, something my own store doesn't have or that I haven't seen yet.

Amazingly, I found this first edition of To The Wedding by John Berger for a very good price. Inside was a postcard of the cover of the last book I had read: Jean Rhys, The Complete Novels. A simple, if somewhat strange coincidence. Later we went to a spa with our books and didn't get them wet and when I got home, I inscribed my name in the book, with Logos and 30 underneath it.

Of course, it hadn't taken me long to become enraptured with Berger's works.

All I had to do was become reappraised of him and to judge among his large, and bewilderingly varied output and to read one of his latest works a few months back, Here Is Where We Meet, a poetic, fictionalized autobiography of landscape and loss that still dazzles my memory and haunts my own writing.

Today, in an infrequently patronized cafe, I finished To The Wedding and found myself dabbing away hot late morning tears over my large cup of weak coffee. Crying doesn't usually happen when I read but Berger, at least based on these two novels I've read, deals in a sort of transformative poignance that is unlike anything I've encountered before in fiction, except maybe for Coetzee in Waiting For The Barbarians and Life And Times Of Michael K.

But Berger's vision is even larger, large enough to contain historical episodes, artistic interludes, geographical quirks, odd species and local customs, among the whole range of variation and fable that are his palette.

Speaking of found objects, because so much of Berger's work feels like a chain of found objects possessing its own logic:

I had forgotten until the other day that I had since replaced the postcard of the young lovers in Brassai's French bistro with another, older postcard that Katy found in one of the books in the sale cart in front of my store.

By all accounts, Eastern European peasants or Roma of some sort, and a mysterious piece of writing on the back.

I hadn't started the book after my birthday trip but instead had laid it aside while I finished another birthday present, The Secret History, a wonderful novel in its own right.

But with To The Wedding, I took my time, I savored the gem-like sentences, the undulating episodes that often, in their telling, take on the form of the wondrous landscapes that Berger, with his painter's eye, renders palpable on the page, mostly black, night-darkened mountains that are being pierced by a sagely motorcyclist and long rivers with many fingers and conduits upon which a melancholy, Czech woman with an aching finger is idly floating down en route to a rendezvous.

The wedding in question is truly, purely bittersweet; and the love story that initiates it feels like one of the most honest, uplifting ones that can exist, mainly because corrosion and mortality and disease are such a defining feature of it.

To love someone unconditionally who is doomed to a wildly premature death, who is tainted with a terminal, ravaging virus, to know that she has 2, maybe 3 years without a blemish before the disease starts to do its rapid destructive work. Berger poses this quandary amidst the plane trees and fields and rice paddies of rural Europe, in the shadow of Communism's failure, in the general soul failure of middle class existence and in all the little things, the trinkets, the food, the palaver of life that constantly bubble to the surface of his prose.

Berger, while remaining staunchly a Communist, a farmer, a man clearly on the side of the earthy and the earthly, turns books into prayers almost, but prayers to the earth, to mortality itself, not to get even with death but to sing of the paradoxes that beset us, as if acknowledging them in the most beautiful, haunting way possible will make them more understandable.

It's a beautiful book, quite possibly as beautiful as everyone has claimed. I would be hard-pressed to distill from all the complex tragedies and joys of life a book that seemed so much like an invocation, a promise to the dead, some ancient Greek form of homage that has long been forgotten.

As Michael Ondaatje says, "In some countries it must still be the writer's role to gather and comfort. . .to hold and celebrate a moment before darkness. With To The Wedding, John Berger has written a great, sad and tender lyric, a novel that is a vortex of community and compassion that somehow overcomes fate and death. Wherever I live in the world I know I will have this book with me."

It left me kind of shattered today after I read it, and then I had a strange day at work, with many awkward, misunderstood and tantalizing encounters. For some reason now I feel sore and beaten, but for no good reason and I better pluck up because I got to go to Chicago in a day from now for a wedding as well! A very happy wedding I'm excited to be attending.

Oh -- and because brute passion really is the stuff of good art, I'll leave you with a band I listened to at work that reminds me of the passion of John Berger: a three piece band from Portland called Dead Moon who played for nearly 20 years, husband on guitar and vocals and his wife on bass and vocals.

Ides Of October

2009-10-16T01:20:00.000-07:00

Recently, besides listening compulsively to The Cramps, Siouxsie, and the Gun Club, I have seen two memorable movies, Carnival Of Souls and Jean Cocteau's Beauty And The Beast.

Both of which are perfect for Halloween viewing.

Both of which excel in sense of place, place as persona, as spirit, as monster, as beloved. Both feature lovely leading ladies who are tormented by yet strangely attracted to ghastly male callers, one in the form of a midway ghoul in a train conductor suit, the other as the aristocratic Beast with his star-flecked wizard cape jacket. Both feature enchanting, spirit-imbued locations that are as weirdly seductive as the two men who live within them.

Maybe I can write some creative essay about both of them?

In the meantime, thanks to a surreptitious encounter with legendary zine-writer Aaron Cometbus (he came into my bookstore wondering if we would sell his zine, Cometbus; of course we would!), I have delved back into my large copy of Despite Everything, A Cometbus Omnibus, a book I procured several Octobers ago, having wandered the city with a huge Cometbus fan who was as bundled in black as I was, and having autumnal thoughts for things like leaflets, trinkets, mementos, perhaps the afterthought of a cheap hotel hangover, we ducked into Needles And Pens and she convinced me to buy it, saying I would like it, that it was "large-hearted, enthusiastic writing, open to everything, in love with life", words to that effect. . .and I bought it along with some map pins which I've since lost.

Many Octobers ago when I discovered bands like The Fall and Television and The Gun Club.

Reading Cometbus is such a blissed-out vacation from the formulaic parade of cleanly-edited, neatly-arced stories about someone having a crisis, and then a revelation and then sustaining in his or her mind's eye a lingering image from his past that the reader is asked to appreciate as a sly summation of all the character's deepest desires. Of course those stories have their moments too, but sometimes you want the sloppy, honest, self-published, handwritten tangents.

Zine-writing is more like life-writing and I had forgotten that.

There is an elegant, slangy, generous spirit alive in Cometbus and I had neglected that and I had forgotten as well the larger zine-spirit and have wondered lately whether the spontaneity, spunk, and fury of zines can translate into blogs.

Hmmm, I suppose it depends on a lot of things.

Finally today I got a chance to visit Katy's grandparents' fruit orchard up in Martinez, CA where apparently John Muir spent lots of time. It was a beautiful place and I was reminded of Steinbeck's description of those rolling golden hills: pastures of heaven. Both of us have realizable fantasies of having an acre or two out there in some lovely rural place like Martinez.

A weird photo I found of myself

2009-10-14T23:43:00.000-07:00

I have lots lots lots to write about, but it's late, I can't think and I dealt with idiots for most of the day. The evening is a steambath, a tropical malaise, all the young yuppies eating fancy pizza outside in designer tanktops. The sound of chainsaws from this morning. Flies over shrinkwrapped meat. "Emotional athleticism": the word tossed around last night at The Phone Booth, a place you should only go when you want to force the hand of fate, or nonchalantly make momentous decisions.

I found a photo that made me happy and was from a party that was, by and large, "fun". A lot can be told from a photo. I think this captures the narrative of a high point in the evening.

I like the placement of the hands in this photo: and the look on my face that says, "I am resigned to a curious fate."

Decidedly Autumn

2009-10-09T20:15:00.000-07:00

Autumn always begins too soon. A brown leaf blew into the restaurant. The waiter served us too much water. It was a windy walk home. Weird head colds swapped. Too many cookies. Too many blankets. Watching Dexter of all things, the first TV show in years I've followed. Not since syndicated Twin Peaks. Finished reading The Secret History: a superb performance, reminiscent of The Magus as a friend pointed out. I'm always a little giddy when a friend reads a book I've just recommended: in this case, it was Ben Caplan.

And I started reading To The Wedding by John Berger -- in which, as usual every sentence is a jewel, every word significant -- and am holding off for the time being the intimidating idea of starting McEllroy's sweeping and sprawling Women And Men.

Meanwhile, I have this history of Islam by Tamim Ansary I need to start: Destiny Disrupted.

I'm thinking about secrets and rumors constantly. They are featured in this novel-in-progress I worked on today for several hours. The hero is an instinctive, compulsive archivist, a folklorist, a gatherer of hearsay and secrets because, coming from a librarian mother and a seminarian father he has conflated the words Holy and Important, and since all is Holy, all is equally important and such is the benign curse he must live down. What enables him to be so good at gathering information is a forced hollowness of his character, a willful surrender to the people's dispositions around him.

Meanwhile, some Autumn shots of nearby and around, in big resolution as always.

Fire escape fascination never ends (hearkens back to that song by "Belly": "made a mistake on a fire escape in San Francisco. . .)

The following three shots are my attempt at capturing in the early afternoon what I think is a very creepy looking house in my neighborhood. . .

And below a lovingly spread red tie in the grass of the park, suspiciously snake-like.

And if you're bored, I recommended some twisted love films at The Rumpus.

And I talked about how my store's wonderful customers tell me what to read next.

A Few Snaps From The Other Day

2009-10-05T16:54:00.000-07:00

The other day I got the hell out of my neighborhood.

It was terrific, a bright, hot, gassy October day and I biked over the hills of the rich, down into the tree-shaded house grottoes of the rich called St. Francis Wood, down into a strange enclave of Asian diners and bagel shops and other non-descript boutiques, all the way to the glittering ocean and back through the park that was mobbed with cars for the bluegrass festival.

I went to my favorite "Secret" cafe -- discovery thanks to Seth -- and wrote like an over-caffeinated graphomaniac for several hours. It's important to find remote places in this town, or else you'll implode.

Also: went to my favorite ridiculously long, austere and dreamy Masonic-style temple -- also thanks to Seth's discovery.

Capped it off with Happy Hour at a new, wonderfully neon-sign-wearing bar, Ritespot. Which has an excellent Happy Hour.

Neon signs are always suitable for on the fly photographs.

That night told very sad stories about death in college and blamed it on the harvest moon.

Excerpts From "Fake Memoir", With Pictures

2009-10-01T16:25:00.000-07:00

My new long project, which I'm surprisingly making some headway on will be a "fake memoir" about myself, but cast in the role of a wily folklorist who finds himself single in the big city and in need of a haircut and on the trail of a very secretive group of people who coordinate the Affairs of The Dueling Cities (Oakland and San Francisco) and who have access to the mysterious place called The Vague Room.

I'm looking for a seamless melding of noir, surreal, magical realism, erotic, comic, and satiric. Yeah, that's my plan at least.

I hope to exploit my meager amount of photographs (more to come) for illustrative/suggestive purposes. Here are some excerpts from a rough draft in progress with some rough photos (some maybe already seen).

ANOTHER 3 A.M. FIRE

The moonlight was all washed out with smoke as we stood in the center of the street, playing with each other’s fingers, bending them back until one of us shrieked or sucking on them until one of us got tired. People watched us with befuddled grins. It was at least four in the morning. When summoned at ridiculous hours to wait indefinitely, this is all we knew how to do, lament the fact we weren’t detained in a larval state. Lately, life had required lots of waiting, moments of detention when fear, instead of glee should have been the reigning sensation. We waited for the bathroom. For the kitchen. For the accident to be cleared from the sidewalk. For the cats to be rescued from the trees. But everyone was always smiling, as if people had finally gone mad all together. The night of the fire was no exception.

