Ides of March

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.

A quick beginning to the 2nd Novel.

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. . ."

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.

Late November

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.

September and Reading Jean Rhys

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.

Notes On Beginning A Novel

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.

Thoughts/Ideas While I'm Thinking Them

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.

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!

Guns, Letters And High Involvement: Rant?

(Hunter S. Thompson motivational posters. Telling it like it is. And yes, it is connected to what I'm saying...)

I sat down and wrote a letter the other day.

I haven't done that in a while. It was to a friend who prefers the low-tech form of letter writing and who makes me hate myself for being suckled so often and eagerly on the Internet. (

Like I'm doing right now with this blog and my other one.)

It used to be I was always sending letters and mail. At one point, it was a game I invented at a very boring, soul-sucking job I had years ago. Besides scraping off rat droppings from my keyboard, and calming down hot-headed real estate agents, I had unlimited access to a whole wonder world of antiquated office machinery. I tried to see how much interesting mail I could make on the clock with all the interesting office machines they had on hand and then I would mail it back to my house under an assumed name. After a couple months, I had accumulated close to a hundred pieces of mail, all without getting caught by the Man. Most of this stuff I'm going to turn into some sort of "zine" type thing. Strangely enough, it creates a pretty cohesive narrative about relationships, 6th street, garbage, poverty, myths, desire, and history.

Even now, I have a compulsive urge to look in the mailbox, hoping that that one letter/parcel/announcement will finally have arrived. But perhaps this is more of a habit acquired by scoping out grad school rejections, or seeing if my Amazon books have arrived.

Hunter S. Thompson, even as early as 17, would carbon copy all the letters he wrote (and he was a prolific letter-writer), claiming that he knew that he would one day be FAMOUS and people would want to compile them at some point.

It was in large part thanks to reading The Proud Highway, his selection of letters aged 17-28 or so, that I got inspired to do a little traveling a few years ago.

I would recommend this book for anyone who needs to be jolted out of their tired, old ways. It never gets old. His letters are uproariously funny and savagely inspiring. They document the transformation of a swaggering young man into a full-fledged writer and all the madness that went with it.

His dispatches about being constantly broke, uprooted, at loose ends, unemployed, prone to constant, dangerous distractions and flailing about inside of his own neurotic fantasies are healthy reminders that trying to do what you want often requires a lot of inhuman gusto. Good stuff. It's more or less the only Thompson I've read in its entirety. Which is a shame probably.

In light of letter-writing, I thought about an interesting proverb I read in Samuel Delany's About Writing: he quotes the seminal media theorist Marshall McCluhan: "Low Resolution Makes For High Involvement." Which in itself is a solid argument for letter-writing, magazine-making, "crafting", cooking and writing in general, not to mention all sorts of other high-involvement/low res. pursuits.

I want higher involvement in things. I didn't always think this. I've never been a good "joiner" and am usually fearful/hesitant to the point of neurotic passivity when it comes to any kind of formal/institutionalized/obligatory conglomerates of people. Classes, seminars, workshops: historically, my devotion to these things is spotty at best. Which isn't to say I'm a bad student. I'm not--and even graduated with Honors-- I'm just suspicious about gatherings where everyone HAS to be there. Maybe it was my Catholic upbringing, or remembering all those D's in behavior I got, even though I got straight A's in what counted.

Generally, I've preferred spontaneous get-togethers or drunken frolics or just walking around aimlessly without an "agenda" or a "target goal." Unfortunately, the world doesn't often cater to such frivolity, especially if you want to do something with your life. Which I do, even if writing isn't really considered "doing something with your life." Actually, writing is more what you do when you're not doing things with your life. NOT that I believe that either though. Like everything worth doing, it's a balancing act and most people take a tumble.

But getting back to Hunter S. Thompson:

I remember thinking March got off to a great start: I began last month by going with my friend down to Jackson Arms and, with impeccable instruction dutifully dispensed and under the watchful eyes of the well-trained (and armed) employees, I fired my first pistol, a 9MM Glock at a paper target that was perhaps 10 or 12 feet away. And I even hit the target, and in fact, I didn't miss the target at all even though I seemed to favor the right side.

I was surprised by the experience and found it invigorating. Shell-casings flying around your head, the snap of the pistol, the stance you took, etc. I was excited and humbled, scared and ambivalent, but in control. Of course, I deplore most violence, think guns in the wrong hands are evil, all that eminently reasonable stuff. I read the Oakland headlines every day. And the San Francisco ones. And as recently as today, a man went on a killing spree, making it the 5th shooting spree in the past month alone.

I can't talk about guns or the ethics behind them. I can acknowledge that they exist and that, in certain hands they do considerable harm. I can't say I worry too much about whether the government will take them away from me. I find them intriguing, I do. As objects they are astonishingly odd if you think about it. And prone to the most abject fetishism.

What I can talk about, sort of is the fact that I'm embarking on a novel that I thought I would never write but that seems the most honest thing I've yet concocted. And it's about murder and guns and sexism and violence, topics that have had little to do with me personally but are still pervasive in everything I read and see and absorb and wonder about when I walk down the street.

But more on that another time.