Repository Of Dream Shards

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.

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!

Mythopoetic Site Study San Diego Part 2

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

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

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.

Gonna Hit The Road Cause Of A Lucky Coin

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