A child had pushed us awake. One of my housemate Zen’s cousins. Knuckles to my eye; hot, sweet breath. I rose and wrestled with the air, still in dream mode. He patted me gently, looking angelic in the dark. The kind of child that will be innocent far longer than he should.

“Fire, in he house,” he said. Monica and I had both fallen asleep in our clothes again. The child’s hand was cold and runny with some kind of sauce. I thought it was the beginning of another nightmare, the kind I had been having lately full of diseased transients and medical mishaps. Every time you see a transient, a teacher once told me, you see a symbol. I always remembered that dictum every time I dreamt about a homeless person or gave a legless man my three dollars in change. But I never cared for that dictum either.

Outside, in the crowded, noisy cul-de-sac, the night smelled of burnt bread. And mesquite. And revving engines. And below that, but swiftly taking the upper hand, a noxious odor that her and I knew only too well. Rotting meat. The ROTC guys in the unit below ours had some kind of black market butchering thing going. A good way to pay for school, one of them said. Whatever it was, I couldn’t imagine anything more invasive than that smell that had somehow found a way to permeate our bedroom every other night. We timed our love life accordingly. Sometimes we gave up though and just embraced it, as we did lots of things those days.

I had three of her fingers in my mouth, but I knew she would rather be talking than playing. Our life was growing unbearable. The same for many, we supposed, but it was up to us to find a way out. Why was it up to us? Because we had decided it was. All the people around us looked at us suspiciously. What were we doing in this part of the city? We didn’t have an excuse.

Surrounding us was everyone from our cul-de-sac, an impressive cross-section of the poorer, immigrant population. And the people not even from our cul-de-sac were there too, wrinkling their noses, laughing loudly and talking on walkie-talkie phones. They had swept in on motorbikes, almost out of some gangland musical.

Another three a.m. fire had broken out so it was cause for a gathering. I hadn’t been scared of such things for a long time and neither had Monica.

Since the fires had begun over a month ago, everyone in the city was better connected. It was part of the general program of over-crowding. There were probably at least a dozen other fires raging on other nearby blocks. Most of them were car arson. But some was caused by structural damage and electrical malfunction. Others just wild hearsay. No fires at all, just constant reports of fires. These false reports, in turn, seemed to spur on actual blazes. The buildings on our street were made entirely of kindling wood. The fires out there in the Excelsior were realer than most.

Time For A Haircut

“When was the last time you got your haircut?” she asked me, pitching her hoarse voice against a siren scream. By then we were sitting down and wondering what to do with ourselves. She had rolled a splif and was licking her lips hungrily. What really to do with ourselves, on a larger canvas that involved not only this night but hundreds of nights to come. Our house was overrun, doors slamming, windows open, salutations and commands richocheting everywhere amidst a confusion of fog and smoke. Our own friends were no longer around –they had long quit the city for smaller towns along the coast, or else had simply vanished like so many people had– and wouldn’t have ventured so far out to see us anyway.

The fire had been faked, but nobody was going back inside. Nobody was sleeping. Dawn wasn’t far off, another grizzly-grey dawn, a hollow light seen burning through a curtain of fog.

I was taken aback by her question and instinctively ran my hand through my bushy hair as I’ve done since I was two. It’s my way of combing not my hair but my thoughts, which are forever tangled, in need of ordering. I don’t think it has ever worked and if it did work I wouldn’t be the same person. I might be a happier person but not the person I want to be.

Her implication was true though, I hadn’t got my hair snipped in a while, mostly because Hank’s whereabouts were still unknown even by his fellow hairstylists. And the police were as taxed in the vanishing department as the firefighters were in arson. Monica didn’t quite understand the gravity of the situation but this had more to do with the fact I hadn’t talked that much about myself yet. I never understood, either, the full extent of her photography assignments, her modeling stints, or her films. What I knew about her was that she was brutally honest but that, like me, we both savored a necessary modicum of mystery, or else life would go static and flat. And love would too.

I hadn’t really explained Hank’s significance to her. So much of my past I was waiting for the appropriate circumstances to unleash upon her. And she was enough of a marvel for me to forget about myself altogether. Her past looked, on paper at least, more like history than mine; there were more tangibly formative events and calamities and of course, a significant origin myth at the heart of it that bound us eternally like sinful siblings.

My own life has revolved around minor events and major obsessions. For me, I tried to explain to her, I couldn’t fathom not going to Hank, not dishing out the forty bucks for a perfect haircut and even more perfect conversation. Bottomless conversation which managed to drudge up all the tiny miracles and hysterical mishaps of my life. Words shared with a man that gave flesh to my own life, gave it a narrative that would sustain me. And when I left him after each session I looked more like the story I wanted to tell about myself. People noticed too.

The thought of him, like most everyone else I loved, having vanished was only further proof that my world was disintegrating, along with my mind, my organs and all my pleasures. There was always the question that sometimes she insinuated: were they really vanishing or was it mostly my imagination? Were they instead, moving on to bigger and better things, as they say? Abandoning a city that was on the verge of collapse? It didn’t matter. What mattered was an unlikely amount of absences. In the absence of loved ones and easy comforts, life would take on an unbearably sharp resolution. It would be a field of rocks without anything soft to sit on.

I still had her though.

I had Monica and she had me. Which is really all I ever wanted. She, the first person I remember fixating on in the crowd and wondering about in my beloved city. And loving her more than made up for the vanishing of the others. Except maybe for Hank. Except maybe not at all.

It wasn’t the first question I figured she would ask. I thought, instead, she would ask, “Where to now? Where can we go now?”

In the muddled light, she looked nude and chiseled, like a tree made of ice. But she wasn’t completely naked. There were stripes to her. She had on her token torn fishnets, damp with mist. She was wearing a black felt hat that she picked off the head of a biker the summer before. A shirt that doubled as a scarf. A pair of old black leather boots she had found in the free bin outside the Church. She had stopped wearing her veil, but sometimes broke it out for nostalgia’s sake. That shade of cobalt blue had been mined from peacock feathers it was so gorgeous.

In the mist, she stood and strutted like a sailor boy working the docks. Her face, caught in the crosshairs of moon and emergency lights, was serious as death. A tension had set her jaw, the same fixity when she developed photos or made stuffed mushrooms or fucked me. Her seriousness was something I hadn’t ever encountered before. It drew her body into a weapon-like posture. Her flesh drawn taut, locked and loaded. I was afraid to say anything. I would sound stupid and weak no matter what.

We knew so little about each other. And it was nearing a year of being together. Or at least I had told her so little.

I wanted to lay her on the warm asphalt with the blurry night fuming around us. I would have condensed into aphorisms my own history and leaked them into her ears. I knew if I had brought that up, she might have agreed but by then we were surrounded by old people in robes and young people on motorcycles. The old people smoked while the young mostly sucked on fruit ices.

Where they got them from at that emergency-fraught hour I’ll never know

Headrush Into Autumn

2009-09-28T20:26:00.000-07:00

Tonight was the first night when it all went dark sooner than I expected.
"Autumnal" is the word I would use for an indistinct excitement related to in-between states. That's how today felt. It also felt like the end of something. Not sure what.

I walked far after work just to get the fumes of the weekend out of my system.
A humid, silver pall clung to the surrounding landscape. Even in the brightness, blue dimness lurked. A sudden gust and even a red leaf crispy under my shoes. A little bit of autumn's scales showing through.

Yesterday was a blazing day at the Folsom Fair, an event which to me truly signifies the last day of summer. Of course, it's always hot for that event, perfect for the solar-phallic cult that it embodies. Light reflecting off trash-strewn blacktop. Bodies gliding along in carnal disarray. Liquors and cameras, tongues wagging and other things too. Katy and I being famous in some nether-zone of the web but the evidence remains so far unfound. All you need really is a half-hour there to remind yourself that this is like no other city in the world.

So much light and liquid and picnicking and September birthdays and two more days off than normal, means that today I want to hide from everyone, mourn my dwindling finances and reacquaint myself with the solitary charms of reading and writing. I don't necessarily want to equate good living with hiding but sometimes that's the most realistic.

I'm reading Donna Tartt's The Secret History which, so far, is an amazingly sustained intellectual detective novel, while also being a college satire, a commentary on academia, and a heady "entertainment" along the lines of Graham Greene's "entertainments." Somehow I missed the boat on reading this book back in '92 when it scored tons of accolades from everyone from John Grisham to George Steiner.

What I love and fear best about the book is how much it reminds me of my friends and I back in college: similar archaic pretensions and Hellenic effrontery and Bacchic tomfoolery.

Taken, however, to a whole new realm of madness.

Quickly, Two Promotional Links

2009-09-18T20:59:00.000-07:00

Hey I know I've been sort of blog-crazy lately. I think the "heat" has driven me indoors. The "din in the head" as Cynthia Ozick calls it has left me staring mad-eyed into my screen.

Anyway, Thursday I wrote a couple longer posts about J.G. Ballard and Rene Daumal at The Rumpus.

I kind of pulled them out of my ass, as the saying goes, but I do believe both authors require extensive exploration and I encourage you to explore. Mt. Analogue might be the greatest non-new age New Age novel ever written about metaphysical mountaineering.

Also, I encourage you to read Rumpus chief editor Stephen Elliott's new book, The Adderall Diaries. Actually I need to do that too. It looks like a harrowing, visceral, genre-busting feat.

Thank you and good night.

Latest Obsession: Siouxsie And The Banshees

2009-09-18T15:37:00.001-07:00

I hope I could capture in my art and life just one iota of one millionth of the primordial, captivating, otherworldly beauty and brilliance of this band.

I just rediscovered them and now I'm obsessed. The other day I spanned four different neighborhood on foot just to procure their first four albums.

They are effecting, in strange ways, what I want to write about and how I want to behave in my off hours.

Santa Cruz Mini-Vacation With Semi-Disturbing Picture Story

2009-09-16T19:20:00.000-07:00

It's always odd yet refreshing to take vacation trips back to my college town of Santa Cruz. And what better place to go on my thirtieth birthday than the city (and, by default, the school) that so much influenced who I am today. And I think mostly for the better.

How interesting it was, as a thirty-year old bookstore employee who lives in San Francisco to be accused of being a German tourist by a couple of local Santa Cruz "toughs" at their overpriced caffeine establishment. I mean, 5 bucks for a cappuchino!

But also, what an amazing opportunity it was for Katy and I to absolutely indulge in everything that the misty, beach-side never-never land has to offer, and to take interesting walks, and see old friends at very friendly imbibing establishments.

The photoessay that follows is largely the work of a man who is enraptured by the expressiveness of his companion Katy, but also baffled at how easily images come together into a seedy narrative. You go for a walk, and you find something, and you find other things, and you follow them until an entirely opposite thing is found. Along the way, plenty of red fog and shrouded bridges.

I warn you that some of the things we found in the woods are disturbing. And graphic. Be warned! But in the end, it all came together, like alchemy and it was beautiful.

The day begins with a young lady knitting a sweater at an outdoor restaurant.

