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.

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

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!

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.)

Two New Books I Want To Read Based On Seeing Them On The Shelves

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!

Strange Aside

I've had poets on my mind lately.

The other day when I did my first shift at Phoenix Books I did my usual wandering around the store seeing which desirable titles they had on hand. On the Sale table I discovered a stack of thick paperbacks, copies of the collected works of a poet I had never heard of before: Harold Norse. And the title of his huge collected poems struck me as irresistibly enticing: In The Hub Of The Fiery Force.

That was June 8th.

Today I finally made right on my resolution to find this poet's biography online. I learned that not only was he a preeminent gay, Beat poet, a fan and friend of William Carlos Williams and Charles Bukowski, and who lived in San Francisco's Mission District for the last 35 years, but that in fact, according to wikipedia at least, he died the very day I was looking through his collection, wondering who the hell he was.

Which makes me think I should go back and buy that On Sale book, In The Hub Of The Fiery Force. And you should too.

Here's a poem from it:

Carnivorous Saint

we dig up ancient shards
clicking cameras
among the dying cypresses
choked by Athenian smog.

yet cats continue basking
in the hazy sun
the chained goat sways in ecstasy
the Parthenon looks down from creamy heights
lichen and rust nibble the pediments
and tourist feet break the spell
of antiquity's vibrations

the grass hits
as I look at rusty orangeade caps
thinking Who needs nuclear Apollo?
thermonuclear Minerva?
Nike crashing to grand finale?

we need the anti-Christ
who is probably playing football around the corner
the sweet boy who used to be called Eros
and wants us to be happy.

bring back the carnivorous saint
whose mother is no virgin
she's Our Lady of Peace Movements
to ban the bomb and clean up the air
she'll wave her umbrella and change the world.

ah yes, when the grass hits
old worlds burn down and new worlds form
in clouds of brown monoxide morning.

Athens, Jan. 1964

A Good Day In A Nice Place

A photo on my camera that I don't remember taking. . .

Beautiful little book framed on wine-stained bed sheets. . .

Most interesting writing is just about people walking around, wondering what they're going to do with their day and what they're gonna eat and how they're gonna pay for it. Which reminds me of most of my waking days in San Francisco. It also occurred to me that a recent teacher compared a story I wrote to the poems of Frank O'Hara, famous New York walking/eating poet. Two weeks ago in San Diego, I found my old Frank O'Hara pocket book with, among other things, a signed edition of the Journals Of Allen Ginsberg. In a nostalgic blast, I remembered how I spent years writing weird, surrealist poetry in little notebooks and walking around with those sleek little City Lights poem books in my back jeans pocket. O'Hara's verse is light, flouncy, accessible, sing-songy, urban and personal. I enjoy it, but I have to say I almost enjoy the orange and midnight blue composition of the book's design more as well as its the varied implications in just the title alone.

MUSIC by Frank O'Hara

 If I rest for a moment near The Equestrian
pausing for a liver sausage sandwich in the Mayflower Shoppe,
that angel seems to be leading the horse into Bergdorf's
and I am naked as a table cloth, my nerves humming.
Close to the fear of war and the stars which have disappeared.
I have in my hands only 35¢, it's so meaningless to eat!
and gusts of water spray over the basins of leaves
like the hammers of a glass pianoforte. If I seem to you
to have lavender lips under the leaves of the world,
      I must tighten my belt.
It's like a locomotive on the march, the season
      of distress and clarity
and my door is open to the evenings of midwinter's
lightly falling snow over the newspapers.
Clasp me in your handkerchief like a tear, trumpet
of early afternoon! in the foggy autumn.
As they're putting, up the Christmas trees on Park Avenue
I shall see my daydreams walking by with dogs in blankets,
put to some use before all those coloured lights come on!
      But no more fountains and no more rain,
      and the stores stay open terribly late.

The days are becoming summer and you know it because the skies are gauzy bruise-tones. Today however was an exception. A bright warm perfect Sunday in San Francisco and they even closed off the Mission streets, or at least Valencia so people could freely roam on their bicycles and walk on the asphalt and blare M.I.A. from souped-up carnival bikes and eat their picnics where normally UPS trucks are idling. I got a chance to work at Dog Eared books this morning for four hours while all this was happening outside the windows. Then I had an hour for lunch, most of which I spent walking back to Bernal, so I could round out my work-day with a four hour closing shift at Red Hill Books. It turned out to be an extremely busy Sunday because it was our 5th Anniversary Sale, complete with bluegrass music and cake and a generous discount. Today I regained some faith in the essential goodness of most people, at least the ones who are interested in books and reading and buying things from small local businesses. Today I was especially proud to be an employee at a bookstore. I'd like to write an essay about that, I think, about the risks, rewards, challenges of working in a highly-threatened cultural industry: book-peddling.