April's On The Out

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.

Things Early January

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

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!

The Sheltering Sky: Briefly

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.

Thanksgiving, Dogs, Blessings, Books

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

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.

Recently On The Rumpus, Etc.

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.

The Journal Of Albion Moonlight

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.

Excerpts From "Fake Memoir", With Pictures

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

Hypothetical Cities: A Drawn-Out Interlude

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.

My first window display, the fruit of a long obsession

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

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.)

A special perk about book work.

Down in San Diego for the weekend doing some family/personal errands, writing, and engaging in friendly reunions that might prove less frequent in the years to come. But hopefully not, especially with weddings and bachelor parties already being planned.

I finished The Brothers Karamazov tonight, set aside Thomas Hardy and Isak Dinesen and Thomas Disch, and pondered death, family and friendship after a late evening visitation from a good friend who is celebrating his one year wedding anniversary, and another friend (the parent of the married friend) back after a five-hour trip from an LA funeral for another friend's father.

I'm satisfying my sense of "work" by sending out stories to various literary journals that I'm told are amenable to unpublished writers. But mostly I'm thinking about the person I discovered recently at my job: Emily Hahn.

A neighborhood bookstore invites questions from eccentric yet affable connoisseurs who long to know about the tribes that may have existed in the remote region of the world that they are visiting in less than a fortnight. So they want the one and only book written on the subject. Written from the point of view of a "lay Jesuitical botanist who has been cross-trained in medical anthropology." Perhaps out-of-print. Perhaps published by a small Swedenborgian non-profit. Maybe it's not even listed. Or real.

And you search for it. And you learn more than your bargained for. And make promises that you can get it for them if they are interested. And they seem anxious for it, hungry for it. That hunger for knowledge that is so much more nuanced than other appetites. You get the hunger too. It's an addiction in the trade. And for what? For more things you'll never fully understand, only graze the surface of.

You discover people you've never heard of. And deeds you never thought possible. And biographies that lead to further associations. And then the potential to be plunged even further into some previously unheard of snake's nest. (The temptation also to buy books is pervasive and hard to resist. But I'm fighting that off heroically so far. Not that I have much money for anything lately.)

Or a person calls you and asks you to do a search for something. It's for a book club, she says. The book is called Nobody Said Not To Go. The title is interesting. She doesn't know what it's about, whether it's fiction or essays or self-help or animal husbandry. You look it up. Holy shite, you say. Why don't people know about her? It turns out to be a biography of an extraordinary woman.

Emily Hahn

How can you not be interested, if only based on the fact that one of her 52 books is called Love Conquers Nothing: A Glandular History Of Civilization?

Exacavating Pivotal Books

I need to know what makes me tick so I can exploit it.

Understanding what makes me tick, and what makes for tics, requires nostalgia. Nostalgia is both pleasurable and upsetting. You want to go back to the rawness, of delighting in the new joys of reading, exploring, climbing trees, being foolishly dreamy. Books read and forgotten. Gardens uncovered. Ruins invaded. Sensations realized at their origins. Sometimes, and maybe mostly, you're nostalgic for things that never existed like you want to remember them. Or you're nostalgic for things that never existed in the first place. Then, you're a writer.

I like exercises to strengthen the memory and follow the thread of inspiration back to its primal coil.

The following is a list of books I read once, years ago, books that shifted my perceptions in beneficial ways. I guess these are the books of my so-called early youth. Maybe I'll talk about adolescence later.

These are what first excited me at the thought of being a writer, of being so acutely sensitive to both implausible possibilities and jarring realities that I couldn't help but write everything down manically and maniacally.

Random List Of Early Reading

Encylopedia Brown. A young private detective? Everyone's hero when you're 11.
The Hardy Boys. I remember the ones about the swamps the most.
The Three Investigators. I remember these guys had a secret junkyard hideout. A totally formative image for me.
Harriet The Spy. A sort of pre-teen, harmless novel of voyeurism, eavesdropping, espionage and all manners of covert reconnaissance which are all terrific activities for a would-be writer.

The Curse Of The Blue Figurine, The Chessmen Of Doom, The House With A Clock In Its Walls, etc., by John Bellairs, covers illustrated by Edward Gorey.
Gothic, young adult metaphysical horror/terror. First time I saw Gorey drawings too. Absorbed the imagery of genteel decay, rotting gazebos, statues, old mansions and warlocks. Check out the visual bibliography of his many works with the original Gorey illustrations.

A Wrinkle In Time, A Swiftly-Tilting Planet, etc., by Madeline L'Engle. I remember learning about mitochondria from these books. Quite captivating and spiritual.

21 Balloons by William Pene Dubois. Learned about Krakatoa.

Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes. Totally made me an American Revolution history junkie.

The Hound Of The Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Instigated a life-long obsession with the "evocatory" images of mist-drenched moors and homicidal botanists.

The Halloween Tree, Dandelion Wine, The October Country, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Death Is A Lonely Business, A Graveyard For Lunatics, Green Shadows White Whale, etc. by Ray Bradbury.
Basically, without the eminent autumnal imagination of Bradbury, there is no need for nostalgia. Undifferentiated intrigue, exciting/haunting moods sustained indefinitely and firefly/carnival/endless meadow childhoods that can only exist on paper makes for very formative reading.

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. Read it in a log cabin. There was snow and an earthquake and a puzzle. I enjoyed it immensely, especially the underground people, Morlocks?

Lord Of The Flies, Catcher In The Rye and A Separate Peace. I read all of these many times, but Catcher the most because I thought it was so laugh-out-loud funny. Lord Of The Flies, if I remember is an extremely sensual novel, at least in terms of physical description, of rendering the island, of feeling, as an old teacher explained, the burning sand under your feet every time he read it which was once a year.

The Great And Secret Show, Everville, Weaveworld, Books Of Blood
by Clive Barker
It's too bad, really, that writers in "paraliterary" genres, like horror, the "dark fantastic", mystery, and science fiction can never really impress high-brow literary arbiters. Barker really articulated some of my early obsessions for dark mysticism, secret histories, carnal complexities, and hyper-dimensional worlds; plus he scared the crap out of me and turned my stomach in glorious ways by bringing spiritual, metaphysical and corporeal themes back into the genre.

The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub. This book is fantastic. Multi-dimensional epic featuring a friendly werewolf. Read this during a major house renovation when I suffered sickness and fever.

Shadowland by Peter Straub. Also fantastic. Magical apprentices at an Uncle's old mansion. Like Bellairs meets Barker.

Foundation Trilogy and Foundation's Edge by Isaac Asimov. Really fascinating stuff about encyclopedias, evil music and the Gaia hypothesis.

to be continued.