Remembering Jim Carroll

2009-09-14T10:18:00.000-07:00

Jim Carroll, poet, diarist and rock star died a couple days ago at age 60.

So far the only obit. I've read is this one in the New York Times. A compelling personal remembrance by Stephen Elliott is here at The Rumpus.

It's funny, I spend so many hours retracing and remembering the things I love in terms of art and literature but it wasn't until I read about his death at The Rumpus that I suddenly remembered how my very early, very adolescent writing self was so directly inspired by Jim Carroll. Really, I was thoroughly indebted to him. He mangled my perceptions for the better. He made me believe I could connect whatever I felt the strongest about. I no longer own his books, but I hope to track them down soon. The means to do so, after all, are at my disposal.

As a fellow lapsed Catholic, he was there near the beginning, 6th, 7th and 8th grade, when I first spoke aloud what I wanted to do with my life and when I started scribbling poetry and filling journals. I didn't know if such a life was sustainable but it was the only life that felt good to me. Good and right too. So much to observe, so much to dream and it was all terribly important. People had to know the news. I thought the world would appreciate my efforts even if they went largely unnoticed.

In hindsight it was a very standard way to begin. You discover rebellion, it's like you found a new set of nerves on your body, and you want it to last even when your rebellions become passe and overdone or prove impractical at every turn. Still, my memory of Jim Carroll was that he had combined things in ways that hadn't been done before. It was a curious alchemy of sports and mysticism and drugs and urban Catholicism. His revolt, despite the drug abuse, was sustainable to some degree, at least through words and this was a terrific jolt to all my own illusions. Words would see me through. They were a refuge.

Of course, any adolescent male with pretensions towards revolt and writing will have found something to savor in The Basketball Diaries, his iconic journal of a youth spent doing drugs, playing sports and being a bad Catholic. That combination, perhaps mystifying to some, made complete sense to me, even though I was young, innocent and the only drugs I did were mostly imaginary ones. (Or else failed experiments with oregano, banana peels, hyperventilation and cough syrup.) What it boiled down to with Carroll, I thought, was grace. Searching for a state of grace. That was the Catholic in him, the Catholic in me too. Sinning and rebelling because you had to find the light. And really, beyond that, just the grappling human at the heart of it.

Even now there are scenes from that book, a book I haven't read in over fifteen years or so, that are indelibly inscribed on my memory: among them, of course, some of the sex scenes, but also the time when Jim and his basketball team accidentally did a bunch of barbiturates instead of uppers, or the time when they all when cliff-jumping but had to time their jumps so that they didn't land in the floating island of refuse. In between all those incidents, I felt strongly the search for divinity, and there was always the shadows of an empty church to fall back on when the drugs were too much.

If memory serves, I first read The Basketball Diaries around 8th grade when I was attending a Catholic elementary school and had fallen under the subversive charms of my rogue science and math teacher, "Mr. Cipher", a soccer fan and poetry fan aged 26 or so who drove a red Carmen Gia convertible while wearing headphones. He espoused the joys of the Metaphysical Poets and Jane's Addiction as well as certain erotic peccadilloes that he wasn't afraid to divulge to a gaggle of rebellious yet vestal youths. When we got sloppy on champagne at our graduation party he introduced us to a few Latin terms that I would never forget. He warned me in all earnestness that the enemy of the artist is "complacency." When I asked him had he ever been to an orgy before, he said, "No, Mr. Berger, but please don't bore me with such talk."

"Try not to bore yourself. Try not to let yourself grow complacent, Mr. Berger."

Those were among his parting words.

8th grade in San Diego was a vision of wavering heat over the asphalt and girls with skinned knees chasing me, not amorously but with genuine, if groundless rage. I remember bloodied t-shirts, accidental arson, dirty notes in the margins of my math homework, altar boy antics, youth group fiascoes, Disneyland scandals, barrages of middle fingers and obscene gestures, mild gropings during detention and the beautiful orange syringes of the Bird Of Paradise flowers looking wet and dangerous in the light. I remember the sun-lit grottoes where the saints and Mary stood frozen in ecstasy. I stared at the statues wondering were they from this planet, or another that I could visit sometime soon.

And my friends and I fantasizing about breaking into the nun's swimming pool. And donning the stiff starch of the altar boy, and getting a kick out of the secret passageway behind the altar that allowed for one altar boy to do the work of two or three. And I wrote poetry, riffing on a word I heard from Jim Carroll, stigmata (my very first poem called Stigmata about playing billiards and sneaking schnapps near a glowing pool and being on some one's water bed with the girl I was very much in love with. And she giving me a set of toy handcuffs and asking me what I was going to do with them.)

And then later being "de-pantsed" by my friend right in front of her on the basketball court. I took it in stride. It was part of the larger ritual. It was when makeshift games of soccer and tetherball all made sense when combined with poetry and delinquency. Her name was Katie, and in all likelihood was the first girl I ever had a crush on.

And there was the day of the exploding taco sauce packets and my good friend Tony talking about watching his older brother's homemade sex tape. That was the day I deliberately left a poem near the door of the Principal's office who happened to be an intimidatingly stocky nun who also worked at an AIDS hospice. One of the lines in the poem was: "It is easy to say I'm an exploding staircase/but it is harder to say why I fuck the sky."

The line, I believe, was a variation on one of Carroll's from Living At The Movies, a book he wrote when he was 22.

The principal found it and had someone send for me. I was sweating, covered in taco sauce and a muddy "slide-tackle" had just opened up a scab on my knee. But strangely this didn't seem to matter. With scathing eyes and her capacity for astringent silences, she reprimanded me instead for my dependence on vulgarity, not because it was immoral per se but because it implied a lack of imagination. She did praise me for the poem as a whole, claiming it showed great talent and even greater promise. But before I left I had to rat out my friend or else suffer damaging repercussions. I had already received D's in behavior in three of my classes, even though I was excelling in the actual work. So I had to be honest with her. Not exactly rat out, but spell out for the principal exactly what he had been doing after the taco sauce packets had been detonated.

"Say it, Mr. Berger. He was jerking off, wasn't he?!", she asked.

"Not really, I mean, he was pretending to, yes," I answered, gripping my poem in my hand, my sweaty palms making the ink bleed, my voice shaking like a dying bird's.

You see my friend Tony, on the day of the taco sauce packets, was caught simulating Onanism to a nun. True, the nun's back was turned but still it was the crowning gesture of disrespect and insubordination.

He was caught by that very same Mr. Cipher and later that day, expelled. He would later spend time in jail where he flirted, very briefly with white supremacy. Oh, and before all that, the two of us went to go see Nirvana together with that brother of his, the one with the homemade sex tape.

All of these incidents, typical for most adolescents, has everything to do with my memories, which are surging back to me now in light of his death, of reading Jim Carroll's two diaries but also his poems, collected in Living At The Movies and The Book Of Nods.

I used to swap copies of these with Mr. Cipher during the middle of Mass. He said he preferred metaphysics to religion. The former was more bodily. But what was more bodily that our Savior's body, bloodied and tortured, hanging from a tree? I asked him. I wasn't even being sarcastic. I was still deeply moved by all the weirdness of my given religion. I think he conceded that point.
It may have been him who gave me my first copy of Living At The Movies, I can't remember now.

Later, when we went with him to a San Diego Padres baseball game and he asked us in the 2nd inning if it was "half-time" yet, we talked about Carroll and John Donne's analogous attempts to capture infinity on the page as the game plodded on scoreless through the 7th inning. I gave Mr. Cipher a bundle of my prose poems with the ridiculous title, "Seance For A Crotch," the title having a lot to do with my burgeoning bio-chemical feelings which generally go by the Old English word, "lust." He responded enthusiastically, made me think I was on to something.

I have no idea where he is now. I do know he told me he used to sit in his front yard on a lawn chair and swill cough syrup in the sun.

And later, another time around the same age, I was in the woods with my family. We were staying at a cabin in the mountains. It might have been hot that Thanksgiving. I think there were bright green bugs in the air and black-red trees that slowly leaned down into a chasm. Manzanitas? I think so.

Over a cup of mint tea, I was reading Forced Entries, the sequel to Basketball Diaries and I was high with a fever too, I think. I came upon a getting-off-heroin scene in the book that was the most stomach-turning thing I had ever read. It had to do with an abscess. It was writing the likes of which I had never read before. Brutally visceral. So much so that I ran out of the cabin and threw up over the railing. In some ways, I prefer Forced Entries to the first one but it's hard to say. Forced Entries includes a really timelessly risque scene with Allen Ginsberg, among other gems.

They are both chronicles of a young man's body and soul undergoing a permanent spiritual crisis. And what else have I ever written about?

Carroll's two books of poetry accompanied me as I made the transition into high school, into a more vicious Catholic battlefield where drugs and sex all somehow flew right over my head. For the most part at least. But I largely lived a life of courtly love and innocuous experiments and cafes and books. Adhering to no cliques, but wishing I was a punk poet, I accidentally fell in with jocks and football players and suffered a very mild high school experience. Yet it was when, still under the spell of Carroll's verse, especially his dope-surreal prose poems in The Book Of Nods, that I cranked out poem after poem, most of them for girls or for my friends and begin to think I could keep doing this indefinitely.

In the meantime, I stole my neighbor's pomegranates.

And wrote about it. And wrote more about it.

And most of it goes back to him, to Mr. Carroll.

Thanks Jim Carroll.

Birthday Observance, 09/09/09

2009-09-09T11:09:00.000-07:00

Nearly 6 years ago now, my friend and former housemate Zan Truman stepped in some spilled orange paint at the corner of Fillmore and some other street and loped down the sidewalk. The other day I noticed that her orange footprints are still there.

I thought the lighting on this fire escape was great.

This is just an example of how tough life is for so many people in San Francisco. . .

Today is 09/09/09 and I am now thirty years old.

On 9/9/99 I turned twenty.

I'm going to Santa Cruz on the train to relax and go hiking. And go to a spa. And got to a lagoon and do who knows what else. We plan on staying in a seedy motel.

I'm still reading Jean Rhys, but am about to start as well the sad-sounding memoir of Guy Debord, Panegyric.

In the meantime, above are a scant amount of photos I took while walking for many miles the other day through the summer-hot city in search of Siouxsie and the Banshees albums.

Today is going to be excellent.

September and Reading Jean Rhys

2009-09-01T23:21:00.001-07:00

Now it is September. I remember this is the hot month. The month of my birthday and the birthdays of many of my closest friends.

I'm nearing thirty in a little over a week. What to think about that? Hard to say. I'm not desensitized to this event but merely, each day, I'm coming closer to a proactive acceptance of it. I won't lie to you either and say that there haven't been mild implosions of self-doubt and self-loathing, of a comical sort, comical in that what I perceive as deficiencies are in all likelihood mere blips, and little breakdowns of will and confidence that have been pathetic to behold -- and yet I know that what I cherish intuitively is what will see through me and make me an active part of reality, and not a passive, shrinking wallflower.

What you make intuitive, or what intuition makes of you, are your saving graces.

The fact is you want to add to the world, and if you're convinced you're doing this, a sense of peace isn't too far off and even if it remains elusive, you can take peace from that as well.

There were a handful of books I read in July and August or so that I didn't really talk about here but which served to exert a sometimes menacing influence on my own creativity. I got into a vein of writing which I can only describe as "male-hysterical" or even "male-histrionic." This very much has to do with my own writing which I know, all too well, stems from a hysterical/obsessive view of reality.

Perhaps the fact that the authors were males had very little to do with the things I read, except for the fact that the male imagination is a pervasive unspoken reality, that informs and colors so much around me and defines so much about being a writer in general.

A lot of it was science fiction/speculative fiction. A lot of it was about cities, relationships, sex, that came from a Freudian place. A lot of it was about indulgence, the loss of control.

I needed, I decided recently a break before moving on to other male hysterical specimens.

Right now I'm reading Jean Rhys, The Complete Novels, beginning with the first one, Voyage In The Dark. Recently, she's been discussed because of the new biography about her that just came out this year, The Blue Hour.

The phrase, the blue hour is beautiful and reminds me of the title of a book by a quintessential male hysteric, Georges Bataille called Blue Of Noon.

So far what has been refreshing about Jean Rhys's prose is the starkness. The love affair with sumptuous language has reached an impasse. At all points you feel it literally as a voyage in the dark, reduced to the most naked nouns and modifiers. A cold voyage, a lonely voyage, a voyage made nervously and without any anchorage.

A voyage that, as a man, I can never viscerally understand. But that I'd like to.

The beginning is perfect:

It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was almost like being born again. The colours were different, the smells different, the feeling things gave your right down inside yourself was different. Not just the difference between heat, cold; light, darkness; purple, grey. But a difference in the way I was frightened and the way I was happy. I didn't like England at first. I couldn't get used to the cold. Sometimes I would shut my eyes and pretend that the heat of the fire, or the bed-clothes drawn up round me, was sun-heat; or I would pretend I was standing outside the house at home, looking down Market Street to the Bay. When there was a breeze the sea was millions of spangles; and on still days it was purple as Tyre and Sidon."

The six novels in the collection, which culminate in her masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea, all seem to document her own real life experiences as a woman going against the grain and suffering much rebuke for it, and inflicting, in turn, her own retributive malaise full of alcoholism and compulsive passivity and relinquishment to the nurturing condescensions of men.

There is a lushness to starkness, a biting heat to the iciest, most suffocating interiors.

I'd like to read all six of them and see where it takes me, before hiding again in the male hysterics I've learned so much from and really would prefer to loathe.

Steve Erickson, Los Angeles and Beyond

2009-08-27T19:36:00.000-07:00

Today I finished reading Days Between Stations, Steve Erickon's first novel.

I found it devastating. Heartbreaking. Brave.

Suffused with a guttural dreaminess that anybody, anywhere might recognize from losing a loved one, or losing love, or losing one's memories, or simply being heartbroken and lost in general.

Life gets weird when those things happen. You don't just sit there, "having emotions".

The whole world changes, the weather inside and out.

This is why we need writers like Erickson. We need "romantic fabulists" and "cynical fantasists." Not just ironic realists.

In a flurry of Vietnamese coffee at a small, dark and very clean cafe well south of Mission down 24th, I wrote this long rant about it, which was more about my feelings about Los Angeles than anything else.

But it's also worth reading my link at the end: Brian Evenson's insightful appreciation of Erikson which is also an astute diagnosis of the problems behind the "postmodern" label.

More about Erickson, J.G. Ballard and sci-fi/spec. fiction soon.

Notes On Beginning A Novel

2009-08-24T16:30:00.000-07:00

I just read online today that an old friend of mine from high school just completed his first novel. I'm happy for him and feel justifiably motivated to start working on mine. I wonder how one finishes a novel, or really, for that matter, maintains the presence of mind and the necessary tunnel vision to even start one. Yet another problem arises:

I start working on the novel, but then my brain jumps back to the common assertion that actually, no I need to write and finish some short stories in order to savor the notion of finality. To be able to submit them. To, god forbid get them published.

But rarely does a short story give me the same frisson as a good novel, or even a big, baggy, sloppy novel. There are exceptions, fairly major ones: Jesus's Son, Flannery O'Connor, Paul Bowles, Amy Hempel and my now long-lost copy, which keeps getting rarer by the day of The Piano Stories by the forgotten progenitor of Latin American magical realism, Felisberto Hernandez.

I used to think that one of the stories in that collection, "No One Had Lit A Lamp" was one of the greatest things I'd ever read, as well as being a prime example of how every instance can contain unquantifiable weirdness.

I gave it to a girl a long time ago. Or lent it, I can't remember which.

And yes there is Tobias Woolf too: there are segments in the second half of the justly-famous, and perennially studied "Bullet In The Brain" that make me tremble.

So I'll work on them, knowing each one, in some way, is only a prelude or a hint of the novel I want to write, or one of the novels I want to write. And then I think that wanting to write a novel is the offspring of a febrile, stunted mind. But then again, not wanting to write the novel would leave me vastly wanting. In life you figure out how to fill wants and needs in a more less practical balance? And yes, it is a question.

This "first" novel is going to be about a LOT of things I have no personal knowledge of, like murder and crime families for one thing. And Islam too. Islam? I suspect it will have less to do with Islam per se and more to do with fanciful heresies and related sects, like the much over hyped Yezidis who live in Northern Iraq. The Yezidis?

The Peacock Angel of the Yezidis. . .

Now, I'm curious to see my own thought process splattered on the page. A novel-planning binge began in my brain today. It was this morning, a grey, quiet day at the bookstore, typical for Mondays. Not many people passed through but some real maniacs felt compelled to loiter in the doorway. I shelved, I cleaned, I researched a rare book or two. I've started buying too, that is to say: buying books for the store from people who want to sell them to us, which is always enjoyable because people bring in all sorts of unlikely things. Like a bag entirely full of gardening, civil war history and erotica, and then you speculate what the soon-to-be prior owner of the books does or used to do, either for a livelihood or a vocation or simply for pleasure.

But it's impossible, when I'm working and when I'm working alone which is most of the time, not to think about writing. Here are the artifacts of it, enclosing me. The smell of the used bookstore which I've grown to savor. I'm reminded six or seven hours of the day about what I want to do with my life, with my brain, with the images in my head. It's oddly claustrophobic, somewhat stifling but also lucky. Like being inside my brain. And then escaping back into it.

I need some other completely unrelated part-time job. Or volunteer gig that is as far away from books as possible. This is one of the challenges for myself right now.

The books exist on the shelves to remind me to start thinking like a writer. And doing that means making improbable connections across the pulsing landscapes of the brain. The Internet aids and abets this process, often hampers and exacerbates. I'm forever thinking I can never do enough research or I haven't been to enough places or read enough books. And then the Internet corroborates this. I'm sent into the wilderness of other people's exploits and failures and victories, trying to cull from that history something that is profoundly mine yet everyone else's too.

I will refrain from saying anything else right now. Mostly because I'm full of tempura eggplant and being mollified by warmth and tango.

Two Recently Discovered Writers

2009-08-20T19:06:00.001-07:00

I went off the handle today at the Rumpus about two new writers I've discovered, Anne Carson and Thomas Ligotti.

(I also realized today that "my world" is becoming more and more absorbed in literature/writing, which is kind of panicky, because I don't want to lose the "connection" to the "real world" but I also don't want to abdicate the very absorbing prospect of calling yourself a writer. That beings said there are at least 5 people I'm supposed to call back, three things I need to edit, ten stories I need to rewrite, 14 other people I need to bestow some kind of attention upon, and a blender to procure. Oh, and running shoes.)

Tonight: cooking cod and kale.

Anyway, in both small profiles above, I maintain a very over-the-top tone, thanks to the fact that lately I've felt somewhat over-the-top.

Both writers are worth tracking down. And for very different reasons, both having to do with the unanswered question at the heart of every moment.

Plus, no need to add that the result of having just discovered these two authors will certainly lead to some expanded notes and ellipses.

At The New Place: A Few Shots

2009-08-19T22:13:00.001-07:00

The view from the top of a hill in Glen Canyon, a natural refuge that is in the neighborhood of Glen Park which is only a half-dozen, meandering blocks away from my neighborhood of Bernal Heights. Glen Park is sort of a mirror to Bernal, with its handsome homes, long-standing eateries, a bookstore, a market, a bank, its quiet, its families, its hints of nature.

Since we are technically all adults now, I will insist, and frankly we'll all insist that the above fireplace ledge is only a temporary tableau but for right now it provides instantaneous unease when you enter our sizable living room.

Just a random shot on Mission St. Not really near my place at all. A grated alley crammed with derelict theater seats. Or something. Part of my incentive to have my camera with me more often.

Figments of the past come back in different personae; here, your classic warehouse, with the checkerboard of windows flashing in the sun, at the end of our new street, Cortland. I can't tell who lives inside, or if it's live/work but it looks gorgeous within, lots of plants and hanging things and paintings.

But then your past comes back in the exact SAME guise. Here, across the street from the end of our street (where Cortland slams into Mission), is the warehouse offices of Golden Gate Tank Removal, my former employer who, when I worked there, used to be situated in a romantically destitute shit-shack in the South of Market. And now they are one block from bucolic Bernal Heights.

A Long Part Of A Story

2009-08-15T20:22:00.000-07:00

Here's a rough, uninhibited draft part of a story I'm working on: a false memoir story: just part of the first two are covered, and not the third one which comes later.

Three Things To Forget

I was never taught to kiss or shave or tie my shoes.

I find it funny that when I first did them it was at the same time.

Was it really? No, not quite. But almost. I knew how to tie my shoes, but it was the easy way, the way a paid nanny taught me and it was not the proper way. Kissing I thought was violence. Until I did it wrong. And it was. Shaving, I assumed, was just what the muscular Apollos in the commercials did before they are whisked away on a sexual spaceship.

Now I can say I have a fairly hefty past. Because of just three things which are the beginning of many more.

It was when kids who were almost not kids played cruel games to pass the time.
Like Truth Or Dare. Or Thirty Seconds In The Gazebo or Doing Time or Smother The Lover. Doing Time, as you might have guessed, was an incarceration game. Smother The Lover riffed on the notion of the dog-pile which was an experiment in endurance, sort of like being tickled when you’re bound to a chair with garden hose. The word "lover" was our first dirty word and it incited the players to pile upon each other like rabid dogs. Often the pea at the bottom of that writhing pod would be four breaths close to passing out. But it was exciting being that pea.

The kissing was at a party full of ten and eleven year olds. It was a pool party where some brave boys had snuck in beer but the parents were nesting within the bowels of the house, playing a card game or watching detective shows, leaving us kids to the darkly-lit residential fringes where water splashed and girls laughed and the sound was the same but different.

Cold feet on rough concrete, easily scraped. We're always running. The slimy rim of the pool that made me shiver. The taste of pie you buy from the vending machines, the stale, frosted shell and the slaughterhouse innards.

Was it a birthday party or some other festivity? Birthdays were the only reason why anyone did anything. You always wanted to get old. Made a big display of it when you did. The houses had scraping edges and basin-shaped backyards that typically had pools gouged into them. The landscape was artificial like candy and thus purely enticing. You don’t stop liking candy even so close to your teens. Candy is a prop and a delight. It is not an acquired taste.

A bamboo grove, falsified or real, whispered on the edge of the pool. Some bogus oriental gazebo where people played their cruel games in. Things like Velcro wallets and limited edition tennis balls got lost in the ornamental foliage and people used that as an excuse to hide there. The unmistakable sound of Velcro opening, even on those sneakers where you could stow secret nickels. But the Velcro sound was never naughty, for it never protected such things.

I admit, now that I remember, it wasn’t a kiss at all that first time.

It was a glorious fuck-up.

Instead of kissing, I sucked and then finally bit this poor girl’s cheek. Her skin was tasteless but flushed. I heard her take in a sharp breath. A shard of air. Every particle was distinct and important. My tongue met her skin, as light and dry as an eyelash. My lips followed, my two front teeth with their rabbit’s gap sank into the occasion.

She took in another gasp. The sound of her breathing was shocking. Maybe she had sipped a half a beer and been splashed by cold, chlorinated water in the side of the pool as of yet unwarmed by the jostling of smooth bodies. I never thought about breathing until I sucked that poor girl’s cheek in the poolside twilight.

I wonder why it wasn’t her lips I kissed. They were, after all, presented to me. But I turned her cheek. What was it about those lips? They were chapped like motel wallpaper and there was candy, perhaps meat stuck in her braces, dissolute traits which made her seem dangerous and I remember it wasn’t her but her sister Corey, who chased me and pinned me against a grounded canoe in a game the camp counselor called Predator Prey.

Corey’s braces had made her gums bleed which invested her with a menacing, predatory face. That was a game that made me nervous. I took those things seriously. It was an unspoken way to gain status: being good at unimportant games.

Cruel games and cruel experiments: later we sit in offices and crack jokes about dying young.

The night of the pool party we had been experimenting with beer foam and lollypops like kids will do, and sometimes with more outright cruelty, knowing that something will always get hurt and will forever cry out to make it stop. Make it stop something will demand. Or not.

I don’t know why it wasn’t her lips. The peeling skin and the flotsam rotting under her metal-gated teeth was less nightmare and more ambiguous invitation. But her cheek was like the skin of a fruit. I’m talking about someone else now, I think. Pale like marble on the outside, sticky, fuchsia meat within, as distant and astronomical as a neighboring galaxy.

She told me it was funny what I did.

Everything was either funny or nice. Agony we kept quiet about. Ecstasy we saved for our dreams. I played it off like a joke. This was a first survival mechanism. I learned early to play things off as jokes, until people got wise that that was what I was doing which made things worse.

You set the fire in the bathroom? Yeah, all in good fun though. You scored a point for the other team? It was a joke, man! When you read aloud your voice cracks and you sound like a girl? I’m mocking my fat friend but I love him. You throw bottles at passing traffic? That was not me, that was him, his father abused him, his sister tried to sleep with him and soon, but you don’t know this now, he’ll become a white supremacist who’s doing time. And not the game Doing Time which was always interesting when the girls got to be the guards. There was visible unease in the boy's faces, as if a lesson was not only being taught but forcibly digested.

. . .HERE AN INTERMEZZO...an awkward encounter with a friend in a park. . .

I wouldn’t have kissed him were it not for the cheap wine and the lovely, riparian verse and the harvest moon with the frilly edges, almost cigarette-burned. B
But the girl I kissed was at a pool party where people were shooting billiards under a plantain tree. The submerged lighting gave everything a blue Hollywood glow. The boys had hairless, bright chests like billiard balls.

I was less self-conscious about taking my shirt off but I remember that even the slightest gust from the valley below could harden my nipples. My friend’s chests felt good to my open palm, like matter at its most permeable. I was palming them because of some game, twister meets hot potato and the smiles in everyone’s eyes were as hard as candy.

We had other games too. Hide N’ Seek crossed with Doing Time (a jail game).

We were ten or eleven and not afraid of life, only each other and what we might become. The girls had fierce hips. Less jutting than stabbing, like they were sidewinders and could injure you in your blind spots if you weren’t paying attention. Walking was as risky as driving when you’re night-blind. You had to pay attention. It was all quite nerve-wracking.

I remember she had a Polish last name and hair so blond it was almost white. I don’t remember being driven home later than night or feeling the anticipation of being in my room, stranded with myself and my eager hands. I don’t know how vivid my conjuring might have been, or if my imagination has gone stale in the intervening years that have done much to sully the soft, impressionable matter I was then. Life’s work, at least in these dirty metropoli is to mangle the softness, a task both necessary and traumatic.

I don’t remember what I might have done by candlelight with my headphones on. Today I attribute minor hearing loss to having expensive headphones. I attribute my immunity to hot coffee cups to my child’s love of candles. But what I would give to remember those first raptures, like a cow remembering dry lightning

But that night I also shaved because I thought I had whiskers. It was just prickly fuzz and I bled a lot, shiny pinkish blood that I smeared in my journal like some occult oath. The oath of the abyss I called it. I would cross the abyss of my own male fears. I’m an only child. I used to love Christ. But now I mistake him for matter. I’m a junkie for matter but I don’t have a lot of things.

I just praise the stones I pull from the creek. . .

TO BE CONTINUED

A mid month obsession update, brought to you by yard sale weather

2009-08-15T16:10:00.000-07:00

Today has been yard-sale day in Bernal Heights!

A recipe for neighborhood mayhem. Everyone is out in their skimpiest, summer-worshipping threads, treasure-hunting their way through the highlands of Bernal, stopping to drink iced coffee, buy flowers and rifle through our books. I've been slain by honey-dripping stares, made dizzy by breaths pickled in booze, made flabbergasted by the demands of the occasional madman.

All in good fun.

I also hear it's national relaxation day. I'm doing that now, in my window nook study, sipping "sweet-spicy" tea, jumping between different pieces of writing. In a little bit I might walk up to the hill and stare at the water as cypress-tinted breezes tickle my arms. I might lay in the grass too. Today has been busy in a good way. My legs hurt contentedly. My mind hums pleasantly. My senses feel grass-fed and wild-roaming.

This morning my bookstore, which is right in the center of the yard sale circuit, was selling books by the pound. I was there, making signs and weighing books and helping people. We had an antique scale and we had boxes of books out front in the sun and the streets filled up and people dove through the boxes and filled up the store eagerly and hungrily. Some doubted the accuracy of our scale. Most were thrilled. It was controlled chaos and it was wonderful. I love the improvisational flourishes of the job and, in a larger sense, this neighborhood.

Improvising and thriving on chaos are two things I need not forget how to do. Especially as my manhood becomes a fuller and richer reality, with new challenges and new ways to resist.

The sun is still out but I'm inside for awhile, not wanting to be tempted by commerce. I like using my study too. It's odd being inside sometimes. I've gotten used to wanting to escape my house. Now it feels like a refuge from other refuges. A persevering chain of refuges.

At our book sale, I weighed an immaculate copy of Sexual Personae. It weighed one pound. I paid a dollar for it.

Here's the first paragraph:

"In the beginning was nature. The background from which and against which our ideas of God were formed, nature remains the supreme moral problem. We cannot hope to understand sex and gender until we clarify our attitude toward nature. Sex is a subset to nature. Sex is the natural in man. . .Society is an artificial construction, a defense against nature's power. Without society, we would be storm-tossed on the barbarous sea that is nature."

I have never read her, I only know she is considered provocative and controversial. If her thesis is that art arises from pagan chaos, then I can whole-heartily agree.

I've decided that Camille is a good name for a female character too. I also like names like Octavia, Esther, Rose and Lynne. Right now, I'm trying to visualize a novel protagonist who looks like and has the same nervous energy as a certain Crispin Glover.

I'm working on too much: short stories, the beginning of a novel and several long-winded episodes from an "apocryphal memoir". Maybe that's the most fun project of the moment, fun in that it reeks of pure self-indulgence and spins on a typical obsession: reading. Oh, reading and "desiring". Moreover, learning how to desire. What to desire. Who to desire.

I mean, who teaches us what we want? I think books have taught me a lot worth sharing.

My idea for this "memoir" which I call apocryphal just to be a pain in the ass, has coincidental resonance with a recent memoir by Nathan Rabin, a writer for the Onion. His book, The Big Rewind focuses on particularly formative and traumatic parts of his life through the lens of certain cultural works that he enjoyed at the time, like Dr. Dre's The Chronic or the film Grey Gardens. It is, he claims, a "memoir brought to you by pop culture."

Now what I have in mind is slightly different: more about books, for better or worse, and certainly far less traumatic, at least based on what I've read about Rabin's life and the disease, madness, homelessness and incarceration that has colored it. I just want to talk about times in my life through the filter of books I've loved and learned from.

This seed might have been planted when I read Henry Miller's essential The Books In My Life.

I hope to limit this to several long essay-stories, including one about queer culture in San Francisco, the long, weird summer and fall of 2001, learning about Death in college, figuring out what Sleaze means in high school, and getting my haircut and talking to my hairdresser about failed affairs, lurid liaisons and ridiculous misunderstandings.

All with books throughout. Ok, then. . .onward!

John Berger And An Excerpt

2009-08-09T18:05:00.000-07:00

"In the center of a square in Lisboa there is a tree called a Lusitanian (which is to say, Portugese) cypress. Its branches, instead of pointing up to the sky, have been trained to grow outwards, horizontally, so that they form a gigantic, impenetrable, very low umbrella with a diameter of twenty metres. One hundred people could easily shelter under it. The branches are supported by metal props, arranged in circles around the twisted massive trunk; the tree is at least two hundred years old. Beside it stands a formal notice-board with a poem to passers-by written on it. I paused to decipher a few lines: . . .I am the handle of your hoe, the gate of your house, the wood of your cradle and the wood of your coffin. . ."

This is the opening paragraph to John Berger's utterly beautiful and ambitiously non-classifiable "fiction" called Here Is Where We Meet.

It was probably the last book I read and the last book I really, really loved. Because it is ostensibly about a man named John Berger walking through the cities and villages he's loved (Lisboa, Krakow, Geneva, Madrid, and rural Poland) and meeting people he once loved who are now dead, interspersed with the most vivid, painterly details about plazas, food, light, water, architecture, love-making, war, weddings, and death, it would be easy to ask the question: what genre is this? It's easier and far more relevant to ask: who cares? It's absolutely brave and brilliant and heart-rending. And it was probably the twentieth book he wrote too.

John Berger is someone I'll talk more about. I reported on him once before at the Rumpus. There are entire paragraphs from this book that are worthy of being quoted in full.

To understand him as well, it is necessary to appreciate what he looks like now. His author photo is one of a kind.

I think Susan Sontag's description of Berger is one of the most complimentary things I've ever heard one writer say about another:

"I admire and love John Berger's books. He writes about what is important, not just interesting. In contemporary English letters, he seems to me peerless; not since Lawrence has there been a writer who offers such attentiveness to the sensual worlds with responsiveness to the imperatives of conscience. . ."

Personal History As Cosmic Mess Or Vice Versa: A Photo Essay Of Houses

2009-08-03T22:04:00.000-07:00

In the interest of exploiting personal myth towards historical ends (after all, what is the point of art but self-exploitation?), and inspired by the fact I just moved again, I'd like to dabble in a photo-essay chronicling the houses I've lived in while living in the Bay Area, those post-collegiate years where, for better or for worse much of my manhood played out, ridiculously at certain times, heroically at others, most often with staid, quotidian grace, the perfect trait of the pedestrian.

And walking is my forte.

I like taking pictures and matching them with words. It's a very simple yet effective way to create a story with multiple insinuations.

So A Brief History Of Homes. . .beginning with

The Lower Haight, a cat on my gut, when I was reading Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, also featuring a cat.

Onward to the infamous Capp St., with the writing room where very little writing was done.

And the tea party where very little tea was drunk.

and there was the kitchen with the shit-clogged windows next to the Gothic Buddhist temple.

And the bicycle in harsh contrast with the checkered floors.

And then the exodus to Oakland, a dream of lake-mist and scaffolding.

Where a "house" was secured in the Far West of the City, a house with dirty windows and a red door and faded yellow bricks.

With a room that was a "fixer-upper" to put it mildly.

And the foyer was a veritable junkyard fit for a king of sorts.

And our hallway, like the loading dock behind an Edwardian dance hall, was always decked out with the most fascinating props.

Which opened up onto your standard, suburban living room.

And from the interior ship's balcony, our kitchen proved not too shabby either.

But then I moved East in Oakland to the place called San Antonio where the skyline was like this:

The water trickled ashore into fake ruins, gnarled trees, odd little copses of greenery where people rolled around and mock marriages were held.

I moved into a house that was about 140 years old, according to the commemorative plaque next to the door, a house that included weird medical-style drawers in the kitchen as well as an attic that was as big as a small church and full of tiny crawlspaces and alcoves. (Unfortunately I neglected to photograph it.)

Nearby was this weird turf that looked like a maze at night. . .

Although East of the Lake was often warm, sunny and humid, there were days when the whole lake was obliterated by fog. . .

Sometimes I dreamt of living in other houses that were nearby. . .
It was the first time I ever lived with strangers, so I spent lots of time decorating my study
walls to indicate what type of human they were dealing with. . .

I also took moody, self-portraits before I hit the town. . .

I refer to it as a"tough" time in my life, but really how tough was it?

Anyway things happened and I moved again, this time back across the pond into a house with friends, a place that was well-wooded and mariner-themed and generally felt to be a cozy container ship full of the coolest people ever, all of us set sail for a life of red wine, boisterous laughter and baroque schemes that went well past midnight, much to the bemusement of the landlord below.

Among the first ship's mates were these wonderful ladies:

Some of the rooms in the house were truly astonishing examples in mood music.

My own room let in the most oceanic light of any place I've ever lived in.

The Inner Sunset was a neighborhood with interesting twilights and good strong sea smells.

There were evenings there where things got out of hand and people walked the ceilings.

With good tidings, I went abroad and stayed in 25 hostels and came back without a house. But then I found a place and a new neighborhood which has been well documented here.

That proved to be a weird year, and so I moved again. And that's where I am now, 152 Park St., Bernal Heights. No photographs yet.

But What About The Soul That Grows In Darkness?

2009-08-02T18:44:00.000-07:00

I just retired my photoblog of the Excelsior now that I know longer live there and can no longer focus on it as terrain, wonderland, maze, weirdoland, frustration, rapture and hangover.

It is day two of having to walk just two blocks to my job and coming home to a clean, wide, bright house full of Good Folks with Good Vibes (and a walk-in pantry, among other amenities.)

A park, a fire station, a coffeehouse. A window, a stoop, a school. I want to sit on the stoop and watch the fire trucks go by. It's like out of a set piece.

Simple spatial indexes that are grounding and consoling. Plus the fact that my dear friends already lived here and I spent ample days and nights at this house.

Houses and jobs: the most interesting things we can talk about sometimes.

Yesterday, I unloaded my boxes of books, found a window-facing nook that my desk fit perfectly, helped arrange shelves and sofas to facilitate both personal creative space as well as communal dancing space and decided that I had much in the way of paper to shred, burn and recycle.

Now time for reading, writing, biking, cooking and sharing.

The Non-Plight Of The Honky Gringo

2009-07-28T22:30:00.000-07:00

Here's a broken-up story for you, fragments from a longer quasi-non-fictiony thing called The Non Plight Of The Honky Gringo.

Sleep is evasive. I read till I nod off, come up for air, go back down the pit, wanting those dreams where I fly and say, I'm flying in a dream and now that I know that, I can fly anywhere, any height, disrobe, be naked in the blue air, send my love to the ants below. Flying in dreams, because I've done it before, what I remember is the thrilling coolness of the breeze my soaring body makes.

My boss sleeps soundly, but then she exudes and orchestrates more energy in any given hour than most people do in a week, a genius of her noble profession, which is noble, truly and forever.

(It is books.)

Sleep for me hinges on what I aim to face the next day. I think this is flawed logic.

A nightmare of a job I won't sleep at all. An appointment, a job interview, the dentist, I'm a little better but not much. If it's a day of leisure, maybe the best, I drown like a baby.

What's the very best though is crashing into sleep from a day that is as long and interesting as an underwater canyon. Think of the last very long, very interesting day you had and go into pin-drop detail describing it.

This last night I lay there visualizing French farms and Polish weddings, pastoral customs I wouldn't know what to do with but that I'd like to observe.

The ashen, acidic, abattoir rot emanates from the botched piping, making me wonder what crime is being suppressed by the imbeciles below. A murder? A trainwreck of sloppy joes and ashtrays and dead rats in the walls?

When I walk now, I make sure not to go my habitual routes, not from paranoia but from a self-empowering espionage. I take unnecessary detours, I backtrack and skit down an alley as if trying to outwit an analyst who's trailing me with judgment on his tongue. Back in childhood, when I spent a lot of time in my room alone, either reading, writing, listening to music or doing generally odd, ritualistic things, I used to pretend there was a child psychologist hiding out in the wardrobe. He was a spy. (More often I made her a she.) People in his trade were forced into the position of spies and saboteurs. The most interesting children had tendencies to burrow deep into arcane alcoves of the mind, hard to pry out, hard to find.

I always thought he came in through the window, along with the coyote howls, the fig tree limbs, the smell of summer limes, sun-baked asphalt cooling under a blue moon, fuzz from lost tennis balls getting stuck in my teeth.

Food is something else.

I ate the plate called Happy Buddha but was disappointed by its lack of variety. I drank the tea called Green and felt less nervous than if I hadn't. The mangoes are delicious this part of the summer but I still don't know how to cut them properly. Their juice feels electric on my fingertips.

I had a dream last night that was more like news.
Poetry is news that stays new. My dream comes with a real-life prelude:

Another lifetime ago, when I was involved with a raven-and-nickel-haired poetess she took me, in her tiny blue clown car, to a tumbledown movie theater next to a gay blues bar, a Jewish pastry shop and a giant rotting lake that had a Christmas tree in the middle of it. This was called The San Antonio.

The theater served warm beer and cold pizza and had gutted couches for people to lounge in while they watched the movies. This movie was about Oakland, in particular about an old, notorious drug dealer who, when he died, was escorted in a massive, outlandish parade of horse-drawn carriages, top-hatted coachmen, major-domos, etc. all through the blighted areas that he had fed and ruined with addictive, powdery drugs much to his advantage, his legacy, his legend.

I used to walk past spit-polished Bentleys idling outside of crumbling SRO's.

In my dream, I was walking through a bad neighborhood that was inevitably filling up with people like me who weren't from bad neighborhoods but because of their artistic livelihoods felt like they had to live in them. In this dream, a funeral procession was turning a corner. Just as my friends and I were walking across the street

Sun blasted against the side of a brick building. Their was an old painted advertisement for bread against the side of some broken-down factory. The funeral was for a "Gangster". And it had all grandiose trappings of that real-life gangster's funeral in Oakland.

Suddenly as the funeral procession neared the center of the block, a legion of screaming police cars screeched to a halt in the opposite intersection, adjusted into barricade formation and cops, and plainclothes detectives, and strangely-uniformed volunteers all brandished rifles, pistols, automatic weapons and started just firing on the mourners, the carriages and the sympathetic onlookers. A barrage of gunfire, all of it done stoically, methodically, without too much concern.

They were aiming for the Gangster Second In Command. It was very shocking. But I awoke thinking, Cops probably do this. They go to Gangster's funerals and fire away at the other Gangsters. It's the best place to find other Bad Guys all together at once.

I know nothing about the hard life.

I talked to a nurse yesterday who had paralyzing eyes and who was jealous that I worked at a bookstore. Her job is usually sad, she said, so she doesn't need to hear about Afghanistan on NPR 24 hours a day, not that she doesn't need to, but it doesn't behoove her disposition to, so could I recommend a book maybe, a book on tape, something else to listen to on her commute?

Which is funny, because it's the kind of the thing I've talked about before. Ease of day-to-day life can sometimes inspire a darker aesthetic side. Whereas if you're a nurse, a truly brave occupation I could probably never do, the horrors of the hours need to be mitigated with something less heavy-handed, something, even, life-affirming. It's understandable actually. I realized this only later.

I read somewhere it's best to stay put now. Cultivate a place. Let your garden get interesting.
I can't stay put usually, or I can stay put in a larger context but in the smaller one, I fidget like a sugar-high waif.

I wolfed down a fried tiger shrimp sandwich at a bar. The same bar where I watched the tail-end of a no-hitter and realized that sports can unify people more than most things. There was genuine glee when he threw that final strikeout. Drinks all around. Aggressive hugs. Shouts to the skies.

A man on the 14 bus, unnerved by a gesture I made, called me a "foreign racist" and, bewildered, I looked around to find even the scantest evidence for this madman's accusation and I found instead a compact mirror a woman had left on a seat that showed me the Russian letters on my ever-present black, bleach-embellished shirt.

Which doesn't explain much.

I am not Russian. I am not foreign. I am not racist, insofar as we're all not racists but still make split-second, visual assumptions whenever a non-us comes our way. He also told an old man to "spit out the dragon, old man."

The old man didn't listen.

My Cronenberg Rant

2009-07-24T23:57:00.000-07:00

This last Thursday, I contributed to The Rumpus a pseudo-review-cum-rant of David Cronenberg's first feature film, Shivers. The film that Alien ripped off. Seriously. It's all in the added documentary on the DVD.

Read my review here.

I think it's amusing, especially the comments it inspired.

I think my love of Cronenberg doesn't necessarily hinge on a "sick disposition", only a respect for bravery and creative brinkmanship. He's a man who is influenced by Vladmir Nabokov, J.G. Ballard and William S. Burroughs. Thus, a word-ranter like me finds much to appreciate in his complex films.

I appreciate it when artists explore all the things I'm afraid of/and yet attracted to, i.e. modern medicine, sexual desire, biological upheaval, the fine line between the mind and the body, and of course that old standby, Death.

Fear is a good thing for artists. Maybe it's the ultimate catalyst for art when all is said and done.

Hypothetical Cities: A Drawn-Out Interlude

2009-07-21T21:03:00.000-07:00

I have a back log of things to talk about it so I might as well have at it.

Hypothetical Cities. Like Calvino's Invisible Cities, like Delany's Bellona, like Mieville's Orciny. Others I haven't entered yet: Le Guin's Left Hand Of Darkness and The Dispossessed, DUNE, Lillith's Brood.

Some Cities happen in a room, under a bed where some things forgotten once rolled and grew sticky and mysterious. Some happen in Shanghai, a City big enough to house hordes of others, where I've never been but which I might pretend is actually Fremont if I'm feeling nostalgic for an OLD JOB. I'll be in Chicago, broad-shouldered, icy-cold, Bellovian, in October for a wedding which, according to my friend is the most racist city in America. That's his Hypothesis of that City. (He lives in Phoenix.) Which isn't unlike my perceptions of San Francisco, New Orleans, Baltimore, San Diego: stratified, blockaded, and yes, perhaps, racist. My original theory of Chicago, a memory of innocence, is going to the greatest art exhibit I've ever seen: Odilon Redon.

But, not talking now, but listening to the Cure and Bauhaus after eating a fresh mango with the tang of mustard still on my tongue, I'm thinking about day-long amorousness when the day out the rickety, shit-splattered window is drab cotton and blustery and not worth doing business with unless the business is turning in.
For a bout inside a musty, humid room.
Turning your back on unseasonal wind. Turning your face to frenzy.

Today I handled a book that could cost between 400-500 dollars. Maybe. It is called THE COMMAND TO LOOK and it's spiral-bound and published in the year 1937 and although ostensibly a manual for Pictorialist photography it's more a grimoire scattered throughout with Picaresque, Grotesque and Lecherous photos. More on that later. Maybe Thursday.

I'm thinking about the woman who came in to the store today in a felt coat, a loud red blouse, mousy hair, lazily tanned and asked to pick up the book she had put on hold, The Pot Growers Bible. It had been there, on hold, for over a month after she had ordered it. I found it necessary to comment on this fact to which she replied, mock-lethargically or real I couldn't tell: "Ah yeah, I just couldn't summon the energy to go pick it up." And then she enlightened me about the origin of the word "pound", as in a "dog pound": apparently, back in the day, runaway dogs were billed in total pounds they weighed by collectors. Or something. And then she paid for the pot grower's bible with a check but didn't have her ID on her.

Last night, sleeping was hard-going. Three different beds in three days. Three kinds of dreams, three breeds of hypnagogia. Some astronomical shit going on which, although not a big believer in, I'm convinced affects me physiologically like some kind of alcoholic energy drink with added, narcotic botanicals thrown in merely to assuage the dying crust-punk scene. All I know is, these days, Saturn is always involved.

Nervy. Mind-busted. Thrumming. Last night. Tonight there is an Eclipse and I have friends in China who are there just to see it. My other friend was in China too and she just got back. I have a friend in Costa Rica right now. Another friend I know going to Brazil. My friend from the bachelor party weekend is going to World Cup in South Africa next year, and to World Cup in Brazil in 2014. After that, he said, he'll cash in his chips, die happily. Soccer, I think, is the sport of writers, or should be.

I own this fantasy for next year of going to Morocco, taking a boat to Tunisia, cutting through Egypt and then up through the Balkans until I wind up in the Carpathian mountains where, perhaps, I might breath wonderfully wooded air and feel haunted and do that body-killing work on the Transylvania farm I was invited to do but it fell through by virtue of something
! What, "writer"? ! This fantasy is, when thrown out there, patently absurd but I want to justify it by calling it "looking for a Character", a Character who in "fiction-time" is chasing after the Assassinista who is supposed to kill him, and thus must traverse a long route, across seas and languages and diasporic confluences for the "female mobster" novel in progress. . .HOW do we justify our creative excesses? Do we need to? Female mobsters? Isn't that more a fetish than a reality??

Spent the weekend in San Diego with the glaring sun, the ultra-tanned hedonists, the bracing cold of the ocean cut with the scalding sand killing hangovers and shame all at once, a bachelor party involving fifteen men in a beach house drinking and eating meat and play-brawling and play-insulting, among them two friends known and loved since kindergarten, a Stegnor Fellow, a Libertarian and an Indian nurse staffer and the potential happy threat of Pornographers coming from another Beach to aggravate and usurp the Bachelor Party. But no, that didn't pan out, just men, loving and laughing and feeling stricken in the morning on the rug, in the sweaty sheets, whiskey-wrecked and meat-glutted, scatological specimens. . . which me think of a STORY of the male ritual, how it ends in slack-jawed, visceral, fecal-focused pain but not without HUGE laughs along the way.

I came home with clippings of old poems, with poems that belonged to a friend, with postcards I started and never sent, with pages ripped out of notebooks about cough syrup and cartoons and trespassing to a Dam, a beautiful letter from my Grandfather which sowed the seeds of a further life-bringing essay about a disquieting yet love-heavy year in my life and the lives of my loved ones. I have brought back a forgotten notebook about all the things I saw in Boston and Virginia and Philadelphia and Washington D.C. when I was a tween obsessed with Paul Revere's brand of revolution and all my scrawls were meticulous cursive, the pride of the nuns.

I started this with an intent, to write about what I've not been writing about.

Scattershot Thoughts Of Change

2009-07-16T22:07:00.001-07:00

AS I NARROW in on my big move to Bernal Heights, as I'm about to slough off an awkward, stilted and oppressive living situation and be only two blocks away from my wonderful place of employment, I wonder what will motivate me, as a human, a friend, a lover, a writer, a son, a non-combatant, a pedestrian, a reader, in the months to come. (Among the other identities I'll have to flesh out as circumstances arise, as things ebb and flow.)

ANOTHER identity is "worker" and, now that I'm in the only field I'm qualified for but making less money than I've made in a long time while remaining HAPPY in what I'm doing, is this then my CAREER or as close to it as possible? IT's the only time that I've COME back to a trade that I had done before, in this case when I worked at Logos Books 6 years ago.

A YEAR ago I would have said I was in uncertain waters, which I was. THAT I had made a sudden move to a strange place full of strange people. (THIS place, called The Excelsior I have tried to document, write about and understand, with certain degrees of success and failure.) THAT I had, in my decision making acted largely out of fear, anxiety and the need to settle again. THAT I had made a very difficult life decision prior to that one, one that still often haunts my waking thoughts. AND that perhaps creatively I didn't have a foreseeable outlet after the decision was made. THE last part was the most ridiculous conviction, thankfully.

OK, so let's finally determine then that now, a YEAR later I know what I want to "do with my life", as if life is putty you get in a kit but the instructions are in Gaelic and the "example" they show you in the drawing of what your putty is to become is of an Iberian fortress near the Tagus River that's been rained on with flaming arrows, so just figuring out what "to do" with your putty becomes this anxious, tactile adventure.

I CAN say, smugly, staidly, that life has no instruction manual, which is funny, because one of my favorite novels translates as "Life: A User's Manual" by Georges Perec.

WHAT I, above all, want to continue to enshrine is that life's purposelessness is fertile ground, and not cause for grief and woe, but a HOLY disorder of sorts that stories are made out of, stories that become lineages, families, next of kin, new rivers for blood to flow in.

THE addiction to literature proves this out.

Thursday Blogging At The Rumpus

2009-07-09T22:02:00.000-07:00

After my two Sundays filling in for Mr. Fischer at The Rumpus, I've agreed to do a regular Thursday afternoon writing gig at The Rumpus, on an array of topics which hopefully will mostly be about books, art, writing.

More or less some of the stuff that goes on here at U.M. Maybe I'll cross-post. Basically, it's blogging about whatever I want. But The Rumpus writing will be more concise, newsworthy and linked to certain other book blogs. And this place here, I'll be keeping for longer rambles, more creative forays, outlines/drafts of critical stances and photography. But of course distinctions are meaningless.

I'm not sure if blogging is the future of writing, but I'm going to see how far I can roll with it, while also wanting to definitely maintain writing of a non-blogging sort. I dislike the short-attention span thrust of lots of blogs, which probably makes me a less than ideal blogger. Because after all I tend to ramble, put it in too much text, not enough links. Who knows?

On that note, some of my recent Thursday afternoon pieces for those interested:

I pose the question, Who Needs Philosophy?

As well as another: Why Do The Scandinavians Seek The Darkness?

I riff on the timeliness of Studs Terkel.

And talk about my own gritty introduction to the works of William T. Vollmann.

So, if at all interested, check out The Rumpus Thursday afternoons for similar yet different posts from me.

Thanks for indulging my hyper-aware self-promotional meta-blogging.

Thoughts/Ideas While I'm Thinking Them

2009-07-06T11:33:00.001-07:00

A SLOW Monday listening to Eastern European folk music, eating Greek yogurt and carrot juice. Priced some extremely rare and expensive books this morning, including a son's none-too-flattering photo essay about his alcoholic father and chain-smoking mother: Ray's A Laugh as well as some Gnostic treatises.

EVERYBODY all the time is loaning or giving me books. When you consider this, plus the additional fact that I work in a used bookstore, or actually two used bookstores, it would seem my addiction for the printed word will soon take on Keith Richards proportions. But it's interesting the books people give me. Stephen at Phoenix gave me Joe Orton's Diaries. And Jodel from Goldstein (my old job) loaned me My Dark Places by James Ellroy. And Wendy from the same place loaned me an Octavia Butler novel.

YESTERDAY, A SUNDAY, ambivalent pale grey skies cut, here and there with flashes of pale light. Walked further on 24th than I'm used to. 24th street that is, one of the more colorful, mural-plastered boulevards, mostly Latino and Vietnamese, and I had this moment, walking to a coffee shop for a writing meeting, that I had crossed some interstitial boundary and was in another city, another country, not necessarily a Spanish-speaking one, but an indefinite one where I could learn nothing from the local murals, or discern any sort of religion from the whiffs of incense from the botanical stores.

THIS psychic feeling of border crossing most likely stems from my enraptured reading of The City And The City by China Mieville. More on that later. More on that later: a mantra of sort for the persistence of obsession?

THINGS I'M WORKING ON HEATEDLY, DISTRACTEDLY<<

1. Short Stories. Not sure if I have the temperament for this form. But I appreciate the discipline/the slice of lifeness/the brevity and solemnity. And the potential interconnection between several tales, like a resonance chamber. I like the ease with which a vignette can arrive on the page and linger in the memory, like a mysterious postcard from a distant ex-fling. My unifying concept is a sequence of dreamy city stories featuring, honestly what I'm most familiar with space-wise: San Francisco, Oakland, San Diego, Los Angeles.

2. Lyrical Essays? I kind of think my longer, illustrated blog posts will be this: essays/meditations on books, culture, art and the personal circumstances of receiving/appreciating cultural artifacts and how they affect one's LIFE. Departing from the idea of life formed by culture. Something like Henry Miller's The Books In My Life or Sontag's Against Interpretation but with personal anecdote, asides, pictures, allusions, cross-references, etc. HERE, some forthcoming ones:

a). Essay on Story of the Eye the movie vs. Story of the Eye the book.

b) Essay on Thomas Disch

c) Dirty novels of the 60's.

d) The Brothers Karamazov as ultimate novel of late-twenties CRISES.

3. OTHER ESSAY TALES. Not sure what I want to call these. Myths? Apocryphal memoirs? Tiny textual movies? One in particular that's getting really long and out-of-hand: a lively, vivacious, somewhat dirty tale of being a straight guy with nothing but hedonistic, sex-loving gay and lesbian friends and the antics that ensue. That might sound superficial? Placating? Trite? MAYBE, but I feel like I have the anecdotal evidence to make it transcend its gossipy-sounding summary, turn it into a cultural document that presents MY generation's life and times in America's most ridiculously awesome city (San Francisco.) ALSO: another essay about the man who travels but wants NOTHING in his journey. Not girls, not ganja, not machine-guns. NOTHING.

4. WORKING NOTES FOR NOVEL, w/Working Title: Assassins. This novel so far has a bunch of segments/story-lines summarizes, some characters sketched out, but nothing fully finished or thought through. Plot thoughts so far: A man grows up with hippie parents. His mother unfortunately has an incident. Kills someone. The Man's sister flees. He is alone and is cursed by the crime of WHO the mother kills, a woman who just happens to be part of a powerful female crime syndicate. The Son grows up nursing a strange fascination-horror with things like perfume, bathrooms, parking lots, courtyards. He is taught that any woman he meets might be a part of this crime syndicate with the working title Pistis Sofia. That he is a marked man. His neurosis becomes a long poem. Then one day his poetry begins to show up at crime scenes that mimic the one his mother was involved in. He must catch the person who's trying to catch him before they catch him??? And on and on. Too much going on with this one...

That's it. Back to book peddling.

Today At The Rumpus

2009-06-28T16:21:00.000-07:00

I do the rounds of the book blogs and come up with gems.

I talk about the routines of writers.

I tell of my discovery of Georges Simenon, a great Belgian.

I wonder, who is Junot Diaz's favorite New Yorker?

I perpetuate a discussion of travel as a political act.

2 Photos of Books

2009-06-27T01:38:00.003-07:00

These Simenon covers create an interesting geography when combined.

I had to improvise some photos tonight for The Rumpus. It's a good thing books are so pretty looking and that I have so many weird things on my shelves.

Reading Writer's Memoirs, Briefly Sort Of

2009-06-22T18:35:00.000-07:00

The first writer's memoir I read, I think I was fourteen or something and figured my life would never ever be as interesting or bizarre as Rexroth's during his years in BohemianlibertarianWobbly Chicago.

Memoirs are all the rage these days, and now is not really the time for me to talk about my feelings on that score. I will say that Phoenix Books has a superb memoir selection. And that it took almost a dozen boxes to haul it over to its new location. And that one of the books has the word, "Sexperiments" in the title.

I would like to add a few comments about writer's memoirs though. Ones I've read, and one, especially I want to read. And perhaps others I'm considering reading.

The few memoirs I've read have been by writers who have lived through emblematic or formative cultural periods in history. Whether it was because the world was actually changing, or it just so happened that tons of talented people were working together at the same place and at the same time, such sweeping historical context gives these memoirs an exciting and often enviable savor.

One of the most fascinating, informative books I've ever read about becoming a writer and a memoir that deals especially beautifully with the mechanics, psychology, sacrifices and neuroses behind the writing process.

Everyone can point to such classic times in history, give them a city name and a decade and a whole zeitgeist is brought to life. Mostly the cities are either New York or Paris. In the 20's, or the 30's, or the 70's. And then there's San Francisco in the 60's. Or really most places in the 60's. Seattle in the 90's. But that's more for music.

I'm not sure where the center of writerly innovation was in the 90's or if there even was one. Probably New York, Los Angeles, San Diego. Wherever Generation X authors first got famous. And then again the whole MFA thing certainly changes the geography of cultural innovation. Perhaps Irvine in the late 80's was akin to Paris of the 20's just because a dozen future Pulitzer Prize winners went to school there. Who knows? And really, broadly speaking, such things don't really matter except after the fact, when the writer sits down to write his or her memoir and realizes that they participated in a critical time in cultural history.

Not a memoir, Shattuck's The Banquet Years is a cultural anaylsis of the origins of the Avant-Garde in France. Featuring the colorful lives of Jarry, Apollinaire, Rousseau and Satie. A must-read. Like the memoirs I mention, this book is a special case of how artists interwove their talents to express a force of history that we feel today, like light from a distant star.

Most of these writer's memoirs are heavy on the name-dropping but not really for any self-aggrandizing reasons, considering that when they penned the memoirs they had already achieved enough fame based on their own merits. Mostly the name-dropping, the brief profiles of other writers and artists is to present the memoir less as a personal document and more as a cultural-historical document that pivots on their own consciousness.

Sometimes I guiltily fantasize about being That Writer way down the road of life, both figuratively and literally who has time to kick back and finally pen his memoir, who can belt out a rollicking 300 page yarn about his accomplishments, failures, adventures and learning experiences, and also about the ones of the people he knew and loved and sought counsel from. Maybe they were metalsmiths or balloonists or short story writers or steampunk ballerinas or filmmakers or radical gay libertarians. Or just teachers, mothers, fathers, gas station attendants, soup kitchen volunteers and gardeners. But we knew each other intimately, these were our shared hard times and we worked hard for what we wanted to express. Right after Bush destroyed our country and Obama disappointed some of us and we all lived in San Francisco or Portland or Davis or San Diego and nobody was making much money. But things like urban farming, sex worker parties, rooftop gardening and bicycling were on the rise, and we all felt like even as the ruins were already growing, that counter-ruins were containing them, fecund, fertile, growing as we grew . .

Ah, but that story's been told before I think. Maybe. We'll see how life plays out. But I wonder if I'm living in an epochal cultural phase and don't know it yet. Which means in order to find out I need to help fulfill it, right?

The one I want to read by the late Harold Norse.

And onward to my final instance of what I wanted to say.
Which brings me to a book that is probably the greatest memoir I haven't read yet. Especially in light of what I've been talking about.

Memoirs Of A Bastard Angel by the late Harold Norse who died less than two weeks ago. Go find it and read it. I plan on doing the same once I finish all the other books piling up on my shelf.

Sunday, June 21st A Guest Blog Stint At THE RUMPUS.

2009-06-20T17:47:00.000-07:00

Call me guilty of meta-blogging, but that's OK. These are challenging times right now. You gotta have your hands in every pot in order to have your ducks all in a line. Right?

Be that as it may, Sunday, as in tomorrow I'll be posting a bunch of interesting round-ups, asides, profiles, tangents and recommendations at The Rumpus.

IN fact, I will be donning the title of Sunday Editor if only briefly in the absence of Seth Fischer. The funny thing is I will also be working at Red Hill Books all day! Busy Sunday indeed!

If you're interested in what's going on in the Book World and other Worlds too, stop in and look around.

Thanks!

My first window display, the fruit of a long obsession

2009-06-18T23:32:00.001-07:00

One of the new window displays at Red Hill. My first contribution: the window of Possessive titles, a trend I can't stop ranting about. Especially with novels. But still, an admirable array of authors employ this sure-fire titling method. I, myself, might try it some day.

Why are possessives so popular in novel titles? Why, for instance, are there so many books titled along the same lines as The Memory Keeper's Daughter or The Bone-Setter's Daughter? The Time-Traveller's Wife or The Astronaut's Wife. Flaubert's Parrot, Correlli's Mandolin, and Wittgenstein's Poker?

I think one reason is that you can convey a sense of complexity in the possessive title, because in just two or three words, there is a distinct relation already at play. With family members there is one person who stands in direct relation to another person who still remains altogether different. And thus with relation stated, difference too is set in motion. Two histories, two identities connected yet distinct, all of it given in a simple title which brings with it too the promise of war, conflict, legacy and inheritance: the stuff of the novel.

I'm not sure though if this logic accounts for the ubiquity of possessive titles out there. But it is a step perhaps in a more illuminating direction.

Hard Labor Book Clerk Style

2009-06-18T21:35:00.000-07:00

I hate generalizing but I'll make an exception here: I'm the kind of guy who gets roped into the most long-winded, arduous, chimerical and physically exhausting projects. Emphasis on the last part I think.

It's similar to the tendency I have of usually moving into houses right when they're at their point of most dire fragility and the inhabitants are either selling off their housemate's appliances to buy crank or the landlords are renting out the garages to ex-con tweakers with prostitutes who double as house-calling therapists.

Or I start jobs that are really just guinea pig positions and my immediate superiors are vigilant to see if I, the affable, curly-haired dude with that winning urban beard, will split under the pressure of being experimented on so cruelly. Like the time I had to dismantle the $100,000.00 architecture model while also making time to affix stamps to two thousands postcards.

But the part where I excel is moving. I enjoy the act of eradicating one space and making another. At the same time, as everyone knows, moving sucks. But still I excel at it.
Especially when it comes to big moves. Big, exhausting, dusty, soul-cursing moves.

Usually it's just helping my friends move. One winter, in the Outer Sunset, I consented wilfully to an 8 hour stint as volunteer mover merely so I didn't have to think of love woes and loneliness. That's a story I would like to tell: the guy OR girl who agrees to physically demanding favors just so they don't have to think about things. Gradually, they realize that they are saying yes to more and more dangerous, demanding and ultimately fatal adventures.

That particular time in the Sunset we had to deal with hauling a mattress up 7 flights of stairs because it wouldn't fit in the tiny lift in their apartment building. Another time, from the same pressing need to be helpful but also to push my body, I helped my friend move, which mostly involved carrying his 8 or 9 keyboards up several flights of stairs in the Upper Haight.

Sometimes I've helped my friends move just because it was the right thing to do. Like three weeks ago, when we got locked into a storage unit with our friend who was 8 months pregnant because the night manager forgot to show up for work. Promptly at nine everything shut down. Elevators, doors, gates. Thankfully a cop responded to someone else's call and found us instead, but he had to spend an hour trying to find a phone number for someone to give him the access code just so we could exit the parking lot.

And none of which even comes close to the mishaps of my own moving adventures...another installment of which will be happening in a month's time.

Which is all a roundabout way of saying that I spent half this week assisting for many hours in the physical, bodily and tangible act of moving a bookstore. Never thought I'd do that before, but then again, I think just by being born I unconsciously signed up for many more, presently unknown but similarly chimerical undertakings.

From one smallish location that had been there twenty years to a spot, three blocks down that is twice as BIG and replete with garden, basement, back office and children's book room, the moving involved all manner of boxing books, loading them, unloading them, sorting them, uncobwebbing, unratdropping, sucking down dust, hammering, carrying, shoving, splintering, sweating, hungering, picking up and dropping, dropping and picking up, being sarcastic to onlookers and being generally ebullient about the dirty, communal act of creating a new space. The last thing to go, maybe, was an old paperback of Dante's Inferno that was utterly clotted with dust and nailed to the wall and had been behind a bookshelf for two decades.

The new Phoenix Books is scheduled to be open tomorrow, Friday, June 19th. Stop by and spread good cheer. Here's a couple photos from the original site and the new site. (First two are from old sight; following three are the good work we did at the new one.)

Two New Books I Want To Read Based On Seeing Them On The Shelves

2009-06-16T21:36:00.001-07:00

China Mieville got a degree from the London School Of Economics, wrote a whole slew of books in varying speculative/sci-fi/New Weird modes and now has this new novel out, The City And The City which looks absolutely irresistible.

Doug Dorst's Alive In Necropolis is the next contender. It's a novel about Colma! But with a strangely beautiful cover fit for an adolescent mystery novel.

Both for sale at Red Hill Books!